#the water and can hang out with the ducks and geese. and there are plants shoved in just about anywhere. it’s like a little slice of heaven

[cleocatrablossy]

There’s honestly something so nice about just existing in a public space. Like not even really doing anything, just being there. Just out and about adoring your own thing with other people just coexisting, maybe not even interacting but just other people. And being able to hang out outside some place where even if it’s not new, it’s a change from home so it’s refreshing. And you can just hang out, in the sun or on a bench or in a corner. Y’know, just reveling in the experience of being human.

[mommymooze]

A Lesson in Beekeeping

Claude x reader

Warning: bee sex discussed. Honeybees. Bee Stings. The noble worker bee giving up her life for the hive

  Today is a free day. Free from classes and studying and homework. Everyone needs time to themselves to relax and do what interests them. You’re deep in the woods near the monastery, collecting plants, seeds, flowers and mushrooms. Your restful time alone is interrupted as Claude, your house leader, has found you.

“What’s a little girl like you doing out in the dark spooky woods? You better watch out for big bad wolves!” Claude laughs.

“I’m not Lys. This isn’t frightening.  The higher altitude and specific climate divergence varies greatly from what I am accustomed to, as well as the flora has specific diverse qualities that interest me.”

“No need to go all Linhardt on me.” The dark haired male backpedals.

“New place, new plants.” You translate.

“You’re not going to complain about being called little?” Claude elbows you, digging for a reaction.

You roll your eyes. “My stature is undisputed. 95% of the student body is taller than I am. As time passes, the percentage pullulates.”

“So now what am I going to pick on?” Claude shrugs.

“Your pants, most likely, you’re standing amongst cockleburs.” You grin.

Pulling your notebook out, you scribble something on a page, stuffing a few leaves in the book before you return it to your pocket.

The next day, Professor Byleth makes an announcement to the class. “The kitchen is in need of anyone who is familiar with collecting honey or bees.” She continues to read the note and frowns. “Honeybuns no longer available in the kitchen.” She looks panicked.

Dorothea, recently recruited into the house raises her hand. “Ferdinand is much like a bee, send him!”

You raise your hand. “I will assist.” You do not mind missing the afternoon class for weapons training and maintenance, since you are a mage, it does not interest you.

“I’ll give it a shot.” Claude throws his hat into the ring.

“You guys are creepy, wanting to play with bugs.” Lysithia snipes.

Class ends and everyone heads out for lunch. Byleth thanks you and Claude for saving the honey buns.

You finish lunch quickly and head to the back entrance of the Kitchens. Martha greets you and hands you a few buckets and sharp knives. They don’t really have the beekeeping equipment, the keeper left suddenly due to his mother becoming ill.

“Looks like we’re going to have to improvise.” You groan.

“To be honest, I’ve never done this before. Always willing to learn something new though.” Claude confesses.

You frown at him. “You’re just curious because their stings contain poison.”

Claude looks away.

You run over to the Golden Deer lunch table. “Professor, we’re going to need assistance gathering equipment together. I’m going to leave the buckets and knives here, if anyone can add to it bring it here. Dorothea, do you have any stiff wide brimmed hats? I need 2. Leonie, can you bring some scissors, needles, thread and thick twine string or cord. Going to need about 3-4 meters. Does anyone have any thick extra leather gloves? Especially if you don’t want them back because they are going to get messy. A pair for me and a pair for Claude. We also need 2 white long sleeved shirts. Ignatz, if you have a spare that would be wonderful. Need one for Claude too unless he has one.”

You run off to the marketplace to find some dark black diamond netting with the smallest holes you could find. Back at the dining hall the Deer have done the deed and all needed items are acquired.

You create a beekeepers veil from the hat, stitching the netting around the brim of each hat. Wearing the long sleeved shirt you put the hat on, then tie the hat itself on with it’s ribbons so it won’t fall off when you bend over. Then you tie the string over the veil around your neck so that the string goes under the collar of the shirt. Putting on the gloves, you stuff the cuffs inside then wrap the open end of the gloves shut with gauze, pinning then tying it with more string.  At the bottom of your pants you tie them around your ankles keeping them close over your socks. You take extra string and wrap them around bundles of semi dry weeds you pilfered from the compost pile.

You are ready for the battle of the bees.

“How do you know all this?” Claude asks as you head out around the walls of the monastery. The bees are located around the back by the fruit trees.

“Grew up a farmer. Brothers wrangled the larger animals. I was stuck with smaller ones. Chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits and bees. Need bees to pollenate fruit trees.”

“An expert on the birds and bees. Got it!” Claude grins.

“Have you ever been stung by a honeybee?” You ask him.

“Dunno. I’ve been stung by all kinds of bees. Black ones, yellow and black, black and white.” He shrugs.

“Claude! Just like every four legged animal is not just a horse, every flying insect is not necessarily a bee!!” You chastise him. “Honeybees are mostly non-threatening unless you are invading their home or disturb them while they gather nectar.” You stop at a nearby flowering bush. “This bush has all sorts of insects on it.” You take the sharp knife and point at a few different ones identifying them. Bluebottle fly, paper wasp, hornet, sweat bee, carpenter bee, bumblebee and finally honey bee.

“Most of the stinging insects have a sharp, smooth, pointy stinger, like Felix’s sword. The honeybee has a barb at the end of its stinger. Think of Byleth’s fishhook. The smooth stingers, can sting multiple times each putting a little poison in. Honeybees, when they sting, their barb gets stuck in your skin, and it rips off their stinger. When the stinger rips out, the poison sac comes along with it. The bee then dies, they are literally giving their life protecting their homes. Never use your fingers to grab the stinger to remove it, you are squeezing more poison into you. Scrape it off with the blade of the knife.”

“Good to know.” The archer nods.

“We are headed out to work on the bees. As soon as you notice you have been stung, we move away and make sure it won’t kill you. If it itches or swells a little, that’s normal. If you swell up to 10 times your normal size and stop breathing, you’re allergic.” You warn.

“Understood.” The Deer’s leaderman nods.

  At the middle of the orchards are several different tables and boxes.  You put the knife and bucket on the table. Inside of the boxes, with the front completely open, are what look like upside down baskets. They have a small hole in front that the bees are going in and out of at a fast rate.

“First we need smoke.” You instruct, taking out a bundle of semi dry weeds, lighting the ends with fire magic until most of the ends catch fire, then you blow the fire out. The weeds give off lots of smoke.

You tell Claude to wait by the table. You quickly go in front of a hive and lift it, pulling it out of the boxlike shelf and placing it on the table. You lift the hive pulling it to the edge of the table and let the smoke go into the hive for 30 seconds or so.

“Smoke gives the bees something to do besides chase you. When bees smell smoke, they think there is a fire in the hive. That means they have to grab what they can and get ready to leave. The bees are filling their stomachs as fast as they can and will fly off when the heat is too much.  Another benefit of this is the bees will have a full stomach and are less likely to sting you. The bee has to curl its body to the front of it to sting you, like bending itself into a letter C. That is much harder to do when its gut is full, less likely to sting.”

You look underneath again There are several rows of beeswax combs hanging down with bees crawling all over them many bees face first into cells eating. You squat down low so you can look up into the hive. The white beeswax comb on the outside looks like it is empty, the next section of comb looks like it has some nectar or honey in it, and the one after that looks like it is fat with honey that has been covered over by the bees.

“Ok. This is a skep, we try to get bees to build their hives in them. It is thick rope that is bound together in sort of a bell or upside down pot shape. The bees start at the top and attach wax to the top, then create these combs. The combs are built hexagonal cells on each side at the tiniest bit of an angle, facing up in a wide V shape. That is so they can put nectar in it and fill it almost half way. Once the nectar is in, other bees will evaporate the water from the nectar by fanning their wings. Once enough water is evaporated, it turns the nectar to honey. Once it is the right thickness they fill the cell up completely, then bees cover it with wax to preserve it. Then we steal it.”

You stick the knife between the ropes of the skep. You cut through the beeswax at the top and sides of the third comb from the left until it comes loose in your hands. Gently, so gently, you pull it out from the hive. It has some bees on it, but most of them stay inside the hive.

“Honeycomb is made from wax that the bees shed off their bodies. They chew it until soft and build these perfectly symmetrical 6 sided cells. Notice the bottom of the cells on this side matches with where 3 cells come together on the other side. Makes it super strong. This honey is heavy, at least 15 pounds on this one chunk alone. We only want to take honey, and the honey should be covered by wax.”

You tilt the comb to the right and some liquid runs out of a few cells.

“Too watery. Bees didn’t cover it and won’t until it evaporates more. Whatever spills the bees will collect and put into their hive again.”

There is about 16 centimeters of comb at the bottom where there is nectar not covered or just empty. You cut this from the rest of the honeycomb, placing the capped comb in the bucket.

You take the part that is cut off and hold it to the light.

“Sometimes you can see eggs in the bottom of the combs that do not have nectar in them, those are bees of the future. I am not wasting this. I’m going to melt the wax at the cut and put it back where I took the other part out.

Squatting under the hive, you summon magical flames, melting all along the cut edge of the wax and nectar, sticking it into the space you took the top of it from. Holding it up there you wait a bit for the wax to cool and it sticks. You leave the next couple combs alone, looking at the opposite side. You don’t want to disturb the queen or babies. The bees keep their spare honey to the sides of the nest where the queen is laying eggs. You decide to cut another chunk out. Gently taking it out you bring it to the table. There is capped honey about half way down. Then the honey stops and there is different colored darker stuff in the combs.

“The top is capped honey. Bees make it to feed the babies and feed themselves, especially in winter. Next they gather pollen. They even sort it keeping the types of pollen together. Grass, clover, ash, oak, maple, sunflower, if it has pollen bees take it. Heavy protein in pollen. They sort honey too. You’ll see all kinds of colors. Really light colored honey in the spring. Darker honey in the fall. Anyway, cells lower than that is where the queen lays the eggs. When the eggs hatch they look like larvae, you know, the stuff Teach fishes with. The bees feed the larvae honey and pollen. It grows and fills the cell. Once it is big enough it spins a cocoon, the adult bees cover them with wax. They pupate and turn into adult bees, chewing their way out and going to work in the hive.

You continue working as you harvest more honeycomb and try not to destroy any of the hard work of the bees by putting what comb you can back inside the skeps.

“I gotta know. Tell me about bee sex. Everyone talks about the birds and the bees.” Claude grins.

“There are 3 castes of bees. The queen. The worker. The drone. There is one queen in a hive. She is the only female that mates. She mates for maybe 7-10 days of her life, maybe 12 to 16 times. Spends the rest of her life laying eggs. Her body is the longest/biggest in the hive, her abdomen is quite large, swollen with eggs. It sticks out much farther than her wings. Next are the female workers. That accounts for 90% more or less of the population. They gather the nectar, bring it back, put it in the cells, dehydrate it, make wax, build cells, protect the hive, guard the hive, get rid of the dead, feed the queen, clean the queen, pollenate the flowers, collect the pollen and 100 other jobs. If there is work to be done they do it. They have the stingers that sting to protect the hive. Queens have stingers too, but theirs are smooth. They fight other queens, nothing else. That is why there is only one.“

“We can’t’ forget the drones, the males. They have no stinger. They do no work. They contribute nothing to the hive except for the queens genes. They don’t pollenate. Their only purpose is to go out and find a virgin or recently virgin queen to mate with. They mate while flying in the air. The drones hang out in an area looking for their lady love. Their eyes make up 80% or more of their head, go almost all the way around it. Once they see a queen, they fly after her. She flies high and fast and whoever catches her first gets her. He sticks his male part into her female part. Upon his entry, his part breaks off, and he falls to his death. She goes out again for more. Bees don’t mate with their relatives, each has their own smell. So they spread their genes around. “

“Gah!” Claude slaps his arm. “They got me!”

“Get over there by the wall and sit down!” You order him, quickly finishing what you were doing, then rushing to Claude’s side, away from the bees you take off your hat and veil putting your ear to his chest to listen. His heart sounds pretty normal. Breathing sounds good

“Where is the sting?” You’re looking him over.  

He points to his right upper arm.

“How are you feeling?” You’re watching the spot where he was stung, checking his fingers, his eyes, listening to his breathing.

“Talk to me for a bit. Just talk about anything. If your tongue swells up, that’s a bad sign. Talk so I know you’re okay.” You unbutton his shirt and pull it down over his shoulder to where the sting is.

“Gah! Just mention bee sex and you’re all over me!” He laughs.

The bee must have snuck inside his shirt, got into a small hole somewhere. His arm looks okay, the stinger is still in his arm and his skin is red around the stinger, the spot is about as big as a gold coin and slightly puffed up. Pulling a dagger out of your pocket, you scrape along his arm, flicking the stinger out.

All the while Claude keeps talking, counting trees in rows. Asking if you would be taking his pants off if he was stung in the leg…

“How are you feeling now?” You ask. “And that is why your pants legs are tied at the ankles. To keep them out.”

“Doing fine.” He grins. “The sting hurts a little less now. Not sweaty, not a real good poison. Mostly localized.

You put your ear to his chest again, checking on his breathing and heart rate.

“So how many stings before they really get to you?” The master tactician asks, his mind always working.

“If you are allergic 1, if you  are sensitive maybe 20? If you work with them all of the time? Well I had over 75 in a single day and it just made me a bit nauseous.” You say as you help him put his shirt back together. “Want to do more or call it quits? I don’t want to do this when it starts to get dark.”

You both agree to play it safe. Marking the hives that were harvested, you head to the kitchen dropping off the buckets of honey. There’s a few bees hanging out with the honey comb, but the kitchen can deal with them.

Heading back to the hives you finish cleaning up.

“So what did you bring to put bees in?” You ask.

“What?” Claude feigns innocence.

“Don’t be all innocent with me. You want some of their poison.” You grin. “Give it to me. I’ll get some in it and then show you how to get your poison. Oh, remember, male bees have no stingers right? I think we should prank Lorenz. It’ll give him a heart attack.”

Claude laughs heartily, “And here I thought you were nothing but a bookworm with no sense of humor.”

“I can have fun too!” You whine.

“Great, just come by my room any night you want to discuss more about the birds and the bees, eh?” He grins.

“Now you’re sounding like Sylvain.” You groan.

“Oooh, that was a major insult. I am wounded.” Claude laughs.

                                              ***********************

Yes. I am a beekeeper. I love my bees. I could watch them work for hours. The smell of a beehive on a warm summers day is amazing. 

[dragonrajafanfiction]

Code: Light

Part of my Series based on the in game dungeons lol. Just for fun.

In fact… there was a boy who lived here… 20 years ago…

The words echoed in Lu Mingfei’s mind as he looked over the rundown landscape in front of him. He was sitting on a dirty pillow on a broken, rotted out porch, rain pouring down on his head through the holes in the overhang. Spiders skittered about and made him pull his feet in. In front of him was a table of rice, vegetables and tea. Outside the porch was a small garden with a pond, green and overgrown with algae. It was pouring down rain as it had been all day. The pond was at capacity and it would soon overflow its banks. From the gloomy surroundings, frogs creeled out a constant serenade.

He was led there by a woman, an elder in that particular village, who had first reported what turned out to be dragon activity in this small town. Lu Mingfei, Chu Zihang, and Caesar Gattuso were called to investigate. According to the report on the dossier, a young child in a red coat, carrying a red balloon could be seen standing at the edge of the village. His face was impossible to make out. Japanese towns could be full of local ghost tales, but this one occurred with disturbing regularity. EVA, the Cassell Supercomputer then detected an elemental anomaly. Plants seemed to be growing at such an incredible rate, that the rain clouds over this small area of Japan never seemed to stop. The rain would fall, the plants would soak it up and transpire the water again. It was as if the Amazon Rainforest took up residence in the far East.

After explaining about the child, the old woman took them out to that ramshackle ruin of a place. “If it’s that boy you’re seeking, why not try making him something to eat?”

Then she left.

“Guys I’m so over this ghost hunt. This is so creepy and the lower the sun gets the more I want to leave.” He said. He was wearing his usual combat suit, that skin tight but extremely durable wear that was close enough to the body to avoid catching on anything, but strong enough to withstand the cut of a knife. But was it ghost proof? Who was to say they wouldn’t get eaten by this ghost and the rice be left cold and moldy with no sign of them?

“Are you excited to be on an actual ghost hunt? It’s a shame that the ghost is a boy though.” Caesar sat smoking his cigar and looking out over the grey sheet of rain in front of him. He was dressed similarly, with his Desert Eagles at his side. Of course, he made a much more handsome figure in the muscle-hugging suit.

Lu Mingfei wanted to pull his hair out. “You’re engaged! Don’t lust after the dead you freak!”

Chu Zihang slid his sword part way out of his sheath to check his equipment. “There’s no such thing as the dead coming back to life, unless it’s a dragon. And dragons don’t really die. They just sleep until they can be reborn. What we’re looking for is not a real ghost… but something that has the properties of a dragon.”

“Ghost… dragon… whatever. Do we even know if it’s attracted to rice?”

“It’s not about the rice, Lu Mingfei, it’s the routine. If the boy had a family or cared for anyone at all, wouldn’t it miss sitting at a table with a family meal?” Caesar bit his cigar, 

“And we’re supposed to be its family huh? Who are you? The mom?” Mingfei shot back.

“Well…” Caesar looked down at the food. “I cooked it.”

Lu Mingfei opened his mouth to say something else but Zihang suddenly tensed. His golden eyes stared into another pair of golden eyes. A boy in a red raincoat, stood at the edge of the mossy pond. He was holding a red balloon. Only those glowing eyes were visible under the red hood. It didn’t seem to have a face.

Lu Mingfei’s face went white and then grey with terror. He shook so hard his teeth chattered “G-ghost!”

A small child’s voice echoed clear despite the pounding rain. “Outsiders. I need your help. Come with me.”

The rain suddenly stopped but the sky grew darker, like a great shadow from something large coming over head. The air suddenly cooled. They were still in front of the table but the garden was replaced by sand. The sand was grooved in artistic circles, like an elegant Japanese rock garden. Looking around, they seemed to be in a ruined ancient village. The piece of land they were standing on was floating in mid air, like it had been torn from the earth. There was no sun. The way was lit by ominous paper lanterns that floated in place, painted with a red swirl pattern. In the distance an ancient Japanese castle tower rose out of the misty horizon.

Torii gates were seen floating in the grey, foggy surroundings. Most were shattered. They seemed frozen in the middle of being demolished, their broken pieces spraying at odd angles, their elegant cross bars tilted, but they never collapsed. 

What was most noticeable about this place however, was the sudden sense of crushing sorrow. The feeling one got when they received some sort of horrible news. Like a loved one had just died. It hit Mingfei in the chest and took his breath away.  “Guys. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to …” Mingfei eyes filled with tears. “What’s happening. I’m so scared.” He hugged his own arms and tried to stop the tears from falling. “We’ve got to get out!” 

He turned to Chu Zihang who always knew what to do in times like this. But the man was frozen, his jaw tense and locked, staring at the ground in a trance, trying to control his out of control emotions. He was breathing fast and trying to swallow the lump in his throat.

Apparently, sorrow drove Caesar Gattuso to action. He drew Dictator and pointed it up towards some broken stairs framed by a bright red Torii gate. Caesar suddenly roared. “This place sucks! Let’s get out of here as soon as we can. The only way out is up!”

His sudden yell seemed to break whatever emotional spell had been cast on the other two teammates. Lu Mingfei wiped his face. “What was that all about?”

“I’m not sure. Likely the owner of this place had a terrible life.” Chu Zihang said gravely. “I’ve heard of Longwei, the natural fear that dragons give off to other creatures, but I’ve never heard of a Dragon’s sorrow being projected like this.”

The stairs were floating over empty air, made of uneven, ancient grey limestone. There were dozens of stairs leading up into the ominous grey sky with broken Torii gates at intervals every twenty steps. Chu Zihang held up his hand to catch what appeared to be snow flying in the air. He sniffed at it. “Ash. Like something is burning. This must be some sort of Nibelungen. But I’ve never seen anything like it.” Chu Zihang said. “We should watch out. Where there’s a Nibelungen, there’s always…”

A sudden loud screeching interrupted him. A flock of bats the size of geese suddenly dislodged from under the stairs.  A whole flock of them swept forward in a single black cloud mass. Lu Mingfei ducked his head as the claws and teeth scraped at him. “I hate this place already!”

Caesar drew his pistols and fired. The bats were flapping and tilting and whirling, but he just needed to aim for just a moment before shooting one out of the air without missing. Likewise, Chu Zihang quickly slashed once and twice, neatly severing their bodies in two without trouble.

“Bats are better than snakes!” Caesar yelled, reloading his Desert Eagles.

“At least Snakes don’t fly!” Lu Mingfei yelled.

 As they climbed the stairs, they stayed back to the back, firing and slicing through the endless swarm of screaming bats. The sound of it was like a constant siren. Mingfei held his hands to his ears and allowed himself to be shielded by his two older students. He could hardly see anything between the endless assault of black bodies.

Caesar’s eyes glowed yellow. “There’s something big at the top of the stairs. That’s where they’re coming from!” He had sent out his Scythe Itachi and they returned with a huge heartbeat up ahead. “Chu Zihang, get rid of these things!”

“Get down.”  Chu Zihang closed his eyes for just a moment and then an evil snarl emanated from his throat. Black waves of heat drove back the bats and then exploded outward into violent flames. The bats were instantly set alight and hundreds of burning bodies folded their wings and fell into the endless pit below. Lu Mingfei didn’t even want to think of what it meant to fall down into that grey void. Would he just continue to fall forever?

“Eugh…” Caesar pinched his nose to escape the smell of burning flesh and hair.  “Good.” He said, reaching down at pulling Mingfei to his feet.

A loud roar shook the stairs and cracked them.  Then the stairs started to crumble, starting from the bottom. If they didn’t hurry, they would be the ones falling. “Run! Run!” Caesar yelled. 

Ahead of them was a large gap. The stairs were falling apart around them, coming to pieces, like the mortar that held them together suddenly lost all its strength. “We’ll have to jump it!”

It looked to be ten feet across over the nothingness. They’d never make a jump that far. But it was either try to jump or fall to their deaths anyway. Chu Zihang suddenly grabbed Lu Mingfei’s arm and without explanation took a leap and dragged him with him. For a moment, there was nothing but empty air under him. And then a sudden blast of heat and a loud boom! Chu Zihang used Royal Fire to blast himself over the gap, dragging the terrified Lu Mingfei the extra few feet needed. They landed and Lu Mingfei collapsed on shaky legs. “Are you out of your mind? You could have at least told me!” He gasped.

Chu Zihang looked at him with no expression. “You would have hesitated.”

Lu Mingfei froze. “I- n.- No…” Lu Mingfei looked away and then looked around. “Where’s Caesar?”

Caesar pulled himself up onto his arms. He was hanging from the ledge, having barely made the jump himself. He looked at Chu Zihang, annoyed. “Sure. Don’t mind me. I’ll just help myself up.”

His eyes suddenly widened at something behind Chu Zihang and Lu Mingfei. They turned around and saw a looming snake with a thick human-like torso and bulging human arms. It glared at them with yellow eyes shining from the skull of an ancient predator it wore as a mask. It brandished a spear as long as a car with a sharp bone tip.

[artificialqueens]

Flower Files, Part 4 (Malaska, Courtya) - Albatross

AN: Been awhile but I’m hoping to get back into posting soon!

Bonus points if you know what anime inspired chapter 7!

Chapter 7: Malaska

A perfectly sunny day, a light breeze, and a casual stroll through the botanical gardens with her girlfriend…what more could Alaska want on a Saturday afternoon?

She used to visit the garden often as a kid, both with her family and with her school. It was one of her favorite memories from childhood and now as an adult, she’s come to love the gardens even more. There was just something so relaxing about wandering through all the rows of flowers and trees, watching the birds and butterflies dart through and around you, sitting on one of the cozy little benches as the ducks and geese swam around the many man-made ponds. She could hardly believe it when Manila had told her that she’d never been to the gardens before!

She booked their tickets for the following weekend, excited to share the beauty of the gardens with someone for the very first time. And Manila’s first reaction didn’t disappoint. As soon as they stepped beyond the ivy covered entrance gate, her eyes went wide with glee and wonder.

Everywhere you turned there was an overflowing abundance of colorful plants, sculptures or wildlife. Butterflies flew haphazardly between the people, sampling all the flowers as they spread out their beautiful wings. Birds sang in the trees, picked seeds or bugs from the plants, or drank from the babbling bird baths scattered through the park. The air smelled absolutely fragrant and alive as you passed between all the clusters of different flowers.

She looked so blissfully dazed as she rushed from one display piece to the next, determined not to miss anything. Manila read through all the little placards she could find, learning about the history of the gardens, donation stories of particular plant species or sculptures, or simply how to identify the different animals and insects that also visited the garden.

Alaska hung back, letting Manila explore at her own pace, as she drank the iced tea she bought from the kiosk next to the Conservatory. She wanted to save the indoor portion of the garden for last; it was, in her opinion, the most impressive of everything the nature preserve had to offer. And Manila was fine with waiting until the end to see it, though it certainly did pique her curiosity.

In the meantime, they made a loop around the landscape, visiting the pollinator fields, the hedge maze and topiary section, even catching one of the fountain shows that played every hour. As they finally circled back to the Conservatory, Manila felt a rush of excitement as they opened the doors to the expansive greenhouse.

Alaska was right to save it for last, Manila thought to herself. 

The first step inside absolutely took her breath away; full grown trees greeted them, as did hanging clumps of flowers and vines. The middle of the floor was sunken in and flooded, curtesy of the miniature waterfall at the other end of the room being fed from an outdoor pond. Floating plants drifted with the man-made current, swirling gently to create a mesmerizing sight. Lily pads littered the surface in so many colors that Manila could hardly believe it; it was like seeing one of Monet’s paintings in real life!

Everywhere she looked, there was a new species of plant that she had never seen before; all of them so bright and eye catching. Manila insisted on visiting every section of the greenhouse that was open to the public, including the children’s garden. Alaska followed behind, snapping a few pictures here and there, sometimes of the flowers but most of her girlfriend’s infectious smile.

As she was trying to focus her phone’s camera on a clump of blue and purple hydrangeas, Alaska felt a pair of arms wrapping snuggly around her waist. A swift kiss was pressed to her cheek just before she heard Manila urging, “Follow me!”

“Okay,” Alaska laughed, taking a quick picture and shoving her phone back into her pocket, “Why though?”

“I found something that reminds me of you!” she boasted, a secretive little smile playing out on her lips.

Unfortunately, Alaska was all too familiar with this situation. Certain memories of childhood teasing that were best left forgotten began to creep in at the edges of her mind. Sighing heavily, she dragged her feet and warned, “Is it that statue? Because I’ve already heard that joke before.”

Too much, she thought bitterly. She could almost hear her classmates comparing her to the gangly, oversized statue once again. The one whose limbs looked stretched until they barely resembled a human’s. The one whose perfectly pale marble expression looked almost like an imitation of The Scream and whose creepy pose of outstretched arms reaching for the flowers surrounding her haunted several children’s nightmares. The one that utterly and completely towered over most kids that came to visit…except for Alaska, of course. It’s head was only a few inches higher than her own when her class had visited the gardens in elementary school but the similarities of skin tone, height, and awkward proportions were more than enough for her classmates to compare her to the disturbing looking fixture.

As Manila continued to drag Alaska towards what she had discovered, she twisted her head around to look at her girlfriend with a mild degree of confusion. “Statue?” she asked curiously.

“The one they put in the middle of the children’s garden?” Alaska explained. Upon seeing Manila’s blank face, she added in with a groan, “The creepy one that looks like a cousin of slenderman? ‘Flower girl’, it’s called, I think?”

Shaking her head, Manila replied, “No…just wait, it’s over here.” 

Rounding the last corner of the pathway, Manila led her on for another 3 yards before stopping in the small clearing surrounding a miniature fountain. Pointing proudly to the Birds of Paradise encircling the bubbling water fixture, Manila exclaimed, “These!”

Leaning heavily against her girlfriend, Manila laced their fingers together as she explained, “These remind me of you cause they’re so unique. There’s nothing else around here that looks like them, or are as colorful…And it kinda looks like they’re all facing the sun, the way you do. You always keep your head up and try to see the positive in everything.” Pressing a swift, gentle kiss to Alaska’s jawline, Manila concluded with, “They just make me happy to look at, like you do. That’s why I thought of you when I found them.”

A rush of warmth quickly spread through Alaska’s chest until it was concentrated right at the center of her heart. Her emotions felt like they were bubbling to surface only to get caught in her throat leaving her unable to truly express just how happy and loved she felt. Instead all she could do was pull Manila in for a proper kiss, passionate and deep, letting her actions explain everything her tongue couldn’t.

When they reluctantly broke apart, foreheads resting against one another and perfectly jubilant smiles stretching across both women’s lips, Alaska finally found the voice to speak. “You’re the sweetest, you know that?” she whispered low enough for only them alone to hear.

“Only with you,” Manila replied coyly. “You wanna go check out the rest of the greenhouse now?”

Laughing, Alaska pulled away and took another appreciative look at the flowers. “In a minute,” she said. “I wanna look at these just a little longer.”

Chapter 8: Courtya

It took almost three full days but Katya was finally unpacked. A brand new apartment, all her own, that she could enjoy for the first time in her life. From the time she started college, moved out of her parent’s house, and all the way up until this last promotion at work, she’d always lived with at least one other person. Sometimes family, sometimes a girlfriend but usually just someone she sort of got along with and could help pay rent. She never had a place that was wholly and truly her’s…until now. 

To say she was excited would be a massive understatement; it felt like a huge milestone she’d been putting off because she never felt financially secure or even just brave enough at times to try living alone. But now that time was finally here; a chance to make this space her own. A chance to turn this apartment into a home.

Arranging the move and packing up everything had been the easy part, she soon discovered. The unpacking and reorganizing…not so much. But then again, order and discipline never really was her strong suit. Often she found herself getting so sidetracked looking for  just one specific thing among all the boxes, that she’d forget to put away anything else in the meantime. It added quite a bit of time to her unpacking and usually led to a rather large mess in most of her rooms. 

But after working almost nonstop for three days straight, everything eventually found a place in her new home. All that was left was to place the flattened boxes outside with the recyclables and dispose of all the packaging supplies. Then she could relax and settle in for this new chapter of her life.

Somewhere between the move itself on Friday and the unpacking that took over the majority of her weekend, Katya managed to spare a few minutes to answer her texts. Most were congratulatory, others offered moving tips or even to come and help. But one person actually asked if they could come over for a visit; Courtney.

A rush of giddiness swept through Katya in spite of the exhaustion seeping out from every pore. She couldn’t think of a better first houseguest than Courtney…and with any luck she can recommend a good restaurant or two nearby while Katya tried to find the energy to go grocery shopping. 

Her fingers typed out her new address at a lightning quick speed and within minutes Courtney announced that she was on her way over. 

If anyone asked, Katya would deny to her last breath that a delighted little squeal emanated from her lips as she read the message. No, she would simply say that she reviewed the text calmly , set down her phone on the kitchen counter, and walked over to the bathroom to freshen up. Because after all, who, after spending a long, exhausting day running around their apartment, moving furniture to just the right spot, arranging all of their little knickknacks and collectibles perfectly on the shelves and tucking away all of the other housing essentials, wouldn’t want to take a nice, hot shower and clean up a little? Particularly if they knew that company near and dear to their heart would be coming over very soon. 

So one quick shower and a fresh pair of clothes later, Katya was back to laying on the couch and anxiously awaiting a knock on her door. Just a few minutes after her TV show flipped to the next episode, Courtney announced her presence. 

Katya sprung from the couch and opened her front door with an exuberant smile on her face. Courtney’s excitement easily matched Katya’s own as a wide grin stretched from ear to ear, brightening the world around her. 

“Congrats on the new apartment!” she commended. Somehow her smile seemed to grow as she raised the leafy parcel in her hands. “Brought you a housewarming gift.”

Courtney held out a large, vibrant plant towards Katya, earning a muffled sound of joy. Eagerly accepting the gift, Katya wrapped her hands around the pot, letting her fingers brush against Courtney’s as they carefully exchanged ownership. 

“Thanks!” Katya exclaimed, carefully examining her new plant, “You shouldn’t ha-” Wait a minute. Her smile fell into something of a pout as the excitement quickly drained from her voice. ”…this is plastic,” she said flatly.

“Uh huh,” Courtney agreed, a pleasant smile still plastered on her face. Her eyes, however, now held a teasing glint in them. “And after you prove you can take care of this little guy, I’ll buy you a real one.” Her lips curled into a smirk as she continued on with, “You know, finding a nice sunny spot to put it, rotating the pot, dusting it every now and then. Perhaps even… weekly,” she mocked in a stage-whisper.

“You fucking bitch,” Katya grinned, side stepping the door. “Come on in…By the way, you wanna get something to eat with me? I’m starving.“

[weaselle]

I like knowing the nature of a place.

I’m getting ready to move after a stint back in my childhood home, and I’m realizing that for me a big part of feeling at home is knowing the Nature of the place.

Here, I have a deep knowledge of the surrounding nature. I know the water, as the house water is all supplied from a well. I know the clayish soil, having pulled tree stumps out of it, grown gardens in it, dug trenches and set foundations in it, sat in it making little mud castles as a child. I’ve tasted it even.

I know the fat little squirrel that knows us also. I know the 3 mocking bird pairs who’s territories converge near here. Or did until recently, when a pair of california scrub jays moved in after a several year hiatus (we lost the willow tree and it became less desirable jay real estate) and now the mocking bird territories are in a state of disarray. I’m excited to see the scrub jays, those clever little corvid bastards, because it means we might actually get to eat some cherries this season. The mocking birds sort of tend to fight more over nesting sites, but the jays will see the cherries coming in and declare all three trees a no-fly zone for other birds -- and boy do they enforce it. Which means instead of every bird in the area eating some of our cherries before we can get any, we get what the two jays can’t eat, which usually works out to about half the crop.

I know the fire ants that patrol areas with water, harvesting the other insects that are drawn to it, the drowned bees, any injured insects, and so forth. I know where the yellow jackets tend to nest, and which plants the bumble bees prefer -- we keep a hedge of those flowers specifically for them because while honey bees are still numerous here (helped no doubt by the six bee boxes in the yard of the house across the field) the fat fuzzy bumble bees used to be a lot more numerous here than they are now. I know where the lizards hang out and what kind of spiders I’m likely to see, and if I wanted to find some salamander burrows on this block I know what to look for. And I know the local possum posse stopped using the north side fence as an autumn path once the walnut tree died, and now in fall they use the south side fence where the guava trees offer them a foraging opportunity. 

I know the raccoon clan. Well, I know of the raccoon clan. After years of jostling for territory with each other, we and the raccoons worked out some boundaries which, like, five or six generations later are just now starting to be contested.

We did things like get geese to protect our ducks from the raccoons and we stopped having outside cats with their outside food, so we turned into a less reward / more risk territory for them and tradition became sticking to the far edges of the yard. But now the waterfowl have been gone for years there’s no more dog and we’ve been dumping the parrot’s half eaten mix of nuts and seeds out there so that what he doesn’t like doesn’t go to waste. I don’t think my mother has caught on to how much that has been slowly changing the local biosphere.

It used to be her mother’s bird, and she has a lot of emotions about Joker (who still occasionally laughs grandma’s laugh or coughs her cough) which results in her offering him quite a banquet to pick from. So his leftovers are a significant resource she’s pouring into this little biome.

I think the raccoons are becoming interested (tracks right up to the edge of the house, three feet from where the bird seed sits). The pairs of birds more or less doubled, and it may be a big part of why the jays are back. The squirrel solved the problem of getting into the elevated dish recently, instead of just picking from what the birds scatter. Which is definitely why he’s so fat and glossy and I predict he’ll have to start fighting harder for this territory soon. The seed dish draws little birds in, but the hawks that would hunt at it like a watering hole have stayed away so far. Except for one newly adult hawk that studied the situation for a couple weeks from the old pine but couldn’t figure out how to exploit it when we responded by moving the bird seed pedestal to under the low hanging branches of a small tree. She finally got sick of the squirrel screaming at her to get out of his pine tree and left. Which is good news for the squirrel because silencing that delicious little alarm probably would have been step one for any intelligent hawk deciding to make this her hunting spot. Honestly imo tho this particular ecological niche would probably benefit from a hawk’s attention. 

We live under a hill, and I know which side of the hill the coyotes stick to, and which side the mountain lion prefers. And I can conjecture a few other mountain lion territories, centering on the smattering of hills off that direction, because it’s been generations of cougars up there and we spot a cub with whoever is currently Queen of This Hill every few years. Sadly, most of them don’t survive, based on both the statistics and the fact that while we catch glimpses of mom and small cubs semi-regularly, we’ve never once seen any in the close to one year old range, when they would be nearly adult sized but still accompanying their mother. Which doesn’t mean there have been none, but does imply that they are rare. And of course there are the years she’ll be spotted with two cubs for a while, but then only with one cub for a while after that.

They coyotes don’t come down unless times are tough or maybe if they are very bored and want to tease the dogs, but every now and then one does wander a couple blocks down our little street that dead-ends halfway up the hill, and slinks across the tree line that separates our front yard from the small field across our driveway. Years ago they used to come along more regularly, but there’s more people these days and the jackrabbits have pretty much disappeared, so now they mostly just come down the other side where the cow pasture is if the cows aren’t going up the hill soon enough for them during calving season. Pretty sure Queen Cougar goes over there whenever she feels like it and tries her luck at a calf now and then too.

I know the deer that come down and wander the neighborhood. They used to swing through our back yard until I engineered the fence between us and our neighbor to discourage them. The neighbors and my parents didn’t want the deer in their gardens but no matter how high they put the wire the deer were trying to go over it and damaging the top of the fencing which meant there was a chance they were injuring themselves. None of us want that. When it got brought to my attention one visit, I went and looked at it and solved it right away. Wood was too expensive, so they were just topping the existing fence with like 6 feet of wire grid. But the deer are coming through dusk/dawn and midnight, and they already have eyes that aren’t built for detail, and this is wire the thickness of a fat toothpick... so I went out to the bamboo patch and got some bamboo as thick as the butt of a pool stick and wove a line of it along the top of the wire. Light weight enough to not bend the wire, and something to smell, big enough to see. End of problem. One mamma deer has figured out how to get through from the other side, and she keeps a fawn in our neighbors yard almost every year.

Anyway, I just automatically tend to learn this sort of thing when I move into  a place, but I haven’t stayed anywhere long enough to get this level of knowledge about anywhere else, and being back here is making me realize how important it is to me. Observing and understanding my surrounding natural setting is, well, natural, and I won’t feel like my new place is home until I start to learn the biome there.

[ginnyzero]

Completely Harmless Ch. 31

Completely Harmless An SSO SilverGlade Re-imagining Story (Or Fix it Fan Salt fic) By Ginny O.

When Lily and her friends wanted to buy horses and were directed to the Silverglade Manor and its myriad of problems, they didn’t expect to start a revolution. They were just a bunch a stable girls. Completely harmless. Right?

A/N: Things are only canon if I say they’re canon. Pre-Saving the Moorland Stables compliant for the most part. Posted in its entirety on my website. Posted in 2000 to 4000 word bits here. Rated T for Swearing Word Count 177,577

Chapter Thirty-One Last Minute Rainbow Week Preparations

Even though Linda had posted that the Riding Arena was going to be closed, Sabine still had an argument with Lily that morning over the affair. Lily had stood firm. The Riding Arena was closed. Sabine’s obsessive need to practice was going to have to go to someplace else.

She saw them lining up their horses and insisted that they were just hogging the show jumping ring for themselves. Lily told her to stick around.

They led their horses inside and first they took the poles off the racks of the jumps and then took the racks apart and laid the pieces out before stacking them on the horses’ rumps.

They rode out of the riding arena with the equipment on their horse’s backs.

The look on Sabine’s face and the way she turned red was priceless in Lily’s opinion. The girl stomped over to her horse and rode off looking like she was going to yell at someone.

If she went to yell at the Baroness, Lily would have paid to be a fly on that wall. As it was, she sent a text warning Judy and Linda that Sabine was coming and she was pissed about the closed Riding Arena.

Once they had everything cleared out, including a table with what looked like an old cd player in the back, they stared around the empty room. The table and cd player went to the tack room. The showjumping equipment went to Thomas Moorland who had come to pick it up at the Manor in his truck.

Then they returned to the Riding Arena to face what was left.

“When do you think the last time this was cleaned?” Brittany asked.

They all looked at her.

“Valid question!” she protested.

They broke into groups.

Bjorn helped hook up the pressure washer to the faucet so they could wash the outside of the building getting the walls and the windows and washing down the parade ground outside the doors.

They were able to wave at the girls washing the inside windows on ladders with large amounts of ammonia and newspapers instead of paper towels. (Something about it doing a quick polish on the thick glass.) Another group of girls raked the dirt smooth.

After the back breaking work of putting in furniture in the wine cellar the day before it was almost relaxing. Though climbing up and down ladders to hang up the plants had been fun as two girls steadied the ladder and one girl climbed. There had been much giggling. The best part of doing the Wine Cellar had been putting in the neon sign over the back bar. Then the greatest part had been having an impromptu tasting party to give Aaron feedback on his menu. It had all been delicious including the rose and lavender ice creams. They weren’t soapy. That was always a big fear with rose and lavender. But Aaron wanted them to be specials for the grand opening!

They swept up the stands on the dressage side. Then they washed the stands down. Vacuumed the walls before washing them with sponges and buckets of soapy water. They took down the signs on the walls too. Because after that, they had to tape off the windows and cover parts of the floor near the walls and paint.

The walls were going from being white to a lovely light lavender color.

Outside, dirt and pollen and grit seemed to slide off the marble faced walls and they had to work extra hard to get it out of the seams where the columns met the walls between the windows and the border under the windows that was a series of Silverglade Clan swirls instead of a traditional Greek key or wave pattern. They cleaned out the eaves as well. Bjorn muttering about gutters. Once everything was clean, including the urns, they were able to paint the urns up. Bjorn had them help inspect the walls for any cracks.

A closer look and Bjorn pronounced that the marble had been treated with something to keep it looking pristine. That’s what made it easy to clean. Marble was notoriously porous stuff.

The girls muttered about how they wouldn’t want the place to fall apart or be defaced.

“Maybe a guard dog?”

“But do guard dogs get along with horses?”

It was a good question. The better question of course was, would the Baroness mind guard dogs?

“Ducks aren’t great guards. Geese are,” one girl observed. “But not necessarily ducks.”

“Corgis are cute and good with horses but not exactly guard dog material unless they are in swarms. I mean, they’re too cute and fuzzy to be intimidating. Plus, they’re super friendly.”

“Someone,” Bjorn reminded them, “is going to have to take care of this dog. Walk it. Feed it. Clean up the messes.”

The nearest pet show was in Fort Pinta and no one really had time at that moment to go and inquire.

“It might not be necessary,” Abigail said.

“Now that’s tempting fate,” Stacey warned her.

“Don’t say things like that, you’ll jinx it!” Brittany waved her arms. She had the hose so she sprayed water all over them.

They squealed and ducked getting wet anyways.

“Brittany!” Stacey shouted.

Abigail tried to wrestle hose from her and succeeded. Brittany yelped, let her have it and ran away. “It was an accident!” she shouted.

“Get back here!” Abigail shouted back.

Bjorn grinned and didn’t reprimand. Let the girls be girls.

After lunch from the Silver Glade courtesy of Tony with the doors fully open so the paint could dry, Agnetha appeared with new showjumping equipment. Thankfully, for everyone’s piece of mind, it wasn’t 100% purple. There was plenty of white in the jumps. Though the bars came in lavender (a light blue purple,) grape (dark blue purple,) lilac (the light red purple,) raspberry (medium red purple,) and mulberry (dark red purple.) Nothing was overly bright or garish, much to everyone’s relief.

“Now, the Baroness has declared she wants a garden style jumping ring,” Agnetha said. “And I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant but she had pictures.” Agnetha made a face.

“Oh dear,” Pauline murmured.

“What that meant, I suppose, was she wanted flowers under the jumps, shaped bushes as jumps, and either trained roses, or rose urns on the sides of the jumps. We’re compromising.”

The girls all looked at each other. They all wondered how much of an argument Agnetha and Anabella had had over this concept called compromise. Bjorn’s lips twitched and he surreptitiously sent them video he had covertly recorded for them to watch later. (There would be many gasps and a lot of giggles.)

Agnetha hefted a larger jump side out of her truck, It was a swirled design painted in raspberry. “We have two variations of these, this one, poor thing, is supposed to be a horse head.”

The girls giggled. The swirls were in the shape of a horse head. They did recognize it.

“And the other, I think for you girls, is lavender and in the shape of a duck’s head.” Agnetha rolled her eyes. “She special ordered these and we’re to train the roses on them.”

The girls nodded. That made sense and would be pretty.

“Now, we’ll be using some more standard configuration jumps and having smaller urns in them with miniature roses to keep them seated in place being heavy and all.” Agnetha continued. “Then there’s to be at least one or two jumps, I’m not sure how many jumps there actually are in this course that will be the big urns with the roses in them. I’m sure you’re sensing a theme.”

They grinned.

“Lastly, we’re going to be using some of the shrub roses to create ‘formed’ jumps. I argued for lavender, but you know how she is.” Agnetha rolled her eyes. “Now, some of the ground roses will be going under the jumps to, and I quote, tie everything together. Now, I think that if she wants a garden jumping course, she should leave the garden aspect to the experts, but no one asked me. There will also be two rose arches that are going to form the entrances and exits of the riding tracks. I guess so everyone knows where to start and where to end.”

They giggled and nodded.

“And you can bet dollars to donuts, that she will want a rose arch jump in the middle of the track once she sees it, so we’re going to get ahead of her and do it anyways.”

“Understood, Agnetha,” Lily said.

“I also have new signs, white with grape lettering and fancy roses and grape corners.” Agnetha rolled her eyes. “In about an hour, the contractors are going to be here to change out the seats for new Mulberry and Grape ones. So, we’re to stay out of their way and let them work.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem if we’re doing the jumps on the showjumping side.” Linn said.

“So, I hope you’re all finished eating because work starts now,” Agnetha announced, hand on one hip.

A couple of the girls took the signs and Bjorn’s favorite battery powered drill and went to put up the new signs where the old ones had been. The grapes and roses were embossed silver bits around the edges. They were really quite pretty and added a bit of flair to the place. They were long out of the way by the time the contractors arrived.

Inside, they had to mark everything out and set things up to see how they’d look aesthetically. Sure, the Baroness had given them a number of jumps and which jumps in each place were supposed to have so many bars, but she hadn’t said which jumps were to be what type of décor.

And Agnetha was fussy. So, they kept having to move things around until she was happy with it all. So, if the ones around the edges happened to be more shrubs and no fancy sides than the ones in the middle. (Though Agnetha had decided to turn a least one of the horse head or duck head jumps into shrub jumps instead of bars.) Then, it was only because the jumps were so close to the edge of the walls.

Or that’s what they’d tell the Baroness.

They were simply following Agnetha’s directions. They had no say in anything, nothing at all.

When they were finished, Linn tested it out.

She wasn’t in her showjumping uniform. They were all dressed for work in their pretty winery clothes that could take hard work. Linn thought it was a challenging set of jumps.

“It’s beautiful,” the Baroness said from the door.

They all turned to her.

Everyone wanted to heave a great sigh of relief.

The Baroness smiled ever so slightly. It was better than she could have imagined. She nodded at them and left.

“Is it bad that I want to give her a hug?” Tyra asked. “Like, things around here have been bad so long and now, I don’t know, I want to give her a hug and tell her it’s going to be okay.”

They all laughed at that.

“It’s not bad.” Regina said.

“I doubt she’d accept.”

“Group hug!” Shouted Brittany.

They gathered around to hug each other. Because sometimes, you needed to get the hugs out.

--

They all woke up excited, grabbing toast and dashing around to do all the clean up chores (and protecting their toast from hungry horses who liked bread.) It was decoration day! Today was the day that they were going to turn their bit of South New Jorvik County into the most rainbow celebratory festival that anyone had ever seen.

Without being tacky.

They knew the baroness would make them tear it all down if it was tacky.

But they were excited. They felt they had the right to be excited. Prying open boxes of decorations with crow bars, they hoped they had enough. Because there were plenty of hearts, and rainbow hearts and big fluffy cloud lights, and bows. Specifically, there was a large box of rainbow sequin hair bows they were to hand out to the girls they met and tell them to go see Jojo Siwa over at Moorland.

And all the bows, sequin or not, had roses with light purple crystals in the middle of them.

Giggling, they helped each other put hair bows on and put an armful of each into their saddlebags. They broke into groups, grabbing decorations, because there were a lot of them and every place needed to be decorated from the Silver Glade Restaurant, to the stables, to the gardens.

They were lucky, the lamps of the manor had arms off of them. So each lamp got a bow at the junction of the arms, a pearl studded heart on the arm nearest to the road affixed in rainbow order from one lamp to the next, and a chain of hearts wrapped around the pole (hearts also in rainbow order instead of being rainbow striped.) There were a lot of lamps.

The birch trees got decorations of hanging small clouds with trails of hearts dangling from them like it they were raining hearts. They also had lanterns with heart shapes cut out of them to hang.

They decorated the bridges with bows and the heart streamers going from bow to bow.

They found a broad board and braced it against the columns in the fountain.

Lily eyed it. “I’m not sure it’s safe.”

“Then be careful not to fall in,” Pauline teased. “Or you’ll get wet.”

“Thanks,” Lily said.

She carefully walked over to get the clouds and hearts in the trees. Linda also gave her lanterns with heart cut outs to hang up.

More of these lanterns got placed into the flower beds and hidden in the urns.

They put the hearts on the doors and in the windows. The heart streamer swags went across doorways and were draped in the windows, across the stall tops on the interior of the stable. They put bows on the fences and bigger studded hearts in the middle of the fence with the heart streamers draped between them. And they put the bows on the lower half of the exterior stall doors of the horses, chiding them not to nibble on them.

They made a display of bigger studded hearts using fishing line in the archways to either side of the main doors of the Manor.

They put up the cloud lamps in the dome of the stables, two girls holding the ladder in place as another perched precariously near the top of it. There were big clouds and small clouds and they created a grouping of them. They turned on the lights after, the LEDs in the clouds a bright white, while the big ones had LED strands in rainbow colors that faded in and out.

They liked it so much they put some over the aisles in the stables and took them down to the riding arena to do as big of a display as they could by bunching big ones together in the dressage side. Using transports, they were able to go get sun catchers and stained glass decorations from Cape West and New Hillcrest to put in the windows of the Riding Arena. There wasn’t any hay in there after all.

Rainbow heart streamers got draped around the railing of the bandstand in the garden. Pearl studded hearts hung from the arches. And more clouds were put under the dome.

They added clouds to the dome in the rooftop restaurant and more studded hearts. They put the lanterns in the middle of every table rearranging the flower vases so they made more sense. Flower boxes got a studded heart in the middle of them, with rainbow hearts swags to each side. They put bows on every fence section.

Someone decided to hide the heart streamers in the rose arches of the long archway. Along the back of the benches, they put the heart streamers, bows, and one of the big studded hearts.

The entire time they were running around, they’d run into girls their age that were riding horses or leading horses or all in all wandering about. They passed out the hair bows. “Come see Jojo Siwa and stand together this Rainbow Week!”

Reactions were mixed but no one as quite willing to refuse a sparkly sequin rainbow hair bow. The hair decorations multiplied.

FOR THE ACCOMPANYING IMAGES PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE MY WATERMARK AND CONTACT INFORMATION. THANK YOU. I get it. Some of you might get excited and want to see this stuff in the game, especially the clothes, tack, and pets. However, the only way I want to see this in the game is if I get paid for it. If I see it in the game and I’m not paid for it, there will be hell to pay. You think I’m salty. I’d be angry. Personally, I’m not going to send this info to SSO. If you do, leave my contact information there! Don’t give them any excuses to steal.

Now, I’ll know you haven’t read this note if you leave me comments about how ‘salty’ I am about the game and if I hate it so much I should do something else. I am doing something else. It’s called Mystic Riders MMORPG Project. Mystic Riders however is a very baby phase game. You can check out our plans on the game dev blog. (Skills, Factions, Professions, Crafting, Mini-Games, 25+ horse breeds!) If you know anyone who would be interested and has money or contacts about game making, direct them to the blog.

[drferox]

So I am feeling under the weather again and wanted to take a break from the usual to daydream about the farm I would one day like to have in the future, and all the things on it.

Basically a permaculture set up maintained by a small group of people that either live full or part time on the property, trying to be self-sustaining and do away with modern monocultures as much as we possibly can. I would love to be maintaining genetic stocks of plants and animals that had fallen out of favor with industrialisation and factory farming, those that perhaps were less efficient as converting feed into animal protein, but those that were hardier on ‘unimproved’ (read: more natural) terrain. Heritage and old-style breeds.

The LSB might be spending his time figuring out how to build Earthships and set up aquaponics and the tech side of it, while I spend my time thinking about the biosphere side.

Oof, I want my fluffy Highland Cattle so badly. Smaller than some of the european breeds, hardy on unimproved pasture and good mothering instincts means they’d probably do quite well on a gradually improving system. Plus they’re one of the breeds most genetically similar to the ancient Aurochs, which is cool in and of itself, but with so much of our beef cattle herd being angus/hereford/shorthorn and the occasional wagyu (whether that’s real wagyu or not) I would really like to maintain a pocket population of these cattle, even if I can only manage 6-8 breeding cows and their offspring.

Some homesteaders milk one as their house cow, but I have a fondness for the old Jersey cow and wouldn’t mind having one around for milk, but I’m not sure if she’d bee too productive or require more feed supplements than we have available. So I would be hoping to carefully experiment with crossing the Jersey to Highlands and see what a 50:50 or 25:75 cross produces and whether that’s suitable for whatever land we end up with. I’d also be very curious to see what a Jersey’s mothing instincts are like if she has other cattle with good mothering instincts to hang around, watch and learn from. (Because whether cows have a cultural component to mothering behavior is something I’d be curious to look at)

Tamworth pigs! An older breed that is barely hanging on in Australia (and importing new pig genetics is nearly impossible with our quarantine rules), I would be really keen to help the conservation of this breed one day. They’re not as long-backed as the Large White x Landrace pigs that are mostly used in commercial and factory farming setups, which means slightly less bacon meat per pig, and they have smaller litters typically or around 8 instead of around 10-12, but they’re better foragers, typically lose less piglets to mortality even in free range settings and they’re brown! Which under the Australian sun means less UV associated skin conditions/cancers.  Imagine them foraging through weedy land to help clear it, or foraging under the fruit trees in established orchards.

Goat friends! Partly to graze down weeds and rough land, and partly because I enjoy being around goats and would love to be able to make goatmilk soap.

Chickens are something that I must have one day, and something that I need to research a heck of a lot more. I want to be able to maintain multiple different genetic groups so I can have different coloured eggs.

All of those egg colours are from chickens! And I think that’s fantastic. But I need to look a lot more into the breeds that are actually available in Australia, brush up on my pet chicken medicine skills, and sit down to do the maths and logistics about maintaining all these separate breeds of chickens together. But somebody has to scour the vegetable patches of bugs and it’s going to be these funky little dinosaurs.

Peacocks are another species I’d be interesting in keeping, espeically some of the weirder colour combinations like charcoal and cameo. I’m not sure on their availability though, and haven’t seen much on their health in general so of course curious to know more about these relatively uncommon colours.

They’re also a kind of family history thing, so perhaps more mascot than anything else, but the feathers are lovely.

I thought about quails for more species diversity, but probably wouldn’t do turkeys or ducks. Turkeys may be difficult to keep healthy if they’re rotating over ground that had chickens in it in a free range system, and to be honest there are plenty of native duck species that I’d rather visit and fly away instead of trying to keep. They’re quire messy little critters, cute as they are.

Geese though, geese are a maybe. They can graze, and in a rotational grazing system they’re useful because there are multiple species of worms that cattle, pigs and even kangaroos can transmit which the geese do not, so there’s potentially a job for them there.

I haven’t contemplated rabbits at all because there are already so many feral ones, and they come with myxo, that keeping domestic rabbits on a rural property seems just unwise. And there are feral deer, feral pigs, and kangaroos/wallaby in many rural areas that they have to be accounted for too. Feral pigs are a quarantine risk for domestic pigs, feral deer can bring in too many worm species, but the roos can visit as long as they stay on the grasses and not the vegetable gardens.

I couldn’t forget fish either. Our freshwater rivers have been in such a bad shape for so long, why wouldn’t I farm native freshwater species in the farm dams or an aquaponics system? Even if most of what we need from the fish is their poop, I like looking at fish, and maintaining a healthy population independent from the whims of river water politics would make me feel slightly more comfortable about the future.

Murray cod and perch are the commonly available species, but with enough tanks there’s no reason I couldn’t have other, smaller river species or even invertebrates that are local to wherever we end up. Gotta keep those genetics alive somewhere, and if we can do it, why wouldn’t we?

Bugs and bees! We’d need to have corridors of native plants as havens for native insects (I want my Christmas Beetles back on the landscape, thank you) but also strips of non-native and cottage wildflowers and herbs to feed the honey bees, grow our drier herbs and florals for soap making.The plan being having lots of different species mixed together makes it harder for pathogens to take hold

And that’s just animal breeds I’d really like to have running around the place, before even looking at the heritage breeds of cottage vegetables that have been making a comeback through places like Digger’s. I think my favourite is Granny’s Throwing Tomato.

[the-never-ending-story]

 My memories come rushing to me so many times through scents and smells I pass by. These hold such power to make me see something long gone. In these moments everything is so wonderfully alive, and my body is still, but myself is somewhere far in a stolen moment to relive time past. I remember this moment clearly even as I am sitting here writing my thoughts. Beautiful moment it was to feel the slow and peaceful space I once had when little. We used to spend the summer at the farm of my maternal grandparents. It was my moment to escape the big world and find my own. Many times, I took my blanket out to the backside of the main farmhouse, with the white, rough walls. I loved that spot, as the sun hit the house during the day and at the back the walls reflected shade onto the grass. I always took a book to read and leave my head on the sun and my body in the shade. The lines of the book would at times disappear and I would fall asleep dreaming of worlds yet to discover. The farm was big, and there was everything you could imagine. You entered through a big wooden gate leading down on a rocky path, opening like a bubble for cars to park. On both sides, along the path shrubs and bushes of berries. I remember picking them and could barely be patient enough to wait until they were ripe. On the right-side a swing and other wooden toys to play with. Through a wooden arch, you arrived to lines of sown plants and seeds. There were tomatoes, zucchini, squash, greens and herbs to pick. My grandmother worked from day to night, I never saw her rest. Along the sides of the farm huge evergreen bushes grew, all the way up towards the hills. On the left side from the path leading to the main house apple and fruit trees. I walked under them many times looking for ones that have fallen off the branches. If I walked further down in the left down corner there were chickens, turkey and other winged animals in a carefully built beautiful home. It had a big patio looking up to the sky and a roofed edge for them to hide under when the storm hit through the skies. Along the fence there were more bushes of raspberries and blackberries. To the right a stone hut where my grandmother kept her cheese. She was talented in many ways and every morning went to milk the cow, that she later carefully crafted in her hands. The cheese cellar was carved out of stone and it was naturally cold inside. The cheeses were sitting on wood planks, wrapped in white cotton. You had to lean forward when entering through the small door, but I was so little for me the door was up the roof. Out on the path, turning into a bubble at the end, on the left side there was a huge, high ceiling workspace. It looked like a barn, with wooden beams running above your head. This was my grandfathers’ space. He kept his car in here, and many bags of oat and hay for the horses. There was a big wooden worktable with a vice-bench. I was told many times to never play with it, my finger could get hurt if it were to get stuck between the pieces of metal. There were horseshoes and picture frames of horses and races hanging on the white walls, dust in the air from moving bags of hay around and a ladder leading up to a small attic, with straw on the floor. A hiding space. I could sit on the top of the ladder and look down as my grandfather was working and fixing saddles, bridles and treads. There was an old western saddle hanging from the wall on a wooden pole, little did I know I will be living in the area from where my grandfather received it once. Outside from the barn, up on a concrete path you passed by the guest house where my grandparents hosted families throughout the year. My grandmother every morning prepared their breakfast from fresh and handpicked vegetables, homemade cheese and meat, bread, eggs and milk. It was a beautiful guesthouse, with that typical Hungarian touch of the countryside. Whitewashed, sturdy, thick walls, triangle rooftops made of wood and big windows with palettes to shut in the evening, beams running across to keep some light in and some out. The house was built like the main house, to where you followed the concrete path and walked up a few steps, on both sides, big evergreen bushes grew. The steps led up to an elevated porch, to one side a sitting area with an outside table and chairs, and to the other rose garden and grass, in-between a stone pathway leading down the side. The main house was magical, with a tall whitewashed stone arch, hidden by the vining trumpet flowers, blooming in orange end of each summer. On two sides grapes grew and made the walls covered with their paws attaching to the small crevices. The house was long, from the entrance you could see both ends, it was horizontally built along the lifted porch. At the far-left end of the house there was a big dining room, with at least twelve chairs to sit down and invite big families to eat. During the colder months, my grandmother served the food in this hall, on the beautiful plates all collected in a big, standing cupboard, with glass windows to see through. The kitchen was right before the main hall. I loved how the entire house was one long line, connecting each room with double winged or single doors. The kitchen was where you could see my grandmother most of the time, except for the outdoors. She baked, cooked and prepared so many homemade foods. Everything was made with heart, love and care. Her cheesecloth was hanging from a small hook, dripping the whey into a big kettle. You could hear every drip clanking the base. My grandfather would slice the fresh bread with a big knife, take out butter and slices of salami and mustard to spread. My brother and I could not wait to take a big bite before starting a new day. There were many days when I had to study, so I would sit by the wooden round table, my grandmother strolling in the kitchen, my grandfather coming to check how I am doing. He is passionate about math and we sometimes spent hours on various tasks. My favorite corner in the house was the long corridor leading to the bathroom with collections of books. My mum when she was little was collecting a series of tales and all these were there covered with colored cotton fronts. They had these pastel colors and their title carved in with golden letters, short descriptions on the back. I loved reading and when I was not riding or working outside with the animals, playing around the gardens, I would pick one of these books and take a chair to the front porch or to the back of the house, to that favorite spot. We were not allowed to watch television, only a short story in the evening. It was coming on every night about a little bear getting ready for bed. Me and my brother would curl up under the big blankets, with big cushions behind our backs and sit there together with my grandparents until our eyes turned heavy and our mouth opened for a yawn. My grandmother would tuck us into our beds and give us each a kiss on our forehead. When we woke to the next day you could hear the cows early in the morning, even before the sunrise. My grandmother walking out to the back in her long boots, saying good morning to all the little animals. Mackomuki, our big German Shepherd, following her every step. Around the house, down from the front porch, through the rose garden on the stone steps, you found to your right a huge fenced in area for horse riding that my grandfather built. To your left a grass patch behind the house, and the stone path leading up to a small wooden gate to the back yard. Entering through the gate to your right still the horse pound, on your left a barn, stalls and stables for the donkey, one for cows with a newborn bairn and two for horses when we brought them up to ride in the pound. In the barn, the ceiling was made of wooden beams and under it my grandparents store more hay and bags of food for the animals. Further down on your left another big open patch fenced in for ducks, geese and hens running around. To your right at the end of the horse pound a new wooden fence circling around a big area leading up on a hill. Cows were in here and if you walked up the hill a small hut for sheep and goats and a big land of grass for them to feed on. The farm was at the end of this small town in the calm and peaceful countryside of Hungary. People lived and talked differently here, you could hear the dialects of old times. The farm was surrounded by lands and hills, forests and vineyards. The hills had beautiful trails where we went to ride horses for several hours a day. My grandfather owned the land across from the main gate to the farm, on the other side of the one town road. The land was huge and spread all the way from the farm to the next town. My grandfather spent years building a wooden fence along his land. This magical land was all for his horses. A little walk away from the farm, down on the main road, he built on his land a huge open barn, with a section that was covered with wooden beamed ceilings and fully enclosed sides for the horses to warm up during winter. The open sides had huge wood carved feeders to pour fresh water and oats into. We had fifteen horses and they all lived freely on this huge land leading down to the other town. This side of the land was different to the one up by the side of the farm. Instead of being a big, open, grass and flower covered field, it turned into a forest that to me seemed magical. Bushes, moss, small creek running between rocks and soil. Birds chirping and some trees with their branches covering the path, having to lift them up and carefully pass by. There is so much more that I could tell, how we jumped on straw bales, creating fairytales, my horse Kucorka and our long rides up to glades, the sun hitting down, eating plums we picked on the way. There are also those memories I could never put into words and they will live inside me, and perhaps I can make others feel them too, but words would never be enough to describe. Sadly, our land is gone. My grandparents divorced and my grandpa moved to our capital. My grandmother, though we really tried to convince her otherwise, sold my horse, all the horses, all the animals, became a nurse and eventually sold the big farm too. This is another story to tell, how my grandmother was so sad she cut all her connection to us all for years to come. She has only seen me three times since and my mother only once. I can never forget the tears running on my mum’s face, finally being in the arms of her mum again. They have not seen each other after that again. My grandmother is still hurt after so many years and does not make much contact with any of us from her family. She is now working in Germany for a family, taking care of an old lady as a nurse. She owns a small house not far from the farm, but the farm as it was is not there anymore. I am hoping maybe one day, I will drive down to the small town to remember the places, the sounds, the smells and finally to visit our old farm. I am scared to go, who knows what and how it is now. Is the magic all gone, with us departing from that land, that space, those places? I am hoping that in my memories none of it will be lost and upon returning, the images will appear in front of my eyes, walking through the land and the house.

‘Fragrances. When a scent hits you and flies you back in time. Today as I was preparing the rose garden and cleaning off the dead branches and leaves of peonies, grabbing for the mulch to lay a fresh ground, the smell was as if I stood on the ground of the old farm that belonged to my grandparents. There are moments when time stops, and those moments are worth every second to be present in.’

*

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

Karen Russell (2013)

THE SCARECROW THAT WE FOUND lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to countrymen and women. They lived in hick states, the “I” states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds, and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me — I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.) Scarecrows got planted into the same soil as their crops; they worked around the clock, like charms, to keep the hungry birds at bay. That was how it worked in TV movies, at least: horror-struck, the birds turned shrieking circles around the far-below peak of the scarecrow’s hat, afraid to land. They haloed him. Underneath a hundred starving crows, the TV scarecrow seemed pretty sanguine, grinning his tickled, brainwashed grin at the camera. He was a sort of pitiable character, I thought, a jester in the corn, imitating the farmer — the real king. All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand watch over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I couldn’t remember (my brain stole this image from the seven-grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag — at school I cheated shamelessly and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist too, copying its homework).

This mission had nothing to do with us or with our city of Anthem, New Jersey. Anthem had no crops, no silos, no crows — it had turquoise Port-o-Pottys and neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, bag ladies with powerful smells and opinions, garbage dumps haunted by the wraith white pigeons; it had our school, the facade of which was currently covered with a glorious psychedelic phallus mosaic, a series of interlocking dicks spray painted to the scale of Picasso’s Guernica by Anthem’s tenth-grade graffiti kings; it had policemen, bus drivers, crossing guards; dolls were sold in stores.

And we were city boys. We lived in projects that were farm antonyms, these truly shitbox apartments. If flowers bloomed on our sooty sills, it must have been because of some plant Stockholm syndrome, a love our sun did not deserve. Our familiarity with the figure of the scarecrow came exclusively from watered-down L. Frank Baum cartoons, and from the corny yet frightening “Autumn’s Bounty!” display in the Food Lion grocery store, where every year a scarecrow got propped a little awkwardly between a pilgrim, a cornucopia, and a scrotally wrinkled turkey. The Food Lion scarecrow looked like a broomin a Bermuda shirt, a broomwith acne, ogling the ladies’ butts as they bent to buy their diet yogurts — once I’d heard a bag boy joke that it was there to spook the divorcees. What we found in Friendship Park in no way resembled the Food Lion scarecrow. At first I was sure the thing tied to the oak was dead, or alive. Real, I mean.

“Hey, you guys,” I swallowed. “Look — ” And pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a T-shirt that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. His hair clung tight as a cap to his scalp, as if painted on, and his face looked like a brick of sweating cheese.

Gus got to the kid first. “You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll.” He punched its stomach. “It’s got straw inside it.”

“It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo.

And he kicked at a glistening bulb of what did appear to be straw beneath the doll’s slumping face. A little hill. It regarded its own innards expressionlessly, its glass eyes twinkling. Mondo shrieked again.

I followed the scarecrow’s gaze down to its lost straw: dark gold and chlorophyll green strands were blowing loose, like cut hair on a barbershop floor. Some of the straw had a jellied black look. How long had this stuff been outside of him, I wondered — how long had it been inside of him? I looked up, searching the boy scarecrow for a rip. A cold eel-like feeling was thrashing in my belly. That same morning, while eating my Popple breakfast tart, I’d seen a news shot of a U.S. soldier calmly watching blood spill from his head. Calm came pouring over him, at pace with the blood. In the next room, I could hear my ma getting ready for work, singing an old pop song, rattling hangers. On TV, one of the soldier’s eyes was lost behind the sticky pink sheet. The camera closed in; a second later the footage switched to the trees of a new country under an ammonia blue sky. I couldn’t understand this — where was the cameraman or the camerawoman? Who was letting his face dissolve into calm?

“Let’s cut it down!” screamed Mondo. I nodded.

“Nah, we better not.” Juan Carlos looked around the woods sharply; he looked up, as if there might be a sniper hidden in the pin oak. “What if this” — he pushed at the doll — “belongs to somebody? What if somebody is watching us, right now? Laughing at us…”

It was late September, a cool red season. The scarecrow was hung up on the sunless side of the oak. The tree was a shaggy pyramid, sixty or seventy feet tall, one of the “famous” landmarks of Friendship Park; it overlooked a ravine — a split in the seam of the bedrock, very narrow and deep — that we called “the Cone.” Way down at the bottom you could see a wet blue dirt with radishy pink streaks along it, as exotic looking to us as a sea floor. Condoms and needles (not ours) and the silver shreds of Dodo Potato Chip bags and beer bottles (mostly ours) had turned the Cone into a sort of sylvan garbage can. The tree spread above it like a girl playing at suicide, quailing its many fiery leaves.

Years ago, before we started loitering here in a dedicated way, the pin oak had been planted to commemorate an Event — there was an opal plaque nestled in its roots. We knew this much but we didn’t know more — some delinquent, teenaged forefather of ours had scratched out everything but the date, “1957.”

The plaque looked like a lost little moon in the grip of the tree’s arachnid roots. I always felt a little cheated by the plaque; it was a confusing kind of resentment; I didn’t really care about the “why” of the tree at all but I didn’t like how this plaque was an open secret either, a mystery that was always itching at us. It bothered me that we were so poorly informed about the oak’s first purpose that we did not even have the option of forgetting it, using our patented June 1 method, whereby we expulsed a year of school facts from our brains in spasms of summer amnesia. (Harriet Tubman — did he invent something? The War of 1812 — why did we fight that one? For tea? Against Mexico or Sicily?) Forgetting was one of my favorite things to do at Camp Dark; I felt like a squid, sending jets of inky thoughts into the Cone. The plaque was illegible, but the oak’s glossy trunk was covered in gougings that you could easily read: V hearts K; Death 2 Asshole Jimmy Dingo; Jesus Saves; I Wuz Here!!! We’d added ourselves:

MONDO + GUS + LARRY + J.C. = CAMP DARK

The “deep end” of Friendship Park we called Camp Dark. Camp Dark was Anthem’s lame try at an urban arboretum, a sort of surprise woods bordered by gas and fire stations and a condemned pizza buffet. THE PIZZA PARTY IS CANCELED read a sign above a bulldozer. These central acres of Friendship Park were filled with young deciduous trees and naive-seeming bluish squirrels. They chittered some charming bullshit at you too, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the true woods, which were about an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown, according to Juan Carlos — only Juan Carlos had been out there. (“There was a river with a purple fish shitting in it,” was all we got out of him.)

Recently, the Anthem City Parks & Recreation had received a big grant, and now the playground looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: All the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam. To absorb the risk of a lawsuit, said Juan Carlos; one night, at Juan Carlos’s suggestion, we all took turns pissing hooch onto the harm-preventing pillows. Our park had a poopstrewn dog run and an orange baseball diamond; a creepy pond that, like certain towns in Florida, had at one time been a very popular winter destination for geese and ducks but which had for some reason fallen out of fashion in the waterfowl society; and a Conestoga-looking covered picnic area. Gus claimed to have had sex there last Valentine’s Day, on the cement tables — “pussy sex,” he said, authoritatively, horrifying us, “not just the mouth kind.” Our feeling was, if Gus really had tricked a girl into coming to our park in late February, they most likely talked about noncontroversial subjects, like the coldness of snow and the excellence of Gus’s weed, while wearing sex-thwarting parkas.

We’d started hanging at Friendship Park four years ago, when we were ten years old. Back then we played actual games.We hid and we sought. We did benign stuff in trees. We amassed a stupidly huge plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the pin oak, including a Sounds of Warfare Blazer that as I recall required something like sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a female guinea pig putting a brave face on her tuberculosis. Those were innocent times. Then we got shunted into Anthem’s combo middle-and-high school, and now we came here to drink beers and antagonize one another. Biweekly we shoplifted liquor and snacks, in a surprisingly orderly way, rotating this duty. (“We are Communists!” shrieked Mondo once, pumping a fistful of red-hot peanuts into the sky, and Juan Carlos, who did homework, snorted, “You are quite confused, my bro.”)

Participation levels varied, but usually it was the core four of us at Camp Dark: Juan Carlos Diaz, Gus Ainsworth, Mondo Chu, and me, Larry Rubio. Pronounced “Rubby-oh” by me, like a rubber ducky toy, my own surname. My dad left when I turned two and I don’t speak any Spanish unless you count the words that everybody knows, like “hablo” and “no.” My ma came from a vast hick family in Pensacola, pontoon loads of uncle-brothers and red-haired aunts and firecrotch cousins from some nth degree of cousindom, hordes of blood kin whom she renounced, I guess, to marry and then divorce my dad. We never saw any of them. We were long alone, me and my ma.

Juan Carlos had tried to tutor me once: “Rooo-bio. Fucker, you have to coo the ‘u’!”

My ma couldn’t pronounce my last name either, making for some awkward times in Vice Principal Derry’s office. She’d reverted to her maiden name, which sounded like an elf municipality: Dourif. “Why can’t I be a Dourif, like you?” I asked her once when I was very small, and she poured her drink onto the carpet, shocking me — this was my own kindergarten trick to express a violent unhappiness. She left the room and my shock deepened when she didn’t come back to clean up the mess. I watched the stain set on the carpet, the sun cutting through the curtain blades. Later, I wrote LARRY RUBIO on all of my folders. I answered to RUBIO, just like the stranger my father must be doing somewhere. What my ma seemed to want me to do — to hold onto the name without the man — felt very silly to me, like the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote holds on to the handle (just the handle) of an exploded suitcase. Latching into pure space.

The scarecrow boy was my same height, five foot five. He had pale glass eyes and a molded wax or plastic face; under his faded brown shirt his “skin” was machine-sewn sackcloth, straw stuffed. So: He had a scarecrow’s body but a boy’s head. I took a step forward and punched his torso, which was solid as a bale of hay; I half expected a scream to roll out of his mouth. I looked down — I was standing on a snarl of his guts. Would a scarecrow’s organs look like this? I wondered. Like birds’ nests. A grass kidney, a flammable heart. Now I understood Mondo’s earlier wail — when the scarecrow didn’t cry out, I wanted to scream for him.

“Who stuck those on its face?” Mondo asked. “Those eyes?”

“Whoever put him here in the first place, jackass.”

“Well, what weirdo does that? Puts eyes and clothes on a giant doll of a kid and ropes him to a tree?”

“A German, probably,” said Gus knowingly. “Or a Japanese. One of those sicko sex freaks.”

Mondo rolled his eyes. “Maybe you put it here then, Ainsworth.”

“Maybe he’s a theater prop? Like, from our school?”

“He’s wearing some nasty clothes.”

“Hey! He’s got a belt like yours, Rubby!”

“Shut up.”

“Wait — you’re going to steal the scarecrow’s belt? That ain’t bad luck?”

“Oh my God! He’s got on underwear!” Mondo snapped the elastic, giggling.

“He has a hole,” Juan Carlos said quietly. He’d slid his hand between the doll’s sagging shoulders and the tree. “Down here, in his back. Look. He’s spilling straw.”

Juan Carlos was jerking stuffing out of the scarecrow and then, in the same panicky motion, trying to cram it back inside the hole; all this he did with a sly, aghast look, as if he were a surgeon who had fatally bungled an operation and was now trying to disguise that fact from his staff. This straw, I recognized with a chill, was fresh and green.

“You got your ‘oh shit!’ face on, J.C.!” Gus laughed. I managed a laugh too, but I was scared, scared. The straw was scary to me, its pale colors and its smell. A terrible sweetness lifted out of the doll, that stench you are supposed to associate with innocent things — zoos and pet stores, pony rides. He was stuffed to the springs of his eyeballs. Put it all back, Juan, I thought hopefully, and we’ll be OK.

“Uh. You dudes? Do scarecrows have fingers?” Mondo held the scarecrow’s left hand, very formally, as if he were suddenly in a cummerbund accompanying the scarecrow to the world’s scariest prom.

“I mean, usually,” he added lamely, as if this were a normal topic to solicit our opinions on, the prevalence of scarecrow fingers.

“His body is soft.” Gus demonstrated this for us, punching it. “But his face is, like, a wax? Not-straw. Some other shit. Plastic.”

Only it wasn’t generic, like a mall mannequin. Even the dark blue eye color looked particular, familiar. His features were weird and specific, like the face of a wax actress in a museum. Someone you were supposed to recognize.

“What the hell?” Gus whispered, twisting the scarecrow’s face by its plastic chin. The chin was pocked with a fiery braille of blemishes and cuts, so convincingly nasty that you half expected them to ooze. The longer I stared at him, the less real I myself felt. Was I really the only one who remembered his name?

“Weird. His face is cold.” Juan Carlos ran a long finger down the scarecrow’s crooked nose.

“He’s not wearing his glasses,” I mumbled. Now that I knew who this was I was afraid to touch his face, as if the humid wand of my finger might bring him to life.

“His face is hard,” Mondo confirmed, knocking on the scarecrow’s forehead. “His eyes are…uh-oh. Oops.”

Mondo turned to us, grinning.

“Oh shit!” Gus shook his head. “Put them back in.”

“I can’t. The little threads broke.” Mondo held out the eyes: two grape-sized balls, an amethyst glass soaked blue by the last light of day. “Any of you bitches know how to sew?” Intense pinks were filtering through the autumn mesh of the oak. It was dusk, sunset; the park was now officially closed. “Seriously?” Mondo asked, sounding a little panicky now. “Anybody got glue or something?”

I stared at the sprigs of thread where the scarecrow’s eyes had been. Now his face was putty white from the “T” of his nose to his forehead. A little firefly was lighting up the airless caves of the doll’s nostrils, undetected by the doll. You’re even blinder now, I thought, and a heavy feeling draped over me.

Then I heard the question I’d been dreading: “Don’t we know this kid?”

Now Mondo stood on his toes and peered into the scarecrow’s eyes with a shrewdness that you did not ordinarily expect from Mondo Chu — his mind was lost inside one of those baby-fat faces that he couldn’t seem to age out of, with big slabby cheeks that squeezed his eyes into a narcoleptic squint, although outside of school Mondo could get pretty annoyingly energetic. There was some evidence that Mondo did not have the happiest home life. Mondo was half Chinese, half something.We’d all forgotten, assuming we’d ever known.

In fact, as a “we,” Camp Dark was pretty fiercely uninterested in the details of its members’ lives outside of school or beyond the fenced urban woods of Friendship Park. Silence policed the shady meeting point under our oak. I didn’t know, for example, if Juan Carlos’s big sister was pregnant or just getting large on Hershey’s Kisses, or how Mondo got the yellowish bruises that covered his flabby upper arms. Inside of our “we,” nobody would ask you about your ma’s cancer or your alcoholic aunt, your moon-eyed half sister, your family’s debts, nobody commented on the emotions that might fly across your face and raise your fists and nobody demanded a bullshit weather report from you either, a reason for your anger — not like the teachers, who were always demanding that sort of phony meteorology from us. We cracked jokes together in Camp Dark, but I think it was the silence, all those unasked questions, that bound us. At school we beat down kids as a foursome and this too we did in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the red-brick Science Building — this march could look a little medieval, like some Gallows Day parade, each of us taking up an arm or a leg — and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. For us, this process was a necessary evil. We were like four factory guys, manufacturing the quiet, a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble around our fists like glue.

It was Mondo who cracked the mystery. He didn’t solve it, I don’t mean that — in fact he made the mystery much worse. That’s what I pictured anyhow, when Mondo tapped the mystery with his little eureka! hammer — hairline cracks appearing in a round, solid shell. Yolk came oozing out of the mystery, covering all of our hands, so that we became involved.

“Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels and let out a bee-stung cry. “It’s Eric.”

“Oh.” I took a step away from the tree.

Juan Carlos paused with one hand lost in the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.

“Who the fuck is Eric?” Gus snarled.

Then Mondo, grinning loonily like a Jeopardy! champ, grabbed the scarecrow’s left arm by the wrist and made it shake hands with the cold air between us. “Don’t you assholes remember him? Eric Mutis.”

Sure, we remembered him now: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried by Coach Leyshon from the room. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October of the previous year, a transfer kid. One day Mutant was sitting in the back row of our homeroom; the teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey, and generally the teachers made the New Boy or the New Girl parade their strangeness for us; but Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, much weirder even than the Guatemalan New Boy, Eric Mutis arrived in exile. He sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.

In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him — there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his oblivion, his froggy lashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Jilly Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a harpy. “What smells?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Jilly, thrilling us with her acid tone, and only Eric Mutis would blink his large, bovine eyes at her and say, “I don’t smell it, Jilly,” in that voice like thin bluemilk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, incapable of shame. Even then, at age twelve, before our glands made us all swell into monsters, I felt allergic to the kid. His ugliness panned into a weird calm, and this combination was like a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too — the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.

The courts, the grass behind them — that was where Camp Dark came to order. We did what you might call these “alterations” on the blacktop. At recess we’d descend on Eric Mutis like deranged tailors, trailing these little threads of Eric’s spittle and Eric’s blood. But his costume — the smoggy yellow cloud of his hair, his sickly bus-terminal complexion — it was his skin. We could not free him, we could not torch the costume off him. He wouldn’t change, no matter how often we encouraged him to do so with our insults and the instruction of our “pranks” and fists. We stole his Hoops sneakers, hung them up on the flagpole, we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times that year, his hideous glasses, with frames the width of my TV set; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same eyesore frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops sneakers, fresh from the Starmart box. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy — or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?

“Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop — closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his blue bubblegum, and what we called “Anthem cologne” — like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stunk of diesel and fried doughnut grease and the sweet, fecal waft off manhole covers.

“Why don’t you learn?” And I Goliath crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.

“Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”

“Are you retarded?” I marveled. “You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was our blood actually, but his voice and his monotone blue eyes made me furious. “WAKE UP!” I backed away to give Gus space to deliver an encore kick. “Listen, Mutant: DO…NOT…WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”

And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?

Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutant seemed terribly oblivious of his own appearance — that was the problem — he wore that stuff witlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we took Eric Mutis around behind the red-brick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even — his blue eyes drifting, unplugged — that it was happening to him.

In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. The school bathroom was tiled, naval blue for boys, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john; I’d cracked younger kids’ skulls on those tiles before. Eric the Mute knew this much about me — that was the one lesson he took.

“Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him.

More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)

“Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, which was his baseball signal to the rest of us that he’d lost it, his patience with our dithering voices, his faith in debate fertilizing an action. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here — ”

“The scarecrow,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.

Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? One way to learn what he is supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”

“But, Gus.” I swallowed. “What if something does come to Anthem?”

“Well, Rubby…” Gus shrugged. “Then we’ll have some fascinating new information about this scarecrow, won’t we?”

We had been riffing on this: What threat, exactly, was this scarecrow keeping away from Friendship Park? Not crows, that was for sure; but what was the Anthem equivalent, the urban crow? Rabid cats? A flock of mob gunmen, or sewer rats? Those poor Canada geese that kept getting sucked into the engines of jet planes at the Anthem airport? (That one was my idea.) What could a doll of a child scare away, a freak like Mutant?

The oak shivered above us; it was almost nine o’clock. Police, if they came upon us now, would write us up for trespassing. Come upon us, officers. Maybe the police would know the protocol here, what you should do if you found a scarecrow of your classmate strung up in the woods.

“I’m with Larry. I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore, either,” said Mondo. “To cut him down. What if something really bad happens? It would be our fault.”

Juan Carlos nodded. “Look, whoever put this up is one sick fuck. I don’t want to mess with the property of a lunatic…”

Juan was still enumerating his understandable concerns when Gus, who had fallen quiet, walking around the tree and finishing everybody’s brews, stood up. A knife sprang out of Gus’s pocket, a four-inch knife that nobody had known Gus carried with him, one of the kitchen tools we’d seen used by Gus’s pretty mom, Mrs. Ainsworth, to butterfly and debone chickens. Down went Eric.

“GUS!”

We stood up just as the scarecrow shucked the oak permanently, and plummeted into the sky.Watching him go over, I felt dread without a drop of surprise — it felt like we were watching a horror movie that we’d seen a thousand times before, The Scarecrow of Eric Mutis Dives Into the Cone! I can still see the stars swarming around the pin oak and Gus sawing at the rope, Gus giving Eric Mutis’s doll a little push — joylessly, dutifully, like a big brother behind a swingset — the plaque catching at him like a stumbling stone, illegibly flashing, the doll launching over the roots, headfirst, into a night that shrank him, into the Cone’s collapsing sky, the doll falling and falling and then, not. He landed on the rocks with a baseball crack. I don’t know how to describe the optical weirdness of the pace of this event — because the doll fell fast — but the doll’s descent felt unnaturally long to me, as if the forest floor were, just as quickly, lunging away from Eric Mutis. Somebody almost laughed. Mondo was already on his knees, peering over the edge, and I joined him: The scarecrow looked like a broke-neck kid at the bottom of a well. Facedown, his limbs all scrambled on an oily soak of black and maroon leaves and strata of our glass. Had it lost more straw? Black plants waved down there and I couldn’t tell which weeds might have belonged to the scarecrow. One of his white hands had gotten twisted all the way around. He waved at us, palm up, spearing the air with his long, unlikely fingers.

“OK,” Gus said, sitting back down next to where he’d dug his red beer can into the leaves, as if we were at the beach. “You’re all welcome. Everybody needs to shut up now. Let’s start the clock on this experiment.”

We emerged from the park at Gowen Street and Forty-eighth Avenue. A doorman waved at us from a fancy apartment building. Awnings sprouted above all of the windows like golden claws. When the streetlights clicked on without warning, I think we all stifled a scream. We stood on the dirty tarmac of the sidewalk, bathed in a deep-sea light. Even on a nonscarecrow day I dreaded this, the summative pressure of the good-bye moment — but now it turned out there was nothing to say. We split off in a slow way, a slow ballet — a moth, watching the four of us from above, would have seen us as a knot dissolving over many moth centuries underneath the green air. It occurred to me that, given the lifespan of a moth, one kid’s twitch would occupy a year of insect time. The scarecrow of Eric Mutis would have twirled down for moth aeons.

“What the hell is so funny, kid?” the doorman shouted. I had been spawning a slow smile on my face, imagining the decades of moth time going by as my smile grew: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, sleigh bells ring, Mr. Moth, here comes spring…

That night marked a funny turning point for me; I started thinking about Time in a new way, Time with a capital “T,” this substance that underwent mysterious conversions. On the walk home I watched moths go flitting above the stalled lanes of cars. I called Mondo on the phone, something I never did — I was surprised I even had his number. We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. You know, I never tried to force Eric Mutis from my mind — I never had to. Courteously, the kid had disappeared from my brain entirely, about the same time he vanished from our school rolls. Were it not for the return of his scarecrow in Camp Dark, I doubt I would have given him a second thought.

I am in the shower, Eric Mutis is where? I tied myself to mental train tracks, juxtaposing my activities against Eric Mutis’s imaginary ones — was he blowing out twisty red and white birthday candles, doing homework? What hour of what day was it, wherever Eric Mutis had moved? I pictured him in Cincinnati squiggling mustard on a ballpark frank, in France with an arty beret (I pictured him dead too, in a dreamy, compulsive way, the concrete result of which was that I no longer ate breakfast). “You don’t want your Popple, Larry?” my ma screamed. “It’s a Blamberry Popple!” The Blamberry Popple looked like a pastry nosebleed to me. What was Eric eating? How soundly was he sleeping? (“Did we break Mutant’s nose?” I asked Gus in homeroom. “At least once,” Gus confirmed.) Now each of my minutes cast an hourglass shadow and I divided into two.

But inside the Cone, as it turned out, the scarecrow of Eric Mutis was subdividing even faster.

Every day for a week, we went back to stare at the facedown scarecrow of Eric Mutis in Friendship Park. It lay there in the sun, sleeping it off. Nothing much happened. There was a mugging at the Burger Burger; the robber got a debit card and a quart of milkshake. Citywide, bus fare went up five cents. A drunk driver in the Puerto Rican day parade draped a Puerto Rican flag over his windshield like a patriotic blindfold and crashed through a beautiful float of the island of Puerto Rico. Nothing occurred on the crime blotter that seemed connected to Eric Mutis, or Eric Mutis’s absence. No strange birds flew out of exile, no new shapes came to roost in the oaks of Friendship Park now that the scarecrow’s guard was down. Downed by us, I thought angrily, like a cut power line. Drowned in air, like the world’s stupidest experiment.

Had Eric Mutis’s scarecrow been babysitting a crop? Some Jersey version of the Amish seven grains? Years of city trash and plastic guns, that was Camp Dark’s harvest. I thought of the slippery weeds crushed underneath his face, the rocks and cans glowing like blind fish in the ravine.

“Did Eric have a dad? A mom?”

“Wasn’t he a foster kid?”

“Where did he move to again?”

“Old Mucusoid never said — did he? He just disappeared.”

At school, the new guidance counselor could not help us find our “little pal” — the district computers, she said, had been wiped by a virus. Mutis, Eric: no record. His yearbook slot was an empty navy egg between the school-mandated grimaces of Omar Mowad and Valerie Night. ABSENT, it read in red letters. We consulted with Coach Leyshon, whom we found face deep in a vending-machine cheeseburger behind the dugout.

“Mutant?” he barked. “That dipshit didn’t come back?” We broke into Vice Principal Derry’s file cabinet and made depressing, irrelevant discoveries about the psychology of Vice Principal Derry — his top drawer contained about five million pointless green pencils, a Note to Moi! memo, in pen, that read BUY PENCIL SHARPENER, and a radiant mélange of glues.

Next we consulted the yellow pages at the city library, Ma Bell’s anthology of false alarms — we thought we found Mutant in Lebanon Valley, Pennsylvania. Voloun River, Tennessee. Jump City, Oregon. Jix, Alaska, a place that sounded like a breakfast cereal or an attack dog, had four Mutis families listed. We called. Many dozens of Mutises across America hung up on us, after apologizing for their households’ dearth of Erics. America felt vast and void of him.

Gus whammed the phone into its receiver, disgusted. “It’s like that kid hatched out of an egg. What I want to know is: Who made him into a scarecrow?”

Again the yellow pages got consulted. This time we weren’t even sure what sort of listing to scout for. Who made a doll of a boy — some modern Mary Shelley? An artist, a child taxidermist? We looked for ridiculous things: SCARECROW REPAIR, WAX KIDS.

I found an address for a puppeteer who had a workshop in Anthem’s garment district. Gus biked out there and did reconnaissance, weaving around the bankers’ spires of downtown Anthem and risking the shortcut under the overpass, where large, insane men brayed at you and haunted shopping carts rolled windlessly forward. He spent an hour circling the puppeteer’s studio, trying to catch him in the act of Dark Arts — because what if he wasmaking scarecrows of us? But the puppeteer turned out to be a small, baldman in a daffodil print shirt; the puppet on his table was a hippopotamus, or perhaps some kind of lion. This Gus learned on his twentieth revolution around the workshop, at which time the puppeteer lifted the window, gave a friendly wave, and told Gus that he had just telephoned the police.

“Great,” sighed Juan Carlos. “So we still have no clue who made that doll.”

“But how the fuck you going to confuse a hippo and a lion, bro!” Mondo grumbled. Often Mondo’s reactions would miss the mark entirely and slam into a non sequitur, as if his rage were a fierce and stupid bird that kept landing on the wrong tree, whole woods away from the rest of us.

“Chu, you have a brain defect.” Gus stared at him. “Something that cannot be helped.”

“Maybe Mutant did it,” I said, almost hopefully. I wanted Eric to be safe and alive. “Did he know that we hang out in the park? Maybe he roped the scarecrow there to screw with us.”

“Maybe it was Vice Principal Derry,” said Juan Carlos. “One time, I’m walking to the bus, and I see Mutant in Vice Principal Derry’s office. Through that window that faces the parking lot, right? And I sort of thought, ‘Oh, good, he’s getting some help.’ But then Derry catches me looking, right? And he stands up, he’s fucking pissed, he shuts the blinds. It was so weird. And I saw the Mute’s mug — ” I could see it too, Mutant’s leech white face behind the glass, I had seen it framed in Derry’s office window, Eric Mutis swallowed in Derry’s leather chair, wearing his queer gray glasses. “And he looked…bad,” he finished. “Like, scared? Worse than he did when we messed with him.”

“Why was he in Derry’s office?” I asked, but nobody knew.

“I saw him get picked up from school,” Mondo volunteered. “After second period, you know, cause he had one of his twitch fests? The, uh, the seizures? And this dude in the car looked so old! I was like, Mutant, is Darth Vader there your dad?”

This too was something we all suddenly remembered seeing: a cadaverous man, a liver-spotted hand on the steering wheel of a snouty green Cadillac, tapping a cigar, and then Mutant climbing into the backseat, the rear window as foggy as aquarium glass and the Mute’s head now etched dimly behind it. He always climbed into the backseat, never used the passenger door, we agreed on that. We all remembered the cigar.

Gus hadn’t stopped frowning — it had been days since he’d told a truly funny joke. “Where did Mutis live in Anthem? Does anybody remember him saying?”

“East Olmsted,” said Mondo. “Right? With a crazy aunt.” Mondo’s eyes widened, as if his memory were coming into focus. “I think the aunt was black!”

“Chu,” Juan Carlos sighed. “That is not your memory. You are thinking of a Whoopi Goldberg movie. Nah, Mutant’s parents were rich.”

“Oh my God!” Mondo clapped a hand to his face. “You’re right! That was a great movie!”

Juan Carlos directed his appeal to Gus and me. “Kid was loaded. I just remembered. I’m, like, ninety percent sure. That’s why the Mute pissed us off so bad…wasn’t it? Dressing like he was on welfare and shit. I think they lived in the Pagoda. Serious.”

I almost laughed at that — the Pagoda was an antislum, a castle of light. Eric Mutis had never lived in the Pagoda’s zip code. In fact, I had visited the house where Eric lived. Just one time. This knowledge was like a wild thumper of a rabbit inside me. I was amazed that no one else could hear it.

Wednesday morning, I went to Friendship Park on an empty stomach, alone. The sun came with me; I was already an hour late for songs with Miss Verazain in Music I, a class that I was certainly failing, since I stood in the back with Gus and made a Clint Eastwood seam with my lips and sang only in my mind. It was the class I loved.

That day we were set to sing some classical stuff, words floating uselessly on the surge of one of those “B” or “C” composers, Bach or maybe Chopin, these dead men whose songs sawed through time with violins and uncorked a forest to let a soft green light flood out, and into the voices of my friends — back then I would have said that Music I calmed me down better than pot and I didn’t like to miss it. But I had my own business with the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. I’d been having dreams about both Erics, the real one and the doll. I twisted on my pillow and imagined it loaded with straw. In one dream, I got Coach Leyshon’s permission to sub myself in for him, lashing my body to the pin oak and eating horsey fistfuls of a bloodred straw; in another, I watched the doll of Eric Mutis go plunging into the Cone again, only this time when his scarecrow hit the rocks, a thousand rabbits came bursting out of it. Baby rabbits: squeamish, furless thumbs of pink in the night, racing lemming quick under the oaks of Camp Dark.

“Eric?” I called softly, well in advance of the oak. And then, almost inaudibly: “Honey?” in a voice that was not unlike my own ma’s when she opened my bedroom door at night and called my name but clearly didn’t want to wake me, wanted instead who-knows-what? A squirrel watched me with an aggravating fearlessness as I entered Camp Dark, scratching its chest fur like a man in a soiled little shirt. I kicked it away and got on my knees and held on to the oak’s roots like my bike’s handlebars, peering down into the Cone.

“Oh my God.”

Whatever had attacked the scarecrow in the night had been big enough to tear his arm off at the root. Green and beige straw spewed out of the hole. You’re next, you’re next, you’re next, my heart screamed. I straightened and ran and I didn’t slow down until I passed under the stone arch of Friendship Park and saw the violet-gray speck at the bottom of the hill that became the glass umbrella of the #22 bus stop. I did not stop until I burst into Music I, where all of my friends were doing their do re mi work. I pushed in next to Gus and collapsed against our wall.

“You’re very late, Señor Rubio,” said Miss Verazain disgustedly, and I nodded hard, my eyes still stinging from the cold. “You’re too late to be assigned a role.”

“I am,” I agreed with her, hugging my arm.

There was one day last December, right before the Christmas break, where we got him behind the Science Building for a game that Mondo had named Freeze Tag. The game was pretty short and unsophisticated — we made a kid “It,” the way you’d identify an animal as a trophy kill, if you were a hunter, or declare a red spot “the bull’s eye,” so that you could shoot it:

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

We’d grinned and our four bodies in our white gym shirts made a grin too, where we’d gathered in the witchy grass of the back-lot ball field. We were up to our knees in the grass, advancing. Two halves of a circle. We didn’t corner the kid, Mutis, we made actual lips around him. From above we would have looked like a mouth, closing. The rules were simple and yet Eric Mutis stared at us with his opaque blue eyes, staked to the field, and gave no sign of understanding it.

“You’re it,” I’d explained to Eric.

Everybody followed me toward Camp Dark in a line.

“Here comes the army!” cackled a bum with whom we sometimes shared beers, one of a rotating cast of lost men whom Gus called the Bench Goblins. He had a long stirrup-shaped face that grinned and grinned at us when we told him about the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. Long fingers brushed at the oatmeal of wet newspapers that covered his cheeks.

“No,” he said, “I don’t see nobody come this way with no doll.”

“One week ago,” I prodded, but you could tell that this unit didn’t mean much to the guy. He had amassed a slippery skin of newspapers on his legs with headlines from early August.

All last night it had rained; the leaves were shining, the red playground foam looked like a giant’s dental equipment. We marched forward. I wasn’t the oldest or the tallest but I was the leader now, and why? Just because I knew the bad scene waiting for us behind the treeline. And, in fact, I knew a little more about the real Eric Mutis than I was letting on. I had some brewing theories, nothing I was ready to voice, about why the scarecrow had arrived in our city. It is a very good thing that we elect our presidents in America, I thought, because this had to be the wrong basis for picking a leader — if I was at this particular moment the best informed about the danger we were heading toward, I was also the worst scared.

“So what do you think did it, Rubby?” Gus asked.

“Yeah. An animal, like?” Mondo’s eyes were gleeful. “Is it all clawed up?”

“You’ll see. I dunno, guys,” I mumbled. “I dunno. I dunno.” Each word crawled like a gray mouse up the bars of my ribs to my throat. Mice dug their pink claws into my belly and my heart. (Could mice have done that to the scarecrow of Eric Mutis? Chewed off and carried away a whole arm? Could ants? Maybe the threat was multiple, pestilential, and smaller than I’d thought.)

Hypothesis 1: A human is doing this.

Hypothesis 2: An animal, or several animals, are doing this. Smart animals. Surgical animals. Animals with claws. Scavengers — opossums or something, the waddlesome undertakers of the park.

Hypothesis 3: This is being done by…Something Else.

But when we reached the Cone and they peered over the edge — I hung back, leaning on the oak — everybody started to laugh. Hysterically, a belly-clutching laugh, like three hyenas, Gus first and then the other two.

“Good one, Rubby!” they called.

I was shocked. “Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, shit, that is a good one, Rubby-oh. This is a classic.”

“This is your best yet,” Juan Carlos confirmed with a gloomy jealousy.

“Dang! Larry. You’re like a goddamn acrobat! How did you get down there?”

Eyes were rolling at me in a semicircle. I found myself thinking of Eric the Mute, Eric the Mutant, and what we must have looked like to him.

“Wait — ” I rolled my wet eyes back at them. “You think I did that?” Everybody nodded at me with a strange solemnity, so that for a disorienting second I wondered if they might be right. How did they think I had managed the amputation? I tried to see myself as they must be imagining me: swinging down into the Cone on a stolen phys ed rope, a knife in my back jeans pocket, the moon hanging over Anthem in a crescent, its light washing over the Cone’s rock walls and making the place feel even more like an unlidded casket; I watched myself approach the doll in the reeds, the doll that had been waiting for my attack with a patience rivaled only by the real Eric Mutis’s; I heard the doll’s right arm ripping away as I grunted the knife into the fabric, the moon shining on, the world watching us out of one slit eye, like a cat, a cracked Anthem stray. And then what? Did my friends think I’d swung the arm back to the surface, à la Tarzan? Carried the arm out of the park in my book bag?

“I didn’t do it!” I gasped. “This is not a joke, you assholes…”

I got up and vomited orange Gatorade into the bushes. It was all liquid — I hadn’t been eating. Days of emptiness rose in me and I dry retched again, listening to my friends’ peals of laughter echo around Camp Dark. Then I surprised myself by laughing with them, so uncontrollably and with such relief that it felt like a continuation of the retching — like disgorging my claims of innocence and crawling on my hands and knees back inside our “we.” My lungs filled with and expelled this relief, which I knew would only last as long as we could loft the joke. After a while the laughter didn’t sound connected to any of us. It was like a thunderhead, a stampede — sound poured all over us. We blinked at each other, under the laughter, our mouths open.

“And the Oscar for puking goes to…Larry Rubio!” said Juan Carlos, still doubled over.

A bird floated softly over the park. Somewhere just beyond the treeline, city buses were wheezing a cargoload of citizens to and from work. Some of these were our parents. I felt a little stab, picturing my ma eating her yellow apple on the train and reading some self improvement book, on a two-hour commute to her job at a day nursery for rich infants in Anthem’s far richer sister county. I realized that I had zero clue what my ma did there; I pictured her rolling a big striped ball, at extremely slow speeds, toward babies in little sultan hats and fat, bejeweled diapers.

“My ma’s name is Jessica,” I heard myself say. I could not stop talking now, it was like chattering teeth. “Jessica Dourif. Gus, you met her once, you remember.” I glared at Gus and dared him to say he’d forgotten her.

“Rubio? Why… ,” Juan Carlos said slowly, picking around my body like an Inquisitor, “…the hell…are you telling us this?”

I was staring down at the scarecrow’s shredded body. A gash down his back had hemorrhaged a dirty-looking straw. A golden bird was hopping around down there, pecking and pecking. Now YOU need a scarecrow, I thought, watching the bird savagely tease out straw from the old hole.

“I’ve never met my father,” I blurted. “I can’t even say my own fucking last name.”

“Larry,” Juan Carlos said sternly, standing over me. “Nobody cares. Now you pull yourself together.”

What followed over the course of the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme:

On Tuesday morning, the scarecrow’s hands were gone. Both of them. I pictured the white fingers crawling through the park, hailing a cab, starting a new and incognito life somewhere, perhaps with a family of unwitting tarantulas in New Mexico. Eric Mutis, the real Eric, he too could be living in a painted desert now, with a new father or a new guardian. Or in a mountain town, maybe. Living at a ludicrous altitude, his body half eaten by the charcoal clouds of Aspen. By the sea. In Salamanca, Spain. In a cold cottage on the moon.

By Wednesday, the scarecrow was missing both coruscating Hoops sneakers and both feet. Everybody but me snickered about that one. We’d stolen Eric Mutis’s Hoops maybe a dozen times last year, we stole Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair enraged me. The “H” logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I’m poor! Once Gus and I had gotten a three-day suspension for jerking off the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and his crusty socks and holding an “America the Great” sparkler to his bare feet — just to mess with him.

“Larry!” Gus said, clapping my back. “How did you get out of the Cone with two shoes in your hands? This is some Cirque du Soleil bullshit! You got to try out for the Olympics.” He checked the backs of my arms for fresh nets of scrapes. “What, are you flying down there?”

“I am not doing this,” I said quietly. I was getting hoarse from saying that. I realized with a grim shock that I was leaning against the oak in exactly the spot where we’d found Mutis’s scarecrow.

“Maybe,” I said in a whisper, “we can fish him up…? Hook him out? Maybe we can get down there and, and bury it.”

“Are you crying, bro?”

Everybody complimented me on my “acting.” But they were the actors — believing their easy suspicion, pretending that I was the guy to blame. OnlyMondo would let me see his smile tremble, and I felt a little better, thinking hard at him: Mondo, whatever’s happening down there, I am not behind it, OK?

On Thursday, his second arm was gone. Ripped whole, presumably, from the cloth shoulder, so that you got an unsettling glimpse of the gray straw coiled inside the scarecrow. Not-it, not-it, not-it, I’d been thinking all week, a thorny little crown of thoughts.

“What’s next, Rubby? You going to carry a guillotine down there?”

Not it! I worried I was about to ralph again.

“You bet,” I said. “How well you all know me. Next up, I’m going to climb down there and behead Eric Mutis with an ax.”

“Right.” Gus grinned. “We should follow you home. We’re gonna find Mutant’s arm under your pillow. The fake one, and probably the real one too, you psycho.”

And they did. Follow me home. On a Saturday, after we discovered that the doll’s legs had disappeared — the scarecrow was starting to look like a disintegrating jack-o-lantern, pulpy and crushed, with a sallow vegetable pallor. I was “It.” I was the only suspect. Under a dreary sky we left the scarecrow where it was, everybody but me laughing about how they’d been fucked with, faked out, punked, and gotten.

“You rotten, Rubby-Oh,” grinned Gus.

“Something’s rotten,” agreed Mondo, catching my eye.

Afterward we walked very slowly across the park toward my ma’s apartment on First and Stuckey, where we lived in ear-splitting proximity to the hospital; from my bedroom window I could see the red and white carnival lights of the ambulances. Awake, I was totally inured to the sirens, a whine that we’d been hearing throughout Anthem since birth — that urgent song drilled into us until our own heartbeats must have synced with it, which made it an easy howl to ignore; but I had dreams where the vehicular screams in the URGENT CARE parking lot became the cries of a gigantic, abandoned baby behind my apartment. All I wanted to do in these dreams was sleep but this baby wouldn’t shut up! Now I think this must be a special kind of poverty, low-rent city sleep, where even in your dreams you are an insomniac and your unconscious is shrill and starless.

When we got to my place, the apartment was dark and there was no obvious sustenance waiting for us — my ma was not one to prepare a meal. Some deep-fridge spelunking produced a pack of spicy jerky and Velveeta slices. This was beau food, suitor food, a relic from my ma’s last live-in boyfriend — was it Curtis Black? Manny Somebody? Which one had been the jerky lover? As the son, I got to be on a first name basis with all of these adult men, all of her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way. We folded thirty-two cheese slices into cold taco shells and ate them in front of the TV. Later I’d remember this event as a sort of wake for the scarecrow of Eric Mutis, although I had never in my life been to a funeral.

They searched my apartment, found nothing. No white hands clapping in my closet or anything. No legs propped next to the brooms in the kitchen.

“He’s clean,” shrugged Gus, talking over me. “He probably buried the evidence.”

“I do think we need to go down into the Cone,” I started babbling again, “and bury him. What’s left of him. Please, you guys. I really, really think we need to do that.”

“No way. We are not falling for that,” said Juan Carlos quickly, as if wary of falling into the Cone himself.

Accusing me, I saw, served a real utility for the group — suddenly nobody was interested in researching scarecrows at the library with me, or trying to figure out where the real Eric Mutis had gone, or deciphering who was behind his doppelgänger doll. They already had a good answer: I was behind it. This satisfied some scarecrow logic formy friends. They slept, they didn’t wonder anymore. That’s where my friends had staked me: behind the doll.

“Let’s go there one night, and just see who comes to shred and tear at him like that. We’ll be the scarecrow’s scarecrow, haha… ,” I gulped, staring at them. “And then we’ll know exactly…”

Mondo winced and snapped the TV on.

“Nice try, Rubby!” Gus crunched through a taco shell. The pepper specks that covered the yellow shell looked exactly like the blackheads on Gus’s broad nose. “Oh, I bet you’d love that. Nighttime. Phase Two of your prank. Get us all good in Camp Dark. I can’t wait to see how this all turns out, kid — what sort of Friday the Thirteenth ending you got planned for us. But we are not just going to walk into it, Rubby.”

It felt like we sat there for hours before somebody asked: “What the hell are we watching?” Nobody had noticed or commented when the station switched to pure static. My ma had an ancient, crappy RCA TV, with oven dials for controls and little rabbit ears; I always thought it looked more authentically futuristic to me than my friends’ modern Toshiba sets. Spazzy rainbows moved up and down, imbuing the screen with an insectoid life of its own. Here was the secret mind of the machine, I thought with a sudden ache, what you couldn’t see when the news anchors were staring soulfully at their teleprompters and the sitcom comedy families were making eggs and jokes in their fake houses.

Eric’s face — the face of scarecrow Eric — swam up in my mind. I realized that the random, relentless lightning inside the TV screen was how I pictured the interior of the doll — void, yet also, in a way that I did not understand and found I could not even think about head-on, much less explain to my friends, alive. My apartment was as silent as the rainbowed screen; with the TV on mute you could hear a hard clock tick.

“Hey! Rubio! What the fuck we watching?”

“Nothing,” I snapped back; a wise lie, I thought. “Obviously.”

For three days, little pieces of the doll of Eric Mutis continued to disappear. Once the major appendages were gone, the increments of Eric’s scarecrow that went missing became more difficult to track. Patches of hair vanished. Bites and chews of his shoulders. By Monday, two weeks after we’d found it, over half of the scarecrow was gone; with a sickening lurch I understood that it was too late now, that we were never going to tell anyone about him. Nobody who saw the wreck in the Cone would believe that it had been a doll of Eric Mutis.

“Well, that’s that,” said Juan Carlos in a funny voice, gazing down at the quartered scarecrow. In the Cone, his light spring-and-autumn straw was blowing everywhere now. All that bodiless straw gave me a nervous feeling, like watching a thought that I couldn’t collect. His naked head was still attached to the sack of his torso, both of these elements of Eric Mutis intact and ghoulishly white.

“That’s all, folks,” echoed Gus. “Going once, going twice! Nice work, Rubby.”

I shook my head, feeling nauseated. I’m still not sure how that silence overtook us. How did we know that we’d missed our window to tell an outsider about the scarecrow? Why didn’t we at least discuss it — bringing the police to Friendship Park, or even V.P. Derry? This might have been an option last week but now, as mysteriously as the parts themselves had disappeared, it wasn’t; we all felt it; we hadn’t acted, and now the secret was returning to the ground. Eric Mutis was escaping us again in this terrible, original way.

That Friday, the scarecrow’s head was gone. Now I thought I detected a little ripple of open fear in the others’ eyes. It was me, I realized, that they were afraid of. All of the laughter at my “prank” had fizzled out. I was afraid of my friends — terrified that they might actually be onto something.

“Where did you put it?” Mondo whispered.

“When are you going to stop?” said Juan Carlos.

“Larry,” Gus said sincerely, “that is really sick.”

Hypothesis 4.

I think this knowledge sat on the top of my mind for days and days. But it must have been unswallowed, undigested, like a little white bolus of food on a tongue — because I didn’t exactly know it. Not yet.

“I think we made him,” I told Mondo that night on the phone. I don’t know how, I don’t mean that we, like, stitched him up or anything, but I think that we must be the reason…”

“Quit acting nuts. I know you’re faking, Larry. Gus says you probably made him. My dinner’s ready — ” He hung up.

About the static — sometimes that was all you could see in Eric Mutis’s eyes. Just a random light tracking your fists back and forth, two blue-alive-voids. When we laid him flat in the weeds behind the Science Building, it was that emptiness that made us wild. The overriding feeling I had at these times was that I couldn’t stop hitting him — OK, I shouldn’t be hitting him at all, I’d think, but if I stop I’ll make things worse. The right light would return to his eyes and he would know what I had been doing. Stopping the punishing rhythm, without any warning, I’d risk waking him from a dream. Me too, I’d wake up breathless. Somehow I swear it really did feel like that, like I had to keep right on hitting him, to protect him, and me, from what was happening. Out of the red corner of one eye I could see my own wet fist flying. The slickness on it was our snot and our blood.

Only one time did anybody stop us. “Leave him alone,” said a voice approaching from the awning of the Science Building. We all turned. Eric Mutant, breathing quietly in the weeds below us, rolled his eyes toward the voice.

“You heard me,” the voice repeated, and, miraculously, we had. We stopped. The four of us followed Mutis’s example, and froze. This voice belonged to our librarian, Mrs. Kauder, a woman whose red lipped face and white hair made her shockingly attractive to us. Here she came like a leopardess, flaunting all her bones.

Somebody wiped Eric’s blood onto his own sleeve, a decoy swipe. Now we could credibly asseverate, to the librarian or to Coach Leyshon or to Vice Principal Derry, that our assault on Eric Mutis had been a fight. The librarian fixed her green eyes on each one of us — every one of us except for Eric she had known in elementary school.

“Now you go back to your homerooms,” she said, in this funny rehearsed way, as if she were reading our lives to us from a book. “Now you go to Math, Gus Ainsworth — ” She pronounced our real names so gently, as if she were breaking a spell. “Now you go to Computers, Larry Rubio…” Her voice was as nasally as Eric’s but with an old person’s polished tremble. It was a terribly embarrassing voice — a weak white grasshopper species that we would have tried to kill, had it belonged to a fellow child.

“Remember, boys,” the librarian called after us. “That is a no-no! We do not treat each other that way…” She finished with a liquidy rattle, so that you could almost see the half-sunk moon of her optimism bobbing up and down inside the sentence (this librarian was a forty-year veteran of her carrels and I think that light was going out).

“Now you, Eric Mutis,” the librarian said softly. “You come with me.”

And here’s the thing: That was just a Wednesday. That was nowhere near the worst of what we did to this kid, Mutis. I think we needed the librarian to keep reading us her story of our lives, her good script of who we were and our activities, for every minute of every day — but of course she couldn’t do this, and we did get lost.

“Do you think Eric is alive?” I asked Mondo. We were alone in Camp Dark; Juan Carlos had improbably gotten a job as a Food Lion bag boy and Gus was out with some chick.

Mondo looked up from his Choco-Slurpo, shocked. Even the junior size of the Choco-Slurpo contained a swimming pool of pudding. The junior was like the idiot adult son of the gargantuan “jumbo.”

“Of course he is! He changed schools, Rubby — he’s not dead.” He sucked furiously at chocolate sludge, his eyes goggling out.

“Well, what if he died? What if he was dying all last year? What if he got kidnapped, or ran away? How would we know?”

“Maybe he still lives right around the corner! Maybe he helped you to put the scarecrow up! Is that it, Larry?” he asked, offering me the fudgy backwaters of the Choco-Slurpo.When Gus wasn’t around, Mondo became smarter, kinder, and more afraid. “Are you guys doing this together? You and Eric?”

“No,” I said sadly. “Mutant, he moved. I checked his old house.”

“Huh? You what?” Out of habit, Mondo heaved up to chuck the junior cup into the Cone, our trash can of yore, momentarily forgetting that the Cone was now a sort of open grave for Eric Mutis; with the freakishness of blind coincidence, Mondo happened to look up and notice an inscription on the sunless side of the oak; not new, judging from its scarred and etiolated look, but new to us:

ERIC MUTIS

SATURDAY

The letters oozed beneath an apple green sap and were childishly shaped; the kid had pierced the heart with a little arrow.When I saw this epitaph — because that is how they always read to me, this type of love graffiti on trees and urinals, as epitaphs for ancient couples — my throat tightened and my heart raced in such a way that my own death seemed a likely possibility. Mayday, God! O God, I prayed: Please, if I am going to die, may it happen before Mondo Chu attempts CPR.

“Look!” Mondo was screaming. For a moment he’d forgotten that I was supposed to be the culprit, the engineer of this psychotic joke. “Mutant was here! Mutant had a girlfriend!”

So then I filled in some blanks for Mondo. I offered Mondo the parts of Eric Mutis that I had indeed been hoarding.

Something was alive in the corner. That was the first thing I noticed when I set foot in Mutant’s bedroom: a stripe of motion in the brown shadows near the shuttered window. It was a rabbit. A pet, you could tell from the water bottle wired to its cage bars. A pet was not just some animal, it was yours, it was loved and fed by you. Everybody knows this, of course, but for some reason the plastic water bottle looked shockingly bright to me; the clean good smell of the straw was an exotic perfume in the Mute’s bedroom. “You think this will fit you, Larry?” Eric held out a shrunken, wrinkled sweater that I recognized. “Uh-huh.”

“You better now, Larry?”

“Terrific. Extra super.” I was, in fact, almost out of my mind with embarrassment — I had been riding my bicycle on the suburban side of Anthem, on my way to see a West Olmsted kid who owed me money, when I felt a fierce pain in my side and I went flying over the handlebars — I landed a little way from my bicycle, where I sat in the street watching the front bicycle tire spinning maniacally with a pebble in my fist that turned out to be my tooth. I knew the car — it was the green Cadillac. It was that gargoyle from the school parking lot who had almost killed me. I was still sitting in the road, hypnotized by the blue sea glare on the asphalt, when I watched a pair of Hoops sneakers come jogging toward me.

“Hi, Larry,” he’d said. “You all right? Sorry. He didn’t see you there.”

I had been planning to say: “Is that maniac your dad? Mr. Hit and Run? Your caretaker or whatever? Because I could sue, you know.”

Instead I watched my hand slide inside of Mutant’s hand and form a complicated red-and-white mitt. It was a slippery handshake, my palm bleeding into it, my bike stigmata — I waited for Mutant to say something about that time I smashed his specs. But his ugly, big-eared face lowered to me and then I was on my feet, following him through a scarred wooden door, number 52, the knocker of which was a brass pineapple with filth-encrusted tropical checkers. Tackiness and incoherence, that’s what awaited me in Casa Mutis, as augured by that fruity knocker — the living room was a zombie zone of grime and confusion. Chaos. The furniture was arranged in a way that made it look like a family of illegal squatters, the plaid sofa rearing on its side, even the appliances crouched. Mutant made no apologies but hustled me into a bedroom, his, I guessed; here he was, going through drawers, looking for a change of clothes to lend me. If I went home covered in blood and toting the twisted blue octopus of my bicycle, I explained, my ma, terrified by how close I’d swerved toward death, would murder me. I pulled Mutis’s sweater on. I knew I should thank him.

“That’s a rabbit?” I asked like some idiot.

“Yeah.” Now Eric Mutis smiled with a brilliance that I had never seen before. “That’s my rabbit.”

I crossed the room, in Eric Mutis’s boat-striped sweater, to acquaint myself with Eric Mutis’s caged pet, feeling my afternoon curve weirdly. It was sitting on a little mountain of food, the rabbit. It had piled that food so high that its tall ears had pushed flat against its skull, which I thought made this rabbit look like a European swimmer.

“I think you are spoiling that rabbit, dude.”

Big fifty-pound bags of straw and food pellets filled all the corners of the room, sharing space with less bucolic stuff: a shitty purple tape deck and a vat of roach-zapping spray, grimy cartoon-print pajama pants and underwear that looked like free-range laundry to me, no hamper in sight. Mutis had stocked this place for the apocalypse, turned his room into a bunny stronghold. (Where did Mutis get his rabbit funds from? I wondered. He got the free lunch at school and dressed like a hobo.) Pine straw. Timothy, orchard, meadow. Alfalfa — plus calcium! said one bag below a humongous Swiss cheese–colored rabbit with what must have been, for a rabbit, a bodybuilder’s physique. The rabbit smiled gloatingly at me, flexing muscles you would never suspect a rabbit possessed.

“My Christ, do they put steroids in that alfalfa?” I peeled off the price sticker, feeling like a city bumpkin. “Twenty bucks! You got ripped off!” I grinned. “You need to buy your grass from Jamaica, dude.”

But he had turned away from me, bending to whisper something to the trembling rabbit. Seeing this made me uncomfortable; his whisper was already a million times too loud. I felt a flare-up of my school-day rage — for a second I hated Eric Mutant again, and I hated the oblivious rabbit even more, so smugly itself inside the cage, sucking like an infant at its water nozzle. Did Mutant know what kind of ammo he was giving me? Did he honestly believe that I was going to keep his lovenest a secret from my friends?

I strummed my fingernails along the tiny cage bars. They felt like petrified guitar strings. “What’s his name?”

“Her name is Saturday,” said Eric happily, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Who knows why? Because Eric Mutis had a girl’s pet; because Eric Mutis had named his dingy rabbit after the best day of the week? I’d never seen Eric Mutis say one word to a human girl, I’d never thought of Eric Mutis as a lover before. But he was kicking game to this rabbit like an old pro. Just whispering a love music to her, calling down to her, “Saturday, Saturday.” Behind the cage bars his whole face was changing. Mutant kept changing until he wasn’t ugly anymore. What had we found so repulsive about him in the first place? His finger was making the gentlest circle between the rabbit’s crushed ears, a spot that looked really soft to me, like a baby’s head. The rabbit’s irises were fiery and dust dry, I noted, swiping hard at my own with Eric’s sleeve.

Inside the cage, the rabbit twitched phlegmatically, breathing underneath waves of Eric Mutis’s love. The rabbit didn’t change at all. Not one whisker trembled. This struck me as pretty rude behavior, on the part of the rabbit. I was just a bystander to their little feeding here, and I could feel my heartbeat getting steadily faster. Behind the bars, Saturday was wrinkling her nose into a joyless, princessy expression, as if breathing air were an onerous obligation that she wished she could give up. What was the big attraction here? I wondered. This pet rabbit had all the charm and verve of a pillow with eyes.

“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.

“No.”

But then I realized that I could do this; nobody was watching me but Mutant and his voiceless rabbit. Some hard pressure flew away from me like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my hand through the door of the cage and brushed the green straw off her fur. Still I thought this pet was pretty stupid, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Whatever. Sure.” At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.

Eric Mutis opened a drawer; there was so much dust on the bureau that his elbow left a big tiger stripe on the wood. There was so much dust everywhere in that room that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.

“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had bobby-pinned to her ear, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to the usual, magical algorithm of rabbits coming out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. Even “found,” hugged inside the photograph, the creature was escaping its owner. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared plaintively. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.

“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble at the exact same tempo as the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with every color of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”

“OK.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”

Suddenly we were laughing, hard, even Saturday, with her rumpshaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.

Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter the maple cavity of their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.

“Is that your father?”

Eric’s face was bright red.

“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”

Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.

“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”

I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?

Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”

For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.

“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”

And then we got quiet,me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.

I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d all be long gone — Eric said he’d torn them all down — but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! fliers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST! MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.

“I have news that might be of some interest to you.”

She knew right away.

“Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents too.

“Yes. That is correct. Something has come to light, ma’am.”

I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. For some reason I was putting on my one-hundred-year-old voice, the gruff one I used when I ordered pizzas on the phone and requested the Golden Years senior discount. I heard myself reciting in this false, ancient voice the address of the house where Saturday and Eric slept.

At school, I breathed easier — I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back. “Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful, she loves being home!”

Eric Mutis’s eyes, locked inside the gray corrals of his Medicaid frames, now became a second, dewless glass. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his face showed the pruny strain of a weight lifter, puckering inward and then collapsing, as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks. When we finished with him they had looked like a doll’s eyes — open, staring, but packed solid with frost, like the blue Antarctic. Permafrost around each pupil. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.

“Larry — ,” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.

Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional. “Jesus H., are we graduating from something?” I grumbled. “Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”

Mondo had stopped walking in the middle of the playground. One of the few pieces of playground equipment that had survived the city pogrom and the red foaming were the zoo pogos, the little giraffe and the donkey on a stick. Mondo sat on it; the pogo groaned beneath his weight. He turned and looked at me with the world’s most miserable face.

“I am not going.”

I said nothing.

“I am changing my mind,” he said, the little pogo donkey listing east and west beneath him. He leaned a fat hand on its head and broke its left ear off. “Goddamn it!” He stood up, as if some switch inside him had broken off. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to convince him of anything. I was glad, even, that he was afraid — I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.

“This is stupid,” he mumbled. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”

“Let’s just get this done.”

An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to satisfy whatever force was feeding on the doll of Eric. It wasn’t a good one, but the other option was to leave the scarecrow untouched down there until it disappeared.

“Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there…”

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”

Mondo shook his head. His chubby face looked tumescent and red, not unlike the playground foam, as if his cheeks were swelling preemptively to protect him. Far away a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.

“Shut up, Larry!” Mondo yelped near the duck pond, when a car backfired and I jumped and brushed the flabby skin of his arm. “Watch where you’re going!”

Our flashlight beams crossed and blinded one another. After this we did not talk. Night had fallen hours ago — I didn’t want to be interrupted by anyone. Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the treeline, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere — the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.

“How’s it going tonight, Mutant?” Mondo asked in a nervous voice when we reached the oak. He chucked something into the Cone — the plaster donkey’s ear. It landed squarely on Eric’s back. This was all that was left of the doll of Eric Mutis, his last solid part. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from — it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. The same golden stuff I’d seen bagged that day in the Mute’s dark bedroom. I took a big breath; I wished that I could imitate the scarecrow and leap into the Cone, swim down to him, instead of crawling along the rock wall like a bug.

“It’s moving!” Mondo screamed. “It’s getting away.”

I almost screamed too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away, inch by inch, the zipper twinkling in the moonlight as the pouch pushed over the roots.

“Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”

So Mondo, staring at me with real fear as if we’d never met, as if I’d only been impersonating his good friend Larry Rubio for all these years, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It took almost forty minutes to lower myself into the Cone, but in fact my friends’ suspicions had prepared me for this descent — I had already imagined myself backing into the ravine. I stumbled once and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was OK, I was OK (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu) — and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lacunae between its frozen roots like tiny underworld lights. Much farther away, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball round and came loose.

I crouched over the scarecrow’s torso, which at this moment could not have looked less like a scarecrow’s anything — if you didn’t notice the seam of straw, you might have thought it was a battered sofa cushion. Featureless and beige. I plucked up a green straw and felt a lurching sadness. Anybody with a mirror in his house knows the strangeness of meeting himself, his flaws, in light. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye — the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed — and failed. A face started to stutter together, shattered whitely away.

“You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it sort of less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the relic of the scarecrow, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t Saturday — I couldn’t steal Saturday back, I’d figured that would appease or solve nothing, but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror — “You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?” Many of the products that this pet store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.

Mondo was screaming something at me from the near sky, but I did not turn — I didn’t want to letmy guard down now. I kept my feet planted but sometimes I’d move my arms crazily, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. When I thought a bird was coming our way, I hollered it away. Shapes caught at the corner of my eye.Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a reversal of its birth from my black book bag — first went with its furry ears, its bunching back, the big, velour skis of its feet. I was there, so no birds dove for it or anything. I was standing right there the whole time. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling me faintly from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or come up yet. Owls, I worried, city hawks. The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.

[lonelybirder]

Falling Over: Part II

A week after my MINWR adventure, I once again headed out at the proverbial crack of dawn with Camille – this time for points south. Among the “rare but regular” visitors to central and south Florida are usually one or two Brants. These are nominally northern geese that, along with Snow and Ross’, manage to make their way “too far” south in winter. Having missed one of this year’s Snow Geese at MINWR a few weeks ago, I was keen on getting a look at this Brant.

The mapped location was in St. Lucie County, which is fairly close, but a county I had not previously birded [map]. It turns out that the bird was seen relatively close to the nuclear power plant! Camille and I made some jokes about coming upon a 100 meter tall goose in the lagoon. The role of nuclear power as part of future energy concerns is a serious topic, both state and nation-wide, but I have no specific  reason to worry about this power plant.

Technically, this part of the Indian River Lagoon is known as Herman Bay. You can see one of the nuclear reactor structures in the background.

Just south of the bay the lagoon opens up quite close to the roadway, and it was here that we came upon our first target bird of the day, loosely hanging out with some Red-breasted Mergansers. I hadn’t seen a Brant since living in Massachusetts, and it was Camille’s first ever!

The relative lack of white around the throat could indicate this is the pale-bellied, or Atlantic sub-species, but young birds can sometimes be confusing.

This goose made a couple of close passes to us, obviously curious about us.

Here is our Brant hanging out with some mergansers. None of these birds seemed to be feeding much.

Red-breasted Mergansers are regular winter residents in Florida, but I alway enjoy seeing them, with their punk rock head feathers and bright orange bills.

A female merganser, just after a brief dive.

After looking around a bit for sparrows and winter warblers, it was time to move along to our next destination and target.

Neotropic Cormorants are a regular visitor to south Florida, but at least one bird has been calling Wakodahatchee Wetlands Park [map] home for the past several years. I looked for this bird in June, to no avail, so I was keen to get a look at it.

As far as urban parks go, Wakodahatchee is a real gem, and despite the huge number of visitors, the park is an important rookery for Double-crested Cormorants, Wood Storks, and several heron and egret species. Most of the nests were empty at this point in the Fall, though some noisy cormorant fledglings were testing out their flying abilities.

A Double-crested Cormorant fledgling had made it across the water from its little island, but seemed unsure about making it back. Note the open bill and expanded gular pouch.

The cormorants were fluttering their throats with bills agape, trying to stay cool in the unseasonable heat (it was in the upper 80s). It’s amazing to me how different cormorants can look depending on their bill position.

Bill open, gular pouch expanded.

Streamlined look.

Black-bellied Whistling Ducks (another neotropic bird species that is found more and more regularly in Florida) also live around the park year-round. We saw several groups of them, including one mother duck with a retinue of “teenage” ducklings, resting in some shade.

Momma duck, taking a much needed rest.

One of several immature Black-bellied Whistling Ducks hanging out very near the boardwalk. Soon this bird will acquire the black feathers and pink bill of an adult bird.

We did finally manage to see the Neotropic Cormorant! Where are the photos, you ask? I have none. For the most part my balky camera had behaved enough for some reasonable photos (as I hope you can see, above). But the distant shots of the Neotropic Cormorant seemed too much for it. Camille and I took some long long binocular looks and compared the bird’s bill, tail, gular pouch, and relative proportions to the many Double-crested Cormorants to nail down a positive identification. This marked my first ever look at this species, so I was excited!

Another newcomer to the Florida bird scene is the Gray-headed (or Purple-headed) Swamphen. These robust and aggressive relatives of the gallinules have been rapidly expanding northward from south Florida in recent years. It’s unclear exactly how the species began its infiltration, but it is a common resident in an ever increasing number of areas.

Gray-headed Swamphens have larger, heavier bills than gallinules.

Long toes help swamphens walk on floating vegetation and with grasping submerged roots to feed on. They are omnivores, eating insects and crustaceans, as well as lizards and even small birds.

Wakodahatchee is also well known for its large and photogenic population of feral iguanas. Some large (over 1.5 meters long) specimens were in evidence that day. If you have ever considered having an iguana as a pet, please bear in mind at how large and long-lived these animals are, and don’t commit to caring for one without all the facts. If you do have one and can no longer care for it, please PLEASE, do NOT release them into the wild. Please contact an iguana/reptile rescue organization. Feral animals cause major disruptions to native ecosystems by using up resources (food, habitat, shelter) that many of our local animal friends depend on, often out-competing them. This isn’t the feral animals’ fault, and a solution to the problem is complex and will take some time.

This adult iguana was almost two meters (six feet) long!

Prehistoric handsomeness.

Toward the end of our walk, we managed to come upon a few loose flocks of warblers and gnatcatchers, but the best was flushing out an Orange-crowned Warbler for Camille’s second lifer of the day!

We made a couple of additional stops on our way back north, including Ocean Ridge and John D. MacArthur Beach State Park, both in Palm Beach County, where we had some usual fall birds, including some Lesser Black-backed Gulls.

Immature Lesser Black-backed Gull, showing black bill and pinkish feet.

Adult gull with bright yellow bill and feet. Those, plus the gull’s size and dark gray back, are diagnostic field marks for the Lesser Black-backed Gull.

Here are our eBird lists for the day:

South Ocean Drive/Herman Bay (St. Lucie County) http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S40855643

Wakodahatchee Wetlands http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S40860421

Ocean Ridge area http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S40863738

John D. MacArthur Beach State Park http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S40866411

It was a fun and wonderful day trip, with a lifer (or two) to make it even better. But the weekend adventure wasn’t over yet. Stand by for Part III, where I take the Muros back to MINWR for some late year ducks…

Falling Over: Part II A week after my MINWR adventure, I once again headed out at the proverbial crack of dawn with Camille - this time for points south.

[sachaci]

Kakadu, from where it all started...

Three years ago on our honeymoon, we came to Kakadu. We went on a rough 'n tumble, offroad tour, sleeping in tents and swimming in waterholes. From dawn til dusk we were out amongst the most incredible scenery and rock art, so much so we were safely tucked up in bed by 9pm after limited will to have a few glasses of wine.

We loved it so much we decided then to travel around Australia and experience this red earth. I am not sure if we had any idea we would or that our beautiful son would be with us too.

So here we are, back where that dream started. I was a bit worried, after all, we had seen so much, could Kakadu really live up to the memory?

On our way in we decided to stop at the Mamukala wetlands. A boardwalk to a hide which overlooks a waterhole. Before I even got to the hide, the sound of the birds filled every ounce of the air. Geese, ducks, egrets, kites, lapwings and many many more were all there communicating, in a rabble amongst the pink water lillies, thousands and thousands of them. Over awed at first I just saw a huge crowd but after a while you see the different groups hanging out, feeding, chatting and warding off rivals or would be predators. There was no one else there. Put off by the build up to the monsoon, here I was just me and the birds as Chris was with a sleeping Louis in the car.

Today we went on the Guluyambi Tour at the East Alligator River. Poorly named as there were no alligators but the water was alive with saltwater crocodiles. These incredible predators were out fishing. On a rising tide next to the ford, the large males swam against the current with claws out waiting for mullet or for any motorist who gets stranded in the flow. It wouldn't have been the first time the crew at Guluyambi have had to rescue people from a stranded car encircled by salties. No such drama today but a stern warning for our trip tomorrow into West Arnhemland.

We then went down river being shown trees and plants with a million uses. The hibiscus being a standout. Flowers for an upset stomach, wood for spears and fire sticks, its versatility is impressive. It likes only the brackish water. Further upstream the water colour altered denouncing fresh water, less food for salties and no hibiscus.

After checking in with the spirits, we were welcomed into Arnhemland briefly before heading back. In the distance our aboroginal guide pointed out a spot where Crocodile Dundee was filmed. A rather loud and over bearing Aussie lady pleading to see it up close was quietly told no we couldn't go see the exact spot where it was filmed. Errr did she miss the fact we were on an aboriginal tour.....

After being safely taken back to the jetty, we decided to go back to see Ubirr, a famous rock art site with a panoramic view of the escarpment and flood plain. It didn't disappoint. We saw it last in the dry season and now was lush and green with the first water pooling. The rock art is similiarly impressive. Difficult to date, they can only be categorical about it when there is a historical reference. The appearance of white man, his pipe and gun is therefore fairly obvious and the picture of the Tasmanian Tiger is at least 4,000 years old as it was extinct from that area then. Given though bones have been found here showing there were ancestors living here 65, 000 years ago, it is fair to assume some may be much, much older.

And that was just day 1!! Tomorrow we head into Arnhemland. The ink just dried on our permits we are off to see an arts centre and rock art tour.

[vacationsoup]

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Top 21 Things to do for Free in York

York is one of the UK’s gems. A wonderfully preserved medieval city, walking down its cobbled streets is like taking a trip into the past. With a wealth of attractions, you could happily spend a couple of weeks in York and not get bored. Even better, there’s an abundance of free activities to do and places to visit. Here’s a guide to the top 21 things to do for free in York.

Outdoor Spaces and Activities

The Shambles Possibly the most famous part of York, The Shambles is an old street in the city centre with a number of overhanging timber-framed buildings, some of which date back to the 14th century. The name comes from its old Anglo-Saxon name Fleshammels, literally translating to ‘flesh-shelves’, as the street used to be filled with butchers’ shops and it was possible to see the cuts of meat hanging in the windows. Now the butchers’ shops don’t exist, but as you walk down this delightful cobblestone street, you will find a great mix of shops and restaurants. The street is also the location of the home of Saint Margaret Clitherow, who was married to a butcher on the street and was pressed to death for harbouring Catholic priests; you can still see the priest hole fireplace where she hid priests at number ten, now a cufflinks shop.

  The Snickelways As well as the Shambles, there are dozens of small streets running off the main thoroughfares in the city centre of York. Most of these narrow streets, big enough only for pedestrians to pass down, are medieval, although a few are more modern. The name ‘Snickelways’ is a portmanteau of the words snicket, ginnel and alleyway, coined by Mark W. Jones in 1983. It is cool to wander around the city seeking out all these little streets which usually have quirky names like Mad Alice Lane, Pope’s Head Alley and Grape Lane. York City Walls The impressive city walls of York have guarded the city for over 700 years. At approximately two miles long, they are the longest medieval walls in England. A walk along the walls takes about two hours and takes you past five main gateways, one Victorian gateway, one postern and 45 towers. Free Guided Walking Tours There are a number of companies which offer free walking tours of the city. The Association of Voluntary Guides leads a two-hour tour taking you past some of York’s biggest attractions and sights, including York Minster, Monk Bar, St Mary’s Abbey and The Shambles, as well as telling you many stories about the city and its history. The great thing about this tour company is that not only is the tour completely free, they don’t insist on tips either. Other walking tour companies to consider are: White Rose York Tours; Footprints Tours; and Strawberry Tours. The Cat Trail Since records began in the city of York, cats have been considered lucky and have played a major part in city life. For about two centuries, statues of cats have been placed on buildings in an attempt to frighten away rats and mice and therefore reduce the risk of disease; they were also believed to ward off evil spirits and to generally bring good luck to the occupants of the property. It is possible to download a Cat Trail map from the website of the Cat Gallery; not only will you be able to seek out the cats of York, but it will take you past some of the most beautiful parts of the city. Shambles Market In the heart of the city is Shambles Market, a vibrant market consisting of 85 different stalls selling a wide variety goods, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, clothing, books, cosmetics, flowers, crafts and gifts. There’s also a really great street food area; be sure to try out the North African and Levantine food. The market is open seven days a week from 7am. Shakespeare’s Village Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre is Europe’s firs pop-up theatre. Although you have to pay for the plays which are performed, it is free to wander around the Shakespeare’s Village the theatre is set in. Located in the car park next to Clifford’s Tower, the village captures the atmosphere of a medieval village, with oak-framed, reed-thatched buildings offering the finest Yorkshire food and drink along with wagon entertainment, minstrels and even a lovely Elizabethan garden with flower and herb beds. The theatre and village only pop up in York during the summer months; in 2019, the village and performances will start in June and run until the beginning of September. Museums and Libraries National Railway Museum One of the city’s most popular museums, the National Railway Museum is the largest museum of its kind in Britain. The museum details the history of rail transport and the impact it has had on society. It has a collection of over 100 locomotives and around 300 other items connected with trains and railways. Some of the most impressive trains in its collection include: a 1938 Mallard; a working replica of the steam locomotive the Rocket; an 1846 Coppernob; and a 1976 Shinkansen bullet train, the only one on display outside of Japan. Other highlights of the museum are: the George Cross medal awarded posthumously to train driver Wallace Oakes for staying on a burning train after it had been involved in an accident; the Royal trains, including a carriage that was used by Queen Victoria; and the warehouse, which houses a permanent exhibition telling the story of the Flying Scotsman.

The Bar Convent Founded in 1686, the Bar Convent is England’s oldest living convent. Originally founded as a school for girls, it still has members of the Congregation of Jesus living there today. Housed in grade I-listed 18th-century buildings, they are open to the public. Here you can visit an exhibition on the interesting history of the convent; at the time the convent was founded, practising Catholicism was very dangerous, so the ladies who lived there had to be very secretive about what they were doing. You will learn about radical nun Mary Ward who traversed the Alps twice on foot and get the chance to hide yourself in a priest hole. There’s also a cafe and accommodation on site.

Parks and Gardens Rowntree Park Located just a ten- to 15-minute walk south of the city centre, Rowntree Park is a wonderful place to take a long stroll. As well as the well-kept gardens, there is also a lake, canal and water cascade which are home to a number of swans, ducks and Canada geese. There’s plenty of facilities to make use of, such as tennis courts, a skate park, a basketball court and bowling greens. If the weather is nice, there are also some picnic areas for you to enjoy a meal in the sun. Kids will enjoy the excellent play area which has climbing frames and a zip wire. Dean’s Park Located north of York Minster, the main draw of Dean’s Park is that it offers spectacular views of this fabulous church. Although you need to pay to enter the Minster, it is free to admire the wonderful exterior. It’s a lovely spot to take some time to relax during a hard day’s sightseeing, and during the summer there are places to buy ice cream and soft drinks. Yorkshire Museum Gardens and Observatory Set in the grounds of St Mary’s Abbey, Yorkshire Museum Gardens is a great way to enjoy some peace and quiet in the middle of the city. There’s a lot of things to see in the gardens. It houses the oldest working observatory in Yorkshire, built between 1832 and 1833; the telescope inside was built by Thomas Cooke, the man who went on to build what was then the largest telescope in the world. The observatory is also home to a clock dating back to 1811 which tells the time based on the positioning of the stars; it is the clock that all others in the city were set by back in the 19th century. There is also an abundance of flora and 40 species of bird to spot. Homestead Park One of the most beautiful natural areas of the city, Homestead Park is located in Clifton, 1 ½ miles from the city centre. The park’s main features include: a wild flower meadow; a tree-lined avenue; herbaceous and extensive shrub borders; and the Backhouse pond and rock garden. There’s loads of facilities for children in the popular play area, such as a paddling pool, table tennis, a monkey gym and helter skelter rides. The park also offer leaflets with different walks, such as several tree-trail walks and a wildlife walk. Yorkshire Lavender Technically not in York itself but only a short 15-mile drive away, Yorkshire Lavender Gardens and Specialist Plant Nursery offers some of the best views in the county, being set in the Howardian Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. As well as the award-winning lavender gardens, there is a sculpture park to explore, a lavender maze to get lost in, a sensory garden, and Highland cattle and lambs to pet. Churches York St Mary’s Dating back to 1020, this beautiful medieval church is known for having the city’s tallest spire, standing at 47 metres high. Having been consecrated in 1958, it spent a few decades as a heritage centre before being transformed into a contemporary art gallery in 2004. Exhibitions change regularly and the church makes an ambient place to view the artworks. St Michael le Belfry Known primarily as the church where Guy Fawkes was baptised in 1570, St Michael le Belfry is an impressive building. It is free to enter but tours of the church are run entirely by volunteers, so it is best to check before you visit whether it is possible for you to enter. St Mary’s Abbey Established in 1088, St Mary’s Abbey was once one of the wealthiest and most powerful Benedictine monasteries in England. The history of the abbey connects two very important events in England’s history: the abbey was built by order of William the Conqueror as a way of exerting control of the north, and was destroyed under the reign of Henry VIII as a consequence of his Reformation of the church. Visitors can see the remains of the nave and crossing of the abbey church. The walls surrounding the abbey, built in the 1260s, are considered to be the most complete set of abbey walls in the country.

Festivals and Events York Food and Drink Festival One of the most popular festivals in the city, this year the York Food and Drink Festival are running three events in 2019: the Chocolate Festival in April; the Taster Festival in June; and the main festival in September. It’s a complete not-for-profit event; the festivals and demos are free to enter and any money that is made from food and drinks sales goes back into funding for the festival the next year. Their aim is to promote local food and drink producers, to put York on the map as a culinary destination and to provide educational workshops on food and cooking.

Jorvik Viking Festival Possibly the city’s most famous festival, the Jorvik Viking Festival celebrates York’s history as a Viking settlement. It takes place in February every year to coincide with the Viking festival of ‘Jolablot’, which was a celebration to say goodbye to winter and herald the coming of spring. Although you have to pay for some of the events, there are also free events during the week-long festivities. Events include workshops, talks and re-enactments. York Festival of Traditional Dance Taking place in September every year, for two days you will hear the sounds of jingling bells, tapping clogs and clashing sticks during the York Festival of Traditional Dance. Throughout the city you will see over 100 dancers and musicians performing a wide variety of dance styles. York Christmas Market From November to December every year, York is transformed into even more of a wonderland than it usually is. Tens of wooden chalets set up shop selling all kinds of festive goods. The Christmas standards of mulled wine, hot chestnuts and grilled sausages can be found all around the city centre. Kids will love Santa’s grotto and adults will love Thor’s Tipi, a Scandi pop-up bar complete with warm open fires and cosy fur hides. York is a stunning city to visit whatever the season. And with this list of free things to do, you can enjoy the city for less.

[patrick-charles]

The Boston Dispatch

I first learn there are two dime-sized holes in the soles of my brown leather boots as we slosh down the narrow streets of Cambridge with our necks shrugged into our coats fighting off the sideways sleet of early April.

Winter came back to life in New England. Hands tucked deep inside coat pockets, the mess of a gray slushy winter lie dirty in the entrance of every bar and hotel lobby. The falling, freezing rain glitters in the sky. Cars ride by slowly as if navigating a flood, headlights guiding the way to safety.

We step off the curb near the Dunkin Donuts, the glorious coffee shop of the northeast, the purple and orange signs on every corner you turn, fueling an entire city, region and area. The country must run on this stuff.

Nearly every stop on the T is filthy, dirtier than I remember New York ever being. But it was a respectable kind of dirty, hard-earned and struggling, dependable and determined. The red line screeches to a halt at Porter Square and we pile on, heading into the heart of the city. A dimly lit pub has two open seats at the bar so we pony up and order our first bowl of clam chowder. The Friday crowd is happy and loud. I rub Sam’s leg, she skims her spoon on the surface of her soup with a silver smile.

It’s halftime at the Garden when we run into scalpers who have got two different box tickets in two different sections. I take a piss to think it over. We fork over $57 for the pair and find seats at center court next to a couple from Ireland in Celtics jerseys who secure us spots. Isiah Thomas does what he does and the C’s hang on in a one-point win. The stairwells are packed with green. The weather rains on the fans in t-shirts, guys take their girls back home, call cabs from the corner.

Inside a dive bar off Massachusetts Avenue a group of a dozen locals take up space at the center table, pulled three tables together to make room for pitchers of beer and pizzas. Not one of them on their phones. Instead they jaw and laugh and holler in those accents. Older men sit at the wraparound bar watching the Bruins postgame show. Our waitress slaps down a plate with Philly cheesesteak, a caesar salad and a tallboy of Harpoon’s IPA. We listen to the accents, grease up our fingers and watch winter come down in thick white pellets.

The next day we stand in line at a brewery for over an hour as it rains and temperatures fall below 30. Right on the harbor, major boats sit idle and wait for joys of summer. The line stretches on forever. We drink a flight of dark beers and can’t get buzzed fast enough. I have a hard time holding or walking, all my digits on the verge of falling off. My hands stay purple up to my wrists for an hour. We have dinner plans so we head out into the cold again, make one more pit stop for a Boston-only beer for Chris back at home and catch a bus across town.

Duck tacos, more chowder, shrimp and grits, glasses of water, big wide windows showing traffic. Rain dribbles down the glass. Sam across from me, shaking her head in delight and trying new foods, her favorite thing in the entire world. I’ve sat across her in these moments in dozens of cities across the country, tasting, picking, forking, nibbling, smiling, chewing, closes her eyes, the shake of her head and then that smile, like a light that wishes it could grow brighter with every bite.

The sun comes out the next day. We stroll along the green, blue and yellow houses of the northeast. We walk along ‘50s Boston. I feel as if I’m walking in Kerouac’s Lowell, in the midst of classic Americana with tiny sidewalks, big bushes out in the front yard, Victorian houses painted the colors of an autumn rainbow. The trees barren but pretty, the mailboxes full, cars in the compact driveways and garages, big wide windows with the greens of gardens and hanging plants. We walk slow and take it all in, get lost on purpose down the winding streets.

For lunch we eat gourmet bagels with almond butter and scallion cream cheese. Downtown, coming out of the train station, we spot a miniature blonde in a long white winter coat with flowing, thick blonde hair. She waves and smiles in sunglasses too big for her and runs across Causeway Street and gives Sam a long, tight, loving hug. Eleanor, all five feet of her, hasn’t lost a lick of her Tennessee drawl or southern charm. She smiles big, tosses her hair with her small hands and calls and Uber to catch our brunch reservations she made on the train ride down from Portland, Maine.

Strong mimosas in flute glasses, syrupy chicken on a plate, pizza with mozzarella and basil. Laughing from the two girls at the table, reminiscing of old friends years and miles away. What happened to our younger selves? Have we forgotten who we are, who we used to be, is it okay to feel old now? At only 25? They talk and ask about Megans, Sarahs, Rebeccas, girls I know and don't.

We step out into the sunlight with full bellies and walk our tired feet across town with coffee in paper cups. Street performers with kids dancing holding plastic instruments gather at Boston Common. The pond of summer is brown like sewage. The grass dull and dead, trees the same. Sidewalks are packed with strollers and healthy dogs on leashes. We sit on a wooden park bench and take in the movement of a city. A woman lays in a tree with her legs sprawled out in beige jeans and leafs through a novel. An Asian couple in Red Sox windbreakers nap on each other’s shoulders.

The crooked streets of North End spine through four story flats like an Al Pacino movie. I look for his handsome face as the sun sets on the buildings beyond downtown and over the river. A 90-year-old bakery on a corner is packed with patrons and cannolis. They make every dessert under the sun and they're all on display in dough-smeared glass cases. We grab $15 worth of treats and Sam and I finish them off with licked fingers as Eleanor boards her train back up north.

The Harvard Arboretum isn’t full with green life this time of year but we stroll hand-in-hand anyhow and imagine June in Massachusetts. A small creek runs through the stones. Kids play near the pond, geese gawk at their silliness.

The blue harbor matches the blue sky for a twilight walk along the water. The lights of the sky twinkle in a big way, a catch your breath and make sure you don’t forget how she walks and moves her neck across the street watching for reckless cabbies kind of way. That moment of the weekend that resembles the dreams you had when booking a flight across the country and the memories that linger forever. At the time I’m frustrated with tired knees at every Italian and seafood restaurant we pass up for an imaginary and perfect one. But looking back this was it, walking along in silence and taking it all in with my southern lover, with my two-and-a-half year lover, the one I’ve given the most time to, the scariest one, the one who knows me best out of anyone. She whispers the names of street signs to herself, biting nails, scarf around her neck, her small ears turning pink with fading winter.

Dinner is a disaster. We walk into a five-star jaunt wearing sweaters and sneakers. The hostess wears a suit. The owner with gray hair and grace asks us how the gnocchi is. I write a note to the staff on the receipt apologizing. Never did we both want to be out of a meal as fast as that one. Neither of us want to stand up to even take a leak. We slump out after a high-end dinner and hightail it out for another dirty subway ride back to Cambridge.

The first Monday in April means baseball, and Boston does their baseball right. Like in movies, TV shows, broadcasts of my youth, sitting in front of the TV watching and gawking at Fenway Park. I find it outside of a subway stop, men and women selling programs, juggling autographed balls, the same scalpers on the sidewalk now as the Garden. Cold beers in cans on the patio as the first-pitch roar of the crowd comes cascading over the Green Monster. A flight of IPAs on the other side of the block with the sun shining down, the glow of Boston goldening the small glasses of heavy beer with the crowds and chants and fans filling up the streets. Sam clinking her rings on the glasses, taking sips of beer and more chowder. Bostonians fill the street, happy with red hats and navy blue jerseys celebrating the first win of the season.

We end our last night in Boston drinking beers in a living room watching the NCAA championship game. Cambridge glows in the rain outside as we toss and turn on the air mattress.

Tuesday rains on us, the city bidding us farewell with more cold and clouds. The owner of the burger joint down the block wishes us well on our travels. On the bus to the airport Sam and I share a half hug-half kiss in front of sad strangers, traveling with the same Tuesday blues. The city sits beneath a falling puddle as planes wait for passengers at the gate.

Where did the days go? Where do adventures take us? Why do we long for them?

To see the way buildings are positioned together next to the ocean. To hear how people talk to each other with pints of beer in their hands. To taste clam chowder, duck tacos, Boston brewed beer and to hold hands on cobblestone streets tight enough so your palms sweat with love and excitement.

Boston did this for us, and so much more.

[jodybouchard9]

5 Clever Ways to Repel Mosquitoes Without Killing Your Outdoor Vibe

Terri Rosa Fox/iStock

With heat advisories raging across the country, dripping humidity, and no relief in immediate sight, we’re bearing the brunt of summer’s doggiest days. To make it all worse, we have to deal with the season’s biggest villain: mosquitoes.

They’re not just an itchy nuisance; a booming mosquito population also means that mosquito-borne illnesses are increasing dramatically, making it downright scary to spend any time outdoors.

And if you’ve already tried everything to keep mosquitoes from crashing your backyard parties, you know the options are less than ideal. Mosquito netting screams that your backyard is a haven for rare tropical diseases. Sprays can be toxic and damage your yard. And Polynesian Tiki torches might not jibe with your vibe.

So what’s an outdoor-loving homeowner to do? We found five mosquito-repelling options that will actually add to your backyard ambiance.

1. Plant rosemary and basil

Cook up a homemade mosquito repellant with rosemary and basil.

MelanieMaier/iStock

When you’re planning out your garden, don’t forget to include these fragrant herbs. Not only do rosemary and basil take a delicious sauce to the next level, they also naturally repel mosquitoes. We humans may love that strong herbal scent, but mosquitoes hate it.

What to buy: Stargazer Perennials rosemary plant, $19 for two; Kauai Gardens sweet basil plant, $16

2. Burn pinon wood

Photo by Thom Filicia Inc.  Don’t just throw any old log on the fire pit—if you’re trying to keep mosquitoes away from your outdoor retreat, burn pinon wood instead. Pinon (or pinyon) is a hardwood pine found in the Southwestern United States. The pinon wood will give off an intoxicating pine scent as it burns while driving away insects from your s’more fest. You can burn it as you would any other firewood—they even manufacture small logs specifically for fire pits. What to buy: Western Pinon mini logs for fire pits, $28

3. Hang a citronella spiral

Photo via Fredericks and Mae

Citronella candles? Been there, done that. But have you tried a citronella spiral yet? These cedar wood pieces are soaked in natural citronella oil and can hang from a tree or on your porch, adding a decorative look that’s sure to fool the neighbors—and the mosquitoes. (Fun fact: Citronella doesn’t drive mosquitoes away; rather, its citrusy scent masks human odors so that mosquitoes have a harder time finding you.)

What to buy: Fredericks and Mae citronella coil, small, $18; large, $40

4. Hang a birdhouse

Photo by The Cousins  If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em! OK, you don’t have to do this yourself. But you certainly can find something that will: birds.

Many birds love to feast on mosquitoes—especially purple martins, swallows, geese and ducks, and migratory songbirds. Attract them to your space by placing birdhouses around your property—usually 15 to 20 feet off the ground.

What to buy: BirdNest 12-room, two-story, purple martin house, $68

5. Install ceiling fans

Photo by Jenkins Custom Homes  When all else fails, air the little critters out! Oscillating fans in your outdoor space keep air (and mosquitoes) circulating, so you can stay comfortable, cool, and hopefully mosquito bite–free.

What to buy: Matthews ceiling fan, $373. For a portable version that won’t disturb your serene summer nights, try the Rowenta VU5670 Turbo Silence oscillating 16-inch stand fan, $106.86.

How to get rid of mosquitoes—for good

The only sure way to prevent mosquitoes is to make sure you don’t lay out the welcome mat for them. That means regularly checking your yard for standing water—from pet dishes to bird feeders and other shallow areas where H20 might have accumulated, says Glen Ramsey, an entomologist at Orkin.

“Mosquitoes need water to reproduce, so limiting this will hurt their ability to have population booms,” he says.

If nothing’s doing the trick, you can always hire a pest control company to spray your yard for mosquitoes. But make sure you do your research and check credentials so you don’t do more harm than good. On average, mosquito control services will run you $350 to $500 per season for a quarter- to half-acre property.

The post 5 Clever Ways to Repel Mosquitoes Without Killing Your Outdoor Vibe appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

[kathydsalters31]

Exactly how to Get Your Dog Used to Water

Isn’t it funny exactly how you can’t obtain some dogs out of the water, yet others put on the brakes when they see the tiniest pool? I have experience with both and also today I’ll let you understand how to get your pet made use of to water. I’ll likewise point out a couple of suggestions for a successful pet bathroom at home.

I’m Barbara as well as I write on a regular basis for That Mutt. I’m a blogger, raw feeder and also pet pedestrian as well as preserve the blog K9sOverCoffee.com.

My late Boxer mix Missy liked the water. She was just among those canines that was birthed a water rat! She swam in the ocean, in lakes, pools, as well as loved “assaulting” the water that appeared of lawn sprinklers.

Her brother Buzz that came from the precise very same litter as her wound up taking pleasure in the water too, but he needed a little convincing and his favored plaything to go in with him.

My current puppy Wally, a Feist mix, didn’t desire anything to do with water in any way when I first adopted him. When I took him to the ocean, he was the type that had actually stroll around a puddle as well as put on the brakes. Currently he’s very slowly finding out that m a y b e water is not that poor after all, although I doubt that he’ll ever be as fanatic concerning water as Missy was.

Wally could not obtain

far from the ocean quick sufficient Why some pets don’t such as the water For starters, allow’s look at why some pets do not like being in the water. There are a few possibilities, as well as the most

typical ones are the following: Fear of the unknown. Dogs do not immediately recognize what water is, so if they’re not effectively mingled to it as young puppies, they may approach it very carefully. This is particularly true if the water is deep and also they can’t see all-time low or if the water is loud like waves or a river running.Not a water reproduce. Some dogs have a love for water in their genetics and also some don’t! Those who do are usually hunting pets that are bred to recover waterfowl like Retrievers( Golden, Labrador, Chesapeake Bay), Spanish Water pet dogs, Portuguese Water canines, Irish Water spaniels, and so on. Trauma. Less likely, but perhaps the dog mistakenly

fell under a pool as well as couldn’t come back out on his very own. Or possibly he obtained assaulted by another canine at the dog coastline. Remember” terrible”experiences to a canine can likewise seem very light to us. Possibly ocean waves terrified the pet dog as a young puppy, for example.Did you recognize? Dogs use their tails to steer and also balance themselves in the water, so dogs with docked tails havea much more challenging time swimming than those whose tail is undamaged.< img src="https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/My-oceangoing-Lab.jpg "alt course ="wp-image-21279 lazy "data-sizes="(max-width: 652px

)100vw, 652px”srcset =”https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/My-oceangoing-Lab.jpg 652w, https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/My-oceangoing-Lab-510×325.jpg 510w, https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/My-oceangoing-Lab-300×190.jpg 300w”> That Mutt Ace loved all

kinds of open water! Benefits of being in the water for canines It’s a downer that some pets do not enjoy the water, since they can benefit a great deal from remaining in it:

Water maintains them trendy in the summer season warm. One of the most evident benefit is that water is extremely rejuvenating on warm summer days. Sometimes, it’s the only means dogs can stay somewhat comfy outside.

It’s a reduced influence workout. That makes it great for pups whose joints are still establishing, as well as also for older pets that suffer from arthritis.Makes for an excellent exercise. Swimming as well as playing in the water is a wonderful means of working out as well as staying fit. The best water sport for pets is dock diving!Water has healing high qualities. Many pet recovery centers utilize underwater treadmills to assist canines reclaim their flexibility after they had surgery. It can likewise help relieve joint inflammation. Present your pet slowly to the idea of water You decide to go about it, patience is key when you work on obtaining your reluctantpet made use of to water

. Prior to you ask him to dip any paws into it, invest some time with him near it. The suggestion is to get him made use of to the idea of water. Start by going with strolls on the coastline, around a regional lake or a fountain. Do this without getting as well close to the water source itself. Additionally, play bring, yank, or whatever video game your pet likes when you’re close to a body of water. You can also

feed him alongside water if that works for you. Lindsay as well as Remy Idea: If he’s scared of the noise of the water fountain or the sea, you can reveal him to lakes and also rivers initially since they’re not as loud. If you wish to be aggressive concerning desensitizing him, attempt playing some ocean or water fountain appears in your home while giving him high value treats or a preferred (squeaky) toy. It’ll instruct him that good, enjoyable things are happening when he listens to the noise. You can discover a selection of those sounds on YouTube.

When you’ve been close to the water with your pet dog a couple of times and also he’s not placing on the brakes or acting terrified, take it up a notch.

Walk closer to the sea, lake, pool, fountain or river and allow your puppy smell it.

Don’t put any stress on your chain to make it as hassle-free an experience as feasible. Commend your pet dog for being such a great young boy or excellent girl!

.?.!! Wally walking beside a small fish pond in an art park I tried this method with Wally and also we’ve made truly great progression. I kept walking him around lakesand fish ponds, as well as

he’s now lastly comfy adequate to stand and also stroll in lakes. What’s really aided him is the consistent exposure to water over the course of several months. That along with seeing ducks and geese swimming in the water, along with various other pet dogs that hang around in the water worked for Wally. Nonetheless, I still haven’t been able to persuade him to swim. That might take a few even more months, however it’s ALRIGHT. I’m not in a thrill.

Slowly presenting Wally to the concept of water Signs that your pet dog is not enjoying around/in water are: If you see these signs in your puppy, you’re too near the water: A put tail Stiff body stance Drinking Too much panting

Refusing to relocate towards the water Increase the distance in between

the water as well as your canine

and also be a little more person.

Bear in mind, it takes some pets much longer to get utilized to water than it does others. Make use of the right incentive for your pet dog Remy is encouraged by a challenge! It’s all regarding making the actual call with it an enjoyable experience when you’ve successfully slipped closer to the water. Undoubtedly every pet dog has their very own idea of what’s enjoyable as well as what isn’t, so this method will certainly vary from dog to pet. That’s why it’s crucial to make use of the ideal incentive for

your pup. This can be: Food or deals with. Toss some in the water as well as have your dog bob for them.Toys. Buoyant playthings like bumpers or frisbees stay afloat as well as are the best plaything to go after in the water.Yourself. Use this to your advantage and also go in initially if your canine trust funds you as well as follows you anywhere. A

specialist. Many family pet health spas and/or resorts have indoor dog pools with trained team who’ll educate your canine exactly how to

swim in their pools. One more pet dog that likes to swim. Canines tend to replicate other dogs, so if among

his friends likes to swim, establish a doggy playdate by the water. Ducks or water birds if he’s right into chasing them.

If your dog suches as a good chase, his hunting impulses may just defeat his reluctance of entering water.

My previous pet dog Buzz learned exactly how to swim at a falls on a walking on a lengthy chain. His was watching his sister Missy have a blast and swim, yet still wasn’t too certain about it himself. Considering that he was currently standing in the water as well as it covered his belly, he obtained a mild push from behind and also voilà– Buzz was swimming! I likewise tossed his sphere in to sweeten the deal even better, which was that. Ever since then, Buzz ranand swam after any kind of toy I would certainly toss into the water. Cooling off with Buzz in a river on a hike Missy(left)as well as Buzz(appropriate)at an indoor dog pool Water safety ideas for your canine Once your dog is comfortable in the water, it’s crucial to maintain him risk-free while

he’s in it too, specifically if he’s not the best swimmer

. Devices I warmly recommend are life vests that include a deal with as well as added lengthy pet chains. If necessary, the life vest maintains your dog afloat and also the deal with makes it a lot less complicated for you to raise your dog in as well as out of the water. This can really be available in handy when you’re on a boat with your dog . Extra long dog leashesgive your dog

a lot of flexibility to have fun in the water, however they leave you in control of exactly how much as well as where your canine can enter the water. Be conscious of where you let your canine swim as well as drink. There are plants as well as animals that can be frustrating at best and also dangerous at worst. One of the most unsafe ones are blue environment-friendly algae in addition to water serpents and also alligators.

It’s a great rule of thumb not to let your canine consume alcohol out of stationary, non-flowing bodies of water as well as to avoid those with eco-friendly surface areas that appear like pea soup or environment-friendly paint. That’s blue environment-friendly algae. Make certain to provide your pet dog fresh, bottledwater

that you bring along on your swimming journeys. Some pet dogs like to consume alcohol directly out of the container, however it’s most convenient to pour some into a retractable water dish. I such as the ones from Mighty

Paw. Kayak training with my pup Kayaking is a fun activity

that doesn’t necessarily entail contact with water. That’s unless your kayak begins to leak of course, or your dog decides to jump into the water after all. Yet in all seriousness, I began getting Wally used to our kayak since it doesn’t require him to spend whenever in the water if he truly doesn’t feel like it. For now, I’ve presented him to the kayak on dry land in the house. In our garage, to

be extra exact since that’s where we keep it. Wally gave it some good smells as well as consumed some treats that I strategically positioned on and also into it. He’s a fool for food and deals with, so I always utilize this technique in my favor to get him utilized to new things. Introducing Wally to the Kayak I then mosted likely to sit in the kayak and invited him to follow me. He had no arguments as well as jumped right in. That was very easy! I’ll duplicate this workout a number of times prior to taking Wally and also the Kayak

out on the lake as well as will report back with an upgrade on exactly how points went! Tips for doggie bath time OK, currently allow’s talk a little about

splashy time at home! Your puppy may extremely well need a bath after he went swimming. Right here are my tips for obtaining your pet used to your bathtub: That Mutt Ace tolerated baths, great young boy! Present the bathtub without water initially. Utilize it as a hiding place during a video game of hide as well as look for, or place some treats or a preferred plaything into it.Bathe him after a long stroll or walking when he’s tired. He’ll be a lot less most likely to set up a fight.Use treats during bathroom time. They’re a great incentive, however select high value deals with instead of dull cookies. Rub some peanut butter on the shower walls. It’s an excellent

diversion and a motivatorto “endure “bath time.Ask a member of the family or close friend for help. They can hold your puppy while you lather him up or vice versa.Some dogs are

beyond persistent, so if your canine fits into that category and also keeps putting up a fight come bath time, schedule a professional dog bathroom with a pet dog groomer. This is additionally a hassle-free choice when your dog’s had a number of muddy fun at the dog park!< img src ="https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ThatMutt.com-How-to-get-your-dog-used-to-water.jpg "alt=" How to get your canine

utilized to water” course= “wp-image-45131 lazy”width=”463″height =”695 “data-sizes=”( max-width: 463px) 100vw, 463px”srcset=

“https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ThatMutt.com-How-to-get-your-dog-used-to-water.jpg 600w, https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ThatMutt.com-How-to-get-your-dog-used-to-water-200×300.jpg 200w” > Barbara Rivers creates frequently

for That Mutt. She is a blog writer, raw feeder and also pet dog walker and maintains the blog K9s Over Coffee. Relevant short articles: Does your dog like to swim? My pet is obsessed with alcohol consumption excessive water source http://www.luckydogsolutions.com/how-to-get-your-dog-used-to-water/

from Lucky Dog Solutions https://luckydogsolutions.blogspot.com/2020/09/exactly-how-to-get-your-dog-used-to.html

[barryswamsleyaz]

Exactly how to Get Your Dog Used to Water

Isn’t it funny exactly how you can’t obtain some dogs out of the water, yet others put on the brakes when they see the tiniest pool? I have experience with both and also today I’ll let you understand how to get your pet made use of to water. I’ll likewise point out a couple of suggestions for a successful pet bathroom at home.

I’m Barbara as well as I write on a regular basis for That Mutt. I’m a blogger, raw feeder and also pet pedestrian as well as preserve the blog K9sOverCoffee.com.

My late Boxer mix Missy liked the water. She was just among those canines that was birthed a water rat! She swam in the ocean, in lakes, pools, as well as loved “assaulting” the water that appeared of lawn sprinklers.

Her brother Buzz that came from the precise very same litter as her wound up taking pleasure in the water too, but he needed a little convincing and his favored plaything to go in with him.

My current puppy Wally, a Feist mix, didn’t desire anything to do with water in any way when I first adopted him. When I took him to the ocean, he was the type that had actually stroll around a puddle as well as put on the brakes. Currently he’s very slowly finding out that m a y b e water is not that poor after all, although I doubt that he’ll ever be as fanatic concerning water as Missy was.

Wally could not obtain

far from the ocean quick sufficient Why some pets don’t such as the water For starters, allow’s look at why some pets do not like being in the water. There are a few possibilities, as well as the most

typical ones are the following: Fear of the unknown. Dogs do not immediately recognize what water is, so if they’re not effectively mingled to it as young puppies, they may approach it very carefully. This is particularly true if the water is deep and also they can’t see all-time low or if the water is loud like waves or a river running.Not a water reproduce. Some dogs have a love for water in their genetics and also some don’t! Those who do are usually hunting pets that are bred to recover waterfowl like Retrievers( Golden, Labrador, Chesapeake Bay), Spanish Water pet dogs, Portuguese Water canines, Irish Water spaniels, and so on. Trauma. Less likely, but perhaps the dog mistakenly

fell under a pool as well as couldn’t come back out on his very own. Or possibly he obtained assaulted by another canine at the dog coastline. Remember” terrible”experiences to a canine can likewise seem very light to us. Possibly ocean waves terrified the pet dog as a young puppy, for example.Did you recognize? Dogs use their tails to steer and also balance themselves in the water, so dogs with docked tails havea much more challenging time swimming than those whose tail is undamaged.< img src=“https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/My-oceangoing-Lab.jpg "alt course ="wp-image-21279 lazy "data-sizes=”(max-width: 652px

)100vw, 652px”srcset =”https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/My-oceangoing-Lab.jpg 652w, https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/My-oceangoing-Lab-510×325.jpg 510w, https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/My-oceangoing-Lab-300×190.jpg 300w”> That Mutt Ace loved all

kinds of open water! Benefits of being in the water for canines It’s a downer that some pets do not enjoy the water, since they can benefit a great deal from remaining in it:

Water maintains them trendy in the summer season warm. One of the most evident benefit is that water is extremely rejuvenating on warm summer days. Sometimes, it’s the only means dogs can stay somewhat comfy outside.

It’s a reduced influence workout. That makes it great for pups whose joints are still establishing, as well as also for older pets that suffer from arthritis.Makes for an excellent exercise. Swimming as well as playing in the water is a wonderful means of working out as well as staying fit. The best water sport for pets is dock diving!Water has healing high qualities. Many pet recovery centers utilize underwater treadmills to assist canines reclaim their flexibility after they had surgery. It can likewise help relieve joint inflammation. Present your pet slowly to the idea of water You decide to go about it, patience is key when you work on obtaining your reluctantpet made use of to water

. Prior to you ask him to dip any paws into it, invest some time with him near it. The suggestion is to get him made use of to the idea of water. Start by going with strolls on the coastline, around a regional lake or a fountain. Do this without getting as well close to the water source itself. Additionally, play bring, yank, or whatever video game your pet likes when you’re close to a body of water. You can also

feed him alongside water if that works for you. Lindsay as well as Remy Idea: If he’s scared of the noise of the water fountain or the sea, you can reveal him to lakes and also rivers initially since they’re not as loud. If you wish to be aggressive concerning desensitizing him, attempt playing some ocean or water fountain appears in your home while giving him high value treats or a preferred (squeaky) toy. It’ll instruct him that good, enjoyable things are happening when he listens to the noise. You can discover a selection of those sounds on YouTube.

When you’ve been close to the water with your pet dog a couple of times and also he’s not placing on the brakes or acting terrified, take it up a notch.

Walk closer to the sea, lake, pool, fountain or river and allow your puppy smell it.

Don’t put any stress on your chain to make it as hassle-free an experience as feasible. Commend your pet dog for being such a great young boy or excellent girl!

.?.!! Wally walking beside a small fish pond in an art park I tried this method with Wally and also we’ve made truly great progression. I kept walking him around lakesand fish ponds, as well as

he’s now lastly comfy adequate to stand and also stroll in lakes. What’s really aided him is the consistent exposure to water over the course of several months. That along with seeing ducks and geese swimming in the water, along with various other pet dogs that hang around in the water worked for Wally. Nonetheless, I still haven’t been able to persuade him to swim. That might take a few even more months, however it’s ALRIGHT. I’m not in a thrill.

Slowly presenting Wally to the concept of water Signs that your pet dog is not enjoying around/in water are: If you see these signs in your puppy, you’re too near the water: A put tail Stiff body stance Drinking Too much panting

Refusing to relocate towards the water Increase the distance in between

the water as well as your canine

and also be a little more person.

Bear in mind, it takes some pets much longer to get utilized to water than it does others. Make use of the right incentive for your pet dog Remy is encouraged by a challenge! It’s all regarding making the actual call with it an enjoyable experience when you’ve successfully slipped closer to the water. Undoubtedly every pet dog has their very own idea of what’s enjoyable as well as what isn’t, so this method will certainly vary from dog to pet. That’s why it’s crucial to make use of the ideal incentive for

your pup. This can be: Food or deals with. Toss some in the water as well as have your dog bob for them.Toys. Buoyant playthings like bumpers or frisbees stay afloat as well as are the best plaything to go after in the water.Yourself. Use this to your advantage and also go in initially if your canine trust funds you as well as follows you anywhere. A

specialist. Many family pet health spas and/or resorts have indoor dog pools with trained team who’ll educate your canine exactly how to

swim in their pools. One more pet dog that likes to swim. Canines tend to replicate other dogs, so if among

his friends likes to swim, establish a doggy playdate by the water. Ducks or water birds if he’s right into chasing them.

If your dog suches as a good chase, his hunting impulses may just defeat his reluctance of entering water.

My previous pet dog Buzz learned exactly how to swim at a falls on a walking on a lengthy chain. His was watching his sister Missy have a blast and swim, yet still wasn’t too certain about it himself. Considering that he was currently standing in the water as well as it covered his belly, he obtained a mild push from behind and also voilà– Buzz was swimming! I likewise tossed his sphere in to sweeten the deal even better, which was that. Ever since then, Buzz ranand swam after any kind of toy I would certainly toss into the water. Cooling off with Buzz in a river on a hike Missy(left)as well as Buzz(appropriate)at an indoor dog pool Water safety ideas for your canine Once your dog is comfortable in the water, it’s crucial to maintain him risk-free while

he’s in it too, specifically if he’s not the best swimmer

. Devices I warmly recommend are life vests that include a deal with as well as added lengthy pet chains. If necessary, the life vest maintains your dog afloat and also the deal with makes it a lot less complicated for you to raise your dog in as well as out of the water. This can really be available in handy when you’re on a boat with your dog . Extra long dog leashesgive your dog

a lot of flexibility to have fun in the water, however they leave you in control of exactly how much as well as where your canine can enter the water. Be conscious of where you let your canine swim as well as drink. There are plants as well as animals that can be frustrating at best and also dangerous at worst. One of the most unsafe ones are blue environment-friendly algae in addition to water serpents and also alligators.

It’s a great rule of thumb not to let your canine consume alcohol out of stationary, non-flowing bodies of water as well as to avoid those with eco-friendly surface areas that appear like pea soup or environment-friendly paint. That’s blue environment-friendly algae. Make certain to provide your pet dog fresh, bottledwater

that you bring along on your swimming journeys. Some pet dogs like to consume alcohol directly out of the container, however it’s most convenient to pour some into a retractable water dish. I such as the ones from Mighty

Paw. Kayak training with my pup Kayaking is a fun activity

that doesn’t necessarily entail contact with water. That’s unless your kayak begins to leak of course, or your dog decides to jump into the water after all. Yet in all seriousness, I began getting Wally used to our kayak since it doesn’t require him to spend whenever in the water if he truly doesn’t feel like it. For now, I’ve presented him to the kayak on dry land in the house. In our garage, to

be extra exact since that’s where we keep it. Wally gave it some good smells as well as consumed some treats that I strategically positioned on and also into it. He’s a fool for food and deals with, so I always utilize this technique in my favor to get him utilized to new things. Introducing Wally to the Kayak I then mosted likely to sit in the kayak and invited him to follow me. He had no arguments as well as jumped right in. That was very easy! I’ll duplicate this workout a number of times prior to taking Wally and also the Kayak

out on the lake as well as will report back with an upgrade on exactly how points went! Tips for doggie bath time OK, currently allow’s talk a little about

splashy time at home! Your puppy may extremely well need a bath after he went swimming. Right here are my tips for obtaining your pet used to your bathtub: That Mutt Ace tolerated baths, great young boy! Present the bathtub without water initially. Utilize it as a hiding place during a video game of hide as well as look for, or place some treats or a preferred plaything into it.Bathe him after a long stroll or walking when he’s tired. He’ll be a lot less most likely to set up a fight.Use treats during bathroom time. They’re a great incentive, however select high value deals with instead of dull cookies. Rub some peanut butter on the shower walls. It’s an excellent

diversion and a motivatorto “endure “bath time.Ask a member of the family or close friend for help. They can hold your puppy while you lather him up or vice versa.Some dogs are

beyond persistent, so if your canine fits into that category and also keeps putting up a fight come bath time, schedule a professional dog bathroom with a pet dog groomer. This is additionally a hassle-free choice when your dog’s had a number of muddy fun at the dog park!< img src =“https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ThatMutt.com-How-to-get-your-dog-used-to-water.jpg "alt=” How to get your canine

utilized to water” course= “wp-image-45131 lazy”width=”463″height =”695 “data-sizes=”( max-width: 463px) 100vw, 463px”srcset=

“https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ThatMutt.com-How-to-get-your-dog-used-to-water.jpg 600w, https://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ThatMutt.com-How-to-get-your-dog-used-to-water-200×300.jpg 200w” > Barbara Rivers creates frequently

for That Mutt. She is a blog writer, raw feeder and also pet dog walker and maintains the blog K9s Over Coffee. Relevant short articles: Does your dog like to swim? My pet is obsessed with alcohol consumption excessive water

from Lucky Dog Solutions http://www.luckydogsolutions.com/how-to-get-your-dog-used-to-water/ from Lucky Dog Solutions https://luckydogsolutions.tumblr.com/post/628889379685957632