#what fucked up poetry cement was she eating

[tea-and-finalfantasy]

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medical sign newly bent in half. literally broken backwards

WEED carved into cement

huge uprooted tree but it's on private property so i can't go look at it

the hospital that's been receiving all the patients from a still-unusable hospital that had a fire so it's severely packed to the point where there's like, no beds, and i couldn't even eat my post-bloodwork crackers privately bc there was no space--i had to pull down my mask and eat in the waiting room around other ppl

a restaurant sign where the letters are fucked up so instead of saying "country" it says "cuntry"

if it were still around, the sandpit playground where anything that wasn't wood or the slides--one of which being hot warbling metal that'd burn the backs of your legs bad if u went down it when it was hot--was made of tires. there was an adorable/fucking SICK tire dragon too but i'm glad it's now a playground for younger kids bc before ppl would smoke weed there and leave needles in the sand like if ur gonna smoke weed at least go to the benches at the track LITERALLY RIGHT NEXT TO THE PLAYGROUND. but we could still go to the playground now bc u can sit on the swings and the ground is a rubber material and it fucks it's so cool

new library!!!!!!!! they have tables and chairs and keurigs u can use for like 1.25? or less??? probably less but i haven't been in a while. a shit poetry selection but it's very pretty there!

in addition to my house, there's my grandma's house, my great aunt's house, another relative's house that used to be a different relative's house, my dad's brother's house--all of these w those ppl still living there! once my great-grandparents moved here, a lot of us stuck to this town i guess

the location of the yearly Portuguese festival where u can hear the music from my house. my dad first proposed to my mom there behind a meat truck (she didn't accept that time but did accept later)

the house that used to belong to the elderly couple from church and when they were still alive and my parents were younger but living together, engaged or married, my parents accidentally shot fireworks into their roof

far less wholesome: former murder shack location (it was burned down i believe before anything got investigated). i will have to ask my sister abt what my dad mentioned of it bc i don't know where it was and my dad's passed so i can't ask him

The Ten Commandments: a ? grouping of apartments nicknamed that bc apparently every commandment has been broken there

a friend i met in college is? was? in my town at a gym or smtn so i just asked her to enlighten my on her favorite site here, such as:

entire fucked up road

missing sidewalk

chinese restaurant that burned down FOURTEEN YEARS AGO and the plot is still a giant closed off fucking hole in the ground or the new site literally right outside my house on the stone wall/fence: packaged sandwich left by road workers over the summer that's still there inside the sealed plastic

[sonadink]

What are your shadow headcanons? :)

yyyYEYYYYYYYYEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS, um,,,,,, a few,,,,,,,,, some of which i mention on my drawings sometimes but yes yes a real list--

It is cannon he eats coffee beans, but I figure he just about raws anything he can get his hands on: popcorn kernels, uncooked noodles, yeast packets, raw meat--the only one that makes sense is like fruit, veggies and nuts lmao either because he likes it that way or he just doesn't want to/can NOT cook for his life. Also eats shitloads of junk food in general

Shadow is hilarious and to expand on that; he can be petty, he is deadpan and speaks very confidently so who would doubt a word he says ("no one would believe you" which is the toppest tier of humor), he makes jabs with those he is comfortable with or like,,when he is enjoying his rivalry with Sonic in general (cannon actually, Sonic Heroes as source and even SA2 a lil "you're not even good enough to be my fake" is WAY funnier in JP version, comics and other games mark on this too, please add if you know them!) He is just a Funny Lil Guy whether he is aware of it or not

He is touch-starved but refuses to admit it. He doesn't want to appear weak/desperate but c'mon. Mans been isolated and self-isolates cuz that's what he's used to, what he generally prefers but deep down he craves some kind of connection to others. He always has, which is why he got so Hecked up in his backstory

His actual rival is Amy Rose.

LOVES nature!!!!! I can't see him living on earth and NOT taking in some kind of interest in the world around him when he grew up surrounded by metal, steel, and a more "sterile" environment in general. I think it's cannon he likes sunsets anyway??

Listens to all music, but I like to think rap is his actual fav. He writes poetry (very silly poetry sometimes because he is FUNNY which is CANNON) and rap is???? poetry??? so. bam. he and knuckles vibe to it. They have sessions on angel island every tuesday night (6:47pm)

I don't actually imagine him with any visible alien biology, but I clearly love the idea of him fucking around with people about it

Shadow is immortal, but I think if he got knucked around enough he can croak. i think that's just me projecting tho since immortality sounds horrifying and i wish him the best

He has a crush on Super Sonic/WereSonic/(Sonic in general) but he's more visibly flustered around those forms. I like to think when Shadow gave his life after Final Hazard and saw how empathetic and kind Sonic was being towards him as his strength faltered that "Super Sonic" was cemented in his mind. He already canonically respects Sonic A LOT so my hc steps a lil further to this falling under a very interesting mix of admiration/idolization (Sonic's strength, heroism, selflessness) and something,,,,more. Not that he'll acknowledge it. Openly. Except with Amy or Rouge/Omega.

He's good with kids!!! so he and Tails have formed a very honest and mutual Relationship™ where they both can see right through the bullshit and just kinda cut to the chase and help/enable their vices together

Shadow and Omega live with Rouge and she is everyone's Auntie including Shadow. I LOVE this HC soooo much.

I can see Shadow as demi, for sure!

I love the hc that Shadow is autistic!!! I'm not sure if I'm comfortable saying the "Shadow" I draw is autistic cuz I don't know enough about autism to claim it, so I don't want to accidentally misrepresent a whole group of people by my lack of knowledge. but I LOVE the idea and if people ever see my art and relate it to that, go for it!

this is getting long so i'll end it by saying he is just an idiot. A small short tiny dummy just like the rest of them!!!!! he drinks stupid juice too!!!!!!!! dont let his love of comically large knives fool you!!!!!

[matthewtkachuk]

feel something pt 1 - jj

On the outside, you’re a kook princess with a seemingly perfect life and a perfect family. The expectations are suffocating you, to the point where the only thing you feel is numb. You’re chasing different coping mechanisms in order to feel something. Until a chance encounter with a certain blond pogue you know you’re supposed to hate gives rise to a different kind of feeling.

Warnings: angst, toxic behaviour, poor coping mechanisms, drug usage, mentions of sex, mentions of suicidal ideations (brief), Rafe being a grade a asshole, shitty parents

Pairings: JJ x reader (eventually), Rafe x reader (slight), Topper x reader (slight)

Words: 3.1k

A/N: I accidentally deleted this, ugh sorry if you see this again!! I started off wanting to write a supremely angsty one shot, turned into a supremely angsty multi-chapter fic. This is a slow burn, babyy. Here’s the set up, let me know what you think! :)

series masterlist

You stand teetering on the edge of the balcony railing, barefoot and facing the waves as they crash onto the beach. You’re not thinking about jumping. At least you’re pretty sure you won’t actually jump. Really you’re just looking for even a flicker of an emotion to stir up in your chest. Lately you haven’t felt anything more than mild annoyance at your parent’s constant bickering and pestering. You know you’re too young, but all you feel anymore is numb. You lift your left leg, balancing precariously on the right for a minute before lowering it and returning to the balcony and slipping your heels back on.

You don’t want to die, you just don’t want to live like this. Kook princess, paraded and practically pimped around by your parents, looking for you to find an advantageous marriage, have 2.5 kids and further accumulate your hoarded wealth. “Why don’t you date the Cameron boy? He’s quite good looking and your father would love it if you married his business partner’s son” and “The Thornton boy would be a good match, the family mansion is the largest” and “Jacob Kane’s father is a name partner at a successful law firm on the mainland”. Your mother’s incessant nagging about finding the perfect husband only further cements your lack of value as a human being, your usefulness tapped out at your ability to be someone’s wife.

You don’t understand the wealth accumulation thing, your trust fund probably equals the national budget of a small country already, and there’s no way anyone could blow through the entire family fortune in a single generation. At this point, it just feels like generating wealth for the sake of generating it. What good is money if it just sits in a bank account or investment portfolio, earning passive income and not being used for anything.

You recognize you’re very privileged, you’ve never once had to worry about where your next meal would come from, you have a closet full of designer handbags and red bottom shoes the value of which could feed several families on the Cut. But what’s the cost? You feel suffocated by the pressure bestowed upon you by your parents. You’re the eldest sibling, primary heiress to the Y/L/N family fortune and expected future successor of the family business. Truthfully, you couldn’t give less of a fuck about retail development or whatever it is that keeps your father so busy that he missed every single one of your piano and ballet recitals growing up. You like the idea of studying Shakespeare’s sonnets and soliloquies over learning about mergers and acquisitions and tax avoidance laws at college, but you know your father would sooner cut you off than let you pursue your own passions.

Sometimes you let yourself fantasize about leaving it all behind, running off to some college like Columbia, moving to New York and living in the city that never sleeps. With your 4.0 GPA and stellar extracurricular activities, you could probably get a pretty good scholarship. Or maybe Paris, where you would sit in a cute little café flirting with French boys and writing poetry by the Seine River. But it would be hard, and you’re too much of a coward to see if you could make it on your own without daddy’s money. Not to mention the little voice in the back of your head that sounds suspiciously like your mothers telling you that you’ll never amount to anything without their help.

Later, you’re wandering the party, both hands curled tightly around the cup you hold to your lips, eyes staring out at the crowd over the rim. Unfortunately, you catch Rafe Cameron’s eye as he’s sat around the coffee table with a freshly cut white line ready on the surface. He’s surrounded by the idiots he calls friends and more than one pretty little rich girl making eyes at him. The left corner of his mouth turns up in a smirk as he realizes you’ve sized up the company around him.

“Hey Y/L/N, want a line? First one’s on me, babe.” He calls out at you, but you just roll your eyes and keep moving forward. As desperate as you are to feel something, you’re not sure you can cross that line just yet. Partaking in the occasional joint or bong rip is one thing, but hard drugs is another. You don’t think trading in the empty feeling in your chest for an addiction is worth it. Seeing the blown out pupils of some of your peers, and the way they not-so-discreetly sniff and wipe at their noses you realize you’re likely alone in that assessment. “Your loss!” he calls out at your retreating form, and you don’t even bother to look over your shoulder. You know he’s not really interested in you beyond making you a customer and maybe a quick fuck.

You snort to yourself, wondering what your mother would think about the boy she wanted you to pursue offering you a line of coke at a party. Knowing her, she would focus on the fact that you had gained his attention and ignore the illicit substance.

Making your way through the cluster of bodies is harder than you had initially thought, everyone was on everyone. Every kook party ends up this way, a certain subset of the group coked out and the rest so drunk they can’t function, and you begin to wonder why you even bothered coming.

You’re not totally sure what you’re looking for, your best friend and Rafe’s younger sister Sarah doesn’t really associate with this crowd anymore ever since she started spending all her time with the less fortunate side of the island. Rafe had called it ‘slumming with those dirty fucking pogues’ the last time Sarah had partied with you. Maybe it isn’t right to call her your best friend anymore because not only does she not associate with this crowd, she doesn’t really associate with you either.

You know she’s hanging with Kie again, there are a lot of watchful eyes on the island and even more flapping lips. It’s kind of ironic, Sarah was the one who convinced you to drop Kie, and you had let her. Now the two of them were spending all their time together on some dilapidated boat named after the inhabitants of the Cut and you were alone at some lame party with a heavy weight on your chest and under your eyes.

Sighing deeply, you down the rest of the contents of your cup and grab a refill before turning your attention back to the crowd of people in the middle of the living room. As your brain starts to fog further with the familiar feeling four vodka crans give you, you let Topper put his hands on your hips and pull your bodies close together, your back to his front. A voice in the back of your mind wonders if you’re supposed to feel guilt over Sarah’s ex’s hands all over your body, but you don’t feel anything and Sarah clearly doesn’t give a fuck about you either.

The next morning you wake up with Topper’s hands around your bare waist. There’s a pain radiating against your skull and you have cotton mouth, but you quietly gather your clothes and sneak out of the room before the sleeping blonde can wake up and give you that regretful look he gets in his eyes every time you hook up. You know he still loves Sarah, in his own fucked up way and though you don’t regret where you woke up, you know you’ll just be annoyed if you have to deal with his issues this early in the morning with this bad of a hangover.

You’ve almost successfully left the large mansion, quietly walking through the living room to the front door when a voice remarks dryly, “Really, y/n? I thought you were better than my sister’s leftovers.”

Inhaling through your nose and out your mouth sharply, you spin on your heel to face Rafe with a blank expression on your face. He sits at the kitchen island, bare-chested with his hat on backwards, casually eating a bowl of cereal. The thought of why exactly Rafe is sitting half naked in Topper’s kitchen, eating Topper’s cereal briefly flashes through your mind but you decide you don’t care. “What do you care Rafe?” you ask, only half interested in his response. There’s a moment of silence, and you pick at your fingernails rather than meet his gaze.

“I’m just saying, I thought you were better than that,” he shrugs, bringing another spoonful to his mouth.

You roll your eyes, already tired of the conversation, “And who, pray tell, is better for me?”

“Me of course,” he smirks at you, and you huff out an annoyed laugh and raise an eyebrow silently asking him to explain. “Come on princess, I know your parents want you to marry up. ‘m your best option on this island”.

Mildly annoyed, you roll your eyes and turn back towards the front door, eager to leave this conversation behind. “C’mon baby, we both know how this thing ends, with you on my arm as the perfect trophy wife.”

There was a time those words might have brought butterflies in your stomach. Growing up best friends with Sarah meant you also grew up with Rafe, and you used to have the biggest crush on him. Forbidden by Sarah after a late night game of truth or dare, you didn’t use to mind when your mother would spout off about Rafe being the perfect boy for you. He used to look out for you like he did for Sarah. But that was a long time ago, and he no longer cared about either of you anymore and you had to admit you couldn’t remember why you had ever thought him anything but repulsive. That was before the drugs and the untethered rage that always rests just under the surface of his skin, ready to be unleashed at the smallest slight. You might have married the little boy with the gap toothed smile who once punched Jacob Kane when you were in the second grade and he wouldn’t stop bothering you, but this Rafe wasn’t good for anything beyond a quick meeting in the dark.

If you had been able to feel anything, you might have snapped back at him, but you had no energy and honestly all you wanted was to shower in your own shower and collapse in your own bed, so you ignored his comment and slipped out the door.

It was a quick walk back to your house, and you snuck in quietly through the front door hoping no one was home and your dreams of slumbering until the early afternoon could be realized. Unfortunately, your mother sat on the cream colored chaise in the sitting room, clearly anticipating your arrival. Her eyes quickly scanned your appearance, your manolos held by the straps in your right hand, your sex hair and décolletage you were sure was covered in bites and bruises caused by overeager lips, before sighing.

“Y/n, darling, you have to stop this silly behaviour and settle down. Boys aren’t going to want to lock you down if they’ve already had you.” She criticizes, effectively slut-shaming you. You roll your eyes at that, briefly wondering if the old wives tale was true and you’d end up with your eyes stuck like that. You decide you don’t mind, it would save you some time as your base reaction to most interactions is to roll them.

“I had a rough night mom, I’d like to go back to bed,” you tell her as you try to slip past her. A cold hand circles your wrist, stiletto tipped manicure digging slightly into the skin stopping you from moving any further.

“I’m serious, y/n, you’re better than this.” She throws the same words Rafe had at you. Exasperated and exhausted you rip your wrist from her grasp and head to the stairs. “We’re not done talking about this!” she shouts but you ignore her and continue towards your nice shower and bed.

Rolling over to an empty bed several hours later, you grumble as you try to identify the source of your wakeup call. Cursing as you smack your arm against your side table, you finally manage to grab your ringing cell phone. Seeing RC flash as the contact calling, you groan loudly, before hitting the decline button and rolling back over. A minute later your phone chimes again, indicating a voice mail.

You figure there’s no point in drawing out the inevitable, so you unlock the phone and listen the voicemail Rafe left. He’s invited you to hang out with him and his friends on his dad’s yacht. Before you can talk yourself out of it, you’ve sent him a text to say you’d be there in an hour. Despite there being no love lost between you and Rafe, you really don’t have any better options and maybe if you tell your mom who you’re hanging out with she’ll get off your back and not subject you to The Lecture. You and Sarah used to laugh and joke about The Lecture, about how being a Y/L/N means being perfect and obtaining a perfect husband. The two of you would mock your mother, exaggerating her southern drawl that slipped out as she lectured you on the importance of propriety and ‘leaving something to the imagination’.

As you slip on a navy sundress with a deep neckline, you laugh, thinking to yourself that there’s not much left to leave to the imagination. You take the time to curl the ends of your hair to create a bouncy wave and apply a few coats of waterproof mascara and lip gloss. The humid heat of the OBX keeps your makeup routine light in the summer.

“And just where do you think you’re going?” Shit. Your dad’s home, he knows you stayed out all night, and he’s pissed. You don’t think your mom told him the full story, because he’s not frothing at the mouth mad, just his typical disappointed mad.

“Rafe invited a couple of friends to hang out on his dad’s yacht, daddy,” you reply back, not meeting his eyes.

You can tell your dad disapproves, because the lines between his eyebrows are more pronounced with his narrowed eyes. As he starts to give you what you’re sure is an impassioned lecture, your mother pops up out of nowhere, gushing, “Rafe? Well of course you can go sweetie, isn’t that right hon?” she turns to your dad, a single eyebrow raised daring him to defy her. Your parents are the ultimate power couple, wielding power and guilt over each other almost as easily as they try to do to you.

He sighs, realizing the fight with his vengeful wife isn’t worth the lesson you’re not going to learn anyway and nods, “Alright, just be back for supper, we’re going to sit down as a family tonight. And tell Sarah we said hi.”

If either parent noticed your stiffened back, they don’t comment on it. You hadn’t told them that Sarah dumped you like yesterday’s news just yet. Why blow a perfect cover story? Again, the lack of guilt should probably concern you, but you’re more focused on the very expensive, very good quality wine that you know is waiting for you on the Cameron’s yacht.

An hour later, you’re sitting between a very uncomfortable Topper and a disinterested Kelce with a full wineglass in your left hand. Your right hand slides your sunglasses back onto your eyes to shield them from the harsh sunlight that beats down directly on your face.

You can’t find the energy to strike up a conversation with either of them, and they don’t seem very inclined to start one either, so you turn your head to the side and look out at the water until you see a familiar beat up boat approaching. You visibly tense as your eyes lock on your blonde former best friend laughing with her arm around John B as their stupid friends talk and laugh around them. “You okay, y/n?” Kelce finally speaks, noticing your change in posture.

“Never better,” you drily reply moving to turn your head back to the other side of the yacht, as if the other boat on the water didn’t exist at all. Your eyes briefly flicker to the other blond on the boat, taut muscles on display beyond the ratty cut-off tank top as the pogue known as JJ attempts to wrestle with his friend Pope. You feel a drop in your stomach that perplexes you as your eyes scan his sunkissed skin. Startled, you turn your head quickly and take a huge sip of your wine.

You anticipated some sort of confrontation, maybe a thrown insult, but their boat simply eclipsed the yacht and they continued on their way. You were annoyed by the concerned look that Kelce threw your way after they had left, so you downed your glass and grabbed Rafe’s hand and all but dragged him inside the cabin.

The second the door shuts behind you, you’re on him, mouths mashing in a hungry kiss. He smirks against your mouth and leads you into the bathroom and proceeds to rid you of your clothes.

As you’re letting Rafe Cameron fuck you in the bathroom of his yacht, your mind can’t help but think you’re fucking over Sarah, too.

“Fuck baby, you feel so good,” he praises in your ear as he thrusts into you from behind. You don’t even have the energy to fake a moan, you just lean your head back against his shoulder.

When he’s finished, you simply slip your dress back on, refill your glass and sit back between Topper and Kelce as if they didn’t just hear you hook up with their best friend.

You go to bed early that night after a “nice family dinner” that consists of back-handed compliments and your mother fishing for details about your time on the yacht. You don’t think she’d be too pleased about letting Rafe ‘have you’ before ‘locking you down’, so you keep it to a minimum. Both parents drill it into your head that as a Y/L/N, you’re held to a higher standard than your peers. Perfect grades, perfect life, perfect daughter. You don’t know how to tell them you don’t even feel human anymore, so you smile and nod as they pester and nag. Your little sister sits quietly the whole time, looking at you with an emotion you can’t quite decipher.

[phanlight]

Twin Flame

 .                                       ✧                   ✵                  ✧                                      .    ✴      .                    ✦               .                        .                 ✦                  .     ✴ 

thank u so much to anyone and everyone who’s stuck by over the years had it not been for ur constant support i would not be doing this rn not in a billion years also i hope i still remember how to write

this is gonna be v slow burn [like a big ol sage sticc] so I apologise for the steady pacing for a first chapter but I wanna set sufficient enough ~ foundations~ so things will pick up soon i promise lol

I digress ANYWAY have some magic

I literally don’t know what to describe this as I guess artist/mage/psychic!dan (if that isn’t a thing i’m making it one), bamf!phil (gotta stay tru to the roots), enemies-to-lovers, semi-surrealism, ethereal-surrealism (I s2g this is gonna be about 5 diff genres wtf am I doing)

✴      .                    ✦               .                        .                ✦                            ✴

summary:

Dan isn't lost anymore. He's finally okay with being an explorer, not a seeker. Content with being a wanderer rather than a wonderer. His checkered luck often leads him to almost hear the laughter of Fate ringing in the sky, but he puts it down to entering the world on the Thirteenth night of June; a Friday full with the Moon. A time where forces higher than usual ripple through the atmosphere, through the night. But he’s okay with that. He’s become okay with that. He’ll look for the light in life, live for the sparkle on summer tides. He’ll find answers at the end of paint tubes and poetry books; get by on his own moral philosophies rather than those of a shattered system. But when he falls into a realm in even further ruins than his own, he himself shatters – and suddenly the cycle begins again. Seeking, wondering – lost down to the soul. But with destruction comes construction. With darkness comes light. With bad comes good. And to exist, they must co-exist.

✴      .                    ✦               .                        .                ✦                       .     ✴ 

actual plot bc that said nothing about what acc happens: 

dan’s a lonely ass painter who loves crystals and one day finds a passage in an abandoned lighthouse that transports him into a spirit realm where he meets someone more lost than him. they don’t get on but for reasons they’ll have to.

.            ✴.                                  .                                .                 .✴              .     

.✴     .                    ✴               .          ✯            .                ✴                      .     ✴.

opposing forces, they attract;

yin won’t exist without its yang.

a sunless moon, a silent act;

in idleness it hangs.

galactic compounds in the skin,

harbour chemicals and cells,

particles, atomic, sub-

vibrate with polar spells.

the grounding force attraction

it ties every single bond.

becomes the gravity,

of life; existence as One.

.✴     .  - Love                                                                                               .     

                                                                                          ✴               .          ✯            .                ✴

                                                  ✴[AO3 LINK]✴

Dan stares at the pale tornado swirling inside the china. Seagulls cackle outside, as if in response to the disgusting abundance of milk.

Fuck this.

The ruined tea goes down the sink with a steamy slosh, and he chokes on the eruption of vapour that partially enters his lungs. Great. The universe has now given him enough to decipher exactly what type of day today will be.

He calls them his Horseshoe Days. He’d had one once – a gift from his grandmother. At the time it seemed something strange to give to a seven-year-old. He was at the age where he wouldn’t know what a horseshoe meant if one came hurtling down from above, bonking the top of his skull.

And it did once – well, nearly. It was only while dodging the thing falling from the shelf, only milliseconds away from meeting his forehead, he realised they might actually be as lucky as she’d promised.

That was, until perhaps, he placed it back on the shelf upside-down. His parents were both blissfully none-the-wiser when it came to anything outside the ordinary – the superstition veining back to his occult-practicing grandmother on his mother’s side (and skipping generation in the process, it seems). They saw a horseshoe as nothing more than a crescent of iron that for some reason sits in the kitchen, whichever way up. It was only once events later that day began to unravel in an unfamiliar manner did a bubbling suspicion of a correlation arise. Dan had vaguely remembered something about the blacksmith Dunstan and how a shoe upturn drains its ‘powers’, but it was only a crashed bike, scraped knee and flattened football later did he actually pay any attention to why his day might have been going so badly.

Well, eventually.  

The entire exchange sits still at the forefront of his psyche, each detail in sparkling clarity. He sees it now, even hears the voices.

“That’s why!” he’d burst out over dinner.

His parents had jumped in unison, and his stepfather elbowed over a glass. The table shone with a thin spread of water, trickling across the mahogany.

The hardness of Gerald’s voice is still nailed into the back of his memory. He used to hate it when he shouted.

“Jesus!” he’d have yelled, scrabbling around the table with a napkin. Dan remembers the kitchen towel surrendering immediately, from sheets to soggy mulch in seconds. He’d then have followed with a favourite catchphrase of his; “Do you have to yell like that?”

It was nothing they weren’t used to. He had a habit of sneaking up on everyone. ‘Feather-Feet’, his grandmother used to call him.

Dan remembers ignoring him, stretching up out of his seat and reaching for the overhead shelf. He doesn’t reckon an upturned horseshoe has ever made anyone this happy but he remembers feeling nothing but delight. It’s a bit of a backward attitude. “I knew I wasn’t just naturally unlucky!”

Being born on Friday the thirteenth certainly doesn’t help, despite giving every single birthday wish to a promise of better luck.

His grandmother used to say it was a good omen. Actually lucky; despite its reputation in amongst the ladders and scaffolding and cracked pavement tiles. The Thirteenth night of June, a Friday full with the moon, she used to muse, eyes bright with love. He misses her.

“What are you doing?” his mother had narrowed her eyes, watching her son reach for the horseshoe. When his elbow disturbed a spherical paperweight in the process and it began a bloodcurdlingly slow descent off the shelf, they flew open wider. “Careful! Mind my-“

He was already ahead of her, he remembers. Fingers clasped around the iron and flipped upright in a fraction of a second. In the other he outstretches his hand, feeling the paperweight plop into his palm in one piece instead of millions more. He‘ll never forget the sigh of relief from somewhere behind him.

He remembers the feeling. The weight of the crystal. The coolness of the cast iron. Saved antique in one hand, upright horseshoe in the other. The absolute thrum of electricity through his bloodstream. He remembers smiling and looking up. “See?”

“See what, exactly?” Gerald had then snapped, masking his panic with anything other than fear. “You nearly ruining our wedding present? A repeat performance of Aunt Nora’s teapot?”

He glanced to his mother, still completely ivory with shock. Her eyes are fixed on the swirled quartz as if it were seconds away from leaping off of his palm again by itself; under its own magic.  

“Did you not see that?” Confusion begins to seep into his initial delight. Were they even concentrating at all?

“I saw you being idiotic,” his stepfather had spat. Dan winces like he did fifteen years ago. The word still holds its weight, even now. He doesn’t know why.

“The horseshoe,” he’d tried to explain. “It wa-“

“I don’t give a shit about the bloody horseshoe!” he’d suddenly exploded. Both Dan and his mother jumped back in their seats.

“Gerald,” he remembers the softness of his mother’s tone, a diametric opposition of the echoes of steel his stepfather had the nerve to call an indoor voice.

“No, I’m sick of it!” he’s erupting now. Bubbling over the surface. A temper like a needle to an overfilled balloon. “He’s always flailing about. Knocking things over. Your mother told me about the vase, by the way,” he spat aside.

Dan’s stomach had dropped. She’d sworn not to say a word. She’d promised.

“You never know what the boy’s next move is going to be,” he continues. “I’m sick of it,” he repeats again, as if repetition be the highest form of emphasis. He snatched the paperweight but ignored the horseshoe, and Dan remembers how it had looked in his grip – the glass probably having more chance of shattering inside his big burly palm than the solid stone floor.

He vanishes and reappears two seconds later, marching back with a face of beetroot and a brow of iron, pressing a daggered glare into the back of Dan’s head. He could feel the warmth burning the nape of his neck, the stare scalding the skin.

“He’s not to be trusted,” he announced as if there were thousands of other ears also listening.

A delicate frown threaded its way across his mother’s brow.

“Wh-“

“Leave it, Penelope,” he’d cut her off before she’d even had a chance to finish the word, let alone the sentence. Dan used to hate the way he spoke to her. “If the boy wants to behave like a child, he’ll get treated like one. No more ornaments in the kitchen.”

Dan remembers thinking then it would kind-of be nice being addressed by name. Just once. Maybe. Gerald’s also about the only person capable of criticizing a seven-year-old for behaving like a child. Make it make sense, Gerald, he doesn’t say. And my name’s Dan, but you’ve probably forgotten that.

She’d thrown her son a quick sapphire glance; a gleaming silent apology. Dan’s heart had lurched at the glint of panic in her eye.

It lurches now. That absolute demon must have given her hell. He’d never been more thankful to see his mother out of a marriage. He was horrible.

And he couldn’t fucking cook. He even remembers what they were eating on the night because it was so inedible. He’s always detested mashed potato, and he’s certain Gerald knew this. He remembers stabbing the offending white lump on his plate during the sacred three seconds of silence His Lordship could manage before that cruel mouth of his opened again.

“Bloody cold, now,” he’d grumbled.

Dan remembers holding back a smirk. As if any amount of heat could make this cement any less torturous to ingest.

He’d briefly wondered if suffocation was in his hidden agenda all along. It wouldn’t surprise him. Death by potato has an interesting ring to it.

Anyway, the whole situation could have been history in under ten seconds. He could have had the horseshoe upright and the paperweight saved in three of those. Job done, panic over, back to dinner in the remaining seven. He imagines Gerald’s reaction had he spoken his mind at the time.

That was fifteen years ago, of course. Being seven, someone could have told him the sky was pink and he’d eventually believe it (maybe if it happened to be during a sunset). From that point onward he hadn’t exactly lapped up old wives’ tales, myths spinning into each other like silver silk, but his superstition remained a conscious glow in the back of his mind; going no further than avoiding three drains and ladders and watching black cats slink across his path with his breath held. Sometimes even whispering a quick wish when eleven lines up the clock (most days he misses, though).

He vowed from that very moment to save anything considered slightly out-of-the-ordinary for those who actually want to hear about it. Those who understand.

He looks at the horseshoe. It’s the same one – it always has been. Seeing three new house-changes and a hell of a lot of life, it sits, still – tightly nailed to the overhead beam of the kitchen. There’s no way it could slip now.

His eyes travel down from the horseshoe at the dazzling abundance of crystals lining and clustering every free available space surrounding the entire kitchen. He figures Gerald’s little ‘no ornaments in the kitchen’ law wouldn’t bode too well here. He’d scream in fear of the raw amethysts by the kettle. Sob at the sight of the glittering chunks of hematite by the sink. Shield his eyes from offending lines of onyx near the spice rack and the little malachite cluster by Rosa (one of many house plants). And as for the great big slabs of rose quartz and Himalayan salt on the windowsill, the glow of sunrise warming the atmosphere each morning; kissing the space with shadowy peaches and dusty pinks – well, his face would be an absolute picture. Priceless. He grins whenever he dusts, love bursting in his heart for each one and humming through every vein in his body. They make him feel like a proud father.

A short, sharp buzz on the countertop interrupts his thoughts. His consciousness snaps back into reality. Shit, how long has it been? Once he gets thinking about Gerald and everything he put his mother through he gets angry, and then half the day disappears and he finds he’s done little else other than stare at a drawer or a wall for the majority of it. It’s easy to get carried away. It happens when he thinks about crystals too.

You okay?

It’s Zema. Part-time housemate, full-time soulmate. It’s almost like he’d heard his thoughts; the voices so powerful they resonate externally. Part of Dan wouldn’t be surprised if he had – Gerald was certainly shouting loud enough in there.

Been better, he answers truthfully. Just made the worst cup of tea known to mankind

I wondered what all that clanking was

There’s a pause, followed by another quick buzz.

HSD?

Dan grins at the screen. Horseshoe day. He’d even remembered their abbreviation.

“H – S – D,” he’d once said. “It’s like LSD. But shitter.”

Dan had snorted. Zema’s about the only person who would compare having ‘one of those days’ to a psychedelic trip.

“Exactly,” Zema had said once Dan had told him this. “It’s not. That’s why it’s shitter.”

Dan hadn’t exactly agreed with him. He didn’t even think it was worth mentioning Horseshoe is actually all one word, but he’d gone along with it because HSD is a lot less effort to type and sometimes it’s good to have a code. Zema’s about the only person who knows about this. He doesn’t trust anyone else enough not to judge him when he tells them he’s basically superstitious, however blanket that definition may be. It’s probably not the correct term, but he doesn’t know how else to describe it. Drawn to the unknown? Like it matters either way. It’s not as if he’s particularly vocal about it. A twenty-three-year-old male, unusually innate occult-esque interests and a static, stagnant society don’t exactly fit together with jigsaw-like ease. Dan doesn’t know why. Dan doesn’t see what the harm is in allowing others to gravitate towards their own pleasures when the concept alone of interests and hobbies is entirely subjective. That’s the beauty of it, he finds. No two beings have exactly the same range, however similar.

Maybe the harm is that there’s no harm at all, and that scares him. The lust for destruction scares him. This planet scares him.

Something like that, he taps back, before pocketing the conversation. 

He gives up with tea involving milk and unlatches the wooden box neighbouring the kettle. It’s stuffed to the brim with teabags of spanning across the entire flavour spectrum.

He picks one up and presses it to his nose, inhaling. Ah, Jasmine.

He picks up another. Camomile and- something. He frowns. Lemon?

He puts it back. Can’t be. He finished the lemon last week.

He picks it up again and sniffs. Ginger, that’s it.

Nah, he tosses it back in for a second time. He only touches the ginger when he’s feeling jaded the morning after a night involving too much wine and not enough water (they happen more often than not).

He picks up another, inhaling the rich, fruity aroma. Red berries. It even smells like the colour red.

He puts it back nonetheless. Strawberries and- well, just about everything else with –berry tagged onto the end – just wouldn’t cut it right now. Ambitious Ribena, that’s what Zema calls it. It hasn’t really tasted the same since he said that.

He picks up another. Jasmine again, he rolls his eyes. He’s seldom ever in a ‘Jasmine’ mood. He doesn’t even know why they have so many – Zema barely touches it either.

He finally settles for a plain green tea. A bit of simplicity wouldn’t go amiss right now.

His phone buzzes again.

Don’t think I can’t hear that kettle. I’ll have a ginseng pls x

Dan huffs out a laugh. Cover blown.

We’re all out of ginseng.

Look under the sink.

Dan rolls his eyes and yanks open the door below him. Six boxes of the stuff stare back at him.

Six??? he taps with one hand, grabbing a box and tearing the cardboard open with another. Really?

Didn’t wanna run out is all that follows.

He shakes his head, but lets the grin tug his lips.

Panic-buying tea now, are we?

Don’t start. You bought six crystals the other day

Ok that’s different. Mercury is in retrograde right now and we’re not taking any chances

What does that even mean

It means u need to stop buying so much tea

I’ll stop buying tea when u stop buying crystals

Dan smirks. He’ll be waiting a while, then.

He assigns Zema the age-old High School Musical mug. It was a gift from Axel one or two Christmases ago, and he imagines the Disney franchise probably didn’t have temperamental dishwashers in mind during the manufacturing process – the boiling steam had left the majority of the characters eyeless and Troy Bolton completely nose-less. He leaves it next to the kettle with texted instructions for Zema to leave the duvet cave immediately before it turns cold, but for what it’s worth, the other boy isn’t exactly famous for his pro-activity early in the mornings. He wouldn’t be surprised if it reached stone temperature before passing his lips. Judging by the lack of audible movement, he’d be safe in assuming he’s probably fallen back asleep.

He pads into the lounge with a steaming mug and a bookmarked copy of Le Fleur Du Mal; completely falling to bits and half of the pages contemplating a permanent escape. Despite his attempts, even the strongest duct tape couldn’t keep this copy together.

There’s something about a parallel translation that fascinates him. How meaning can so flawlessly transcend dialect. He wonders if Baudelaire had this in mind. Whether he knew his works would one day be read in languages far from his mother tongue. Did he know his own craft to be so acute, so fine, that whichever order, whichever laws of letters they’re under – the same meaning shines through? The same rhythm, the same senses, colours, emotions rippling through each sign and symbol? That’s poetry.

His eyes scan the neighbouring verse. Learning a bit more French would definitely help, that’s for sure. His own skill is rusted from years of neglect; having abandoned all hopes of igniting his love for such a beautiful dialogue after school had strode into his life and seeped all the joy and passion out of just about everything he once loved. He’s glad to have reignited that. It was years until he picked up a paintbrush again.

He’s only three words in before he’s interrupted by an all-too-familiar sound.

He rolls his eyes, peering over the edge of the pages. “What now?”

Two eyes wait for him. One emerald, the other azure.

“No,” Dan immediately answers.

The reply is longer, louder.

“Ugh,” his glance scours the ceiling for a second. “It’s literally been an hour, Vee. Where are you storing it all?”

The eyes answer with an innocent glitter, but Dan knows better. His eyes flicker back to the page:

What will you say tonight, poor lonely soul,

What will you say old withered heart of mine,

To the most beautiful, the best, most dear,

Whose heavenly regards bring back your bloom?

We will assign our pride to sing her praise:

Nothing excels the sweetness of her will;

Her holy-

Then there’s a gentle chirrup. He feels his heart turn to jelly. She knows exactly what that sound does to him.

“Venus,” he groans in defeat, elongating the ‘u’. He plops the book down next to him and hauling himself up from the sofa. “Only one, okay? No more.”

She slinks down from the stool, her stool – only about fifty years old and fraying at every single edge. What was once a delicate floral tapestry now existing as aged blobs in various shades of pastel. All four legs, previously smooth mahogany, are now a splintered beige from years of busy carving. He doesn’t understand how such soft paws bear such ceramic claws.

They’d tried everything. From cardboard and cereal boxes to actual climbing towers she would barely look at, let alone touch. Beds she ignored; choosing only Dan’s favourite satin pillow. And she’ll only ever drink water out of a specific pint glass.

“We’ve adopted a human, not a cat,” Zema had once said.

“It’s like she owns us,” Dan had agreed.

She’s trotting along the kitchen floorboards now, her tail high. She stops once she reaches the drawer under the crystal cabinet, throwing her human a demure glance.

“Alright, alright,” Dan catches her up, grabbing the bronze key. He’s thankful cats don’t have the power of thumbs. The world is already chaotic enough. 

He ends up giving her three. It’s those eyes, he tells himself in a small bout of self-justification. Those fucking eyes.

“Venus flytrap,” he mutters, running his fingertips along her silky back. “What are you like, eh? Where do you put it all?”

“Hollow legs,” a voice appears from behind him.

He almost leaves his own skin.

“Jesus!” he clutches at his chest. “What happened to the No-Giving-Dan-Cardiac-Arrest-Before-Noon rule?"

He whirls around to find Zema sat cross-legged on the marble surface just beside the sink, all silken robes and bed-beaten hair. A smirk gets bitten back under his teeth.

“I texted you."

Dan can’t quite believe the twenty-first century has come to this. Texting those who not only live in the same property, but are on the same floor.

They’re not actually too dissimilar in appearance – his head also home to a gigantic mass of thick brown waves, although in a darker shade to Dan’s own hair. His eyes stare back at him in a shade of gentle grey. Chameleon Eyes, Dan calls them; for they reflect their surroundings. He remembers how they looked when they’d first met that day at the beach – bright turquoise; matching the sky and the sea. He remembers how perplexed he been the second time they’d met and his eyes were suddenly a shining shamrock; sharing the glow of the grass. Then a gentle grey on the street under overcast clouds.  He’s always wanted to go into one of those rooms covered completely ground-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, in mirrors. His eyes would probably boast galaxies.

He’s shorter than Dan (a rare occurrence among his friends) and about fifty times as agile – something he and Venus have in common is their blatant disregard for actual furniture. Even she sits on a stool more often than he does. Zema the Lemur, he calls him.

“Because chairs don’t exist,” Dan mutters now, his tone soaked with sarcasm. “Christ, you’re worse than her,” he nods down towards their little family member, still fixated on the drawer.

She trots up to Zema, seizing the opportunity.

“Are you hungry, honeybear?” Zema coos, his eyes sparkling. He gets an emphatic ‘mew’ in response.

“Don’t be fooled,” Dan interjects quickly. “She’s had a bowl and two treats already today.”

“Those eyes,” Zema grins knowingly. Green flashes in his direction. They’ve noticed she responds to ‘eyes’ faster than her own name.

“Those fucking eyes,” Dan shakes his head in agreement. The eyes in question now dart towards him. Whenever ‘eyes’ happen to crop up in conversation between the two, she looks as though she’s watching a tennis match. Dan’s abdomen still aches at the memory of the night they’d made the revelation; both curled up either side of the room in tears of laughter at her light-like response. “How’s the tea, by the way? Not too cold, I hope?”

“It’s lovely,” he sips appreciatively. “Good mug choice. Always better when it’s from Troy Bolton’s brain. It’s like I can taste his thoughts.”

“I didn’t know Gabriella tasted like ginseng,” Dan says. “Cut her open and she bleeds the stuff.”

Zema smirks. He holds the mug up, examining the worn surface in all its glory. “Looks like someone already has. God, this thing’s falling apart,” he thinks aloud, bringing himself ear-to-lip with the partially eroded character. “What happened to your nose babe, eh? Did it fall off during basketball?”

“Troy Boldemort,” Dan mutters immediately. Zema all but chokes, droplets showering the countertop.

He loves mornings like these, mornings where neither of them have any prior academic engagements and they can just sit and talk for hours about – well, anything, really. The final year of University boasts a monumental amount of focus and preparation and just a general resounding ‘oh-shit-this-is-actually-real’ feeling that apparently never really goes away; not even after you graduate, according to one of his cousins.

For Dan, nothing has really felt real since he was about fifteen, so it’s not something that particularly bothers him. He could just do without that ten-tonne workload.

“So what are you up to today, then?” Zema swings his legs over the edge, giggling as Venus begins an attack on his slipper. “Anything exciting?”

“Not much,” he sips thoughtfully. What can he do today? It’s been so long since he’s had a free day he’s forgotten how he spends time on his own terms. “Might get another painting done.”

“Paint me,” Zema beams, carding a hand through his fringe.

“Oh yeah?” Dan raises an eyebrow. “How the fuck would I go about painting your eyes?”

“Paint me in a field,” Zema continues. “And a beach. I wanna see-…” he hesitates. “We need to go to, like, a strawberry field or something. I wanna see if my eyes would go red.”

“Just smoke some pot. Then you’ll be halfway there.” Dan says, before hesitating. “Anyway, if we went to a strawberry field it’ll be mostly green. The strawberries are only the berries.”

“A poppy field, then,” Zema says.

He literally has an answer to everything. Dan rolls his eyes.

“One day,” he finally affirms, and the other boy grins. “In Spring.”

“I’m glad you’re painting again,” Zema says. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen you do anything creative.”

“Tell me about it,” Dan mumbles, taking another sip although the tea’s losing its heat. It’s always the case when talking to Zema – the rapid, quick-fire pace of every conversation leaves barely enough interval to drink (that is, of course, unless it’s alcohol). “It’s been so long I doubt I even remember how to paint.”

“I highly doubt that,” Zema fires back, gulping more tea and placing the ghostly mug beside him.

“How about you, then?” Dan gulps down the remaining liquid before it has a chance to grow any colder. “What are you doing with yourself today?”

“I’m off out,” Zema stretches, his voice slightly strained. “Need to be at Eddie’s by ten. We’re doing the bass today.”

They’re two of a wide circle of musicians playing in each-other’s orbit. Zema’s never anywhere without his guitar, Axel the same with his saxophone (Saxel, he’s often referred to as), and Eddie would be the same, he imagines, had he not chosen the piano as his instrument of choice. He bites back a smirk, picturing him struggling with a rope, trying to drag his enormous Bösendorfer Grand onto a train for a gig. Thank almighty Yamaha for the existence of keyboards.

Dan winces, his eyes flickering to the clock. “You’re cutting it a bit fine, then.”

Zema’s own eyes flash towards the time. “Oh, shit,” the remaining tea gets swallowed in seconds and the ghostly mug falls into the sink with a steely clatter. “I’d better go.”

“Nothing they’re not used to I imagine.” Dan smirks.

“Don’t,” Zema cringes, grabbing his bag and shooting down the corridor into his own room. “They brought up my punctuality only the other day,” his voice continues. “Fuck, Dan. Why do I do this to myself?”

“Alarms exist.” Dan calls after him. 

“It wasn’t even that,” he reappears holding a handful of guitar picks and a capo, shoving them into the front pocket of his case. “I decided to stop off on the way. Never in my life have I seen such a queue for the drive-through. It was ridiculous.”

“At least they got a couple of fries out of it.”

Zema stares at him. His expression speaks for itself.

“Okay. Well at least you got a couple of fries out of it.”

“Cold fries. And a melted McFlurry,” he mourns, hauling his guitar over his shoulder and looking Dan dead in the eye. “Word of advice, Dan. Never try eating ice cream while you’re driving. It doesn’t work. There’s a time limit.”

“There go my plans for the day,” Dan scoffs. “I don’t even drive.”

“And it’s about time you learnt, eh?” Zema grins. “Give your bestie a break from all that parallel parking. It’s doing my head in.”

“If it means getting you to places on time, I’m more than happy to,” his eyes flicker to the clock. “You have nine minutes, Zee.”

“Fuck’s sake!” Zema groans. “I’m doing it again. I’m going, I’m going-” he flusters around, filling both arms up with various belongings.  “Can you grab my keys for me? They’re on the plate.”

The Plate, Dan smirks to himself. Keeping vital belongings within reaching distance of the door, it’s the porcelain base to everything – keys; both car and house, cards; both debit and SD, alongside an ocean of lighters, loose change, semi-important receipts, and a Pizza Hut flier that had been there when they moved in. He remembers the delight they’d both shared upon discovering the possibility of five-pound large pizzas – crushed immediately by disappointment upon realizing the flier was from 2006.

It’s filled now to the brim with such a pile had it not been for Zema’s obnoxiously large keyring collection it would have taken him an age to locate them. He grabs them by the ‘Amsterdam’ pipe-shaped bottle opener.

“There,” he thrusts them into his hands with a jingle. “Now go.”

“Lifesaver,” Zema clutches them, slipping out of the door. “I’ll see you around five, yeah?”

“See you,” Dan grins, watching him jog to his vehicle. “Safe journey. Don’t drive through anything this time.”

The look he receives tells him all he needs to know. He watches the smaller figure amble up the road to his car; a battered blue thing with a collage of stickers plastering the rear. It was a seventeenth birthday gift; four metallic walls capturing four years of freedom. Despite having known Zema for only two of those four years, they’d already ridden up and down the country in it; halfway back home they’d had to make an impromptu visit to a tiny town somewhere along the south coast due to a faulty tire, but that ended up being one of the best decisions of their lives.

Because had they not set foot into the first tavern they’d walked past whilst the car was being repaired somewhere up the road; a crooked, old thing with bookshelves for walls and a resident cat asleep on the stool, they would never have been served by a bartender with a nose ring and hair the colour of moss (Dan remembers wondering how someone can suit such surroundings whilst simultaneously looking so out of place). They would never have stuck up a conversation about the clock on the wall and discovered it was an original nineteenth-century piece passed down from Germany, and the bartender would never have noticed Zema’s obsidian pendant and asked him about its origins. They wouldn’t have spent the remains of the afternoon sunk into the floral upholstery, swigging ale-upon-ale with this vibrant character as the sky loses the light before reality dawns and they realise they came here with a car that needs attending to.

He still can’t believe this was how they met Axel. All three of them have evolved so much since then, all grown in each other’s orbit.

(The rapid blossom of the butterfly effect has never failed to astound him. It never will.)

The fade of the engine introduces a silence he hasn’t heard since seven a.m. His smile seemed to have travelled along with the car; with Zema. Shit, has it always been this deadened without him? The quietness cuts into his eardrums, growing sharper and sharper the more he strains; searching for something, anything – a whisper of a tree, a yelp of a dog, a-

He paces away from the front door, finding comfort in the soft pad of his own footsteps. The floorboards groan with every movement, and he’s thankful for the noise.

He can never find his way back to sleep upon awakening on a Horseshoe day. It’s the tell-tale sign for him – if he claws his way out of a biting nightmare bathed in sweat, scrabbling around the duvet until his fingers touch cool amethyst, rough and raw, he knows there are challenges waiting for him.

He doesn’t know why it happens. Or how. He’s only ever tried to explain the whole thing to Zema a handful of times and even then he doesn’t really get it, doesn’t really understand how he can just know something’s about to happen before it does, just feels the flames underneath his ribcage, anticipation burning the embers red.

“You ought to get on those Beta-blockers,” he’d once told him through a mouthful of raw bagel. Several crumbs fell to the floor, something Dan viewed as a skill if not anything; uncooked bagels are near impossible to eat that messily. “They helped me when I started getting those anxiety attacks. No way would I have survived college without them,” as he took another bite, more crumbs parted ways.

“I don’t think the buckets of coffee every morning particularly helped,” replied Dan, before adding, “and every evening.” He’d stopped then, frowning. “And wherever else in the day you can- okay, that’s not the point. It’s not the same as anxiety,” he paused, the corners of his mind struggling to describe something so utterly inexplicable. “It’s-… different. It’s never constant, it’s not like that.”

As he reminisces, he feels the jolt.

Something’s going to happen tonight. Today. Sometime.

That is all he’s absolutely certain of. That an event is around the corner, and that it’ll happen sometime within the frame of the day. Good or bad, positive or negative, it’s the same spike in his gut, the same blade of intuition cutting into his senses. Such a skill sits somewhere on the fence between a blessing and a curse.

He makes every effort to swallow the feeling down, place it anywhere but the absolute forefront of his psyche, and treads upstairs. If there’s one thing he’s learnt during the years of having to contend with this (whatever ‘this’ is), it’s not to dwell on it, not to feel it too much. Whatever happens, will happen. No amount of thinking, feeling, sensing, will change that.

As far as superpowers go, it’s a pretty shit one to have, he thinks. Enemy, up ahead. Wait, it might be a friend actually. How close are they? Fuck knows. We might be waiting a while, but it could be any minute now. I know they’re coming though, trust me.

It would be useless.

He reaches straight for the art supplies as soon as he opens his bedroom door, grabbing as many paints as the laws of physics operating his satchel bag will allow. He relies on oil for today’s medium, seizing handfuls of small foil tubes spanning the entire visible colour spectrum, all thoroughly crinkled with use. A couple of sponges leap into the leather (stained, but he doesn’t have the capacity to start his cleaning ritual right now. Cleaning one art supply leads to another, and another, and then ‘just one more’ until the day sits partially behind him and all he’d have to show for himself is an empty canvas and two very wet sleeves), along with a healthy selection of paintbrushes, and the remaining dregs of his paint thinner (he really ought to get some more. He keeps forgetting.).

He releases a breath he didn’t know was taking up his chest. He’s actually ready for once. Wow.

Breakfast is crunched in seconds, accompanied by two planet eyes and a mass of black fur.

“Vee,” he mews through a mouthful of toast, his eyes rolling. “I’ve barely even started mine.”

Her expression doesn’t falter, her gaze only glittering more. He lasts two more bites before caving in and heading to the cupboard. Her paws are feathers; silent little things, but he doesn’t need to hear her (or even see her, for that matter) to sense she’s trotting along behind him – tail in the air and eyes to the sky. He awards her a third treat, internally self-justified by his forthcoming absence for the rest of the day, and watches as her nose delicately pokes the pea-sized thing before accepting it with much grace.

“What is it about you, eh?” he scratches the very top of her head, loving the way her eyes close in response and a deep purr begins rolling. “How do you do it?” his tone is weirdly devoid of rhetoricism. “All you domestic cats do is sleep and ask for food.”

He hesitates.

“I mean, that’s not all you do. You knock stuff over. Both solid and liquid. And scratch things up. And sleep on important documents. And make me late for things sometimes,” she purrs louder – almost solid confirmation cats can understand humans. Of course that would please her. “Yet we love you unconditionally,” his fingertips travel behind her ears and she leans into his touch. “All you have to do is exist.”

If only that were the case for humans.

His toast is cold by the time he returns to it, but he doesn’t care. He wasn’t particularly hungry to begin with – he doesn’t have Venus’s appetite. They should have named her Jupiter instead.

Binning the remains, he slings his art supplies onto his back and reads the weather through the net curtains. It looks fairly promising; the sky slightly overcast but showing no immediate threat of rain – they’d fallen victims to a heatwave not long ago and then a raging storm the following week.

September is often precarious; not quite summer, but not yet autumn. The sun smiles at him but he makes a mental note to pack an umbrella just in case.

✵

His concept of ‘perfect beach weather’ is a bit weird.

His perfect beach weather welcomes a threat of rain. Embraces stronger breezes. He doesn’t care if there’s a cloud bigger than the sky heading in his direction. As long as it’s comfortable enough to sit and paint without the wind claiming just about everything he arrived with, he’s happy.

When he looks out of his window towards beams of warmth, that’s forest weather. That’s lay-in-sunlight-pools-and-read-the-tree-trunks weather. When whites and greys cut the sky, that’s when it’s time for the beach.

This beach is his home. His sanctuary. The only surroundings that actually manage to cut through the thickening tar of anxiety coating his soul, the sound alone of the hissing waves setting him free of any spikes of fretful darkness still latching onto him.

Here he can think.

Feel.

Be.

His eyes match the horizon. Solitary. Still. He doesn’t understand how an element moving so fierce can appear as nothing but a perfectly straight line.

Then again; Jupiter’s a raging mass of storms and still the perfect sphere remains. As for Saturn.

He whips out his sketchbook, the A1 pages immediately making friends with the breeze. He eventually claws the pages into a surface at least half-sketchable, the paper sheets cutting through his gentle grasp as he tries to wrestle with giant flaps of paper, great white veils. The definitive opposite of a bat, he concludes decidedly. He’s probably a good ten minutes into this whole endeavour before the thought of whipping anything colourful out crosses his mind. His hands hurt now.

He starts with the greens. He always does. Touches of evergreen, of shamrock and a blue-tinged teal make their way onto the palette first. He takes a tiny amount of the brightest and begins creating a dusty emerald sky, the bristles massaging the canvas with gentle strokes. He’s never seen a green sky before. He’s seen skies spamming across the entire palette of the planet’s warmth, all rubies and vermillions and even violets. But never green. Green seems to stay on land, he finds. Maybe the trees will be blue.

The trees end up purple. He’s painting what he can see right now; a thick smatter of bushes lining the top of the cliffside. The forest. His forest, he secretly calls it, already hearing ‘you can’t own a forest, Bezos’ from a mini Zema somewhere in his mind.

He’s painted this view, this vast stretch ahead of him, so many times he found the shades to be somewhat restricting despite the sun making all the difference – indigo in the rain and a glittering turquoise in the summer light. So he’d swapped the cool palette for warmth one day, and fell in love with the idea of a ruby ocean. The sands had become a dusty lilac; something that had later appeared in a dream of his. The sky he’d kept to its natural shade that day – a gentle grey; accentuating the heightened colour of the other two.

It was like a fuse had exploded inside him after that. He’d come home from the beach with armfuls of half-damp paper; all thoroughly watercoloured at first – before experimenting with the oils and the pastilles upon realisation that soluble paints and rain-threatened skies do not mix. He’d branched out; grasping at all ends of the visible colour spectrum; knocking on every door, pushing every possible boundary. Rockpools became crystals, the shores began to sparkle – really sparkle; once he figured out how to paint with glitter correctly, - and colours began to multiply. Soon there were three colours in the sky – the gradient fading one into the other and often bearing complete contrasts; reds eloped with greens and purples entangling golds.

He’d combined just about every colour; primary, secondary; tertiary – but never attempts to create the same shade twice. It’s more fun that way, he decides.

He reads the horizon. The line of beach huts are still just as colourful in reality as on paper, so he’d taken to embellishing each door with swirls of gold using his thinnest brush. The shadow of the overhanging clouds looks to have deepened the ocean’s bed, and he wonders just how far the floor of sand slopes down. How many miles of ink until he reaches the earth. He’d swum countless times (some while drunk, thanks to a team effort involving Zema’s persuasion and his own impulsive nature), but never dared to venture anywhere past the Lighthouse a stretch of metres away from the shore.

Dan doesn’t quite know when it became derelict. How long it’s been since a beacon pierced the night with neon light; guiding the lost and the found, the leavers and returners. There are no windows; only wooden squares where light once seeped through – but the Widow’s Walkway still remains weirdly open in the air, the iron cates curling up at the top.

Some say it’s been months. Others longer. Having only lived in this town for the generous part of two years, he has no real clue himself – but every new crack on the surface, every new splinter of wood or peeled paint, doesn’t go unnoticed. However long it’s been, it’s definitely no longer in use.

It’s taken many forms on his papers, behaving slightly different with each medium. He once even took to disregarding colour altogether and using only black ink and silver glitter; each curve, dot and line finely constructed. That one, he must admit, was a personal favourite. He’d turned every crack into a vein, pumping midnight blood into every inch of the tower. Every chip of paint revealed a crystallised surface underneath – its inner beauty begging to see the light.

He adds colour today – but always acknowledges its signs of time. If it’s cracked up there, it’s cracked on the page. If he strolls by one day and there’s a chunk of brick missing; a gaping hole in the surface, he wont lie to the paper.

He’ll just cram a million stars into the space.

His eyes sink back into his own page. The violet trees have a teal cliff to sit upon, and today the sea is a concrete grey – not too many shades off exactly what he’s seeing right now.

It’s another different combination of colours; a new one, but there’s something missing. He reads the page, eyes darting between his creation and his surroundings.

He looks up, bending his neck and staring at the clouds until his eyes water. They glide over him, over them, over everything, like glaciers in the sky. The beautiful thing about just a slight threat of rain, is the sheer metamorphosis they seem to undergo a priori. He sees one turn from Yoshi into an ice cream. One that starts off as a squashed Darth Vader before growing a tail and turning into a seahorse. Another that begins as a boot, considers turning into a palm tree, before finally joining up with another and becoming the Cheshire Cat. A couple that look like skyships. And one that looks exactly like Appa, much to his absolute delight. Even down to the horns.

An idea grips him with such force he jumps, elbowing his paint water into the sand. Punished by Karma for being creative. Great.

He grabs his lightest pastels and reads the emerald sky again.

One sweeping motion, and there’s now a moon; a glowing crescent against the green hemisphere.

Two soft strokes, and there’s a surrounding haze. He softens it with the very tip of his finger, and feels something flood through him. Yes.

Three quick dots of white, and a belt sits in the sky. After another dozen more, a shield. Then a bow joins.

He’s grinning now, inspiration thrumming through his veins like a current.

After seven more, there’s a plough (Trough? He can never remember which one it is. More like the fucking saucepan. Or square with a tail.).

Completing painting after painting in colour after colour, how has this idea never occurred to him before? He should even include a couple of planets, he thinks as his pencil scrapes in a suggestion of Saturn.

Two moons later he grins at the page, sparkling with new celestial life. He throws his eyes up to the sky, wondering how inhabitable the earth would be had his interpretation somehow become scientifically correct overnight one day.

He tries to imagine a sky with three moons. Scarily large asteroids. Comet trails scarring the atmosphere.

Then his smile vanishes and his eyes return back down to this A1 universe beneath him. Tries to chow down the growing realisation that inhabitability is probably inevitable anyway with the way things are headed, and that the problem is down here, not up there – and he dabs in a small Pleiades. Up there is safe. Under the watchful eye of the Seven Sisters; that’s protection.

Aliens are probably avoiding us on purpose. Who can blame them?

[omgthatdress]

How to make Cats a good movie.

I watched Cats, and once I got over the initial horror, I was actually pretty entertained and found myself enjoying the shit out of it. Like god bless it, for as nightmare-inducing as much as it was, Tom Hooper was clearly *committed* to his vision and you gotta give him credit for that. The scenery was actually really beautiful and the cinematography was frequently breathtaking. Like it really did have a lot of elements that really worked for it. But for every bit of genius, there was something terrible that the movie just couldn’t overcome. So let’s dive in.

First of all, you kind of have to understand Cats: the musical. It’s an adaptation of poems that T.S. Elliott of nihilistic lost generation fame wrote for his godchildren about cats. And the poetry is charming af and totally captures the nature of cats and why they’re so lovable. In the in the 1970s, Andrew Lloyd Webber did a shit ton of cocaine and decided to make a musical out of these poems. As a result, Cats has no plot. It’s a bunch of cats singing their songs about who they are and doing a lot of dancing. The thinnest of narrative devices is created with the “jellicle” ball and the deciding of which cat gets to ascend to heaven or some shit. So yeah. Cats is actually pretty controversial among theater nerds, it’s very much a you either love it or hate it thing. Is it stupid? Yes.  Is it going to make everyone happy? No. Does it lend itself well to film adaptation? fuck no. I get the feeling that Tom Hooper was really going for deep, meaningful poetic cinema here and trying to make another Les Mis (which was way overly long and ultimately sank under its own sheer weight as a movie and probably is better viewed as a play). I’m operating under the assumption that Hooper was going for ground-breaking cinema that would have made millions and swept up during awards season and cemented him as a legendary director and gone down in movie history, because every little detail of Cats is clearly meant for maximum impact. You kind of need to drop all expectations going into Cats, so once you’re there, you can have fun with it. So how do you make it a good film?

1. The HORRIBLE hyper-realistic cgi human-cat hybrids. YES, it’s a technical marvel, and the CGI artists who made it all deserve a ton of credit for the work they did. And I understand why the actors were kept in their human shapes: live dance is a huge part of what makes Cats work. One of the smart decisions made was hiring theater veterans for the filler roles in the cat chorus, so when you have the choreographed numbers, it’s really spectacular. It’s just the end result was way too uncanny valley and bizarre for any of the film’s good parts to ever rise above it. I think a minimalist approach would have actually worked best. Cat ears and simple costumes with clean lines that show off the dancer’s bodies. Go for the suggestion of cats, and kind of let the viewer’s imagination take over, and showcase the cat’s personality. A huge part of what I enjoyed was hearing the poetry and imagining these cats and how they all relate to cats I’ve known. The dance and the music helped heighten this experience, but hybrids kept reminding me of the joke: what do you get when you cross a human and a cat? An immediate cessation of funding and a stern rebuke from the ethics committee.

2. The schlocky, honestly amateurish attempts at slapstick humor. I’m gonna come out and say it and say that Hooper is pretty deeply entrenched in *dRaMa* and has no sense of how comedy works. There was a lot of added in comedic bits from Rebel Wilson and James Corden, and it was honestly terrible. I mean really, a crotch hit? That kind of lowbrow comedy is so crude and base that it’s actually really hard to pull it off well. Slapstick comedy actually lends itself to the whimsical tone, and slapstick done well can be utterly sublime, but Cats seemed satisfied that fat people falling over is the height of comedy and should be left at that. And a second note on the comedy? Weirdly fat-shame-y. A saw a post about how odd it is to see James Corden, who has been very frank about how he’s struggled with dieting and come to accept that his body is fat and can’t be made not fat, playing this role where fat is added to his body, his CGI vest strains at the buttons, and he’s literally stuffing his face with garbage. The theme of fat people as lazy, stupid, and slovenly carried over from Rebel Wilson’s role, in which she also plays a fat lazy cat who is leaned on heavily for comic relief. I know the role is about a fat cat, and gently laughing at a fat lazy cat who loves to eat is fine, but, speaking as a fat person myself, this felt like a gleeful exploitation of a nasty and cruel stereotype. James Corden and Rebel Wilson are both extraordinarily funny people who happen to be fat, and their comedic gifts were tremendously mis-used here, reducing them to simply two fat bodies to be laughed at.

3. Jennifer Hudson. She’s a talented actress who can sing and emote like a motherfucker. And emote she did. She was clearly GOING for that second Oscar. I really don’t want to call her performance bad. The same level of emotion, tears running and snot flowing, in another movie, would have been devastating (Hello, Viola Davis in Fences). But this isn’t Fences, it’s fucking Cats. You need a level of character depth and development that Cats doesn’t afford to make those tears hit. All the crying and misery was an odd maudlin and over-dramatic break in the fun and whimsy. With a subtler performance and a hint of self-awareness, it could have actually brought in an emotional anchor for this light-as-air film, but Cats doesn’t make any attempt at nuance, and as a result the scenes just hit you out of nowhere like a load of bricks. 

4. Francesca Hayward. Okay, before we go anywhere, I want to say that this girl is not un-talented. She’s the principal ballerina of the Royal Ballet, and has a very long list of ballets that she’s lead in. So it makes sense that she’d be hired for a role that’s primarily ballet. This girl is a really really great DANCER. But Cats was clearly trying to make an A-list actress out of her. They tried to make her into Florence Pugh, who has been acting for a while and is blowing up right now because she’s very talented. Like everything about Francesca’s role in the film said “This is a star-making role.” A new song was written just for her to sing as an addendum to Cats’s show-stopping signature song. But the song was just okay, it didn’t carry nearly the emotional weight or all-around beauty of “Memories,” and all in all felt wedged-in and totally unnecessary and really just felt like a grab at that “best original song” Oscar. Francesca’s voice is high, thin, and child-like. It’s not unpleasant, but next to the richness and depth of Jennifer Hudson’s voice, it crumbles, and it’s not the sort of voice that I want to seek out to listen to over and over again. As for her overall performance, she largely keeps the same look of wide-eyed wonder throughout her numerous close-ups, so much so that I found myself thinking of the the MST3K “dull surprise” sketch. But I don’t know if that’s really entirely her fault. There was an attempted romantic storyline with the magic cat, but again, because of the nature of Cats and its lack of real character development or depth, the chemistry fell flat. There really isn’t much of a chance to show off a lot of dramatic range, so to keep going back to her character, it kept reinforcing the one-notedness of her performance. Really, I just kept wanting to see Francesca dance. Ironically, I think they really blew an opportunity trying to make an A-list actress out of her. All she really need to make people want to see more of her is one spectacular dance number, but for some reason, she never really gets that show-stopping moment. 

5. Dignity? I guess this goes back to the whole CGI cat thing, but there were a lot of moments when I felt this tremendous wave of second-hand embarrassment hit me on behalf of the talented actors in this film. Watching Gandalf lap up milk from a saucer was a wholly uncomfortable experience, like come on, grant the great Ian McKellan some fucking DIGNITY here. Which goes back to whatI said earlier that a suggestion and interpretation of cats would have worked better than all-out just being a cat. Or it could again just be how much Cats just fails its attempts at comedy. But then again there was no fucking reason at all for Idris Elba to be that fucking NAKED. I guess they were trying to make him sexy? But his sexy smolder and just being Idris Elba wasn’t enough they had to make sure that we all saw his chiseled pecs and thick thighs. And then at the end when he’s dangling off of the rope of a hot air balloon and what’s supposed to be a funny scene, I think, I kept thinking “I’m so sorry this is happening to you, Idris.” 

There’s a bunch of other small, nit-picky things that I could go into. Those cockroaches would have worked so much better if they weren’t humans with an extra set of arms. Watching them get eaten was some horror movie shit. Taylor Swift’s Macavity song would have worked a lot better if the cat chorus full of cats we’ve gotten to know had sung it, but instead Taylor Swift is brought in as a new cat we don’t know whose only purpose is to sing the Macavity song? but of course a big oscar-bait movie needs to have that pop star that draws in the people who wouldn’t otherwise see it and making her a part of the cat chorus would have had her performing throughout the whole movie and she would have floundered the way pop stars tend to do when performing musical theater around a bunch of musical theater actors. So I guess I get why she was thrown in.

So.... yeah? Is there anyone else who found themselves enjoying it in spite of everything? I’m glad I have dogs and didn’t have to watch this mess with actual cats around me.

[traumagician]

When you get back from watching cats, tell us your thoughts!

Cats was, tragically, nowhere near as surreal and bizarre as the reviews led me to believe. I was expecting every second to be full of what-the-fuck fever dream nonsense, to be befuddled at every new occurrence, and this was just not the case. At least, not after the first twenty or so minutes. The first twenty to thirty minutes of the movie are, in fact, every bit as mindfuckingly strange as everybody says.

The sheer oddity of the CGI costumes—seriously, who the hell thought those were a good idea?—hit you like a cement truck during these early scenes. And that uncanniness is made even more jarring by the fact that pretty much all the horrific happenings you’ve read about in the other reviews occur in these same early scenes.

Yes, Cat Rebel Wilson eats a diminutive cockroach person—two of them, in fact—and scratches her ginger-furred cat crotch in awkward silence. Yes, there are horrifying dancing mice with the faces of vapid schoolchildren. Yes, the massively obese tuxedo cat who follows Wilson’s act comes dangerously close to sucking another cat’s toes onscreen. Yes, there are cringey cat puns and a neutering joke. And yes, Cat Idris Elba simply Thanos-snaps Cat Rebel Wilson off the screen, and we are all very glad to see her go, because she is fundamentally un-funny, and almost all of the aforementioned horrors are ENTIRELY HER FAULT.

But the thing is, almost all of this occurs in the first thirty minutes of the film. After that, it becomes a much more normal movie musical. The CG costumes are, of course, horrifying, and they continue to be horrifying throughout the film. But after those first thirty minutes, you become pretty inured to the horror of it all and begin to accept that that’s just how the unfortunate creatures in this world look. You eventually stop noticing it in the same way you eventually stop noticing the hairy mole on your Auntie Edna’s neck. You start to pay more attention to TS Eliot’s nimble poetry and to the dancing, which would honestly be pretty cool if they didn’t slap so many unnecessary CG effects over absolutely everything. You start to see that if they had only done REGULAR NON-DIGITAL COSTUMES and not hired Rebel fucking Wilson, this may have actually been a fun and whimsical movie.

Your mercifully-acquired blindness all goes away, of course, the instant Cat Idris Elba sheds his overcoat, revealing that the CG people did not bother to give him fur, instead opting to simply oil him up for maximum glister, give him a tail that sprouts unnaturally from his gleaming muscular buttocks, and edit out his genitalia. Somehow, this is even more horrifying than if they had left his genitals ON. Everything awful about this movie—and there is an awful lot of awful about it—comes from one of two things (three if you count Rebel Wilson): the CGI, or their ill-fated attempt to surgically insert a plot into something that was never meant to be anything more than a collection of poems about cat personalities. (Or Rebel Wilson. Dear lord, Rebel Wilson.)

If this had been a simple anthology of TS Eliot poems performed to song and dance, that would have been fine. But the writers’ futile attempts to arrange it into an actual STORY, doomed it. This may well be the fault of the original musical writers rather than the movie writers—I’ve never seen the stage musical, so I can’t confirm this. But even so, it’s so glaring it needs to be addressed.

To answer a much-asked question, Cats does indeed have a plot, and it would be infinitely better off if it did not. The “plot”, such at is is, is this. All the singing cats want to die and be reincarnated into a new life—why do they want to die? They’ve just sung about how lovely and whimsical their current lives are, after all! This is never answered! But they do, for some reason, and they can’t do this unless Cat Judi Dench gives them permission. Crime lord Macavity, a.k.a. Cat Idris Elba inexplicably wants to die most of all, even though he is Idris Elba and a bitchin’ criminal mastermind and can Thanos-snap anyone he wants right out of his life. He is so determined to be chosen for reincarnation that he teleports every other cat who wants to die to a barge in the middle of the Thames. And when Cat Judi Dench refuses to let him die even though he is the last uncanny cat-man standing, he throws a fit and Thanos-snaps Cat Judi Dench into the Thames too.

The other cats are distraught at the loss of Cat Judi Dench and bully a magician cat, through a painfully-drawn out musical number wherein the chorus is sung about a thousand times, into literally waving a magic wand to bring her back—the laziest “plot” resolution ever. Upon her rescue, Cat Judi Dench then gives a very depressed cat (who has been ostracized from the start of the show for the grave crime of daring to briefly date Cat Idris Elba) permission to die, and the depressed fallen-woman cat ascends to the heavens in a bejeweled hot air balloon before evaporating, thus creating unfortunate implications that if you’ve been dumped by an ausive partner there’s nothing left for you to do except to die and hope that your next life is better, which is just a huge steaming pile of bullshit.

But despite the ill-advised CGI and the even more ill-advised plot (which is barely there and serves only to create a very bad taste in the mouth), it is still, at its heart, just a collection of rather delightful TS Eliot poems set to music, and if you ignore the abhorrent machinations of the writers and the effects department, you will be left with the poetry and the music and the dancing. And really, poetry and music and dancing are not such horrible things to be left with. 3/10, neither as bad nor as interesting as it could have been.

[dvrcas]

               * ╰    KATHRYN  NEWTON  ;  TWENTY  ;  SHE / HER  ——  wow,  DORCAS  MEADOWES  sure  has  grown  !  it’s  almost  hard  to  believe  they  actually  passed  recruitment…  i  still  remember  them  being  so  INTUITIVE  &  OPTIMISTIC  now  they  just  seem  MATERIALISTIC  &  CAPRICIOUS.  guess  they’re  special  if  they  made  it  this  far.  word  in  the  halls  is  they’re  training  to  be  a  HIT  WITCH  but  i  don’t  think  they’ll  make  it  out  alive.  after  all,  they’ve  shown  signs  of  being  NEUTRAL  in  the  war.

PINTEREST

character  inspo:  amy  march  (  little  women  ),  shelby  wyatt  (  quantico  ),  glinda  upland  (  wicked  ),  rachel  green  (  friends  )

dorcas  louisa  ruth  meadowes  hails  from  old  money,  sweltering  summer  heat,  peaches,  spanish  moss,  and  crickets  at  dusk.  she  grew  up  in  the  american  deep  south,  the  baby  of  a  well-established  pureblood  family.  

with  four  older  siblings,  two  doting  parents,  and  a  fleet  of  nannies,  dorcas  was  never  in  want  of  attention.  basil  &  myra  meadowes  married  and  had  children  young  and  fast;  her  mother  had  dorcas’s  eldest  brother  when  she  was  only  twenty  one,  and  had  dorcas  (  the  youngest  )  five  years  later.  

(  her  siblings,  in  order:  montgomery,  or  monty.  the  only  boy,  aged  25.  clementine,  23.  the  twins,  willow  &  winona,  22.  and  last  comes  dorcas,  20.  )

their  parents  loved  them,  to  be  sure,  but  basil  &  myra  were  never  much  for  hard  work;  the  nannies  dealt  with  diaper  changes  and  crying  toddlers  and  scraped  knees.  

but  when  the  sun  was  shining,  the  meadowes  would  gather  their  offspring  and  spoil  them  rotten  with  picnics,  and  weekends  at  their  beach  home,  and  banquets  with  all  basil  &  myra’s  friends.  and  so  all  dorcas’s  childhood  memories  of  her  parents  are  of  laughter  and  golden  days  and  bliss.

basil  &  myra  held  frequent  catered  banquets,  the  adults  getting  flushed  and  tipsy  off  rot-your-teeth  sugary  drinks,  cooing  over  the  dolled-up  children.  dorcas  adored  the  attention.  she  loved  dressing  up  in  her  best  clothes  and  showing  off  the  meagre  magic  she  could  do  (  though  she  still  had  impressive  control  over  wandless  magic  for  a  child  )  and  being  patted  on  the  head  and  called  darling.

i’m  pretty  sure  jkr  has  said  that  ilvermorny  is  the  only  north  american  wizarding  school  but  i’m  gonna  go  ahead  and  say  fuck  that  cause  i  can’t  see  dorcas  and  her  siblings  going  to  ilvermorny,  since  1)  it’s  in  massachusetts  and  2)  it  “  has  the reputation  of  being  one  of  the  most  democratic,  least  elitist  of  all  the  great  wizarding  schools  ”  and  i  think  dorcas  would’ve  gone  to  a  preppier  school

also,  one  school  for  all  of  north  america  ?  yeah  ok,  sure

so  we’ll  say  she  went  to  a  smaller,  more  prestigious  wizarding  school  in  virginia,  the  wizarding  equivalent  of  a  private  school.  aglionby  academy  vibes  from  the  raven  cycle.  

it  wouldn’t  be  quite  fair  to  say  dorcas  excelled  in  school.  she  did  quite  well,  but  she  wasn’t  top  of  her  class.  more  like  …  fourth  in  her  class.  

she  wasn’t  even  top  in  her  siblings.  they  all  had  their  unofficial  roles  to  play.  monty  was  the  athletic  one,  clementine  was  the  brainy  one,  the  twins  were  charming  and  mischievous,  and  dorcas  …  dorcas  was  the  pretty  one.

but  that  doesn’t  bother  dorcas.  she  loves  her  siblings,  and  she  loves  her  parents.  everyone  knows  how  close  the  meadowes  family  is.

the  thing  about  dorcas  is  that  she  never  seems  bothered.  she  floats  through  life  with  a  carefree,  laissez-faire  attitude,  apple-cheeked  and  dimpled,  laughing  off  any  failure  that  comes  her  way,  because  hey,  no  big  deal,  it  wasn’t  that  important  anyway.  

(  if  you  asked  dorcas  what  is  important  to  her,  what  matters  to  her,  she  would  have  trouble  giving  you  an  answer.  )

dorcas  flits  from  short-lived  interest  to  short-lived  interest.  when  she  was  thirteen,  it  was  horseback  riding.  when  she  was  fourteen,  it  was  wandlore.  when  she  was  fifteen,  it  was  poetry.  but  none  of  them  lasted  very  long,  conquered  by  that  old  familiar  restless  boredom.

dorcas  is  the  quintessential  baby  sister  (  think  amy  march  )  which  is  why,  when  monty  enrolled  in  a  martial  arts  course,  dorcas  insisted  on  enrolling  as  well.  (  i  feel  like  wizards  probably  have  their  own  unique  styles  of  martial  arts,  but  i’m  gonna  say  it  was  something  like  jiu  jitsu  where  you  use  the  opponent’s  strength  against  them,  since  dorcas  is  fairly  small  )

soon  after,  monty  was  recruited  by  the  american  quodpot  team  and  had  to  leave.  but  dorcas  stayed  on.  something  about  the  thrill  of  it,  the  foreignness  and  the  physicality,  kept  her  hooked.  when  she  was  on  the  mat,  there  was  no  past  or  future,  just  in  the  moment.

not  that  she  vocalized  any  of  that.  if  you  asked  her,  it  was  just  a  fun  way  to  stay  in  shape.  

dorcas’s  parents  found  their  daughter’s  new  ‘  hobby  ’  strange,  but  delightful  and  cute,  trotting  it  out  as  a  fun  tidbit  at  parties  when  they  showed  dorcas  off.  did  you  know,  dorcas  reckons  she’s  a  wrestler  now  –  bless  her  !  watch  out,  she’s  dangerous  !  followed  by  a  round  of  laughter.

as  a  child,  dorcas  would’ve  loved  the  attention,  but  now,  it  was  starting  to  grate.  not  that  she  would’ve  ever  dreamed  of  protesting  —  she  loved  her  parents,  and  they  meant  well.  there  was  no  sense  in  making  a  big  deal  over  a  silly  hobby.  it  wasn’t  that  important  anyway.

the  only  person  who  took  her  seriously  was  her  coach,  a  fearsome,  grizzled  wizard  with  an  amusing  name.  in  fact,  robert  robertson  took  her  more  seriously  than  she  took  herself.  he  wouldn’t  let  her  quit  when  things  got  tough,  and  under  his  tutelage  she  branched  out,  explored  other  fighting  styles,  met  other  experts.  

her  parents’  interest  in  her  martial  training  waned  quickly,  especially  when  a  new  hobby  came  along,  one  with  well-defined  cheekbones  and  striking  grey  eyes.  seymour  darville  was  the  nephew  of  a  family  friend.  also  pureblood,  of  course.  he  and  dorcas  hit  it  off  right  away,  and  it  wasn’t  long  before  they  were  an  item  and  their  gossipy  relatives  finally  had  something  to  gossip  about.

years  went  by.  dorcas  grew  from  a  teenager  to  a  young  adult.  she  continued  her  training.  meanwhile,  her  relationship  with  seymour  solidified.  her  older  siblings  all  found  partners  and  wed  young,  just  like  their  parents.  dorcas  became  an  aunt  four  times  over.  their  gossipy  relatives  began  dropping  not-so-subtle  hints,  wondering  when  it  would  be  dorcas’s  turn  to  take  the  veil.  the  cement  of  dorcas’s  future  life  was  hardening.

seymour  proposed  over  a  candlelight  dinner  with  roses  and  a  ring,  violins  enchanted  to  serenade  them.  it  was  picture-perfect,  something  straight  out  of  a  romance  novel.

dorcas  didn’t  answer.  she  told  him  she  needed  time  to  think  about  it.  for  a  girl  unable  to  commit  to  most  things,  a  husband  was  an  awfully  big  commitment.  especially  one  she  feared  she’d  fallen  out  of  love  with.  but  her  family  was  expecting  it,  and  his  family  was  expecting  it,  and  besides,  there  was  nothing  that  made  a  girl  half  so  interesting  as  a  diamond  on  her  finger.  right  ?

and  that  was  when  dorcas  was  recruited  for  edin,  by  robert  robertson  personally.  dorcas  had  never  been  overseas  before.  she’d  always  stayed  home,  comfortable  with  the  spanish  moss,  the  peach  trees,  and  american  pureblood  tradition.  going  to  edin  would  be  …  insane.  training  to  be  a  hit  witch  ?  dorcas  wasn’t  a  hit  witch.  she’d  get  one  month  in  before  she  got  bored  and  wanted  to  leave.  not  to  mention  how  far  it  was.  and  she  had  family  in  georgia,  a  loving  boyfriend,  a  future.  

these  were  all  things  dorcas’s  family  said  when  she  told  them  she  would  be  going  to  the  united  kingdom  for  a  year.

i’m  just  worried  about  my  little  girl,  darlin’,  her  mother  said.  you’ve  never  been  so  far  from  home  before.  what  if  something  happens  ?  what  if  you  don’t  come  back  ?

to  which  dorcas  replied,  well,  of  course  i’m  coming  back.  i  can’t  miss  my  own  wedding.  

and  of  course,  that  derailed  their  protests  completely,  as  dorcas  knew  it  would.  dorcas  would  go  to  edin  and  play  hit  witch,  have  her  fun  for  a  year,  and  then  she  would  come  back  to  her  family  and  her  fiancé.  shackled  to  home  for  life.  and  edin,  and  dorcas’s  martial  training,  and  the  one  thing  she’d  committed  to  in  her  life,  would  stay  an  ocean  away.

some  other  things:

even  though  rappaport’s  law  forbidding  muggle  and  magic  interaction  was  lifted  in  1965,  when  dorcas  was  five  years  old,  the  segregation  between  muggle  and  magic  was  too  deeply  ingrained  to  fade  that  easily.  as  such,  dorcas  is  HELLA  clueless  about  the  muggle  world  !  her  private  school  had  very  few  muggleborns,  and  the  muggleborns  that  did  attend  kept  quiet  about  their  heritage.  there  was  no  muggle  studies  or  anything  of  the  sort.

she’s  also  used  to  being  rich  af  lol

other  than  on  the  mat,  dorcas  tends  to  avoid  conflict.  she’s  genuine,  kindhearted  and  optimistic,  and  remarkably  in  tune  with  others’  emotions,  though  her  pureblood  naïveté  might  rub  some  the  wrong  way.  

she’s  like  …  fucking  good  at  fighting.  she’s  nimble  and  surprisingly  strong,  and  people  tend  to  underestimate  her.  she  works  hard  to  keep  herself  in  top  physical  health.  she  eats  healthy  and  exercises  regularly.

this  was  a  fucking  NOVEL  i  am  so  sorry

[sophiamcdougall]

And what kind of Italian pop music are you obsessed with?

Let me start by explaining why I am obsessed with Italian pop music.Imagine a sexy, feelgood summer hit called “Rolling South", about going on a sexy summer holiday. There will be beaches, surfing, sunshine. There will surely be hot girls. The chorus is all about riding the waves… rolling south…You can imagine a song like that existing in English, can’t you?

But that song would absolutely not contain the lines “The dignity of the elements! The liberty of poetry! Beyond the betrayals of men, it’s magic, it’s magic, it’s magic!”But “Rotolando Verso Sud” by Negrita does.

Italian pop music has no chill at all and for that I love it to fucking death. We are talking a corpus in which “I will cross seas and rivers, I will ride storms and whirlwinds, I will fly between the thunderbolts, just to have you” is an ordinary, workaday sentiment. (Meravigliosa Creatura by Gianna Nanini)   For months on end obsessing over Italian pop music was my primary method of teaching myself the language. Do you know how easy it was to learn the phrase “the soul of the universe?” Very easy. Because that comes up a lot. (L’Anima Vista Da Qui by Negramaro)If I sound like I’m taking the piss – well, maybe sto prendendo la musica italiana un po’  in giro (teasing it a little)  – but at heart I am not kidding at all. There are so many artists combining banging tunes with intricately poetic lyrics that are just … fantastically unafraid to go there, wherever there may be.  Which is not to say  it’s all explosive romance all the time, plenty of Italian songs can be wry and self-deprecating and hilarious and nuanced… they’re just that much more likely to take the view that there’s no reason NOT to be those things AND dialled-up-to-eleven EPIC at the same time. After a while a lot of  English lyrics seem a bit … tame by comparison. Like, sorry, if your immortal soul is not currently whirling through the spacetime continuum leaving a trail of supernovae blazing in its wake in order to punch your shitty dad/the mafia/death itself right in the fucking face why did any of us even bother showing up. So here is a very short and imperfect primer on the kind of Italian pop music I am obsessed with. To be clear, I am using “pop” extremely broadly, I am crappy at genre distinctions even in English-language music.

Ligabue: Imagine U2, but not shitty and really, really sexy. I know. It’s hard.  Ligabue’s hobbies include defying mortality and being stardust, howling at the sky, and not wanting people to be afraid of things. Was doing an extremely good Millennial Whoop at least 20 years before anyone in anglo pop got round to it.  

Negramaro Kind of like Muse, but as you have hopefully grasped, infinitely more so. Started out just whimsically enjoying the summer, (“You don’t hear that I tremble while I sing” ) ended up hallucinogenically awaiting the revolution  (“HEY! SAVE IT! This breathing earth that never falls apart!”) and predicting some sort weird post-apocalyptic time-travel happy-ever-after. (When you come back don’t turn away, for I no longer want to disappear: In the record of my days, stay till nightfall.”)

Loredana Berte Italy’s Queen of Rock: if anyone embodies the “dial it down? Well, fuck you” spirit of the kind of Italian pop music I am obsessed with, it is this legend. 69 years old, blue-haired, miniskirted, belting it out like there’s no tomorrow, she is not a lady, but someone whose war is never over. She will therefore definitely turn into a wolf and eat you (because what else were you EXPECTING), may we all live up to her.

Fabrizio Moro  Is like “What’s a genre? Sounds cool I’ll take ten.”  Consistently “AGAINST whoever BURIES their CONSCIENCE in CEMENT!!!”, Fabrizio is otherwise FUCKING UNCATEGORISABLE. Rapping the Mafia into tiny poetic pieces, funking his way through a panic attack, sweet piano ballads, stadium rock, why would he not. Sometimes in the same song.  Furious but also just wants to give you a big dorky hug. Explicitly pro-trans in 2009! Chronicling modern Italian political history with tragic, compassionate vision, but also taking the piss out of himself, going crazy for sheer joy, it’s all in a day’s work for my overly-tattooed fave.

 I am trying to cut back on the number of things I’m doing which ultimately boil down to “because Fabrizio Moro…” but I have now done a lot of things because Fabrizio Moro. 

So that’s what’s going on with me and Italian pop music. You did ASK.

[lxme-xss-imxgines]

Butterfly Effect // BTS pt 1

Prompt: Kim y/n attends a college with multiple opportunities, a great English program, and lots and lots of boys. Even with her best friends Jung Hoseok and Kim Taehyung by her side, Will she make it through unscathed?

Will any of them?

Word count: 1598

Warnings: Reader will struggle with anxiety, depression, and related topics later on. Detailed warnings will be placed on those specific chapters.

A/N: this is kind of trash, whoops

“Fuck,” a harsh swear leaves Y/n’s lips as her foggy eyes adjust to read the time displayed on her phone. 8:24. “How am I going to get to class in six fucking minutes?” she angrily mumbles to herself.

-Scatterbrained, she attempts to quickly get dressed and out the door- late is not a good first impression to a college professor.

Not bothering to eat breakfast, Y/n grabs her bag and sprints out of the door of her dorm, nearly knocking a girl over on her way out.

Resorting to a speed walk once reaching the other side of the campus, her eyes stay glued on her schedule, trying to figure out where in the he-

Y/n gasps from a sudden collision, schedule flying out of her hands and bag slipping off her arm. She tries to stop herself as she watches the cement path coming up to meet her face when she feels a grip on her shoulders.

“Still clumsy as ever, I see. I guess some things never change . . . “

The familiar voice registers in her ears, Y/n’s heart suddenly pounding in her chest.

Once steady again, Y/n spins around to face a boy with faded blue hair.

“Tae?!”

She almost couldn’t believe it. Her best friend from school, one of the only people she could stand to be around for longer than an hour at a time - just happens to be going to the same college she is.

Taehyung holds out his arms,”Where’s my ‘first time I’ve seen you in months’ hug?”

Ignoring the very present issue of being late to class, she engulfs Taehyung into a bone-crushing hug.

“How come I didn’t know you were going to be attending this college?” She questions as the hug is broken.

“Because I really didn’t know where I was going, to be honest. Things just kind of ended up leading me here,” he shrugs and partially shows off his boxy smile. “Funny how that works, huh?”

Y/n nods, glancing slightly upwards,”Yeah, it is.”

Taehyung and Y/n fall into a walking pace next to each other, their previous endeavors forgotten momentarily.

“So, you seemed like you were kind of in a hurry. Where were you off to?”

A sigh leaves her lips,”English 101. It started at 8:30, though. So I think it’s a little late.”

“Uh, are you sure? I thought that class didn’t start until 9:30,” a crease forms between Tae’s brows,”Considering that’s also where I’m headed, that is, after I grab some coffee.”

Y/n stops in her tracks,”You can’t be serious. Are you saying I rushed for nothing? How come my schedule said 8:30 then?”

A small chuckle leaves his mouth,”Silly Y/n. You must not have checked your email, a few days ago the professor said the class will be pushed back to a new time due to some confusion. What would you do without me?”

“Probably be to class 50 minutes early.”

_____

After retrieving some much needed caffeine, Tae and Y/n walk happily to the first college class of their school careers. They were both in much better moods now that they knew they wouldn’t have to brave college without one another. They wondered if the day could possibly get any better.

______

“So, where you off to?” Tae glances at Y/n as she slides her things into her bag, the class finally having ended.

“I’m actually going to meet up with Hobi outside the dance studio. He’s been there for a few hours and wants to take a break,” Y/n responds, slinging her bag over her shoulder once again.

A crease forms between Tae’s eyebrows,”Hobi . . . as in Jung Hoseok? He’s a bit older than us, isn’t he?”

Y/n fails to stifle a giggle,”He’ been my best friend for a long time, our families were close.”

“Wouldn’t make sense for him to be closer to Jin? He is older than you after all.”

“Please, Tae. He reminds me of that enough,” Y/n rolls her eyes,”But yeah, there was some conflict with that a couple of years ago. We’ve decided we’re okay with sharing Hoseok, though.”

“That’s weird. I don’t remember seeing a lot of him.” he shakes his head slightly.

They begin to walk toward the dance studio, continuing the conversation about the creation of Y/n and Hobi’s unorthodox friendship.

“Well, he was really busy trying to prove himself as a dancer and occupied himself with street dancing pretty often. That’s how he got into this school, on his skill alone. We were all super proud of him.”

“That’s . . . impressive,” Y/n turns and looks at Tae with a bit of a smile, and he returns it.

“You guys walk so slowwwww! I’ve been dancing for like four hours and even I’m keeping a good pace,” Their heads snap up to Hobi exiting the dance studio a few yards ahead. “Please tell me you have some sort of nourishment on you.”

“You’re so dramatic oppa,” Y/n grumbles and pulls a granola bar out of her bag that had been thrown in there at some point.

“Thank god,” Hoseok grabs the food at the speed of light, quickly unwrapping it and shoving at least half in his mouth,”I see you brought a friend.”

“Hobi, you remember Tae. He was my best friend throughout school.”

Hoseok frowns, raising a hand to point to himself,”I thought I was your best friend.” crumbs fall out of his mouth and Tae chuckles silently.

“I said in school, silly,” y/n rolls her eyes once again,”how long are you on break for?”

“Mmm. I’m not sure. I’m holding some auditions for my dance group today,” Hoseok pushes the rest of the granola bar in his mouth, restricting his speech momentarily. “They’ll be showing up soon.”

“On the first day of school? You think any of the freshman dance majors will manage to not be intimidated by you? Or even the upperclassmen?”

His focus drifts away from their conversation, his eyes concentrating on something behind y/n and Taehyung.

“Apparently, I’m not as intimidating as you think,” he gestures behind them.

They turn to see a trail of 15 or so boys from all class levels walking with duffle bags strapped across their chests heading toward the campus’ dance studio.

“Oh.” Tae and y/n say in unison.

“Well, we’ll leave you to it,” Y/n braces for an overly sweaty hug and forehead kiss from Hobi before retreating back toward the center of campus with Tae.

They walk for a bit, just catching up about everything that’s happened since school ended. Why Tae dyed his hair blue, old boy drama with y/n, what made them decide to be English majors.

“Listen, I’m not gonna end up as one of those girls who post sad poems on Tumblr and hope that it blows up or something. I want my words to reach someone. To mean something.” Y/n sighs, leaning back on the park bench.

“I get it. Though, posting your poetry on a platform wouldn’t hurt. Constructive criticism is good for you,” Tae’s blue hair falls slightly as he tilts his head, y/n turning to glance at him.

Suddenly their faces are just a little too close, and the space feels small.

Before y/n can say anything, Tae’s lips press lightly on hers. Surprise floods her brain, and Tae pulls away almost as quick as he was there.

He shakes his head,”Nope. Didn’t think so.”

“Yeah, definitely not.”

They both sit in silence for a moment before turning to face each other, almost laughing instantly.

“What was that Tae?” she giggles again.

He scratches the back of his head,”Just, uh. Confirming something.”

y/n snorts,”What? The lack of romantic feelings between us?”

He smiles sheepishly,”It’s a little more than that.”

“Then what?” she sits up fully, turning to face him. His silence gives her a moment to think, and a realization dawns upon her. “Kim Taehyung, are you gay?”

“Well, when you say it like that . . . yeah.” His cheeks turn bright red, and a feeling of guilt washes over y/n. Had he been struggling with this throughout the entirety of their schools careers, and she just hadn’t known?

She engulfs him in a hug, hoping to wash away all of the uneasiness that had settled over Taehyung. It was the least she could do.

She pulls away,”I think that’s enough for today.”

Taehyung nods, agreeing,”I didn’t really plan for that.” he smiles a little, and y/n returns it.

“I think I’m gonna head home,” y/n says, standing up. “Just text me if you need anything.”

He nods, and it seems like Kim Taehyung will be sitting at this particular park bench for a little while longer.

_____

Kim Y/n was almost asleep. After all the walking she had done today, she wanted at least a little bit of rest before working on her first English assignment.

Today wasn’t so bad, she thought. I think college will be okay.

Her eyes begin to flutter, her senses going dull . . .

DING!

Her eyes pop open, a groan leaving her mouth.

Slipping her phone into her grip off of the soft surface of her bed, she clicks the home button to read a text from Hobi.

Party at one of my dance recruit’s flats tonight!!!!! I’m picking you up at 8, no questions asked. I refuse to not be in attendance for your first college party! Not to mention I have some rad news about my dance group ! See you later

- Hobi

Great.

[tessatechaitea]

Doomsday Clock #5

Nostalgia's branding efforts might be a little off the rails.

Dammit. I had almost forgotten how everybody blamed and mistrusted superheroes!

Of course there's always been a long history of Gotham Police mistrusting and hating Batman (if only because he does their job better than they do and obviously has way better pay and benefits). But DC really fucked up when they decided that level of mistrust should be applied more broadly so that every citizen suddenly turned against even Superman, the universally acknowledged boy scout. I'm not a comic book historian so I don't know when that attitude began but I think it's generally acknowledged that it was a byproduct of Watchmen and similar comic books of the time. "Look at how more realistic this is! Why should a world embrace and trust masked heroes?! And Watchmen was so popular, that aspect of it must be what made so much money!" But, of course, that's the kind of thing people who didn't read Marv Wolfman's New Teen Titans believe. Because if I had to pick a starting point for when the mistrust of heroes seriously got rolling (I'm not saying it wasn't there before! It just wasn't the standard reaction of the public), I'd point to Wolfman's work trying to adapt The X-men feel to DC's superheroes. In the X-men, the "heroes" were actually mutants enrolled in a school where they could feel safe and learn to control their powers. They were hated by the public due to bigotry and a misunderstanding of what they represented to humanity's future. They were constantly attacked by "evil mutants" due to a disagreement on what mutants meant to the world. This worked as a plot point because of the bigotry aspect and the underlying difference between mutants and superheroes. But translating that to DC's world where mutants don't exist completely missed the mark. Wolfman's world became a place where The New Titans formed to help the world but never actually did. They simply created a headquarters in New York where they were constantly attacked by family members. Of course the people of New York would begin hating them for bringing danger and destruction to the city. Because they were actually doing that! And since The New Titans became DC's biggest seller for quite some time, every comic book writer on Earth learned that Wolfman's model was acceptable to readers. Instead of having heroes exist for saving the world, they could just exist to be targeted by super villains. And if that's all super villains seemed interested in then isn't it true that heroes are the root cause of all the problems with super villains? It's one thing to comment on bigotry in America by portraying people's hatred of mutants. It's a totally stupid other thing to have people hate heroes because of the destruction caused by the heroes attempting to simply save themselves from their enemies. In the first one, you side with the mutants because the people hate them for irrational reasons. In the second one, you have to side with the citizens because who wouldn't be upset if their house was destroyed and their dog was killed because The Joker was trying to kill Batman? I've said all of that before. Sometimes, I feel that's all I have left to say about DC. At least when Priest recently had the public hating the Justice League, it was because the Justice League was racist! Not in the regular racist way where Batman is using slurs and Superman is flying around in blackface and a sombrero but in the systemic way where they don't realize they're being racist but they just are. That was at least different (even if I still wasn't happy about it). I don't understand people who prefer heroes who are mistrusted and hated over heroes who are inspiring, loved, and embraced by the public. Wasn't the latter version the whole point of them in the first place?

Dammit! I should really read ahead before I go on a rant! Although, technically, I think this somehow proves my point about how this is all supposed to fix what went wrong with The New 52.

This issue is called "There is no God." I'm guessing at the capitalization because the font actually reads "THERE IS NO GOD". But it doesn't end in an exclamation point (or any other kind of punctuation, being a title and all) so I'm assuming it isn't meant to be yelled and it's just DC's perverse avoidance of lower case letters. Anyway, "There is no God" is the perfect title to ruffle religious feathers. But I bet it's a set-up! I bet Geoff Johns is going to write a story about how God does exist, even if only in a metaphorical way that gives hope to people who need more than a few decades of random, chaotic life! I mean, I would like more than a few decades of life too! But I wouldn't mind if it remained meaningless. Who needs a purpose? That's just adding obligation to this precious gift! Why do people want that?! I think that's why "being inspiring" has become such a huge achievement for so many people. Because it seems to give meaning to your life without you having to actually do anything except exactly the thing you want to do. So, say, I was coming up with a completely hypothetical situation where a guy I know survived an IED attack in Iraq but the four other people in his Humvee were killed, he might want to find meaning in why only he survived. He might feel somehow responsible for carrying on in a meaningful way to make their deaths less random and nonsensical. He might also become religious because it's too painful to believe that those four other guys simply winked out of existence in a meaningless war that didn't do anything for anybody (aside from some people making a lot of money (and aside from opening up the country to more chaos and instability)). And the meaning he might find in his life is becoming the center of attention just like he always wanted but could never attain. He became a comedian who also inspires people because he's so badly burnt and disfigured, how can he tell jokes?! Now his life has meaning even if his jokes and his poetry never get any better because the people who hear and read them are Christian and patriotic supporters who can't be critical of anything he does. So if he says in a poem that his daughter is crying "alligator tears," nobody tells him that they're "crocodile tears" and that if his daughter is crying them, it means she doesn't actually care that he's off in Iraq. And when his only joke is that he was blown up and set on fire, nobody minds because he was blown up and set on fire and—look at that!—he can still stand up and tell jokes! So inspiring! Now if my thought process were better than it is, I would delete all of that so that I don't sound like a jealous and bitter friend. But I explained my thought process earlier so you can judge me but I've got my Oreos ready to go after you misunderstand the hyperbole and facetiousness. Also, I'm not jealous and bitter. I'm supportive but critical! Which is why I didn't post what I just wrote on his wall. Because he can take supportive but I don't think he's up for critical. Especially hyperbolic and super truthful critical. Hypothetically, I mean! Back to how this comic book is doing its part to reset the DC Universe into the Post-Zero-Hour, Pre-New 52, Post and Pre a bunch of other stuff I can hardly guess at because DC Continuity is super fucked, a news report on a hospital television reports on Hawk, Dove, Red Star, and the Rocket Reds. So maybe I was wrong about Post-Zero-Hour! Maybe this reboot is post-Crisis only? And I might be wrong about that too! Isn't the current Superman from the Crisis timeline where they actually beat the Anti-Monitor? It's hard to remember Convergence because it was super boring and terribly written. It rated 5 Flaccid Penises out of 5. Unless you're totally into flaccid penises and then it rated zero of them. Along with the Rocket Reds and Red Star gearing up for an anti-west battle, Pozhar has stepped up to the plate as well. Or whatever you step up to in Russian baseball. Do they have something akin to baseball in Russia? Maybe cement-block-call? If we're going by themes, it's beginning to look like we're headed back to the eighties cold war, so a reboot to pre-Crisis levels of continuity isn't completely off the table! If I didn't know Geoff Johns was writing this, I'd be tempted to guess it was Dan Jurgens. The Cold War of this ear isn't about nuclear superiority but about metahuman superiority. But that's just a superficial difference, really! What's actually happening in Watchmen 2: Doomsday Clocks is identical to what was happening in Watchmen. Which means everybody will get along at the end not when Mister Terrific teleports a fake space creature into the middle of New York but when an actual cosmic threat attacks Earth and all the American and Russian metahumans have to team up to save the day. Then everybody will be inspired and begin fucking. Right on panel! I hope. In Moore's Watchmen, there was a thread with that kid reading the pirate book. I wasn't smart enough to know what that was about. Maybe it had something to do with how, to survive, the lead turned himself into a monster the way Ozymandias did. Or maybe it was just about the kinds of things media used to distract the populace. Who can tell?! Not me! Anyway, this series has Nathaniel Dusk stories as the story within a story. I guess it's the only way DC could get people to read them. So boring! You can tell they were boring if you read them in 1984. Also because an old man really loves them in this comic book. That old man is Johnny Thunder! His name makes him sound exciting but you'd be wrong! More boring! And he's trying to get the Justice Society back into continuity. Most boring of all! Some of you might be bristling at my description of the Justice Society as "most boring of all." But you've forgotten about the hyperbole and facetiousness! There's a twenty-five percent chance that I actually liked the Justice Society and own a bunch of their comic books! The Superman Theory states that the American government is in the business of making metahumans to make sure they retain control on the world stage. Most of the heroes deny that they were made by the government because they were actually made when they were exposed to Nth Metal. Duh. Everybody who believes The Superman Theory must not have read Metal. How did they miss it? It was the biggest and longest blockbuster ever produced! Anyway, Lois thinks Lex Luthor is the one behind this propaganda. But Lex denies it. In fact, he says somebody in the government is creating metahumans and that person was once a member of the Justice League! So, um, like Lex? Hopefully the reveal of the person behind The Superman Theory doesn't wind up being somebody like Commander Steel. With a twist like this, it's got to be somebody you generally associate with the League, like Martian Manhunter or Gleek.

Here Ozymandias lectures Batman thanks to years of terrible comic book writers.

By the end of this issue, Rorschach and Saturn Girl have caught up with Johnny Thunder who finally found Alan Scott's lantern. Batman has been captured by The Joker. And Geoff Johns is well on his way to telling comic book fans how dumb they've been accepting the bullshit narrative they've been fed for years that super villains only exist because super heroes exist. Rating: This issue was called "There is no God" and it had nothing to do with the story inside. But it was used because it was part of the Eugene O'Neill quote that closes the issue: "When men make Gods, there is no God!" Is that how every issue has been titled so far? Using a bit of the quote at the end? I haven't been paying close enough attention to know. Anyway, I have a few issues with that quote. First off, you shouldn't capitalize "Gods." I suppose you can argue that you would capitalize "Johns" but if you choose to do that, I probably don't like you and would discount your argument on that basis alone. I mean, the point is that men are making little gods which kills the proper noun God. Second, why does it end in an exclamation point? Is the second half of that statement such a huge twist that it needed the surprise element of the exclamation point? Maybe Eugene knew it was a fairly week turn to the phrase and thought the exclamation point would bolster the sentiment. I know that trick! The third problem I have with it is that I don't understand it in the context of this story. Is Johns saying that super heroes have replaced God? Are fans now supposed to feel reprimanded for being blasphemous monsters?! Am I supposed to believe that if we rely on heroes, we have lost our faith in God? Is Johns saying inaction through faith is better than relying on super heroes? Or is he saying that we lose our own motivation and free will when we expect heroes to save the day? How is that any different than expecting God to save the day? I guess in that context, I understand the quote! "When we come up with something more entertaining that still doesn't actually help or save humanity, we've forgotten the original concept we came up with that doesn't actually help or save humanity!" Hmm, good quote! I've won myself over! Five out of five stars! Not for this issue but for my twisted logic! For more of this sweet, sweet writing, subscribe to my newsletter: E!TACT the Newsletter.

[penyourpoison]

Port wine is for the small wine glass baby

Why are you always turning nothing into something baby

Why do you chase your vitamins with Gin

Stop reading poetry in the bathtub, I’m tired of scrubbing your sonnets off the tile

Your shoes are on backwards baby

Your sexuality makes me insecure in my own skin

Stop eating chocolate in bed baby

We’ve seen Peter Pan forty times let’s watch something different baby

Your hair is all over the bathroom

Stop biting your nails baby

Don’t put your feet on my dashboard

Stop wearing my boxers baby

Hey

What happened to the beach down by the hotel we always stayed at in San Diego, it doesn’t feel the same anymore, the waves are crashing harder than usual. Why does the sand feel colder baby?

Why does July feel like December

I can’t scrub you out of my pores anymore

I used to bleed fireworks around you

I swear I love you baby

Stop putting the whites with the colors, you’re turning all my shirts grey

I swear I still love you baby

Stop singing while you make breakfast, it’s too early to be this alive

I swear I do love you baby

I’m just not in the mood tonight

I

I just think we met at the wrong time

But I don’t believe in clocks

So I’ll unwind the stitches you sewed into my lips the night I first hummed symphonies into your tongue

Ill buy a new wardrobe cause no fabric softener can burn the smell of you out of my clothes

I’ll learn how to pay my own phone bill

I’ll replace the pillow in the rocking chair you used to read in cause your shape is cemented into the cushion

I’ll.. I’ll learn how to cook for one person,

I’ll offer up my heart to every pretty girl I see at the bar

I’ll hope she can learn to love me like you did

I’ll never fold my own socks

I’ll think about you more often then I should but I’ll get cozy with the first girl that hands me her organs in exchange for a late night fuck

I’ll settle again

For another girl who can’t make me love myself

And I’ll remember you

And the forts we used to build in our one bedroom apartments

And all the pets we could never care for

And the way your tongue slid up my thighs at 2 a.m

And how you liked 4 ice cubes in your water

I’ll remember you

I won’t regret this but I swear I’ll remember you .

[lettersforfiona]

Letter #75

Dear Fiona, September 1996 I was living in a mega small suburban NY town. I took 3 buses to community college because I did not have a driver’s license. Then after school I took 2 buses to Barnes & Noble & waited for my mom to pick me up. This end of the day ritual was my favorite pleasure. Coffee, poetry/astrology books, and discovering new music. Back then they had squishy headphones to listen to the 1st 30 seconds of a song on new albums. That’s how I discovered you. The 1st few seconds of Sleep to Dream had me obsessed. I bought that album just to hear the rest of Sleep to Dream. I love melodies & lyrics equally, and after reading all the lyrics I thought, holy shit, she’s my kin. 1997 I remember my silly pretentious teenage pride I felt when you became mega famous and I already knew your music by heart. I saw you on MTV music awards saying that, “this *celebrity* world is bullshit,” and I saw the media assholes going nuts over it and I thought, if a male celebrity said that, people would have celebrated him. I didn’t want to be famous after that because I already felt misunderstood in life, all I did was imagine myself in your situation. I am extremely sensitive and outspoken, a tough mix I didn’t know how to balance back then. February 29, 2000 - Roseland I was there. YOU had no idea how good you sounded. You could have ended it there and just left and received rave reviews. Then you said after starting & stopping Carrion a couple of times, “This song is dead.” I laughed because carrion/dead… Ya, that cemented my love and empathy for you, and for myself. I say unintentional funny things when I am frustrated or angry too. Thank you for comping my Beacon Theater tickets. I was so grateful I got to hear you twice in one year. 2003 or 2004? Free Fiona! Well, I had dropped out of college and then returned in my late 20’s. I changed my major from Art History, then to Fine Arts (I drew you), and then to Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry. I stayed in a dorm room on Claremont Avenue at the Manhattan School of Music because the New School didn’t have enough room in their dorms for me and a whole floor full of kids. I remember standing on Broadway thinking, what should I eat? I saw you walk out of the vegetarian deli and I thought you looked familiar. Then I think I did a triple take because I realized that it was you. I stood frozen in place and watched you walk to the end of the block. Finally I gathered up courage to walk fast after you. As I was speed walking I thought, what the fuck am I going to say? “Hi Fiona, I’m 5 days older than you.” No. “Hi Fiona! I love you!”  Definitely not because, lol, for obvious reasons, I don’t know you. A woman stopped to talk to you on Tiemann & I thought, I can’t interrupt, and I can’t stand here like a stalker. So I left and walked to Riverside Park to sit on a bench. I felt so sad. I saw Daniel Day-Lewis on the street and was no where near starstruck as I felt when I saw you. I’m laughing now, but there are 3 celebrities I always wanted to meet, Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, and you. 2004 I am guilty. Someone gave me Extraordinary Machine before it was out. I loved it. I deeply love both versions of Red, Red, Red. 2006 Your cover of, I Want You and Sally's Song, are amazing! 2012 I was still trying to get over someone from 2011 when your album came out and now every time I hear that album my eyes well up with tears.  Valentine is the toughest to listen to and it was exactly what I was going through while I first listened to it. Some people you love leave a crazy permanent imprint on you and you always feel them years later when a song plays that reminds you of them. Even if that song didn’t exist while you were with them. 2012 - NYC & Huntington, NY Hey! I loved those concerts. Dull Tool - no pulse in your impulse is a fucking brilliant line! Your cover of, Let Me Roll It, is the best. 2013 Pure Imagination - are you kidding me? You should have an album dedicated to covers of songs. You make them better than the original. 2015 - Lincoln Center I saw you outside on stage - Watkins Family Hour. That was such a happy surprise! Your songs carry strength and that strength kept me afloat in extremely tough times in my life. Thank you. I am happy you exist in this world. I am happy that you kept on making music, and good music that was well-crafted, thoughtful, clever, witty, soulful, and artful. You made quality art on your own terms. It is so amazing that at times people had viewed you as this way too vulnerable person when you have more balls & guts than most people. To state the obvious, we are all vulnerable. I’ve found that the people that appear the toughest on the surface are actually the most scared and the most easily manipulated by loved ones, especially lovers.   It’s funny how you can love an artist so much despite not knowing them. Art is powerful stuff. I read somewhere that you write only when you’re angry or sad. That made me incredibly happy because it meant with only 4 albums in 21 years, that you are more happy than sad in life. You deserve happiness. Sending You Hugs, Amber D’Amato P.S. I am 5 days older than you. ;-)

[thunderheadfred]

Valentine’s Day, 2181 CE

In honor of Valentine’s Day, here’s the Very Special Valentine from Red Streak.

Featuring Jane Shepard’s N7 mission on Akuze with cameos from Urdnot Wrex, Private Hudson, and one too many unapologetic 1980′s cinema references. Soundtrack by Meat Loaf. 

Total word count: 5k

Jane Akuze 

The ground was a long way down.

Much like falling in love, there was a drop that could kill you.

Shepard had ample time to worry about the skeleton-splattering deadliness of that distance as the Mako idled ten stories above the crater floor, clutched in the belching gullet of a thresher maw. Shepard spun her wheels against wet meat and empty air, but it was useless. There was no purchase to be found.

Delirious and giddy with fear, she couldn’t stop staring straight down at that drop. Hey, how about that? She could see Uncle Urdnot’s house from here.

The krogan warlord’s fortress might have been a lot friendlier looking if it hadn’t been sitting directly on top of the mouth of hell. The mercenary outpost was now smack-dab in the middle of a rampaging thresher nest, having gone from ‘habitable’ to ‘hell-hole’ overnight.

A week ago, Shepard had been comfortably grounded, babysitting fifty deeply filthy colonial Marines, swerving a baker’s dozen tanks across the rugged landscape of Akuze. Under cover of a remote M35 field driving course, they had been covertly pursuing a tip from Admiral Hackett, trying to find and neutralize “a mad-scientist superweapon.”

Armed with little more than the vaguest estimates as to the location and scale of the threat, things had been tense. All they knew was that they were after a sizeable terrorist splinter cell that had named themselves Cerberus, as if calling dibs on the underworld. What a bunch of assholes.

A week into the search, she’d intercepted Clan Urdnot’s distress call.

It was a sorry excuse for an S.O.S. - just a long, seemingly accidental broadcast bursting with imaginative profanities and the sound of an entire krogan mercenary company dying loudly in the background.

So - much - screaming.

Speaking of loud noises. The thresher maw that currently held Shepard’s tank in its drooling jaws was through with waiting for its snack.

Inch by squealing inch, the tank crunched down around Shepard’s ears, little more than a tin can in a suckling vice. There was a deafening roar of tearing metal, and then a massive glowing polka-dotted tongue crashed through the starboard hatchway. It flopped around with a ferocious slap-slap-slapping, like a great white shark leaping from the water to flail hungrily across a beach of screaming tourists.

Without even the courtesy of asking to be her Valentine, the thresher deepthroated the M35 and then spat out a throatful of acid.

It was no miracle that Shepard was spared: someone paid the reaper in her stead. Her gunnery officer - Private Sheb Wilhelm - took the whole hit of acid full on the chest. He blasted out a wild high-pitched scream before he bubbled, melted on his own bones, and died in tortured gore behind her, the sixth Alliance Marine to perish on Akuze under her command.

Engineer Apone drew unlucky number seven. He was pushed out the acid hole on the far side of the cabin and fell to his death in silent surprise before he even got a chance to turn his head and see what was coming.

As she suspected. Exactly like love, a fall like that could definitely kill you.

The thresher bellowed: a thousand quaking octaves of pure noise. Then, just as suddenly as it had rushed up from below, it abruptly let go of the tank, dropping Shepard ass-backwards into a skyrise worth of empty air.

She fell. And fell. And kept falling. There was no way to know when it would end - all she could see was the sky.

Shepard wasn’t proud. As death rushed up to meet her like a bat out of hell, she clutched the steering column and tearfully remembered sleeping in her pari’s arms… Then she breathed in deep and screamed her lungs bloody. If this was curtains, she was going to fucking announce herself all the way offstage.

The Mako and the ground reunited at terminal velocity, with a sound as loud as it was painful. Airbags deployed from every angle, scrambling her with enough force to break all the ribs on her left side. Just for kicks, her head slammed against the seat back in a sudden explosion of ugly stars, and then everything got real fuzzy.

Shepard was still screaming when someone wrenched open whatever was left of the starboard hatch and clamped their massive hand around her forearm with bruising force. Those brutal, groping fingers rattled her so violently that she stopped screaming entirely out of annoyance.

She turned and saw him. Urdnot Wrex. Huge, red, and lit from behind in glorious technicolor like a god of the sun. With her head in a fog, all she could do was stare.

Sweeping in to rescue the krogan band had been Shepard’s call. Luckily, her Marines and Wrex’s mercs had fallen in love at first sight, and after the initial raid cemented the marriage, nobody had questioned her orders. Wrex was especially infatuated with his rescuers, and he expressed his affection with blended gifts of heavy weapons and heavy drinking. The touch of intoxicating love in the air had only been enhanced by the looming proximity and subsequent arrival of Valentine’s Day.

You haven’t heard poetry until you’ve heard a krogan merc reciting a hand-written sonnet to the Alliance Marine who just pulled his ass out of the fire.

Shepard’s ears were ringing - she was in a stupor. Wrex shook her again.

“Shepard! Stop gaping like a baby salarian and let go of the wheel! Is this what you call a rescue?”

Oh yeah. She was supposed to be rescuing him, not the other way around. Things had not gone according to plan. How had things gotten so backwards? Somewhere between the thresher maw’s mouth and the ground, presumably.

The thresher maws just kept coming. There were dozens. Every five feet, they seemed to spring from the ground like man-eating dandelions, and there was no weeding them. Shepard’s Marines had been forced to attack in shifts, pulling out a few more half-eaten krogan survivors with each crazy, desperate trip into the central compound. Taking turns to dart back to the few safe inches of perimeter, they ran like hell, slept in bursts, and drank themselves numb in between.

Now on day three of the assault, Shepard had been leading the very last wave. Then - whoops - everything had gone straight to shit when Wrex had run back into his fortress, drunkenly screaming that he’d forgotten his piece-of-shit family armor. She should have cut him off after that fifth mug of ryncol. But then again, how do you tell a thousand-year-old battlemaster that he was too deep in his cups? She could use a stiff drink herself right about now. Her whole body roiled with pain.

It felt... sort of… purple. A royal hue.

Wrex, for his part, was through with gentility. He reached into the cabin and slapped Shepard right across her stupefied face.

“SHEPARD! Wake up! It’s time to get your pretty ass in gear! I don’t remember giving my future queen permission to die!”

During one of those scanty breaks between raids, Shepard may have accidentally gotten blinding drunk on ryncol and promised to bear a krogan battlemaster twenty fruitful daughters. Or something.

The thought of being heavily pregnant with exterrestrial offspring was what finally brought her back to her senses. Her head snapped up and she looked outside. Oh god.

Half a dozen thresher maws were writhing in the distance beneath the unending hellfire of turrets, rockets, and mortar squads camped along the western perimeter. Tanks were scattered across the crater floor like discarded toys, most of them reduced to little more than smouldering clumps by concentrated bursts of acid.

Wow, it was loud out there. If she sat on her ass a moment longer, she would surely, surely die.

Undoing her harness as fast as she could, she checked for broken body parts - there were several, but none that mattered - and then she grabbed two fistfulls of rippling krogan neck and let Wrex yank her out of the tank like a bad tooth. Perfectly at ease amidst an exploding hellscape, with the sun setting behind him in a blinding flash of orange, Urdnot Wrex pulled Shepard from the still-steaming wreckage of an Alliance M35 and held her against his chest in a bridal carry. He was seven and half feet tall. Covered in mountainous scarlet plating and scarred even on his good side. Two hundred and fifty raging kilos of pure berserker muscle. Urdnot Wrex: a thousand years old and still not ready to die.  

The two of them together made for one hell of a spectacle.

That is, until Shepard beat him firmly on the hump and forced him to set her down.

Every instinct in her body told her to run for the perimeter, but she knew her best chance of survival was to stay perfectly still until she could get her ass back into a functioning Mako. Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm... that had been the motto of the week.

She radioed her lieutenant.

“Alenko! Report!”

The voice on the other end was breathless but ready for anything.

“Commander! Glad to hear your voice. Perimeter squads are holding, but the tanks are getting ripped apart. Saw yours go up - said a prayer.”

She skipped the reunion. Time for that later, over a mug of tasteless swill.

“Do you have the Cerberus intel?”

“Negative. Ferro’s squad went dark right outside Urdnot HQ. They barely made it out the door.”

Goddammit. Ferro, Drake, Spunkmeyer. Just like that: eight, nine, and ten.

Without the data that Engineer Ferro had mined from the Cerberus satellites, she had nothing solid to bring back to the Admiral. Just a fistful of thresher maws and a ten dead Marines.

“I’m still standing. I’ve got Wrex. We’ll get that fucking data. Wait for my signal, then pull everyone back.”

“Roger that, Commander.” She heard him calling to the troops before the comm cut out. “Keep dancing, princesses! Move-move-MOVE!!”

There were shouts, a few well-timed explosions, and then a tsunami of furious gunfire rang out in stereo surround across the canyon floor as the Marines continued to lure the thresher maws away from the base.

“That’s more like it, Shepard. Let’s show Kandros how to choke on a quad.”

Despite Wrex’s blustering, he and Shepard were doomed unless one of those tanks made a rapid detour to pick up some extra passengers. There was no survivable way to do this on foot. She whipped up her omni-tool and did a quick roll-call. Who was about to pull the short straw?

Private Hudson was the closest. Halle-fuckin-lujah.

Private William Hudson, whose first words to her had been: “Hey Shepard, have you ever been mistaken for a turian?”

“I don’t know, Hudson. Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” had been her unenthusiastic reply.

She radioed him for pickup and then turned to Wrex.

“Private Hudson is on our nine and closing fast. Says the ultimate badass is about to take me for the ride of my life.”

“Ultimate badass? He must be talking about me.”  

Wrex wrapped his arm around her waist and pumped the action on his shogun with a forceful, single-handed throw.

Hard to argue with that.

The Urdnot clan leader was magnificent. A rare krogan biotic leading a ragtag clan of social progressives, Wrex had been bunkered on Akuze for years. Said he'd been trying to trigger a krogan cultural renaissance - but Akuze was an obscure Terminus shithole of interest to few, and Wrex’s conclave of misfits had attracted little interest. Still, he had secured himself a cozy little headquarters, a towering scrap heap where an old warlord could sit pretty on his massive hoard of weapons, credits, and loyal mercenaries. When a seemingly endless hive of thresher maws had ripped his world to bits, he’d barely blinked an eye.

She let Wrex hold her while they waited for Hudson, but only because she felt marginally safer with a krogan battlemaster girding his arm around her in the middle of the apocalypse. Really. It wasn’t because she had a crush on him. That would have been ridiculous.

In comparison, Hudson was a measly posturing blowhard. Green and wobbly as a bowl of medbay gelatin. Exactly the type of touchy-feely, sludge-spewing, barrel-chested man-boy that Shepard’s pari had caught her sneaking out to drink with on more than one occasion.

She’d always had a soft spot for any loudmouth with a heart of gold. Even so, unlike the harmless farm boys back home, she wouldn’t have let Private Hudson anywhere near her own privates, not with a ten-foot pole.

Scratch that. Especially not with a ten-foot pole.

He was obsessed with two-hundred-year-old rock songs, not to mention naval shanties that stretched several centuries even further back into obscurity. While they’d been digging for Cerberus’ trail, he had found a way to broadcast his own private radio channel into the internal sound system of every Mako along the caravan. How many torturous rounds of “Sink the Bismarck” and “Farewell to Grog” had she endured?

By the end of that first week, the Private had led enough enthusiastic rum-fueled sing-alongs for the entire platoon to know every word of Hudson’s Choirbook by heart. To spare her own sanity she might have put a stop to his nonsense, but Hudson was to morale what a shot of tequila was to a margarita. Necessary.

Hudson’s tank skidded to a noisy stop behind them, spewing rocks and dust ten feet into the air. The hatch opened and a wall of sound spilled out.

Oh great. Meat Loaf for dinner. Again. I Would Do Anything for Love, Hudson’s choice anthem for hardcore romantics on this most auspicious holiday.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, lovebirds! Your horse-drawn carriage has arrived!”

Shepard and Wrex dove into the tank. Hudson was driving solo. His squad had been obliterated early in the day, when numbers four and five had been called to Heaven.

Shepard manned Gunner Ripley’s post at the turret, sliding her hips into the channel of the gunnery pillar, where Wrex’s massive hump was too big to fit. The krogan was forced to sit in the bitch seat and do his best impression of the small-boned Engineer Newton.

Shepard had to shout at the top of her lungs to be heard over the music.

“I need this party bus to make one more stop, Private. Get me back to Urdot HQ - we can't leave without Ferro’s Cerberus data!”

Hudson screamed right back at his usual volume: eleven.

“Maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, Commander, but we just got our asses kicked! I would do anything for love, but I won’t do tha-”

“Shut the hell up and drive me to Ferro’s tank, Hudson.”

To his credit, the Private shuffled his armor around his shoulders, smacked himself on the helmet for resolve, and then screamed:

“Aye-aye Ma’am! Next stop: the real pretty shit! Anything for love!”

The bulk of the threshers were busy trying to eat everyone on the western edge of the crater, but there was always the risk of a new one popping out from beneath with no warning.

It was the rumbling that gave it away. You could always feel the tremor first, as if the earth were sucking in a starving breath.

Speak of the devil. There it was now.

Hudson had felt it too.

“Ahhhhhhh shitttttt thar she blows...”

After watching his squad dissolve in a rain of acid, Hudson knew the risks better than anyone. Without delay or finesse, he slammed down the accelerator and raced to the mercenary compound, redlining at whatever level was beyond top speed. The Mako’s wheels jumped and skittered over the terrain, barely making contact with the crater floor.

Shepard’s teeth rattled in her skull to the beat of sex and drums and rock and roll, and she was instantly aware of all the injuries she’d sustained in that fall. The pain was enough to make her puke.

She clung to the handles of the turret’s periscope and held back a scream. Instead of passing out, she sang at the top of her lungs - it was the only distraction insane enough to keep her on her feet.

“As long as the wheels are turning…”

They were within spitting distance of the compound. Hudson joined his voice with hers at a blistering pitch.

“As long as the fires are burning!”

Hudson pumped the boosters and skipped them like a rock over a lake, pushing the Mako well beyond the advisable heat tolerance, roaring forward as fast as the tank’s six exhausted wheels could carry them.

They sang on, “As long as your prayers are coming true!”

Private Hudson clutched the wheel, shrieked like a little girl, and then screamed:

“YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!”

The thunderously sentimental chorus of the song burst out around them as the thresher maw surged from below, glancing against the port quarter. The impact popped the back of the tank like the tab on a beer can, and with a startled hiss of spinning wheels, the Mako flew forward and crashed into the flimsy wall of barricades surrounding the mercenary compound.

A hard landing, but not the worst she’d had today.

They had wiggle room around the base’s perimeter: a scant circle of solid ground that the thresher couldn’t slither beneath.

Safety was still a long way off. ‘Spitting distance’ was a measurable quantity out here, not just a catchy turn of phrase. One hundred meters. Two hundred, if you wanted to avoid getting acid splashed in your eyes by accident.

Ferro’s tank was an arm’s length away, upturned and smoking. On foot, totally unprotected with a thresher maw hovering nearby, that distance might as well have been interstellar.

Without waiting to be asked, Hudson kicked open the port hatch.

“ANYTHING FOR LOVE!”

Then he ran for it. He had a handful of seconds to get there and back. Ten, if an optimist was counting.

01 - 02 - 03

(Frost - Dietrich - Crowe)

Limbs flailing wildly, screaming the entire time, Hudson made it to the other Mako and ripped open the door in three seconds flat - a world record if she’d ever seen one.

04 - 05 - 06 - 07

(Ripley - Newton - Wilhelm - Apone)

He spent four seconds rummaging in the tank. The thresher maw had seen the Marine’s crazy, pinwheeling approach, and now it turned its head in ravenous anticipation.

08 - 09 - 10

(Drake - Spunkmeyer -  Ferro)

Hudson’s hand emerged, data pad hoisted triumphantly. One second later, his head followed. The Valentine’s hearts he’d painted all over his helmet flashed like perfect, pink targets. The thresher roared and lined up a flesh-eating loogie.

11

“Hudson!”

Shepard threw herself out of the hatch to rescue him before Wrex could do so much as close a contrary hand around her heels.

Hudson was halfway out of Ferro’s tank, scrabbling for purchase along the chassis.  The thresher was a lousy shot, and the main acid projectile missed by several feet. Even so, the splashback was deadly enough on its own.

Shepard got lucky. A footlong gash of acid slapped across her thigh guard. As she ran, she popped the seals and tore off the plating before the acid could reach skin. Hudson had been knocked to the ground, and he wasn’t fast enough.

There was a six-inch hole bubbling through his abdominal guard, sizzling and steaming through layers of ceramic and underplating, and then...

The only advantage of a thresher acid burn was that it cauterized as it went, so you never saw much blood.

She locked her arms under Hudson’s sweating, hairy pits and dragged him kicking and screaming back to his tank. She threw him to the floor behind the gunnery perch in a wailing pile of his own guts and pus, and then turned to Wrex.

“DRIVE!” she screamed.

Wrex, despite his age, experience, and superiority to Shepard in every conceivable sense, obeyed like a docile spouse. He clambered across to the driver’s side, slid the seat all the way back with a crunch of gears, and then the Mako slammed into full reverse.

The wheels smoked beneath them as Shepard ripped the medkit from the wall and dosed Hudson with every last ounce of medi-gel she had left.

“What were you thinking?” Wrex shouted over his shoulder. “That whelp wasn’t even worth the drag!”

Hudson wasn’t dead yet, and he wanted everybody to know it. Between his endless pealing screams, he managed to spit out, “What the hell, man? I’m right here!”

Then, in defiance of all sense or reason, Hudson abruptly stopped screaming and started to read.

Until seeing it with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed him capable. Ferro’s datapad bounced crazily in front of his face, and his eyes were as round and cartoonish as the hearts on his helmet.

“Game over, man!”

“What?”

He pushed the datapad into her hands, and she saw. A Cerberus breeding facility built into a solid pillar of bedrock right beneath Wrex’s outpost. There was the mad scientist superweapon in all of its apeshit maniacal glory. It had been directly underneath them the entire time.

She scanned Ferro’s report, glanced at the schematics. The ring around the rosie was vulnerable - little more than sediment and worm holes - the thresher maws had been churning the dirt for days. The whole thing was ready to cave.

She let the Mako rattle around her head for a few seconds, and then made up her mind.

“Wrex, how about a little vengeance? Can’t guarantee your hoard will survive, but I can promise you one hell of an avalanche.”

The krogan looked at her, narrowed his eyes, and then barked out a giant, rocky laugh, like a boulder smashing down a mountainside.

“I knew there was a reason I liked you. Let’s blow this place wide open.”

“Alenko!”

“Ready!” The Lieutenant was on a hair-trigger.

“Pull everyone out. Prep every weapon we’ve got for one final, unified blow. I’m sending coordinates. Once I’m clear, hit them all at once, right where it hurts.”

“Roger that, Commander. We’ll bang on the drum all day.”

The Mako stumbled over a pocket of soft earth, and Shepard’s head hit the gunnery pillar with a hollow clap. An unfathomable shade of yellow sparkled in the back of her retinas.

Wrex was a lot of spectacular things, but a good driver was not one of them. Being three sheets to the wind was hardly improving matters. As he tried to shift without easing down the clutch, the Mako groaned and creaked, then let out a tortured squeal.

Despite his injuries, Hudson reached for the wheel and cried, “Ease up, man! You’re killing my baby!”

Shepard’s Marines were a lot closer to the perimeter line than she was, and unlike Wrex, they were professional drivers. As each tank pulled back over the edge with a ballerina’s twirl, the threshers refocused their ire on the remaining targets. Soon, Hudson’s tank was the only moving thing in the field. A ripe fruit dangling on the vine.

Their best chance was to make a suicide run for the nearest edge of the crater - the unguarded eastern periphery. Wrex was too busy focusing on the tantalizing firepower to the west - he was going in exactly the wrong direction.

One by one, the threshers vanished beneath the shifting sands. They were going to come up from underneath. God only knows how many at once.

They were never going to make it. Not with Wrex behind the wheel. With half a dozen thresher maws closing on their location, there was not a single second left to get the krogan out of her way.

She screamed “STAY ALIVE” in Hudson’s face, and then she flew over the transmission box and landed directly between Wrex’s enormous thighs, stealing the wheel right out of his hands.

In a flash of lunacy, Shepard reflected that this would be a difficult Valentine’s day to beat: sitting on a krogan’s lap to take a trip through the thresher maw tunnel of love.

The threshers raged up from all sides, one massive hoard surging in every direction at once. Hudson’s unasked-for soundtrack made a roaring comeback in much the same way: with no warning and a torrential howl of noise. Sound so loud that it filled her pores and forced the fear right out of her.

She couldn’t risk a look into the rear cabin, but she could hear the mass accelerator cannon firing, could feel it shuddering the wheel beneath her hands. Somehow, with his guts spilling out behind him in a sizzling pile, Hudson must have hauled himself up into the turret, and he’d queued up a tune to whistle while he worked.

Just as she had trained her Marines to waltz with their Makos like glittering princesses, so Shepard did now. The only way to successfully steer an M35 was not to drive - but to dance.

With that overpowered eezo core glowing under her hood, the tiniest flinch could send a Mako bucking like a wild bronco. Not much mass and plenty of juice meant the controls felt fidgety on a good day. Only with a lover’s patient hands massaging those thrusters, all care and tact and precision, could you truly see the vehicle’s combat potential. If you treated her like a lady, a Mako could float like butterfly and sting like a bee.

She tried to keep all of that in mind while the thresher maws heaved before her, a frenzy of tentacles so vast that their sheer bulk blocked out the sky.

The cannon overheated, and Hudson switched to the coaxial machine gun without pausing for breath. He tore Shepard an exit route through sheer grit and determination - stubborn, ceaseless, and screaming all the while.

Right before her very eyes, Hudson’s machine-gun buzzsaw hacked down the thresher directly ahead, felling an undulating thirty-meter slab of living flesh like it was a dried out tree. Shepard pumped the thrusters and rode over the steaming corpse. The resulting thump-thump-thump of metal-meets-flesh was startlingly rough - her ass bounced against Wrex’s lap in a way that the krogan was enjoying far too much for comfort.

No time to be a prude. She could see the solid ridge of the canyon just ahead.

One hundred meters.

The mako smoked with exertion as the damage readout flashed cherry red.

Fifty meters.

Burning fumes filled the cabin, a choking black steam of hot metal, torn belts, and eezo.

Twenty five meters.

POP-POP-POP

The thrusters barely had enough hydrogen to burn, and the Mako hopscotched drunkenly to the edge, barely catching her front wheels over the lip of the canyon.

“C’mon, beautiful! So… close!” Shepard grunted, slamming down the throttle and milking the dwindling fuel reserves for every last drop.

A rocky voice groaned directly in her ear: “You’re telling me,” and then Wrex thumped his fist against the dashboard with such a whomp of muscle that the Mako gave one final, sputtering hurrah.

Her engines flared to life and then immediately died, but it was exactly enough. The tank tipped to safety with an anti-climactic mewling sound, like a baby kitten landing in a basket.

Alenko must have had them locked in his sights. The moment Shepard’s Mako was resting on solid ground, she heard him screaming over the comms:

“Marines! The Commander is clear! FIRE EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT!”

Shepard spun in place and craned her neck to look out the port hatch. The fireworks display was spectacular.

It started at the western edge of the canyon, where the Marines' concentrated firepower was dense enough to crush half a planet. The soft, sandy earth sucked itself down and away, transforming into a churning abyss, a grinding whirlpool of rock and stone. The thresher maws, despite their titanic size and strength, were sucked into the tumult like twigs. Howling and thrashing, they spit artful fountains of acid half a mile in the air, until in a single startling flume of earth, they vanished to the last.

A mile-wide crater of earth flushed itself down to hell like the universe’s filthiest port-o-john, and then everything went dead silent.

Standing in the center of the bottomless pit was Clan Urdnot’s base, gleaming like a solid-gold trophy in the sunset. Not only had her Marines just saved centuries of the krogan’s collected loot, she had just turned Wrex’s podunk mercenary outpost into an impenetrable fortress.

Behind her, Wrex let out a gasp that could only be described as sated.

His gratitude was obvious. She could feel it jabbing into the small of her back, and her eyes went wide. Equally difficult not to hear the groan of unmistakable full-throated arousal that he unleashed right in her ear.

“Hey Shepard, was it good for you?”

She allowed herself a single, disbelieving laugh before careening back to reality.

All the pain rushed back at once, an instantaneous gutpunch of broken bones and acid burns. Ripping Wrex’s hands away, she turned abruptly from the krogan’s lap and flopped in battered agony towards the rear cabin. If she’d had the luxury of succumbing to her wounds, she might have blacked out.

Instead, she yelled an incomprehensible mish-mash of turian curses and scrambled over the transmission, dragging herself back towards the aft gunnery perch, where she saw Private Hudson slumped within the pillar, twitching and quiet.

When she approached and gently pulled him off the turret, he reached for her and flapped his lips noiselessly. She eased him down into her lap and wrapped a comforting arm around his shoulders to see him off.

Despite her noblest intentions, she couldn’t stop herself from giving him an angry shake.

“Goddammit Private! I ordered you to stay alive!”

The phrase ‘I would do anything for love’ - mouthed in silence by a dying asshole -  was the loudest sound she’d ever heard. Private Hudson, perpetual eleven. She let him put his hand in her hair and drag her down to hear the rest.

“…but I won’t do that.”

[atc74]

11 things

I was tagged by @just-a-touch-of-sass-and-fandoms and @mamaredd123; so you are getting 22 answers!  I am feeling really under the weather, like dog poop rolled in used kitty litter, so I am NOT making up ALL my own questions, I am going to use some of what was sent to me - I know this is cheating but I am hoping y’all will forgive me! Everything under the cut, cause I can talk!

So, the rules are:

a) Always post the rules, answer the questions then write 11 questions of your own.


b) Tag 11 people and link them to the post.


c) Tell the person who tagged you that you’ve answered their question

So my 11 questions FROM @just-a-touch-of-sass-and-fandoms:

1)     What is your favorite thing to make to eat? My world famous lasagna (no really, it’s that good)

2)     What was your dream pet growing up? A pony, duh!

3)     How many times have you re-watched Supernatural? All the way through, twice (except Bugs, can’t watch that more than once). I have many episodes that I will rewatch or whole seasons, like 8,9, and 10. 

4)     All expense paid trip, where would you go? I have two answers:

     a) The Motherland and I am taking my “twin”, my little sister, @just-a-touch-of-sass-and-fandoms the Sicilian of Smut and our long lost sibling, @ellen-reincarnated1967, The Sicilian of Sass. Look out Italy - HERE WE COME!

     b) Since this is all fantasy, I want an all expenses paid to VanCon and I want @just-a-touch-of-sass-and-fandoms @impala-dreamer @mamaredd123 @frenchybell @inmysparetime0 @idreamofhazel @paintrider13-blog  @iwantthedean @d-s-winchester @babypieandwhiskey @chelsea072498 to join me! What a party that would be!

5)     Favorite thing to study at any point in school? I loved Geography and math cause I a nerd

6)     Dream car, besides Baby? I dont really have one. If I can’t have Baby then any car that Jensen Ackles is current in. 

7)     Three things you always like to have with you besides your phone? Lip balm, a lighter and smokes (I know  I know)

8)     If you could get anything pierced, tattooed, or have any color hair, would you or would you stay as you are? P.S. You’re already beautiful just so you know ;)  I will get a new tattoo in the next 4 months and keeping up with my bright red hair (cause I should have been born a ginger, but someone fucked up).

9)     Favorite movie and why? I LOVE Disaster movies (I dont know why!), so Armageddon

10)  How did you meet your best friend? I actually met her at work, she started on my birthday and that kind of cemented it

11)  Jared, Jensen, or Misha? Jensen, the correct answer is always Jensen.

@mamaredd123‘s questions:

1) Your favorite thing about Tumblr? ALL of the wonderful writers I have met, and that I am really allowed to be myself, of whomever I chose.

2) How long have you been on here? I joined about 8 or 9 months ago maybe. 

3) Your absolute must have things in life in general? COFFEE, Phone, laptop, slippers, my dog

4) The one fic you are the proudest of? Shotgun Rider was my first series. It will always be my baby.  And since I am already cheating, This Is My Story series; it was a hard piece to write and somewhat personal, and I am extremely proud of how it turned out. Yeah, they may not be perfect, but they are mine.

5) The blog you secretly follow from afar? I try to be vocal on all the blogs I follow but probably @manawhaat

6) Who is your biggest Tumblr crush? the one you would fangirl over the most? Most definitely @iwantthedean, the day she followed me I fangirled so hard! She is also one of my biggest supporters and I love her to pieces. Funny story, I wanted to meet her at MinnCon/SPNMinn 2016 but was too intimidated to do, but now we talk regularly and I can’t wait for this year so I can hug the piss outta her! Can I have two? @katnharper, she is one of my ungettable gets! 

7) 2 things about yourself that you haven’t shared in one these things before? I got a promotion today! and am preparing for some huge life changes this year, but I can’t share that right now. 

8) If there a fic you have wrote that you might have done differently? or one you have been toying with to make a sequel out of? Honestly, no. I am immensely proud of all of my fics. I know that may sound conceited or stuck up, but it doesn’t bother me. 

9) How long have you been writing? (not just on here) I dabbled in some poetry in my late teens and early 20′s but started writing on Tumblr in Sept 2016.

10) How often or do you like to post new writers works to help get their name out there for others? Sadly not as often as I should. I have to get better at that. 

11) The one thing you dislike the most on Tumblr? HATE and the stupid tags not working.

               WOW that was A LOT! Sorry! Now for my 11 questions for you:

1) Who is your biggest Tumblr crush? the one you would fangirl over the most?

2) 2 things about yourself that you haven’t shared in one these things before?

3) The one fic you are the proudest of?

4)     All expense paid trip, where would you go?

5)     Favorite thing to study at any point in school?

6)  How did you meet your best friend?

7)  Jared, Jensen, or Misha (or other)?

8) What is your most favorite feature about yourself?

9) Who followed you that you had a total fangirl moment over?

10)  What is your favorite thing to make to eat?

11) Name one blog goal for 2017:

I am tagging: @paintrider13-blog @ohwritever @avasmommy224 @ellen-reincarnated1967 @winchesterprincessbride @charliebradbury1104  @impalaimagining @like-a-bag-of-potatoes @padackles2010 @idreamofhazel @babypieandwhiskey @chelsea072498

[skelffricat]

Practising

Practicing? Practice your practise? I’ve just been for dinner with my mum, which was nice. I fortunately cycled between torrential downpours (they’re still going on, in June...). I wanted to go to my dad’s cousin’s daughter’s mate’s book launch, but, when I excitedly put it into my phone calendar a couple of weeks ago, I forgot I had a job. I forgot I’d be late, so late that she’d left, driving herself back to Dublin. My mum got me a book of her poetry, the one she was launching. She forgot to get her to sign it. It’s hard to remember these things.... She also got a lovely bottle of red, from her. (WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK? I JUST HAD TO RESTART A NEW RECORD COS IT WAS JUMPING LIKE BILLY-OH. BUT IT’S NEW!!!) My mother was sat at the bus-stop when I arrived, across the road. She said, I messaged you. I told you it was too late. But my bus isn’t coming, for ages. I said, I just jumped on my bike, and cycled. I didn’t want to read her messages, cos I kinda knew I was too late. If I had driven, she moped, I could’ve dropped her home. If I’d driven, I said, I’d still be all wet (got soaked at work... and I wanted to change, anyway) if I’d driven, I’d have been circling, looking for a parking space, getting angry... So... shall we eat? We went to the Other Place- just next door to the book shop where the launch had been. Handy! I don’t think I’d been to the Other Place since 1994, when I first discovered that I was now adult enough to drink coffee. We had been tripping all night. They had free refills. We took the piss out of their free refills, and fair play, they didn’t complain. They let us sit there and drink 18 refills. Am I remembering that correctly? Did I cement my new acceptance of the evil adult coffee drink by drinking one refill for every year of my life? Perhaps. My memory tells me that we went to the docks to watch the sunrise, too. It seems different colours on different sides of the bridges. Different bridges, then. Did the Lagan still smell? Was it still full of bicycles and shopping trolleys? This record is still jumping, even though I blew the needle. It’s new. Oh WHY? You can BYOB in the Other Place. I’m still pleasantly full. It’s good, to hang out with your ma. My ma is great. Nothing lasts forever. I should appreciate everything. Especially the generous and kindly folk who appreciate me. She got a bus home, too. She hates taxis. I quite like to indulge in them, when I’m feeling flush. But I’m not flush now. I paid for a wedding (for all three children and me!) in Scotland. Well. I have savings, but they’re for the summer. The summer is nearly here, and I’m excited. I’m not going abroad, but we will have the craic. Oh we will. In England, and Ireland, and Scotland. Oh, I’ve just remembered my practising title. We had a couch surfer on Monday, lovely Mexican fella. You end up chatting about Brexit, inevitably, with couch surfers (actually, we ended up talking about it in Dublin, too, back at my dad’s cousin’s 81st birthday party, when we learnt about the book launch. It’s hard to explain how one sick one is, of Brexit chat. It’s hard to explain how powerless one feels. How, yes, I vote, but then I switch off the news and just hope something happens. Or doesn’t happen, perhaps. Can we have our ball back? We’re going home for dinner now, then can we just leave everything as it was? Or perhaps we should have a united Ireland? Oh, I think the DUP are accidentally making a United Ireland happen? Oh, well, actually, that might be grand. I like BBC radio and the NHS but they seem to be fucking them right up anyway and their news is lies and oh- hang on- we can’t have gay marriage or abortions? Oh wait, aye, a united Ireland IS a good idea!) We showed the Mexican fella the fleg at the bottom of the street (something to do with poppies and the war) saying, that’s a Proddy fleg, this is a Proddy area. Only it isn’t, really any more, cos it’s full of Asian people, and African people, and there’s a Muslim family, and, shh, jaysus, you wouldn’t think it, CATHOLIC people. Only, well, not really. Not practising Catholics. Then I thought about what a strange phrase that was, cos it implied that the only ones who are actually real Catholics can’t even do it properly either- they’re just practising. There aren’t any experts, or anything. No champions. Just some who went to their schools by mistake, and stuff. A lot of ex-Catholics (oh how I’d love to be ex-communicated! Yet my desire to be ex-communicated is silly, cos it implies there was some truth in my baptism etc, some actual entrapment of my soul. My desire to be freed would suggest that I do feel actually trapped, trapped by shackles that I don’t believe exist. I mean, if you found out a relative had christened your child, you shouldn’t care, should you? You should just think, oh, that’s nice, a comfort to her, as she doesn’t want to go to her heaven without him. But instead you feel a burning searing RAGE and want to burn down some churches {not necessarily chapels; the Catholic habit of calling church chapel is simply incorrect- a chapel is a church within another building. This has always annoyed me}. It has left its mark. That church has Got To You. GRRR.) Hours after the Mexican left, the new flegs were in place. (Was it him?!) There seem to be less than last year. I don’t have one on my lamp-post, so I almost didn’t notice. Shiny new Union Jacks and Northern Irish flags for the street, but none for me. I feel weirdly left out. Or perhaps priveleged. Who knows. They never seemed to mind that I had a child (the eldest, too- she went FIRST) in a Catholic school uniform. Perhaps they had checked me out. (Do they do that?) I have forever confused folk, that way. Going to a Catholic school but living in a Protestant area. If people hear you grew up in the Cregagh, they assume you’re a Protestant. I also feel a bit put out that I didn’t see them do it. They did it on the 12th June last year (6 days earlier!) at 12pm, by my house (I thought it was a twelfth thing) in matching grey tracksuits, like urban camouflage. I liked to imagine they were all wearing union jack underwear. Let me point out that this is the only time I have imagined men in union jack underwear. In fact, it is the only time I have ever imagined ANYONE, in ANY sort of underwear. I think. Hmmm. It’s pouring again, and it’s dark, and the record has jumped its way to its end. I’m going to Body and Soul Festival tomorrow. I’ve pretty much packed. I have to work, before I pick folk up and GOOOO. But I’ve the morning, to throw the stuff in the car, and buy booze, (drinking tonight was practising :P ) and more strepsils and ibuprofen and all that jazz..... It’ll all work out fine, I hope (I’m totes SKINT!)

[lunarfae714]

guatemaya & mecksiko

12.29 Atop Yaxha Pyramid

when we can measure our journey

in love shared,

found, exchanged?

instead of in fear of disease

hijack eyes of mania

panic

feeding-off-conflict

the beauty is known no ego

only offerings

can the love always be

charged like the Sun,

infinite, and changing

in each hour-

when does it become a service,

the exchange?

when can it be fully free

undrained, exuberant?

for yourself & for all

for the earth

for the wind

for all that is—

changing form

a leminascate

can it all be

selfless 

words & actions,

are they enough?

like the rocks that love the water which kisses them,

the eternal dance 

of stability & moving union.

***

after noon

soft dreams

downstream

count backwards

from twenty

& forth

until the numbers dissolve

facts turn to feeling

& the border boxes break free

natural & unseen

patterns yet changing

each non-moment still

like pre-dawn’s cirrus

the dance like curtain

unfold away lights

strong-

the elements

burnt sun

ice water

really

feeling it all

full

heart

full

mind

full

of

nothing

as it should BE

always still

&  moving

seed to harvest

sow

in to morrow

with Love’s light

blasting

*

1.17.16

amethyst

charged

emerald & selentine

dreams directed

by the mind’s wind

candlewax drip

fixed on fingers

the torch lights

our nightcrawl

naked under the quarter moon

& the river runs high

poison toads

& branches that split,

graze under the soles

night becomes dawn

time told by Sky

the visions change in Ember’s logs

consume gadgets not necessary

almighty mother fire force

acts, destroys, creates

our womb ignite

as we place hot stones on our sacral chakras,

active the living unacknowledged children

the family of us

&

the natural

All living as one.

water pulleys from the creek,

the new flow.

the same water near passes

over our feet twice

our collective feeling,

on solid foundations.

***

when I’m alone

& write poems

of travelers notes

how real addictions can be

to communication

sugar from the parasite

all the world addicted to the white mans crystal

ancient ruins of conquest

how to get away

from conquerer mentality?

can we remove ourselves from history?

why do we capture another?

separate, control, dominate

trapped in the material system

material hunger

we are spiritual beings

meant to live like plants

will it disappear as the bombs go

the few who print the papers

the chemicals & vaccines

police and sex tourists

drag us where?

the north and south pole

on the same earth.

*

morning meditation on the river dock

silver smokerings oscillate

tubes of ashes fall

the air moves east

& the river rolls west—

wind & water

frankincense & appelblauwzeegroen

their dance

smooth & constant

like thoughts dancing along the rivers

(background noise is all)

no use to anticipate

the next moment

or dwell

the past moment

who you were

what you said

what you thought

what you felt

meaningless

when we live in the mind

in our fears, pain, or planning

we will miss the sweet kiss

of wind on our lips,

the first sip of coffee, bitter

the way the monkeypod shines crimson

gleams bark in the noon sun,

the glory in taking a inhale deep

in tune with the sway of the trees,

you may not see

the makeshift fishingrod

of sticks & shells

the bearded fishermans tailored pants

beside me on the dock

what are we trying to catch?

how simple to speak in silence

when we are at peace,

knowing we swim through these bodies

beyond our crown

beneath our feet

complete

in the profound simplicity

of stillness.

***

day mares

1.7.16

cold breeze & hard nips

a woman sings go ask alice 

and the naked children shushing me

under fallen ladders ex-lovers

with newfound company locked

out of the room of togetherness

outside, the observer watches

the time

a stolen wristwatch

a sun blistered lip,

salty like sea waves

& bad barganing

what golden melancholy brings

an even pace a meditation

a clearing of nebulous brain lobes

rotten with acid washed

down gopher holes

bruised & fallen tangerines

which do we shape shift into

focus our energy our hearts

we can be the potted plant

or are we already,

and who is the gardener?

****

san marcos sound wave

lights across the lake, starry

dogfights in the calle

endless & ghastly

cries of infants constant

like crickets

& fireworks

thrown reckless

like the piles of shit

scattered on cement

trumpets & flutes

balancing cop cars on fire

across the lake

peace in the balance

of turquoise caldera

the mother lake

has waves.

*

*

when i heard pretchel speak of

the navel—

bellybutton of the earth

blood sacrificed from the

hard hits

deep fingered

dirty regrets

just to sleep in a bed

away from the nightmares shadow/work

9-5 & 5-9

what a way to pass the time

we jump off the piers onto boats

trembling volcanos make our circles as we

kiss on the mouth

bless the food

break the blender

pull the Devil

karma

as orange the Sun understand

could twist that way

pure BLISS the goddess

we are all a part of

perfect nothingness

nonetheless

i am you

are me

what i do to you

i do to me

when i pour out my mind

like lemonade

the sun shines through

shitshow brigade

body ecstasy

outside the body

we were born as two

we were born without shoes

without the navel of the earth

that keeps

pulling us back.

***

friends with scorpions

the all-knowing scorpion

aliens

why do they return

to the same places

same beds like

second-time lovers

who think they can get by

hiding beneath your pillow

while you wonder in silence

what it will take to be strong

amid Surprise

**

5.18

sleep paralysis

& dead drunks on the sidewalk

brains hanging loose over

puddle of blood sangria

faerira any excuse

to drink to death

feel the pain in my kidneys

free the beating heart parasite

pulse in my body

pulse in my pulse

in my despair,

mary oliver’s wild geese sing,

tell me of yours

i will tell you mine

tell me why the shadow man

comes at the coldest part of night

sun rise before

we rise too

pretend these bodies

will keep us going

and the wind will carry us

in the way she pleases

living to die noble

or living humbly?

***

6.20

sweetwater

the little pleasures-

to graze my tongue along a frozen mango

perfectly ripe

deep orange, unique & so sensual,

craving union with the mouth

to remain nude all day in the jungle

to dance wildly to a drumbeat capable of visioning

to hear ruiz shout the problems of the mind

to think of life outside misery

to cook granola on the fire

to free the lice eggs from my head

to view problems as roadblocks

water-filled potholes choose

how to get through and admire the turtle.

reptilian overload

to see the birth of the day—

the fresh black baby chick

bounce under mamas wing

to roam freely & pick cactus spikes

to prepare dinner

all when the negativity has stepped out. 

***

jellyfish regenerate, they are the aliens of the sea. 

how to live naturally, harmoniously

here i am, meant to

reflect the fucked up system i am from,

to encourage others to return to the land.

wake up & work together

return to simplicity

not selfishness, pleasure & comfort

we meet the right people at the right time.

truth comes in action & awakening

not the the illusion of movement

or perception deception.

thank you iyke

***

*

not feeling

vs. feeling it all

meant to ascend

& experience nothing

do you love rollercoasters

or are we?

*

poems hidden in moleskins

in a sugar-addicted consumer country

malnutrition consciousness

school teachers in system to know the enemy

there’s a reason why the madmen cooped up in the jungle

away from us all

& there’s a reason why the city folk stay cooped up in concrete,

swarm like fish, absorbed in screens & button

virtual reality, where Gaia Mama

shows her pubes in remote rooftops

the belief in the debt coins & papers

manifest by three generations of puppeteers.

And yet-

who feels more alive?

i see the frustrated alien bacteria control the game

war mentality,

beheading kittens 

craves community-

yet blows them away with the word vomit violence.

hate the system, know the system

to use the system,let the system

control how much can we control?

how much will outside stimuli satisfy?

busy consume interweb-reliant

instantly gratified

forget what is really gratification, blessings

how many systems

no different species

we are infinite,

nonlinear time

no reptiles control

don’t get caught up in the spiderweb of the world

who weaves your dreams?

the spiders body, lemniscate

forever expanding

intend, manifest, unchain, let be.

you  hate poetry because it doesn’t move fast enough

& paints a portrait too pretty

unknowing that scenery

& the white spaces

speak and move in in ways

the human body could never.

spinning in the cycle of earthly life

creatures on the wheel, darwin

hired to tell us dog-eat-dog

& win not work together

lets separate for power & call it evolution.

but we eat too. we eat chemicals in candy

the white man’s crack, let memory be a hard drive

in the computers of our minds.

backpacker dilemma

live in love

live to get high

live in fear

live to die

live to live

***

morning coffee with crazed

one way to wake up.

irony of sitting & talking

the real parasite the defeat of pessimism

when truth speaks

don’t be insulted

swimming in sweat

in the mexican sun

caked dirt

being in isolation

makes one angrier?

lonelier?

working together

the real solution

instead of believing

in the money go-round

that separates us in our boxes

our safe.

*

in a meat-excessive society

to fight, kill, invade

poison the food

control the water

damage the sea

leak nuclear waste

when free energy

could fix it all?

ets walk, step by step,

mindful

in our place

in the evolution

of being, aware

of control, corruption

of our ripple, on ourselves

into the universe and under the stars.

remember what hicks said,

we are all expressions of the same ocean

6.16

each day i’m asked by a mexican man

why I’m traveling alone

they don’t understand

im not alone

last weeks companion

a parasite in my gut

and now i have a family of lice on my head.

eggs waiting to watch

you see

i attract the finest suitors to share myself with

you wouldn’t think they wouldn’t want to join me

as i walk for hours in vernal Mexican sun

eating only fruit

living away from traditional travelers

caught in the system

on vacation oil their money runs out

drinking their way along the hostel road

sightseeing the hits of their tourist books

you are your surroundings

you are your environment

express the unique wave

you image yourself to be

all your beliefs

shaped by stimuli, external

reflections

pregnant in the dreamscape.

*

fast-paced taqueria tales

i find it silly to spend much money on myself

pay the price of locals

& sit at the tamale stand

on the street corner

with teens and papas

& saucy mujer server

(always love that central american women are not afraid to laugh at you)

behind the counter like a dealer

in the casino of the calle.

bright lights

of the coke machine behind her

& bad television, sports that fuel the town

in the sugar-addicted novella.

division as entertainment.

hit me.

another tamale strikes the bar

with swift hands,

the 40 peso workday

soft camote sleeps in a bed of corn

under a blanket of hot sauce.

hit me.

*

a week of accidental fruitarianism.

can’t stand the heat

reptilian land

a far walk to the village

flesh-eating bacteria going around

the one who passes gives me a ride

with shotguns in the backseat

he eyes it & grins,

“are you scared?”

*

today a gang member

tattooed tears under his eye

in an iron blue shirt

large bodyguard

working the tourist turtle beach

like a chessboard

eyescans

hustling at the entrance

to watch all who come & go

like prey. he lent me

his nephew’s jacket

from his swanky rick roller

family car

and thought about

the slice of cheesecake in the dumpster

you can find sweet things hiding

in all corners of the earth.

*

pat watches as papayas

do the reverse-rainbow dance

satisfied, self-reliant

as the green parrots pass

& a new pair of eyes

hatch from the egg.

meanwhile, the masses dive

in binary systems

of separation, run the wheel of the money-go-round

chew on the potent chemicals,

live inside cement boxes,

domesticated mice working for money-driven madmen

but

since time isn’t linear

& the seeds have been planted

what you seek

is seeking you

in the karmic cycle

of non-attachment

non-aversion

true action.

with steady hands,

a quiet mind,

patience

you’ll watch the earth

return to tribe or die.

*

flora teaches us

to honor what’s growing

follow new life

all realities created

*

christmas eve in the mayan jungle

mules do the pleasure bankroll not he dirt

as the rainbow scale turkeys peek aimlessly from the forest

the jaguar stalks the deer behind us

& the howler monkeys do the tree-top tango.

their call like a lion

i practice the guitarita

watch makeshift football

& lazing hammock brothers sway

blistered soles from miles of dirt deep

treks through mosquito village

i miss my blood family

yet present with my tree family.

my ancestors in their mysteries

corn & snake gods

modern looters & night guards

body full like the moon,

blood sacrifices and love rituals on the jaguar pyramid,

solstice of the waves of this recycled life

of forgiveness.

*