#only parts i like is sky’s pose and amys expression

[total-drama-fugitives]

big brain move from the td makers to foreshadow the dogshit character interactions in the tdpi poster

Notice the lack of closeness? How none of them are touching each other? Giving any indication of friendly interaction? Truly spectacular. By gum, what will they think of next?

[clairebear1298]

So. My submission for the Fluff Crawlspace is really only, like, 2/3 fluff. Because I'm me, and I can't help but throw in a little angst in what's supposed to be a day to celebrate adorable, light-hearted Shamy goodness. But I hope you enjoy it anyways:

The parameters of Date Night became much more blurred once Sheldon and Amy started living together. They were with each other constantly now- at home, at work, and everywhere in between (literally; they drove together from the apartment to CalTech every day). They had virtually every meal together now, even at work, so did that make every time they ate together a date? What about when they watched a movie, or went to a lecture, or spent any kind of quality time together? It was a pesky game of semantics that Sheldon still wasn’t sure how to clarify in their Relationship Agreement.

Regardless, Date Night remained a fixture in their lives, every second Thursday of the month or every third in a month with five Thursdays. It was comforting, in a way; no matter how their relationship would evolve or change, no matter the discoveries they would make, the children they would have, or the years they would share together, taking one evening a month to get dolled up for a night on the town to reconnect would remain a constant. Their love would always be a priority.

So it took Sheldon by surprise, when it was Amy’s turn to pick the location of their next Date Night, that she chose to have a night in. Amy always enjoyed a little pomp and circumstance when it came to their dates, so when she told him that they were just going to order chinese food and stay in their regular day clothes, Sheldon was more than a little suspicious. He’d been with her long enough to recognize when she was trying to butter him up, but if there was one thing that he loved, it was getting his way even if there was an ulterior motive behind it. And besides, a low-key night at home with his girlfriend would be worth the price of whatever said girlfriend had up her cardigan sleeve.

Unless that price was watching what was to him the most dreaded movie sub-genre in existence. The rom-com musical.

“La La Land?” Sheldon asked as he sat on the loveseat, arms crossed and staring down his girlfriend. “You mean the movie that won Best Picture for all of two minutes before going to the actual deserving film?”

Amy paused in the middle of unwrapping the DVD to look at him. “You know about that?”

“Of course, it’s all Penny talked about for weeks. I also learned from her that the movie is full of unrealistic bursts into song, signs of Hollywood’s narcissistic self-absorption, and jazz.” Sheldon crossed his arms and sat back in his seat. “I won’t let you put me through this.”

“If I can sit through the extended edition of Batman v. Superman for you, you can sit through this for me.”

“But-”

“No buts. It’s my turn to pick the movie. End of story.” And with that, Amy popped the DVD in and moved to the couch, plopping the popcorn between them as she went. “I won’t even make you hold my hand this time.”

Sheldon sighed. It was only when Amy was irritated that she started picking at years long fights like this one. “I’ve told you, I don’t object to holding your hand in general, but for prolonged periods it gets sweaty and itchy and keeps me from paying attention-”

“Just start the movie, Sheldon,” Amy said.

And so he did. From the moment the movie opened with people dancing on cars on a freeway he unfortunately knew well, Sheldon knew he was in for a miserable ride. He heaved a sigh at Mia’s acting woes and rolled his eyes at Seb’s hipster attitudes. Never mind that he found the colors aesthetically pleasing or the script surprisingly sharp, nothing could save the horrendous, erratic notes of jazz. Even if Seb’s passionate explanation of the genre reminded Sheldon of Physics.

Then as the movie was bathed in the purples and pinks and a hint of orange, and Mia and Seb tap danced to the backdrop of a Los Angeles sunset, Sheldon somehow found his toes tapping out a soft rhythm with them. Amy glanced down at his feet as well, and Sheldon quickly drew them closer to the couch and out of her line of sight.

But it was the scene at the Griffith Observatory that did him in, the horror he felt at their audacity to sneak in after hours offset by his fantasy of enjoying the museum without the usual throng of people surrounding him. And as Seb and Mia gazed into the astral projected sky, and as he lifted her into the starry night, Sheldon felt his hand creep slowly around the half-full popcorn bowl and towards Amy. Maybe it was his deeply secret love of astronomy, or their perfect waltz pose, or the memories of dancing with his own love as the universe watched over, but just as the scene began fading into white Sheldon decided to leave old arguments and his own stubbornness behind and take his girlfriend’s hand.

As the music drifted down from it’s crescendo, Amy glanced at him, and they shared a smile before turning back to the movie.

The rest of the movie was expressed through their hands. Sheldon found his thumb tapping out a rhythm on Amy’s hand during the summer montage, and Amy’s fingers grew restless and fidgety when Seb left to go on tour. Sheldon’s nails dug into her palm during their argument, and they both held each other in a vice grip when Seb chose to skip Mia’s show. They relaxed during Mia’s audition, and as Seb and Mia sat on the bench afterward Amy slipped her other hand into the crook of his arm and rested her head on his shoulder. But Sheldon felt himself grow more and more tense throughout the epilogue, his hand going cold in hers, and in the final moment where Mia and Seb parted ways he dropped it altogether.

“Well,” Sheldon declared as he tossed the remote aside. “That was a colossal waste of time.”

“What do you mean? You seemed like you were enjoying it.”

“How can I enjoy a movie with an ending like that?” Sheldon stood abruptly, grabbing the long abandoned popcorn and taking it to the kitchen. “You take two characters, endear your audience to them, demonstrate over and over how perfect they are for each other, and then break them up for good?”

“They wanted different things,” Amy said. “Their dreams didn’t align anymore.”

“They would’ve been fine,” Sheldon said as he emptied the popcorn into some tupperware with a little too much vigor. “Mia could’ve done her movie and then gone back to Seb.”

“But he was touring with the band,” Amy argued as she rose to join Sheldon in the kitchen. “They just grew apart, that’s all.”

“They didn’t even try!”

“They did try, and it only made them grow to resent each other,” Amy said, resting her arms as she stood at the island. “They broke up so they wouldn’t keep hurting each other. All that long distance, back and forth and back again. It would’ve been too much work.”

“It’s not too much work for the person you love!” Sheldon almost shouted, making Amy take a step back again. “No, the problem was that they put their own ambitions above each other. A partnership is about working to achieve your dreams together so that you can have it all in the end. Is it even worth it to open that jazz club, or get that Oscar, or win that Nobel Prize if you don’t have the love of your life to share it with?”

The air hung heavy after Sheldon’s words, the silence deafening. Sheldon felt his eyes grow wide in realization of the carefully guarded emotions he let slip to the surface, and he quickly turned to avoid seeing Amy’s face. He had no clue what Amy must be thinking, and he feared the worst until he felt her small arms come around to hug him from behind.

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” Amy whispered, her head pressed between his shoulder blades.

Sheldon’s hand came up to grasp her own, feeling like he and Amy were fused together as one, like this was how they had always been meant to be. “Well, now you know,” he said, speaking just as softly.

“Sheldon…” He heard Amy’s voice grow tight along with her embrace around his middle. “You know I’m always going to come back, right?”

Sheldon craned his head to look at the black suitcase sitting in the corner of the living room, its omen constantly draped over them as Amy’s departure for Princeton drew ever closer. He turned in Amy’s arms so he could look at her. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

Sheldon released a heavy sigh as his hands came to rest on her shoulders. “I wasn’t talking about you, I promise. I meant it when I said that this is a chance you need to take. I was talking about me, before, before…” Sheldon thought back to years of putting his work before Amy, of looking down on her achievements, of taking for granted that she would always be there until she left behind the shattered pieces of his heart in the middle of Howard’s living room. “Before.”

Amy stepped closer to him so that their chests pressed into each other, her heart beating beneath his. “Well… we’re just gonna have to find a way to make sure our dreams align.”

Sheldon tilted his head down so he could look at her, a smile playing at his lips despite his earlier melancholy. “We’re two of the smartest people on the planet. I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

Amy grinned back, then stood on her toes to kiss him before turning back to put away the popcorn. With her no longer looking at him, Sheldon took a chance to glance at the bookshelf beside their bedroom door, where Gollum stood watch over a certain something tucked behind a stack of comic books, where Amy was sure to never venture near. That could be one way to get their dreams aligned… but no, it wasn’t time yet. He didn’t know when it would be time, but people seemed pretty adamant that he’d know when it would. So for now, he would wait. Maybe after the summer, when Amy came back to him. Because she was right, no matter how long she left, she always came back.

But there was one thing he knew without a doubt, as he wrapped an arm around Amy and she held his hand in reply as they turned off the lights and went to bed. He was adding the La La Land soundtrack to his Spotify, even if it was jazz.

[rollflasher]

Another Sonic ramble

So once again I’m here with one of my rambles about my incredibly subjective view of how the Sonic series should be handled! *Beat*

...anyway.

So, one of the more recurring opinions on the fandom is that Sonic games should be written by Ian Flynn, I have talked before about the gripes I have with his writing and why I disagree with this but this post is not entirely about him, but rather a more general topic that has been bugging me for a long time.

The other day I was watching a video speculating about the upcoming Sonic Rangers, there’s not much to write home since it was pretty well made but there’s a particular part that inspired me to do this post and talk about it with other fans to discuss it.

See, at one point the video critisized the fact that Sonic Forces was written by a Japanese writer because they have to re-write the script in English and that can cause problems with localization, and that it would be better to have western writers from the get-go since Sonic’s main demographic comes from there, while making an off-hand suggestion that Ian Flynn could be a main choice. While I can see where they’re coming from, my response was a simple:

‘‘Absolutely, not’‘

See, I have a lot of issues with this to put it bluntly and I’ll try to break them down and explain them the best I can since they’re pretty subjective in nature, but I’m bringing this up because I want you guys to share your thoughts as well.

So, why does it bug me so much the idea of Sonic being handled by western creators?

In my case, the main reasons are because Sonic loses a core part of it’s appeal because of this, the fact that SEGA of Japan seems to have a better grasp of the franchise’s tone and characters and there’s the very subjective point that, in my eyes, American versions of Japanese franchises were always nothing more than dumbed down products of the source material.

To start with my first point, whenever someone talks about Sonic’s creation, a lot of people are quick to point out that our favorite blue hedgehog and his games were inspired by western pop culture and cartoons, and that is true, however oftenly they forget to mention a core thing that not only inspired, but also formed part of the core identity of this franchise.

Sonic is very inspired on anime, and at heart this franchise is a shonen.

(This image by The Great Lange expresses more clearly what I mean)

Generally, the most acknowledgement anime gets on it’s hand on Sonic is the mentions of Sonic being inspired by Dragon Ball, particularly the Super Saiyan, but there’s so much more than that, as Sonic blatantly takes inspiration from Studio Ghibli films specially in games like Sonic 3, which draws a lot of inspiration from Laputa: Castle in the Sky, this great post shows proof that this is not a coincidence.

And it doesn’t stop there, Shiro Maekawa himself has stated that SA2′s story (and in particular, the characters of Shadow and Maria) draw a lot of inspiration from the manga Please Save My Earth.

Even Sonic’s character design resembles shonen protagonists moreso than the main characters of silent cartoons, don’t believe me?

Sure, Sonic has a cartoony anatomy, no one can deny that, but he also exhibits a lot of traits from shonen characters such as spiky hair/quills (?), dynamic posing, a confident, courageous and energetic personality and most importantly, fighting spirit.

If you compare Sonic’s personality and more specifically, his abilities and moves to, say, cartoon speedy characters like the Road Runner, there’s a pretty big disconnection between him and western cartoon characters. Hell, this disconnection is even just as present if you compare him with a character like The Flash from DC.

Simply put, Sonic acts, moves and more importantly, fights like a shonen anime character. He doesn’t just go Super Saiyan and that’s it. Here’s even a quick comparison if necessary.

And this is important because this doesn’t apply just to him, but the whole franchise as a whole and when it takes a more western approach, all of these details are kinda lost or more downplayed, of course this depends on the artists and there’s YMMV at hand, but I think my point is clear.

My second point is...SoJ has consistently proven they have a much clearer grasp on how Sonic’s world and characters are compared to SoA.

Hear me out, yes, Sonic 06 and ShtH exist and yes, SoJ is not perfect by any means. But hear me out...when did the characters start to get flanderized and turned into parodies of themselves? In the 2010s...and when did SEGA move from Japanese to western writers in the games?

Of course it was more then that since there’s a whole tone shift that came with this decade and the new writers, but it’s not a coincidence that when writing in Sonic started to decay, western writers also happened to get on board with the games.

Besides that, SoA has a wide history of not getting Sonic’s tone and characters, from how they made media without much of Sonic Team’s input, to altering how characters are seen in the west. (Such as how they amped up Sonic’s attitude in their media or how the English scripts of the games featured things like Sonic seemingly barely tolerating Amy while the JP scripts portrayed this as Sonic just not understanding girls all that well instead, or for more recent examples, the addition of the ‘’torture’’ line in Forces). Not only that, but even ignoring obvious infamous writers like Ken Penders, even the ‘’best’’ writers from the western side of Sonic are still not above of giving us Pontaff-esque gems.

Like this one.

Or alternatively, I feel like sometimes western writers on Sonic rely a bit too much on their personal vision about Sonic which may or may not be a good thing, clear examples of this are Ian Flynn himself and Pontaff.

By contrast, while SoJ has it’s own share of notorious inconsistencies when dealing with writing (The 2000s era is a big offender), it seems that for them Sonic hasn’t changed much and this is visible not only on the JP scripts of the Modern games which are for the most part better than the ENG ones, but also things like the Sonic Channel comics and the recent one-shots they made with Sonic interacting with the cast show that for all intents and purposes, the Japanese’s staff vision of Sonic is much more clear and consistent compared to the west. Because of this, I’d rather have a good Japanese writer on Sonic games with the localization being focused on being faithful with the original script than have a more western writers dramatically changing the characters. (I don’t mention the tone since either way, SEGA is the one in charge of that and the writers have to follow that)

My last and very subjective point is that, at least for me, everything SoA does with Sonic involving the writing and canon feels like a dumbed down version of the source material. One of the reasons it bugs me so much that in the latest decade Sonic has taken a more western direction is because a lot of what I pointed out gets lost as a result, even if some of those elements are still there, you can tell they’re more downplayed with products like the Tyson Hesse shorts having a more predominant cartoon direction. If any of you have been following my blog for a long time, you should be aware that just because I prefer the Japanese Sonic content doesn’t mean I won’t give the western products a chance, my enjoyment for Mania, the Tyson Hesse shorts and the movie should be a testament of that, but at the same time I can’t help but being sour about the fact that because of these products, we don’t have stuff like a new anime for Sonic or even a serialized ‘’main’’ manga as an alternative for the comics, and my hype for these products is generally more subdued as a result since I’d wish SEGA rather spent that money and resources on more Japanese content than just merchandise.

In particular, because Sonic is a Japanese franchise with a notorious inspiration from anime, what I get from this is a pretty big contradiction. I know Sonic is much more popular on the west but...is it really necessary for his game or products to be handled by western creators to keep their appeal?

For instance, imagine if Dragon Ball’s manga and anime got replaced by western comics and animated series because of it’s world-wide appeal, would that really be the same?

Or imagine the same thing with Fullmetal Alchemist, a pretty aclaimed anime that has a lot of western influence. Would it really not matter at all if it’s Japanese products were replaced with western ones?

At least for me, it wouldn’t.

And what I said about American versions of Japanese franchises being nothing more than watered down versions of the source material? I have that view because of countless examples.

Mega Man and how the English manuals removed a lot of important information about the story of the Blue Bomber’s game and world, causing a lot of plot holes in the process.

American remakes like Godzilla 1998 or Dragon Ball Evolution being an in-name only version of the source material.

Or the many censored anime English dubs from the 2000s, for instance, whenever I see the Yu-Gi-Oh! dubs, I only see a very dumbed down and childish version of a show that was originally a shonen.

And I know that all of these things don’t have to necessarely get lost since every creator is different and there’s franchises like Avatar which are made on the west but draw a lot of inspiration from anime and I’m aware of that, and I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to say that American writers are not allowed to work on Sonic, what I’m trying to say is that inevitably there’s always gonna be some culture dissonance and clash when writers from another culture handle a foreign franchise. And even with examples like ATLA, I think being made by one culture while being inspired by the other is actually a big part of these franchises appeal and it’s something that can’t simply be replicated by handing it to creators from that specific culture they draw inspiration from.

I think James Rolfe’s quote about the same thing with the Godzilla franchise sums up how I feel about this.

‘‘It’s like champagne, anybody can make their own and call it champagne, but unless it’s from Champagne France, it’s not real champagne’‘

So, this last part was very subjective, but I think this post in general sums up why I dislike so much the idea of Sonic having western writers specifically in the games or just focusing more on that side in general.

But what do you guys think? I guess I am too biased so that’s why I wanted to ask for opinions and discuss this topic.

[sonamy-flashfic]

So... There was a new Taylor Swift album. I’ve been listening to it lately, so I guess you can probably expect more of this in the future? We’ll have to see, though. Today’s fic is titled after Mirrorball, which is both my favorite song off the album and gives me super strong Amy vibes. I’d recommend listening to it while reading for the ideal experience, but it’s not necessary or anything!

There’s a little bit of background for this piece, specifically its AU designation - I’m not super clear on the storyline, beyond the basics, but I might pursue it further someday. The rough idea being that most of the world’s turned on Sonic for some reason or another, with only a handful believing in his innocence. Still, right now I don’t think I could do justice to a longer, more dramatic storyline like that - I tend to fizzle out after a few parts, most of the time.

Mostly, I thought of a few of the lines of dialogue in this piece first, and the starlit scene, and the rest fell into place. It’s not complete, just a fragment of something I might never come back to, but I hope it’s enough for you to enjoy. 

(Please let me know what you think, I’d love to know if I’m doing well at all!)

hush, when no one is around, my dear Universe: Modern/AU Word Count: 742

Tails is asleep, curled in on himself with his tails as a makeshift blanket. Amy sits quietly nearby, watching the starry sky above them.

Sonic leans back against the cliff wall in a casual pose as he voices his question. "Why are you still here?"

She offers a small smile. "I won't leave you," she promises; her hand settling over his. "Why? Did you want me to?"

And it's sweet, but that's not what he asked. "Ah… No, not at all."

"Then what is it?"

"I… You stayed," he mutters, the only solid, coherent thought he can seem to voice. 

"Of course I stayed," she says; like it's as simple as that. "I'd follow you anywhere, Sonic. You know that."

"Yeah," he whispers, studying her expression. "I guess I do."

(He's not sure what he knows, anymore.)

"I love you," she tells him, soft and low; like it's a secret, like she doesn't shout it from the rooftops at any opportunity. The starlight above them is reflected in her gaze, the tiniest hint of a mischievous smile.

"I think you're alone in that," he sighs, sorry to shatter her sweet illusion. 

Her smile doesn't falter, only softens as she touches his face with her free hand. "No," she says, "I don't think so."

He waits patiently for her to continue.

"I love you. Tails loves you. Cream loves you, Sonic, and Vanilla does too. There are people on your side."

He looks away, shaking his head. "I wish I knew why, sometimes. Still, even if you're right…" His gaze returns to her now, studying her face with a certain intensity. "That doesn't answer why you're here."

"I know you," is all she says at first. Then she repeats it, stressing the word: "I know you, Sonic; you'll always do what you think is right. So I'll always be here for you."

"You never had to follow, though. You chose that."

There's something strange in her expression, something he doesn't understand in her wistful sigh. "You saved me, remember?"

He hums quietly, an acknowledgement of memories that feel like another lifetime now. "It was nothing."

(He was only doing what was right, and that it changed their lives is little more than a coincidence.)

"It was something to me," she says, and there's that smile again; that starlight sparkling in her eyes. "You saved me, and suddenly everything was different... And you were the only thread holding me together; like something was tying me to you."

He's already speechless; but she's not yet done. 

"I don't know who I'd be without you, Sonic," she whispers. "I never want to find out."

He keeps studying her face, trying to understand the wonderful anomaly that is the girl at his side. "...So that's how you feel?"

"I lay my heart out before you and that's all you have to say?"

Leaning further back, he closes his eyes. "I'm thinking."

They sit in silence for what might be minutes and might be hours, thinking quietly to themselves.

Eventually, he speaks. "I'm not sure who I'd be without you, either," he tells her, wondering if his words carry the same weight. "I think that maybe... I'd be lonely."

"I love you as you are," she says, and she's still smiling, though he can see the tears glistening in her eyes.

He hugs her; a rare occurrence, but this is a rare occasion. "I know," he whispers, and there are the words with the weight to match her own; heavy with affection and sincerity. "I know you do."

He wants to say more, feels like he should say more; this starlit scene, this sweet confession, deserves better than he knows how to give.

(She deserves better than he knows how to give, too, but she keeps choosing him anyway; and he's not sure how to voice how much that means to him in a way she'll understand.)

"Amy," he murmurs, purely to get her attention.

She looks at him curiously, but as he leans forward and rests a hand on her cheek she seems to realize his intention; and she's leaning into him when he kisses her.

It's awkward and uncoordinated, but sweet all the same, and he only hopes that it's good enough. The faint taste of strawberries on her lips still lingers when they part.

"Thank you," he says softly.

"I… Always," is all she says in return, seeming just a little dazed. "For you, always."

[talbottoimasaka]

Reng Hang - Ivory Research Paper

Photographer: Ren Hang

Website: https://blindspotgallery.com/artist/ren-hang/

Bodies of Work: 1) Human Love,  and 2) My Mum

“Every year I have the same hope: to die early,” Ren Hang posted this on his personal blog on January 27, 2017 (Qin). Then he followed up: “I wish it would come true this year”. That day was the Chinese New Year Eve. Two months later, Ren Hang, this 29-year-old Chinese photographer passed away, likely because of depression. All of his social accounts went silent, all of his shows were cancelled, all of his works stopped for sale, and what was left was only his untitled and unexplained photography. 

Ren once said “Whether it was happiness or anger, it triggers stronger emotion when I was taking photographs” (Song). Maybe it is because of this sensitivity to emotion, Ren suffered from depression, but also because of it, he was able to create pictures with a recognizable style and a different perspective. He was also described as “laconic” because he never explained his artworks. He didn’t even name them. He once said, “I can’t use any words to describe my style.” (Ciel). With such mysteriousness, it is often hard to find out about the specific information about his work. Many of Ren’s photographs contain nudity, sometimes are commented “too exposed”. He has a distinct style of posing his picture using different human body parts, or combining them with parts of animals or plants to create a feeling of weirdness and absurdity.

In 2017, just the same year he committed suicide, an exhibition of his called “Human Love” was set up at the Swedish Museum of Photography, Fotografisca. The pictures in this collection are taken during 2009 to 2012, at various locations. This series of works strongly shows Ren’s preference for taking nude pictures and posing with human bodies. In this collection, the photograph Untitled 46 presents five people lying on their stomach. What is noticeable in this picture is that the camera only focuses on the hips of these five people. At first, it seemed unclear to us what the subject really is, with the sky-blue background and just the hip of the people: it creates an illusion of a scene of dunes in the desert. The shape of the hip is round, like mountains that connected to each other. The texture of the skin looks like small particles of sand. The photograph perfectly presents the litheness of the human body, and the smoothness of the skin’s texture, which makes the bodies, in a way, look like a landscape in nature. The color choice is also essential to this picture. At first, the blue background looks like sky, but once the viewers recognize what the subject really is, it turns very artificial under the contrast of the skin color of the hips in the front, which creates a contrast between organic and inorganic objects. 

(Untitled 46, “Human Love”, 2012)

Untitled 40 is another example of how he used unusual posing in his photograph. It is a portrait of a woman, but with her head completely sinking inside of a plastic bag full of water and goldfish. The composition of this picture is simple and direct, but it helps create this shocking feeling to the viewer because it shows the subject directly to people’s eyes. It is hard to figure out what exactly is going on in this picture because the plastic bag is fixed on the woman’s head in a strange way. This also creates an unrealistic feeling because the viewers don’t know how the picture is posed. There is also a contrast between life and death: the fish inside the bag seem lively, while the woman’s head inside the water creates a feeling that she is suffocated. 

(Untitled 40, “Human Love”, 2012)

Another important collection of his work is called “My Mum”, taken in 2014, at unknown location. In this series of work, Ren hang took pictures of his mother. Similar to the “Human Love” series, all of these photographs were posed portraits, with the intention to create illusion. In the collection “My Mum”, the photograph Untitled 61 shoot at his mother in front of a yellow wall. She is facing the camera on her right side, with a goose on her shoulder. The goose is alive, with its wings spreading in a strange angle, creating an illusion of the goose connecting with her body. The goose’s wings are directly placed at his mother’s back, which looks like the wings are growing out of the woman’s body. What was different about this series of pictures is that it is more “gentle” and “light-hearted” (Blind Spot Gallery), while the pictures in “Human Love” are more bold with nudities. Also, in “My Mum”, because there is only one human subject, which is his mother, the series shows a narrative perspective, which is not so obvious in “Human Love”. Rather Ren is aware of the narrative or not, the repetition of similar animals under similar backgrounds creates a fairy tale feeling: white goose, white pigeon, white rabbits. Even if we can’t tell what the story really is about, there is a strong connection between each picture in this series.

(Untitled 61, “My Mum”, 2014)

(Untitled 64, “My Mum”, 2014)

However, what is presented in “Human Love” that cannot be seen in “My Mum” is the wilderness of Ren’s style. In “Human Love”, there are more pictures taken outside of a room, in totally different environments. The photograph Untitled 21 shoots a woman and a man naked,  kissing on a rooftop with an uncommon pose. The woman is bending backwards while kissing, which causes her face to become upside down. Behind them is the cityview under the rooftop, and the sun is right above them. The wilderness in this picture is the contrast between the two bold bodies and the vastness of the city view. The softness of the body in front of the reinforced concrete clashes together to create beauty. The lighting is also very different from the other works: it is backlighting. The main objects are in shadow, but the closer to the background the lighter it gets. The vague city view at the foremost end also gives the picture a division from the foreground to the midground, and at last to the background. 

(Untitled 21, “Human Love”, 2012)

To me, what is strange about these photographs is that the composition of these photographs all look clean and simple, there are also not a lot of contrast of colors, but they all create huge impacts to me when I see them. In most of the pictures, the models seem indifferent with little expression of their face, like they are not a part of a subject being photographed, in other pictures, the models don’t even show their faces, but the photograph can still convey emotion. Maybe this is why Ren Hang cannot explain the style of his work, and he left them unexplained, because these pictures contain so many contradictions. Most of these pictures contain opposing elements, but he can combine them together using posing, composition and color. Looking at his pictures is like reading metaphors. His pictures all look very still and quiet, but with the absurdity and weirdness, there is also power underneath. Maybe it is best to leave his work undefined, and give more possibilities to the audience.

Works Cited

Blind Spot Gallery. “Estate of Ren Hang” https://blindspotgallery.com/artist/ren-hang/

Hernadez, Ciel. “Every Frame of His Photography was like a Behavior Art.” Lomography, 28 February. 2017, https://www.lomography.cn/magazine/327738-bare-flesh-ren-hang-from-china-male-photogrpaher-nsfw

Qin, Amy. “Ren Hang, Provocative Chinese Photographer, Dies at 29” The New York Times, 3 March. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/arts/ren-hang-dead-photographer- china.html

Ren, Hang. Ren Hang. Edited by Dian Hanson, Taschen, 2017.

Song, Shuang. “RenHang: I don’t know what is ‘private photograph’” Xin Zhou Kan, 25 February. 2017, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_62914aab0102wu2d.html

[mitchellsbeca]

Chapters: 1/? Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Chloe Beale/Beca Mitchell Summary: A collection of prompts/tumblr requests. Bechloe for now but may change later.

prompt 18. “I shouldn’t be in love with you.”

In all honesty, it was the last person Beca expected to turn up, her arrival always catching Beca off guard and tilting her center of gravity.

It had been about six months since she’d officially signed with Khaled, six months since the Bellas had split and gone their own ways and Beca had moved to Florida. But she’d still invited them all to the release party for her first album, something she’d worked tirelessly on to get it completed as soon as possible (and she already had a repertoire of songs and beats saved on her computer so there hadn’t been a great deal of work to do, just plenty of fine-tuning).

Understandably some couldn’t make it; Jessica and Ashley were busy at a different event in California doing... something (she should really ask them what they’re doing now), Cynthia Rose was in military training and couldn’t get the leave, Lilly or Ester or whatever her name was now was off somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, Fat Amy had flown herself over since she had the money now, along with a Aubrey, Emily, Flo and Stacie (who had actually brought Bella with her and made motherhood look cool and easy at the same time). But Chloe had reluctantly declined, her studies taking up most of her time now that she was at vet school with an unavoidable exam taking place the same Friday. And she was the one Beca had been most looking forward to seeing.

It was a red carpet event so everyone was dressed particularly nicely. Beca had been assigned a blazer slash play suit piece, dark red with cut-off shorts in matching fabric and heels. Hair and make up had been done - maybe even over done for Beca’s liking - but done nonetheless. And she did look killer, she wouldn’t disagree. Beca was actually feeling good.

But even in the sea of people at the venue, alongside influencers, other artists and photographers, Beca pulling attention from all corners, her focus wasn’t with anyone else but who’d just walked in.

It was like a parting of the ocean, Beca’s direct line of sight guided by a line of emptiness with people either side and all sound plunging to mute.

A blue gilded dress with a deep neckline held the woman tight, hair braided like a halo around her head with strands falling to frame her face. And the sky. The endless gorgeous sky that Beca always saw in her eyes, even from halfway across the room it was like daylight and the height of summer and the endless possibilities that could be. Could have been.

Beca excused herself from the group she was surrounded by, one of them a journalist who was halfway done with asking Beca questions about the album and attempting to pry into her personal life.

Chloe looked lost, eyes wandering across the vast, dark room in sight of any face she might find familiar with clutch caught in front as her body turned. Beca wove through bodies on the approach, smile growing ever so slightly larger as she neared.

And Chloe beamed, spotting the brunette head towards her and she moved forward, arms outstretched and ready to embrace her best friend. Laughter escaped them both when they hugged, Chloe’s warmth seeping into Beca, dissolving her stress and settling some of the underlying anxiety she’d been suffering from all day.

“I thought you couldn’t make it?” Beca asked.

“Amy flew me over from New York. You know she has her own private jet now, right?”

“I do.”

“Well, she didn’t take no for an answer, so she got her pilot to fly back and pick me up after my exam and I got ready on the plane.”

“Yeah, you look like you got ready on a plane,” Beca jested with a playful smirk.

“Please. This is Mile High Couture, thank you very much,” she said, splaying her arms out as she showed off her out and stroke a pose, “And I was going to say I look better than you but that would be an outright lie. You look... stunning, Beca, honestly.”

“This? It’s just people doing their job to make me look good. Turns out you can only do so much with an actual potato. But yours is all natural, you don’t even need to try; you always look incredible.”

“You’re not a potato. But we’ll leave the ‘all natural’ comment out for discussion.” “Dude, I’m not kidding.”

The grin on her face faltered, like a sudden thought had popped to the forefront of Chloe’s mind and escaped to her expression. She eyed someone next to them before she leaned in, pulling at Beca’s wrist and asking in a hushed voice, “Is there somewhere we can go that’s a bit more... private?”

Beca turned to who Chloe had been eyeing; a tall guy with heavy duty camera equipment that was beginning to snap pictures, flash almost blinding. A small group of people lingered behind him too, so Beca nodded in response and grasped the wrist of the hand holding her own, pulling Chloe behind her. She knew where to go. There was a secret balcony down a corridor next to the restrooms that she had scouted earlier that day. So Beca lead them there, out into the Floridian air that was more humid than inside but fair quieter.

“Sorry about that,” Beca apologized.

Chloe shook it off, “You’re a big celebrity now. People want to know you.” “I’m just making music, like I’ve always been doing. Just... more people are listening to it now.”

A silence fell. The thumping bass of the music inside was the only thing that could be heard but the air was still around them. They were both leaning against the edge of the balcony, solid stone wall cool on their skin.

Beca was about to speak when Chloe jumped in before her, “I listened to it. The album, I mean. As soon as you sent it over I listened to it in one sitting. I’m not going to lie to you when I tell you I cried a little bit.”

“You cry at videos of dogs.”

Chloe chuckled, “So it wasn’t necessarily a hard task, okay? But still... it really moved me, Beca.”

“Good. I’m glad you like it.”

“Especially the hidden track.”

The brunette’s posture went rigid. She doesn’t know how, but Beca had been hoping Chloe had missed it, that dumb song she’d unknowingly recorded on her down time (thanks to Theo, once again), stripped back and acoustic. “Yeah?” she asked.

“I don’t know why, but when I first heard it I was kind of... I don’t know. I had to listen to it again. But when I did, I was just... crying and I couldn’t work out why, but I felt like it was a piece of a puzzle that I didn’t even know I had that I’d been missing. And I asked Amy if she’d heard it and what she thought of it and she told me. She told me it was about us. And how you felt about me.”

“Feel,” Beca corrected, staring at the street below them.

A beat, too long too be promising, “...what?”

And it was now or never, Beca decided. Because if she owed Chloe anything, it was the truth. She didn’t have the energy to keep tip-toeing anymore. Chloe had her life sorted now so it wouldn’t make a difference, but she deserved to know, “How I feel about you. Because I love you. And I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t be in love with you because it’s not my place to be in love with you—”

“Beca...”

“The truth is, Chloe, I’ve loved you since Freshman year; starting from when you broke into my shower and invited me to audition for the Bellas. When we sang together for the first time?” Beca asked like she thought Chloe wouldn’t remember. “It just took me too long to realize, and when I did... it was too late. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was too slow and gave too little. I didn’t just break up with Jesse because of the long distance. He wanted me to move with him to LA and I said no, but as soon as you said you were going to New York the thought of not seeing you on the daily made me feel like I was going to drop off the planet. So I agreed to move with you and make it work. I knew I couldn’t ask you to be with me the same way as I was with Jesse, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because I was still saw you every day. And even on the USO tour I didn’t say anything because... because I already knew I was too late...” she looked up at Chloe with a sad, gentle smile, but blue eyes were covered by eyelids pressed shut, cheeks glistening in the dark, “and that was okay. I made my peace with that even before we moved. I just wanted you to be happy, and Chicago made you happy, so I didn’t interfere. And all the Bellas wanted me to take this opportunity so I did. And it was a perfect way to move onto the next chapter.”

“We’re not... together anymore. Chicago and I.”

It was Beca’s time to be taken aback, “What?”

“I didn’t really work out. He’s a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he would have been working away from home a lot and I barely know him already so that’s... not what I want.”

“I’m sorry, Chloe.”

The redhead moved to Beca, clutch left behind resting on the flat of the ledge so she had two delicate hands free. And they reached for the hands across from her, pulling them closer and making Beca turn to face her, “What I’m trying to say is... that chapter? It didn’t start for me when we left Spain, but it ended on a cliffhanger when I heard your song. And I don’t know what the next one is going to be.”

And they were both so close. As close as Chloe had pulled her on hood night all those years ago, but this time Chloe’s eyes were red and puffy and there was a million things swimming within them that Beca had only dreamt about seeing half of. And just when she thought she was used to all the ways Chloe could make her feel...

Clear music erupted from the door behind them. Chloe pulled away, turning away from whoever it was that interrupted them and regaining her composure.

“Beca! We’ve been looking everywhere for you; we need you for the speech,” Theo said, his British accent grating Beca’s neck moreso than usual, “Come on, you’re already late.”

“Two seconds. Just two, I’ll be with you soon. Just... tell them I’m coming.” “We can’t, Beca, we’re already running late,”  he replied, holding the door open. “Dude, I was having a moment!” she near yelled and she heard a chuckle from the side of her. She turned to Chloe.

“You should go. I’ll be fine. Don’t want to keep them waiting any more, Miss Hotshot Artist,” the redhead said, eyes twinkling still but the smile she offered not quite reaching them.

“I don’t care. They can wait, but you can’t. I won’t make you,” Beca whispered, even over the music, so that only they could hear. And she cupped the bottom of Chloe’s jaw, thumbs stroking damp cheeks before pulling her close and pressing lips together. And Chloe? Chloe was everything Beca had imagined her to be. Soft, gentle, perfect. Her perfume smelled divine. She could smell the sweet scent of her hair as it danced into her senses and enveloped her completely.

And before she knew it, Chloe’s arms were wrapped across her shoulders, the crook of her elbow pulling her body closer by the neck. They were pressed so close. So close like when they sleep but this time they were both so awake and vibrant and alive.

Chloe pulled away and Beca craved to follow but the redhead pressed delicate fingers against her lips, “You’ve done enough. I can wait ten more minutes. Go and knock ‘em dead, Becs.”

The brunette couldn’t be beaming brighter if she tried. She pressed a gentle kiss against Chloe’s fingers and pulled away, making her way to the door. She didn’t escape without a pat on the ass from the redhead, though.

And whatever the rest of this chapter had, Beca thought, it was going to even more brilliant.

[theflashdriver]

By Land and Sea

When Sonic makes a bet with Amy, it backfires almost immediately. He has come face to face with one of his greatest fears but, at the same time, he isn't one to back down from a challenge. Can he beat Amy at a swimming race or will he flounder? This is the third part of my Sonamy Week catch up! This fic was written for the race prompt! It’s a little over 4.5k words long, I hope you will enjoy!

"This isn't what I agreed to, Ames."

"Oh, it's exactly what you agreed to, my darling." He could hear the delight in her voice; though his eyes were turned from her the blue hedgehog could plainly see the grin on her face. "You promised that if I beat you in a race you'd go on a date with me."

No, he wasn't looking at her; instead, his eyes were fixed upon the racetrack before him. The very racetrack he took issue with. Marked with floating orbs and, no more than 200 metres away, a flagpole that slowly bobbed from side to side. Two lanes of ocean had been isolated, made into a path through the positioning of small orb-shaped buoys. The two met at their ends, a larger central buoy with a blue flag marking the midway point. If the water were land it'd be simple, as fast as Amy was he'd beat her to the marker, around it and back. He'd probably pass her before she got halfway up her lane… well, maybe three quarters. But the sea was a different matter, they were stood on a beach rather than a raceway. Though he avoided water, he'd seen Amy swimming before. She was good and fast, while he might as well have been made from lead. The blue hedgehog needed a life preserver to keep himself above the surface, let alone swim a straight line. No matter how he tried to bolster himself, throwing his eyes to the sky or focusing on that flag, fear and, an emotion he so rarely faced, doubt was plaguing him.

There was a tug at his wrist. Shuddering, he pried his eyes away; allowing them to meet those of Cream. Innocent and full of empathy, she spoke. "I'm afraid that is what you said Mister Sonic. You didn't specify what kind of race, you only said that Miss Amy had to beat you."

"She's got you there, Sonic. You should've been more specific." From his other side he'd heard Tails, the young fox he trusted more than anyone, betray him over the silly technicality. "You kinda brought this upon yourself."

"D-Don't side with them Tails! You know what I meant just like they do! I mean really. When I say race, is your first thought actually…" He shuddered, looking to the lapping waves ahead of them. "…Swimming?"

Amy's didn't hesitate to answer, gleefully posing a question of her own. "Come on Sonic, what would you call this if not a race?"

Many phrases rushed through Sonic's head; a death trap, a nightmare, a one-way ticket to a watery grave, but he settled on, "Lame. Just plain lame." Unable to stomach it, he turned around; eyes closed and chin raised. "It's like challenging Knuckles to chess after he says he can beat anyone in a one on one match, or askin' the Chaotix to solve maths problems rather than mysteries. It's just not what they do, just like I don't swim."

Cream gasped, innocently taken aback. "Oh no, does that mean you're giving up Mister Sonic?"

"Of course not Cream." He'd turned back to the young rabbit, lowering himself to better look her in the eye. "Even if Amy's better at…" Despite having spoken it once already, the word 'swim' felt gross in his mouth. He shook off its vile taste, continuing to reassure the little girl. "Even if Amy's better at this than me, I've got to give it my best shot! No matter how scared you are Cream, you should never back down." It wasn't his best motivational speech, but then he wasn't in the best headspace. He was bolstering himself almost as much as he was trying to send a message.

The young rabbit gave a strong nod, the little chao in her arms matching it. "You're right Mister Sonic! You should always do your best, even when defeat is certain. You might get lucky!" It wasn't quite the glowing affirmation he'd hoped for; even though he knew the rabbit was being genuine, her lack of faith did scuff his pride. Before her wounding could show, she'd turned to face Amy. "Cheese and I will go set things up. Good luck both of you!"

With that, Cream rushed away from the group; what she had left to set up Sonic had no idea. There was a beat of silence, his gut wouldn't let him turn toward the sea and yet he didn't have the strength to face Amy. Thus, he looked to the sky; the sun was shining, the day was windless and only had a few clouds to its name. If this were it a regular race, these would be the perfect conditions.

"Sonic." All of a sudden his imagined visage of Amy was discarded, the anxious way she'd said his name had stripped it all away. "Are you actually scared? You know we don't have to do this if you don't want to"

"Me? Scared?" He snorted, both attempting to reassure her while, simultaneously, puffing himself up. "Yeah right."

"Well, supposing you were, there's nothing to worry about." Unfortunately, his words hadn't been quite enough. She probably wanted him to meet her eye. "The waters are calm today and we shouldn't be at sea any longer than ten minutes. Besides, we're not going too far out."

Finding the strength, he looked to her. Sure enough, there was a glint of concern in her eyes, hands clasped before her. He grinned, shaking his head. "Honestly Ames, I was just putting on a show to make the kids think you stand a chance. Keep things interesting. I'll totally be able to…" The word 'swim' caught on his tongue again, its mere thought made him queasy, but he forced himself through it; maintaining bravado. "Win this race, no sweat."

"Oh really? You're not?" Following his show of confidence, her concern had mostly slipped away, a smile sliding into its place. Amy had leant in, standing on her tiptoes to match his height. "It's cute seeing you flustered for once, Sonic." Perhaps his queasiness wasn't so easily hidden. "Don't worry; I'm sure it'll be an easy lap." There were few cockier than him and so, when it came to smugness, he could recognise it from a mile away. "If anything happens just call me and I'll swim over to save you. I want you in one piece for our date after all."

Attempting to exceed her cockiness, Sonic rose to his own toes and outsized her once more. A winning smirk returned to his lips. "Don't you worry about me Ames, it may be calm now but as soon as I'm out there it's going to get choppy. Maybe duck under when I pass by, the waves are gonna be huge."

"Yes Sonic, I'm terrified of your doggy-paddle." Once again, his endeavour had failed. "Well, as long as I can hear your screaming over the splashing you're in safe hands." Amy lowered herself, turning on her heel, but before she left she looked back to him, a gentler smile on her face. "As much as I want to win, more than that, I hope you have fun; I know you enjoy competition after all. Good luck Sonic!"

"Y-Yeah, good luck Ames!" He ran his finger beneath his nose and, before he could stop himself, called out in reassurance. "Don't worry so much, swimming or running, I like spending time with you." He almost bit through his tongue as she turned around. A pinkness matching her hair had snuck onto her cheeks. "I mean, having you around keep things interesting… you know what I mean?"

Amy's hands clasped, her smile blinding. "Aww, Sonic! Of course, I know what you mean!"

When Miss Rose turned around the spring in her step had more than doubled. He rubbed his forehead. Sonic wasn't sure which parts of that conversation he regretted and, while he was no stranger to making a fool of himself, the knot in his stomach and heat he was feeling were a little too much to handle. He took a deep breath, circling his shoulders, and tried to push out such thoughts. What's done was done, he'd talked a big game so he had to do something… even if winning wasn't in the cards. Just what that something was, he had no idea. Planning was difficult…

"If you're so worried about it why don't you just run off?" Tails question pulled Sonic from his stupor; the little fox had raised a good point. "It's not like you haven't before."

"As stupid of a race as this is, I did kind of promise her, you know?" He ran a hand through his quills, continuing to ignore the heat on his cheeks. "Running off now, it'd just be wrong. Uncool even."

"Wow, I guess this really was smart of her. I didn't realise your word to her meant that much." A glance to Tails proved a fact he'd feared, there was a broad grin on his face. The smugness was spreading.

Flashing his own grin Sonic reached down, ruffling the young fox's ears. "Nah, it's just that Cream's here. Got to be a good role model, after all, I can't let her think heroes back down from a challenge. Let alone lie."

The young boy snorted. "Yeah right, you just don't want to admit it."

"Admit what?" He feigned ignorance.

"Though you whined about the race, and I'm sure you'll moan when you lose, you don't think Amy winning would be such a bad thing." Sonic could practically hear his influence in the young boy's taunts. "In fact, I bet you want to go on that da-

The hedgehog continued to noogie him, further messing his fur and cutting him off. "Yeah, well, when I beat her in this race I'll prove you doubly wrong, won't I? That'll be a change."

Finally, the boy genius pushed him off. The grin on his fluffy muzzle was forced into view. "Lucky I brought your inflatable then, isn't it? Or will you not be needing them, seeing as you're so confident."

Hands crossed over his heart, an overly pained expression overcame the Blue Blur's face. Bending his right leg he allowed himself to lean on the young fox as if he'd been gravely wounded. "My own little bro, siding with the enemy. Where did I go wrong? You knew about this, you knew they'd tricked me all this time and yet you said nothing. Oh Tails, how could you?" His right arm raised to cross his brow as he began to mock cry; "My own bro, betrayed by my own bro!"

Laughter erupted beneath him, Sonic heard the sound of feet struggling to kick up sand as the little fox struggled to support him; "It's not like I could've done anything about it, you agreed before I could say anything."

At that, Sonic brought himself to stand straight; whipping a final faux tear from his eye. "I suppose I'll find it in my heart to forgive you then. Stop me next time though, alright? Tackle me to the ground if you have to, you're meant to be my brains."

"Fine, fine, I promise I'll stop you next time." Tails promised. Reaching behind himself and into a small rucksack, the youth pulled out a dark blue lifejacket. On its shoulder a new addition, a bright orange whistle on an extendable cord.

Sonic took it with a sigh, pulling it over his shoulders before doing the buckle around his belly. "You're really confident in me winning, aren't you Tails?"

He shrugged, that smugness had returned. "Better to be safe than sorry,"

The blue blur turned back to the water, Amy wasn't lying when she said it was calm. It must have been close to low tide but the beach was long and empty. A glance further up the bank revealed Cream and Cheese, staking two flags into the sand; both their finish line and likely starting point. So, there would be a dash from land to water before the true challenge started. While at first he'd thought this would merely give him a small head start, an idea snuck its way to the forefront of his mind. There was a technique that, while difficult, he had performed before in times of crisis. The sand sprawled out far enough for it, the only problem he could really foresee was rounding the midway buoy, a sharp turn. If he could control his turning long enough to manage that then things would be fine. Running on water, well… it was worth a shot at least?

"Well, good luck finding your nerve. I'm sure you'll have fun on the date." Before Sonic could get in another word, Tails had taken off; tail spinning as he rushed over to aid the young rabbit.

Rolling his eyes, Sonic opened the valve in his lifejacket and started to blow; inflating it until he felt safe. The young fox wasn't necessarily wrong; even if this plan didn't work out he was more scared of the water than he was the practically inevitable date. Despite his stutter and regret, he hadn't lied; he did enjoy spending time with her. Amy was always excited to see him and she could pull reactions from him that no one else could. She kept him going like no one else could. Pacing, he cast his eyes across the water's surface; watching the waves froth as they broke against pale sand. It really was gross, everything from the scent of salt to the sound told him he wasn't meant to be here. Even the sand beneath his feet was uneven; it kicked up with every step and certainly didn't make for smooth running. Standing on the beach was definitely way worse than lying on the beach, at least then he could keep his distance from the water, listen to music and properly daydream.

"I thought I'd be seeing you at the starting line, I'm surprised you're still hanging back here." Amy had returned, freeing him from his thoughts. "You'll be swimming in your shoes then?"

"Figured I'd end up waiting for you no matter what." He grinned, turning to her as they wandered toward the finish line. "And well, if we're starting with a sprint I ought to get the most out of my head start."

Her red dress had been shed in place of a red swimsuit. While he tried not to think too long about it, let alone stare too long, he did think it suited her. It was a simple, red, one-piece suit but, around the waist, it had additional fabric that flared out to give the guise of a white skirt with a thin red hem.

"I thought you were going to win this race no sweat." She teased.

Winning would still be difficult but with his plan in mind; there was a spark of genuine confidence in his heart. "Well yeah, but this way you won't even make it to the water. No point in you getting soaked over what's sure to be a landslide victory."

"Oh, we'll see about that." They arrived at the starting line, Cream having gathered pebbles from the surrounding area to construct the start/finish line itself and flags being planted to better separate their lanes. "If you're going to do your best, so will I."

As she started to stretch, warming up well for someone certain they'd win, he couldn't help noticing Amy's hairband had been replaced with a messy bun; her quills bundled near the back of her head. Despite telling himself he wouldn't, he'd found himself staring at the cute sight; pulled in by her excitement. Tearing himself away he reached across his body, beginning a stretch of his own.

With the kids continued to set things up, Tails preparing a camera in case (by some miracle) a photo finish occurred, Sonic saw idle opportunity to pry. "So Ames, what did you have in mind for that date?"

"You'll just have to wait and see." She swapped from crossing her right arm against her body to the left.

"What, no spoilers?" He bent down, touching his toes before reaching behind himself; feeling his calves warm. "Come on Amy, give me a hint at least."

"I know the only way to keep you interested is to keep you on your toes," She continued to refuse. "If I told you now, wouldn't you get bored?"

"A deal's a deal, isn't it? I'm coming on the date if you win, no matter how gross it is." Another glance to Amy found her mid-lunge, returning his gaze. "But that doesn't matter, I'm only asking 'cause I'm gonna win. Tell me now, it might convince me to lose on purpose."

"We both know, as soon as your feet leave the sand, you're going to get stuck my darling." She jested. "Regardless, I want you to enjoy yourself on the date so…"

"So?" He quirked a brow, awaiting her statement.

"Well…I haven't quite decided what we're doing yet." That surprised him; Amy had been asking him out for as long as he could remember… yet she had nothing planned? She elaborated. "I've waited so long for this, I've had my heart set on so many ideas, but now it's so close I'm not sure what I want to do." She stood straight, rolling some final kinks out of her shoulders. "Twinkle Park, going to the movies, getting dinner… I can't decide." There was a sparkle in her eyes that, coupled with the glow in her cheeks brought on by her warm-up, was too much for him.

Maybe, if his plan did work out, he'd treat her to something anyway. Go out for chilidogs or maybe just hang around the beach a little longer, today felt like an ice cream and relaxing kind of day.

Having caught himself staring again, Sonic turned away. "Well, it's good you're not set on anything seeing as I'm gonna win."

"In your dreams my darling Sonic." The pink hedgehog had taken her place on the starting line, lowering herself to a crouching start position.

Sonic matched it, fingertips buried in the sand and eyes locked on the path ahead. The running lane couldn't be longer than twenty metres, even that was a higher estimate. Still, he figured it would be enough to build up the speed, he'd grab onto the buoy on the way around for turning leverage. Yeah, that seemed like it'd work!

At the edge of his lane stood Tails and at Amy's stood Cream, both prepared a flag in one hand and a whistle in the other. Cream was beaming. "The first one back wins! Good luck you two!"

"On your marks…"

"Get set…"

With the blow of the whistle he was off, kicking up sand and bolting forward as fast as he could; not a glance to Tails nor even back to Amy as he claimed his lead. No sound but his footfalls and breathing filled his ears, vision tunnelled on the midway buoy. Soon the dull thudding of his feet turned to splashing, the smack of his soles against water, he had to be prepared for that; had to maintain his pace, quicken it even. He could feel the wind cutting against his cheeks, muffling the sun's warmth as the pounding of his heart grew faster.

Then it happened, the first splash; he'd arrived in the shallows! Sonic closed his eyes, refusing brace himself lest it slowed him. Seaspray coated his body, beads of water like bullets buried into his fur to mingle the salt of his sweat with their own. His footfalls continued; short, rapid, splashes that blurred into each other, making it impossible to identify how far out to sea he was. Confident he could keep this up, the hedgehog's eyes reopened. As he could feel, the waters directly in front of him were flickering up with every step; colliding with his legs and bare stomach. He refocused on the buoy, growing closer with every fraction of a second, in preparation he reached out with his right arm. It couldn't have been ten seconds since he'd left the beach, probably closer to five.

The hedgehog lent in preparation for the turn. Contact was made with the flag. His fingers coiled around the pole's length. A resounding snap cut through his wet footfalls. The flagpole hadn't been strong enough to handle his speed and had broken in two; before he could even realise what had happened it was dragging behind him. The drag from the pole had an immediate impact on his speed, rather than bounce off the surface Sonic's next footfall splashed straight through it. Sonic quickly let go of the pipe but it was already too late, his slowed (but still considerable) momentum led him to bounce off the surface twice, splashing deeper each time, before he found himself submerged and spinning.

The world was a blur, his mouth opened only to fill with seawater as his head dunked time and time again, carried by his own prior speed. When he finally stabilised and surfaced he'd completely lost his bearings, coughing and spluttering the hedgehog found himself surrounded by ocean; kept afloat by his life vest more than his awful attempt to tread water. His shoes waterlogged, he could already feel them starting to slip. Limbs smacking against the surface, Sonic was struggling to turn. Craning his neck, bobbing as though he were tempest-tossed, Sonic could see the base of the buoy and, no more than a few metres beyond that floating grey orb, a bobbing pink head on the approach.

Having spat up what was either his fourth or fifth mouthful of water, he felt a wave meet with his back and push him ever so slightly closer to the floater. He knew he was supposed to lean forward, kick his legs and swing his arms, but the position was just too bizarre to him. The hedgehog was at his best upright, sprinting, not lying down and flailing. Thus, precisely as Amy had predicted, Sonic found himself doggy paddling; arms fumbling through the water as he ran in place. His pace was gruelling, though he continued to wriggle the truth he'd always known had set in. In the water, he stood no chance of beating Amy.

Her consistent, fast-paced, breaststroke was cutting through the water unfazed by its gentle waves. As he watched the pink hedgehog approach he did, admittedly, feel himself relax. Tail's lifejacket, despite its condescending whistle, was keeping his head well above the water despite his frantic efforts. He wasn't comfortable but, at the very least, seeing her so close made him feel safe. Before he could quite make it to the buoy she'd pulled up in front of him, coming to a halt and treading water so very casually.

Soaked and ragged, he used most of his remaining smarm. "Hey, Ames. Long time no see."

"Hey." That prior cockiness wasn't there, instead that gentle smile she'd worn when she'd worried about his fear. "Need a little help?"

"Maybe just a little, looks like you're goin' my way and getting there way faster than me." He smiled.

"Nothing to it but practice." She'd gotten closer still, floating shoulder to shoulder with him. "Wrap your arm around me and I'll show you."

He fully stopped treading water, taking her offer and allowing herself to properly float with her. It'd be a lie to say he wasn't embarrassed but, given the situation, he thought he was keeping his cool rather well. "I think it'll be lost on me but I'll give it a shot."

Amy lowered herself, laying flat in the water, and began to swim again. She'd slowed yes, head permanently raised above the water rather than bobbing, but her pace was still ten times what his had been, "You just need to understand that, as long as you keep moving, you'll keep floating."

"You say that but without this vest, I'd have sunk like a stone regardless of how hard I struggled." He explained.

"That's where the practice comes in, the more you do it the longer you'll manage to stay up."

"I'm sure you're right Ames, but, I think I'll just stick to dry land wherever I can." He couldn't help staring at her as she swam; powerful arms cutting through the water. Words seemed to bubble up without his say. "Then again, I guess I would like to practice running on water some more. If I'd made it around that corner I'd have beat you for certain."

"Well, if you want another shot at it you could always challenge me to another race." He could tell she was joking, at least mostly, "Although, I've yet to decide on our first date, let alone a second…"

As she raised the deal again, a thought entered the hedgehog's head, one he hadn't considered until now. Thinking fast, Sonic waggled his forefinger; "I said if you won I'd go on a date with you, not what kind of date we'd be going on." Finally, having been soaked and beaten, things were back to their natural state. He was the one being cocky. "That means I get to pick what we do."

"Oh Sonic, you really think that matters to me? Of course, you can pick our first date! I'd love that!" Her swimming slowed, she'd turned to look over her shoulder. A smile had spread across her lips, still gently pulling him along. "I didn't pick this race because I knew I'd win, I picked it so you couldn't keep running once you cleared the finishing line. Any time spent with you is a good time."

"Y-Yeah, sure, wh-whatever, Ames." Though he couldn't bring himself to admit it, surrounded by ocean and blushing profusely, he felt the same.

[deathbyvalentine]

Assorted Prompts

Loveletter

There are always secret places in schools. They’re unseen to adult eyes. Hollows of trees, particular broken drawers in classrooms, unused desks. They could become post offices, central hubs for things to come and go. Lip glosses, lists, small talismans for luck and witchcraft. Some were private, known only to best friends, not realising they were carrying on a grand tradition practised by hundreds of schoolgirls before them.

Chrissie and Angelique were two such girls. They had the type of friendship only fourteen year old girls could have. They were joined at the hip, endlessly fascinated and infuriated with each other. The came apart and came together in a cycle as predictable as the tides. 

They went to the woods on the outskirts of the grounds, pricked their fingertips with needles and pressed the bloody prints to each other’s lips, swearing an oath to be each other’s forever. They walked to class with linked arms, heads leaning together, weaving whispers between them. They invented their own language, as much about twitches of the hand and eyebrow as the nonsense words they said. They passed notes, never caught. They lay together on Chrissie’s bed, legs tangled together, pressing hands to each other. Sometimes they didn’t even need to speak. They just gazed at each other, memorising the other’s body until it may as well have been their own.

Years later, when they had graduated and were girls no longer, a new pupil plunged their hand into a birdbox and found a faded piece of paper, blue ink bleeding a little from years of damp. It said; 

Chrissie, Tomorrow we will wake up and we will be friends still. How can life get better than this? Your Angel

High Flyer

She had red hair. That was what I remembered best about her. When she took her helmet off it shone like fire in the evening sunlight. She was like a poster come to life, her lipsticked smile perfect, her leather jacket fitting like a dream. She was the perfect pilot, everyone’s idea of one. At least, she was certainly my idea of one. I loved her best in the morning, before she left, before she had to put the world before me. Even in her sleep she was a fighter, never still for too long, always stirring. I knew that she would never go out quietly, that however she went, it would be with an explosion. It turned out I was right, her plane tumbling down into the English channel like Icarus, her hubris being the assumption she could out fly death. She’s buried there somewhere, out with the salt and the seaweed, conquering the waves as she conquered the sky. I don’t miss her. In life she was never around enough to form a life around and now without her, her absence feels as a natural as the wind. I still love her, and I love the spaces where she once was.

Blue

Constance woke up, as she so often did, in the early hours of the morning. For once, the school was peaceful, the entire place breathing slowly. Everything was bathed in pale blue light, the colour of a summer just before dawn. The place was as lonely as she felt, corridors and teaching rooms abandoned. Well. Abandoned if you didn’t know the right way to look.

She realised what had woken her on this occasion. Not nightmares, not rain pattering against the window, not hearing giggling in the next room. Distantly, echoing down the corridor, was a soft wailing. She tilted her head, wondering why the nurse hadn’t taken care of it. Then, after a moment, she realised exactly why. She slipped out of bed, bare feet hitting the cold polished wood, pulling open her bedroom door. She peeped out, listening before distinguishing where it was coming from. 

She followed it down the corridor, a small shiver travelling down her spine from cold or fear. Her fingers brushed the banister as she tip toed down the stairs, slipping past the teacher’s quarters like a forgotten shadow. It was deep within the kitchen where she finally found what she was looking for, rubbing her eyes to free them from the clinging fingers of sleep.

The figure was small, as she expected it to be, sitting on the edge of the wooden table and howling fit to burst. Constance forced herself to keep a neutral face, to not recoil or flinch when the figure looked up to reveal a face with deep claw marks across it. She hadn’t met this one before, but then ghosts appeared whenever they liked. Sometimes it could be centuries before they manifested. Yet another part of her power she didn’t quite understand. Timidly she stood, squirming as she worked up the courage to ask if it was alright.

The answer would be no of course. She had yet to meet a happy ghost. But sometimes someone seeing them, talking to them, acknowledging them would ease their soul enough that they would let her sleep. It didn’t always work. Hence why Constance had quite the reputation for falling asleep at her desk. She took a step closer, fingers brushing the shoulder of the incorporeal form. With a shock like electricity, she felt the claws rip into her flesh, the teeth and terror. She blinked, and her body was her own again, vital, living. The ghost had not yet stopped crying, only for a moment to be surprised that Constance could see him before continuing, undeterred.

With a sigh, she moved over to fill a heavy iron kettle and place it on the hob. She needed tea. It was going to be a long night.

____________________________________________-

Calpurnia and Matthias’ first meeting

He stood behind his mothers and fathers, attempting valiantly to look disinterested. But he had never met a Urizeni before and his curiosity betrayed him. He peeked around his father’s shoulder to inspect her. He noted her stance, straight backed and rigid, the expression giving nothing away as to what she thought of his land, his family, his lodgings. His instinct was to assume arrogance, but he had been told about the Urizeni occupation with poise. She could just be controlling herself, a concept fairly foreign to the young changeling.

He also noted the soft feathers sprouting along her brow. If it wasn’t clear from her confidence, the feathers made her lineage intently clear. He himself had no chance of hiding his own - swirls painted his face, the beginnings of antlers protruding through the mess of curls, his eyes a sparkling blue. In hindsight, he probably should have spent less time examining every inch of her and more time listening to exactly what his family was saying. 

“- Matthias will show you - “ “- What?” He blinked, rapidly being jolted back down to earth.  “You know the way. Calpurnia here needs to be shown and we’re too busy with the clients we currently have. It’ll get you out from under our feet for a few days.” Their tone was traditionally blunt and invited no argument. Matthias frowned and looked over at the other teenager that had caused him to be jolted from his days of relaxation and socialising.

She smiled. What a dick.

_____________________________________________

That Bloody Alleyway

The alley provided a much needed moment of respite. They stood for a moment, backs pressed to the brick walls, their chests heaving. Their assilants sprinted past, not a single one of them glancing into the gap. Even if they had, they might not have seen anything. They were bathed in shadow, the light of the street not quite touching them. 

They could hear nothing but faded footsteps and the sound of their own breath catching in their throats. Alyssa tilted her head, double-checking. Then grinned. She wrapped her hand in Taylor’s t-shirt, closing the gap between them and kissing her, hard. Taylor returned the love, moving up the hand that wasn’t holding a bag of stolen jewellery to Alyssa’s hair, tangling her fingers within it. 

It took them both a moment to notice the body. It was only when they had broken apart and glanced either way to begin to plan their exit when they saw it. Alyssa clapped a hand over her mouth to prevent a scream, but Taylor did nothing more than inhale sharply. They stood as still as statues, making certain that his chest was not rising and falling, that it wasn’t just some drunk sleeping off his evening. Taylor stepped closer, using her phone to cast a little more light on the situation. 

A dark pool surrounded his head like a twisted version of a halo. One pale hand lay flat against the concrete, the other tucked inside his jacket pocket. He was smartly dressed, looking for all the world like he had just stepped out of an office. But that seemed unlikely in this part of town. Legitimate people didn’t work around here. This was a place for getting by and getting into trouble.

Hence the dilemma that now faced the partners. Did they call someone, anonymously and risk sticking their noses somewhere they did not belong? Or did they do the right thing? It was Taylor who stirred first, grabbing Alyssa’s hand and tugging her out of the alleyway and into the street. Not their problem. Not their business.

_________________________________________________

“Any two etc. au bandfic.”

Amy stormed into the green room, tossing her bass onto the couch without caring if it landed on the cushions. She stood in the middle of the room, motionless, her hands clenched into fists, cheeks flushed pink. After a moment she broke the pose, moving over to carefully adjust her bass, murmuring an apology under her breath as she did so. She ran her fingers down it’s neck. 

It was a thing of beauty, the only constant in her life since she was thirteen. Parents left, friends, boys, girls but her green bass stayed, as much a part of her as her hands. She stays in the silence, listening only to her breath. I am close to crying I think. I’m not sure. It’s been so long that I’m not sure all the pipes are connected right. She hated how she looked when she cried. Red puffy eyes, blotchy cheeks. She was not a girl who suffered prettily and she hated that she was even conscious of that fact. She wondered if boys watched themselves through another’s eyes, even at their worst.

She wasn’t sure if James worried about anything, let alone if his sadness was beautiful enough. But then, she also wasn’t sure if sadness was an emotion he felt. Anger, yes, frequently. Bitterness, of course. Sadness? She couldn’t see it on him. Which was probably the problem.

Amy was sad a lot. It was her default state. That and anxious. She frequently found her moments of happiness only came on stage, the music surrounding her, watching James sing her words, the words she had written. Out of his mouth, her words weren’t teenage and embarrassing. They weren’t personal. A crowd sang them back and they became poetry. They became something profound, universal. It felt like releasing them into the world, the weight from her chest finally easing, just a little.

She thought she had found another place. In James’s arms, in his bed. It had started almost as an ego boost. James was stunning, with those big brown eyes and thick eyelashes, strong arms and perfect smile. The fact that he wanted her, with all her flaws was enough to give her head rush. Then it had became more. It was him, just him that made her mood jump, her heart race. Stupid of her really. Falling in love in general was idiocy. Falling in love with a lead singer was lunacy. She didn’t know how to tell him to be careful. Not with her, she was already broken, but with her words. Her music. Her band. That was all that mattered really, when you cut down to the bone of it. 

But James was not a careful man. He didn’t know how to be. He knew only how to be reckless and brave and maddening. It’s what made him so electric to watch and so dangerous to know. Amy only knew how to be careful. She lived in a fragile world. Everything was made of glass, everything could come crashing down, leaving cuts.

She wasn’t surprised that she had seen him kissing somebody else. It was in his nature. The old story of the scorpion and the frog, played out a hundred times over and over. She was however, surprised it hurt.

_______________________________________

“Any character: sex work AU”

It had taken a while to get used to. Her civvie clothes were flowing layers, in deep yellows and oranges, a way of carrying summer with her all year long. Her work clothes were not just tight - they may as well have been painted on. They clung to every dip and curve, highlighting the imagination rather than leaving something to it. What wasn’t covered by latex or leather was not covered at all, the black of the material and the tan of her skin working together to create a symphony of seduction. 

Amberly liked it now. The feeling of it, especially when it warmed, becoming like a second skin. She ran her hands over her hips, feeling the slopes of her own body. She was not often aware she had a body. She generally considered it irrelevant. Simply a vessel for actioning her thoughts. A machine, just one made of flesh and blood.

Here it was different. Here it became a way for her to present her personality, to cause and stir excitement in others. It could be desired and admired. She became fascinated with herself, the swing in her hips, the noise her skin made against sheets, the way her hair streaked down her back. She memorised her freckles and scars, inspecting herself in her mirror with nothing but kindness. She knew logically she was supposed to find fault. Prod at her thighs, despair over a spot, circle what she would change. But none of that entered her mind. She loved herself, her body. And this job gave others the opportunity to do the same.

Experimentally, she smacked the crop against her palm, smiling at the noise that echoed through the room. 

__________________________________________

Petitioner Change

Canyon sat on top of the decaying rock, feet just resting in the water. Dark shapes moved below, but she wasn’t afraid. Shadows were as much a part of this world as the sea itself. The sea spray and the mist left tiny droplets on her skin, shimmering like crystals.  Sometimes they fizzled where they hit her skin, the infernal burning inside her not abated. She was a creature of fire surrounded by water. Not that she minded. Not anymore.

It wasn’t just the landscape that was changing. She had known from the moment it had happened that Abyss had gone, shifting into something of his essence but definitely not the same. Your shaper was a part of you. When they changed, the world changed, and as a part of the world surrounding you, so did you. 

Her rage hadn’t subsided. Her passion. Her adoration and hate. That was still there, fuelling the fire of her soul. But something else was there too. A deep, dark shadow behind the fire. One whispering about acceptance, peace, about the refuge that came with accepting shadow as the natural counterpart of fire. One that saw no experience as valuable as experience. One that thought one sounded like a dreadfully lonely number.

She leaned down, trailing her fingers in the sea, watching some shadows dart up and nip at her fingers. Part of her wanted to slip into the water and let them consume her, a thousand pieces of her in a thousand others. She wasn’t scared. She was happy.

[kforourke]

Birmingham

Inspired, in part, by Gulf Coast’s Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing—which I did not win, bummer—last year I visited the Frye Museum in Seattle and wrote about Toin Ojih Odtola’s Birmingham, vis-a-vis other black portraiture.

Because Odutola’s piece is no longer on view (it was taken down in December), and because after several close editorial calls I want my essay to see the light of day, here it is in full. I am, as you’ll see, a fan.

Conditions for Energy: Black Portraiture and Toyin Ojih Odutola’s “Birmingham”

In all art, the structure and rules of one’s chosen form can be hard to escape. This goes for both forms with strict parameters—such as poetry’s villanelle, with its five tercets, single quatrain, refrains and repetitions—and “unlimited” abstract visual forms, which of course have their own rules, even if they’re harder to divine. Why are some Pollock paintings more successful than others? Why was Christo’s Running Fence better than The Gates?

While this is true of any form, it is particularly true of portraiture. Portraiture is as limited a form as exists because portraiture’s core subject—people—never changes.

Sure, every face and body is different, and artists have approached and treated different portraits in infinitely varied ways. But the fact remains that portraits will always be portraits. When looking at a portrait, one is always looking at a person or persons, with all of the complications and complexities that looking at people—and therefore thinking about people, which is its own ball of wax—entails. For example, whenever I’ve looked Chuck Close’s Big Self-Portrait, 1967-8, either in a reproduction or in person (as at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis), I inevitably think about myself. After a while, after staring at Close’s direct, shirtless gaze, unshaven and with a burning cigarette in his lips, my own gaze invariably turns inward, first to the banality of the painting’s details and my relation to them (do I need a shave??), and then to that silent inner core of self-reflection touched by only the best art.

The key is quality, or “painterly energy,” as John Berger calls it in his essay about the Fayum portrait painters:

“Among the several hundred known portraits, the difference of quality is remarkable. There were great master-craftsmen and there were provincial hacks. There were those who summarily performed a routine, and there were others (surprisingly many in fact) who offered hospitality to the soul of their client. Yet the pictorial choices open to the painter were minute; the prescribed form very strict. This is paradoxically why, before the greatest of them, one is aware of enormous painterly energy. The stakes were high, the margin narrow. And in art these are conditions which make for energy.”

Despite Trump’s daily provocations, and the not-so-inaccurate sense that the world is teetering on the brink of various catastrophes, there are glimmers in the darkness. For one, Americans are living through a golden age of portraiture. Specifically, black portraiture, which says better and more lasting things about America than Trump ever will.

To cite two famous examples, by virtue of their having painted the Obamas’ official portraits, Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley are inarguably America’s best-known portraitists. That their work, critical quibblings aside, has for so long been generally excellent has only bolstered their cases. And the Obama portraits—on view at the National Portrait Gallery—are so different from previous presidential and first lady portraits that they seem to have come from another universe, one where vibrant color and formal inventiveness actually exist. Even the portrait of Clinton, famous for his saxophone playing and philandering, among other colorful things, is of him standing in a dark suit in the Oval Office, his right hand resting on the HMS Resolute desk. It looks positively staid next to Wiley’s portrayal of a seated Obama among an explosion of colorful foliage. Sherald’s Michelle Obama, meanwhile, puts on a master class in the power of contrast and sharp edges, not to mention a direct, confrontational gaze. Both Barack and Michelle Obama face the viewer in each of their portraits, but Michelle is the one who really seems to challenge her viewers. Where Barack’s eyes are somewhat lost in the richness of Wiley’s hues, the whites of Michelle’s eyes stand out starkly in Sherald’s piece. It is as an arresting, attention-grabbing portrait as an I can recall.

The work of Toyin Ojih Odutola, though less well-known than that of Wiley and Sherald, is no less arresting, though in a much quieter way.

Specifically, her print Birmingham, which the Frye Museum in Seattle is currently showing as part of its “Recent Acquisitions” biannual series, takes a multimodal approach to portraiture. Comprising three separate panels, the work—four-color lithograph on satin paper, each panel 24 x 16 ½ inches—is both static and dynamic. The portrait’s subject, the artist’s brother, is captured in different poses in each panel (looking down; looking at the viewer; and then turning away) that can be seen either as discrete still images or as a series of movements. The work resembles a zoetrope strip at rest, and it works however one chooses to view it.

In person, hung as it is in a hallway between the museum’s entrance and its well-known salon room, Birmingham does not overwhelm the senses. Because the three prints hung together measure about feet wide by two feet high, its does not bludgeon its viewer with its size, in contrast to Wiley’s President Barack Obama (roughly 7.5 feet tall by 4.5 feet wide) or Close’s Big Self-Portrait (almost 9 feet tall by 7 feet wide). Birmingham is understated, but you still can’t miss it.

See, its size is to Birmingham’s credit, for it does not seek to confront the viewer, as in the Close or the Sherald, or overwhelm with the looming import of its subject, as in Wiley’s Obama painting. Birmingham’s form follows its function: the piece’s subject expresses a sort of recognition, which is a very different thing from confrontation. Moreover, because it comprises three views of its subject, Birmingham has something that the other paintings don’t: a narrative, or at least the framework of a narrative.

The portrait’s subject seems to be startled out of a reverie—in the first to the second panels—only to turn his back on what he sees in the piece’s third panel. Interestingly, in the third panel the subject’s back is indeed turned, but he keeps his right eye on the viewer, as if suspicious, or perhaps in pity.

Moreover, how Birmingham’s subject is portrayed lends the piece a deep richness. Ojih Odutola uses highly stylized, almost abstract line work that gives her subject a deeply dark, almost fully black skin tone, which is intermittently highlighted by bright white shaded areas that indicate both light and texture. The effect of the harsh black with white contrast is that Birmingham’s subject’s skin looks a bit like the night sky. That, combined with his white undershirt rimmed in gold leaf, and the movement of his body and gaze—up toward the viewer, but then away, as if he’s no longer interested in looking at what he sees—gives Birmingham’s subject an otherworldly (cosmic even) aspect. Moreover, to paraphrase Berger, the piece gives so much hospitality to its subject’s soul that Birmingham is suffused with a quiet, wholly realized sadness. And it is that sadness, and turning away from the viewer, that really sets Birmingham apart from its more famous forebears. Birmingham sees us and what we have become, and decides to look away.

...

Header image, “showing the wreckage of a bomb explosion near the Gaston Motel where Martin Luther King., and leaders in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were staying during the Birmingham campaign of the Civil Rights movement. Trikosko, Marion S., photographer.” via Wikimedia Commons.

Birmingham image via https://tamarind.unm.edu/product/birmingham-left-middle-right/

[heatpeen03-blog]

Life in the Present Tense: “Like” by A. E. Stallings

NOVEMBER 25, 2018

IN THE SEPTEMBER 2012 issue of Poetry magazine, the Canadian poet and classicist A. E. Stallings reflected on living in Athens, where she moved with her husband in 1999. “The one thing people will ask you here,” she writes, “if you are, as I am, clearly a foreigner, is: Are you here permanently? Are you planning to go back?” Nearly 20 years after her move, Stallings continues to live and work in Greece, where the immediacy of contemporary Athens collides with ongoing meditations on motherhood, mythology, politics, and poetry. In Like, her latest collection from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Stallings presents a diverse quiver of poems — arranged in alphabetical order — polished and sharpened by her typically innovative use of traditional verse forms, poised vocabulary, and a playful dexterous teasing-out of simile and metaphor.

While the alphabetical arrangement of the collection creates a kind of echoing, it also reveals Stallings’s distinct threads and themes. Prominent among them is her interest in writing about all-encompassing, everyday parenting. Recalling what the inside-cover calls Stallings’s “archaeology of the domestic,” which grows and changes with her children, as in “Ultrasound,” from Hapax (2006), these poems continue in the spirit of her previous collection Olives (2012), written “smack in the middle of life, marriage and kids,” as she says to one interviewer, “and [which] I hope is full in the way that my life is currently very full.”

Certain poems in Like exist as an extended meditation on the objects of domestic routine — a pair of scissors, a cast iron skillet, a wooden children’s toy, “[n]odding its wooden head” to the mechanical horse-and-dancer of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Cirque d’Hiver.” Don’t miss the “genuine horsehair,” either, rounding out “The Last Carousel,” which showcases the poet’s wit and metaphorical precision. The iron skillet, accidentally cleansed of its “black and lustrous skin” becomes “vulnerable and porous / As a hero stripped of his arms,” while her poem about pencils scratches steadily toward a blunt and darkly comic close, surrendering itself to Time, that “other implement / That sharpens and grows shorter.”

Elsewhere, Stallings plays the role of archivist, recording the minutiae of urban Athens — a city of “folding chairs” and “broken windowpane[s],” “ill-made potholed modern road[s]” and the occasional whiff of tear gas lingering behind after a protest — alongside snapshots of domestic life: pruning the garden, delousing her daughter (“How pediculous!”), searching on her hands and knees for “[s]ome vital Lego brick or puzzle piece.” Not least due to her standing as a classicist and translator, it struck me how related Stallings’s Greece feels to the world of Homer’s Odyssey. The supernatural notwithstanding, the setting of Homer’s epic “feels entirely realistic, even mundane,” writes Emily Wilson in the introduction to her new translation, “a world where a mother packs a wholesome lunch of bread and cheese for her daughter, where there is a particular joy in taking a hot bath, where men listen to music and play checkers, and lively, pretty girls have fun playing ball games together.”

Where Stallings writes specifically about her children, she joins a formidable group of contemporary poets (on my side of the Atlantic, at least) engaged in exploring the same fullness of life she attributes to her time in Athens. Stallings’s poems chime with recent work by Fiona Benson, Liz Berry (whose poem “The Republic of Motherhood” was recently awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem), and Sinéad Morrissey, especially the title poem of her 2017 collection, On Balance, which rebuts the wished-for ordinariness of Larkin’s “Born Yesterday,” written for the infant Sally Amis. What Stallings’s poetry shares with these writers might be something like awareness, a quality of self-reflection that accompanies the world renewed by parenthood. Anne Stevenson seems to touch upon this in the final stanza of her “Poem for a Daughter.” “A woman’s life is her own,” she writes, “until it is taken away / by a first, particular cry”:

Then she is not alone but part of the premises of everything there is: a time, a tribe, a war. When we belong to the world we become what we are.

I think it’s this feeling “part of the premises / of everything there is,” that governs much of Stallings’s poetry, including “Lost and Found,” the longest poem in the new collection, a kind of Chaucerian dream-vision in which the poet, following an argument with her son, is guided through a cratered moonscape by Mnemosyne, the classical goddess of memory, to the place “[w]here everything misplaced on earth accrues, / And here all things are gathered that you lose.” It isn’t only objects that end up here but an entire imaginative spectrum of the irretrievable, from the rooms to which we can’t return and the insomniac’s lost hours of sleep, to “the letters / We meant to write and didn’t” and “the frayed, lost threads / Of conversations […] we’d thought we’d spun / Only to find they’d somehow come undone.” On waking, the world is business as usual: hurried school-runs, packed lunches, paperwork, and bills. And yet, to borrow a phrase from Stevenson again, the poet resolves “[t]o live in the sublunary, the swift, / Deep present.” Stallings attends to the moment and the momentary, even as they pass to “[t]he light on my children’s hair, my face in the glass / Neither old nor young; but bare, intelligent.”

Thinking about Stallings as a poet who writes so unapologetically about her life as a parent, I’m reminded of an article by Ange Mlinko, published in the September issue of Poetry back in 2009. In it, Mlinko expresses her suspicion toward what she refers to as “mommy poems,” suggesting them to be, on the one hand, “intense, but also kind of boring” and on the other a frustrating instance of the commodification of contemporary poetry, and of motherhood in general. I found myself wondering what Mlinko might have to say about Stallings’s poems, especially given that Mlinko is thanked in the acknowledgments. In the case of Like, I expect she would approve. “I don’t want to read anthologies of mother poems,” she writes, though “I am always interested in what individual poets write about their children, in context with all the other things they write about.”

As an academic, an expatriate, and a North American mother of two, Stallings is careful to balance her experience of motherhood with the realities of the European refugee crisis, in which Greece plays a significant and complicated role. “I’m grateful tonight / Our listing bed isn’t a raft,” begins one poem, “Precariously adrift / As we dodge the coast guard light,” “That we didn’t buy cheap life jackets,” that “we don’t scan the sky for a mark, // Any mark, that demarcates a shore / As the dinghy starts taking on water.” Later on, the sequence “Refugee Fugue” stands out as one of the collection’s most successful moments, the poem transfiguring itself through different forms and voices like Shakespeare’s Ariel, who’s singing echoes softly through the poem:           

A fathom deep, the body lies, beyond all help and harms, Unfathomable, unfathomable, the news repeats, like charms, Forgetting that “to fathom” is to hold within your arms.

The sequence ends with a found poem of “Useful Phrases in Arabic, Farsi/Dari, and Greek,” constructed from a “Guide to Volunteering” distributed in Athens in March 2016. Somewhere near the middle, the poem introduces its anonymous dramatis personae — “Refugee / Volunteer / Foreigner / Friend” — though we are left to write the conversations that exist between the gaps ourselves:

I don’t understand I don’t speak Arabic / Farsi Slowly Come here You’re safe Are you wet / cold? […] How many people? Sorry Stay calm One line, please Next person

The poem reminds me of certain passages from Human Flow (2017), Ai Weiwei’s massive documentary exploring the extent of the global refugee crisis, and his recent installation Law of the Journey (2017), on display last year at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, a 230-foot-long black life raft, suspended from the ceiling, crowded by 258 inflatable faceless figures.

Like Ai Weiwei, Stallings seems to understand the inherent connection between displacement and anonymity. It’s an idea that surfaces several times in the collection, as in “Alice, Bewildered,” taking an episode from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass as its starting point, in which Alice wanders into “the wood where things escape their names.” On entering this new environment, Alice temporarily loses grasp of her identity, suddenly “un-twinned from the likeness in the glass.” The scene in Carroll’s novel is short: Alice briefly forgets her name — and the names of everything surrounding her — but remembers who she is on exiting the wood. In Stallings’s poem, she never recovers, the poem ending before she has time to “reclaim / The syllables that meant herself,” disintegrating into babble, half riddle, half tongue-twister:

Yet in the dark ellipsis she can tell, She’s certain, that her name begins with “L” – Liza, Lacie? Alias, alas, A lass alike alone and at a loss.

Alice’s displacement here is permanent or, at the very least, indefinite, returning us to the question posed to Stallings, time and again, during her time in Greece: “Are you here permanently? Are you planning to go back?”

Toward the end of that article in Poetry magazine, Stallings refers to a Greek proverb which, for her, articulates the uncertainty of her status as a full-time resident in Greece: “[N]othing is more permanent than the temporary.” The proverb returns in the collection’s opening poem, a villanelle concerning her family’s indefinite period abroad: “Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.” Here, it acts as a kind of refrain, but the proverb reaches out across the rest of the collection, too, coloring the other poems, which so often turn to a consideration of the temporary and the permanent. It’s understandable how this might come to be the overwhelming preoccupation of the classicist; it’s certainly a steady presence in the work of Alice Oswald (“Dunt: a poem for a dried up river” springs to mind). What’s clear in Like, however, is the way Stallings embraces the inevitable falling-away of things — of language, cities, people, civilizations — not as a way of reevaluating the past, but as a means of focusing on the fullness of life in the present tense, on the stuff that’s here now but might not be for long.

As for the poet, the act of writing comes to serve as a kind of solidification, a way of preserving the present before it slips away entirely. “I felt the moment pass / Right through me,” writes Stallings in the final stanza of “Lost and Found”:           

               currency as it was spent, That bright, loose change, like falling leaves, that mass Of decadent gold leaf, now turning brown – I could not keep it; I could write it down.

¤

Rowland Bagnall is a freelance writer and poet. He studied English Literature at St. John’s College, Oxford, and completed an MPhil in American Literature at the University of Cambridge.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/life-in-the-present-tense-like-by-a-e-stallings/

[sonsoffenris]

Merrick sighed with satisfaction as he gazed at the night sky. The stars shone brilliantly while the full moon cast the forest clearing in an eerie white light. With a belly full of meat and wine, he lay down upon the mossy ground beside a crackling fire. Radomil and Amis soon followed suit, having had their fill of the feast and organising the day’s takings. Coin pouches, weapons, food, drink and trade commodities were laid out neatly in the shelter of a fallen tree to be spirited away and fenced come sunrise. Merrick turned to his side, staring at the loot gleefully. Gold and jewels had their endless charms, but he would trade his entire share for one item in the haul; a single sword. It was a rare beauty, unlike any he had seen before. From the point, sharp as a Hapry’s talons came a razor edged blade devoid of any chips or scratches. No hammer marks or corrosion stained the highly polished metal. The quillons were pointed forward along the blade like claws grasping at its prey. Merrick’s eyes followed the lines of the sheathed weapon from end to end and took in every detail of the engraved leather carefully before coming eye to eye with the pommel, the grisly visage of a snarling bear’s head. His eyes began to fail him as fatigue set in. His eyelids heavy, Merrick relaxed himself and let sleep set in; all the while imagining taking the weapon for his own. Surely with a blade like that he could strike fear into the heart of many a traveller. Any quarry would be his without any bloodshed once his prey set eyes on it. Merrick’s eyes shot open as a loud crack came from the forest. The horses of the gang’s victims snorted and shied away from the source of the commotion, pulling their reins taught against a tree stump. The three men leapt to their feet, taking up arms in a perimeter around their sputtering fire. Merrick and Radomid peered out into the gloom, straining to see anything in the darkness while Amis haphazardly readied a torch.

“My apologies, sirs!” Said the shadows. “Could I trouble you for a place by the fire?”

Merrick cleared his throat and looked to his two accomplices, both frozen in fear.

“Show yourself!” He exclaimed. “I fear I cannot extend my hospitality to a voice!”

The shadow replied with a sinister chuckle as a figure emerged into the moonlight. The white light did little to reveal the visitor’s shrouded features, but for the sheathed longsword held in its grasp.

“Much better!” Merrick said, his tone relaxing. “If you would be so kind as to hand over that razor you are more than welcome to our gathering.”

“Of course!” Replied the stranger as he handed his weapon to his host cheerfully. “My name is Fingal, of Ard Skellig.”

Merrick motioned to his two compatriots to lower their weapons. “I’m Merrick, there’s is Amis and the bald ‘un there is Radomil.” The introduction was met with an indignant snort from the tall, bald man.

“A pleasure!” Fingal said warmly before settling into the nook of a tall oak. He cast a stealthy glance at the collection of loot a few steps away from him. Amis quickly threw a filthy blanket over the treasure.

“What are you doing out here. stranger?” Merrick asked. “Folks say all sorts of beasts call this place home.” A barely perceivable smile danced across Merricks features, followed by a similar look from his two compatriots.

“Merely passing through!” Fingal reached into his cloak as he spoke. Quick as lightning, Radomil took up a rusty mace, preparing himself to strike. Merrick made a quick wave of his hand and Radomil lowered the weapon slowly. After a pregnant pause, Fingal retrieved a wine skin from within the woolen folds and threw it to Merrick. “I must admit, I became somewhat lost travelling through the woods. Praise Melitele I came across you fellows!”

Merrick bit down on the cork stopper and tore from the skin, staring at Fingal intently all the while. He could get the sense of a person quickly after his years dealing with all sorts of criminals, killers, and con merchants, but this man was an enigma to him. There was no outward sign of the stranger posing a threat and yet Fingal’s every move set Merrick on edge. The hood covering the man’s features frustrated him to no end. Taking a long swig of sweet wine from the skin he lobbed it to Amis, rolling his eyes in embarrassment as Amis barely caught the container and spilled its contents over his stained shirt.

“Take down that hood, stranger.” Radomil said forcefully. Fingal took note of the rows of missing and broken teeth adorning the bald giant’s mouth as he spoke. The man had seen his share of brawls.

“I apologise, gentlemen.” Fingal replied anxiously. “An old war wound from my youth. Quite a mess up here, I assure you!” He chuckled.. “I prefer to keep myself covered, don’t want to scare folks off, after all.” Amis and Radomil chuckled, warming to their new guest. Merrick on the other hand remained stoic, painting his face with a false smile. “In any case, what brings you three you to these gods forsaken woods?”

“Trade.” Merrick answered, quick as a whip. His two accomplices remained silent, busying themselves with drink. “We’re on the way to Vergen and decided to travel on rather than stay at the inn a while back.”

“I see.” Fingal said thoughtfully. “Novice merchants, I assume?”

Merrick bristled. “What gives you that idea?” He asked, brushing a hand through his thin, greasy hair.

“Well, a more seasoned traveller would have better knowledge of the land.”

“I suppose you’re right…” Merrick replied with a nervous chuckle. “What about you, then?”

“Oh, I’m just an old drifter these days. Make my living moving from town to town telling tall tales, doing odd jobs, that sort of thing.”

“Stories?” Radomil blurted, sending red tinted spittle flying toward Fingal. “How about repayin’ our generosity with a yarn?”

Merrick nodded with consent. “Yes! Give us some entertainment, stranger,” He had him now. He suppressed a predatory smirk as he watched Fingal. Surely he would lose his nerve.

Fingal stroked the thick bristles covering his chin in thought. “I wonder…” With a click of his fingers, the stanger’s half covered features brightened. “I have a new tale. One I haven’t had the chance to put to an audience yet! Would that suffice?”

Amis stopped draining the wine skin for a moment. “By all means!” He shouted, adding a loud belch before returning to the drink.  

“Very well then. Settle yourselves and get comfortable, friends! I shall tell you the tale of the hunter!” Fingal announced with a booming voice.

“Not long ago, a simple hunter travelled through parts not so different to these.” He spread his arms wide, motioning to the surroundings. “He searched for new quarry. deer, boar, anything to feed his family better than simple game and hare. Desperation drove him deeper into the woods. Trees and bushes pushed in around him and before long he found himself lost and alone, his horse would carry him no further.”

“Get to the good bit!” Radomil heckled. Merrick smiled wryly, watching for Fingal’s response.

“Patience!” The storyteller said with a laugh. “You’re more impatient than a toddler about to piss himself!” Radomil put on a faux expression of injury before unleashing a hearty laugh.

“As I was saying. The hunter went on alone, deeper and deeper into the darkness. Suddenly, a bellowing screech filled the air!”

Fingal suddenly animated, jumping to his feet while maintaining his shroud. Radomil applauded while Merrick and Amis flinched, grasping for their weapons before Fingal continued.

“From the shadows came the slender figure of a woman. For a moment the hunter was stunned by her beauty before her face was revealed by light of the full moon. One side was that of fair, ivory skin and flowing blonde hair. The other was the image of death itself; skin burned and scarred, stretched thin across her ragged face and a single eye that blazed like a burning coal! She wailed again, the hunter recoiled in terror and took to his heels. Charging as fast as his legs could carry him, he found himself in familiar ground. Praising the gods under his breath he looked for his horse. The faithful steed has disappeared and with it his salvation. The man fell to his knees, unable to go on. Not only had his escape eluded him, but his weapon. A beautiful sword-”

Merrick’s eyes went wide. He looked over at the treasure haul, noticing the unique weapon still visible over the hastily placed blanket. This has to be a coincidence... He thought to himself. Looking down at Fingal’s sword, realisation hit him. The blade in his lap, with it’s engraved leather sheath and expertly crafted blade. Finished with a bear’s head on its pommel.

“-passed down his family for generations. A snarling bear’s head adorned the heirloom;  the mark of his once noble family. Death came for him soon after, and it is said his spirit still haunts these woods, vengeful and angry. Seeking his weapon and the thieves who took it. In fact, it is said that the sword is cursed, forever dooming those who come across it….” Fingal finished his tale with a bow and as he raised his head he met the gaze of the his audience, weapons drawn and ready.

“So, what now?” Merrick barked. “We hand over this ‘cursed’ sword? Are you the vengeful spirit?” He laughed heartily with his men. “So the horse we…nicked the other day was yours?”

“It was.” Fingal replied. The rasping, cheerful voice was gone, replaced by the rumbling growl of a younger man. He reached to his chest and removed the pin holding his cloak in place. The garment dropped to the floor silently, revealing dark chainmail nestled under leather armour and on top of the layers hung a large steel medallion in the visage of a ravenous ursine beast. Merrick took a step away from the stranger and raised his weapon before a scream halted him with a start. Amis stood with his mouth agape as his stare was met my Fingal’s snake like eyes, glowing bright orange in the gloom.

“What are you….” Amis whispered.

“Witchman!” Radomil barked.

“Three of us against one freak?” Merrick said nervously. “You supposed t’ scare us?! Bastard doesn’t even have a weapon!”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be afraid of me. Not at all.” Fingal spread his arms wide, opening himself to ahis foes. “Her, however.” He pointed behind Radomid. “Her, you

be afraid of,”

Radomid turned, locking eyes with ‘her’ just in time for a long, razor sharp blade to pierce his throat. The bald thief clutched at his neck and the sword embedded in it, slicing open his hands as blood flowed freely from the wound. The last image to enter his mind was the monster of Fingal’s story. The  weapon’s owner gazed at him as he futilely gasped for air. Her half burned face contorted into a scowl as the blade sank deeper, punching through his spine. Her glowing eye remained fixed on Radomil as he went limp and crashed to the ground. Merrick made to turn to the new threat when Fingal contorted his fingers, projecting a blast of force that crashed into the campfire. Flaming debris and glowing ash hurtling through the air. Amis yelped as the fragments flew into his eyes. He landed on his knees screaming in pain, hysterically clawing at his burning eyeballs. A polished blade coated in crimson flashed in the moonlight, casting a shining arc through the darkness before slashing into the screaming figure.

Fingal crashed into Merrick, tackling him onto the ground and hammering down vicious punches onto his foe. Merrick raised his arms across his face in a desperate bid to defend himself. He could feel his forearms swell under the force of the impacts almost immediately, forcing a scream from his lips. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, an object rolled into view. Still holding back the torrent of blows from Fingal, Merrick stared at the object with horror. As his eyes focussed he picked out the details; ruddy skin, a large nose, a mouth hanging open, and blackened eyelids screwed shut. Amis.

“Enough, please! Mercy!” Merrick wailed. Tears welled up in the corners of his eyes.

Fingal was relentless in his assault. With inhuman strength the threw merrick’s defences aside, opening his foe to his next strike.

“You beg?!” He roared. “Did the people you robbed and killed beg? Did you show them mercy?”

“I..I…” Merrick choked on his words. Mewling and screaming in fear, he wordlessly begged for his life.

“Coinneach, just end it.” Came a voice from the dark. It was harsh and deep, yet unmistakably female.

The Witcher closed his eyes and nodded before he looked down at Merrick. For a single moment the thief thought he would be spared before Coinneach’s fist slammed down. Merrick’s head smashed off of the ground beneath him. There was a sickening crack and the battered thief’s eyes went wide. The moans and yells of protestation were cut off soon after as a blade punched into the thief’s heart. With a final gasp, Merrick was gone.

Coinneach got to his feet with a grunt and placed a dagger back into its sheath.

“Excellent timing.” Coinneach quipped.

“I couldn’t stand any more of that fucking story. Why even go through with that?” The woman responded. She took up Coinneach’s stolen blade and admired it as her mentor spoke.

“For information.” He replied matter of factly. “If I didn’t get a good look at what we were dealing with, we’d never have noticed this.” Coinneach kicked Amis’ body out of the way unceremoniously, revealing a crudely carved wooden block shaped into a three toed foot.

“A hoax?” She spat. “

tricked the villagers?”

“It’s easy to fool simple folk, Kamil. Especially when all manner of outlaws and monsters have them living in fear.” Coinneach marched to Kamil and reached out for his sword, which Kamil evaded.

“You know…” She removed the weapon from its sheath and gave it a swing, feeling the weight. The blade sang sweetly as it sliced through the air. “I could get used to a fancy razor like this.”

“I’ll pass these on to you one of these days.” Coinneach replied with a smile. He deftly snatched the sword and sheath from Kamil’s grip and placed them together in a fluid motion.

Kamil let out a sarcastic sigh. “What now?”

“We gather the loot, saddle it on these horses and take them back to town.”

“You’ve got to be kidding…” Kamil said quietly.

“Do I often joke? Get to work, little Witcher.”

[glittership]

Episode #42 - "The Passing Bell" by Amy Griswold

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Episode 42 is part of the Spring 2017 issue!

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  The Passing Bell

by Amy Griswold

  My hired horse threw a shoe between Bristol and Bath, and by the time the wearying business of getting another nailed on was complete the shadows were growing long and the wind was sharpening its knives. 

“It’s kind of you to put me up,” I said, jingling pennies in my pocket to encourage such generosity.  In a town so small it had neither pub nor inn, I considered myself fortunate to be offered the chance to sleep in the blacksmith’s loft. 

[Full transcript after the cut.]

  Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is “The Passing Bell” by Amy Griswold.

Amy Griswold is the author (with Melissa Scott) of DEATH BY SILVER and A DEATH AT THE DIONYSUS CLUB from Lethe Press. Her most recent work (with Jo Graham) is the interactive novel THE EAGLE’S HEIR from Choice of Games. She lives in North Carolina, where she writes standardized tests as well as fiction, and tries not to confuse the two.

    The Passing Bell

by Amy Griswold

  My hired horse threw a shoe between Bristol and Bath, and by the time the wearying business of getting another nailed on was complete the shadows were growing long and the wind was sharpening its knives.

“It’s kind of you to put me up,” I said, jingling pennies in my pocket to encourage such generosity.  In a town so small it had neither pub nor inn, I considered myself fortunate to be offered the chance to sleep in the blacksmith’s loft.

“Glad to, if you’ve got the coin,” the blacksmith said.  “Only the missus is particular in her way about knowing something about strangers who are going to sleep under her roof.  What’s your name, and what’s your age, and what’s your trade, good man?  For she’ll ask me all three.”

“Rob Tar is my name, and my age is twenty and six,” I said.  “And I’m an able seaman aboard the Red Boar out of Bristol.  My girl Minnie lives in Bath, and I’m on my way to keep her company a while until we sail again.  I’ve never claimed to be a good man, but I’ll be no trouble to you, and I can pay you for supper and bed.”  In fact I had three months’ pay, most of it stuffed down my shirt to pose less temptation to thieves.  “Will that satisfy your lady?”

“It should,” Mister Smith said, with a sheepish sort of shuffle that would have looked more at home on a boy than a big man with biceps like hams.  “You understand, she’s a particular sort of woman.”  He seemed to notice for the first time that his dogs were circling me suspiciously, as if waiting for the cue to set their teeth into an intruder.  “Get by, dogs, we’ve a guest tonight.”

He led me into a kitchen where a warm fire was glowing and went aside to speak with the presumed mistress of the house, a young wife but hardly a merry one, her dun hair matching her dun dress so that she looked faded, as if washed too many times.  I was beginning to get some feeling back into my feet when she came over with bread and salt fish.

“That ought to do for a sailor,” she said, and I nodded polite thanks, though in truth I’d eaten enough fish while at sea that I’d have preferred the toughest fowl or most dubious of hams.  “If you’d come a week ago, we’d have had nothing for you but pork.”

“Too bad,” I said, and tried not to think about crisp bacon.

At that moment, a dull music split the air, the heavy tolling of a steeple-bell.  It rang twice, paused, rang twice again, and then began a doleful series of strokes.  It was the death knell, and I put on my most solemn face, thinking how awkward it was to be a stranger in a small town at such a time.  “Who do you suppose has died?”

“I expect no one yet,” Mister Smith said.  His wife said nothing, only stood with her mouth pressed tight together, listening to the tolling bell.  In a small town such as this, I could well believe they kept up the old custom of ringing the bell as soon as the parson heard news of a death, but to ring it before the death seemed perverse.

“Surely there aren’t any hangings here,” I said.  A condemned prisoner was the only sort of man I could think of whose death might be predicted with certainty beforehand.  “I suppose if someone’s lying deathly ill . . .”

“We’ll know by morning,” Mister Smith said.  “The bell never lies, you see—”  He broke off abruptly as the bell finally came to the end of its dull refrain and seemed at a loss for how to go on.

“Twenty-six,” Mistress Smith said, and when I turned at her tone I saw that her face had turned gray with some strong emotion I didn’t understand.  “Nine strokes to tell a man, and twenty-six to tell his age.  Don’t tell me I miscounted.”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” the smith said.  He twisted the leather of his apron in his hands, looking from one of us to the other.  “It might be best if you found your bed now.”

“The hour is growing late,” I said, because I misliked his wife’s expression, and had developed aboard ship a keen sense of how the wind was blowing.

The man picked up a lantern and led me back out into the chill dooryard.  The ladder up to the loft above the forge was rickety, and he held the lantern to light my way.  “You mustn’t mind my wife,” he said.  “Our troubles here are nothing to do with you.”

Well, only the most incurious of born lubbers could have refrained from asking the question after that. “What did she mean about the bell?”

“There’s somewhat wrong with our church bell,” Smith said.  “The parson rings it in the ordinary way after every death in the town, but you can hear it all through town the night before.”

It took me a moment to parse that.  “You mean the bell rings before someone dies?”

“The bell sounds before someone dies, but the parson doesn’t ring it until after.  It’s been that way as long as anyone in town can remember. You mustn’t think we’re entirely ungrateful; when it tolls for your old uncle, you can go round and see him beforehand and say your farewells, you see?  But it’s hard when it tolls for a child, or a man in his prime with little chance of passing away peacefully in his bed.”

The light from the lantern shifted, as if his hand were less than steady on its handle.  Outside its circle of light, black branches bent against a dark sky that was beginning to spit frigid rain.  “This wouldn’t be a tale spun to frighten travelers, would it?” I asked.  “For I’ve heard them all in my time.”

“I swear it’s the plain truth,” Smith said.  “And it’s a bad night for traveling, but I’ll understand if you’d rather be on your way.”  He paused a moment and then added, “It might be for the best.  You heard what the bell told.”

“I’m willing to take the chance,” I said.  “I’ve heard more frightening stories than this.”

“It’s no more than the truth,” the man said, but with resignation, as if he were used to skepticism from strangers.  He hung up the lantern, and turned abruptly to go.  “Your horse is shod and I’ve got your coins for the night’s lodging, so I expect we’re square, and there’s no more that needs to be said.”  He tramped out, leaving me to ascend the ladder in no mood to settle down easily to sleep.

I shivered for a while under the thin horse blanket spread over an equally thin pallet, and then realized that the forge and the kitchen of the house shared a common chimney that went up the opposite wall.  I made my way over to it, hoping to warm my hands at least, and I heard the mutter of voices through the wall.  After a bare moment’s hesitation, I pressed my ear unashamed to the stones, having long profited from such caution.

“Give me the hatchet,” I heard Mistress Smith say, and was abruptly glad I hadn’t balked at eavesdropping.

“You don’t need the hatchet,” Mister Smith said.  “I mean to leave it in the good Lord’s hands.”

“You mean you don’t mean to lift a hand yourself to save your life, when it’s you or that stranger who’ll die tonight.  Well, you needn’t get your hands dirty if you scruple to it.  Just you give me the hatchet, and tell anyone who asks that you slept sound.”

“And what do you mean to say, when the town watch comes knocking?”

“Old Bill?  I’ll tell him that I woke at a noise in the courtyard, and came out to see men running away.  He’ll set up a hue and cry that will take the rest of the night.  You’ll see.”  There was a feverish certainty to her voice.  “All you need do is leave it all to me.”

“I won’t have it, I tell you.”

“I don’t care what you will and won’t have.  You’re not much of a man, it seems, but you’re my man, and I don’t mean to wager your life on the toss of a coin.  Give me the hatchet, and don’t you set foot outside until I come back.”

I had only a few moments to escape.  I had a knife, which I took up now, and the cover of darkness on my side.  For all that, my heart was pounding in my chest; I’ve never been a brawler, nor been much in the habit of fighting with women.  I made for the ladder, but before I reached it I heard the sound of footsteps below.

“Do you lie comfortably?” Mistress Smith’s voice rose up.

I thought of feigning snores, but lacked confidence in my own dramatic skills. “Quite comfortably,” I called back down.  “I’ve everything a man could want.”

“I thought I’d bring you a hot drink,” she said.  “A bit of a toddy to take the chill from the air.  Do come down and drink it before it gets cold.”

“It’s very kind,” I said, putting my back to the loft wall and hoping that a swung hatchet wouldn’t go through it.  “But I never touch the demon drink, not since I got religion.”

“A sailor who’s an abstainer?” she said.  “I never heard of such.”

“It’s true all the same,” I said.  “It pleases my girl, you understand.”

“I’ve a blanket for you at least,” she said.  “And you can come in with me and fetch a cup of hot milk.”

“Thank you kindly, but I’ll lodge where I am.”  I held my breath, and heard the ladder creak as she put her foot on it.  It creaked twice more, and then her head and shoulders appeared framed in the doorway and light glinted off the hatchet blade.

I kicked her square in the bosom, though I’m not proud to say it, and knocked her and the ladder both down from the loft.  I swung down after her, seeing her sprawled in the straw, unhurt but struggling to rise, and went for the hatchet.

She grasped it as well, her hands clawing at mine, raking them with her fingernails.

“Will you give over!” I tried to shoulder her away.  “You’re wrong in what you think.  I’m no man of twenty-six.”

“You claim now you were lying?” Her face was close enough to mine as we struggled that I could smell her breath.  “There’s a strange habit, for a man to tell lies about his age to everyone he meets.”

Her grip on the hatchet loosened as she spoke, and I tightened my own.  “So it would be,” I said.  “But I’m no man, and that was the lie I told.  That and the bit about the drink, which I admit is a besetting vice.  I put on breeches to go to sea, but I’m a woman all the same underneath them, and never more glad of it than today.”  I forebore to add that my girl was glad of it too, as I felt under the circumstances it would be taken as cheek.

She laughed in my face.  “That’s a nasty lie to save your skin.”

“I’ll prove it if you like,” I said.  “If you’ll give over your attempt to chop me up for firewood long enough.”

At that moment, her husband came in, and I shoved her toward him, hoping that he’d catch the hatchet out of her hands.  He plucked it away from her with his left hand and tossed it aside, but as he let her go I saw that he had a cleaver in his right hand.  I saw the bulging of his shoulders and thought I must know what a chicken felt like at butchering time.

“It came on me that it was wrong to leave the missus to do what must be done,” he said.

“I’ll swear any oath you like, my mother named me Kate,” I said, and reached for the top button of my shirt.

“A wicked wench who’ll dress up as a man can’t complain if she’s buried as one,” the woman said, and I saw a look pass between her and her husband that made my heart sink.  “What the parson doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“I’m sorry to have to do it,” Mister Smith told me, but he was lifting the cleaver, and I turned tail and ran.

I heard the clamor of dogs barking behind me, and rethought in a hurry my initial plan to make for the road out of town.  I looked about for a tree to climb, and saw none.  There was a stone wall at the end of the lane, though, and I went pelting toward it with what sounded like a whole Bedlam of dogs baying at my heels.

They leapt snarling as I scrambled up the wall, but any sailor, lad or lass, can climb like a monkey, and I reached the top of the wall and dropped down on the other side.  I was in a little churchyard, but before I could slip away over the wall on the other side, the parson came out to see what was the matter with the dogs, who were still howling in a perfect fury.  Though he wore spectacles balanced on his narrow nose, he also had a heavy stick in his hand and looked as if he were willing to use it.

“The blacksmith set his dogs on me,” I blurted out.  “I swear to you I’m no thief.”

The parson didn’t loosen his grip on the stick.  “I don’t believe Mister Smith is in the habit of setting his dogs on innocent strangers.”

“It’s on account of the bell, the passing bell,” I said, and couldn’t help looking up at the tower that threw its shadow over us both.  The bell tower was just a rickety little thing by the measure of city churches, but the pool of gloom it cast over the churchyard seemed heavy and dark.  “His wife put him up to it, for she thinks it’s either him or me who’ll die tonight.”

The parson came forward a little, then, and looked me up and down through his spectacles.  “I never knew the blacksmith’s age,” he said, as if speaking as much to himself as to me.  “I try not to know, you see.  But in a town so small, it’s hard not to be aware . . .”  He shook his head, and there was something closed in his expression.  “I think I had better see you out the gate,” he said.

“The dogs are still out there,” I pointed out.

“That’s really not my concern.”

“And you a parson.”

“I can’t stop what’s to come,” he said.  “You must understand that, you must see.  I’ve tried, sometimes, when I knew.  There was a girl, a child of thirteen . . . I sat up with her all night, in the church, and we prayed together.  She wept, and I told her to have faith, that the Lord would protect her.  And an hour before morning her fear overcame her, and she rose to flee.  I caught hold of her, I demanded she stay, I promised she would be safe.  I struggled with her.  And she fell, and her head struck the altar steps.  And God was silent.”

He reached out and caught hold of my collar to march me toward the gates.  My hand rested on my knife, and then I took it away again, not sure if I could bring myself to stab a man of the cloth, even to make my escape.

“I don’t see why you can’t just resolve not to ring the bell anymore,” I said.  “If you don’t ring it in the morning . . .”

“I did not ring it that night,” he said, still marching me along, as if by thrusting me out the gates he could banish the memory.  “I sat on the altar steps in misery, and at the first light, I heard the bell tolling.  It was little Johnnie Boots, the choirboy, who had taken it into his head to ring the bell for me as a kindness, since, as he said, I must have been taken ill.”

He paused before the high wooden gate, and outside I heard an eager chorus of barks, and then the even more ominous growling of dogs who see their aim in sight.  “There are some who have called for us to take down the bell,” he said.  I silently cheered on “some,” whoever they might be.  “But it is the Lord who put this curse on us, and when he judges us free of sin, he will take it away again.  When we have been made clean.”  His knuckles were white on his stick, and his eyes were on the horizon, as if he saw some horror there I couldn’t see.  “I have prayed, but of course my sinner’s prayers have not been answered,” he said.  “Pray now, and perhaps yours will be heard as mine have not been.”

I put my hands together, although I had done precious little praying of any kind since I’d taken up my present life.  It sat badly with me to beg for my life anyway, like a craven captain pleading for quarter on his knees.  Dear Lord, I’ve been a wicked woman but a good seaman, I said silently.  You’ve winked at my deceit, and let me live when better men have died.  If you care for wicked women, as I’ve heard you did in life, show me one more trick to save my skin.

The parson was reaching for the gate, and I blurted out, “A moment more!”

“You’ve had time for your prayers.”

“A moment to wish my girl goodbye,” I said, and drew out the locket I carried.  It was a little tin thing with a half-penny sketch inside, but the boy who drew it had caught Minnie’s laughing eyes, and it was worth a fortune in gold to me.  She’d scolded me for going back to the sea, though it was my wages that kept her all the time I was away, and told me at some length that if I drowned she wouldn’t have a single prayer said for my worthless wayward soul.

“You’ve had that as well,” the parson said, and reached for the latch on the gate.  I reached again for my knife, wondering if I could stick him without hurting him too much, and what the townsmen would do to me if they caught me after that.  Being hanged for stabbing a parson seemed even worse than being hacked apart for nothing.

And then I had it, all at once, like a breath of wind snapping open a slack sail.  “One thing more!” I demanded.  “I had a traveling companion on the road, another sailor who took ill and died by the wayside.  I buried him as best I could, but I’d be easier in my mind if the passing bell were rung for him.  His name was Tom, and I know his age as well, for he told me at the end he was born twenty-six years ago to the day.”

The parson stood staring at me for a long moment.  “Do you expect me for one moment to believe such a story?”

“Is it any of your business to doubt it?” I asked, and reached into my coat to draw out my purse.  “If I had come to you a week ago, would you have questioned whether there was a man named Tom or a roadside grave?”

“I would not,” he admitted.  I held out my purse to him, and while I’d like to believe he took it in pure gratitude for the escape I offered him, I can’t say that its weight didn’t figure in his decision as well.

“Then go on and ring the passing bell for poor old Tom,” I said.  “For I think I have worn out my welcome in this town, or at least it has worn out its welcome with me, and I am eager to be on the road again.”

I followed him to the foot of the tower stairs, and watched him ascend.  I waited until the sound of his steps told me he had gone a full turn of the stairs, and then started up after him, keeping my own steps quiet.

Even after everything that had happened, I was not entirely prepared for what I saw when I mounted to the bell-tower; the parson was heaving on the bell-rope, his back to me, and the bell was heaving as well, the clapper slamming into its sides hard enough that I could see its tremor, but no sound came from the bell, no sound at all.  The only sound was the wind, keening through the wide openings on all sides of the tower like a crying dog.

I waited, breath held, until the bell made its final swing and the parson released the bellrope.  I scrambled around him, evading his surprised attempt to catch me back, and clambered up onto the beams that held the bell in place.  The bell was an old one, and held only by thick ropes, not by a heavy chain; it was the work of a moment to hack the stiff ropes in two.

There was a clamor like brazen hounds baying in hell as the bell came crashing down.  It tumbled out the open side of the bell tower, clattering for a moment on its edge and then plunging toward the earth.

“They do say the Lord helps those as help themselves,” I said, jumping down.  The parson crossed himself and backed away from me.

“There’s some devil in you, and I’m not sure whether to try to cast it out or thank you for what you’ve done,” he said.

“Call it payment for all the hospitality I’ve had in this town,” I said.  “But now I must be away.”  I took off down the stairs at a run, and plunged out into the open air.

I stopped short when I saw the bell lying fallen on the churchyard stones.  It was cracked and split, crumpled like the body of Mister Smith, who lay fallen beneath it, with his dogs circling round him, cringing now and whimpering.

The parson came out after me, and made the sign of the cross over the dead blacksmith in silence.  “He was a good man,” he said after a while.

“I expect he was,” I said.

“You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“Nor will I,” I said, for it seemed the blacksmith had been doomed from the time the bell first sounded, and at least now the bell had rung its last. “But can I have my purse back, then?  I expect I can find a man to ring the passing bell for my old mate Tom somewhere considerably nearer home.”

The parson gave me a look as he handed it over that I suppose I well deserved, but what can I say?  I’ve never claimed to be a good man, but I am Minnie’s best girl, and she’d been waiting patiently for me to bring her home my pay, and to come back to her safely from the sea.

END

  “The Passing Bell” was originally published in Temporally Out of Order and is copyright Amy Griswold, 2015.

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Episode #42 – “The Passing Bell” by Amy Griswold was originally published on GlitterShip