#pocke tee

[warehouse-staff-blog]

Lot 4601 ポケットT ＆ Lot 1082 CHINOES & Lot 5242 DENIM CAP & Lot 6039 GARRISON BELT

こんにちは 名古屋店 コジャです。

一部、再入荷商品の御案内です。

WAREHOUSE & CO. Lot 4601 ポケットT ＼7.040-(with tax)

まだまだご要望の多いポケTEE。 入荷後早々に完売状態のまま数ヶ月、嬉しい再入荷です。 かといって潤沢なストックではないのでお求めの方はこの機会をお見逃し無く。

. . .

WAREHOUSE & CO. Lot 1082 CHINOES COL：BEIGE ＼25.300-(with tax)　※ONE WASHは1.100-UP

チノと言えば思い浮かべるカラー［BEIGE］。 そして一番の人気者［BEIGE］。

少し前に再入荷のお知らせをした際は、既にベージュのサイズが欠けてしまっていましたが、 それから間もなくしてベーシュがあがりましたよ〜。

GREEN・B.GRAYも再入荷したのでチノパンが潤っておりますよ。

. . .

WAREHOUSE & CO. Lot 5242 DENIM CAP ＼9.900-(with tax)　※ONE WASHは\550-UP

久しぶりの入荷後、 完売していたデニムキャップが再入荷しております。

夏の超攻撃的な日差しが気になる。

新たな帽子が欲しい！方や、 色落ちしたから真っ紺が欲しいっ！という方、 この機会に如何でしょう？

. . .

WAREHOUSE & CO. Lot 6039 GARRISON BELT ＼12.650-(with tax)

ギャリソンベルトも届いてサイズが揃っています。

ベルトは買い換える頻度が高くないとはいってもお求めの方は多く、 ここ数ヶ月再入荷は無くサイズが欠けていたので嬉しいお届け物ですねぇ。

. . .

-----------------------------------------------------

☞ [営業時間のお知らせ]

平素よりウエアハウス直営店をご利用頂き有難う御座います。 ウエアハウス直営店では営業を下記の通り変更しております。

《2024.8.11.現在の営業時間》

◎東京店　【営業時間：平日 12時～19時　土日祝 12時～19時】無休 ◎阪急メンズ東京店 【営業時間：平日 12時～20時　土日祝 11時～20時】無休 ◎名古屋店【営業時間： 平日 12時～19時　土日祝 12時～19時】水曜定休 ◎大阪店　【営業時間： 平日 12時～19時　土日祝 12時～19時】 無休 ◎福岡店　【営業時間： 平日 12時～19時　土日祝 12時～19時】 無休 ◎札幌店　【営業時間： 11時～20時】  木曜定休

今後の営業時間等の変更につきましては改めて当ブログにてお知らせ致します。 お客様におかれましてはご不便をお掛けいたしますが御ご理解の程、宜しくお願い申し上げます。

.

☞ 『WAREHOUSE直営店の LINE公式アカウント開設』

WAREHOUSE&CO.直営店からのお得な情報や、エリア限定のクーポンなどを配布しています。

LINE公式アカウント開設にあたり、 2019年3月26日（火）以降、提供しておりましたスマートフォンアプリはご利用できなくなっております。 お手数をおかけしますが、今後はLINEアカウントのご利用をお願いします。

ご利用されるエリアのアカウントを「友だち登録」して下さい。 ※WAREHOUSE名古屋店をご利用頂いているお客様は【WAREHOUSE　EAST】をご登録下さい。

※直営店のご利用がなければ【WESTエリア】をご登録下さい。

.

☞[リペアに関して]

弊社直営店で行っておりますジーンズ等のリペアの受付を休止させて頂いております。 ※ご郵送に関しても同様に休止させて頂いております。再開の日程は未定です。

ご迷惑お掛け致しますが、ご理解下さいます様お願い致します。 ※弊社製品であればボトムスの裾上げは無料にてお受けしております。お預かり期間は各店舗により異なりますのでお問合せ下さい。

.

☞WAREHOUSE公式インスタグラム

☞WAREHOUSE経年変化研究室

☞“Warehousestaff”でTwitterもしております。

ーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーー

WAREHOUSE名古屋店

〒460-0011 愛知県名古屋市中区大須3-13-18

TEL：052-261-7889

《2024.8.11.現在の営業時間》

【営業時間：平日 12時～19時、土日祝 12時～19時】

[miss0atae]

Mark plays Aek, a senior student in sport club who is a born leader.

Jimmy plays Pao, a normal kid who major in sciences and has few close friends.

Keng plays Pat, a collected, calm and observant person.

Zee plays San, a wild character who has a bad temper.

Tonnam plays Toto, a senior in cheerleading club.

Park plays Gus, someone who loves his friends and who is willing to get hurt or make sacrifice for them.

Max plays Torn, someone who cares for and loves his friends. He stands up for what is right and he is unafraid.

Yim plays Tee, Thorn's younger brother who has a "dominant" personality and he is obsessed with zombies.

Nat plays Night, an easygoing guy who doesn't like to be in trouble and loves solving any kind of problems.

Cartoon (Toon) plays Nan, the big sister of the group who is extremely tenacious and she is a fighter.

Dream plays Mook, a caring person who takes care of others and she is also very strong.

Pang plays Fah, the youngest of the group. She is skittish and easily frightened.

Tommy plays Jean, who helps others and is ready to fight if necessary.

(Nink) Chanya plays Lily, a manly girl who is selfless and altruistic. She is a close friends to Gavin.

Tutor plays Gavin, close friends of Lily who is a manly guy and very self-confident.

Boss plays Pooh, an observant person who is discreet, sensible but also reliable.

Praew plays Prao, a clever and pretty straightforward woman. She is cool and strong, but also unafraid.

Net plays Earth, a person who loves his friends and he is resolute.

Nunew plays Non, a university student at the Faculty of Art who has a fighting spirit.

Janis plays Ning, a quick thinker who is also skilled and a clear decisive person.

Namping plays Qi, a character who has a unique perk.

Pock plays Dr. Kanchana, who does everything for her child and who will make mistakes but she will try to fix them.

I don't know what character will Weir play or what will be his role in the series. To be seen...

Every pictures come from Zomvivor IG

[elementalladymallorie]

Titles of the Bells Hells

Fearne Calloway Fey Scion of the Ancient Flame.

Laudna Veil Mistress of the Shadow Tee

Ashton Greymoore Reforged Hammer of Paradox.

Dorian Storm Master Muse and Scion of the Wind

Chetney Pock O'Pea High Hunter and Lupine Paragon

Imogen Temult Exultant Hope of the Red Stom

Orym of the Air Ashari, Savior Blade of the tempest

Braius Doomseed Nascent Might of the Plantnum's call.

[popatochisssp]

Aesthetics Ref - UFF Bros

Nickname: Carmine (UFF!Sans)

Height: 1” taller than you (OR 5’0”)

Eye-lights: Carmine red (#960018)

Magic Specialty: Red, yellow, orange

Scars/distinguishing marks: Gold tooth (left canine), light defensive scrapes and nicks on his forearms, two faint rings circling his cervical vertebrae, one deep pock-mark on the underside of his right humerus

Preferred Style: Urban casual, dresses equally for comfort as for a Look and aims somewhere in the vicinity of streetwise punk. He likes having a distinctive style going on, but not too distinct as to separate him out from a crowd, just a bit uniquely flavored. He prefers things loose and tries to layer, but he can never commit because of overheating issues, so outer layers tend to get shrugged half-off or removed entirely. Likes a lot of black and red and shiny gold.

Outerwear: Zippered hoodies, athletic/tracksuit jackets, often end up hanging at his elbows or thrown over his shoulder

Top: Tank tops and muscle shirts, a largely random assortment of graphic tees (band names, album art, product logos, locations, etc)

Bottom: Joggers, baggy pants, drawstring and track pants

Footwear: Sneakers (nothing special but well-cared for and quickly racking up use)

Trademark accessory/accessories: Gold chains, he’s got a few in rotation and isn’t shy to wear a few at once, but he usually has a little bling on at any given time, with a preference for interesting linking patterns (as long as they’re not right up against his neck)

-

Nickname: Tank (UFF!Papyrus)

Height: 2’4” taller than you (OR 7’3”)

Eye-lights: Cardinal Red (#C51E3A)

Magic Specialty: Red, white

Scars/distinguishing marks: None

Preferred Style: Varsity Boy Next Door, a built jock who has a soft spot for loud Valentine colors (red, white, pink). He mostly prefers simple minimalist designs, the occasional double-stripe hem or a color-block, but every so often he’ll be lured in by a pattern or a classic wide-striped red gingham (his weakness!). He keeps it basic (albeit bright) when he expects to be doing any dirty work, but when not, he likes to show off some of his nice things.

Outerwear: A varsity jacket or two for cold weather, though he hardly wears them

Top: Lots of t-shirts and long-sleeved muscle shirts, all on the tightly fitting side, and a handful of ribbed halter and polo-collar crop-tops for special occasions

Bottom: A good range of jeans from slim fit to relaxed fit, many with dirt/dust/paint stains or a few rips and tears from use (these often get patched either with plain blocks of fabric or an interesting design he found somewhere). Some cargo pants in a variety of colors too, and the odd athletic pant to help build an outfit

Footwear: Boots, largely work boots with steel toes, but some combat-style boots in a lot more styles and colors, usually with little to no heel—he really doesn’t need the height…

Trademark accessory/accessories: A sleek silver ring with a single large white stone, worn on either the index or middle finger of his right hand, or on a chain around his neck. In any case, it never leaves his person.

[littlebosslady7]

Travis in the Chetney Pock O'Pea Woodworks tee.

[words814]

BURLAP OUTFITTER

"S/S Pocke Tee"

[witchysmagicalhaven]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Blooming Jelly Black and Leopard Print Tee.

[poursomesunaonme]

36, 2 can I do 2 characters? Eren and Porco, if not I'll chose porco.

YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY ASLDFJASDF

send me a character and 1-2 numbers & i'll write a little drabble<3

wc: 473

cw: nsfw, minors dni (pls have age in bio or dm it to me), somno, cucking, exhibitionism, voyeurism, brief male masturbation, spit, use of "good girl" and "baby"

“shh - shut up!” porco hisses as he opens your door. eren tries to steady the table that he had bumped, making sure that each item is still before the pair proceeded.

“just move it along, would ya?” eren shoots back, creeping in behind porco and softly shutting the door. you gently stir in bed. the covers fall from your body, revealing one of porco’s big tees and - as he had guessed - no panties.

“shit” is all that eren can say at the sight of your thighs peeking out from underneath the shirt.

“isn’t she a beauty,” porco smiles down at your sleeping face. he turns back to eren. “now don’t make a fucking mess.”

eren nods along and swallows past the lump that forms in his throat. his steely gaze watches porco crawl between your legs, rubbing his hands up and down the backs of your thighs before reaching underneath his tee to squeeze at your ass. you shift slightly, but fall back into a deeper cycle of sleep.

porco’s teeth flash in the dim light of the moon.

eren watches as a dribble of spit falls off his lips and splatter onto your cunt. he rubs it in with his fingers and slips one in to work you open. soft breaths fall heavy from your lips as the pleasure porco gives you reaches you in the deep slumber.

it isn’t long before porco deems you ready, before eren holds in a grunt at the sight of porco slowly working his length inside of you. your eyebrows knit together in your sleep. eren imagines what kind of dream you’re having.

“that’s my good girl,” porco mutters under his breath, holding back a moan that would definitely have woken you up. eren can’t help but reach down and confirm his suspicions of arousal with the tent in his pants. he reaches under the waistband to release the tension that had been building there ever since eren lost the bet that led to this exact moment.

one loud slap to your hips is all it takes to rouse you from your solid sleep. the first thing your eyes can focus on is eren fisting himself under his pants.

“‘ren?” you murmur groggily before turning your head over your shoulder to watch porco thrust into you from behind.

“pock, what’s going on?”

“nothin’, baby,” he coos, stooping down to press a kiss on your shoulder. “just lost a bet, that’s all.”

“huh,” you yawn, letting a little moan escape your mouth as you close your eyes again. you can feel eren’s gaze searing into your skin. “guess a little bet never hurt anybody.”

it surely doesn’t hurt eren’s feelings as he watches you cream all over porco’s cock while busting in his pants. he’s just excited for the positions to change as part of the bet.

© all work belongs to poursomesunaonme. do not copy and repost.

[warehouse-staff-blog]

4601 POCKE TEE, HENRYNECK TEE & 4082 1BUTTON HENRYNECK TEE

こんにちは 名古屋店 コジャです。

定番生地（シャドーボーダー）の半袖TEE《PLAIN（無地）》のラインナップを改めてどうぞ。

WAREHOUSE & CO. Lot 4601 ポケットT ＼6.490-(with tax)

WAREHOUSE & CO. Lot 4601 ヘンリーネックT ＼7.040-(with tax)

※2023 新色：D.GREEN、D.ORANGE

今年の新色もめちゃくちゃ良い色！ 実物を見るとついつい手が出ちゃいますね(^_^;)

173cm,60kg SIZE:L(NON WASH)

179cm,69kg SIZE:XL(NON WASH)

「凄く良い色だ」と思わぬ出逢いに思わぬ出費となる方が多いですよ。笑

そして白Tは永久不滅。 メディアで毎年といって良いほど取り上げられる欠かせないマストアイテム。

そして、 白は細身のパンツにキレイ目で。 それも勿論良いですがXX MODELで往年のアメカジ感を。

173cm,60kg SIZE:L(NON WASH) 《with 900XX》

179cm,69kg SIZE:XL(AFTER WASH)  《with DSB1947MODEL》

くぅーーーっ、たまりません。

また無地と言えばポケTEEでヘンリーネックはその次といった印象が強いのですが、 In Style等でヘンリーネックをチョイスしている方が例年より多い気がしますね。（ヘンリーネックはほぼSOLD OUT状態です。）

. . .

そして無地のラインナップに加わり数年。こちらも定着してきました。

WAREHOUSE & CO. Lot 4082 1ボタンヘンリーネックT 無地 ＼6.490-(with tax)

定番ヘンリー(3ボタン)より抑えられた主張でちょっとしたワンポイントになっているデザイン。

. . .

また全色では無いですがポケットもボタンもプリントも付かない「THE PLAIN（無地）」と、 Vネックもほ～んの少々御座います。

WAREHOUSE & CO. Lot 4601 無地 ＼6.160-(with tax)

. . .

WAREHOUSE & CO. Lot 4601 VネックT ＼6.160-(with tax)

. . .

定番・安定の無地TEEもいくつあっても問題なし（←何に対しても言っている気がしますが。。。(^0^;)）

173cm,60kg SIZE:L(NON WASH)

179cm,69kg SIZE:XL(NON WASH)

WAREHOUSEのHPにシャドーボーダーTシャツのエイジングなどに関してのトピックスを掲載してますのでそちらも是非御覧下さい。

↓↓

【生地のフェードが魅力 ウエアハウスのシャドーボーダーTシャツ】 https://ware-house.jp/newitem/ltng2304/

無地でもパターンは様々。 プリント無しでも仕様の違いで気分を変えてお楽しみ下さい。

では失礼致します。

ーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーー

☞ [営業時間のお知らせ]

平素よりウエアハウス直営店をご利用頂き有難う御座います。 ウエアハウス直営店では営業を下記の通り変更しております。

《2023.6.13.現在の営業時間》

◎東京店　【営業時間：平日 12時～19時　土日祝 12時～19時】無休 ◎阪急メンズ東京店 【営業時間：平日 12時～20時　土日祝 11時～20時】無休 ◎名古屋店【営業時間： 平日 12時～19時　土日祝 12時～19時】水曜定休 ◎大阪店　【営業時間： 平日 12時～19時　土日祝 12時～19時】 無休 ◎福岡店　【営業時間： 平日 12時～19時　土日祝 12時～19時】 無休 ◎札幌店　【営業時間： 11時～20時】  木曜定休

今後の営業時間等の変更につきましては、 改めて当ブログにてお知らせ致します。 お客様におかれましてはご不便をお掛けいたしますが、 ご理解の程、宜しくお願い申し上げます。

.

☞ 『WAREHOUSE直営店の LINE公式アカウント開設』

WAREHOUSE&CO.直営店からのお得な情報や、エリア限定のクーポンなどを配布しています。

LINE公式アカウント開設にあたり、 2019年3月26日（火）以降、提供しておりましたスマートフォンアプリはご利用できなくなっております。 お手数をおかけしますが、今後はLINEアカウントのご利用をお願いします。

ご利用されるエリアのアカウントを「友だち登録」して下さい。 ※WAREHOUSE名古屋店をご利用頂いているお客様は【WAREHOUSE　EAST】をご登録下さい。

※直営店のご利用がなければ【WESTエリア】をご登録下さい。

.

☞[リペアに関して]

弊社直営店で行っておりますジーンズ等のリペアの受付を休止させて頂いております。 ※ご郵送に関しても同様に休止させて頂いております。再開の日程は未定です。

ご迷惑お掛け致しますが、ご理解下さいます様お願い致します。 ※弊社製品であればボトムスの裾上げは無料にてお受けしております。お預かり期間は各店舗により異なりますのでお問合せ下さい。

.

☞WAREHOUSE公式インスタグラム

☞WAREHOUSE経年変化研究室

☞“Warehousestaff”でTwitterもしております。

ーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーー

WAREHOUSE名古屋店

〒460-0011 愛知県名古屋市中区大須3-13-18

TEL：052-261-7889

《2023.6.13.現在の営業時間》

【営業時間：平日 12時～19時、土日祝 12時～19時】水曜定休

[humant-hours]

We made an incredible amount of Alice in Wonderland pronouns! We thought you all would enjoy!

The White Rabbit

• White/Rabbit/Whites/Rabbits/Whiterabbitself

• (Why/Whi)/White/Rabbit/Rabbits/Whiterabbitself

• Ra/Rab/Rabbit/Rabbits/Rabbitself

• Ti/Tick/Ticks/Ticks/Tickself

• Tick/Tock/Ticks/Tocks/Ticktockself

• (La/Lay)/Late/Lates/Lates/Lateself

• Wa/Watch/Watchs/Watchs/Watchself

• Pock/Pocket/Watch/Watchs/Pocketwatchself

• Pocket/Watch/Pockets/Watchs/Pocketwatchself

• Clo/Clock/Clocks/Clocks/Clockself

• ⏱/⏱/⏱s/⏱s/⏱self

• ⌚️/⌚️/⌚️s/⌚️s/⌚️self

• 🕰/🕰/🕰s/🕰s/🕰self

• 🕙/🕙/🕙s/🕙s/🕙self

• 🐇/🐇/🐇s/🐇s/🐇self

• 🐰/🐰/🐰s/🐰s/🐰self

Alice

• (Al/Ala/Ali/Alice)/Alice/Alice’s/Alice’s/Aliceself

• Lo/Lost/Losts/Losts/Lostself

• (Won/Wonder)/Wonder/Wonders/Wonders/Wonderself

• Won/Land/Wonder/Lands/Wonderlandself

• Won/Wonder/Land/Lands/Wonderlandself

• Lo/Lock/Locks/Locks/Lockself

• Mush/Mushroom/Mushrooms/Mushrooms/Mushroomself

• Hou/House/Houses/Houses/Houseself

• 🏠/🏠/🏠s/🏠s/🏠self

• 🏡/🏡/🏡s/🏡s/🏡self

• 🍪/🍪/🍪s/🍪s/🍪self

• 🍬/🍬/🍬s/🍬s/🍬self

• 🧁/🧁/🧁s/🧁s/🧁self

• 🍰/🍰/🍰s/🍰s/🍰self

(Relating to the ‘Eat Me’ and ‘Drink Me’ items in the movie)

The Mad Hatter

• Mad/(Mad/Madden)/Mads/Mads/Madself

• Hat/Hatter/Hatters/Hatters/Hatterself

• Mad/Hatter/Mads/Hatters/Madhatterself

• Tea/Tea/Teas/Teas/Teaself

• Tea/Time/Teas/Times/Teatimeself

• Tea/Pot/Teas/Pots/Teapotself

• Tea/Cup/Teas/Cups/Teacupself

• Rhy/Rhyme/Rhymes/Rhymes/Rhymeself

• Rid/Riddle/Riddles/Riddles/Riddleself

• Mou/Mouse/Mouses/Mouses/(Mouself/Mouseself)

• Door/Mouse/Doors/Mouses/Doormouseself

• (Stra/Stry/Stray/Strange)/Strange/Stranges/Stranges/Strangeself

• 🎩/🎩/🎩s/🎩s/🎩self

• 🐭/🐭/🐭s/🐭s/🐭self

• 🫖/🫖/🫖s/🫖s/🫖self

• ☕️/☕️/☕️s/☕️s/☕️self

• 🌀/🌀/🌀s/🌀s/🌀self

The Cheshire Cat

• (Che/Ches/Chesh/Cheshire)/Cheshire/Cheshire’s/Cheshire’s/Cheshireself

• Cheshire/Cat/Cheshire’s/Cats/Cheshirecatself

• Cat/Cat/Cats/Cats/Catself

• Purr/Purr/Purrs/Purrs/Purrself

• Meow/Meow/Meows/Meows/Meowself

• Smi/Smile/Smiles/Smiles/Smileself

• (Gri/Grin)/Grin/Grins/Grins/Grinself

• (Smi/Smir/Smirk)/Smirk/Smirks/Smirkself

• (Tee/Teeth)/Teeth/Teeths/Teeths/Teethself

• Claw/Claw/Claws/Claws/Clawself

• (Stri/Stripe)/(Stripe/Striped)/Stripes/Stripes/Stripeself

• Pi/Pink/Pinks/Pinks/Pinkself

• Pur/Purple/Purples/Purples/Purpleself

• Van/Vanish/Vanishes/Vanishes/Vanishself

• 🐱/🐱/🐱s/🐱s/🐱self

• 🐈‍⬛/🐈‍⬛/🐈‍⬛s/🐈‍⬛s/🐈‍⬛self

• 🐈/🐈/🐈s/🐈s/🐈self

• 💜/💖/💜s/💖s/💜self

• 💖/💜/💖s/💜s/💖self

The Caterpillar

• (Cat/Cater)/Caterpillar/Catterpillars/Catterpillarself

Caterpillar

• Butterfly/Butterfly/Butterflies/Butterflies/Butterflyself

• Smo/Smoke/Smokes/Smokes/Smokeself

• Puff/Puff/Puffs/Puffs/Puffself

• Blue/Blue/Blues/Blues/Blueself

• 🌀/🌀/🌀s/🌀s/🌀self

• 🐛/🐛/🐛s/🐛s/🐛self

• 🦋/🦋/🦋s/🦋s/🦋self

• 🌫/🌫/🌫s/🌫s/🌫self

• 💨/💨/💨s/💨s/💨self

• 🏺/🏺/🏺s/🏺s/🏺self

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

• Twee/Tweedledee/Tweedledee’s/Tweedledee’s/Tweedledeeself

• Twee/Tweedledum/Tweedledum’s/Tweedledum’s/Tweedledumself

• Twi/Twin/Twins/Twins/Twinself

• 🎀/🎀/🎀s/🎀s/🎀self

• 👥/👥/👥s/👥s/👥self

The Cards

• Card/Card/Cards/Cards/Cardself

• (Kni/Knight)/Knights/Knights/Knightself

• Sol/Dier/Sols/Diers/Soldierself

• Soldier/Soldier/Soldiers/Soldiers/Soldierself

• Guard/Guard/Guards/Guards/Guardself

• Heart/Heart/Hearts/Hearts/Heartself

• (Dia/Diam/Diamond)/Diamond/Diamonds/Diamonds/Diamondself

• Club/Club/Clubs/Clubs/Clubself

• Spade/Spade/Spades/Spades/Spadeself

• Suit/Suit/Suits/Suits/Suitself

• Deck/Deck/Decks/Decks/Deckself

• Spear/Spear/Spears/Spears/Spearself

• Sword/Sword/Swords/Swords/Swordself

• ♥️/♥️/♥️s/♥️s/♥️self

• ♦️/♦️/♦️s/♦️s/♦️self

• ♣️/♣️/♣️s/♣️s/♣️self

• ♠️/♠️/♠️s/♠️s/♠️self

• 🃏/🃏/🃏s/🃏s/🃏self

• 🗡/🗡/🗡s/🗡s/🗡self

• ⚔️/⚔️/⚔️s/⚔️s/⚔️self

• 🌹/🌹/🌹s/🌹s/🌹self

• 🌹🎶/🌹🎶/🌹🎶s/🌹🎶s/🌹🎶self

The Queen of Hearts

• (Quee/Queen)/Queen/Queens/Queens/Queenself

• Heart/Queen/Hearts/Queens/Heartqueenself

• Cro/Crown/Crowns/Crowns/Crownself

• Crown/Crowned/Crowns/Crowns/Crownself

• Red/Red/Reds/Reds/Redself

• White/White/Whites/Whites/Whitself

• Red/Rose/Reds/Roses/Redroseself

• White/Rose/Whites/Roses/Whiteroseself

• Rose/Red/Roses/Reds/Roseredself

• Rose/White/Roses/Whites/Rosewhiteself

• Fla/Flamingo/Flamingos/Flamingos/Flamingoself

• Cro/Croquet/Croquets/Croquettes/Croquetteself

• Off/With/Their/Head/🪓self

• 🦩/🦩/🦩s/🦩s/🦩self

• 👑/👑/👑s/👑s/👑self

• 👑♥️/👑♥️/👑♥️s/👑♥️s/👑♥️self

• 🌹/🌹/🌹s/🌹s/🌹self

• 🌹🤍/🌹🤍/🌹🤍s/🌹🤍s/🌹🤍self

• 🤍🌹/🤍🌹/🤍🌹s/🤍🌹s/🤍🌹self

• 🌹❤️/🌹❤️/🌹❤️s/🌹❤️s/🌹❤️self

• ❤️🌹/❤️🌹/❤️🌹s/❤️🌹s/❤️🌹self

• 🌹/❤️/🌹s/❤️s/🌹self

• ❤️/🌹/❤️s/🌹s/❤️self

• 🌹/🤍/🌹s/🤍s/🌹self

• 🤍/🌹/🤍s/🌹s/🤍self

[sweater-daddiesdumbdork]

@stargazingfangirl18​ put a thought in my head and this is what is taking over. 

Chris Evans Characters As Seasons Aesthetics

Spring- 

Steve Rogers- I know many people would probably think of him more as summer, but in my mind he is spring time warmth and rebirth. I can see Steve stepping into the new sunlight warming the earth and soaking it into his tired body, the rays curling through his system to give him brand new life. A rebirth. There is always hope if someone is willing to believe in it.  

Steve sat under the tent, downpour raining all around him. There was no real way to keep dry in the mix of rain and snow drizzling all around him. The ground beaten and muddy disaster as the troops marched through before he arrived. Everything to the eye was a desolate grey and brown, war ravaged everything that could be beautiful. 

Except he found a struggling life, it unfurled in the sun trying its hardest to break through the last grip of winter. Tiny blossom straining to find the light, fighting beyond the mud to reach for hope. Steve could be patient, his pencils lead mimicking its movements onto paper with a patience he didn't normally have. You would drape over his shoulder, chin resting there while you scanned his work, humming softly how his talent made it truly come to life. 

Summer- 

Frank Adler- The epitome of late summer nights having a beer after a sweltering day. Hes speaks a bit of comfort laziness in the heat after a day of hard work staining the back of his shirt. I can see Frank easily slinging his arm around his partner, smiling to himself satisfied because life doesn't get better then seeing the sun set after a day well spent taking care of his family. 

Heavy thuds of boots carried him across the dock till he reached the current project he was hired for. Swinging himself onto the deck, he reached for the part needing replacing, grease stained fingers tracing the part, a red rag pulled from his back pocked to swipe it over. Gleaming in the hot sun baring down above him. 

Nearby was his reward after he finished this project. Cold six pack swimming in ice, the sweltering heat rolled droplets of sweat down his forehead and along the back of his neck to drench into his cotton tee. A shower tonight would be good, wash away the days work to circle the drain. After tucking in Mary, him and his cooler would sit out on the porch step and let all the days worried drain away, enjoying the moment of a day finished while you stepped between his thighs, tilting his head back to catch the wet droplets encasing his mouth. 

Late Summer- 

Ari Levinson- He speaks of golden rays and letting things go for a while. There is almost a lazy rush to accomplish what needs to be finished. Last minute get togethers bring people together, goals accomplished and settling into saying goodbye to the long days of summertime. 

Coming up the beach, beads of water roll between his shoulder blades to be whisked away under the sun. Mornings were for preparations for later, the sunshine putting on a charade of easy times are still to be had. Its sneaky though, Ari knows as his hand runs along the auburn covering his cheek and along his chin. 

The sun would leave sooner, encasing the dark enabling them to move, escape, and like the sun, time for him was running out. It was now a matter of days before it was all going to end. He knew it, you knew it. When you brushed up against his side, glancing up at him with question, he let his fingers skim your equally golden skin, the sun had been nothing but good to you. “Todays the day, now or never.” 

Autumn- 

Ransom Drysdale- He comes in with a cool breeze that will sting your lungs at first. Sharp snaps of long coats and scarves will swarm around him while he looks you up and down, his tone will have a bit of a bite, kind of like a cinnamon stick burning the tip of your tongue. Hes on the move, changing everything before him with a single touch. He can be a mix of ice coldness or hints of summer warmness. 

Leaves crunched under his footfalls as he descended upon his families home, his hands curled in his pockets to keep the days chill from turning his fingertips red. The wind blew lapels of his coat slightly while he descended the stairs. He never hesitated with a pause at his grandfathers door. Sweeping in as if he belonged in the manor, this was his time, it was coming to him, he just knew it. 

“Ransom...” A greeting from you curled warmly in his chest, fighting back the frigid chill his family brought. The rare moments Ransom would loosen his bite chill was with you, you became the soft warmth undertones that made him more tolerable to others. 

Late Autumn- 

Andy Barber- Rolling through in a way that cant be stopped, no matter how hard one tries. Ice edges the water and frost curls over in a finite way that you are left having to watch the ending coming. You can see life trying to hold on, dig deep and persevere, but hibernation is coming. I can see Andy, in his strive to continue with his everyday life having to witness it starting to shut down, sleep for a time to protect itself. 

He sat there, clinks of ice in his glass melting and watering the liquor down till its bite no longer was satisfactory. He wanted that pain, it would match what he was dealing with every day. Tiredly he let it wash over him for a moment, a loss that sat in his chest while everything continued on without him. 

You've seen him slip into these chilling spells, his eyes turning glassy at the memories and you would slide next to him, first your hand would slide up his back that made him quiver and then along the back of his head till you could turn him to look at you. Hollowed in that moment eyes bore into yours looking for forgiveness. A soft smile you would give him while you removed the glass from his trembling fingers and your lips would press to his while whispering. “Sleep Andy.”  

Winter- 

Curtis Everett- He matured in the darkness and cold, survived where death wanted to curl stiffly, sucking out anything that could possibly spark life. Sometimes things thrive in the harshest of elements, turning them to sharp edges and harsh truths about life. Not everyone survives. Sometimes his touch can and will be pain, searing ice to dance along your skin in furls of promise that if you survive, you to can battle the fiercest of elements. The light will be weak, filtered but its the connection to life. 

Those he passed sank away from his path, not from fear but respect. Whispers would howl through the trains car much as the wind did in the weak places. It was a dark promise of revolt, of a war coming in the strive for survival. And it all followed this man, he was walking darkness to those that crossed him. 

But you were the bit of light shining in his darkness, cool as he was, when his harsh hands softened around your face and tilting up to look at him, he found the reason not to let himself succumb to the harshest of elements. Rough fingertips softened for you, a intricate snowflake, one of a kind and the most beautiful made entirely from everything trying to encase life in a frozen memory. If he was not careful, you would cease to exist, forever just a moment. 

[villainousshakespeare]

Bobby’s Play Date Part 1

The pandemic is keeping Tom idling in London by himself. One positive is that wearing the mask helps him avoid recognition, allowing him to wander in the park with his dog, Bobby. On one of their walks, Bobby becomes smitten with a dog named Lulu and Tom is equally enchanted by her human. Can the Hiddleston men manage to find a way to see the lovely ladies again?

Tom Hiddleston/OFC

Rated M - Pandemic, Fluff, Quarantine, Masks, Adorable Puppies, Meet Cute, Second Part May (will) Contain Smut

@yespolkadotkitty @just-the-hiddles @hopelessromanticspoonie @wine-and-whines @arch-venus25 @caffiend-queen @devilish–doll @enchantedbyhiddles @hiddlesholic @i-do-not-fangirl-i-fanwoman @kellatron55 @ladyoftheteaandblood @latent-thoughts @gorgeous1974 @maryxglz @myoxisbroken @nuggsmum @nildespirandum @pedeka @redfoxwritesstuff @sinfully-lustful-darling @vodka-and-some-sass @wrathkitty @kingtwhiddleston @wolfsmom1 @poetic-fiasco @shiningloki @dangertoozmanykids101 @bookworm-christina @thecutestlittlebunbunfairy @amwolowicz @delightfulheartdream @frostbitten-written @what-a-flammable-heart @tom-hlover @nonsensicalobsessions @myraiswack @loki-yoursaviourishere, from-hel-i-with-love, @sweetsigyn, @fictiondoesitbetter, @ms-cellanies @evieplease @viviennes-tears @turniptitaness @cynic-spirit​

It was months into the pandemic that had ground the world to a halt. Tom desperately hoped things would go back to normal soon, and that a vaccine would be found to help more people from getting sick and dying. There were, of course, many changes to the world at the moment that Tom was not pleased with. Being unable to work, for instance, or travel to visit his sisters was both frustrating and depressing. One change, however, he had to admit he was not completely adverse to.

Tom loved his fans. They were usually polite, often intelligent, and had donated millions in his name to charities. He often said that he couldn’t consider himself an actor without an audience, and he meant it. It was just that there were times when he wanted to enjoy a little anonymity. Particularly when health advisories suggested a six foot distance between people, Tom was relieved to be able to slip on a plain black mask along with his baseball cap and sunglasses and blend in with the other people wandering about on errands.

He was enjoying just such a stroll now despite the warmth, grateful for the ability to hide in plain sight. Bobby frisked happily on his lead, chasing after imaginary prey as they ambled aimlessly down the winding path. It was a lovely, sunny day, but fear was keeping many people at home and they had the park largely to themselves.

When they reached a bend, Bobby began barking excitedly and pulled Tom along, his human chuckling as he was dragged by his furry companion. The reason for Bobber’s excitement soon became apparent. Sitting on a bench placed beside a scenic little river was a woman in a flowered mask, holding the lead of a small, gold and white shih tzu dog in a ridiculous pink and white checked dress.

Tom had to take a firm hold as Bobby frantically tried to go over and meet the smaller dog, who had begun barking herself as they rounded the bend. Her fluffy head, complete with bow to keep the hair from her eyes, perked up, and she began jumping up and down in a little dance. Bobby calmed down a bit as he felt Tom’s pressure on his lead, but his tongue still lolled out of his mouth in a dopey smile.

“Steady,” Tom commanded, feeling embarrassed as Bobby continued to hover as close as allowed to the silly looking strange dog. “I’m sorry, I promise he is completely friendly.”

“It’s okay, so is she,” the woman replied, smiling with her eyes even though he could not see her mouth behind her mask. “You know, she’s usually quite shy, but she seems to like him! May I pet him?”

“Please, and thanks for asking.”

Letting the lead out a bit, Tom watched as the woman reached down to give Bobby a good pet, complimenting him on being a handsome boy. Her fluff of a pup had advanced timidly, and she and Bobby commenced sniffing and circling each other with obvious enjoyment.

“Wow, I have never seen her respond like that to a strange dog!” the woman laughed.

As she spoke, Bobby rolled onto his back and waved his paws in the air with a complete lack of dignity.

“Safe to say he is rather taken as well,” Tom chuckled. “Absolutely shameless! Mind if I have a seat? It seems a shame to deprive them.”

He gestured to the bench next to hers, wanting to keep a safe distance and indicate he respected her space, and the woman nodded. She was dressed much more simply than her dog, he noticed. Black leggings and long rose colored tee shirt, a pair of keds. Apparently, she got all of her whimsy out on her pup.

“What’s his name?” she asked, watching as the dogs frolicked with each other.

“Bobby,” he supplied. “I’m Tom.”

“I’m Leia, and that ridiculous creature is Lulu.”

“Like the princess?” he couldn’t help but ask with a chuckle.

“General,” she answered without missing a beat. “It’s what happens when you are born during the release of a cultural phenomenon. Pity all of the little girls out there now being named Daenerys or Gamora.”

Tom held his breath for a moment. If she was a Marvel fan, then did he have to worry about her recognizing him? Fortunately, she seemed more interested in the game of tag their companions were playing, and he let himself relax.

“There’s a dog run about half a mile from here,” he suggested after a few minutes of companionable silence. “It’s actually where we were headed.”

“I know, but Lulu is so skittish,” Leia sighed. “She just huddles in a little ball when the bigger dogs come near her.”

“She seems fine with Bobbers.”

“I know! Your adorable boy is some sort of sorcerer! It makes me so happy to see her playing with another dog!”

“I have to ask…”

“The dress?” she guessed; voice wry.

“Yeah.”

“She’s a rescue. When I got her, she was a pathetic, bedraggled little thing that had been there for ages. It was winter, and the first times I took her out I had to put a coat on her. After that, she started equating dressing with going out, and would get so excited every time I took a coat or sweater out for her. When the weather warmed up, I realized that I missed the way she would jump up and literally throw herself into whatever I had picked out for her to wear. It’s completely silly, I know, but it makes her happy, and she just looks so cute!”

Tom’s heart melted a little as he listened to her explain. Yes, the dog looked silly, but it was such a sweet reason that suddenly the little dress transformed into a symbol of kindness rather than an eccentricity.

“She does look adorable,” he said.

A beeping noise had him drawing his phone from his pocked, and he was surprised at the time. He had to get back home soon for a virtual session with his trainer. Oddly, he found himself reluctant to go. It had been so long since he had just spent time with another person, it had felt good just to sit in her presence and relax.

“I’m afraid I have to get going. But Bobby and I usually walk this way around lunch time,” he blurted out, lying through his teeth. “Hopefully we will run into you lovely ladies again. So that the dogs can play.”

He was more grateful for the mask than ever, as it hopefully hid the blush he could feel coloring his face. Once more her vivid eyes sparkled and she stood up too, twisting around with him as they attempted to untangle the leashes.

“I’m sure Lulu would love that!” she told him, picking up the golden dog as she whined and tried to follow after her new friend. “We’ll see you around, Tom. Bobby.”

With a jaunty step he let his long legs take him away, looking forward to tomorrow already.

It rained the next two days. Not just a soft drizzle but am early summer storm that made the idea of a pleasant walk a fantasy. Tom and Bobby both resented the weather, and it was a toss up which of them was more disagreeable as they were forced to stay indoors.

When the sun shone on the third day, Tom immediately cancelled all of his afternoon plans. He had waited patiently, he told himself, he was not going to let this day go to waste. It was for Bobby’s sake, after all. The pup deserved a nice day out after being shut up inside.

They left home mid-morning, Tom unable to sit still any longer. He couldn’t say why exactly he was so keen on meeting Leia and her silly dog again, but he had been able to think of nothing else during his enforced isolation. Perhaps it was simply the novelty of meeting someone new who didn’t instantly faun over him or act nervous and shy. She treated him as though he were just an ordinary guy walking his dog in the park; which of course was what he was!

He arrived at the benches where they had met earlier that week, but they were empty. It was still early, so they made a circuit of the nearby trails. His eyes always alert for their new friends. They passed a few other people walking their pets, but both Tom and Bobby were uninterested beyond a nod hello and brief sniff. The Hiddleston men were both to focused on finding particular companions.

It was, as it had been before, Bobby who first discovered their presence. As they were walking through a more secluded, twisting section of the park, the dog’s ears pricked up and he began barking in excitement. Tail wagging frantically, Bobby yanked on the lead and pulled Tom along behind him as he took off around a curve. A high pitched yip sounded from the direction he headed.

“Well hello there!” Leia greeted him, leaning down to scratch Bobby’s head as he and Lulu danced around each other. “We were hoping to run into you boys again!”

“Eh heh heh,” Tom laughed, dancing around to keep his leash from entangling too badly with hers. “Obviously Bobby here was looking forward to that as well! As was I.”

“Well then, I am so happy you found us.”

He felt absurdly pleased as they fell into step beside each other. The two dogs were happy to walk along, darting back and forth in play as they went.

“Were you going anywhere in particular?” Leia asked casually.

“Oh, just wandering about,” Tom answered, not wanting to admit that they had been on a mission to hunt down the ladies.

“Well then, we can wander together.”

As the dogs played, Tom and Leia chatted happily. He learned that she was an aspiring writer working on edits to her first novel, and a tour guide, specializing in guiding small groups around literary sights in London as a way to earn money.

“Of course, it’s hard to be a tour guide with no tourists,” she sighed. “You would think it would give me more time to write, but its hard to focus. Anyway, I talk too much. What about you?”

“Oh, I’m on furlough,” he shrugged, staying vague. “Just loafing about the house, annoying Bobby. So what is your novel about?”

He managed to direct the conversation back to her, even though she avoided the subject of her book. Instead, she brought up some of the more interesting places she had brought tourists. Tom, a proud Londoner, had been to many of them, and they happily discussed the more interesting locations. She seemed impressed that he had read books by most of the authors they discussed and was quite ready with a line or two from memory. In turn, Tom loved how expressive she became when describing the joy people experienced finding themselves walking in the footsteps of their favorite fictional characters.

By the time Leia announced that she and Lulu needed to head home, (Tom thought he detected regret in her voice) he was surprised to realize that they had been talking for almost two hours. It was the most pleasant afternoon he had passed in some time.

After that, Tom and Bobby spent every afternoon in the park. At first, they managed to “stumble” upon their companions most days. The days they did not were frustrating for both of them and usually ended with them barking at each other. After a few run-ins with Leia and Lulu however, Tom took the plunge and asked if they would like to make their daily meetups official. Leia seemed pleased, but with the caveat that some days she did need to stay home and write when she was struck by the rare inspiration. Tom deflated momentarily, thinking she was looking for an out, until she offered to text him an let him know if they would be absent. He happily gave her his cell phone number and took hers in return, letting her know that she should feel free to text anytime and then feeling like an idiot the minute the words left his mouth.

Over the next two weeks they met all but three days – two because of her writing and one when the skies once more conspired to thwart him. Their conversations ranged from literature to films to favorite places to travel. Leia sometimes teased him about his obvious upper class life style, jetting about to Viet Nam, Hawaii, Australia… but that was the closest his celebrity status ever came to being brought up. He would occasionally feel a stab of guilt over keeping that part of himself from her, it felt dishonest to lie by omission, but he was enjoying being just Tom, and didn’t want to spoil it.

Tom started taking more care in his appearance as the days went on. Gone were the torn running shorts and frayed t-shirts, and in their place were his slim fitting dark jeans and more presentable tops. If those tops also stretched a bit tight across his chest to better show off his muscles, well, he had worked hard enough to achieve them! He made some attempt to style his untamable locks as well, experimenting with different products until he found something that made the curls less crunchy. If he was remembering Leia’s off hand comment about how she liked his natural curls no one else needed to know that.

On the one month anniversary of meeting them in the park, Tom paced nervously back and forth near their favorite bench as he waited for them to arrive. He had a proposition for Leia and hoped desperately that she would say yes. When Bobby started frisking about he knew that he would see her walking Lulu, and spun around to see her come towards them.

“Sorry I’m late!” she smiled with her eyes. “This one managed to hide my house keys, and it took half an hour to track them down to her stash under the sofa.”

Lulu looked unrepentant as she pranced around Bobby, and Tom chuckled good naturedly. He gestured to the bench and sat after Leia, leaning back and stretching out his legs.

“No worries, honestly,” he assured her. “I am just delighted you are here now.”

“You are the perfect gentleman.”

“All lies, I assure you,” he waited for a moment, wanting to sound casual, and then launched into it unable to delay any longer. “I was wondering… The park is lovely, of course, but I thought it might be nice – for Lulu and Bobby – if they had a bit more freedom to run about. Lulu being afraid of the dog run, she has no opportunity to be off leash, and that can’t be too fun for our furry companions.”

“They seem to be having a good time to me,” Leia laughed, looking at where the dogs were investigating a small pile of leaves by the side of the trail. “But what did you have in mind?”

“Well, you see, our house has an enclosed back yard. Not huge, mind you, but large enough they would be able to chase to their hearts content without fearing larger beasts. I thought that perhaps you and Lulu might want to come over this Friday evening for dinner. There’s a testing sight not far from here. We could each get swabbed to make sure we are uncontagious. My bubble is only my Mum and Bobbers, and from what you’ve told me yours isn’t much bigger. It should be reasonably safe for you to come. I could make us dinner, and we could eat outside. If you would be comfortable with it, that is.”

He tried to look calm, but inside Tom was a riot of nerves as he waited for her answer. Leia’s brow crinkled in thought, and she glanced again to where the dogs were once more hopping back  and forth across the path.

“I can’t do Friday,” she told him, and his heart fell.

“Oh, alright then. It was just an idea.”

“Friday is my virtual book club,” she went on, talking over him. “Would Saturday work?”

“Saturday would be perfect!” he beamed.

“Great! I’ll go to the clinic for a test tomorrow then. Would you like me to bring anything?”

“Just Lulu and a healthy appetite.”

“Excellent! Now what do you say we walk over to the little waterfall?”

Tom practically floated through the rest of their walk. He had enjoyed getting to know her so much, but he wanted to spend more than an hour or two at a time with her. Dinner would give them a chance to really relax. Plus, he was dying to see her mouth. After a month of imagining her smile he wanted to know if what he had in his mind was anywhere close to reality. She would see his full face too, but if she hadn’t recognized him by now it was doubtful she would from the lower half of his face.

His confidence dipped a bit when they returned home. Looking around, Tom began to panic. Between photos of him in his full Loki regalia to a group picture with the cast of Skull island, there were far too many give aways of his fame. She might not recognize him, but you would have to like on another planet not to know who Sam Jackson was!

Tom spent the next few days rearranging his home. His awards, normally discreetly placed in a cabinet in his living room on the insistence of his mother, were moved to a back shelf in his office closet. The set photos from a decade plus of filming were shoved under his bed and various pieces of memorabilia were secreted away in the spare bedroom. By the time he was done his guilt had increased but he was fairly confident that all trace of his career had been tucked away safely.

“Well, Bobbers, let’s hope we don’t blow this,” he sighed, adjusting the bandana he had bought to go around the dog’s neck. Bobby whined slightly and Tom grinned. “None of that, you want to look good for your date. She has a fondness for clothing, after all.”

Bobby gave him a look that said he clearly knew Lulu was not the one Tom was trying to impress with his new fashion statement, but Tom cheerfully ignored it. Tonight was going to be a wonderful night.

[rhetoricandlogic]

By: Catherynne M. Valente

Art by: Thais Leiros

Issue: 7 September 2020

9199 words                                                                                   

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Variations in Luminance

Big Edie was a useless piece of shit.

Johanna Telle found the most significant relationship of her life on a Saturday afternoon in late May, sitting on one of those excruciatingly handmade quilts crafty stay-at-homes used to make out of their precious baby’s old clothes and putting a deep, damp dent in the buttercup-infested lawn of 11 Buckthorn Drive, Ossining, New York. A four-pointed Arkansas Traveler star radiated out around her, each of the four diamond patches so exquisitely nailing the era of the quilter’s pax materna that Johanna pulled out her Leica and snapped a shot before the homeowners could stop her: The Pretenders, Captain Planet Says No Nukes, Got Milk? and a Hypercolor tee subjected, as so many had been, to the indignity of a commercial dryer until it finally gave up the thermochromic ghost, its worn cotton-poly blend permanently stuck on a sad blown-out pink.

And Big Edie in the middle, ugly as all the sins of man, with a box of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Second Edition modules on the eastern point of the compass, a mint condition Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Playset to the west, a working laserdisc player up north, and down south, one beefy hardcase Samsonite in Executive Silver with a handwritten sign on it promising a complete set of signed first edition Danielle Steel hardbacks inside. A steal at $300, suitcase included.

Still life with late 80's/early 90's. Johanna loved it.

But she only had eyes for Big Edie. The absolute and utter trashbeast technological abortion winking up cheekily at her from within a nest of vanished childhoods.

She’d driven all the way out into the golden calcified time-bubble of the Hudson Valley after the ephemeral promises of an estate sale. The people here had so much money they never had to grow or change or evolve past the approximate epoch of their children’s most precocious years. That’s how Johanna had gotten a Hasselblad for $90 and a fake phone number a couple of years ago at a fuck-Gam-Gam-just-get-rid-of-this-junk free-for-all in Stonybrook. You just crossed your eyes and hoped the kids were the type to tell everyone who never asked that social media was a disease and didn’t sully themselves with Google or eBay.

This was clearly the case on that late-May Ossining afternoon. The card balanced against Big Edie’s case read:

Does Not Work. $50 OBO.

Johanna Telle smiled in the perfect post-processed sun. The EDC-55 ED-Beta Camcorder retailed for a cool $7700 in 1987. Just over sixteen grand in 2015 funbucks. It could produce over 550 lines of resolution in an age where high definition was barely even a phrase. Automatic iris control, dual 2-3 inch precision CCD imaging, Fujinon f1.7 range macro zoom, on-the-fly audio/video editing, capable of recording in hi-fi stereo and most impressively for its time, native video playback. Angular black and matte silver bug-ugly design. The last glorious 13.5-kilogram gasp of the Betamax world, still in its hardcase shell, that particular shade of tan that meant Serious Business for the Terminally 80's Man.

In digital terms, Big Edie was prehistoric. Big Edie was fucking Cretaceous. If there was a camera set up on a tripod to record what happened when the primordial soup stopped being polite and started getting real, Big Edie would have been a top-tier choice for the discerning prosumer.

Big Edie was archaeology.

Johanna whipped her faded seafoam-green hair to one side and hefted that machine corpse onto her dark brown shoulder. She was comically heavy. The weight of a dead world, its concerns long quieted.

Johanna Telle, when she was paying attention, when she was happy, in those moments when she was most definitively Johanna, saw down to the deeps of things. It was all she was really good at, in her estimation. She saw that world, le regime ancien, projected onto the back of her skull like a drive-in theater screen.

When she was little, she’d sat criss-cross applesauce in her mother’s lap in a kind of mute blue nirvana, watching a crew send an unmanned submersible in a metal cage down the icy miles to find the HMS Titanic. Before her father left them, before they lost the house, before the hundred little fatal cuts of getting from one end of childhood to the other. Long beams of light broke the black water of forgetting and scattered across that ghostly bow and found what had been lost. Impossibly lost. Forever. Johanna had barely been able to breathe. She knew herself then, in that terrifying way you know things when you are small. The warmth of her mother’s chest rose and fell behind her, an entire universe of protection and presence. A gentle little prick of the aquamarine pendant she always wore against Johanna’s scalp. The familiar smell of Pink Window, her mother’s signature Red Door knockoff, pulsing off her clavicle. The tinny voice of a rich man floating out of the blue ocean. Later, when the neighborhood kids played games on their unforgivably Spielbergian suburban streets, hollering I’m the Incredible Hulk or I’m the Pink Ranger or I’m Tenderheart Bear, Johanna would call out something nominally culturally appropriate but whisper the truth to herself, which never changed, no matter the game or the streets: I am the exterior lighting array on Robert Ballard’s Argo ROV unit.

Johanna put her eye to Big Edie’s viewfinder. The black cup pocked gently against her cheekbone. Such a nice feeling. Like holding a girl’s hand for the first time. She stared into inert darkness.

“It only takes these weird old tapes,” someone said from outside Edie’s warm lightless innards. A friendly, well-hydrated, nicely-brought-up male voice, full of solicitude, exhausted, heartbroken, hanging in there, like the orange kitten in the old poster.

Johanna didn’t look up. She amused herself picturing the kitten putting its paws on its hips and whistling regretfully through its sharp teeth at the $50 OBO paperweight before them. She suppressed her not-very-inner snob. Yes, dear, ED Super Beta II and III series cassettes. You can still get them, anywhere between $35 and $50 a pop. You can still get anything if you don’t care what it costs.

“There’s one stuck in there. Made a nasty sound when I tried to lever it out. I don’t have any others, though. Dad didn’t stick with this one for very long. I put his digital cameras around by the hydrangeas, way better. You want me to show you?”

“Does it turn on?”

“Nope. Well, not unless it’s a Tuesday and the moon is in Pisces and you’re standing on one foot or some shit. I keep the battery charged up, though. I heard you have to do that or it degrades. I’m Jeff, by the way.”

Of course you are. That’s what they always name soft orange kittens like you.

Johanna’s fingers slid down Big Edie’s flank and found the raised plastic goose-pimple that marked the power button as easily as a practiced accordionist settling onto C Major. She pointed the lens at the bereaved child of its former owner and hit the big red square.

A firehose of light white-watered through the generous 1.5” black and white viewfinder into her cerebral cortex. In the middle of it stood, not the hang in there kitten, but a tall handsome guy in his late twenties or early thirties. Big emotive eyes, tennis shorts, dark polo shirt, with a shimmer of beard-stubble six or seven hours deep, hair the cut and style of debate team and law school and firm handshakes and warm decades ahead in a secure center-right Senate seat.

A shard of glass punched through his chest. Black monochrome blood sheeted down over his shorts and his long, grey, summer-muscled legs. His neck whipped hard to the side, like he’d suddenly seen an old girlfriend and was about to call her name, but when he opened his mouth, a jet of dark liquid spurted onto the quilt of his so-loved childhood clothes. It cut across the white block-print Pretenders in a clean spattered line.

“What’s the verdict?” Jeff asked. That voice like a clean fingernail cut through Johanna’s attention. She yanked her face up off the viewfinder. Jeff’s fine blond eyebrows arched curiously before her in full color, waiting to find out if that old Betamax monster still had juice. If the moon was, in fact, in Pisces. He shoved his hands in the pockets of a paint-splattered pair of jeans.

Johanna glanced back down into Big Edie’s gullet. It was waiting down there, that death-image of silver and ichor.

“I like your shirt,” she said. The walls of her throat stuck together. Inside the camera, that charcoal polo dripped silent-film blood onto his new white tennis shoes. Outside, he wore a slim-cut celery-green tee with Newport Folk Festival 2010 stamped across his chest in a faux-rustic font. She could look back and forth between them. Back and forth. Black and white. Color. Black and white. Grey and green. Green and grey. And wet, dripping jet-onyx blood. All that faded thermochromicity blazing back onto the scene to react with the not live but definitely Memorex heat-death of Jeff from Ossining.

Big Edie went down for the count.

The image guttered out like a pilot light, a sound both grinding and whining shook through her, and she rather ungracefully peaced out.

“$30?”

“All yours,” Jeff grinned.

He took Johanna Telle’s money and strode off across the mown lawn, through the labyrinth of his late father’s obsessions, the sun on his shoulders as though it would never leave him.

Aliasing

It’s much easier to pry a stuck tape out of a machine when you’re not that bothered if you break it. Get a screwdriver and a Sharpie and believe in yourself. It came free with significant but impotent protest, trailing a tangled mess of ropy ED Supra Beta II behind it. Johanna wound the mistreated tape back through the cartridge with the pen the way kids would never do again, and she would have been perfectly content for the rest of her days on this maudlin, over-saturated planet if she could have said the stupid suburban sun got in her eyes and that’s all she really saw.

But Betamax tells no lies.

Johanna sat on the floor of her apartment like the kid from Poltergeist all grown up, heavily medicated, and a cog in the gig economy. A massive daisy chain of converter cables hooked Big Edie up to the living room flatscreen, each one coaxing the signal five or six years forward from 1987 to the slick shiny present day.

The reflected video image washed her face in color. A forgotten pleasure, like the taste of ancient Egyptian beer. You used to always see your shot in black and white when you looked through the viewfinder. You only got to see the colors when you reviewed the footage. Inside the camera was another planet. Color was a side effect of traveling from that world to this one. Step from Kansas into Oz, cross your fingers for fidelity, saturation, hue, hope those shoes still look as red as they did before you crammed them through a lens.

So. No more black and white artsy viewfinder image. Now it was straight outta Kodachrome. But this tape sat in Big Edie’s time-out box for thirty years. Chromatic degradation slipped and popped all over the image, sickly green blooms, hot orange halos, compression artefacts, uncanny edging that rimmed this and that object in weird chemical colors.

Johanna watched a factory-direct 70's mustache-dad with tennis socks up to God’s chin helping his small, yet unmistakably Jeff, son unwrap a record player on Christmas morning. Big Edie came standard automatic fade-in and fade-out, so everything transitioned elegantly, creating a subtle sense of deliberate editing where none truly existed. Fade to black, then a slow melt into a hopeless lacrosse game, small children running nowhere, hitting each other with sticks too big for them to hold properly.

Another bloom of darkness.

A school play, reedy, vulnerable pre-adolescent Jeff dressed as a cloud fringed with silver tinsel rain, twirling and twirling, technique-free, his arms stretched out. Then another and Johanna presumed this was Jeff’s mother, the maker of the T-shirt quilt, 80% Diane Keaton, 20% Shelley Duvall, a white-wine flush on her cheeks, smiling up at the man with the camera in frank, unguarded affection and not a little desire, her shoulders bare above a strapless summer dress the color of the hydrangeas she probably hadn’t even planted yet.

Such wildly un-special moments, clichés of heart-beggaring authenticity, carefully cut out of the flow of time and pasted into the future, selected for immortality for no particular reason, random access memories transfigured into light that cannot die—but can get stuck in a metal cage for want of a Sharpie and a flathead.

Time travel. The only real time travel, unnoticed and uncredited because it was so unbearably slow. In the present, you use this astonishing machine to freeze the past. And you send it to the future. One second per second.

The image cut to black and then it was 2015 and Jeff selling off a lifetime of his father’s lovingly dragon-hoarded objets d’American masculinity. Standing on a lawn with catalogue-ready light and dark green stripes in the grass. Talking not to the man who produced and directed his childhood but to Johanna. She can hear her own voice on the recording.

Does it turn on?

He makes a joke about the moon and tells her his name. Sitting alone in the dark, Johanna realizes he was flirting with her, and she has a second to wonder what his mustached father’s name was before the glass smashes through his sternum again and blood streams down to soak a just out-of-frame blanket stitched together from mass-marketed polyester and lost time.

Johanna ran the tape back. Then she watched it again.

Back. And again.

She was still doing it when the morning broke into her apartment without announcing itself.

Five weeks later, she’ll be down to two or three run-throughs a day. An article will swim across her feed.

Late Night Four-Car Pile Up on I-84 Leaves Two Dead, Seven Injured.

Jeffrey Havemeyer of Westchester County, NY, 34, remains in critical care.

Johanna will feel nothing. She’s seen it a thousand times already.

Overclocking

“Sit there,” Johanna tells her cousin’s daughter, pointing at a cracked leather barstool.

Anika is nineteen, in her second year at Columbia. She is everything Johanna is not: mentally stable, tall, good hair, vegan, grounded by parental encouragement and affection, prone to healthy relationships, able to commit to an exercise regimen. The twenty-first-century girl. Johanna has always found her fascinating. Scientifically. It’s like hanging out with an alien. Your whole ecosystem is based in carbon and abandonment and trash, and you just always assumed those were the essential building blocks of life, but it turns out they’re totally unnecessary and sentient beings can just as well be made out of palladium and love and sensible choices instead, look at this actual good person right here, you have the same nose.

Johanna’s arthritic Great Dane watches them coolly from his massive fluffy bed.

“Your hair looks like a badger,” Anika says.

It’s been some time since Ossining and quilt and the hydrangeas and what Johanna has come to think of as the glitch. Technical difficulties. Runtime error. It’s late summer. Sweat darkens Anika’s hairline under the expected carefully messy topknot. The boroughs are one long incessant screech of twelve million window-mounted air conditioners and the smell of warm garbage bags, round and shiny on every doorstep.

Seafoam green softheart mermaid look out; icicle-white collarbone-length brutalist bob with black tips in.

“I like to think of it as ermine. You know, royal cloaks and all that.”

“Did you know ermines are just regular stoats with their winter coats on?” Anika helpfully informs her. “Not special at all. Fancy weasels. Glam weasels.”

“That’s perfect. I myself am a decidedly unspecial glam weasel.”

Johanna adjusts the tripod under Big Edie. It took Johanna weeks to gut the old girl, order parts, and convince her that modern life truly was worth living. Nothing really wrong with her at all, other than the audio-visual equivalent of osteoporosis and a bad back. Johanna loved the work. Data was invisible now. Stored on sand, transferred on air, transcending physical form. Light talking to light. But not Big Edie. She was very visible. Gross and awkward and tangible. The girl would never be good as new again. But she was good enough.

“No you’re not, you’re amazing,” Anika says softly, and Johanna can hear the little girl she’s known in that grown-up, gonna-save-the-world-with-believing-it-can-be-saved voice.

Johanna ignores this obvious lie.

They’ve already done a few shots with the Hasselblad, the Leica, a couple with her phone. She doesn’t really know why she’s putting on a show. Anika wouldn’t question just sitting in front of an old Betamax camcorder for a few minutes and then heading off for Hungarian pastries and a good full-body-cleanse political rant. But it feels important that today has the appearance of a plausibly professional kind of thing. Not that Johanna is using her.

Which she is.

Johanna doesn’t have access to a lot of people at the moment. They find her offputting. Not user-friendly. An unintuitive interface. Carbon-based.

“Can you let the blinds down halfway?” she asks.

Anika does. Slats of August light and dark slash down her face and torso (like glass slicing through skin) like an old pre-lapsarian end-of-programming test screen. It would be a gorgeous shot even if the shot was the point.

“I mean it. This apartment, your work. Margot. Mapplethorpe.” The Great Dane’s floppy black ears perk up at the sound of his name. “I love it here. You’re living the dream.”

Johanna hesitates with her forefinger over the record button. God, she remembers how much she hated it when people told her college wasn’t the real world and she had no idea what it was like out there, as if studying and working full-time wasn’t more work and less fun than the barren salt flats of adulthood between your twenties and death. But she wanted badly to shovel the same shit for Anika now. The only way you could look at this place and see a dream was through a lens that had never touched reality.

This is fine, she tells herself. The Havemeyer Glitch is not a thing. Just a shill for Big Coincidence. It’s not like he died. And besides, nothing bad can ever happen to Anika. She is a palladium-based life form. So this is fine. It’s for science. You will take beautiful footage of your beautiful niece-once-removed, and buy her a walnut kolachi, and she will tell her mother what a nice time she had.

“Margot moved out last week,” Johanna says without emotion. Margot moved out three months ago. She left a purple brush in the bathroom. Long black hair still tangled up in it. Johanna can’t bring herself to move the last cells of Margot that exist in proximity to Johanna’s cells.

“Oh,” Anika replies gently. “So that’s why you changed your hair.”

Johanna hits record.

For eighty-seven seconds, the only thing Big Edie has to say is that Anika Telle was born for the camera, a portrait of her generation, artlessly artful, a corkscrew of loose dark hair hanging forward to catch the light, one grey bare leg tucked up beneath a billowy sack dress with small elephants printed on it, the other not quite long enough to touch the peeling floor. Her expression genuinely, infinitely, but entirely temporarily sad for the misfortunes of someone else. See? This is fine. Tell her to say something. Recite Shakespeare. Or Seinfeld.

Deep in Big Edie’s viewfinder, Anika’s left eye crumples in a wet gush of pearl and black. Her head rockets back, shrouded in mist. She coughs, gags, tears streaming from her remaining eye. She’s still sitting on the barstool in Johanna’s apartment with silvery botanical wallpaper behind her, the tall window, the August sun, the half-drawn blinds. But the Anika in the camera wears black leggings, a puffy black winter coat, a black surgical mask. White duct tape criss-crosses the back of her jacket to form the words: #NOJUSTICE. She’s older, the lingering baby softness in her jaw gone, her hair a buzzed undercut. The cords on her neck stand out as she runs, her face ruined, blind with pain, stumbling, looking over her shoulder as she bolts on the video feed from one end of the living room to the other. Out of nothing, a cop in riot gear steps out of Johanna’s kitchenette, grabs the back of Anika’s skull in one hand and shoves her down. Anika-in-black falls to her knees, sobbing, puking into her mask, holding one hand to the hole where her eye used to be, screaming silently into Johanna’s (Margot’s) red paisley rug.

Johanna yanks her head up out of the sucking desaturated pit of the camera.

Mapplethorpe snores loudly. Trucks beep in reverse outside the apartment building. Anika sighs softly, bored but not rude. She scratches a mosquito bite on her knee. “I really am sorry. I liked Margot. She was good for you, I think. Got you out of the house.”

All the blood has either rushed to or drained from Johanna’s head. She can’t tell which. All she can hear or feel is her own pulse slamming itself against her eardrums.

“Do you … want me to do something?” Anika asks uncertainly.

Johanna shuts the camera down quickly. The image at the bottom of the viewfinder clicks out of existence. She tries to talk, but there’s no talk to be found. Just the burning hot green-on-red afterimage of a crystal brown eye collapsing in its socket, over and over.

“Come on, Auntie J,” Anika says finally, hopping lightly off the stool and bending down, scratching Mapplethorpe between his spotted shoulder blades. “Dinner’s on me. Malaysian okay? Maps can have a curry puff, can’t you, baby?”

Test Pattern

An experiment that cannot be repeated is evidence of nothing.

Johanna establishes a beachhead in Owl’s Head Park. Back supported by a black walnut tree. Bare toes clenched in a sea of tiny white flowers and clover-infiltrated grass. Big Edie propped against her breastbone, lens stabilized by knees on either side. Mapplethorpe’s yellow lead loops around her ankle, but the big fellow has long passed his days of running off after unsuspecting children. He munches philosophically on a pricey organic broth-basted rawhide shaped like a braided ring.

She finds a target, hits the button, rolls footage for a few minutes, tracking them as they throw frisbees for far-inferior dogs or kick soccer balls or kiss on picnic blankets or drag giant wooden chess pieces across a giant board or just walk aimlessly, whatever Saturday afternoon moves them to do. She doesn’t look through the viewfinder into that hellworld of black and white. Just presses buttons.

Turn it on.

Shut it off.

Find someone new.

Repeat.

She chooses at random. No more Anikas. No one is special, or unspecial. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they look like. They’re just data. That man, that woman, that child, that set of twin babies, those skaters, that guy sleeping with a James Patterson book over his eyes. Compressed data to be converted later.

Johanna’s brain checks out and begins a speed run through the five stages of grief over the death of a reliable reality. Denial: you’re losing it, change up your medication, girl, it’s not real, it’s not anything, just a stupid old camera that you bought because you are stupid, at best it’s old footage coming through on an old tape.

Stop recording. New person. Girl in green skinny jeans with a sketchbook.

Anger: fuck this, fuck you, fuck estate sales, fuck Robert Ballard, fuck the Columbia School of Law, fuck sad elephant print fabric, fuck hydrangeas, fuck curry puffs that make my dog poop out his soul, fuck Betamax you dumb drooling obsolete idiot tech, fuck me, fuck my dad, fuck Jeff Havemeyer’s dad, fuck I-84, fuck Margot, fuck the linear flow of time, fuck everything, life is garbage and this is proof. Why is this happening to me?

Stop. Scan. Record. Lanky white-dude dreds fuckboy in a vest but no shirt.

Depression: Of course it’s happening to me, because I am garbage and this is proof, and whatever cosmic hazmat disposal dump site got its back end trapped in my camera would only open the gates to a warped maladjust like me.

Stop. Scan. Record. Old man on the bench with god-tier eyebrows and a yellow plastic sunflower in his lapel.

Bargaining: I’ll just watch this back tonight and whatever happens, afterward I’ll tip Big Edie in the bin and never tell anyone. And then I will straighten up and clean my apartment and go on Tinder and eat leafy greens five times a day and see Anika more often and make amends and buy an exercise bike. Okay, Elder AV Club Gods? Deal?

Stop. Scan. Record. Kid on a dirt bike with (elephants) puffins on her dress.

Acceptance.

Acceptance.

Acceptance is Johanna sitting cross-legged (criss-cross applesauce) on Mapplethorpe’s bed while he snoozes jowlfully on the couch. She braces herself for red slicks of gore and bone. For Jeff and Anika redux. Once is luck, two is coincidence, three is a pattern … or at least time to wake up and smell what your inevitable descent into psychosis is cooking.

But that’s not what Big Edie has for her.

Not entirely, anyway.

Entropic Coding

Gloppy August sunlight washes out the image. Everything is overexposed, too bright, unforgiving. His thin chest rises and falls with his breath. He watches a small blue and white bird hop nervously down the iron rail of his park bench. A cerulean warbler, Johanna notes with supreme irrelevance. Closer to him, then further away, then close again. He crumbles a crust of brown bread on his tweedy knee and waits knowingly. This goes on long enough that Johanna starts to relax. It isn’t going to happen again. The bird will give in, and eat, and Johanna’s life will resume the program already in progress.

Then the sunlight cools, then it darkens, then it is a dim nothing-watt lamp with a tacky early 60's cherry pattern on the shade. The branches of black oak and Dutch elm in Owl’s Head Park still reach into the frame like kids who’ve spotted a news crew, showing off in the background, dying to get on TV. But the bench and the octogenarian perched on it have become a mustard-colored corduroy sofa and a young man with his head in his hands. Vaguely Scandinavian mid-century wooden end tables bookend the couch. A clock with thin brass spikes radiating out around it ticks over a clearly decorative fireplace. Above the man hangs a proto-Bob Ross painting of standard-issue lake/pines/mountain/lonely boat in a dizzying array of shades from brown to brown. Children’s toys cover the floor. At least one boy and one girl. Maybe more. Wooden blocks, a rocking horse with yellow yarn hair, green plastic army men. Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny and Snoopy staring lifelessly at the ceiling in a triple rictus of frozen grimaces. A book of Connie Francis paper dolls with most of the smiling valium-glazed Connies already carefully cut out hiding under the formica coffee table. A Funflowers Vac-U-Form Maker-Pak Johanna recognizes from a box of crap her grandmother let her play with the year they had to live with her because, no matter how she tried to pretend it was an adventure, her mother had no options left. You squeezed out perfumed lucite goo into molds and made “Daffy Dills” and “Tuffy Tulips” that looked like crystals in the sun until you got bored and broke a vase just to get some attention. A Spirograph and stacks of spiralled paper, scattered across the avocado shag carpet like ticker tape after the parade has gone. Like mystic offerings before the massive, inert cabinet television that probably weighs more than everyone who lives here put together. The kinds of toys you lift off a flea market shelf with joy and reverence, despite the peeling paint and chipped edges and missing vital organs.

But these are all new.

A wind moves through Owl’s Head Park and dappled shadows in the jaundiced light of the living room move across the man, the sofa, the table, the TV, the toys, the cherry lampshade.

The man on the yellow sofa looks up.

He is so young. Perhaps thirty-five, perhaps not even that. His incredible, architectural eyebrows are dark brown now; he has all his hair. He’s still wearing a suit, but this one has wide lapels, no tie, a plaid pattern that will crown endcaps in Goodwill until the sun burns out. He looks exhausted. Someone’s been smoking all night and it was probably him. maybe not just him. Butts overflow a pink pearlescent ashtray under the cherry lamp. About a third have frosted coral lipstick prints glowing on their filters, each one fainter than the last.

Johanna braces herself for the shard of glass or the ruination of his eye or gunshot or gas leak, whatever is about to break this poor soul in half. Her heart rate spins up into the rhythm of a jet propeller carrying her into nothing and nowhere. Her stomach muscles clench for impact.

But: the man gets up. Wipes his palms on his wrinkled pants. Walks across the room. Stops. Bends down to pull one perfect yellow Vac-U-Form Funflower out of the pile of misshapen attempts. Slides it into his lapel. The man leaves the house. He closes the door behind him so gently it doesn’t even click. No sound at all until his car engine starts outside, and then that’s gone too.

In the margins of the image, the cerulean warbler flies off with a cry. The shadow of his little body flickers over the empty room.

Fade out.

Fade in on the girl in the green skinny jeans and peasant blouse lying with her sketchbook under the willow tree.

Johanna makes it five people and ten minutes sixteen seconds deep by the overlarge alarm-clock-style timestamp before she scrambles off the dog bed and shuts the whole rig off.

An hour later, she gets out of bed and pads back to the living room on tiptoe, as if afraid to wake Margot’s brush. Blue light washes her cheeks and her hands and her walls and Johanna doesn’t move until it’s over.

Then she hits rewind and starts over from the beginning.

Image Burn

Mapplethorpe makes it another year before turning his creaky back on that big dog life. Since Johanna got to keep him through the quiet post-apocalypse of their union, they agreed Margot could have his ashes.

She looks the same. Just the same. As if Margot stepped out of the day she left and into today with no interruption in continuity. Johanna knows that dress, the navy blue vintagey thing with white piping and a little too much room in the torso, but that she refused to take in or give up on, because at thirty-seven, she might still have some growing left in her.

“Your hair,” Margot says softly. She steps gingerly over the map of cables and playback devices that have replaced living breathing life for Johanna and sits uncomfortably in the old bisque-colored armchair (falls asleep re-reading Harry Potter in it during a snowstorm five years ago; Johanna drapes a crocheted blanket over her and squeezes the bare foot hanging over the overstuffed arm gently, fondly). She sits as though she is trying to hover, as thought it might burn her to stay.

“What about my hair?”

“It’s … shocking.”

“It’s my hair.”

“I assumed you would have gone puce or checkerboard by now. Your actual hair hasn’t seen the light of day since high school as far as I know.”

Johanna only dimly recalls that she used to care about things like wilding her hair. It seems like a fact about a stranger. Like something she would see on Big Edie and use to pinpoint a date.

They make small talk. Margot is leaving the city soon. She’s bought a house in Providence with her wife, two blows Johanna absorbs expressionlessly as a cascade of words concerning Victorian architectural flourishes and small, private ceremonies patter down around her ears like raindrops. Mrs. Margot was apparently called Juniper, because of course she was, bet you call her June-bug too, gross. She was joining the obstetrics team at Rhode Island Hospital. Margot would teach very well-scrubbed scions of the even-better scrubbed at a private prep academy in the fall. Plant heirloom squash. Adopt three-legged rescue Labradors.

What are Johanna’s plans? If she has a gallery show before September, Margot would love to come. Anyone new in her life? How is Anika?

Well, Marge, I plan to shoot weddings and graduations and bar mitzvahs in which the cakes have significantly more artistic value than my entire self until I die alone pitched face-first into my takeout massaman with no dog and no stomach lining and no friends except a magic camera, can I get you a 40%-off Pinnacle buttered-popcorn-flavor vodka straight up, because that’s where I am right now.

But she doesn’t say that. She would never say that.

Instead, she decides to ruin Margot’s life. And in that moment, she genuinely believes it’ll work.

“Can I show you something?” Johanna says.

“Of course. Always.” Margot brushes her hair out of her eyes, now and a hundred thousand times in that chair, in this light. “New work?” Miss M was always her first audience, first viewer, the only other eye she trusted.

“Sort of. Mostly I just want you to tell me I’m not crazy.” And she doesn’t realize how entirely true that is until it’s out of her mouth and loosed on the dusty air.

Margot frowns. “You don’t look well. I didn’t want to say. Are you still drinking?”

Johanna laughs bitterly as she flips through the input options on the flatscreen. “Why would I not be drinking? Drink is friend.” She shoves delivery detritus off the couch to make a space: receipts, plastic bags, black takeout containers, breath mints and fortune cookies and after-dinner toffees.

And they watch together. Side by side. Just the same. Like it is before. Like she will pick up her purple brush again tonight and run it through her hair and come to bed and tomorrow will be years ago and the film of them will run forward from the splice.

Rather, Margot watches. And Johanna watches Margot.

The colors waver on her face like she’s underwater, staring up at the parade of strangers fading in and out before her.

The old man/young man on the park bench and the mustard-corduroy sofa.

The girl in the green skinny jeans under the willow and sitting at a bistro table with fake electronic candles as a man walks in, says her name uncertainly, kisses her cheek, orders an old-fashioned.

The guy with white-boy dreds and a vest with no shirt steps off a bike path and into a gorgeous apartment in no way decorated by a man who would wear a vest with no shirt even once, all minimalist monochrome, and a woman in pajama pants and jade chip earrings sobbing get out get out not one more minute I’m done get out.

A kid in a Spider-Man hoodie swinging upside down from a jungle gym and lying on his couch, a teenager, playing Madden on XBox, yelling to an invisible mother that he’ll mow the lawn, yeah yeah, just one more game.

And worse. A boy’s face fades into his forties on the subway. He asks why he’s being pulled over. A gash blooms on his beautiful brown neck. A student drinking alone in a bar ages fifteen years and loses twenty pounds between sips of house red. She waits for someone with frantic energy and when somebody shows up, gives her a little wax paper packet, leaves her to it, her fingers start to turn the color of corpses on the wine glass. A volunteer museum docent grows red rings and bags around his eyes but loses his wrinkles. Somewhere between the Ancient Greeks and Mesopotamian pottery, gets out of a Camry, locks it, and runs toward an appointment, wholly unseeing the baby in the backseat, asleep in a puffy lavender knitted hat.

“What is this?” Margot says. “Glitch art? Datamoshing? Like Planes and Jacquemin? What program did you use? It’s really seamless.”

“No program.”

“What do you mean ‘no program’? This is a practical effect?” Johanna chuckles mirthlessly. The screen shimmers. “Where did you find all these actors?”

“No, look, you’re not seeing. You have to look. The calendar in the apartment. The clothes the girl in the bistro is wearing. Do you recognize any of the players in that Madden game?”

“You know I don’t care about sports. I wouldn’t recognize any player’s name five minutes after I heard it.”

“Okay, fine. The song on the radio when the guy gets stuck in traffic.” She pauses it, waits for Margot to catch up, to see the faint cursive 2026-At-A-Glance calendar on the inside of the pantry door in that perfect sleek flat, the unfamiliar controls on the car dash. “I’ve never heard that song. You’ve never heard that song. Because that song doesn’t exist, on any service, in any catalogue, anywhere.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. Come on, you couldn’t possibly know that for certain, Jo.”

But Margot doesn’t see. Margot isn’t Robert Ballard’s submersible lighting array. She doesn’t know how to crawl into an image and live there. What she does glimpse in Johanna’s pleading eyes is the weight of time. Time she has spent searching for these things, for connections, hoping, honestly hoping, to find that song buried on some indie compilation CD with some revoltingly photoshopped jacket art and a discount sticker. And a thousand other objects like it. Books on televisions, limited edition toys, tie-widths, license plates, worse, more scattered, atomized, randomized information that never coalesced into anything but Johanna’s increasing silence and solitude. She vibrates so intensely it looks like she is sitting still.

And so, slowly, knowing how it sounds, hating how it sounds, Johanna explains about Big Edie as more strange moments unfold before the not-really-that-long-lost love of her life; naked bodies, and there are a lot of them, in embraces violent and lovely or both or neither, strangers meeting, over and over, in different clothes, different hairstyles, different seasons, a child abandoned in an airport in Reno, calling for her mother, surrounded by slot machines ringing in cherries and oranges, tears rolling down her face. And at the end of the reel, Jeff and his glass heart, Anika and her shattered eye, the long staircase into images that has become Johanna’s life.

Margot says nothing for some time. It is a terrible, sour nothing that lingers far too long in the air between them.

“So you think your camera shows … what? Death?”

“Maybe. Sometimes. But not always, not even often, really.”

“Then what if not that? The future? Like the calendar.”

“That’s closer, I think. Better. But at least a third of them are the past.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, the man in the living room is 1970. You can tell by the Updike book on top of the TV. That was the first edition cover, and it’s pristine. You can figure it out, sometimes. If you care about these things. If you know too much about garbage. And you know I know too much about garbage, M.”

Margot smiles faintly, but it is very faint.

“But also I went back to the park and talked to the guy. His name is Antony.” Johanna scratches at the back of her hand. “Antony left his family. In 1970. Just up and walked out on Grace, Walt, Irene, and Amelia, who he’d married when she was fucking seventeen. The proverbial running out for a pack of cigarettes. Left them like they were just … a skin he was molting.”

Margot looks for a way to shut it off, but Johanna doesn’t help her find it. Why should Margot get to turn away from it? Why should she escape?

“Fine,” she says coldly. “What is it then?”

Johanna takes a deep breath. “So whenever you transfer or transmit or store data, especially a lot of data, like audio or video or both, it gets compressed, and in the process, you lose a little bit of it. Maybe a lot, like MP3s were always straight garbage compactors for sound. Maybe only a little bit. Maybe so little you wouldn’t even notice. But in order to fit the storage device or the bandwidth, in order to save information or share it, you have to … you have to harm it. And that creates distortion. Halos. Noise. Warping. Busy regions in the image. Blocky deformations called quilting, and visual echoes called ghosts. They’re called compression artefacts, and that’s … that’s what I think these are. Distortions created by the present and everything else getting compressed, crushed into one stream. Halos and noise and warps and quilts and ghosts. A lot of words for damage. Just damage.

“But the answer is: I don’t really know what it does. Technically speaking, it’s a problem of parallax. Catastrophic parallax. A vast difference between the apparent object and the actual object. And for awhile, I thought it showed the worst day of your life. Which, odds are, for some percentage of people, is going to be the day you die. But not for everyone. Not for Antony. See, nothing ever went right for him after he left. Two more divorces and a dried-up retirement fund. Grandkids he isn’t allowed to meet. Lung cancer he picked up working a big gorgeous free man’s HVAC repair shop. But it took him almost his whole life to understand any of it. To process where he fucked up. What he lost when he thought he was barreling down the highway to a big gorgeous free man’s life. Big Edie knew it in an instant. She had his number faster than a speeding therapist, and that number was 1970. So it seemed to make enough sense. When I shot old people, Big Edie usually spat out the past. Young people mostly turned up older on playback. The future. That kid playing Madden. Madden 23, to be exact.” She points to him on the projection. The hole in his sock. The length of his hair. The name on the Patriots’ QB jersey.

“Do you actually expect me to believe your camera recorded something in 2023? Jo, come on. I’m really busy, and frankly, I’m not in the mood.”

“Just listen. Because then there was this. A wedding. Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel and Lucy Vaclavik.” She fast-forwards through scene after scene. Johanna can tell just the sheer number of them is starting to look bad on her, and the manic sizzle in her voice isn’t helping, but she can’t stop herself.

The creams and golds and pops of understated rose-shades of a high-end matrimonial spread flood the screen. The bride waves her lily-dripping bouquet in the air. The Hudson River throbs with sunset behind her. Her hair sparkles with carefully applied glitter. Eyeliner and brows that date her nuptials as surely as a library stamp. Her new husband, in a grey tux, bends down to kiss her expertly neutral-frosted lips and their unified families clap like a gentle river of approval. The picture flows smoothly to the edge of the frame. No ghostly picture-in-picture. No shadows cast from other places, other times.

Margot smiles politely. Johanna knows she is losing her (has lost her). “I don’t get it.”

“I didn’t either,” she confesses softly. “I shot this no differently than the others. But what you see is what I saw. What Big Edie saw. No parallax. No difference in images. I rolled tape and the wedding marched right through the lens and back out again and it was just a wedding, no more or less. Nothing else has been like that. And the next day we got right back to business-as-horrible. I couldn’t figure it out. Why was it special? What was different? The thing is … he killed her. It made the news for about thirty seconds in April. They found her in the woods in Connecticut. But, you know, hedge fund guys aren’t that good at forensics, even if they’re 100% current on all CSI franchises, so they caught him pretty fast. So maybe … maybe Big Edie doesn’t record the worst thing that ever happened to you. Maybe it’s something so much smaller than that. The moment when the worst thing that ever happens to you sees you coming. Turns toward you in the dark. I think, once she married him, he was always going to hurt her. Because that was in him, an egg or a seed or a tumor, whatever you want to call it, a future that no longer has the option of not happening. The flowchart flows until you meet that person at that conference and then there’s no more choose your own adventure, you’re going to fall in love and they’re going to bankrupt you or betray you or just … disappoint you until there’s nothing left but cynicism swirling around at the bottom of your heart like tea leaves. Or leave you in the woods in Connecticut. I don’t know, maybe it’s just a huge ugly regret machine. And mostly I will never understand these. What happened to the Madden kid or the girl in the bar or why getting stuck in traffic on that particular day was so important to that man’s whole trajectory, or any of them, because that stuff doesn’t come across the AP like Mrs. Vaclavik. They’re just moments, unconnected, pulled free of every other moment.”

The wedding fades out and the two women wince together as a man they do not know pushes a woman they have never met against a wall. Blood trickles down her temple where she hit a picture frame and she looks up at him with unbelieving eyes.

“Enough,” Margot says. She grabs the remote. Shuts it all down. Turns to Johanna and touches her face. Touches her. No one has touched Johanna in a year. It is an alien burn. It is Margot. It is the past and the future and death, stroking her hair and making enormous eyes at her while the constituent atoms of their dog look on from the coffee table.

“I miss you so much,” Johanna whispers, and wishes she could have thought of something better, more elegant, more memorable, but her need banishes pretty words.

“Don’t,” Margot answers with finality. The finality of Providence, Rhode Island and heirloom squash varietals and Harrington Preparatory School and June-Bug and poor Mapplethorpe in a box.

“What do you think?” She cannot help that either, the need for her approval, her regard, the perfect full absent moon of her gaze on Johanna’s work, Johanna’s self.

“Honey … I think you need help. This is … this is nothing, J. It’s a bunch of slice of life shots of nothing in particular and three or four gory jump-scares. You taped over some movie of the week with a lot of nonsense. And I’m supposed to believe it’s what, magic? It’s you stalking strangers. Listen to yourself. Catastrophic parallax? You’re manic, you need care.”

But Johanna can’t hear that. “Okay, but that’s just exactly what I mean. Do you know what catastrophe means? It’s Greek. It just means a turn. A turn down or a turn under or a turn inside. A turn away.”

“Jo, this is basically a conspiracy theorist wall and you’re unspooling more red yarn. This is not an X-File. This is you not coping. As usual.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’ll show you. Just stand over there, I’ll shoot you for a few minutes, a few seconds, and you’ll see.” And what will Big Edie see? Margot leaving that hot, humid, unretrievable night, Margot packing up boxes for Providence, Margot right now, right here, telling Johanna she will never believe her? One of them, maybe, surely. What else was even possible?

“No,” Margot whispers firmly. “You don’t need me. And you definitely don’t need to ride that camera any harder. I’m not going to enable this. You just need help, baby. Professional help. That’s all. I have to go.”

“Wait—”

“I have to go.”

There is a disentangling, a hurry to go back, edit, remove even the idea that physical contact was made. Margot excuses herself to splash water on her face and Johanna sees herself in the mute black monitor, sees as the ex-moon of her night sees: a woman so thin her clothes don’t fit, who smells sour, whose hair hangs limp and unwashed, whose face has grown lines it didn’t have even a few weeks ago, degradation lines, juddering through the frame of her face.

Margot emerges awkwardly, chagrined, her familiar elfin face not one cell altered from the day she left, her voice echoing against every surface: I’m so fucking lonely, Jo, I’m lonely even when you’re here. Especially when you’re here. I’m lonely right the fuck now and I’m looking at you.

She holds up something in her hand. Something purple. Something precious.

“Forgot my brush,” she says softly.

And then she is gone.

Ghosts

Johanna puts it off for a long time.

Why bother? What use could it possibly be to her? What use is any of this? You couldn’t do one single thing with it. The shot was too tight to predict the future. Fight crime? Protect the innocent? No. The camera crowded the subject, an unbearable idiot intimacy that took away everything but the seeing itself.

But eventually, she was always going to do it.

Johanna watches herself on the flatscreen. Watches herself get up in Big Edie’s face. Fix the focus, back up to sit on the same barstool that held Anika all those ages ago, shifting awkwardly as she looks into the lens like an actor breaking the fourth wall.

She knows what she will see. She is calmly certain of it. She shouldn’t have bothered running the tape back for this little screening. She saw it the first time, when she was seven. When she was thirsty in the middle of the night and padded quietly out of her room to get a glass of water. Out of her room and past her father sitting alone in his armchair, the moonlight crawling in after him through the window, grasping at him just before he shot himself and her life … turned. There never was any hope for her. She was turned before she got one foot in the world. It wouldn’t be a prettier shot now.

The compression artefact burns out from the center of her nuclear-powered selfie. Her stomach muscles seize up the way they do when she just barely reaches the tipping point of a roller coaster and enters freefall, down the rails into her old house, the rugs, the stain on the ceiling, the off-kilter hang of her bedroom door. Her father’s face. Her mother’s soft snoring from the bedroom.

But that’s not what she sees.

No moonlight. No armchair. No 3 a.m. drink of water in a seven-year-old girl’s hand. It is just Johanna, seafoam green hair and all, walking on the lovely light and dark stripes of green on a lawn in Ossining, in sunlight direct from a photography lab, approaching a quilt made of old T-shirts and the objects it carries. She bends down and presses her warm thumb into the patch of Hypercolor shirt, waiting for the fabric to change color, to unsuffer the damage of too-constant exposure to the very thing that it was designed to react with, which of course it will not, can not, ever again.

Johanna touches her own face on the television, that seafoam green girl who still had Margot and Mapplethorpe and opinons about everything, that familiar face, yet better-fed and better-loved and almost obscenely untroubled. An ancient version of herself, suddenly unearthed at the bottom of the sea.

Finite State Machine

Johanna puts Big Edie up on Craigslist, all her specs laid out like a personal ad: enjoys long walks on the beach, getting lost in the rain, composite video output, and turning everything you point me at into an avant-garde film-school short. If you can’t handle me being haunted, you don’t deserve me being way more work than the camera app on your phone.

She lowballs the price. She means it. She can change her artefact. She can let it all go, like Margot said. Get care. Be normal. Cope. She can take that moment in Ossining and make it nothing. Make it just another random memory on a compilation tape of the decades fading in and out, like the little tinseled cloud boy turning and turning on his forgotten school stage, meaningless, untethered, beautiful and sad and without connection to anything before or after.

And then anyone could. The boy who doesn’t want to mow the lawn. The girl meeting that man at the bistro. Lucy Vaclavik. Antony. Jeff. Anika. Anyone. The long white beam of the Argo’s exterior lighting array sweeping through that dark and missing the great hulking skeleton in the blackness, brushing gently by, just barely, just by inches, finding nothing but open water.

She doesn’t answer a single query.

Six months later, Johanna doesn’t even remember what it’s like to leave the house without Big Edie. The pockets of her original-issue carrying case bulge with new tapes.

[hotpotrandomfics]

Fifth Year AU: Shenanigans and Starshowers

Summary: Jason finds Merula relaxing with his notebook and after some silly banter the two would sneak out for a surprising view. Who says romance is dead?

Word Count: 1,875

Merula had been sitting in the common room, going through Jason's notes. She always preferred his notes to her own, as he always seemed to know how to organize them in a way that was reasonable to follow. It made sense of how he is a reliable tutor to his underclassmen as she skimmed through a pair of arms wrapped around her.

"So that's where my notebook," Jason smiled as he held Merula close. "Find anything of interest, Miss Snyde? A few words for your prefect."

"You're annoyingly good at note-taking, and it's just irritating how everything makes sense." Merula looked up to see his eyes beam at her causing her to give a small smile. She wrapped a hand around his neck and pulled him down to kiss his cheek, then pushed him off gently. "But I appreciate you showing me them," she whispered.

"I am happy I can be useful," Jason smiled, "and it's good knowing you like me for more than my notes, right?"

"Eh, the notes are the real reason for our relationship." She teased him as she kissed his nose. "You are your own library, after all."

"You wound me," he placed a hand to his chest, acting like he was hurt. "But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Merula is the sun!"

"What are you going on about?" Merula raised a brow, giving a slight chuckle at the weird way he spoke.

"Oh nothing, just reciting some old play I read a while ago," Jason jumped over the couch, landing next to Merula and tapping her nose ever so lightly.

"A play? You read about plays?" Merula covered her mouth, now trying to stop from bursting into a laughing fit. "Please tell me you're joking? You like plays, and I am now finding this out?"

"I'm not." Jason tilted his head in confusion. "Why?"

"Oh, nothing!" Merula smirked as she laid her head into his lap while swatting at his tie.

"Come on, tell me, please?" Jason looked down at her, giving her his signature puppy dog eyes. Leaning down, he rubbed his forehead into hers, causing her to giggle at his attempt of influencing her to reveal her surprise her boyfriend reads plays for the sake of reading.

"No! No way!" Merula looked at him, frowning sternly, pushing his face up playfully only to have him frown. "Stop it now! Stop being adorable! I am not going to break by those blatant attempts, Aurelius."

Jason sighed and poked her stomach gingerly. He hated when she brushed off his little "puppy tricks" but found it part of what made her all the more charming. The two talked about their day as some of their class were different. Jason hummed as he played with her hair to Merula amusement. As he and Merula relaxed in the common room until the evening arrived, Jason spoke up, waking Merula from the temporary daze she was in.

"Hey?" Jason looked down at the half-asleep girl in his lap.

"Mmm?" Merula grumbled while glancing with one eye.

"Do you want to, um, wanna sneak out of the dorm to go for a walk?"

"A walk? Really?" she raised a brow to her boyfriend.

"Yeah." Jason smiled at her. "But it's going to a bit of rulebreaking involved."

"Aurelius De Leone, rulebreaking? Do tell Fire Snot." Merula pinched his cheek. "What naughty thought you have in mind?"

"One, please don't use 'Fire Snot.' It was one time." Jason pinched her side. "Two, I'm willing to 'bend' the rules if it helps."

"Okay, so what do you propose?" Merula climbed up into his lap and poked his cheek. "Now, I am the one asking the question, so you better give me answers."

"I'll tell you in an hour. Get changed into something you won't get seen in," Jason kissed her cheek, getting up and heading to his dorm room. It was fun for him teasing Merula in this way, as making her wait for her is funny.

"What does my Fire Snot have planned?" Merula snickered to herself then got up, making her way to her dorm room to get ready. Whatever his plan, it better be something worth the mystery.

An hour later, Merula met Jason down in the common room door. Jason wore his signature boots, ripped jeans, and a black sweater. He paced back and forth then spotted Merula in black jeans, boots, and fishnet sweater over a Weird Sisters band tee.

"Well, that's totally not inconspicuous, Aurelius," Merula said as she strutted over to her furball.

"I wouldn't be the one to judge Snyde," Jason pocked her cheek, "come along, then dear."

"Now, don't get cheeky with me. Understand?" Merula smirked and took his hand.

"Off we go to rulebreaking," Jason smirked as he led the witch through the castle.

Step by step, the two made their way through the corridors until they reached the passage leading to the training grounds. The two heard a meow, Mrs. Norris, meaning Filch was somewhere close by. Merula pushed Jason into a column, holding her hand to his mouth, shushing him.  For a small girl, she had a lot of physical strength. Merula pressed close to him tightly so they wouldn't be seen.

Mrs. Norris looked around and meowed for about a minute before scurrying off to wherever Filch would be. Merula let go of Jason, and the two breathed a sigh of relief. Merula gazed up at him and giggled, prompting him to snicker himself. The two continued to the training grounds where Jason cast "Alohomora" on the door for where the brooms are stored. Wait, what was he doing?

"Do you mind explaining your plan, love?" Merula crossed her arms, staring cautiously at him.

"Well, I u-um thought that we go for a late-night flight?" Jason said as he grabbed a broom for them. "Why?"

"Never thought you would be willing to step out of line Prefect," Merula smirked. "Is there a reason for this? A late-night walk to a late-night flight?"

"Is it wrong to bend the rules if it suits me? Especially if it's to have a moment with my girlfriend. I can make the exception." Jason smirked and walked over to Merula, kissing her. "I am learning these habits because of you," he laughed as he set himself on the broom, urging her to get on behind him. Merula did so and wrapped her arms around his waist and helped tight as he took off. She watched as Jason kicked off and started flying off through the castle grounds. What was his plan she had no clue, but this was going to be fun.

Jason flew the two of them with care, flying pass the clouds over Hogwarts. He looked back to see the wind running through Merula hair. She gazed at the sky and ran one hand along with the clouds next to them. He smiled as he held the hand on his stomach.

"You know," Merula laid her head to his back, "I have to say you know how to have fun."

"I can have fun sometimes," Jason held her hand tight, "but you compel me to do be more daring things. If it's for you, fun, I'll be."

"S-stop that!" Merula blushed as she held him tighter.

"Stop what?"

"Saying c-cute... things..." Merula muttered as her heartbeat pace started paced up. She always was at a loss for words when Jason got all romantic. It frustrated her, but not in a wicked way as he was smoother than any of the male students at Hogwarts. Well, that's what she thought to herself.

"Why?" Jason turned his head to look at her. The moonlight glistened on her cheek and made her eyes glow in just the right way to send chills down his spine.

"B-because... it makes me feel h-happy you f-furball," Merula hid her face into his back. How was it that he had such power over her? No spells said, or potions were stronger to her than that of Jason's kindness to her.

Jason smiled as he flew the two of them to the shore of the Black Lake across from Hogwarts. As he landed, he placed the broom down and embraced Merula. Merula looked at him curiously as the moon, though only a crescent, as the light radiated against Jason's hair and eyes gazed at her.

"What is it?" she asked. "You seemed kinda out of it."

"Nothing, I'm just happy you agreed to this little escapade of mine," he smiled.

"You're sure are strange, but I prefer your brand of strange," Merula caressed his cheek. "Jason, why do you treat me so nicely? I'm not always nice, and yet you treat me better than I deserve. For all that's holy, I'm sure I have almost gotten you killed on too many occasions."

"Who's to say. I never saw you as bad, evil, or any synonym of the sort. Merula," Jason pulled her by the waist, "I think you deserve happiness. Why do you think I'm more daring?"

"Because you can't stop getting in trouble?" Merula smirked at him with a raised brow. "Or you're naturally insane and just hide it with a cute deception."

"No," he laughed, "I want to share moments with you. Like this." Jason pointed up to the sky to which Merula turned. "It took some planning and getting a bit of advice on what would be the best time to do this. I hope you like this."

"Is that a meteor shower?" Merula jaw slightly dropped as the sky rained with streams of lights drizzled the air. The streams danced as they soared through the canvas of midnight, blue and black. "How'd you know about this?"

"I may have asked Professor Sinistra, the astronomy professor, about how to learn about meteor showers and other things. I agreed I'd help with ensuring the room was organized and trust me; it was in needing of it." Jason smiled at her, holding her close and throwing his back into the sand having Merula yelp as Jason brought her down with them.

"Jason!" Merula squealed at her idiot's shenanigans. "Why is it we end up like this when you end up doing something stupid?"

"I am reckless, not stupid, and I have no complaints," Jason smiled as he sat them both up, "anyway, w-was this worth it?" He was nervous as he ran his thumb in circles with her hand in his.

"You never cease to amaze me." Merula couldn't help but feel blessed that her boyfriend would go so far for her. Someday she'd do something better than what he's done to show him he means the world to her. "It is perfect, but I am sure I can do something better."

"Is that a fact?" Jason raised a brow grinning. "Wanna prove that oh most powerful girlfriend in all of Hogwarts?"

"Oh, now you're gonna get it." Merula jumped up and pulled her wand out, taking her dueling stance.

"This isn't what I was expecting, but I can work with this. Whoever loses has to do something for the other, no complaints," Jason smiled as he stood up with his wand now in hand. "Shall we?"

[spacecakes20]

Begin Again

(Chapter 4)

Chapter 5: Luna, Pool Night

Friday came so quickly; Luna barely had any time to even notice. All her days were starting to blur together now that she wasn’t in charge of scheduling meetings and appointments. Looking through her planer, she had nearly forgotten about the plans she made to meet Sam and his friends at the Stardrop Saloon. Well, she didn’t make any promises, but she was still planning to go. She just didn’t want to commit just in case she chickened out and didn’t show. First things first; she needed to wash up and change. She wanted to look more presentable; her current mud crusted overalls didn’t exactly scream “Friday Night Out with Friends.”

     Friends. Would she consider them friends? Acquaintances perhaps. She’d only been living here since the start of spring, and summer was fast approaching. But despite her short amount of time in Pelican Town, everyone seemed to welcome her with open arms. Well, almost everyone. Some were warmer than others, but Luna didn’t really blame them. She still considered herself a stranger here, and it’ll probably take a while for her to find her footing.

     After a nice warm shower, Luna went through her fresh clothes. It was surprisingly hard for her to find anything casual that didn’t scream “business party” or “important meeting.” Most of her wardrobe consisted of dress suits and cocktail dresses. Only at the very bottom of her unpacked boxes of clothes did she find her more casual wear. Zuzu University shirts that were way too big for her, sweats, and short-shorts that were way too short. Luna made a mental note to go shopping in the city sometime soon for more casual wear.

     Don’t overthink it, Luna. I’m sure no one’s going to pay attention to how you’re dressed. Unfortunately for her, overthinking seemed to be one of Luna’s hidden talents. Working with the higher-ups at Joja HQ, she had no choice but to be self-conscious about how she was dressed around other people. Especially if she was with Charles...

     Luna shook those thoughts away, and decided fuck it, she’ll wear what she wanted; and decided to put on the tee-shirt and shorts. It was supposed to be a relaxing and fun night after all, and Luna was tired of overthinking herself into oblivion. Throwing on some socks and her favorite pair of high tops, she grabbed her keys and was off to the saloon.

     The sun was still up, but it was still comfortable outside, despite summer being just around the corner. Her stroll wasn’t too long, but she took her time to enjoy the soothing sounds of spring. She made it to the saloon, already able to hear the music and chatter from outside. Upon entering, scanning the inside, she noticed there was more than just a few people in here.

     She noticed Leah off at her own table. She had a glass of wine in hand, tapping her foot to the beat of the music playing on the jukebox. Pam was seated at one of the bar stools, nursing an ale while holding a conversation with the bartender, Gus. Next to Gus was a blue-haired woman. Emily, if Luna remembered correctly. She was conversing with a man in a worn-out blue jacket with a five o’clock shadow. Shane, right? Marnie’s nephew? Before she even had time to think about it any further, she heard her name being called. Searching the room for the source of the voice, she saw Mayor Lewis seated at one of the tables near the entrance. She smiled and made her way over to him with a small wave.

     “It’s nice to see you out and about Luna.” Lewis smiled kindly, “Your grandfather could be quite stubborn, I feel like he rarely ever took breaks.” His smile turned bittersweet.

     Luna couldn’t help her own sad smile gracing her features. She remembered how hard-working her grandfather was. Remembered the pride and joy that always decorated his face whenever he spoke about his farm. How frustrated and heartbroken he was when his old age started to slow him down and keep him from his work… Shaking those sad thoughts away, she decided to try and lighten the mood, “You’re speaking too soon!” She chuckled, “According to my dad, I’m just as stubborn as my grandpa. I just haven’t shown you my fullest potential yet.”

     That got the amused response she was hoping for. Lewis simply shook his head, a light laugh escaping him, “Of course. Just be sure not to overwork yourself, okay? Your grandfather would haunt me for the rest of my days if I let anything happen to his granddaughter.”

     Luna smiled warmly at that, “Don’t worry sir, I’ll take care of myself.”

     Lewis took another sip of his drink before shooing her off, “Don’t let me keep you. Grab a drink and relax.”

     “Will do,” Luna nodded. She did another quick scan of the saloon before she noticed the game room that was off to the side of the building. She made her way over to one of the arcade machines. Reading the cabinet, she realized it was Journey of the Prairie King. Luna was suddenly hit with a strong wave of nostalgia. She remembered she used to play that game with her dad. Lola wasn’t too good at video games, so she’d usually just watch. It was how the three of them would spend time together on the rare occasion their dad wasn’t too busy with work. Before her parent’s split…

     She was mercifully brought out of her thoughts by the sound of someone clearing their throat. She froze for a second, unaware someone else was here too. Turning to the source of the noise, her heart stopped at the site. A familiar tall man in black high-tops ripped skinny jeans and a black hoodie. But what caught her most off guard were his eyes. Of course, she wouldn’t forget those eyes. They reminded her of quartz. So cloudy, like a rainstorm, yet crystal clear and cool, like filtered water. And they were looking right at her.

     Sebastian mumbled out a, “Hey.” Before getting back to chalking the end of a cue stick. That was when Luna noticed there was a pool table in the middle of the room. 

     “Hey.” Luna returned the greeting, slowly making her way to the said pool table. “I’m sorry, did I show up too late?”

     He shook his head, eyes never leaving the table, “Early, actually.”

     That did make her feel relieved, but also a bit nervous. This would be the first time Luna and Sebastian were truly alone together since the door incident. Sure, they made amends at the Flower Dance, but they had Sam and Abigail there with them as a sort of buffer. Come to think of it, had she ever been alone with Sebastian before? There was their first meeting at the docks, but she hadn’t even known his name and they were only together for a second. Did that even count?

      “Do you play?” His question caught her off guard.

      “Huh?”

      “Pool.” He finally looked at her, “Do you play pool?”

      “Oh.” She was a little surprised at the fact that he was the one trying to start the conversation. Was he trying to make her feel more comfortable? This was probably awkward for him too, so perhaps this was just his way of breaking the ice? “No, I’m afraid I haven’t.”

       He hummed out as a response, and the room filled with silence again.

       “What about you?” Luna asked, trying her best to fill the stillness, “Do you play?”

       His eyes never left the pool table as he smirked to himself. Something about it looked cocky and she had to admit; it looked good on him. “Yeah, I play. Me and Sam play every Friday. He still hasn’t managed to beat me.”

       Luna hummed, amused by his slight change in demeanor. She decided to humor him. “How do you play?”

       “Huh?” He blinked at her, the confidant gleam in his eyes now replaced with genuine surprise.

       She smiled up at him and asked again, “How do you play?”

       He stood there a while, still as a statue. For a minute, she wondered if she might have said something wrong. Her mind was set at ease however when he grabbed the other cue stick and handed it to her. She graciously took it and watched as he took the balls from the table and organized them in a triangular rack.

       “The goal,” He said, giving the rack a light shake, “Is to pocket all of your designated balls, and then the eight ball.” He pointed out the round black orb with an “8” written on it in the middle of a white circle. 

         Luna nodded in understanding, but her brows were furrowed, “That sounds… simple…”

         Sebastian just chuckled. What a wonderful sound. She wouldn’t mind hearing that again.

         “Simple huh?”

         “I mean…” She looked away, distracting herself by looking at the pool table, “What’s to stop me from just, getting the eight-ball pocketed on my first try?”

         “You’re not allowed to do that.” He said, “You’ll have to sink all of your designated balls first,” He explained simply, “I’ll go first.”

         “Okay…” She fiddled with her cue stick and watched Sebastian’s form closely. He gracefully knocked the white ball, crashing it into the other colorful round orbs. They rolled around the pool table easily, but none fell into any of the pockets. He bit his lip, eyes focused, brow set in concentration before looking over to her.

         “Your turn,” Sebastian said simply.

         “Huh?” Luna looked to him and the pool table in confusion, “Wait, how do I know which balls mine are?”

         He gave a soft lazy smile, “Just pick stripes or solids. I’ll take whichever you don’t.”

         She nodded silently, walking around the ends of the table, searching for an advantage. Finally, she decided on solid colors, leaning over the table and knocking the cue ball into a red one. She missed the pocked by a mere inch.

         “Close.” Sebastian sounded almost impressed, and Luna couldn’t help but feel a little proud. The two went back and forth like this; analyzing their moves, looking for strengths and weaknesses. It was a surprisingly strategic game, and Luna felt a little silly for underestimating it.

         It was nice seeing Sebastian look so relaxed. Which was an amusing thought, because Luna also noticed he seemed to have a bit of a competitive streak. But it wasn’t like she didn’t have one herself. She did enjoy problem solving and challenges, and he felt like the perfect opponent. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was holding back.

         “Not bad.” Sebastian’s voice took on an almost teasing tone, as he hit the eight ball into the closest pocket, “But looks like I win this round.”

         Luna shook her head with a hum, “I can’t help but feel like you went easy on me though.”

         He gave her a half-smile, and she could have sworn he had a dimple, “Do I seem like the type who does that?”

         She didn’t know if she could believe him or not. Sure, he really didn’t seem like the type that would hold back in a game, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was showing some restraint.

         “You don’t look so sure.” His expression was unreadable, “Want to play another round?”

         She agreed to it without a second thought. She watched him closely this time around. He seemed to be in his element; much more at ease here then he seemed to be at the Flower Dance. Perhaps if they had met someplace as relaxed as the saloon, their first meeting might have gone a lot smoother.

         “Hey, Seb!” The new familiar voice caused Sebastian to lose his focus, making him overshoot his target. The cue ball missed the pocket, deciding instead to roll off the table, hitting the floor with a thud and a roll. Sebastian sucked the air between his teeth, eyes darting in the direction of the new voice.

         Sam and Abigail had finally made their way to the saloon, entering the game room with a tray of drinks at hand and a pizza. Sam had seen Sebastian’s missed shot, and gave him a sheepish look, mouthing “sorry” under his breath.

         Luna tried to stifle a giggle, drawing the attention of Sam in the process. “Luna!” He sounded surprised, “You made it!”

         “Yeah,” She smiled a bit sheepishly. “I did.”

         Sebastian had picked up the fallen cue ball, placing it on the table. He gave Luna an embarrassed smile, “Looks like you win by a technicality.”

         Luna wrinkled her nose, “That’s an anti-climactic win.”

         He simply shrugged, “Wanna play another round?” He offered.

         “Wait!” Sam interrupted before Luna could give her answer, “You two were playing pool together?” His eyes looked almost pleading, “Please tell me you won, Luna?”

         She shook her head with a grimace, “Nope. He’s just too good.”

         This answer must have amused Sebastian because he let out a very light chuckle.

         “Don’t encourage him, Luna!” Sam said dramatically, “His ego’s already big enough as it is!”

         Luna just shook her head with a giggle. Looking up to Sebastian, she said, “I’d take you up on your offer, but I know when I’ve been beat.” She smiled simply. Her innocent smile seamlessly morphed into a teasing one, “But I promise, I won’t lose next time.”

         That got her the reaction she was looking for. His lazy smile melted into a smug smirk, “Don’t get too cocky.”

         Abigail cleared her throat, interrupting the playful banter. She grabbed Luna by the arm, surprising her in the process, “Alright,” Abigail said, “You guys can finish this later. I want to get to know our new farmer.”

         Come to think of it, out of the three here, Luna did feel like she interacted with Abigail the lest. They had run into each other a few times in town, only to give out a “hello” in passing. She hadn’t even realized she was a friend of Sam’s, until the Flower Dance.

         Abigail’s bright blue eyes looked over to Luna’s green ones, “Have you ever played Journey of the Prairie King?”

         That earned her a lopsided smile from Luna, “I used to play it a lot as a kid.”

         Abigail’s smile seemed to have brightened upon hearing this. “Think you could help me out than? I’ve been stuck on this one level, and this game is so much easier with two people.”

         Luna looked over to Sebastian and Sam with an apologetic smile, but Sam just waved her off. “No worries Luna.” He said, “I’ll avenge you in pool!”

         Sebastian let out a snort at that, “I highly doubt you can.”

         “Wanna bet?”

         “Sure,” Sebastian answered dryly, without missing a beat, “I could use the extra cash.”

         Luna couldn’t help but giggle at their banter.

         “Try not to lose all of your money, Sam,” Abigail added while placing some change into the arcade machine. The screen blinked to life, and Abigail stepped aside to make room for Luna.

         “You two have no faith in me.” Sam whined dramatically, before pouting at Luna, “You’ll root for me, right?”

         Luna bit back a laugh, “Sure. I’ll cheer you on.”

         Luna was happy she didn’t place any bets by the end of the night. It turned out Abigail and Sebastian weren’t joking; Sam truly was just that bad at pool.

(Chapter 6)

[odetolove]

sh-shit!

he’s going to pass out. your tits are pressed against his chest, thin fabric barely separating you both, and there’s no way you can’t feel his hard on with how close you are.

i— jax, b-back up, please.

his voice cracks at the tremendous effort of not grabbing you and bending you over.

n-nothing’s wrong. i-i’m just not feeling well!

— koutarou 🧸

i immediately reel back the moment i feel the warmth and hardness of his cock against me- face bright red i take a step back, glancing down with wide eyes before looking up at his face.

oh... my god! i’m so sorry! i didn’t mean to touch it- i mean- i’m sorry!

i babble, whole body throbbing with want at just feeling him pressed to me. i look down in between us, not knowing what to say, a giggle bubbling up in my chest with nervousness.

um... i can- i can wait in the bathroom, if you wanna take care of it... or can it go down on its own? i mean, we can forget about cuddling for now.

i squeak out, trying not to rub my thighs together, nipples fully pocking through his tee shirt, i absentmindedly play with the hem of it, trying to diffuse the situation.