#unsurprising result: I used it for sketching already

[shrews-art]

Today's little sketches 🌾🌾

[hermit-lover]

PLATONIC REQUEST (If you include any romance I will be sad.) Reader who is adventurous and curious, loving science and fantasy in equal measure—so long as no one tries to misapply them and claim falsehoods are factually true or that stories always need to be scientifically perfect. Intentionally tries to pick up lots of skills. Innocent and childish. Intelligent, but uses internal fact checking to discern lies, which obviously has limitations when trying to determine if someone is lying about *themself.* Reader is friends with Scar and/or Etho. (So, personally, those two are my favorites right now, and I wish I could be friends with both of them. Approximately everyone who knows me in Real Life is unsurprised by this, because both of them are a type of person I like, and both of them have traits I like and want to cultivate in myself. 🤷‍♀️ Or at least, everyone would be unsurprised if I were the type of person to talk about having squishes [that's the word for wanting to be friends with someone, like a platonic crush] but I tend to keep my emotions about myself to myself, so only a few actually know.) Anyway, I think that the differences between Etho and Scar can be really interesting. Of course, you can choose to only include one of them in the resulting Reader Insert story, if asking for two Hermits is too much, or you don't feel familiar enough with one of them to write for them, etc. Other than the Reader being friends with one or both of the requested characters, you can have a lot of free will in the type and genre of the piece. Want to write silly fun times? I'm down! Want to write an adventure piece? Those are some of my favorites! Want to write about Reader helping the selected character(s) (or vice versa?) Sounds good to me! In the mood to write angst or hurt/comfort? I'll accept that too! Anyway, if this was all too long, or too vague, or too dull, or you have any questions—you can message me and ask questions or request that I send in a better request myself! 😅 Thank you for your time, consideration, and potential writing!

Fetching Wood!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Character: Ethoslab x Reader, GTWS x Reader.

Type: Blurb (~2k)

Theme: Platonic

Summary: Unsurprisingly, attempting an adventure on the HermitCraft server attracts shenanigans.

TW: brief swearing.

A/N: I hope I did your ask justice!! These two are so silly together and so adventure awaits. :)

The chirping of birds drifts through the ajar window, letting in the sounds of morning calamity and the gentle breeze that brings with it the scent of deep woods and dirt. Your cluttered desk stands proudly in front of you, stacks of intricate designs meticulously sketched, bottles of experimental potions, gadgets, gears, suspicious white powder, and ink spattered across the solid dark oak. It was your workshop- or at least part of it. At the moment you are preoccupied from tinkering, rather you squint at the mess of your storage trying to decide what exactly this trip warrants.

You see, your build, a large wizard-esc tower and subsequent dungeons was a rather demanding feat, and with your newfound appreciation for the Nether woods and brick, you needed a trip to Nether.

It was much to your surprise that when casually discussing the idea with those surrounding you, your neighbor Etho was quick to jump aboard. Apparently he too needed a restock on warped logs and mushrooms, and was more than happy to tag along to make the process more enjoyable.

It was always exciting seeing the ivory haired man, so many Hermits (including yourself) looked up to him.

With the whole HermitcraftTCG and Decked Out craze of last season he was a hard man to come across besides fleeting moments in games. You would be lying if you said you weren't eager to impress. Tucking another fire resistant potion (you can never be too sure) you sigh and check the time.

No...it couldn’t be that hour already...

Snatching up your backpack and skittering towards the door of your starter-starter base (something you will be tearing down) you made it out into the grass. You were so smart when it came to inventions you'd think you would be a little more aware of the time- but unfortunately not. Being late was an reality you lived with often. Snatching the reins of your beloved horse Millennium, you place a foot in the stirrup and very nearly faceplant off of the other side of his torso. He lets out a vibrating huff and you pout.

“Cmon, I can't have a horse making fun of me.” You scoff, rightening in the saddle. The horse doesn't comment back, shaking out its mane and beginning to trot. You ease Millennium into a canter, riding with practiced ease through the forest towards your neighbor.

It's a bright and sunny day, the wind whipping across your face and tugging at your clothing where it is free from the confines of your armor. You had asked Cleo and Stress to help in making a perfect outfit to combine the high fantasy of the wizard tower with the stylish ease of a scientist. You say they have done wonderfully. Despite not actually having a tower to call home yet, you were eager to leap into the aesthetic.

Spotting the gorgeous blue ceiling you broke into a grin, pressing a bit harder to have your horse break into a dash. Leaping over a small creave you break into the clearing, spotting the man of hour leaning against the side of the portal- a full one with corners and all of course. He straightens at your sudden appearance, watching you with careful eyes- You stand up in the stirrups, throwing a leg over and slowing the horse to let you jump off. Millennium whinnies and turns, slowing to blink at you. You hit the ground with a small ‘oof!’ knees bending to not topple over.

“Tadaaa!” You wiggle in the ever-corny jazz hands, watching his expression crinkle into a smile. His light chuckle makes you beam in pride.

“Woooow what an entrance.” Etho claps slowly, muffled by his fingerless gloves. It was almost sarcastic but it amused him nonetheless. “Almost makes up for the fact you're late- huh?” He prods, clearly in a teasing manner. You pout.

“Only by-” You check your watch. “Half an hour!” It's defensive, but you stick your tongue out to show no harm.

“Mhm, still late.” He turns sharply on his heels, now facing the portal. “We better start moving so we still have daylight!”

“It’s 9:30, plus we’re going to Hell- No sunlight there.” You quickly tie up Millennium, taking a tic to admire the build. Pacing quickly to catch up beside him, you note vaguely that he didn't move, instead throwing a coy smile (Hermits got used to only reading his eyes) down at you before stepping into the swirling purple depths. It was always nauseating, the world thrown off kilter and shapes fluttering behind your eyes. Then the pure heat- it prickles your palms immediately with sweat and makes you wipe them on your pants as you step out onto the odd red stone, slightly squishy under foot. It was an eyesore as always, the usual red cavern punctuated by glowing portals and scattered cobblestone paths.

“Sooooo.” You drawl, turning to face him- he looks odd in the environment. Pale skin and stark haired reflecting the orangish hues of ever-burning fire. Greens of his outfit reminding you much of the holiday season. “Lead the way captain.” You prompt- the notification of ‘Going deeper’ noting your lack of experience in this particular world. He chuckles, but sets off, picking around fires and large craters. You follow to a tee, analyzing the scenery in an attempt to memorize it for later. You've almost committed this well populated spawn area when a panicked scream breaks through the crackling silence. Jumping out of your skin you launch towards Etho- sword drawn. But that scream…It wasn't a ghast-

“NO NO IM SORRY I KNOW I FORGOT GOLD JUST SPARE A SCAR ONE SECOND!-” Hightailing from around a corner the offender nearly knocks into you, letting out a yelp. Scar’s eyes are wide, his expression that of pure terror, cheeks dusted in the same red dust as the scenery. A tic goes by as you open your mouth to speak, at the same moment he realizes you're friendly, dashing to cower behind you. The sound of a crossbolt loading pulls your attention from the man. The piglin snorts, eyes narrowed in bloodlust, weapon drawn as it searches for presumably Scar. Tattered tunic and scraped golden boots. You and Etho had planned accordingly- a gold dawning his boots as you opted for golden bracers- but a quick glance at Scar confirms he had in fact forgotten. Flicking your sword you swipe at the beast. Blade forcing it backwards. It squeals in surprise, having not seen you as a target. The crossbow rounds to your chest, you brace for pain. Then another blade cuts through the air. The piglin lets out one last squeal as it dissolves quickly into mist. Crossbow and leather toppling to the floor. You let out a breath and look to your savior with a pout.

“I totally had it handled!” You insist, poking him in the chest with a finger. It slides uselessly off of his iron chestplate. Etho blinks at you, then shakes his head.

“Uh no, you were totally doomed and in need of a strong PvPer to defend you.” his quirked head shows his comfortable ease, and it warms you that he liked bantering. Too bad you were about to murder him.

“Oh? Do you know one I can bring next time?” You ask, batting your eyelashes innocently. He gawks.

“Oohhh!-”

“This is fun and all but do you have any food and gold I can borrow?” You had forgotten about him. Turning to Scar you flash him a grin, digging in your pockets for food.

“Didn't expect to save a charming Scar this fine morning.” You chuckle, offering some of the steak you gathered to his shaking hands.

“Well I didn't expect to be in peril- I knew I had forgotten something!” He eagerly crams the food into his mouth, chewing as he talks around the bite. “Good thing Etho came to save me.” It's a tease- but you still squawk.

“hEY-!” The unholy noise grates your throat, and causes him to nearly choke on the mouthful, swallowing hard to avoid choking. His muffled giggles tug a smile to your lips. “You're an ass.” You spit, turning sharply away from him. “And to think I was going to share my bracers. Guess not!”

“Wa-Wait!” Scar stumbles to bump against your back, straightening himself to not invade your space too much. “You wouldn't leave a helpless scar all on his own?” His voice tilts into a whine, widening his eyes to plead. You scoff, gesturing vaguely to Etho.

“You have an Etho, isn't he enough for you?” You snark back, Scar is silent. He sulks to the Canadian, throwing an arm across his shoulder to begin his sales pitch.

“Ethhooo my buddy, you wouldn't happen to have some gold I could borrow?” Scar tries, offering a meek smile to the taller man. Etho hums, tilting his head to peer across the blazing landscape.

“Nope.” He pops the p, eyes squinting into what must've been a shit-eating grin. Scar groans, letting his knees buckle in exaggerated disappointment. Etho shifts to slow his descent, the uniformed man sliding helplessly to the red floor.

“Need me yet?” You call, shifting to spin and stare at the off pair. Scar groans again, but lifts his arms to grabby-hands. Splitting into a grin you trot towards him, sliding off one golden clasp. His fingers barely brush the surface before you snatch it away. “Nuh uh!- you gotta say I’m better than Etho.”

“Hey!” Now it was Etho's turn to protest, placing a hand on his hip. “You can't make Scar lie.”

“Then I guess he won't get any gold.” You shrug, Scar sputters. Using Etho as a pole to claw his way back up.

“Uh- I didn't say that, I think you're incredibly talented and definitely better than any old Etho.” He smiles, flashing his teeth. You hum now, swinging the gold bracer around. Scar winces every time it nearly slips from your grasp.

“Yea alright.” You toss the accessory and he lunges for it, fumbling for a few moments before managing a firm grasp.

“Oh thank you kind and generous-”

“Alright, that’s enough horsing around, we are already running behind schedule.” Etho interrupts, trotting back on path. You groan in childlike disobedience, but follow along. Scar stumbles to catch up.

“What are you guys doing?” He asks, keeping pace but tucking close to the protection of your side.

“Fetching wood.” You answer, giving him a nudge. “What were you up to?”

“Oh! Same here!” Scar answers confidently. You give him a once over. He doesn't appear to have even successfully made it to the biome, judging by the lack of mycelium on his boots. Raising an eyebrow skeptically he chuckles. “Well I was going to…”

“There's always space for another.” Etho butts in, clasping him on the shoulder. “Even if the role is just the goof.”

You giggle, causing Scar to shoot you a glare.

“I am more than just that!- I can be the entertainment, have you seen the most recent news about Mando?-”

You grin, a small excited noise leaving your throat. Etho groans loudly, retreating a safe distance to let you geek out. He knows the consequences of getting too close, being dragged into full body renditions of scenes.

Despite the blistering heat and hostile atmosphere, a few friends never fail to lighten the mood. You always feel safer when tucked between their shoulders, endless chatter filling the air. And maybe some shenanigans and mishaps occur along the way- but that's the fun of HermitCraft.

[inkdemonapologist]

IF YOU HAVENT READ BOO’S RECAP for the previous session (chapter 4) of our Call of Cthulhu But With Bendy Added game YOU REALLY SHOULD......

okay are u caught up? You got the reveal? 

okay cool

SO WE FOUND OUT WE’RE DEAD!!! Well, specifically Sammy and Joey have been killed(?) and this whole adventure it’s just been Henry haunted by his two friends, and we have just been POSSESSING HENRY every time we interact with the world in any tangible way, and every time we have a conversation it’s just been Henry Having A Conversation With Himself to everyone else’s eyes, WHICH I GUESS EXPLAINS why everyone has been acting so unsettled and frightened every time we start bickering with each other!! I have been just LOSING IT thinking back through everything we’ve done and imagining Joey and Sammy’s expressions and body language on Henry’s physical form. INCREDIBLE.

Also, while Sammy’s mind/spirit/???? is stuck with Henry, his ink-drowned body appears to have gone a bit prophet-y and is running around with this cult talking about serving his lord and sacrificing sheep, which Sammy would just rather not deal with. Sammy Being Deeply Embarrassed By His Ink Self is my favourite genre of comedy

(also credits to @sketch-cryptid for their henry design..... he’s just, v soft,)

OUT OF CONTEXT QUOTES AGAIN!

[Sammy is played by me, Joey is played by Boo (inkyvendingmachine), Henry is played by Maf (sketch-cryptid), and Thren (haunted-hijinxer) is our GM!]

[Sammy] [ooc] Unless one of them decides, “I'm not going to follow Henry, he seems responsible,” and just stays put at the hotel, then that doesn't help us-- [Joey] Well, Henry's "crazy," so [Henry] Honestly, yeah, I think maybe if we have Henry and Joey split off, then those might be the ones that they'll follow, which... leaves..... S a m m y  to talk to Senegal I guess;;;??? [Sammy] ...I don't know how to feel about the way that you said that.

[Joey] I guess once Joey's downtown he's going to, kind of look around and see if he was followed. [GM] Make a Spot (hidden) roll! [Joey] *rolls* [Joey] ... he is not going to look around and see if he was followed!

[Henry gets a hidden message in his sketchbook, "They're doing all they can, please don't blame them for leaving you."] [Henry] Okay, then, he's going to write back "who do you mean?" [GM] "Who do you mean?" [Henry] Yeah, who is "they"? [Sammy] Unclear antecedent. That's what I'm writing in the book, "unclear antecedent."

[Joey] Once he's back at the table, Joey is definitely drinking Henry's drink. I don't think he's noticed that it's not his, just, his hand came in contact with it and now he is drinking it.

[GM] Looking out the window, you don't see any guards, but you do think you see some black drips on the balcony-- [Sammy] UHHH CLOSING THE WINDOW. NOT ENGAGING. [Joey] Sammy Does Not See It... Sammy is Looking Away,

[GM] After a bit, he probably starts distantly hearing That Song again. [Sammy] WHY ME. UM.......... THAT’S FINE. It's just very annoying. It's hard to play music when someone is playing music loudly next door. [GM] It's quiet. But it's also Sammy.

[GM] There is a tough-looking individual that is holding a gun onnnnnn..... Henry! [Henry] Why me? [Joey] WHY HENRY?!

[GM] "Correct me if I’m wrong, but you're with Joey Drew Studios?" [Joey] Yes! And it's about fucking time you talked with us! [Joey] [ooc] Sorry, I rolled a one on my Bad Decision dice.

[Joey] [to our kidnappers] ...Can we have a car? [GM] ...........make another Fast Talk check.

[Sammy] ...Tom is the one being stabbed, right? [Joey] I guess? If he's already hosting whatever it is-- [Sammy] My dream ended with me getting stabbed... [Joey] Joey's gonna take a moment to kind of process that, and says something along the lines of, Well, we can't let that happen! Who else is going to write the songs? [Sammy] tHANKS,

[Henry] Really!! Can I get-- [Sammy] an amen [Henry] --a straight answer!

[Joey] Joey pockets the map, and he looks between the two of them............. and he bolts! [Sammy] oKAY, [Henry] Can I roll... to grab him.... [Sammy] Runs after Joey! [Henry] runs after Joey..., [GM] Um, okay -- [Henry] I want to make a roll to grab him, I will wrestle him to the ground. [Joey] I want to make a roll to lose them! [GM] uhhhh..... in retrospect I should've looked up the chase rules.....

[GM] *still looking up chase rules* Why is it all about cars?!? [Sammy] Get back in the car, chase after Joey! Sammy's gonna hit him with a car! [Joey] This is why he needs the cane later.

[Henry] DREW. You are not leaving us! You're not going by yourself, you're going to get yourself killed. [Henry] And then he's going to try to drag him to a halt. [Joey] I do think, Joey is just going to kind of stare at him,,, he wasn't ready for Henry to take that tone with him,,,,

[Sammy] I'm not really sure what decisions my past self thought most wise. Apparently, my past self thought coming on this trip was a good idea! [Henry] *mumbling* I don't think any of us thought this was a good idea.

[Sammy] Sammy really is impressed at the way that Joey is able to weaponise his worst qualities.

[GM] Make Spot (hidden) checks too, just for funsies. [Sammy] Oh! Oh just for funsies! Just a little, a fun activity, planned just for us!

[Henry] Have we ever gotten Binoculars’ name? [Joey] No. [GM] I know it, but no, you haven't. [Sammy] [in character voice] "Binoculars" works! We all know who we're talking about! [Henry] Oh, no, that wasn't in character! That was just ME wondering. [Joey] Henry's also wondering this, but just not saying it. [Sammy] Sammy just takes a moment to think about how much we don't need to know Binoculars' name!

[Joey] He is going to take out his gun, and then-- [Sammy] Oh! That's right! We have guns!

[Joey] Joey is going to toss the mask on the ground and step on it with his foot to break it. [GM] It... it snaps! [Sammy] [ooc] NO, MY LORD

[Joey] Sammy, is that you...? [GM] No reply. [Joey] ...Binoculars?! [Sammy] ........we really should've got his name.

[Joey] *pushes Sammy's voice out of the way*

[Sammy] We’ve gotta bring Joey back to life, so we can strangle him.

[Henry] Oh my god. I didn't expect ANY of this!! [Henry] I expected this game to be a short, fun session of, you know, Oh! That's neat! That's a Bendy, that's a Bendy right there! I DIDN'T EXPECT... THIS.

[Sammy] [ooc] I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT HENRY’S BEEN FAST-TALKING WHILE POSSESSED BY THE SPIRIT OF JOEY DREW.

[Sammy] Sammy thinks it'd be a great idea for you to go back and grab one of those Bendy masks, and put it on. [Henry] *sighs* ...would it make you feel better, if I went back and grabbed a Bendy mask? [Joey] NO.

[GM] And you hear a voice from the bushes say, "Anything for my Lord!" [Sammy] Oh god, it's me.

[Henry] NO WAIT, this is Sammy, I can't kill him! [Joey] Hit him with the back of the axe! [Sammy] Throw a projector at him, that works really well!

[GM] The creature skids to a halt, and the snickering happens again, and it says "I had you going that time, though, didn't I?" [Henry] Henry, uh, hesitantly stops running, [Henry] Uh, yeah, you did! Is this a trick, should I keep running. [Sammy] Well THAT's the sort of question that ALWAYS gets answered honestly!

[GM] It seems they're implying that whoever is currently the host made a deal that ended up with the Lurker starting to look like Bendy, and Henry being unable to die. [Joey] *distressed noises of realisation* [Sammy] That sure sounds like the kind of deal Joey would make, doesn't it?! DOESN'T THAT SOUND LIKE SOMETHING JOEY WOULD WANT, FOR HENRY TO NEVER DIE?!?!

[Joey] Joey is having his own breakdown now, because he finally accepted that he did something wrong, and thus his brain has gone into both overdrive and.... it's like a computer that's overheating, [Sammy] Joey doesn't know how to function when things are his fault.

[GM] Increasing your spiritual power, for lack of a better way to put it -- which you've repeated now, how many times? [Sammy] This buff stacks? That seems like an oversight. [Henry] No, don't tell the devs! [Sammy] I mean, admittedly, Joey has done a bit of, of cheating, I think? Which is unsurprising for him.

[Sammy] If Joey's the host, I wouldn't be surprised if whatever deal he made might result in him not dying in addition to you. [Henry] Yeah, it sounds like, in all the previous loops, either I died, or he died. [Sammy] I'm not really sure what I got out of this arrangement. [Henry] I'm not sure either. [Joey] *hopefully*... some quality time in Haiti?

[Henry] [to the ink demon lurker creature] Anything else we should know? [GM] It does a shrug. It looks real weird.

[feanope]

☆ My contribution for @officialtolkiensecretsanta 2020 for @arianaofimladris - 🎄Merry Christmas 🎄 ☆

Scientific Curiosity

“Coincidences do not exist,” Fëanáro stated, walking over towards the anvil. “The word itself is a lazy excuse, used for everything that cannot be explained. A lazy excuse for lazy folk, unwilling to look beyond what is obvious.”

“Of course,” Curufinwë agreed. “You know I do not believe in coincidences.”

Whilst the snow piles up in Tirion, Fëanor and Curufin experiment together in the forge.

Relationship: Fëanor & Curufin

Rating: General Audiences

Word count: 1.2 k

Additional Tags: Family Feels, pre-flight of the Noldor, Science, Forging, Good Dad Fëanor

☆

The snow fell, and fell, and fell, blending with Tirion’s buildings, made out of white marble. Snowfall was rare in this part of Aman, and for the snow not to melt away immediately after falling was even rarer. It had been snowing for days and no end was in sight.

Fëanáro was not surprised to hear children’s laughter from outside. No matter how different their usual interests were, snow somehow united them. It brought a smile to his face for he, too, had loved the snow when he was a little boy.

Whilst outside, night descended and icy winds howled, Fëanáro had withdrawn into his forge to work on his latest project. A while ago, caused by external circumstances—the growing rift between Ñolofinwë and himself—Fëanáro had decided to focus some of his time away from his father’s court to work on improving the blades he had been forging all his life. Success never comes without envy. He spoke little, if at all, of the improvements he had already made.

Fëanáro’s life was no sung tale, devoid of struggles and fights, no matter how privileged he was. Creating was an escape for him, something that put his reeling thoughts at rest. A reckoning, of a kind—with himself.

☆ continue reading on AO3 or below the read more ☆

Beautiful moments, where he could lose himself in the world of science, discovering and exploring what no other has ever studied before. His interests were many and varied, but forging was always dearest to his heart. So it was unsurprising that he was to be found in the forge more often than not of late—trying to enhance the strength and the performance of his blades.

Through trial and error, Fëanor refined his approach. He devised improved alloys,  investigated how to temper them for improved strength and lighter blades. Although Fëanáro was successful, he was not content with the results—good was never satisfying enough.

Fëanáro kept exact track of all the experiments he has carried out so far: the metals he used for each alloy, the exact amount of them, when and where he had acquired them. Additionally, he noted the weather conditions outside, the humidity and if Telperion or Laurelin spread its light. Although, perhaps, it was superstitious nonsense, Fëanáro had the impression that experiments carried out under Telperion’s light were more prone to fail.  

The scroll has grown endless over the course of time, turned into an incomprehensible collection of information. Although his calligraphy and sketches are flawless, Fëanáro doubted that anyone would understand his experimentation journal without explanation. Curufinwë, maybe, the sole exception. He often visited Fëanáro late at night in the forge—his hunger to learn and refine his knowledge matching Fëanor’s own.

*

Fëanáro narrowed his eyes when Curufinwë came in to put a small leather bag on the anvil. “What is this?”

“Bones and ashes,” Curufin said, leaning against the anvil. Casual, with a smile playing about his lips. “I asked Tyelko to supply me with some of it after going hunting with Oromë.”

“Bones and ashes,” Fëanáro repeated, half incredulous, half curious He knew that Tyelkormo collected an abundance of these rather useless things, but didn’t know that Curufinwë has taken an interest in hunting and bones as well. Maybe, he hadn’t, but came with an idea. “What would I want with them?”

Curufinwë regarded him, his expression coming alive with creative passion. “Carry out another experiment,” he suggested. “The last time we spoke about that project of yours and the progress you made you told me that you the best results so far were obtained when you added fragments of burnt leaves to the alloy. We do not know yet what caused the strength of the alloy created that specific day. Maybe, it was a mere coincidence, however—”

Fëanáro cut him off. “Coincidences do not exist,” he stated, walking over towards the anvil. “The word itself is a lazy excuse, used for everything that cannot be explained. A lazy excuse for lazy folk, unwilling to look beyond what is obvious.”

“Of course,” Curufinwë agreed. “You know I do not believe in coincidences.”

“With the temperatures used for the alloys, even bone should be easily reduced to ash, to something else,” he said, encouraged by his father’s nod. “If ground beforehand into small particles, it could be evenly distributed within the melted iron.”

“Or simply added beforehand,” Fëanáro mused. “And melt everything together.”

Curufinwë nodded, smiling now. “Ideally, both approaches would be pursued and compared afterwards if any differences occur,” he said, throwing the little bag with the bones towards Fëanáro. “What do you think?”

Fëanáro caught it. “A good idea.”

Excitement coiled in Fëanáro’s guts. He knew it was unwise to start the experiments right away, without proper planning; but his thoughts were already fixed on the idea, an oh-so-familiar itch in his fingers. “How much is there?” he asked after a while without opening the bag.

“Roughly two hands full,” Curufinwë told him. “But it shouldn’t be a problem to order more.”

“Do you have time to help me plan?” Fëanáro wondered, sitting down at the small desk where he usually drew his sketches.

Curufinwë laughed. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked, giving the answer himself without awaiting his father’s reply. “It isn’t even close to early morning yet. I wouldn’t have entered if I hadn’t seen the lamp light. So obviously, I have time.”

It wasn’t unusual for Fëanáro to work late into the night; or rather into the next day, time just slipping through his fingers as his mind was fixed on something. His family has long adjusted to that.

Curufinwë walked towards the desk and sat down opposite of Fëanáro, curiosity aflame in his eyes. Fëanáro was certain it matched his own.

And so they began to design a set of experiments in the low light of the lamps, discussing what amount of bones in relation to the metals should be used, and how small the bones should possibly be ground, making adjustments to their ideas every now and then.

When they have agreed on six individual sets of experiments, the snow was still falling outside but morning has already come, time just slipping by with their thoughts fixed on their new idea.

*

The following days, Fëanáro did not allow himself to rest, nor did he want to rest. Once his curiosity was piqued, it was impossible to let go.

But it was worth it; it always was.

The blades he had created with the addition of the bone material showed superior strength in comparison to everything Fëanáro has ever forged. Just as he had suspected, adding previously ground bone to the raw materials at the start worked better than adding it to the molten metal—and was far easier to handle, too. The distribution was more homogenous like this, resulting in tempered steel that exhibit the same properties throughout the entire length, not brittle at all; a raw material perfectly suited to Fëanáro’s needs.

Without showing Curufinwë the initial results, promising as they were, Fëanáro set up the experiment again to prove it wasn’t mere coincidence. In order to minimize possible errors, Fëanor began the experiment at the same hour of the day and with the exact same amount of raw materials, in the exact same containers he had initially used.

It wasn’t coincidence—far from it: the strength and performance of the steel was exactly reproducible, much more than Fëanáro had anticipated it to be.

It brought a smile to his lips, and content to his heart. Curufinwë would be so delighted to hear his suggestion had worked so well.  Fëanáro could not wait to share every detail with him, certain that Curufinwë wants to plan new experiments right away.

*

[mocnliights]

hello friends !! i’m kit ( in est , using she/her pronouns ) and so flippin excited for this !! i bring you nadira , my new child who i’m still learning so ... apologies in advance for any mistakes i make about my own muse y*kes . i will add a wanted plots page here when i can get my life together a bit more to help with plotting , but for now , smash that like button and let’s get this ball rolling and i will stop with the dad cliches now bye !! ( not bye , i’m still very much here )

possible trigger warning ( all just brief mentions ! ) : cancer/illness , parental death & family estrangement . i think that’s it , but if i forgot anything , please let me know and i will add it !

* MISHTI RAHMAN, CIS WOMAN + SHE/HER | you know NADIRA KHAN, right? they’re TWENTY-SIX, and they’ve lived in irving for, like, ONE YEAR? well, their spotify wrapped says they listened to GREAT ONE BY JESSIE REYEZ like, a million times this year, which makes sense, ‘cause they’ve got that whole CONSISTENT PLETHORA OF UNREAD NOTIFICATIONS, LACE LINGERIE UNDER SATIN SLIP DRESSES, UNDISTRIBUTED BEAUTIFULLY EMBOSSED BUSINESS CARDS thing going on. i just checked and their birthday is AUGUST 10TH, so they’re a LEO, which is unsurprising, all things considered. ( kit, 25, est, she/her )

THE BASICS  .

full name : nadira sharmin khan  etymology : nadira ( arabic / precious , rare ) , sharmin ( persian / shyness , modest ) nickname(s) : nadi , nadia , didi ( by amir ) birthday & birthplace : august 10, 1994 & los angeles , california sexual orientation : pansexual/romantic hometown : she moved a lot growing up , but would consider new york city & london where she spent her most formative years current residence : aquila drive in irving , north carolina  immediate family ( relation / occupation ) : kashif khan ( father ( deceased ) / renowned fashion designer ) , resna khan ( mother / model , humanitarian ) , amir khan ( younger brother , 21 / student ) occupation : for show , she continues as the public face and head of her father’s brand KHAN , but for all intents and purposes , currently unemployed  education : bachelor’s from columbia university , business management . took a few design classes at FIT  positive personality traits : charismatic , ambitious , loyal , amiable , creative , dutiful , empathetic , honest , innovative , prudent , zealous  negative personality traits : competitive , coquettish , preoccupied , materialistic , possessive , resentful , discontented , opinionated , headstrong 

THE SUMMARY .

tl;dr : nadira grew up as privileged as they come , jet-setting from los angeles to new york to london to tokyo and everywhere in between for her entire life . with her parents at the heart of the fashion industry , nadira grew up with a love for the finer things and a sharp eye for her own designs . she was primped and primed to take over her father’s empire when he decided to retire to irving . she took the reigns of KHAN post-college graduation and was living her dream until it came to a screeching halt just about a year ago when her beloved father received a grim prognosis . with her mother still working ( and estranged ) and her brother younger and in school , nadira decided to step down from her hectic position and move to irving to take care of her father . now , he’s gone . for the first time in her life , she feels listless and unmotivated , so she’s still here , acting like her dad’s going to walk back through the door .

THE EXPANDED BULLETS .

on a hot august day in los angeles , nadira was born to a prominent couple in the fashion world . with a billboard of resna consequently outside the hospital , it only seemed destined that nadira would also take the fashion world by storm ... one day .

for as long as she can remember , she was always in awe of her father’s work . as much as she admired her mother , she was much more interested in the inner workings of a company and designs coming to life from a blank sheet of paper . so as kashif’s design empire expanded globally , it was only fitting nadira tagged along from city to city , even after the family essentially “settled” in new york city following amir’s birth .

her creativity was evident from a young age , producing her own mini spring collection for KHAN at sixteen . while her brother gravitated towards instruments , nadira was hooked to the cutthroat nature of the fashion industry , the constant grind to create great work , and the power of one day running the company at her father’s side .

speaking with a very faint british accent that comes and goes from her years spent in london mixed with her years in america , nadira had a taste of her dreams in college . staying close to KHAN’s headquarters meant she could step into a bigger role ( don’t we love nepotism ) while maintaining her expected 4.0 gpa at columbia .

seeing his daughter’s success and simply tired , kashif decided to retire upon nadira’s college graduation and move away from it all to irving , north carolina , a town he had discovered and frequented over the years whenever he sought the complete opposite of his everyday .

needless to say , resna was unhappy with the decision . though she had allowed his little beach escapades during their marriage , she could not understand moving there permanently when her livelihood was in new york . without officially divorcing , resna declared she was staying put , much preferring the luxuries of a ritz carlton than the laidback nature of a destination town , and kashif could do as he pleased .

nadira watched her happy , loving family crumble before her eyes , which only meant she threw herself into her work even more than she already would have . in the subsequent years of taking over KHAN , she worked constantly , resulting in her most prolific seasons and an exponential boom in sales , but also incredible burnout .

she kept it up for three years , always on a red eye or in a meeting or sat at her desk over a sketchbook . this way , she could ignore the fact that her parents were living in two different states with her brother in a third now attending college of his own ( berklee college of music  , to be more specific ) . but her world came crashing down again when she received a call from her father , informing her that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer .

it felt like a sign . a terrible sign , but a sign nonetheless . she needed to stop . slow down . take a look at her family and deal with what was happening . nadira immediately stepped down , naming an interim head and creative director of KHAN while she uprooted her life to move to irving to take care of her father .

no matter her good-willed intentions when she moved , it seemed only inevitable that the young fashion star who had had it all would grow to feel trapped . she wasn’t going anywhere , not when her mother rarely came down to visit and her brother dropping out of school wasn’t even something anyone would let him consider , but she couldn’t help her growing feelings of resentment  - not towards her father , just her situation .

sometimes , even when money can buy the best , it simply isn’t enough . kashif passed away in july , effectively ending nadira’s obligation to stay in irving , but she hasn’t left . she could step back into her role full time at KHAN , get back to designing and running a global powerhouse , but she fears she’s lost the ability to . for now , she doesn’t see herself going anywhere - physically , mentally , figuratively , literally - despite the growing number of sketches in the notebook she carries everywhere .

[realm-sweet-realm]

Moving On

This takes place chronologically after the events of another one of my stories, called “Breaking the Time Loop.” I think it’s understandable without having read it, though. I hope everyone enjoys it.

---

For twenty three years, Sammy Lawrence had longed for everything he had now. Freedom. His old body. The whole, open, colourful world for him to live in. Even his relationship with Susie Campbell had been given back to him. In his daydreams, Sammy had fantasized about publishing the music he’d written in his years of captivity, becoming involved with a church, marrying, and never coming back to that horrible studio or performing demonic arts again.

Less had changed than he expected. Until he was finally free, he had never realized just how attached he was to the churches he already had within the studio, and the people he’d helped there. And so, every day after work, he’d head into the sketch dimension. The portal to it had found a new home in the closet in the bathroom of his brother’s apartment, where he and Susie were staying until they found their own place to stay. Joey had been perfectly willing to help him move it: there was no more closure to be had from the sketch dimension, and a part of Joey was honestly just happy that someone from the dimension was moving on and helping to salvage the souls of the damned.

Within the dimension, Alice Angel was hard at work sending the souls of Sammy’s cult to heaven. A necessary part of that was separating a soul from the hive mind that lost one’s tended to become when left unattended.

There was nothing functionally wrong with separating them out as needed like Alice was doing. The souls, spread out across dozens of bodies, simply wouldn’t be aware of themselves. A few of them, Sammy knew, had never even attempted to separate due to what could only be described as a very weak will to live. The only problem was that Sammy didn’t like seeing his people melt away into a languid hive. That was why he reopened the Church of Unity and returned to it whenever necessary, playing audio logs for anyone who had forgotten who they were.

There was a good deal less to do at the Church of Unity now that Alice was at work- nothing helps one’s will to live like not being hunted by a demon and the concrete promise of escape. And of course, now that Bendy had given life back to every person he could, the Church of the Ink Demon was permanently closed. The only other “work” he had as a pastor was in encouraging the occasional lost one who was afraid to give himself over to Alice. As a result, Sammy had a lot of time to spend hanging out with the important people in his life. He and Jack were still best friends, and would Sammy often played music with him. Jack also joined Sammy, Tom, and Alice for games of cards. He generally wouldn’t leave the sketch dimension until ten or eleven at night, when his body’s need for sleep forced him to.

At first, Susie stayed up for him. Though, his social batteries were usually drained by that point, so he typically just showered off and went to bed after that, careful to remove every drop of ink from himself and the floor. Susie hated seeing ink in any quantity greater than what would come out of a pen, and she hated when Sammy talked about what was going on in the sketch dimension. Thing was, that was pretty much Sammy’s whole life. Eventually, she stopped staying up for him, making him agree to have dinner with her and his brother each night before disappearing into the sketch dimension instead.

Over dinners, he mostly let Susie talk. She’d always been the type to enjoy talking about her day and the like. As of late, she’d been talking about new technologies and other little things that had changed between the forties and the sixties that she wanted Sammy to see. His response was always the same: “we’ll do it on the weekend.” As of late, she’d been doing a lot of complaining about him not becoming more involved in “the real world.”

Sammy hated that. The people of his cult were real. Real and important to him. If Susie didn’t want to listen to why that was (and she didn’t. She didn’t want to hear a word about the sketch dimension) she’d just have to accept it blind.

Despite some bitterness towards her, Sammy did feel bad about neglecting to make a life outside the sketch dimension, especially as Susie began to lose interest in him. And that wasn’t the only problem with living most of his life there. The other problem was that the people that made up his life were disappearing before his eyes.

Sammy had always known that that would happen eventually, of course. And he knew that his people were going to a better place, and that there was no way for them to live in a physical body again. Still, when someone he had known was there one day and gone from him the next, he couldn’t help but think of it as their death. Like people he knew were dying on a regular, steady basis and the studio just kept getting emptier.

Alice was the only one he could talk to about that. He didn’t even want Susie to know about it. So, when his memories of some ascended lost one were keeping him up at night, he’d leave and head for somewhere where no one could bother him. Oftentimes to his old sanctuary. From his time in captivity, he was used to hearing lost ones cry at night. He was even used to being one of them.

Susie noticed that Sammy’s mood had taken a turn, and was even aware of him leaving at night, but she didn’t know what to do about it. He denied that it was even happening, until a particular event pushed her to act.

It had all started when Sammy had come to Alice and Tom’s place, as he had many times before, only to be greeted by a strange, sketchy, black-and-white man. The man was tall, burly, and completely unsurprised by Sammy’s shock. “Like my new look? Oh calm down, Sammy. It’s Tom. Come in.”

“How...?”

“You see, Sammy,” Alice explained, “I decided to get one of the harder cases over with. The searcher that you’d isolated in that cage because she’d gone entirely insane. Well, after a few hours I realized that there was no fixing her. I should have known. She couldn’t even even speak, the poor thing. So I did what I did for Norman’s soul and just blanked it out and let Tom use it to change form. Boris here might be fine as a mute dog, but Tom isn’t!”

“Oh. Uh, congratulations, Tom. You look great!” Sammy replied, though he was much more concerned with his favourite blob with a hat. “She was so insane she couldn’t talk, you say?”

“Oh, Sammy. I promise you that Jack is going to be fine. I don’t know why he’s always stayed a searcher, but you know that none of them can talk. His soul seems pretty normal from what I can see.” From the corner where he was stroking Boris the wolf, Jack nodded in agreement.

“Alright, good to hear,” Sammy had said. That night, though, he laid awake, pondering his friend’s mortality, and the promise he’d made to his church to do everything in his power to save them. And it just seemed so unfair that he should get to live, just because he happened to have kept a bit of his own hair.

Sammy sat up in bed. That was it. The only way to bring him back was to get some physical remains of his. If that tiny, inky bundle of hair was enough for Bendy to do his magic, then anything ought to do.

Sammy retrieved a phone book from the drawer, taking a glance at the clock, which read 2:36. This was insane, and Sammy knew it was insane. Nonetheless, he flipped through the pages until he came upon the name “Fain.” It made most sense to just start at the top of the list and work his way down. He dialed the first number, the noise painfully loud against the silence of the night.

“Hello,” came a sleepy, female voice. Sammy had to wonder what he’d been thinking, doing this at this hour. Yet, it felt too late to back out now.

“Yes, hello. Do you have a relative named Jack Fain?”

“Uh, let me think... yeah. An uncle, I think.”

“Is he dead?”

“What?

“Sorry, I mean, uh...”

“Who is this?”

There was a silence.

“I’m hanging up-“

“Wait! I’m a geneticist from uh, New York University! We have reason to believe that he had a rare but harmless genetic abnormality that we’d like to study. Do you have anything that might have his DNA?”

“Oh, okay. I’m sorry, no. You might have a better chance with one of his adoptive kids, but I doubt anyone has anything. He went missing a long time ago. Can I give you one of their numbers?”

“I’d love that.”

Within the next ten minutes, Sammy had been on the line with all three of Jack’s adoptive kids, and was no closer to securing Jack’s DNA. He hung the phone back up and slumped to the floor, defeated and ready to cry. His sheep might be going to a better place, but he was still losing them, and he wasn’t sure how much more he could take. Susie and Sammy’s brother watched in silence from the hall. Susie beckoned his brother over.

“What should we do?” she whispered.

“I don’t think we can get through to him,” he replied.

“I think I know someone who can.”

Susie left the man’s side and left for the entrance to the sketch dimension. Even just poking her head through the door and seeing the sepia-toned studio on the other side made her heart pick up the pace. Slowly, she forced herself in, and pulled the door shut behind her. She checked it to make sure that it was in fact unlocked. Alright, she could do this. She’d done it before-done it for years. And it wasn’t as though the ink demon was here this time.

“Relentless forward momentum, Susie. Just do it, and don’t look back.”

Susie made her way through the studio, found an axe, slaughtered a few butcher gang trios, and found the elevator.

Relentless forward momentum. Don’t think, just do. There were plenty of artifacts of her past to trigger her memories, but she refused to take any of it in.

After a trip through Bendyland, she came to an ink river and stopped dead. Allison would be on the other side of this. Come on. Relentless forward momentum. It’s not gonna melt you. After some serious hesitation, Susie got in, waded through as quickly as she could, and found herself at Alice’s door. She gave it a few hard knocks.

“Who is it...?” Alice asked sleepily.

“It’s Susie Campbell.”

Confused, Alice got up and opened the door. Sure enough, Susie was there. “Susie! What brings you here?”

“It’s about Sammy. He’s not adjusting to the real world and I don’t think he would listen to anyone else. I want to give him an intervention, but could use you to soften him up. What do you say?”

Alice hesitated. Susie was getting desperate. “This is the last time he’ll ever get to spend with these people, Susie. I’ve seen into his soul, and you have no idea how much his people matter to him and how good his time here was. Have you ever considered just letting him grieve?”

Tears pricked at Susie’s eyes. “I wish I could see how he’s grown. But all he wants to do is come here. And talk about here. And I don’t wanna ever think about here again. All the ways I was hurt, and hurt other people... I just wanna forget it all and he won’t let me. Alice, if nothing happens, I’m going to have to leave him for my own sake so that I can move on. And I’m worried about how he’ll take that. He’s already crying almost every night, and tonight he was lying to people on the phone and acting like a fool in the middle of the night because he doesn’t want to lose Jack. I don’t wanna put a break up on him on top of that. What should I do, Alice?”

Alice looked to Susie with pity. At this point tears were flowing down the smaller woman’s face. “I guess you should at least warn him,” she sighed. “About the breakup, that is. I guess I can try talking to him. I’m biased, Susie. I don’t know what there is to value out there. I only know about in here. But I’ll try.”

“Okay,” Susie choked out.

“Can I walk you to the elevator? You look like you swam here.”

“There’s an elevator?”

“Yep. The lost ones made it.”

That explained why Susie didn’t know about it. Why would the lost ones share their knowledge with a monstress who wanted to vivisect them for their hearts? But, Susie didn’t have to think about that. A few minutes, and she’d be out of this inky hell.

—-

Sammy was overjoyed that Susie was finally allowing him to bring Allison and Tom out of the sketch dimension. He had something very important to tell them. After, of course, showing them around a little.

Allison in particular was awestruck as they walked downtown together. “There’s so much colour. Oh my gosh, what’s this one called?” Allison asked, pointing to a woman’s dress.

“Indigo. And the belt’s colour is called red,” Sammy said. Showing Allison around like this made him feel like a hero. Suddenly, Allison tore off to a cart selling flowers. By the time he’d caught up with her, she was face-deep in them.

“Oh, Sammy... you told me there were a lot of different kinds of these things, but... I never thought there would be this many.”

“Wanna buy some?”

If it were possible, Alice’s face lit up even more. Sammy bought her some small indigo flowers.

Soon, they were at the park they’d intended to go to. “So,” Alice began, voice somber, “I have something to tell you.”

“Really? Me, too.”

“You first.”

“Okay. So, I know you don’t really know yet what you’re going to do once you’re on the outside, and I’ve been thinking that you and Bendy could make a great team for curing mental illnesses like schizophrenia or dementia. Just kill them, manipulate the soul, and have Bendy bring them back to life. Easy, and it would probably bring in a lot of money.”

Alice looked at him like he was crazy. “Don’t the people out here have more reservations about death than us?”

“Oh, right. But, they also have reservations about torturing themselves with mental illness. I think a lot of people would still take it.”

“I don’t know, Sammy. I kind of want to find out who I am when I’m not killing people and manipulating souls. I don’t expect you to get it, but choosing who someone is supposed to be without their input is stressful. I’m not sure I can even do anything about dementia- it’s more a physical thing. And just... look around,” Allison gestured at the park. “It’s beautiful. Tom and I want to come out here and try something new. Anyhow, do you know if Bendy would be up to it?”

Sammy looked pensively to the grass. “No. Can I call him now?”

“Sure.”

So, that’s what Sammy did. Bendy picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Bendy. It’s Sammy Lawrence.

“Hi, Sammy! To what do ah owe the honour?”

“This is... mostly hypothetical, but I was wondering if you’d be up to joining in a little project with Allison. It would involve moving across states to live with her, but I can imagine no greater use of your gifts.”

Bendy was silent a moment. Then, he heard Bendy call out, “Dad! It’s Sammy! He wants me to move in with Alice!”

“What?” Henry grunted before taking the phone and chasing Bendy off to play. “Sammy, hi! How are you adjusting to the real world?”

“Good...”

“Good. Now look, I’m sorry, but Bendy relocating now is not a good idea.”

Sammy was surprised with the strength of his reaction. “But why? You don’t even know what my plan is.”

“Because, Sammy,” Henry said patiently, “Bendy is a child. It doesn’t matter what the plan was. He needs his parental figures.”

“No he isn’t,” Sammy retorted, “He’s a powerful, 20-something-year-old demon that can control ink and raise the dead.”

“Yeah, but he spent several of those years locked and chained in an empty room, and spent the rest of them wandering around in a pocket dimension attempting to steal a soul. And right now, he wouldn’t want to be separated from me for two days, let alone to move to another state with Tom and Allison. Mentally, he’s just a child with abandonment issues. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him long-term, Sammy. Right now we’re going to try putting him in school. He’ll probably be ready for something like what you’re talking about one day. But right now, we honestly just want to move on.”

“Oh. Okay,” Sammy said. Then he hung up.

“What did he say?” Alice asked.

“They want to move on.”

Alice nodded. “That’s the thing I needed to tell you. Susie is worried about you. She thinks you have to move on.”

Sammy hid his head in his hands. A ton of thoughts, most of them nasty, brewed. He counted to ten and said, “Susie doesn’t realize how important my cult is to me. She doesn’t want to talk about anything.”

“She’s traumatized.”

Sammy strained to keep the anger out of his voice and the tears out of his eyes. “Why couldn’t you have just fixed that when you had the chance? It hurts us. You fixed that other guy.”

Alice sighed. “That’s different, Sammy. Depression is basically the brain not producing enough of a couple chemicals. To use the writing metaphor, it’s a matter of correcting a couple grammatical errors. With Susie, it would be like rewriting the plot, or deleting sentences. Susie’s trauma is about her memories, and her interpretation of them. Unless it were necessary, I couldn’t just... delete soul-deep memories. I could have planted thoughts in her head so that she wouldn’t be so affected by them, but after doing so much of that already for her identity issues and aggression, I just wanted to keep it low-interference wherever I could. And maybe that was a mistake. There isn’t a manual for this, y’know. I have to make choices and then live with them.”

“Oh. Okay,” Sammy replied, resigned. “If I can ask, what’s the biggest thing you did to me?”

“I made your thinking less black and white. That’s about it.”

“Okay.”

Sammy sat in silence a while, head on his knees. “What are you going to do when you can come out?” Sammy asked. “Who will you stay with?

“Presumably Tom and I will just live in the sketch dimension until we can afford a real place.”

“Okay. I was just thinking about letting the sketch dimension go for Susie’s sake. The thing is, I don’t want to leave you to learn about the world alone-“

Alice grabbed Sammy’s hand. His perfect, creamy white hand. This was someone pure. Someone who wouldn’t be stared at by every man woman and child out here. “Sammy. Look at yourself. You belong out here. With people. I wouldn’t want to hold you back.”

“You wouldn’t be. Alice, I’m not the person I was going into the sketch dimension, and I wouldn’t want to be. I want to discover who I am now and how I could fit in to this world, too. That’s what Susie doesn’t seem to get- even when my cult is gone, I don’t want things to go back to the way they were. We could figure out our new lives together. Tom, too.”

Alice would have blushed if she were physically capable of it. She also laughed a little, which confused Sammy. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. It just that I was supposed to get you to see the light and leave the sketch dimension behind. It seems like I’ve done pretty much the opposite. I’m gonna warn you, though: Susie and your brother are waiting for you to come back to the apartment so they can do a little intervention for you.”

The two came back to the apartment together, where Susie and Sammy’s brother were waiting. They had a serious talk together about what Sammy could be doing to handle loss better, and Sammy listened. He also explained his side of the story and what he’d planned with Allison. Susie was devastated, but also relieved when she and Sammy broke up. After the intervention was finished, Susie called her sister, and was moved out within a week.

—-

It was a little over a year later, and Sammy was rowing across a lake with Allison and Tom, where they planned on having a picnic to celebrate the anniversary of Tom and Alice’s entry into the real world. Sammy was happy that he’d chosen to be a part of it.

had found their place in a little town that housed the greatest hospice in New York State. The people out here had gotten used to having two sketchy, black and white people around. It had taken time, though. Sammy had gotten a job at the hospice fairly easily, but it took him a while to convince his boss to give Allison a chance. It had turned out to be a good place for them both to use their skills, including ones Sammy had developed during his time as an ink creature. It was far from a secular hospice, so Sammy could even use spirituality to comfort some of the patients. Alice occasionally took a soul home and fixed it up enough to land it in heaven, which she found to be a good balance between using her power and being more than it. Tom was also happy working as a lumberjack. Even aside from work though, it was a nice town, though- small, tight-knit, out in nature, had a nice church.

Not all of their transition was easy. It was very hard for Tom and Allison to discover that just because they’d been together when their were no other options, didn’t mean that their love would survive once they were free to make other choices. Alice and Sammy had had feelings for each other on some level since the moment they’d met, and became a couple pretty much the second that they were both single at the same time. The trio remained friends, though, with Tom living fairly close by and visiting often.

Sammy had readjusted some of his unused music for the modern age and had released them to some success. Susie had called him to congratulate him as soon as she saw a record with his name on it for sale. They exchanged stories about how they were doing. Susie was doing well. She was back in voice acting and was getting fairly good roles, and she was engaged now. That had been a couple months ago, and they hadn’t talked since. That was okay. Sammy had moved on. At their own pace, everyone had.

---

Do you guys think Sammy made the right choice? When I started writing this, I was thinking I’d end it with Sammy giving the portal to the sketch dimension to Henry, forcing himself to move on, and eventually marrying Susie.

[nomanwalksalone]

UNSHIFTABLE SHAME

by David Isle

Earlier this week I went to see a production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 at the Folger Theater in Washington, DC. The play, with its endless turbulent palace intrigue, roiling populist insurrection, and fixation on political legitimacy, is as relevant today as ever, particularly in our nation’s capital. But a poignant scene in Act 2 stops the downhill tumbling of political chaos momentarily to sketch one character in lonely isolation from the continuing fray, and in the process turns back to a Shakespearean theme I have written on before: the inability of clothing to change a person’s character.

The play opens with the boy king Henry VI holding the throne, but delegating governance to his trusted advisor and uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. The Duke is faithful to Henry, but his wife, the Duchess Eleanor, has designs on greater power. The Duke’s enemies uncover Eleanor’s schemes and reveal them to the king, resulting in her exile. Before leaving, Eleanor is made to walk the streets in a white sheet, “mail’d up in shame, with papers on my back.” The Duke forsakes her to continue serving the king (unsurprising spoiler alert: this ends up not working out). The Duchess is finally left alone with her minder, some guy named Stanley:

DUCHESS

Stanley, I prithee, go, and take me hence; I care not whither, for I beg no favour, Only convey me where thou art commanded.

STANLEY

Why, madam, that is to the Isle of Man [ed note: this Isle is no relation to the present author]; There to be used according to your state.

DUCHESS

That's bad enough, for I am but reproach: And shall I then be used reproachfully?

STANLEY

Like to a duchess, and Duke Humphrey's lady; According to that state you shall be used.

Already here there’s a wedge being driven between the different aspects of the Duchess’s “state” - on the one hand, she holds a high rank, on the other hand her behavior has brought shame upon her. This creates a tension because in Shakespeare’s time, those of high rank are presumed to conduct themselves honorably (these presumptions now seem dated, of course). This theme is echoed throughout the play - for instance when the Duke of Suffolk, whose main role is as the queen’s secret, is executed by a band of pirates after telling them that “the honourable blood of Lancaster, must not be shed by such a jaded groom.”

The Duchess’s scene with Stanley continues:

STANLEY

Madam, your penance done, throw off this sheet, And go we to attire you for our journey.

DUCHESS

My shame will not be shifted with my sheet: No, it will hang upon my richest robes And show itself, attire me how I can. Go, lead the way; I long to see my prison.

Stanley still holds on to the conception of Eleanor as a Duchess, who only needs to change back into her normal costume to regain her hold on dignity, her “penance done.”

The Duchess understands a deeper truth, which is that even though she may resume her superficial title or her outwards appearance, her standing is reduced irretrievably. Her shame will “show itself,” no matter how richly she is attired.

A lesson often learned too late.

Quality content, like quality clothing, ages well. This article first appeared on the No Man blog in July 2017.

[impromptu-manifesto]

The Literature of the Pandemic Is Already Here

For those engaging in quick-response art, mess and chaos—not polished elegance—are the forms to best mimic a crisis that has no end in sight.

Intimations BY ZADIE SMITH PENGUIN BOOKS And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers From Around the World on the COVID-19 Pandemic 

BY ILAN STAVANS (EDITOR) RESTLESS BOOKS

A bleak fact of writing is that honing sentences is often far easier than honing the thoughts they convey. 

A corollary fact is that polished, elegant prose serves as a useful, if not always intentional, hiding place for half-baked ideas. 

Walter Benjamin wrote that a key element of fascism is the aestheticization of politics— the concealment of bad thinking behind bright optics. Even in fascist-free situations, the concealment principle is common enough that I have come to approach beauty and neatness in art with some skepticism.

So far, the nascent literature of the coronavirus pandemic has reinforced my distrust. Three assemblies of coronavirus-response writing—

Zadie Smith’s essay collection Intimations; 

NY Times’ short-fiction compilation, The Decameron Project; and 

the mixed-genre anthology And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, edited by Ilan Stavans—

tell me why: 

No one has had time to truly refine their ideas about personal life in a state of widespread isolation and existential dread, and literature, even when political, is a fundamentally personal realm.

It relies on the ability to channel inner experience outward, and because no inner experience of the coronavirus pandemic could plausibly be described as complete, prose that renders it static and comprehensible rings false. In the shaky realm of literature reacting quickly to a crisis in motion, mess and chaos are the forms that speak best to painful realities.

Zadie Smith opens Intimations, which contains six short, beautifully structured essays written largely in her characteristically gleaming prose, by acknowledging, 

“There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytical, political, as well as comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those—the year isn’t halfway done. What I’ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me.” 

So, instead of social insight, which Smith admits is not yet available, she chooses self-organization. The turn inward is entirely logical, but the structuring impulse does not bode well.

To be fair, Smith’s opting for order is unsurprising. 

In fiction, she’s a master of structure and form. Traditionally, she has allowed greater looseness in her essays and criticism—I am thinking, for instance, of Feel Free’s shaggy, implausibly delightful “Meet Justin Bieber!,” which uses a pop-star meet and greet as an occasion to revisit Martin Buber’s I and Thou—but not in Intimations. Its essays are short, tight, and glossy: pleasurable to read, but coy and cagey with their fundamental subject, which is death.

Take “Peonies,” in which a startling, lush garden sets Smith thinking about human vulnerability to biology. In theory, “Peonies” acknowledges the creative and destructive primacy of nature over determination—which includes its primacy over art. To Smith, art and determination are nearly synonymous: “Writing,” she explains, “is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience … rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate … But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance” to experience.

Of course, this is not true for all writers. Some seek to portray bewilderment rather than shape it into reason. Smith attempts to do the former in “Peonies,” but when it comes time for her to wrangle with the crushing confusion and helplessness that disease generates, she bails on her project. The coronavirus appears explicitly in “Peonies” only once, not named but described as our “strange and overwhelming season of death”—and the moment Smith mentions it, she arrives at her argument’s end. “Peonies” is a conventionally structured literary essay, which means, as we learn in high school, that its conclusion recapitulates its beginning. Rather than continue thinking about overwhelming death, Smith returns to the place where “Peonies” began: a flower garden, and the stifled yearning for disorder that it provokes.

“Peonies” is not the only essay in which structure helps Smith turn from death. “The American Exception,” a linear, op-ed-style argument, addresses death as a mass phenomenon, but never as a personal one. “Something to Do,” a reflection on why writers write even in crisis, reads like the first portion of a writing-workshop lecture. In “Screengrabs (after Berger, before the virus),” Smith returns to the section-heavy style of her 2012 novel, NW, in which neat, titled chunks of narrative replicate the unwillingness of her hyper-controlled protagonist, Natalie, to engage with emotion. But here, Smith is the one unwilling to engage.

In its premise, “Screengrabs” does reach for emotion: Six of the essay’s seven sections are nonfictional character sketches in which Smith implicitly says goodbye to her New York life’s minor players before leaving to shelter in London. The essay is faintly elegiac—as I read, I could not escape thinking that its subjects, even the man who insists, “I survived WAY worse shit than this,” might not survive the virus. But its fragmentary structure lets Smith stop short of expressing grief. The form demands that she move quickly, even as its content might more fully emerge if she slowed down. The lone exception is the seventh section, titled “Postscript: Contempt as a Virus,” in which Smith describes and mourns the killing of George Floyd. Here, her dealing with death is not fleeting or abstract. Her prose is ragged and free of ornament; her consideration of racism as deadly contempt is the only idea that Intimations sees through from beginning to end. The reason seems clear: Floyd was killed in late May, and I received my advance copy of Intimations in mid-June. The section was evidently written quickly, but it emerges from centuries of American history. Smith has no need to hide behind structure here.

The Decameron Project has a bigger problem than a proclivity for organization. Many of its 29 stories are emotionally neat and one-note. Etgar Keret’s contribution, “Outside,” is unique in that its neatness is negative: Keret’s narrator squashes the common and sustaining dream of post-pandemic empathy and solidarity, asserting cynically, “The body remembers everything, and the heart that softened while you were alone will harden back up in no time.” Other contributors take the opposite approach, pursuing positivity and beauty at the expense of honesty. Take Alejandro Zambra’s “Screen Time,” in which the small graces of family life—watching a toddler sleep, conducting a fingernail-growing race—outweigh the stresses of quarantine, which Zambra describes with less imagination and in less detail. The mother in “Screen Time” manifests anxiety primarily by no longer “reading the beautiful and hopeless novels she reads,” which may reflect a common desire for optimism. But Zambra’s apartment-size world is too sweet, its calm too accessible and unexamined. The result is charming, but, for me, unconvincing.

Still, the Decameron Project does contain successes. Rachel Kushner, Téa Obreht, Leila Slimani, and Rivers Solomon all smartly smuggle very good stories about older, different topics—storytelling, exile, storytelling again, incarceration—into coronavirus frames. Only Tommy Orange dares an actual portrait of quarantine in “The Team,” which wobbles like a kid on her first two-wheel bike. Its language is often confusing, sometimes ugly. Words tumble from its narrator, who monologues about time, turkey vultures, marathons, pig slop, racism, Oakland housing prices, and more, with no plot or connective tissue between each topic but the speaker himself. The result demands attention simply by virtue of the narrator’s need to be heard. It has no moral or fixed meaning; to borrow Zambra’s formulation, it offers neither beauty nor hope. Yet as I read its description of time ticking past in quarantine, as “hidden and loud as the sun behind a cloud,” I felt a jolt of recognition. It is like that, I thought. Orange’s messy descriptions and run-on sentences, alone in the Decameron Project, offer small new truths.      

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, a genre- and border-crossing anthology of mostly translated reactions to the coronavirus, is full of mess. In fact, the editor Ilan Stavans seems to invite it. He juxtaposes styles—poetry next to literary criticism, experimental fiction next to personal essay—in a way that is consistently disorienting and sometimes jarring, but pleasantly so. He permits political contradiction: In one contribution, Mario Vargas Llosa lauds Spain’s quarantine protocols, while in another, the translator Teresa Solana expresses terror at the Spanish government’s treating the pandemic like “a war, establishing a military scenario and using bellicose language with patriotic resonances.” If Stavans’s goal were coherence, he might have cut one piece, but he lets both remain, offering non-Spanish readers multiple views of a country unclear about its path forward—and implicitly accepting his own lack of knowledge.

Uncertainty is a driving theme in And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again. So is brokenness: broken bodies, hearts, medical systems, immigration systems, and more. Lynne Tillman takes a Tommy Orange–like approach to the breakdown of time, writing hectic, unadorned prose that turns into a breathless pileup: “I am exhausted, lie down, sit up, touch my toes, swing my arms, make a phone call, ignore a call, hear a voice, see a message, answer it, don’t, there is plenty of time, too much time.” Tillman’s sentences are cramped, confined, and unbeautiful. They don’t try to impress the reader. Reading her contribution generates the same restless boredom a writer—or any inessential worker—might feel while pacing the same apartment for the 100th day, knowing that there’s nowhere to go. So does the French Tunisian writer Hubert Haddad’s, which takes the pileup strategy much further. His story is a collage of fictional “false starts, drafts, approximations, [and] broken-off openings” that describe and evoke the “hazy driftlessness” of quarantined life. Its choppy, static structure captures the dysfunction of pandemic time.

In a May essay on coronavirus journals, the New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal described the diaristic impulse as “beautifully ordinary.” 

Records of quarantine may be banal, she writes, but their very existence is reassuring enough to be lovely. In other forms of writing, however, beauty is not enough to comfort. In fact, it runs the risk of 

trivializing, 

distorting, or 

evading the crisis it portrays. 

Thus far, the coronavirus literature that works best admits certain truths about life mid-disaster: 

The news is terrible and relentless. 

Nobody knows what will happen. 

The search for a vaccine is ongoing, 

as is the search for sources of hope and meaning. 

Will the coronavirus pandemic lead to stronger social safety nets? 

Better health-care systems? 

Will it produce cohesion or despair? 

We have no way to know yet. What true story besides an uncertain, unbeautiful one is there to write?

[hannahsspotlight]

Hannah’s Spotlight

2019 by Jacob Hagedorn

Awake all night, now Asking Saint Chris in the morning about the weather shows how up-for-chaos an agender, asexual is when there is a party happening downstairs, already chaotic, as the alarm alarms and I rub my eyes - my sister’s graduation party. 

You may come to know of my worries in a flaming context that proves that I am centered some; mornings I feel the pain so. The worrisome functions are still snowballing - and even if I hold out my hand, Saint Chris shakes it, even tho I was just needy of solutions and was unsurprised he decided to leave the day as a surprise. 

Ignoring the noise from downstairs, and circling the present moment, I am sitting on the side of the bed and gazing plainly out the window, the dreams of the night - this time, a lot like other times, was of the demon in my closet that will be left discrete, that is certainly not blood and that makes me cry even if it is a dream now…not crying now - although it was quite real then, and it made me sick to be reminded, or made out to be some sort of Event that was uncanny considering I was mostly content and happy and did not have all that many dark ideas or concepts hovering over me or inside me - it is anxiety and it will be examined but not made of the entirety of my mood. And that is what is funny, a different version is in fact inside me and it is not beautiful. It is what made me how I am way back when. 

The schizo affective muttering (addition) slips from my tongue as I turned on collaborative paraphrasing, ergo modern indie rock, and also pulling out strings of hair of figuring out what color of shirt I was going to where - hmm, not a crop top or leggings today, and definitely no magical robe. It is not Sunday, yet this event there will be people of somewhat or definite promising futures or a presence of presents and giving presents. The thought occurred to me about how I am going to probably miss my morning coffee, so I chose a white polo and settled for a bottle of water on my desk. My sister will be beginning a masters study at The University of Texas in Austin. 

There will be all sorts of personal cringing for not being adamant about the latest political buzz, or cameras, or philosophy, and even wanting to run back upstairs to take the one bullet from my closet for the one, personal use because my scholarly voice is not of par or being a whole failure - god damn it, being dramatic; I smirk then cringe. The aura from downstairs ignored, *shiver*.

There is no toleration, only anxiety - an outcast feeling, in my home too due to said party. The way to feel alright is to know not only is the person themselves doing alright, it is if we are alright together - mutual concern. Otherwise we are not picking each other’s brain or learning but we are just filling time and air. I am not apt to showing upright confidence, and also I am too experienced to act defeated..usually coming off precisely sarcastic or nonchalant but I am rather just worked up in some way - and hopefully it is not painful for them although it is for me and I fight to survive in this world. 

Asking questions is a bit easier than developing something interesting as a response, so this will not be too difficult - the people will not seem familiar mostly; just my parents and sister of course. I will find a seat and sit for about one whole hour, than escape back upstairs to avoid being killed, to be safe, and most likely to read a comedy book meaning drama and not all that funny in modern context - that can be funny in it’s own way to me at least. Okay I will wear the white polo, blue jeans, and just socks. Books are my escape, and I usually get something out of them that was not intended, which indeed makes me frantic about it; frantic about most anything but the breathing is still manageable and I can smile about random things.

Outside there are cars parked and the front door opening and closing to people making loud exclamations towards one another. Imagination brings me to the idea that if, when downstairs, they are all in fact monkeys swinging from the chandelier or turtles stacking on top of each other to reach heights to balance the monkeys swinging and than - possibly - a huge rhino (resembling chaotic power) plows them all over to all truly exceed my expectations and giving me a reason to take out my video camera, taping the rupture to finally being close to have an interesting scenario to show besides being a character in someone else’s figment. Participating is worrisome at times. Having control of a concept helps me sleep at night; make it healthy and good for all the right reasons, I hope. 

Yeah, I do not get out much. The college schoolwork is homeschool and I have never been on a date - 22 years old, and the most interesting thing about me is that I am a filmmaker against the odds of popular aspirations, which does not bother me because I am easily inspired. The most interesting film style, personally, is music videos - one can match sound with physical - double the emotion, and that is the only pleasure I get considering the small amount of emotion I muster up on average - not much, and my personal musical scores live in a way together with the visual depictions. 

There are no friends downstairs or outside, or anywhere - there are none at all in this life. There is not a map to find me, a trace online or a voice of hints; no use, there is no point in making connections, there must be more wrong with me…I am a bit taken aback at any social point. Making short films or music videos for the simple, acoustic piano songs I make for practice occupies me and I do it for myself completely, I say. To study music theory, or video editing techniques, or new gear knowledge is what I will study on my own - listen, celebrate truth not success (the difference is slim). The truth is I am asexual/agender and this is not the problem, it is just how I am, and yet my parents would like me to get married and there is an obvious raincheck for that. Karen, the eldest of us two and my older sister does not currently have a boyfriend, so she is far from family building as I am, although her chances of success is higher in my eyes - but I probably just will not find a success in that ever; cats, or rhinos. 

Muttering my name over and over eyes to eyes: ‘Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam…’.The mirror reflects the body flailing to the music now, vocal paraphrasing, gusts of strums, and strikes of keys - precisely pumping myself up for the bussing job downstairs; cleaning is somewhat a priority but I do have delusions on how often things should be helped when there is a public setting; guessing it is a random obsession act. If the obsessing grows and there is not a dialogue happening at any rate, maybe there is an escape to the neighborhood park. It is only partly true to myself; am not against the human race at all. 

The rhythm of aimlessness is a settled spiral till the end where it shoots out in every which way that refuses to be gathered; so you need someone else to pick a point for you, and I have been waiting for that. The loneliness coming naturally ergo this sense of sexuality, although it is really a lack of sexuality, teaches me to start points logically before they spiral and match them with some other logic as an arrow headed somewhere. If it is going to be chaotic soon, there must be a theme and most of the time the idea is of loneliness, being introverted and having no interest in most emotions. So, dancing for a short duration, or going downstairs is actually a huge risk because the voice in my head thinks it an apt time to mock myself and feel small; worthless, and when I do shrivel back into my reality…I feel ashamed. 

Sing along for myself, make my bed for myself, and make any effort for myself - this is why the days are long and frantic; there is no one to speak with or of, and for awhile now. My phone does not buzz, no one is ringing the door bell for me, and there are nobody checking in. If I mixed it up and wore a dress, that would be for myself but it ruins all chance for myself and others, even though I know that is not true - more or less to be included but I wish I was just already in the midst of it all. People pretend they want to get away, like they do not rely on gratification at all - and maybe there conversations are not a good-heavy, but at least something is going on in general for them; surely there is good tho. 

Now not a completely aimless morning, running back some personal favorites of my musical creations; sketching out visual scenes that probably will not make sense to anyone, including myself. A mood, or even a title, is more powerful than trying to depict meaning - and there is no feedback in my life but I sure enjoy it anyhow, even if beauty is misunderstood or short of cohesiveness. The lack of emotion, the lack of interesting subject, the lack of genuine message: all leaves me sulking, but only in the context of if anyone sees it - what will they think? I know my life has meaning, and the results I am fine archiving or even releasing to be found years from now by one person that may be inspired; best scenario, and absolutely worth the effort whenever it was started. And if not, it satisfied me for a moment while personally interacted with.

Most of my college credits are things that interest me, and there is not a day set for a known completion - there is a chance college will never be completed on my behalf, and I guess that is okay; music, German, fiction, history - it all is great and would not be possible to go in person, although missing society and seeing a smile on a face in reality would be healthy for me, and would create a new sense of how to integrate myself into society, help it grow in some small way, and inspire me to smile myself too. 

Then I shift to be in the midst of other music, other videos - it reminds me of meth back a year ago when the nightmares began; crippling, lonesome experience: the most risky endeavor of my life, and I have done my share of rehabs and mental hospitals - combining heroin does not work, of course. Mold, enjoying mold?… *Shiver*, relax and refocus. The mere sound or visual intake of what inspires me: does so freely, and I am washed away in a tide of bliss and love because they are so much accompanied by endearment; there comes tears and something magical to identify with, and the only time emotion is uncontrollable - it could go on forever, but then I get back to myself: nothing; nothing great at all - I will go take a shower. Their magic is not my magic, unfortunately - yet I can take a next step which is always good. 

Standing there, through the hallway, by the stairs, I could hear the roar of the crowd and sudden laughter, or indecipherable exclamations. The anxiety in me grew. What is my name? Part of controlling the chaos within is realizing that most people are much like you; different, but living in the same time. Maybe I just feel challenged a lot - by myself, and uncontrollably by others; being fixed on a craft or just having a clear mind makes you a bore unless situationally. I turn on the water. 

The future imagined is far from soon receiving disability, or staying at home much longer - ugh- ; it is actually not a defeated mindset, it is finding love in the impossible way meaning romance is so foreign. In the shower I look at the Blue Bed tattoo on my leg, the color fading - maybe the bed is where I belong and may also be the negative influence of my imagination: it is emotionless yet powerful in it being so necessary - although my bed is white. Being aware of having a version of laziness is far from humorous - it makes me sick even though I know a lot can be done or discovered in a bed. I get out of the shower, towel off, skip brushing my teeth, and look in the mirror all ready: boy.

There could be a whole lifetime wasted on depicting reality and worrying about it - and to think I can turn it into art even if it will never be seen is an impossibility and is a part of my delusional thinking - the stuff is important, but I cannot communicate any contrast at all of anything. I am happy mostly, because I intake and study at moments - it is all so beautiful indeed. A boost of confidence is needed, and the reason appearing downstairs is frightening is because hope has only let me down over the course of my life - and being happy is separate than that I believe. Being optimistic, and resetting that optimism is mostly quite simple in retrospect; we mainly defeat ourselves.

No matter the song, no matter the image - there will be a break of ego and the mutual, yet confusing (for me) interest will be kicked around and it will kill me slowly even if it is only two minutes at each go - and there is a bad habit ingrained to just walk away to somewhere else; me, awkward and rude. Do not get me wrong, I am capable of admiring and developing of just about any topic - the emotion they feel though, and what they are trying to relay for some reason does not register. I just say, ‘Oh yeah!…’ and feel defeated and death-near.   

Mother said the party will go on till about 2 o’clock. I pretend to look for clothing when I see my closet is cracked; shivering and cold - there is no demon here now, though there probably is but I am sober or not in a dream to be in that sort of realm, and that is terrifying of itself. When it happened then, the creature thew up black mold onto my floor, and was gracefully-but-weirdly accompanied by beautiful, blissful string music; what I heard before and after seeing the most terrifying visual. That song, that I could identify still to this day, is in my hopes that there was also an actual angel soothing me against terror, but what a small closet! There is no way to be an entity with such demonic attire but also mustering up the sound of heaven; I heard heaven and now the closet is closed.

Some tears came as the chair by my desk spun around with me in it - stopping, put palms to face and bending over to my knees; this is my aesthetic, and this will not get easier. A bit of nausea as well, with sweaty palms which makes the whole Manly concept a joke in my shoes. My voice, when speaking anywhere or with anyone, sound like someone is pinching my face and demanding I talk sweeter - like immediate and organic sincerity, but the mocking voice in my head often makes me sound drastically uninterested - and that is just not true. 

If the thought of ‘The One’ appears in the brain, it is known that the concept is of the bullet or even the demon - not a real person that is of a hoping mind, or a golden opportunity. The violence is too drastic and the occasion is not on this course of this now though; just a thought and the gun is in the attic - I’d blow holes in my soul for it to rain and come down on the people; the chandelier falling and the creatures in panic as I am in panic in a way but different. Cheers to the few. The white walls in the room are getting higher - and the shadow still lurks in some way - this is the haunting aura and it has just begun. Maybe that experience will be chased endlessly in a way throughout my life - because the music could not have come from evil, jest-like cruelty that was in my face; running out of the room then to my parents was a feeling I have not felt since I was a young child - all the times avoiding nightmares. 

Haunted is right; cynical things have happened and even if Hopeless is more daily than anything else,  I sometimes think there are no pros only cons in this experience. My friends left me from high school, my parents do not accept me fully, have been shown no grace by society it seems, although I try to get included, and it goes roughly - even if that somehow seems like I am showing grace and easing myself the apparent defeated attitude; I do not want that, this is just what is known by me for the last year or so: more than ever before. There is nothing gained from these ego deaths besides never having to feel this emotion newly again; old and new now, but when it is new it stings above all and I teach myself to minimize the old into a secondary worrisome-process. Maybe I will shed this perspective - good things have happened and will happen I now admit. This tends to happen: it is about latching on to something hopeful and good in the end of a segment, starting a new. There are pros, so let me work this out. 

My parents will be smiling, my sister too - that makes it easier; seemingly friendly and inviting: this comes natural for them, and I will busy myself with dishes or offering organic smiles for a millisecond then break away and look down. If the people think I am selfish, they are probably right. When I snuck away and eased with drugs, that was easy - although there was never a point to rely on it completely. This is doable, this is manageable and my sweaty hands are just my sweaty hands - the spiraling and chaotic arrows of unsettling anxiety will not kill me. One foot after the other; conversation and interaction is healthy - that is known but not practiced personally. Following sentences and coming to realize the purpose of them always wants me to practice more - keep asking questions until you find out a unique point and than feel satisfied that they have managed a sincere smile; something like an accomplishment, and making them feel okay mutually - no lies at all, and a mutual firework will gleam around the room back and forth until that night when someone smiles in bed, thinking: ‘That was a good day.’ That is what I hope altogether, and it makes the uncomfortable feeling less dramatic - the pressure shortens. 

I am smiling - wow. The mania is drifting towards a light indeed, and it is fait that works in my favor sometimes - and also, of course, feeling giddy about the light. Is this a dream? - gleaming again. If the day started again I would have began it with this song - rolling down a hill, momentum gaining, love or joy possible. There is satisfaction now that the day is coming together - or falling specifically in a happy array of flowers; a new perspective I suppose. Caught on, holding on - near the stairs; deep breathe. Ok, Adam. 

-

Glaring to my left and right with softish eyes, mostly an excited stance, things are lively but not as quick and random as I had imagined. Some see me and give a little smile, in meaning that they recognize me, or a general arrow towards me of pure addition; one more in the room, and even though that did not hold up to my usual satisfaction - that ideology - but knowing there were all sorts of personalities, like the thirty-five or so human figures and voices, that opened up all sort of possibilities for a better chance at a satisfying exchange. My stomach started to hurt; feel a little light headed and my heart kind of is fluttering. I can make out words from people, like: ‘Yes!’, ‘Right.’, ‘Well..’, ‘How did you..’, ‘Ya know..’, etc. 

Making way for the caffeine and to find my family one by one to locate for a secure feeling. My sister had her hands on her waist and then raising them as she proudly embraces an old friend - she is just as enthusiastic about mutuals. Right now, a feeling of contentment and satisfaction overtake me because of how much she has accomplished and how much she will too; she is just getting started making a positive impact. A wide smile, a Texan tan, and freshly highlighted hair: people use to identify us as twins, but I stand mildly random about my appearance and hardly prepare - this in fact is not my big day, but it is so for a lot of other reasons. 

My mother wearing a flowery dress - big smile, next to my dad, talking to a couple that I know is from church that knew us kids since we were born. Mom is the same person that comforted me when things were low: friends lost, feelings damaged, or a lack of hope in any way. My dad has expressed that he has similar social anxieties or a worried mind no matter the situation - he handles everything just fine, and participates for the sake of loving his family and being proud of everyone. For me, there is an indescribable love for my family - but the fact that there is a house full of people is more potent of a state currently; no matter the original motive. 

The first person that talks to me is my dad’s best-friend’s wife, who is the mother of two boys that were some of my best friends when I was very young. Where are they? Your husband too! They were such a great family, and I have not seen any of them in about five or so years. She told me the youngest was working at a camp in Oklahoma, and the eldest was with his father seeing a baseball game in Michigan; where my dad and his friend were from, and the Tigers to always root for. Although a newish, spare-time occupation, writing scores for videos, she heard that that is how I spend my life instead of leaving the house; she knew that too from just the look of me and how I talk seemingly. *Blush*, I asked about the boy’s college experiences and that conversation vanished when the first exit appeared, somehow and it was awkward; I do not know how it was carried but damn it… 0/1. 

When arriving at the back patio to find a seat around a table, I was able to recollect and be reflective on how it was going: planning how my tone and mood would contrast with anyone. Breathing, dressed boyish but when talking to any woman here my voice goes up and my pronunciation is more upright and feminine - there are people looking when this happens, but it is when I am the most myself, and the more I ask questions with a more giddy yet wholesome aura, the more people actually hug me or say Adam with some playfulness. The women have strings of potent emotions, and the men seem to scale on productivity or focused on how the present will effect the future; to express intricate stories that may not be but for the purpose of striking a meaning of the subject - to laugh and identify something of value, versus concrete, masculine ideations. 

Today, right now, does not remind me of anything here, like a video I have seen; there is no music either happening and the thought of either music or visual captions is appealing due to a boredom, or a genuine idea to process something so foreign to me - the company at the house. The loud crowd and the people hustling around could in fact be cut/arranged into a romantic piece of a sort - the people on the patio could look interesting from across the street, my mom decorates pretty well indeed, and the music would have no beat - but a major key piano that is medium paced, ergo soothing and inviting to showcase gleeful gatherings with hyper zoomed out or in with a Karen voiceover. I do not know; to me it is fun to think about - although it maybe shows how amateur and unfocused I am in actuality. *Yawn*.

Sweat on my body, and shaking hands - my mother comes over and asks if I recently got up from bed: yes, and is Karen enjoying herself amongst friends? She said yes, in fact, she may have found a roommate for Austin or at least a complex to consider. If I made friends that easy, there would be a different future. If it is zoomed out, like the cinema, it would be a ballroom of ants. They come as they come, some dressed as they are or other. How I feel is that I should crawl away back upstairs to where the big red dragon reigns. Now I turn left or right; not going to wait. Pick one of the ants, a new priority but mouth dry - drink tea. Would it be too much to ask if I was wearing a terrifying bird mask? Sipping tea sparingly via slightly taking off the mask; they probably would still ask how my life is and it would not feel any different to me, but they would ask to go off to sit somewhere with my vote and hearty permission, it is so. Been waiting for the urge to run inside to turn on Peter Pan in the living room for the room. Why am I waiting? Or why is my guilty conscience racing my identity? 

Looking at my fingernails, somewhat in tune with the feelings of the movements, yet all the reasons they are laughing are contradicting the electric jest of the real psychotic charity I am holding a white flag for - no one is helping and this is why I quit drugs. Speaking any tongue to me is a way I feel like the victim of all this: frightened; yes? Do tell me about the looming elegance of interaction that I have for years avoided; developing a horrific laziness, but I am editing colors in my head calmly at the moment. I get up to go for the coffee, seemingly pressing on with more anxiety coming with the caffeine; maybe just two cups and some tea later.

In the process of giving up being so young and difficult, ready to change partly; an adult, that looks familiar, heads towards the couch I am sitting on - sipping hot coffee, and my soul completely dropped. Uh, uh, uh, uh. A tunnel brought her closer, and she was growing radiantly, now towering over me, in complete surprise. 

‘Don’t you remember me, Adam?’ With both hands around her back, and a teeth-smile that broke my eye contact immediately after. Fucking emotion, I remember her - she glances at the space between us, and I say, 

‘Sleep…Sorry, I felt asleep.’ Yet my legs were shaking, oh heaven. 

‘Do you feel lonely over here all by yourself?’ It is Hannah. Hannah was mormon some time ago, she sometimes hangs out with my old high school buddies ,which those friendships dissolved, and her older brother took Karen to Homecoming her junior year. 

‘Hannah. How are you? Your hair is short and purple. I like that! And your voice has changed.’

‘How so?’

‘I do not know, you have changed.’ One. Definite nice one, Adam…

‘Oh, well it is so nice seeing, it has been years! So, film?’ 

We were in film club together sophomore year in high school and she was just as attentive and passionate about it. She was the fashion hand, which now makes sense - her yellow, unicorn shirt is intriguing. Butterfly earrings and very well done, minimal makeup, eyeliner, and light blue fingernail polish. It is just a genuine breathe-take seeing her - this makes me very happy, and now my voice gets higher but normalizing. I feel comfortable as she sits right next to me on the couch with our drinks. 

-

Impossible to resign when faced with the uttermost sincerity; struck by a calm, white cloud, it feels. When she touched my shoulder after an accidental Lonesome reveal, all the voices hushed in the rooms it seemed as she grinned with contentment. There is no rush for me: bright blue eyes. Hannah has changed a lot indeed - she has grown to be magnificent and she proves that when I say ‘I am not sure…’ and she makes me think it is known in fact, whatever it is; a needed grasp on the self that she seemingly promotes and delicately practices. Go on and ask her:

‘How are your friends?…my old pals?’ Smirking minimally in naiveness actually, because she did not feel challenged - not one bit. 

‘They talk about you! Everyone worries about you of course. Ya know, you had some pretty daring obstacles: the drug season maybe, that is so incredible that you have conquered!’ 

Hannah paints for fun, she showed me a waterfall from her phone, and also works at a gallery now across town, plus a breakfast place on weekends. She is getting more exact on the spectrum of relation - I am dark; everywhere that has been explored for satisfaction was in a false mindset: people, or just maybe her now makes me realize that what has been going on inside is definitely affecting the outcome of my reality. It is the experience she has had, and a knack for keeping it genuine, and this all astonishes me. Now I see that maybe my friends moved on because they needed room to grow: that is a sad thought, but she is proof of evolution in any case of more growth. At school, Hannah was quiet, and stuck mostly around her church friends yet still sweet as can be when speaking out in film club.

‘Did Alex ever tell you… oh, never mind.’ I stopped, being stupid and knocking down the fortress of purity, or the floating adoration bubble she herself brought over and freely included me. Alex was like me in some ways: feeling explorer, and we grew so close it felt like the only thing romance is grouped with in my life in context. 

She laughed smartly at words we were saying and the emotion they proclaimed and we, together, were intertwined in a function of progress.

‘Tell me what?’

‘Never mind that. My realm is just a little dark…’

There was a point where there was self-inflicted, heavy tension for me, but not between us. Hannah’s beam was not fading, but I am realizing that this is taking a lot of work for her considering the unhealthy preoccupation that possesses my mind regularly and is seeping out, and with no beam of my own at all. Obviously far from any sensual ideations, and she seems way bigger than me and the attempt to equalize shows me like out-of-options and struck dumb and numb. 

-

We did not go on a walk and I could not find the words to pursue more questions in her direction; how selfish indeed, yet she gave me her number and she told me to update her on my work and I told her the same - me, beyond perplexed and unspeakably inspired. Today, Hannah is my blessing. As the people left, and my sister was happy, I asked Karen about her and she says they have talked before - only a couple months ago too. That night, instead of wondering when there would be another opportunity to redeem myself, or wondering when there would be another event in satisfaction in general in my life: I closed my bedroom door, danced as the sun went down, and Hannah’s everlasting spotlight cleansed my soul and guided the demons away. And I thought: You learn to dance when you fall in with nothing to do, like the universe; my own hell diminished by bliss and the one that saved my day - I fell asleep smiling knowing influence is soft, and a chance for a beautiful state to be accessible is at any moment if I try and acknowledge the eternal beauty of the human race; till tomorrow, and all I will need is a smile.

jhagwrites@protonmail.com

[nomanwalksalone]

UNSHIFTABLE SHAME

by David Isle

Earlier this week I went to see a production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 at the Folger Theater in Washington, DC. The play, with its endless turbulent palace intrigue, roiling populist insurrection, and fixation on political legitimacy, is as relevant today as ever, particularly in our nation’s capital. But a poignant scene in Act 2 stops the downhill tumbling of political chaos momentarily to sketch one character in lonely isolation from the continuing fray, and in the process turns back to a Shakespearean theme I have written on before: the inability of clothing to change a person’s character.

The play opens with the boy king Henry VI holding the throne, but delegating governance to his trusted advisor and uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. The Duke is faithful to Henry, but his wife, the Duchess Eleanor, has designs on greater power. The Duke’s enemies uncover Eleanor’s schemes and reveal them to the king, resulting in her exile. Before leaving, Eleanor is made to walk the streets in a white sheet, “mail’d up in shame, with papers on my back.” The Duke forsakes her to continue serving the king (unsurprising spoiler alert: this ends up not working out). The Duchess is finally left alone with her minder, some guy named Stanley:

DUCHESS

Stanley, I prithee, go, and take me hence; I care not whither, for I beg no favour, Only convey me where thou art commanded.

STANLEY

Why, madam, that is to the Isle of Man [ed note: this Isle is no relation to the present author]; There to be used according to your state.

DUCHESS

That's bad enough, for I am but reproach: And shall I then be used reproachfully?

STANLEY

Like to a duchess, and Duke Humphrey's lady; According to that state you shall be used.

Already here there’s a wedge being driven between the different aspects of the Duchess’s “state” - on the one hand, she holds a high rank, on the other hand her behavior has brought shame upon her. This creates a tension because in Shakespeare’s time, those of high rank are presumed to conduct themselves honorably (these presumptions now seem dated, of course). This theme is echoed throughout the play - for instance when the Duke of Suffolk, whose main role is as the queen’s secret, is executed by a band of pirates after telling them that “the honourable blood of Lancaster, must not be shed by such a jaded groom.” 

The Duchess’s scene with Stanley continues:

STANLEY

Madam, your penance done, throw off this sheet, And go we to attire you for our journey.

DUCHESS

My shame will not be shifted with my sheet: No, it will hang upon my richest robes And show itself, attire me how I can. Go, lead the way; I long to see my prison.

Stanley still holds on to the conception of Eleanor as a Duchess, who only needs to change back into her normal costume to regain her hold on dignity, her “penance done.” 

The Duchess understands a deeper truth, which is that even though she may resume her superficial title or her outwards appearance, her standing is reduced irretrievably. Her shame will “show itself,” no matter how richly she is attired. 

A lesson often learned too late.