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intergalacticships · 5 years

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pieces

rating: g pairing: michael guerin/alex manes words: 2211 summary: after months of dreading it alex finally tells michael about that piece of alien spaceship

big thank you to @the-middleish-ages and especially to @insidious-intent for beta reading and for the massive help and support! :)

you can also read it on ao3

--- It was the little domestic things that turned his cabin into a home. It was having a second toothbrush in his bathroom. It was preparing more than one cup of coffee in the morning. It was cuddling on the sofa while watching a TV show before bed. It was having a second car parked in his driveway. It was hearing Michael talk to his siblings or Liz while Alex was taking a shower or getting ready. It was having more than his own clothes in his closet. But mostly it was Michael’s presence, him just being there made coming home so easy.

They hadn’t really discussed it, Michael stayed one night and then kept staying. At first it was a comfort thing - falling asleep next to each other and waking up to the warmth of the other person. Knowing that they were alright had been something both Alex and Michael needed desperately. But now they both came back home to the cabin.

It took some time before he realized that Maria was right, that he didn’t need a “white picket fence house” to have a home. A home could be a person and his person was Michael. Even if it was hard because Alex still couldn’t say the words he knew he should say to Michael. Even if starting over with the love of your life can be awkward at best, and crushingly sad at worst.

But he kept pushing for dates and kept having trivial conversations with Michael, getting to know him like Alex had dreamed of, back when he was young and newly in love. It was fascinating to hear about Michael’s favourite movies and his favourite food, how he drank coffee or what music he liked.

These were things Alex could have learned over a decade ago, if their lives had been different. If he hadn’t enlisted; if there had been less secrets between them.

But here he laid on his couch, listening to Michael softly hum while he made lunch and Alex couldn’t stop thinking about that one secret left between them. He thought about the piece of the alien spaceship that he was keeping from Michael. In moments like this when he knew that Michael was feeling the most relaxed and happy, Alex felt run over with guilt and fear and sadness.

It had been months since he found that piece, but he couldn’t bring himself to actually give it to Michael. If he was honest with himself Alex was afraid that Michael loved the idea of finding his family more than he loved Alex. Maybe it was an irrational fear, but Alex didn’t want to risk losing Michael, especially not now. They were happy for the first time in their adult lives and if Alex could keep their lives and happiness, he would.

His thoughts got interrupted as a loud bang erupted from the kitchen followed by an intense, “fuck!”

“Michael? Are you ok?” Alex asked, rising from the couch and shuffling over to the kitchen.

“Yeah, yeah. Everything's fine. Just a broken plate.”

Alex walked over slowly and put his arms around Michael, “what’s going on?”

Michael stayed quiet for a moment, but Alex could feel a slight tremor running through him.

Then as if a curtain got pulled over him, his face changed entirely, and Michael gave his patented devil-may-care smirk over a shoulder, “Oh you know how it is, I see you looking all sexy in those sweatpants and I lose all control.”

Alex didn’t buy it at all, but he was loathe to break this domestic moment. He gave a soft smile of his own, and kissed Michael’s cheek, “since this is my fault, let me help you clean up then.”

“Nah. It’s saturday and you’re not allowed in the kitchen today. It’s my day. Go away,” Michael said laughing and ushered Alex out of the kitchen.

Alex just laughed again and went back into the living room, even as guilt still churned in his stomach.

He couldn’t lose this.

After lunch they went to Max’s to spend the evening with all of their friends. It had become a tradition to meet up on the weekends to catch up, and sleep came easy and deep once Michael and Alex got home. So Alex couldn’t quite process why exactly he woke up in the middle of the night until he heard Michael mumbling something and rolling around in bed.

They were used to nightmares, one of them had one every other night.

He put his hand on Michael’s shoulder, trying to wake him up gently, without spooking him.

“Michael. You’re safe. It’s alright. Come on. Wake up.” Alex kept whispering, even as Michael slowly awoke.

Alex immediately put his arms around him, pulled him close and Michael clung to him. He kept whispering against Michael’s curls until he could feel him calm down.

“You ok?”

“Yeah, I was just...it was very confusing honestly.” They had found out early on that talking about the nightmares helped, since they were both the only two people who could understand each other’s pain. It reminded them that the dreams weren’t real, but they had survived the terrors of the past and still had each other.

Alex waited until Michael continued, not pushing him.

“It was about the planet I come from I think. I had to leave earth because the government found out who the aliens were...they had already captured Iz and Max and I- I couldn’t help them and I just needed to leave and I-”

Alex pulled him closer again, kissing the top of his head while Michael’s head rested on his chest.

“They were dead, Alex. But I couldn’t leave because I couldn’t finish building the console and they were after you and me, and I just wanted to get us out of here but I just couldn’t do anything about it,” Michael finished sounding broken.

This was new. Michael’s dreams were often about Michael’s deep seated - and eventually confirmed - fears of government conspiracy against aliens, but it was never about Michael not able to save himself because he couldn’t finish building the console. It was never about the console.

Seeing Michael helpless and desperate like this broke Alex’s heart. He could feel the guilt in the pit of his stomach. Even if he didn’t want to lose Michael, he couldn’t keep doing this to him.

He untangled himself from Michael and sat up to grab his crutch.

“Alex? Where are you going?” Michael asked confused.

“I’ll be back in a minute.” Alex kissed his temple and left the room.

He couldn’t keep doing this to Michael.

Alex came back to Michael sitting in their bed, looking at him with wide eyes.

“What’s going on?” Michael asked slowly.

“I...I need to tell you something. And I know you are going to be mad, and disappointed in me and I deserve it, but I want you to listen to me fir-”

“Alex. Hey. Stop. You’re scaring me.” Michael turned to face him properly and tried to grab his hands, but Alex reached to the backpack he had with him.

Alex knew this would going to be one of the hardest things he had ever done. He opened the backpack, reached in and placed that piece of alien spaceship right between them.

Michael’s eyes widened. He stared at the piece then whipped his head back up to look at Alex’s face.

“How…?” Michael whispered.

“I found it in the bunker. Jim Valenti left it here for me,” Alex said quietly, tears already collecting in his eyes.

“When?”

Alex stayed quiet and looked at his lap. He couldn’t dare meeting Michael’s eyes.

“Alex. When did you find it?” Michael asked with a stronger and more desperate voice.

“I...I found it right before I learned about aliens,” he admitted in a choked up voice, the words barely a whisper.

He could see the hurt in Michael’s eyes and he knew he made a mistake, he knew he should’ve told Michael about it sooner. He knew that right after he left the bunker that day and didn’t say a word afterwards.

“That was months ago,” was the only thing Michael said first.

He continued after a few moments of silence: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was scared,” Alex’s voice was quiet and rough even he could hear the tears he was holding back. He cupped Michael’s face and looked him in the eyes, seeing his own sad expression mirrored in Michael’s face. “I was scared of losing you. I couldn’t let you go after getting you back...I was selfish and unfair I know, but I-”

“Why did you think I was going to leave you, Alex?”

“You said you want to leave the planet, Michael. You want to go to the planet you come from and I can’t come with you. Of course you were going to leave me. You worked on this for so long and I know I should’ve given you this sooner I just wanted to enjoy our live for a bit before letting you go.”

“Alex,” Michael began, grabbed one of Alex’s hand and placed a kiss on his palm, “I showed you the console to get rid of all the secrets between us and I definitely didn’t want you to find out about that later on. You wanted to talk so I told you what I was doing for the past ten years. Ten years on top of my entire childhood where I didn’t have a home to call mine. I was working on a way out because there was nothing for me worth staying. Max and Iz have each other they would’ve been fine and you...well, you pushed me away. Again and again. I figured you wouldn’t have been unfazed if I actually left the earth, but I also didn’t really think that you would care that much. ”

Alex opened his mouth to interrupt Michael and tell him that he was wrong, that he would’ve cared, that he does care.

Michael chuckled at that. “I know that’s not the case, Alex. I know now and I knew it the second I told you about the console, but I wasn’t sure before that. And I knew that I needed to give you space, that I needed to wait for you to come back to me. If you had asked whether I want to finish building my ship, I would have said yes, but if you had asked whether I want to leave you, I would have said no ,” Michael said in a soft voice.

Tears were streaming down Alex’s face, he exhaled a breath he didn’t even know he was holding and took Michael’s hands in his own. “I just want you to be happy, Michael.”

“I am happy, Alex.”

“You want to find your home and I was holding onto the only thing that separated you from that. You deserve to be happy,” Alex’s looked down at their joined hands.

Michael put a hand on Alex’s chin and lifted his face before speaking up. “I found my home and my home is definitely not a different planet. You are my home. You make me happy. I don’t need to leave earth to find all of that, I already have it right here.” Michael leaned in and captured Alex’s lips with a soft kiss.

“I love you, Alex Manes. And I’m not going anywhere.” He pulled Alex close to his chest and put a kiss on the top of his head.

“I love you too.” Alex whispered, put his arms around Michael’s waist and nuzzled his head right in the crook of Michael’s neck. Alex felt so relieved that all the secrets were now out there and it felt like a huge weight that he was carrying with him for the past few months was lifted from his shoulders. That overwhelming nauseating feeling finally left his body and while he was inhaling Michael’s familiar scent he was thinking that maybe when talking about “pieces that wanted to be together” Michael wasn’t only talking about pieces of alien spaceships.

They stayed in that slightly uncomfortable position, just enjoying the closeness after that nerve wracking conversation until a thought shot through Alex’s brain and he sat up again.

“Aren’t you mad at me for not telling you about this?”

Michael stayed silent for awhile and Alex started to get nervous again. Just because Michael didn’t want to leave the entire planet didn’t mean he wasn’t disappointed in Alex.

He sat up and angled his body so he was facing Alex directly before starting to speak: “No, I’m not. A few months ago? I definitely would’ve been angry, but I’m not desperately trying to build this console anymore so I don’t care if it takes me a few months longer. And I understand why you didn’t tell me. I never told you that I didn’t want an out anymore so...” he told Alex reassuringly.

“We’re really not good with this communication thing, huh?” Alex's voice was quiet, but he was smiling.

Michael shook his head making his curls bounce a little which made Alex smile even more, he loved it when Michael did that.

“Nah, not really. But we’re getting there.”

#oh look i wrote another thing #malex fic #malex #roswell new mexico #rnm #malex fanfiction #i write sometimes #hope you enjoy #happy roswell new mexico day!!

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whatisaheroanyway · 7 years

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Unlikely places

Bucky Barnes x Reader, AU

Word Count: 2 213

A/N: This is for the amazing and incredibly talented @just-some-drabbles 4k follower challenge. She deserves every single one of them and a lot more. Well, this is not exactly a rom-com, but after re-writing about fifteen times I gave up. I hope you enjoy it though :)

Prompt word: unlikely

You had your first heartbreak when you were fifteen. A memory you will never forget. The first love who got access into the little garden right in the middle of your chest, and the first thief who picked out your favourite flowers without asking. The sound of the glass door shattering when they shut it before they left echoed for a long time in your ears.

It’s an unfair rule of life, that you have to get hurt in order to live.

You felt the coldness of the ground in your heart as you closed the garden’s door, promising to not let anyone in anymore. You didn’t want to go home, a flowerless field since a long time. Instead you went to the place with the tallest trees.

Your Grandmother herself was the most mesmerizing rose and wherever she went lilies grew. You found yourself on her porch, crying, sobbing, evolving. She came out with a blanket and tea, and held you close until you had no more tears to shed, while humming Funny Valentine into your hear.

When you found your voice again, you asked for her secret. How could she bloom, even after this time in the world full of angel-like thieves? Her knowing smile and wise eyes gave you hope.

“There are three secrets I have for you, my love” her gentle voice was like a gush of wind on an early autumn night. “One, love is the only thing worth living for in this funny world, and don’t you dare let anyone prove you otherwise. Two, you have to learn how to laugh at the unfunny jokes life tells you and you will see how the sound of your laughter will water not only yours but everyone’s plants along the way. And three, you see honey, love hides in the most unlikely places, and don’t be afraid when you will get lucky enough to see it.”

She died just as she lived, with such light. Her petals fell down slowly and gracefully with time.

You were eighteen when you saw the most beautiful red rosebud, on the seat next to yours, on a bus heading towards London, when you escaped during summer. Her name was Peggy, ironic that someone named after a flower was completely different from what she should have been. She proved you that you don’t have to be like what the world expects you to be. A marguerite can be the most fierce rose. Her punch was just as deadly as her smile. She was so much like her.

In another summer called ‘the place of first times’ you lay next to Peggy in a park you often visited as a child, with the first intention to get drunk, with the second beer in hand you wondered how to name your fear.

“Pegs, can I ask you something?” you let the words fall freely, “Why are you my friend?” Without batting an eye she sang, “Because even though you are sometimes sourer that a basket of lemons and you try to push everyone away, you are the best person I know. And I like a good challenge so I had to find out what lies underneath your resting bitch face. And I have to tell you, I really like what I have found.” That was the first time you gave a key to the lonely place of beating muscle.

You were twenty-three when you finally quit smoking because two bedrooms, one bathroom, a little but comfortable couch, a kitchen and a tiny balcony with your friend who gave you a real key in exchange for your trust, weren’t a dream anymore. You learned that life can be pretty, too. You realised that you can shape it as you want to that it’s possible to be happy without a fake smile.

But everything has an end, my friend. The bad times and the good times, too.

You were twenty-eight when you got that call, which shook your world and your hand lost the power to hold the phone. When the shock made a ringing sound in your ear When your vision got blurred When you lost the ability to see the pretty.

Peggy had a car accident. In the busy streets of New York a guy decided to play with others lives when he sit behind the wheel after too much whisky. And the gamers didn’t have a word in how the dice rolled.

They called you from the hospital at six in the morning. They said her life is in danger and she needs surgery. You didn't even get dressed just put on a jacket and shoes before rushing out of the building that couldn’t be called home without Peggy. The smell of disinfectant, the endless labyrinth of white walls Rushing nurses, sympathetic smiles, sorrow in watching eyes. The place where life begins and ends, where you can hear much more prayers than in a church, where you can find the happiest person crying and from a room away the saddest person breaking. You didn’t know at that point which one will you be.

After two hours of dead silent you were sitting on the floor next to the coffee machine which decided to stop working, while you held your aching head in your palms.

“I know this is gonna sound stupid, right here and right now, but are you alright?” A deep male voice prevented you from sinking even deeper in the pit you were thrown into. But you didn’t have the power to look up, nor did you care to. “You’re right, it does sound stupid.” You scoffed, sarcasm was your only thing left. You thought that the guy will walk away and leave you be, but with your head down you heard him push a few buttons on the evil metal machinery next to you. It of course worked just fine for him.

At your biggest surprise the scent of cheap but still heavenly seeming coffee hit your nose. You finally looked up to see the man crouching in front of you offering you a cup. You laughed out bitterly and accepted the life savior nectar with a small, but genuine smile. After taking the first sip and gulping down almost half of the awful thing, you could hear your grandmother’s voice in your head from when you were a kid and missed half of your teeth.

“You didn't drug me, did you?” you asked half seriously, eyeing the stranger. He laughed and for a second you forgot where you were. It was a tired sound, it didn’t reached his eyes, but it was still beautiful. “You know with all the cameras and witnesses I wouldn’t get away with it, unfortunately.” You laughed, and it seemed like it has been ages since you let your shoulders fall.

“Is there any particular reason why you’re sitting on the floor?” “There’s a strange satisfaction in it. Knowing you can’t get any lower.” You got a little taken aback when after a second of thinking the guy went to sit down on the ground opposite you. “You’re right. It’s oddly satisfying.”

After finishing your drink you collected the remains of your energy to finally take a look at the stranger.

You saw a black tulip, A myth mixed with reality. Bone-crushingly strange and mesmerizing, uniquely dark, but soft at the edges, built with simple shapes. His longish hair escaped from the hairband at the back of his neck and it was brushing his cheekbones, his sharp jawline was impressive but strangely rigid, probably from stress. It was clear that he wasn’t there for fun either, his stormy grey eyes had so much worry and sadness in them, you had to tear your gaze away.

“I’m Bucky, by the way.” A curt nod was all he got from you.

After thirty minutes of looking at each other, standing behind your own doors and looking through only the windows, creating an image just from the pieces peaking out from the curtains, a doctor came into the hallway and stopped in front of Bucky. They talked about a man named Mr. Rogers, that he had pieces of broken glass in the right side of his body from the contact of the bus window he sat near. You weren’t really paying attention to the words, rather to the colour draining from Bucky’s face and seeing from the outside what you felt few hours ago.

You realised that he needed your company more than you needed his.

You turned off the warning alarms in your head and shut off the scared screams in your chest. With a weird motion, on the hospital floor, in your pyjamas you crawled next to Bucky and took his hand in yours. Sometimes that’s all it takes, a little dose of courage.

His name was James Buchanan Barnes. He lived in Brooklyn with his friend Steve, who got into the same accident as Peggy. He told you about his childhood, that he met this kid on the playground who got stuck in a slide and after he laughed at him he helped him out. They played that they were superheroes during the rest of that day. In his eyes Steve was like a little brother who just needed a little help to became this unrivaled and peerless great blue orchid, who was just a little sprout back then.

He told you that his parents were his heroes and he grew up believing in true love, and he fell for this girl in high school. They had planned that they will get married after graduation, buy a big house and have kids. He told you that he always wanted to be a chef and he was good enough to open his own place when he was twenty-four.

He had everything he wanted.

One day he worked late, making a cake for his girlfriend’s birthday after the restaurant closed. It all happened too fast, a stupid mistake of the tired mind. The oven was still hot and he slipped. Almost his entire left arm got burned. His girlfriend left him after two weeks.

He lost everything, except Steve.

It’s hard to say if it was the atmosphere of the hospital, the amount of coffee and nothing else in your system, the state of mind you were in, or the nice feeling of his hand still in yours but you gave him a tour in the place that you had closed so carefully all those years ago. You switched on the lights, you showed him things that even you forgot.

It was frightening, terrifying and strange, and liberating.

You were always the type of person who prepared for the worst and expected the the worst, too. You never let yourself believe in fairy tales, it was easier so you didn’t have to cope with the disappointment. But sometimes life can be gentle and sometimes things can turn out to be good in the end.

They called the two of you at the same time, that you can visit your friends. Not until that moment you let go of each other. With an encouraging smile you went into separate ways to finally see the other parts of you.

You met Bucky for the second time two weeks after that. You went back to the hospital with Peggy for checkups and you saw Bucky with a blonde man on his side who struggled to put on his leather jacket. They were ready to leave when Bucky accidentally looked in your way, his eyes light up this time without the worry in them they actually seemed blue. You turned towards Peggy to show her the man you talked about all the time, but she was already smiling at the one next to him.

You were sitting on the metro, heading home after a long day at work. The music stopped playing in your ears because you got a call. It was Bucky

“Stop, you Punk! I’m on the phone! Steve, I’m gonna kick your ass if you keep stealing the food!” Laughter and music came through the line and your cheeks hurt from smiling. “Hi, doll! Sorry. Could you please bring some more wine on your way home? I had to use some for the food and Peggy and Steve already drank the rest.” “Yeah, sure. I’ll be home in twenty.” “Great. Love you.” “Love you, too.”

After hanging up you took a deep breath, pushing the play button to the song and Funny Valentine came up next. As you remembered back to the porch, some happy tears welled in your eyes.

Love really is the only thing worth living for, without it, without all the different flowers our gardens would be colourless and empty. When Bucky laughs, your heart really grows bigger. And well, love can be found after a heartbreak in a comforting hug, It can be found in a seat during a bus drive to the other part of the world It can be found on the floor of the hallway of a hospital and it can be found on the metro in the smile of a little girl who’s mum is too occupied on her phone Love really does hide in unlikely places.

tags: @kapolisradomthoughts @theliteratureloser @abovethesmokestacks @ursulaismymiddlename @nataliarxmanxva @canumoveyourseatup-no @readtosurvivemusictolive @hellomissmabel (Please tell me if you’d like to be added)

#My writing #Bucky Barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky fic #bucky barnes au #bucky barnes fic #marvel #marvel fanfiction #marvel au #just-some-drabbles #jsdchallenge #jsd4kcelebration

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bligh-lynch · 5 years

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Ask Now the Beasts

December 11th, 2007, Dog’s Creek, Tempest, West Virginia Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? _________ William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene i The first time Bligh realized that he was more than what he thought he was, he was alone – he did not have his best friend Drew with him, his loyal retainer, or his dog, Duke, his steadfast squire.

Duke was due to be taken to Dr. Barnes' vet clinic to re-up his rabies shots, but his grandfather – the whole town called him Pappy, even men and women older than he was – had been adamant that Bligh hunt for a squirrel to be tomorrow's dinner, since he himself had hunted dinner to be served that day. So Drew, in the pattern of almost-marriage they possessed years before either of them were ever brave enough to admit that was precisely what it was, had volunteered to take the dog to the vet himself, because Dr. Barnes' daughter, Betsy, was his girlfriend. It was just as well: even though Dr. Barnes liked Bligh, and had even helped his mama birth him because nobody else back then could help – born in a vet's office like a damn dog, how bout that – Betsy never took a shine to Bligh…too jealous, he guessed, how close he and Drew were. So Bligh was alone. No cell phone, that was another rule of Pappy's – hunting takes concentration, no intrusions by the frivolity of text messaging allowed. Pappy expected him to grow up and be a man and really at all of sixteen Bligh was a man already, the itchy clouds of black beard starting to form on his face, conscious imitation of his grandfather – thick blue flannel, squirrel gun, poke over his shoulder. He was the image of coalfield youth – the ruggedness inherited so soon, so quick, being young was too good to last here in the mountains, a small town nobody had ever heard of where weird things went on in whispers and legends. It was December, the first week, when the spooky pumpkins of Halloween and Samhain were all carved up and eaten, spiced and baked, for Thanksgiving pies – now all that was left was the desolation, the reckoning, the trees barren and naked, branches clawing at the overcast skies in supplicating prayers never to be heard. The smell of distant woodsmoke admixed with the clean, fresh wintry mountain air. It was a quick walk down the little hill that ridged up neatly and then leveled off where his house was – if Bligh had gone the opposite way he'd end up going up the mountain next to his house, where proud turkeybirds used to strut and a rare kind of herb that was useful for slaughtering hogs when Bligh had been a youngster grew…but now it was a dangerous place, a family of mountain lions lived up there even though the State of West Virginia was absolutely certain no mountain lions lived in West Virginia at all. But that was a lie – Bligh had to kill one, the very first animal he'd ever shot, many years ago, because Drew and he had blundered their way into its home. His grandfather said there weren't no mountain lions up yonder, but great big cattywampus – whatever they were, he didn't elaborate and Bligh and Andrew were too scared to ask why he'd said that…they hadn't been up there since. He had warned them with something Bligh had kept close to his heart – Ain't tellin what ye find in em woods, and that was the final say, the sagest advice you could either give or receive in their town. So Bligh went the other way – his grandfather was strict about him keeping up his shooting skills and being self-sufficient enough to catch and kill your own food. Bligh would get the meat, and his grandfather would cook it in the big electric crockpot they had just inherited from Cousin Bobby, Pappy's nephew, in Huntington…God rest his soul, his heart finally did what the diabetes couldn't and killed the poor man dead. It was very cold and Bligh was hungry and frustrated – he missed Duke and he missed Drew, he had been hunting alone only a few times in his life and now he felt awkward, like he didn't know what he was doing…maybe that was Pappy's plan all along, to show him how to do things by himself, and be self-reliant. At the thought, Bligh rolled his eyes – Pappy was convinced of the rightness of his positions and it was really hard to argue with him because, incidentally, he was almost never wrong…but goddam, couldn't they just order a pizza? But he was like his grandfather in many ways and each year it became more and more obvious he was his grandfather's grandson, an undeniable Lynch. Looking at Pappy was like looking a much-aged Bligh, and looking at Bligh was like peering into the past of who Gustavus – his real name – had been, all those decades ago… …it should have warmed his heart, but the air was too cold for that, and his irritation too fresh. At lease Bligh could like the cold, because he was used to this time of year being right airish and he liked it when the breeze blew his too-long hair gently into his ears under his new Baltimore Ravens cap he had bought at the Greenbrier Valley Mall on Black Friday. The chill on the air is lovely if you expect it, if you know where you are. Bligh had been keeping time with his steps to stalk squirrels as he had been taught to. He could faintly make out some in the distance by a big walnut tree on the closer side of Dog's Creek his movements were slow, quiet, pausing for some minutes when he saw the squirrels tense and look his way. He knew this area well, but if he got lost, he could tell where he was by the owl, louder and louder as the town got further behind him, calling from the forest past the border of the languid flow of the creekwater. The creek's flow was lazy and slow these days, soon enough it would cease altogether, choked by fine splinters of ice, and set apart on its banks by ermine shawls of the first snows. December even in its morbidity was not without its beauty. On the breeze you can hear him, the barred owl, lonely misshapen creature of feathers, forced to call out: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! It is not a full question that seeks to know, it is a taunt, a demand, a conversation that begins and ends by offending and abusing who it is asked to. He would love to say something else, his brothers in the wood with their long feathery eyebrows merely ask Who? Who? and you can gather from this something perennial, the philosopher's troubling wrestle with how life is drawn into existence in the universe – he has relatives that utter no human-like words at all, but mere tremolo, long and low and mournful, not as sad as the wolf's howl or the fox's wail beneath them as they are perched on their branches but a little more striking: on the breeze, a plea to listen. These owls are the wisest creatures in the forest because they have things to say. Listen to them: they will ask you things because the chill on the air is never, ever sufficient to itself, it must have accompaniment, a fiddler at your banquet table as the food is served and the moonshine poured. A meal fit for a king. The forest is a monarchy, after all, it is an empire that stretches and reigns forever, a world without end. The people here when Bligh's grandfather was very young used to get married outside under trees, and they'd say they were married in the big church, their ancestors' genetic memory curdling in their blood and released as an unconscious homage in their words with the phrase: knowing and understanding that no structure built by humans, large or small, can contain the majesty of nature, the big church is where one worships because one is compelled to, there is nothing to replace it, long live the king. The colors in the forest this time of year are a reminder that the world is dying and that misery comes with the cold – in some months there will be ripples of pink and white, there will be bloom, the bare branches will be decorated delicate with the promises of life's return, there over yonder, the path is new the world is free…before giving way to a death-afore-death, behold how the phoenix renews himself, so too will the trees, the feathers, the leaves: embers of gold and crimson. And then – the end. December in West Virginia is an empress-queen with a baritone roar – the femininity of her beauty so crushingly powerful to the eye that it makes one's soul hurt, the demand for obeisance for merely looking upon her evoking a terrible goddess from the first, pure days of humanity when one could still read by starlight… …stark, savage pulchritude. Up north from here they called a place the Canaan Valley, a sequel to the paradise from the Bible that Bligh's grandfather would preach from – for, surely, they had found what must have been a newfound Earthly paradise, summits bathed in glory like our Prince Immanuel's Land. And there are many places in America that are called God's Country and so it was here, but in West Virginia which god is never specified: whomever it be, it is ancient, it is feral. Bligh took a breath, billowing out faint vapor – the air was cleaner over here, away from town, a single paved road going out, out, stretching until it picks up 63, then 219, Lewisburg, bigger cities and bigger places far away from the creek, the forest, the owls. The creek had, by its occupation of geology, drained the area around it and turned it into grassy, shrubby flatland – its waters formed a drawn border between the meadow plain, marred by the occasional bare spot of rock, and the hilly woods. Next to the meadow, the road plunged out toward the shifting hills on the horizon, on a clear day you really could see forever. After the road and the meadow the woods appeared and the hills resumed their climb, inhabited in the uneven transition by squat shrubs, cruel briars, and, in happier times of the year, billowing, fragrant herbs and wildflowers that bees would excitably buzz about. Great jagged boulders jutted out like the bones of the prehistoric ground sloth who once reigned here, and tangles of dead vines would crawl and creep, up and over the exposed rock. Way on up ahead the creek broadened, and on its banks sat the ruins of an old mill, sometimes a beaver dam, alongside a rabbit-bitten plain that dipped into a holler as Dog's Creek disappeared into the Earth. Bligh stopped where he was, listening for the owl – Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! – to tell him where to go. He could measure by the owl how far away he was from town, and where the squirrels were. Head away from where you hear the owl, his grandfather had told him, for when he goes quiet, that is when he has found prey – where is he noisiest there are no animals for him to catch… …in the woods. The entrance to the woods was a doorway to somewhere else, one false step across the creek and into another realm, you'd stumble. He heard from Pappy once that a boy who courted his mama had taken sick and the night he was supposed to have died a whole big passel of squirrels sat by his window, and then his mama had seen him, healthy but changed into a half-squirrel hisself, watching her sadly from a bush or a tree. His mama used to tell that story as a funny thing, she couldn't be sure if it was a dream or not. But Pappy thought it weren't no dream – Pappy believed her. That was the kind of weirdness and strangeness and blurring of lines that took place here, this town, Tempest, West Virginia – really all over West Virginia, everywhere you went there was stories and tales and whispers and secrets. That was what you had to watch for in these woods. Was it real or was it all just imagination? You'd never know – you'd never know. The woods surround you and hug you and clutch you tight, a bereaved mother deranged from watching her child age – the woods listen to your heartbeat and watch you, always, as you pass through. And the woods grant wishes, but they are terrible wishes. Best stick to the creek, best stick to the road. Most of the animals now in December are gone. The crows are left, because they never leave, and so are the cardinals to complete a bucolic scene of Appalachian Christmas. They dress up as Richelieu, hopping about the snow and singing about the closing year, they will speak of all that has happened – the deaths, the births, the endings and the beginnings – they will speculate on what the new year will bring, and laugh to think of their cousins that flew south to escape the cold. The owl, too, is left. This time of day, when dusk was creeping and the clouds conspired with the darkness, the squirrels weren't as active, and the larger creatures – the mighty bear, the slender fox – had hid themselves in their yearly ritual of hibernation. But the owl still calls: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! It breaks into a stillness that is at once preternatural and yet expected: the chorus becomes not one of birdsong and katydid as it is in Summertime but rather of silence itself, each voice is muted but still singing, it will fade back in, it will return – montani semper liberi, montani semper spem, for others may see a dying world but the mountaineer sees a world merely asleep, for now, for now. Bligh was out past that old abandoned church where he had found Duke, that the woods rose up behind and the creek ran through underneath its wormy, decaying floorboards – floorboards with old and rusty nails, Drew had stepped on one after Bligh had goaded him and goaded him to come along with him exploring, and boy Pappy got mad as a hornet, really jerked a knot in his tail… …tail. Almost involuntarily, Bligh found himself frowning – he wanted a tail, he wanted to be a werewolf, get on all fours like Duke and hunt his food with his nose and his mouth. That was the old – oldest thing about him, what he retreated to when he first came to live with his grandfather after his daddy and mama crashed their Cadillac car in a rainstorm. He was so, so young then – from then on it was just him and Pappy against the world. And Drew – Drew too. But Drew didn't know – Pappy once thought he knew, but didn't really know – none of his guys on the football team would know, either. It was his own interior world, his private place – howling at the moon, staying out late with Duke and sneaking back in. Someday he'd tell Drew, he'd tell him all about how he knew that werewolves always belonged to the Devil according to the legends, and how he could never face Pappy because Pappy was a man of God like that, never knowing his own grandson badly wanted to be something so opposed to what he practiced, that's why Bligh would get sad every Sunday, that's why, secretly, he weren't Christian no more… Not that he didn't believe. He surely did – haints and monsters were just as real as you and me, yes sir – and maybe there weren't a Heaven, but by golly there was probably a Hell. But Drew didn't believe, he didn't believe in nothing, that's what made telling him so hard – Bligh pretending he was a werewolf like he'd always done, that part of him, that stayed religious and inflexibly spiritual even after he'd stop being really sure whoever Jesus Christ was – Bligh was still certain that the world around him was hardly all the world he got, and he never doubted werewolves were out there somewhere, that animals had souls…and the woods took care of their own. He just never figured it all out yet – maybe he never would. The ramshackle church, and his thoughts on religion, passed behind him. Bligh sucked in a breath through his nose, stopping where he was – the crunch of leaves ceasing beneath his boots, deep up to his ankles – to look about him. His eyes were of a different color than everyone else's in town, different than anybody else he'd ever really met, but they were the same color as his grandfather's and his daddy's too, who Bligh remembered only faintly before he died – they gave the impression of seeing everything by seeing past it, into it, X-ray eyes, strange magic, blue the color of ice, blue the color of the cold itself. And his eyesight was, actually, more excellent than most anyone he knew – it's what made him a good quarterback, it's what made him a crack shot. Like his grandfather, he could see what others couldn't. He smirked at that – he never really smiled, Drew's wily little brother Stevie said that all the time and he was right, he smiled like his grandfather smiled, crooked, a little proud, a little bashful…a smirk. Now he stopped to squint and try to sharpen his focus – the squirrels he'd thought he'd seen were becoming clearer, a rare passel of them, there, not far, the edge of the woods, but on the nearer side of the creek, two, three, four squirrels. How lucky! He'd have to tell Pappy: one climbing the base of a great big walnut tree, one on the branch that made it shake as it moved – two on the ground. This would be easier than he'd thought – maybe he did know what he was doing. He approached them stealthily – Drew always said he was good at sneaking up on people, an unconscious skill he never remembered learning, but which he put to adept use out here on the hunt – he raised his gun, he took his shot. The noise erupted into the stillness and startled a murder of crows that flew off, cawing raucously, from a tall beech tree near the walnut where he had felled one squirrel, then another – only two, felled with one shot each: "New record," Bligh muttered to himself. Their compatriots fled for their lives into the forest, their peace of tail-twitching and squawking at each other ruined by violence and bloodshed. Bligh took his time walking to reach them, inhaling deep again, another airish breeze coming up and grazing his skin – it was getting colder, because it was quickly getting darker. He reached down to pick up the pair of small, furry, lifeless bodies – he murmured the prayer that Pappy had taught him, thanking them for their lives and now for their death, that he could live on because they had given themselves up. That was the way of the woods…Pappy talked all the time about salvation and the Good Lord and what the Bible said, but sometimes Bligh would wonder – putting the squirrels in his poke to carry home – if Pappy didn't put his own take on the Good Book, something like the Indians that intermarried with the first settlers out here used to practice, about being with nature and being in balance. Bligh was supposed to have some Indian in him – that explained the black hair. As he rose from the grass, adjusting the poke over his shoulder, he thought he heard the owl again, louder, somewhere near him – Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! Loud – louder – close. He whipped around him – where was it coming from? He gripped his gun, hearing it – rising – nearer, nearer… Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! Then – a chaos, a rushing whoosh, stronger and stiffer than the breeze. Bligh spun on his heel to see it, pouring over the grass and the leaves, a noxious, spreading shadow that darkened the ground – above him came a flapping of wings, deep and ominous, the sound shuddering into the Winter air. And then, attacking the tallest branch to make a perch, there it was: a thing, a giant thing, a thing – that looked like an owl. Its wings were enormous, so large that had they been fully outstretched Bligh in his panicked fear wondered if they could have blotted out the feeble Winter's Sun – its talons were sharpened to a point, scaled legs and feet digging into the branch it held deeply enough that it would surely leave marks. It had been crafted out of the very forest itself, as though spat out of every fitful nightmare every scurrying creature on the ground once had, and now come to life: Tall, antler-like bundled feathers gave the impression of horns jutting off of what should have been his eyebrows, above eyes that, themselves, were ablaze with a psychedelic, ever-changing opalescence, never looking the same way twice, like lava captured in glass. But the worst part was its face – no beak, no feathers, just skin, too smooth and healthy to be like a vulture's but too uniform to have been plucked off. Taking it all in, his mind racing, Bligh's own eyes widened in horror as he realized: the face looked vaguely, passably – human. The owl he had been hearing was no owl at all. This was a monster, a creature of the woods from the fantasies of the first settlers and from the febrile fears of the Moneton – primeval, prehistoric, awful. Its feathers were shaggy, unkempt, bristling with poorly-molted plumage, the color of the leafless branches, perfectly camouflaged in the wild tangles of the treetops it leered down from. Bligh raised his gun, finding to his fleeting relief that even in his state of total bewilderment, even looking into those fiendish, hypnotic, fiery eyes of the creature, he was not scared – all the preparedness his grandfather had instilled in him had worked. The thing seemed to threaten him, and Bligh meant to defend himself. Again the question came, from the branches clenched in its talons, down to Bligh, through eyes of relentless fury that threw off fiery sparks of molten orange-yellow wherever they turned: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! Bligh's breathing steadied, and he lowered his gun – slowly, very slowly, never taking his eyes off the monstrous feathered thing. The words – and they were words – echoed, hard, in Bligh's ears. He could understand them, he could make them make sense in his own head, the voice with a far more rich timbre than any owl's should be. His eyes were still wide with bewilderment but the fear was being replaced with something – something he would never think to feel out here, alone, confronted with a giant owl that leered at him from a walnut tree, with a gun in his hand. He felt – guilty. He felt that he should be able to understand this creature and that not being able to was making it sad and desperate, like he wasn't keeping a promise, like Bligh had been entrusted with something important, dire, and had carelessly forgotten it. Yet again the owl-thing hooted at him – again it leered at him. Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! In the woods you are always trespassing, in the woods you are always being watched – the owl hooted and hooted its outrage, the only words it knew, transmuted, translated, into human-like words that Bligh understood as an inchoate, unanswerable question: the portcullis was lowered, and now Bligh, whose people were meant to be kings of this land even when Drew's people were the ones who bought and sold and enslaved it, was an exile in his own realm, for heavy is the head whose crown has fallen. He felt foolish, foolish enough to answer an owl – or what looked like an owl – or something that was half-owl, half-boy… He gritted his teeth, he cocked an eyebrow, he shrugged his shoulders: "I dun – I dunno?" A silence passed, tense and chastened, between he and the plumed beast above him. He repeated: "I dunno! I dun – I dunno!" The owl-thing withdrew – it did not take its great, staring eyes off of him, but held him in a gaze that was accusatory, angry – sad. That was not the answer it wanted. It hooted out the same thing – again now, distraught, defeated, in disbelief, as though trying to make sense of what the human beneath had just said: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! And then Bligh knew. The mournful siren of the owl, the same phrase – Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! – over and over and over, had an inescapable meaning: he was too inexperienced, he was irresponsible with his duties – he was not worthy. In the silence that was not stirred by any caw, tweet, cricket, rustle – in this silence, this perfect silence of West Virginia's December, at the border of the real and the unreal, the known places where humans lived and the unknown places of tree, wood, and leaf, he understood, looking into the eyes of the owl that he was sure was no owl at all…he understood, ashamedly, perfectly, what had happened. Bligh had wanted this, something like this, to be close to this, be a part of this – he had wanted to be a beast himself, a werewolf to roam the forest, and yet here he was, at the very gate to the forest, with the wood itself so full of shining eyes and creeping feet, beckoning him with long clawed fingers…and he had no idea what to do. The owl-thing flew off, off into the distance, spread its wings so wide its shadows could have killed the Sun – it bore itself aloft, far, far from where Bligh stood, his gun, and his defenses, his confidence, all down – the predatory shape the owl-thing took melted into the treetops, its bushy plumage indistinguishable from the branches and the leaves. The encounter had lasted no more than three, four minutes – and yet it seemed so much longer, it had seemed like forever, several forevers, it seemed like time and its dimensions had simply ceased to be, and that the friendly world of logic and understanding, Planet Earth, had let open a small pocket of weirdness so potent it undid reality itself. Worst of all was how, staring after it, trying to put everything together, how Bligh felt – different. He felt, somehow, and for no rational reason, that this would not have happened to anyone else, that this was destined, doomed, for him to find and for him to experience, alone. Not Drew, not Pappy, not Duke – only him, for whatever reason. He started back for home, quickening his pace as he went – that owl-thing's awful face, awful voice, refusing to leave his tortured mind's eye. When he got home he was still shook up, and as he opened the door to come in, doffing his boots and hanging his Ravens cap on the wooden rack nailed to the wall, putting up his gun, he tried to right himself once more, steadying his face and his emotions. Pappy was waiting for him in the kitchen, the whole house alive with lusty smells of seasoned cookery stewing in the crockpot. He came to meet Bligh in the little hallway that led to the dining room with its big window next to the kitchen, salt-and-peppered eyebrows arched and together as he nodded his greeting – dressed in his usual flannel, like Bligh, and workaday jeans with house slippers, he looked nearly like Bligh in the face, a full chinstrap beard to accompany the same rugged handsomeness, but creased and aged. "Ya shoot us some dinner fer tomorrow night?" He had a powerful voice, honed for decades in the preacher's pulpit. "Yessir," Bligh answered. "Squirrels – pair of em, whole passel out down past the ol church." "Well bring em over, lemme clean em – ya done yer homework?" "Yessir," Bligh repeated, bringing his poke to the counter to leave for his grandfather. "Done it afore I went out." "Aight," Pappy answered with another nod. "Drew came by n'dropped off Duke – I gave em some o'them preacher cookies fer his trouble, weren't much but yanno he loves em." He motioned with his head to a closed door where their living room was. "That dawg o'yers is sleepin in ere, he waitin fer ya." "Thank ya, Pappy," Bligh said, forcing a grin, hoping he wouldn't notice the worried expression that had riddled into his face all the way home. As he turned to move on, Pappy removed the squirrels from the poke and called out after him: "Clean kill, son! I'm impressed!" Bligh sniffed in spite of himself – his grandfather's praise elated him, even this close to actual manhood. As he opened the door into his cozy, wood-paneled living room he could feel, and see, a fire burning in the fireplace, and Duke, a huge, shaggy, bearded thing who always looked noble and aloof but who was also unfailingly sweet-natured, rose from his spot aside it to greet him – a little logy from his shots at Dr. Barnes', his furry ears went limp to let Bligh scratch the top of his head, he made a rough O with his snout and growled out a long hello. "Hey, boy—" Bligh murmured back, embracing Duke tightly. Not far from him in the kitchen Bligh could hear his grandfather hum a tune familiar to them both, sometimes with his voice rising to sing pieces of the words – "Oh! He led her over mountains, and valleys so deep…" Now he shut his eyes – hearing his grandfather, feeling Duke, his fireplace-warmed fur against his own hand – it brought Bligh back to reality, to a groundedness that the open spaces by the road, the gates that led to the forests and up into the hills and then even further up into the mountain that loomed above his house, had all, momentarily, taken away. Here in his home nothing could hurt him, the gleaming eyes or stealthy paws or the big, billowing wings of bird-creatures that spoke near to a human's words – he let himself sigh, an outrush of air to release the day, into the protection of the wooden walls. Duke did the customary face-licking, a laving of Bligh's lips and budding beard, and he responded with one of his strange, delighted laughs that Drew's brother Stevie – again – would make fun of, scratching Duke's neck. He sat down by one of the armchairs and Duke, enormous though he was, sat in Bligh's lap, near as big as Bligh was – Bligh hugged him close and buried his face in the dog's fur, remaining like this for several minutes, Duke waiting patiently, letting his human hold him as close as he needed to. At some length he relinquished his hold on his dog and with a muffled growl-bark – mruf! – he rolled over, signaling to Bligh he was demanding a bellyrub, and Bligh obliged, and wanted to smile down at him, ask him how his day was, he always talked to dogs like that, pretending that they had the full command of the English language and could hold a witty conversation…he'd wonder sometimes if anyone could really talk to them, understand, hear what they'd have to say. But right then he couldn't smile – because he could have used someone to talk to. No matter how cute Duke was being, tucking his head down and looking at Bligh with those heterochromatic eyes, one mud-brown and the other a crystal blue similar to his, he still couldn't shake being so bothered, being so puzzled. Pappy called him to dinner in the next room, and he signaled for Duke to roll back over and join him – as Bligh left the living room Duke trotted past him, assuming his usual position under the table between Bligh on one end, Pappy at the other. The dinner was squirrel, killed by Pappy the day before, in the crockpot – he'd been so tickled to have a new kitchen appliance and he had been putting just about everything in the crockpot for a whole week – seasoned with all the smells Bligh had encountered when he first walked in: ramp, vinegar, pepper, salted just a little, with some buttered biscuits and, as a special treat, some muggins that Pappy had been saving. He was hungry – he felt his mouth water just looking at his plate. He knelt his head and joined hands across the table in the prayer his grandfather led: "Dear Lord we jest wanna thank ye fer the bounty afore us, n'thank ya Lord fer keepin Bligh safe – please keep us in yer grace, Lord, n'we ask this in Jesus' name—" Bligh let bloom the last little flower in his dead garden of Christianity by joining in: "Amen." His first few bites were enthusiastic, the taste of the squirrel-meat so well cooked, the muggins perfect with a little butter – but as he ate the face of the owl-thing, bitter and mean and near-human, reappeared in his mind's eye…the bewilderment at what he had seen returned in force, and he slowed his eating, bit by bit, enough that Pappy took notice: "What's ailin ye, son?" Bligh shook his head. "Ain't nuthin…" "I know when I'm bein told a falsehood – n'ye know that's a sin." Bligh sighed. "I – I saw sumthin real weird in the woods. Right after I got them squirrels. It – got me afeared." Pappy nodded. "What ya see?" Bligh told his story and Pappy listened, nodding along, letting Bligh speak. When he was finished he took a deep breath, the images reemerging, and he shifted uncomfortably – the painful memory of being accused, of being scolded, still made him feel dirty and ashamed. His grandfather laid down his knife and fork, seeming to escape into his own deep thought and contemplation. Some seconds went by before he turned his head back to Bligh and answered: "Ya say a big ol owl?" "Yessir, big ol son of a gun," Bligh affirmed, his throat suddenly dry – he took the glass of water Pappy and poured him and downed half of it. "Kept – hootin at me, n'hootin at me, making all this noise like I…like I weren't s'posed to've been there." "Hmm…" Pappy said, folding his arms – and then again: "Hmm." "What is it?" "Well…I jest hafta say, that's mighty interestin." "It – it is?" Pappy did not answer at first – his face took on an unusual aspect, the eyes that saw everything suddenly seemed to encapsulate the entire universe and reduce it into his icy eyes. Bligh laid his fork down across his plate – Duke, perhaps sensing his human was upset, appeared beneath him, leaning his head back to get Bligh to scratch him more. "I wanna – tell ya a story." Pappy began to murmur, sighing some. His voice became commanding, lilting with his accent, the sound of a polished raconteur, a master storyteller. "Long time gone…when I was li'l boy, I never knew my granddaddy, reckon I told ya—" "Yessir ye did." "He ah – went crazy – ran off one night and ain't nobody seen em ever again." Bligh nodded – Pappy's face did not change, as though his gaze was now peering directly into the past. "Well…" he began again, "come ta find out, right bout the time Ol Patrick Lynch – my granddaddy's granddaddy – came over here from Ireland, he met a young man, not yet two-and-twenty, by the name o'William – William, ah…" He shut his eyes now, as though trying to remember – a bemused look came to him as he chuckled to himself. "Naw – I can't remember, I wrote it down somewheres but – anyhoo, ah…" He grunted in self-affirmation. "William come up to Ol Patrick's one day, sayin he was witched." "Witched?" Bligh repeated. "Yessir – witched. Said a lady he was tryin ta court cast a spell on em and he was right sick – wudn't say how. Asked Ol Patrick fer help, said he wanted em to cook up sumthin that'd make em not witched n'more, seein as he was Irish so surely ta goodness—" Pappy smirked, knowingly. "Surely ta goodness he'd know how ta take care of em. Well – what's Ol Patrick gonna do? Little racist, weren't it? Ol Patrick believed in witches jest like everybody else but – what kinda sumthin he gonna fix gonna cure all that? He mighta been Irish but he weren't no wizard, he was a big ol Catholic, a God-fearin man." "Can't ya fight witchcraft and all that with Christian stuff?" Bligh ventured. Pappy shot him a warning glance. "Ain't no stuff, boy—" Bligh looked away, knowing he had spoken out of turn. "Sorry – sir." His grandfather made a small sigh before continuing: "Anyhoo, evidently this weren't that kinda witchin, cuz he had tried everythin, understand. Priest n'preacher and Lord knew what else – guess Ol Patrick was his last chance." "S-so he—" Bligh hesitated. "He – he wanted him to – cook for him…" Pappy raised his eyebrows as though to consider it before nodding. "Sumthin like that. Thought Ol Patrick could know a thing or too, give em sumthin or other ta help out, like I say. But seein as he weren't that way – he tell William to g'on and go – get on bout hisself." At this he motioned with his head, again, as though he were Ol Patrick and he was shooing off poor William – he paused now, as though for effect. "Well – here's where it gets a li'l queer, now. Come ta find out, there's a big ol owl livin down ere by the creek – this bout a month later – and folk say it weren't no owl t'all, but William hisself up ere, in the trees, all feathered and with big claws – waitin, waitin fer sumthin." He paused again. "Whether it be that girl that witched em ta take the curse off, or – sumthin else, I…" Now he shook his head, slowly. "They, rather – they never say." Bligh was bewildered – he stared at Pappy, mouth agape, both hands on the table, speechless. "I heard that story growin up – passed down through the years – fer the longest time, thought it was – yanno, ol folks jest tellin tales…" He grinned. "Nuthin wrong with that now, but—" The grin faded. "I done heard a whole lot over the years about folk seein an owl – weird-lookin, big ol thang, up ere in them trees, hootin and hootin loud as can be." He seemed to ponder the idea a moment, and then: "When I tell ya ta listen fer the owl – that ain't the owl I'm talkin bout." At this, Bligh was beset with a feeling he had never experienced before – the story that his grandfather had told him, the tale of some unlucky sap being spurned and cursed by a witch and turned into a half-man, half-owl, doomed to haunt the countryside forever, seemed familiar to him, so much so he was near-spinning with something like déjà-vu, like a disused vault in his head had been thrown open, and there, long-forgotten, was the complementary facts to accompany his grandfather's narration. He had never, not once, ever experienced anything like this – a regression, a joining, from nowhere to nowhere, pieces falling together that were all blank, collecting together to form some indecipherable picture. The owl-thing had asked him questions and it had been like being in school and being called on by a teacher, expected to know the answer when you hadn't even read the book. This was similar: it was like he had known about this the entire time and had it, somehow, completely obliterated from his memory. But where had it come from, and where had it gone? And why? Who was William? His abrupt, unwelcome introspection was cut into by his grandfather's voice: "Boy – boy." Bligh jerked his up from staring at the table to stammer out his new revelation: "I know – I know all about that." His grandfather was nonplussed. "Zat so, now?" Bligh nodded. "I dun – I dunno why, but I do." Pappy took a drink of water himself. He set down his glass, and gave his grandson's remark a judicious look. "Ain't like much ever happens round here, and people talk – n'talk n'talk – I ain't sayin what ye saw was that William feller up ere in em trees." His voice had grown soft, almost comforting. "But sometimes…" Pappy began, seeming to choose his words carefully. "What we see – ain't what really is." He raised his eyebrows to end the sentence. Bligh stared at him, unsure – he glanced away, past his grandfather to the window behind him, where the darkness of the wooded mountain was pouring through, shimmering dimly with reflected firelight. "I ain't—" He cleared his throat. "I ain't sure what ye mean, Pappy." "What ye reckon I mean?" Bligh considered the thought before shrugging. "Reckon ye mean – reckon ye mean my mind saw sumthin, but my eyes didn't—" "T'ain't what I'm sayin t'all, boy." Pappy leaned back in his chair, his eyebrows still up. There was a twinkle in the corner of his eye that Bligh knew meant he was withholding something, that he knew something Bligh didn't and that he'd have to figure it out himself – this was how his grandfather taught him critical thinking. Bligh sighed through his nose, drawing his lips together in a deep frown – he shook his head. "I dunno – I—" He tried powering through the congealed mass of questions, confusions, frustrations – but he failed, he shook his head once again. For the second time that day, he had to admit: "I dun – I dunno." "Ye thought ye'd seen an owl, zat so?" Bligh nodded – Pappy's eyebrows finally went down. "Well mebbe it weren't no owl t'all – maybe it was sumthin else." He seemed to read Bligh's tormented confusion, and gave one of his own crooked smiles back. "Ya gotta think, boy – were it that tale I told ya bout Old William – come ta life now? Ya said ya heard it from somewheres, n'ye could be right." He cocked his head some, challenging his grandson. "Or ya could be wrong. Mebbe – s'jest a reg'lar ol owl, nuthin more, nuthin less." "Why—" Bligh frowned, this time sadly, feeling as though his grandfather was, for the first time in his entire life, letting him down. "Why ain't ye tell me the answer?" Pappy leaned back in. "I dunno the answer, son. I ain't gonna tell ya what ye seen cuz I ain't the one that seen it – ye gotta be the one." He leaned back as though to survey his grandson, whose head came down slightly to contemplate what the old man had told him. "All I know is this town has some nutty stuff goin on round it – n'ye deserve ta know it. Yanno I love ye, boy, I'm here ta help ya—" For a moment, just a moment, his eyes seemed melancholy, his face turned helpless, and the confidence and certitude he projected melted back to reveal something actually worried. "But sometimes – a man has ta decide on his own. I wanna tell ya what ya saw ain't nuthin ta be afeared of, but – I can't rightly tell ya that, honestly. Jest be careful – what I been tellin ye all these years?" Bligh cleared his throat. "Ain't – uh – ain't no telling what ye find in em woods." Pappy smirked. "I mean it, too. Be careful, Bligh – n'tell me if'n ye see that bird again." He sniffed, reaching for his grandson's hand – Bligh slid it to him and he squeezed it gently. "What I always tell ye, all these years – all these years ye've been livin here?" His smirk became a grin. "I'd never let nuthin happen ta my boy – not ever." He paused. "Monster or no monster." Bligh nodded, smirking himself, humbled and loved – he sensed the conversation had come to an end. "Y-yessir – I – I understand." He smirked, embarrassed at the attention. "I love ya too, Pappy." He tried to cheer up, because he could his grandfather searching him, wanting him to reach a conclusion, even if the conclusion was not a conclusion at all, but a question mark. In the instant, he realized the method behind the disjointedness of Pappy's reply – the story that seemed to confirm something but only added to the confusion, so that the question would be left forever open. They returned to their dinner – savory squirrel, the meat tasty, well-seasoned, Pappy was an excellent cook as he was, probably, everything else. Duke curled underneath the table to watch for scraps, and for the moment Bligh tried to push seeing the owl-thing – William – out of his head, to enjoy the December evening with his grandfather. When the dinner was over and Bligh told Pappy how much he enjoyed it, he offered to clear the table and wash the dishes – Pappy retired to the living room to read his Bible and wait for him, so that they could watch Law & Order together, their nightly ritual, guessing whodunit, trying to take their minds off whatever happened that day. Duke would join them, laying by the fire, rolling over with all four paws in the air, snoring. Bligh had plenty to think about as he scrubbed the plates and silverware and set them aside on the waiting towel to dry. Next week they would go out and find a Christmas tree together, still alive and not cut down, so that they could, when the season was over, plant it on the slope of their mountain. Pappy would light candles in the house and he and Bligh would clean together for Baby Jesus' birthday – you know all the farm animals face east on Christmas Eve? It's true, Pappy would say, like he said every year, adding that anyone around here will tell you that – all the animals know, better than the humans they live with, that it's time to wait for the Lord to be born. Some say they talk to, but Pappy ain't ever heard a cow say his own name. Pappy would see to it that Bligh, living in a town with such savage strangeness pulsing beneath it, without parents and facing down a world which would not understand the way he was raised and the way he spoke, was still, at least for a time, safe – and loved. Bligh thought about that the whole time they watched television together – he hid a grin as he cuddled closed to Duke, he and his grandfather's favorite show flickering on the screen. Then the hour grew late he and Pappy said good night to each other after they watched the news – Bligh lay awake in his bed, Duke on the floor, curled on his rug like he always was, still exhausted from his day at Dr. Barnes'. When he heard Pappy's bedroom door shut, Bligh's eyes went open, his face creased with perplexity – and a little fear. He had tried to sleep, but couldn't – he always slept real good when it was cold out like this, and cold in his house, but he couldn't, he couldn't sleep at all. He'd always known his town was a strange one, he'd always heard that weird things went on, he'd even seen that big mountain lion – cattywampus – but he had never expected something like this, something he couldn't deny, something he couldn't explain…right in front of him… What made it weirder, harder to believe it wasn't all in his head, was – his mom had the same experience. Some crazy half-man half-something looked down at her from a tree…what little he remembered of his mom was that story, and how Pappy telling her it weren't no dream, it was real, because she had seen it. Now the same thing had happened to her son – Bligh. She'd been alone, no one around to tell her if she was crazy or telling the truth. And right then, Bligh had been all alone too. No Drew – who would tell him it was just an unusually big owl he'd seen, nothing more, no need to worry about it too much, people don't turn into owls and there is definitely no such thing as a forest-guardian. No Duke – who would growl and charge and courageously defend him, not leave him vulnerable to be questioned by whatever the Hell had roosted in that walnut tree. And no cell phone, not that his own cell phone was all fancy and had a camera like Drew's but even so, it would have helped to know he wasn't so isolated out yonder… …like he felt isolated now. Just as he felt out near the woods, he felt different, he felt apart from his bed and his bedroom and his house and his town, like he had experienced something nobody else was supposed to, just him, only for him, the woods, the mountain, the whole universe staring at him, waiting for him to speak, waiting for him to answer that owl-thing's question…a question that, deep inside him, he was sure he knew the answer to, somewhere, somehow. It made him important, that way – to know the answer, to be entrusted, to be the one who kept the promise but maybe wasn't ready yet, maybe wasn't old enough. But being important isn't always a good thing – having all this weird attention on him, or feeling like he did, wasn't a good thing. Drew had told him once: eventually everybody looks at themselves and wonders who they really are. That's the point of being human, he said – and he was coming from a place of his science books and all his smarts which Bligh didn't have, and not knowing Bligh winced at the idea that he, too, was a human being, So then who was Bligh? The guy that talked to monsters in the woods? All his people except his daddy, Lord rest him, had been woodsmen – was that it? Something about his family, way back when…? Bligh shut his eyes, the day finally catching up to him at long last, a welcome feeling of tiredness coming to him – what had happened, what he had seen, the riddles left all unsolved, not yet, not today. As sleep finally shrouded his mind he thought he could hear it, one last time, the hooting, the call from beyond, close to his ears, inside his head, nearer to his heart – a secret, a door to which he had a key but did not know how to turn the lock, not yet, not just yet… Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all!

#bligh

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kelsen8er · 7 years

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Emerald Dancer

Hey guys! I wrote a short story, and it’s kinda sad but I hope you like it!!!

Emerald Dancer

It was the find of the century. No, more like the greatest find of all time. There it was, floating through the endless void of space, unaware that it was even being watched. It seemed so pure and innocent. The astronomer stared in awe at the find that would make him famous; yet, he could not bring himself to do anything but watch. He stared at the planet, terrestrial and positively teeming with vegetation of the brightest verdant. Life outside of Earth. This discovery would flip the scientific community on its head. He watched it gracefully rotate, moving rapidly and yet seeming so still. As he stared, his blood grew hot in his veins and he felt a strange urge to either vomit or shed a tear. He was not used to such a feeling, being alone as he was, and it snapped him out of his trance. He glanced up at the clock. He had been staring for almost an hour, and yet it seemed as though time had stood still while he watched the little planet rotate. It was like he was watching a dancer gracefully pirouette through a sea of blackness, her glittering outfit glinting about her as she smiled at him. He yearned to see that smile, to touch that soft face that contained so much life and youth. No, he was being ridiculous. He had to report this planet to the government, to the press, to every media outlet he could! It was, after all, the find of a lifetime, of any lifetime. He rose quickly from the large telescope and went across the room to the phone on the wall in the hallway. Yet he lingered a moment in the doorway. Did he really have to tell anyone? This could be his little planet, his ballerina, his never ending ballet. He glanced back at the telescope. Well, the government could wait. The find that would redefine modern space exploration would still be there after a few days. And dinner. He had forgotten to eat, and now his stomach was groaning at him restlessly, reminding him that it was empty and constantly demanding sustenance. He walked out of his observatory and down the hall to his tiny kitchen. He looked in the fridge for anything edible, but all he found was a carton of apple juice and what used to be sour cream. He stared at the empty space and was reminded of his little planet, floating in a void of space, the blanket of darkness in eternal night, with the only life giving force being a ball of burning gas rocketing through the dark, providing life to only his ballerina. His stomach groaned again, louder than before. He had to go shopping, it seemed. Unfortunately, his research lab had been making some cutbacks lately, and his next paycheck was postponed indefinitely. He sighed. The job hunt had proven unsuccessful as of late, and that little planet was the answer to his prayers. If only he could just tell someone about it… But he could not bring himself to do it. This was his private show, his ballerina’s shining moment, and he was strangely attracted to her. Nobody else could find out about her. They would try to take her from him. She was his, smiling at only him. He could not give that up. Not after being alone for so long. His stomach harshly reminded him that he also could not give up food. He began to dig through his wallet, emptying it of old crumpled receipts and other various bits of paper. Twelve dollars and sixty-two cents. That was all he had left. A man cannot last very long on twelve dollars and sixty two cents, and so he decided to scavenge around the house for any loose change. The couch - empty. The drawers - nothing. He searched like a starving lion, prowling his two room apartment and ripping apart anything that might contain what he was searching for. Nothing. Not a single dime. He slumped against the wall, sliding to the floor. Twelve dollars and sixty-two cents. His bank account had been emptied weeks ago, his last paycheck having run out far too quickly. He let out a groan and his stomach moaned with him. This was one of those times he wished he had wealthy friends. He looked down at the measly amount of money that so much hinged on and he clutched it in his fist. He would survive. Even if he had to sell his books and the clothes off his back, he would survive. He would sell anything - even his grandmother’s urn - but not his telescope, because it was the only thing letting him see his beloved ballet. His mind drifted away again to the little ball of emerald. He thought of the little jade plants that covered the surface, how he could imagine the little curled leaves like locks of hair. He wondered if the area was tropical or temperate. He realized he either had to starve or give up the show of a lifetime. He could not even bring himself to think of calling anyone about it now. He remembered how she danced in the sky, seemingly still, yet turning so quickly. He wondered if she ever got dizzy out there, whirling through the darkness. He knew it was a ridiculous sentiment, but he hoped she was not nauseous with all that spinning. Now he knew he was being positively preposterous, but he still could not help himself from worrying about that little ball of life. He longed to go there, to stand on the green surface, to inhale the untouched oxygen that flowed from the flora, to dive under the surface and see the interior, to feel what a truly clean atmosphere felt like. He longed so much for this that his stomach quit its incessant groaning and seemed to find peace with the idea of living on this planet. Maybe he would not feel so alone, being surrounded by all the greenery and life. He was always so alone here, in his little apartment. He wasn’t alone if he was with her. He decided that he would not tell anyone about her. He moved his bed into the observatory, and he felt his love’s presence when he slept. It was a comfort to him. He slept very soundly, despite the fact that he had very little food to eat. His possessions left him one by one, but his ballerina was always there. She was there when he sold the books. When he sold the shelves and all his kitchen appliances, she stayed in the sky, smiling at him and almost taunting him with her life and his lack thereof. She beckoned to him to come and roll in the flora and eat of the fresh fruit and breathe in the clean air that she had. He tried to tell her that he could not possibly reach her in his lifetime, but she called to him every night, her viridian eyes always laughing, always watching. Finally, all he had left was his telescope and his show. He had rented out his other room, keeping only the observatory for himself. But the show went on, as all shows must. He watched it all day and it distracted him from his hunger. He watched it to soothe him to sleep at night, when the pain of his hunger would have kept him up. His love sang sweet silent lullabies as she twirled. He never told a soul about her. She was all his, and she never left his sight. One day, while he was watching his coryphee dance through the sky, he saw something change. Suddenly and without warning, her eyes were no longer their sweet verdant, but red and burning. Burning, exploding into a bloom of red and orange, then a cloud of brown, and finally settling into the blackness of space. It was then that he realized his folly. She had been dead for millennia, slowly decaying from the inside until finally destroying herself from the inside out. She was dead long before his time, even before humans existed. He could never have reached her because what he saw was merely the end of her life, the final curtain call. The shadow of a finale that existed light-years away. His love was gone, she had always been gone, lost for all eternity with a cloud of dust floating through the cruel blackness of space as her only applause. And with this realization, he wept. He had loved that show, had sold everything he had to afford the front row seats, wasted months of his life watching the prima ballerina dance. And for what? To die alone, starving and crushingly impoverished? No, he not wasted that time. He had adored every second of every day he spent watching that little dancer, and he would not trade that for the world. The greatest show on Earth, and he had been its sole witness. His body had taken a massive toll, however, and the lack of meals had finally caught up to him. When the last bit of his beloved had finally vanished out of sight, he collapsed on the floor with a dull thud. His breath was raspy as he slowly let the hunger take him away. “Give a bow, my love. Your performance was truly breathtaking.”

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daveywankenobie · 4 years

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So, the results are in for the Christmas and New Year period.

It was a maintain.

Last week I lost 1.5lbs, and this week I gained it back again – so if nothing else in terms of the holiday season I’m no heavier than I was when I started which is a plus.

In contrast my other half managed her second week in a row losing weight at probably the most difficult time of the year, meaning she dropped at total of 4lbs over the holiday season and because of this also took home the group’s Slimmer of the Week basket!!!

Now it’s my turn to try and emulate her good behaviour because its officially 2020.

Now the hard work starts.

Currently there are a significant number of shirts in my wardrobe that look like they’ve been sprayed onto me – and for anyone that’s been following my blog for any length of time they’ll know that this is a serious issue – because I possess more of this this particular item of clothing than any other.

My last tally came to well over a hundred and then I just stopped counting because I didnt want to stop buying nice ones when I found them. Thankfully my partner seems quite happy to encourage this particular element of my behaviour and she rather likes me in a more flamboyant shirt.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m still not short of shirts and trousers that fit – but some of my absolute favourites are annoyingly out of reach at the moment, and I know that the ones I’m wearing represent (to me at least) someone that I’d rather not be at the moment.

However – there are still wonderful things to find – and (despite their tendency to appear in rather fuddy duddy shops for the middle aged and wealthier denziens of the world) for some time I’ve wanted a pair of Meyer trousers.

Prior to my dumpster diving approach to clothes buying I had no idea about these – but they’re ridiculously well made, comfortable and hard wearing trousers.

They also have lovely stitching and detailing – such as the lining which looks and feels totally awesome!

I picked these up for £5 in a Coventry charity shop – but if I’d bought them new the price would have been VERY different (link).

I have some absolutely prized possessions like these (such as my Paul Smith and Levis 501’s) all of which were found in charity shops – which will last me a very long time indeed if I look after them.

Annoyingly I gave an entire suitcase full of absolutely superb makes of shirts, trousers and denims back to charity about six months ago because they were slightly too big for me.

Consequently I’ve had to re-buy these items over the last month or two just to maintain an operational wardrobe, but it’s been a valuable lesson.

I’ve come to realise that what’s happened to my weight is not failure.

It’s just life.

Well. It is for me and many others anyway.

I have a friend who remarked casually on a walk several months ago that she has dresses and other items of clothing that are well over 20 and sometimes 30 years old that she still wears regularly.

At the time I think she expected me to be horrified when she admitted this to me – but to my mind it represented an absolute dream come true and is practically a perfect description of the guy I’d love to (but don’t think I ever will) be.

For a start it’s environmentally friendly to use clothes for this length of time and because of that I definitely approve. It just goes to show that if you are careful and buy really well made items then they last longer than supermarket fashion brands.

However that wasn’t the only thing that stood out when she said it because most of all her frikkin weight hasn’t changed at all for thirty plus years!!!

The truth is that a huge part of me wanted to just lose all of my fat and then live in a dream world where I never craved anything ever again and where I was to all intents and purposes completely over all of my battles with eating.

I guess it’s why I found the end of my tenure as MOTY such a relief – because I wanted my existence from that point on to be about more than constantly checking and monitoring weight and tinkering with aspects of my diet.

In all honesty I wanted this blog and my everyday world to become a story where I was well adjusted, happily employed, busy doing things I loved and finally – secure in a relationship that makes me feel valued.

Maybe by now I’d have a dog…

Maybe some of that is just wishful thinking though (possibly not the dog though…) because I’ve realised that to leave oneself no breathing room or ‘space to fail’ with deeply entrenched eating habits is a bad thing.

At least for me.

I think I may have to accept that there will be periods in life where I’m the slimmest that I can be and there are others when I’m definitely going to be a bit more cuddly.

Thankfully I recently aquired a great barometer – and she’s proven that she’ll support me when I want to be lighter and also me when I’m a little heavier.

It’s nice to have a voice of sanity (attached to a finger invariably poking me in the ribs) when I’m busy trying to tear myself to shreds with negative inner monologues.

Truthfully though it’s actually helped to have my very first Christmas both off and on plan – and you can trust me when I say that I’ve enjoyed more than my fair share of Christmas cake and other treats!

This Christmas has been very very different to any other year that I’ve experienced though and I don’t just mean in terms of my willingness to consume seasonal nom nom’s.

Since 2016 it’s been relatively easy to have an austere holiday period. I could sit alone at home, not having to acknowledge the time of year and treat each meal time the same way that I would on every other day of the year.

If I wanted to have a salad on Christmas day then who would care? It would after all be only me sitting in front of the TV with a Pyrex mixing bowl full of lettuce so it wouldn’t matter one little bit.

However – after reaching my target weight Christmas suddenly (and a little unexpectedly) became more poignant.

Whereas the 25th of December used to be just a another day on the calendar to me, over time it’s become something that carries a lot more weight than it used to. I’d even go so far as to say that events relating to it have (bit by bit) changed every aspect of my life.

Amazingly it’s only the third year running that I’ve put a tree up.

The first year (link) was something of a triumph for me to do it at all because doing so was wrapped up in lots of long held and very negative associations with my childhood.

When I finally decided it was time to make a change in 2017 the act represented hope and a sense that things were finally changing for the better in my life. I was on my way to target and the tree I bought ultimately ended up covered with decorations that were donated to me by the women at my Slimming World group.

It also had a SW cardboard wish bauble on it with my goal.

Furthermore (although I didn’t buy it) I also had begun to try on some seasonally themed clothing – which was a major leap towards a festive attitude that I’d never felt before.

The following year was quite different though – and instead of me looking at my delicately dressed tree as a symbol of all the positive changes that I’d made in my life (and a reminder of the generosity of others) I instead sat back and viewed it with an overwhelming sense of sadness because all of a sudden it made me feel crushingly lonely (link).

Things happen for a reason though – and as everyone now knows it was that post which prompted my current partner to reach out to me.

The rest (as they say) is history.

This year therefore is (what I consider to be) my first real Christmas since I was a child – because the entirety of it has been spent with someone that’s not only very important to me but makes me very very happy.

Consequently we’ve done Xmas properly – from unwrapping our gifts on Christmas morning (I used to open them as I got them more often than not), having a special dinner, travelling to see family, hosting family, eating cheese and biscuits, indulging a glass or two of Prosecco (I had fizzy pop instead) tucking into in some festive chocolates, playing board games, watching movies and also diving (with great gusto) into some more chocolate.

None of this was really on plan – and I couldnt really even claim it was ‘flexible synning’.

It was really just synning – and therefore my overall maintain is something that is totally deserved. If I (well more accurately WE) hadn’t been so focused on exercise it could just easily have been a massive gain.

Instead my other half and I managed for the entire two week holiday period from the 20th December to today (my partner is a teacher so was off work) to go swimming every single day that wasn’t a bank holiday as well as walking an average of around 9 miles.

For me that meant about 14+ kilometres in the pool and almost 130+ miles on foot.

It’s going to be difficult to get out of the relaxed ‘treat myself’ mentality now though – but do so I must, because now Christmas is over, the decorations have to come down, and my exercise needs to continue without cake.

Balls.

That’s going to be a challenge.

However – I’ve done it before and I can do it again.

Today (Sunday) we got up at 6.30am, got ready, walked two and a half miles to Leamington’s Newbold Comyn leisure centre, swum a kilometre (and I managed a record time for me of 26.50) had a sauna, sat in the plunge pool, walked two and a half miles back again, went straight out to do the shopping (Aldi is CARNAGE unless you’re there waiting for it to open at 9.55am on a Sunday) and then finally returned home to have breakfast and a cup of tea at 11am.

Now all I have to do is not eat everything in sight for the rest of the day and week ahead.

It’s going to be a tall order – but I’m willing to give it a go.

From this point on though (just in case) I’m not going to get rid of the jeans and shirts with a waist that allows for a little bit of wriggle room, but instead put them at the back of a shelf in my wardrobe and save them for a ‘rainy day’.

I’ve currently got nine weeks left on my SW 12 week countdown (I purchased it a while back) and by the end of it I’m calling target – wherever that may be because I have absolutely sod all left to prove and I’m still as fit as a butcher’s dog.

My current goal weight in SW’s system is 15st, and I need to drop a stone and a half in order to get back into that range (15st 3lbs is the top end), which I think is probably do-able in two months.

If I can get any lower then that’s a bonus – but this time around I’ve not got to worry about photoshoots or press calls at the Ritz – I’ve just got to get to a maintainable and comfortable number that suits me and doesn’t mean I have to buy another 100 shirts.

(At least another 100 in a larger size…)

Here goes nothing!

Davey

The wages of cake So, the results are in for the Christmas and New Year period. It was a maintain.

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literateape · 6 years

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The Graceful Failure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel

By David Himmel

I didn’t vote for Rahm Emanuel the first time he ran in 2011. I don’t remember who I voted for because that vote was less one for that candidate and more one against Rahm. Never liked the guy. Didn’t trust him. He seemed weasely back when he was running the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and shamelessly opportunistic and out of touch with Chicago when he plopped in to run for mayor. I was right.

But in 2015, I went against my better judgement and cast a vote for Rahm, thus making his reelection all the more absolute despite his approval rating of 35 percent. I was wrong here. Completely wrong. Wrong for voting for Rahm, of course, but also wrong for the reason I voted for the swine. It was a single reason. I was a single-issue voter in 2015.

I was working under contract as a marketing strategist for a non-profit with a mission to bring arts education (music, theater, visual arts) into all Chicago Public Schools strictly through private funding to tide CPS over until they could get their financial shit together and fund the programs in full forever. Without boring you by dragging you through the weeds, the organization’s mission was a righteous one. Arts education has proven to have vast benefits to the whole student. As part of this capital campaign the organization was championing, there was great involvement with CPS and many Chicago leaders. One of these was, obviously, Rahm.

The work I was doing also came at a time when tensions between the mayor and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) were almost as high as they’d ever been. But when are tensions not high between the CTU and the mayor’s office? From where I stood, at the time, I thought much of the trouble CPS faced was due in large part to the CTU, specifically, its president, Karen Lewis’ brash, vehement, unforgiving leadership. In no way did I think Rahm didn’t screw the pooch with CPS time and time again in his first term, but I was convinced that the future of CPS would be brighter if the CTU could dial back some of its fury and be reasonable. I felt they were solely focused on self-preservation rather than quality education. And Rahm was just the tough, hateful sonofabitch to stand up to Lewis and the union, and beat them down to size. Chuy Garcia, Rahm’s opponent that year, was not. Though I otherwise really liked Chuy. He seemed to me to be a Chicago neighborhood kind of leader. The antithesis of Rahm. The kind of leader Chicago needed. Or as good a leader as Chicago was going to get.

I wavered back and forth on what I would do on election day. Rahm or Chuy. Chuy or Rahm. As I entered the voting booth, I couldn’t shake the thought of my children. Children I didn’t have. Hell, Katie and I weren’t even engaged yet. But I was thinking about my imaginary family far off in the future. And I thought about my kids’ education. And I knew that if they were to have any hope of attending a school inside of a district with any kind of potential for real educational prosperity, the change to CPS needed to begin immediately. Rahm, therefore, would be my guy. He would whip that school system into shape. I voted for Rahm.

I walked out of the booth and the building tense.

“Fuck!”

I felt dirty. I felt silly. I felt sad. And I was right to feel that way because not long after the election, Rahm’s handpicked CEO of CPS, Barbara Byrd-Bennett had to step down amid some pretty hefty bribery charges. She was found guilty and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in the same cushy prison Martha Stewart once called home. At the time of this writing, the old, greedy bitch has one year down and three-and-a-half to go. With that news, it was crushingly clear that CPS was hopeless under Rahm’s watch. He couldn’t be trusted. He was a crook, a typical pol who put his guys in jobs despite their obvious penchant for corruption and/or vast incompetence. In that way, really, Rahm was as much the perfect Chicago mayor as either of the Daleys had been. Which is exactly why I didn’t like him to begin with.

So, I was pissed. Pissed at Rahm, pissed at myself, but happy that the contract with that non-profit concluded because it became harder and harder for me to market strategies for a campaign I knew was going to fail. And it did. Because there is no trust in CPS’s leadership. We had heard, “I’d be happy to support the arts in schools but where’s the sustainability? How do I know my money will be used appropriately?”

Yeah, that’s the thing about Chicago, you never know how your money is going to be used. Or who is using it.

I must pause here to make clear that my opinion of the CTU has mellowed. Perhaps because I learned exactly how systemically fucked things were at the hands of city leadership, rather than CTU’s leadership. Sort of. I think things got better after Lewis got sick, then better, but seemed to mellow out. I also don’t think that my kid will be screwed by attending a CPS school. He’ll be fine. School is only part of the equation. I, apparently, went to a fantastic school system, and I’m lucky I read a calendar. Katie and I will just make up for whatever they’re unable to teach him because of budget cuts or whatever. That’s parenting. I also have the utmost absolute faith in CPS teachers. Well, the few I know. I’m sure plenty of them are awful. And can you blame them?

And then there were the 16 shots. And all other matters of police brutality, cover ups, the Blue Collusion to never do the right thing when one of your brothers did wrong. The obvious distaste Rahm had for the poor; the obvious hard-on he had for the Loop. Yeah, he stood up to Trump with that whole sanctuary city thing but so what? That’s easy. He easily lost points by offering blow jobs and anal to Amazon — a deal that looked almost as fiscally irresponsible as Daley Junior’s parking meter deal.

I was standing in the green room of the WBEZ studios waiting to record a podcast for POLITICO Focus when the news broke.

“Fuck!”

I was ecstatic.

But now what? I was concerned that no one could beat Rahm in 2019. He’s got too much money, he’s too powerful, he’s too… Rahm. Now that he’s gone, there’s a new hard part to get through, which is getting a candidate of real quality that won’t split the progressive vote making room for a chud to come in and lazily let the city continue to careen into financial and social chaos. Or worse, take the helm by the nutsack and slam the throttle down.

Yesterday was for celebrating. Today is for action.

So what’s next? For Rahm? Well… He already raised $10 million for his re-election. I don’t know what the stipulations are on returning campaign money if the candidate drops out. The most cursory of investigations into it left me no smarter or dumber on the subject. So, assuming it’s his money to do with as he pleases, here’s what I suggest Rahm do with that $10 million in his suit breast pocket.

• Give the money to CPS. Fund the fucking arts already. Or…

• Create a political science program in CPS high schools. Rahm can be a guest lecturer the day the Doltish Corruption lesson comes up.

• Drive through the city’s poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods — someone will have to show him where they are — tossing stacks of cash out the window a la Jesse Pinkman. He owes them that.

But what’s he really going to do? I imagine that he’ll spend the next three to eight months furiously beating his knob to a pulp jerking it to footage from the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots in Grant Park. You know, back when Chicago was a city he could get behind. One where the police policed.

Maybe he’ll spend his days eating Arby’s sandwiches hoping to find a finger in his food. His finger.

But what do we do? We find the right person for the job. Someone to replace him. Someone who isn’t a Big Bill Thompson or a Daley or a Rahm. Someone who isn’t even a Byrne. Someone who is a Washington. Someone who has Chicago in their DNA but is everything the politics of Chicago is not. Someone good, for fuck’s sake.

We can also head up to Rahm’s house in Ravenswood and celebrate his riddance in the same manner in which we celebrated the Cubs winning the World Series.

While any and/or all of that happens, we should, as I’m sure the mayor did before coming to his decision, consider his legacy. What will Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s legacy be?

A badass motherfucker who turned and ran from his failure. He wasn’t man enough to face the consequences of his misplaced pride. He wasn’t man enough to stick it out and make good on all his rhetoric.

Then again, maybe it takes a man to recognize that you’ve fucked something so fucked already so badly there’s no way you can mend it. Best to leave it to the next foolish bastard who thinks they can go toe-to-toe with Chicago.

#Mayor Rahm Emanuel #Rahm Emanuel #Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel #Chicago Mayor #Laquan McDonald #16 Shots #WBEZ #Justin Van Dyke #Arby's #1968 Democratic National Convention

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theliterateape · 6 years

Text

The Graceful Failure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel

By David Himmel

I walked out of the booth and the building tense.

“Fuck!”

Yeah, that’s the thing about Chicago, you never know how your money is going to be used. Or who is using it.

I was standing in the green room of the WBEZ studios waiting to record a podcast for POLITICO Focus when the news broke.

“Fuck!”

I was ecstatic.

Yesterday was for celebrating. Today is for action.

• Give the money to CPS. Fund the fucking arts already. Or…

• Create a political science program in CPS high schools. Rahm can be a guest lecturer the day the Doltish Corruption lesson comes up.

Maybe he’ll spend his days eating Arby’s sandwiches hoping to find a finger in his food. His finger.

We can also head up to Rahm’s house in Ravenswood and celebrate his riddance in the same manner in which we celebrated the Cubs winning the World Series.

While any and/or all of that happens, we should, as I’m sure the mayor did before coming to his decision, consider his legacy. What will Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s legacy be?

#Mayor Rahm Emanuel #Rahm Emanuel #Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel #Chicago Mayor #Laquan McDonald #16 Shots #WBEZ #Justin Van Dyke #Arby's #1968 Democratic National Convention

0 notes

3one3 · 7 years

Text

The Sequel - 783

The End of a Very Long Wait

André Schürrle, Juan Mata, other Chelsea players, and random awesome OC’s

(okay they’re less random now but they’re still pretty awesome)

original epic tale

all chapters of The Sequel

“Here, try this. Blow on it! It’s hot! Duhhhh.”

“Very good, but it needs salt.”

“I haven’t put the cheese in yet. The cheese makes it saltier.”

“Can I try a-“

“No! Hands off!”

“What difference does it make if I eat one now or eat it in three minutes with the pasta and sauce?”

“It’s better with the pasta and sauce! It’s like wasting one. Meatballs are not a renewable resource.”

“Actually they really are.”

“Actually they’re really not, because we’re going to run out of grass to graze the cow on.”

“Okay but ground turkey doesn’t come from cows.”

“Yeah. Well. Okay. We’ll run out of something necessary to raise turkeys too.”

Juan walked away laughing and Christina frowned at her skillet of creamy sauce for her Swedish meatballs, which happened to be of the turkey variety. I used beef stock though! So it still requires cows! I’m still right, she argued to herself. They were going to order Thai delivery but the lady who answered the phone at their favorite spot warned of a long wait, so the rider ran down to the market for a couple of ingredients to throw together her dad’s Swedish meatball and egg noodle recipe. It was easy and quick and tasty, and she didn’t get to Juan’s until almost 9 on Wednesday night so the first two benefits were crucial. Her first day post-André was long and busy because she put some things off during his last days in London to spend more time with him. Juan’s family had all gone back from whence they came too, and his sad Christmas tree was in the collection pile outside with his neighbors’. The twinkle lights from his bedroom were packed away somewhere, and with them the extra cozy feeling they conjured in there a week earlier.

“You want more Riesling?” the Spaniard asked.

“Obviously.” Christina held her glass out behind her and stirred the sauce and noodles with the other hand. She had asparagus steaming on the stove too. He took it from her to top it up.

“Eat at the table or eat on the couch?”

“Couch.”

The couch was where the pair of friends ate and where they ended up entrenched for almost three hours. They found an illegal HD copy of Manchester By The Sea after some diligent online hunting. The film generated a lot of Oscar buzz and was touted as the best of the season. It was brilliantly shot, even more brilliantly acted, viciously real, and soul crushingly depressing. Each time they thought maximum sadness had been reached, something even more tear jerking was revealed about the characters. The depths to which the movie dragged Christina, who identified most with the perfectly captured awkwardness of human interaction following a death, had her clinging tighter and tighter to the player. She ended up lying on her stomach and hugging his waist. He was on his back, perpendicular to her, and got squeezed each time she felt like crying, like that could ward it off. The screenplay writer and the film’s director helped to dam the viewers’ tears by providing blunt, raw, and exquisitely timed and delivered comedy. The jokes broke up the sadness, and, unusually for most really good serious plots, were truly laugh-out-loud funny. It was bedtime after they discussed the unsatisfying ending, because they had an early flight to Spain in the morning and because it was just bedtime anyway.

“Are you sleeping with me, or?” the player asked the rider as she drained her water glass before getting up from the couch. He stood in front of the coffee table and scratched his elbow. It was an awkward gesture and it reminded her of the movie. It reminded her of the number of times the main character said “okay, thanks” to the three people in the hospital telling him about and helping him deal with the immediate fallout of his older brother’s death. That is to say, his itching seemed like something one does when one does not know what else to do.

“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked back once the water was gone.

“Two weeks with him...maybe things change,” Juan shrugged.

“Not really.” Oh you have no idea how they’ve changed, Christina smirked to herself. She hadn’t thought about that all day. She didn’t spend her workday thinking about how she had permission to do whatever she wanted with him that night, or feeling eager about it. It didn’t occur to her at all until that moment.

“Good. That means I can give you your gift from the Three Kings a little early.” He smiled but it was unclear to her if he was grinning because improving things with André did not result in her wanting to put some distance between them, or if it was the present. She told him some of the good things that happened with the German during his stay. For example, when André said she could stay in London until the house was ready, she told Juan the next day. When they had three “good days” in a row, she shared that with her friend too. She was tactful about it so as not to rub anything in his face that might disappoint him. She just wanted to share her updates with someone and Natasha was not as in the loop as Juan.

“Is it a miniature Sicilian donkey? I hope it’s a donkey.”

“Why would it be a donkey?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t the three kings come on donkeys or something? I don’t know anything about this holiday,” the rider shrugged, following him to the bedroom.

“Do you know of many kings who rode miniature donkeys?”

“No. I don’t know. Has Sicily ever had a king? I can’t really picture some fat mafia guy on one, but I’m sure Sicily hasn’t always been full of fat mafia guys. Is my present really in the bathroom?” Christina inquired with a skeptical brow situation when her friend waved for her to follow him in there.

“Yes.”

“Why? Why do I feel like it’s going to be something gro-“

“Here you are.” The Chelsea man opened the top drawer of the stack in the middle of the vanity and produced a toothbrush with a red bow tied around it, and then a box of paste too. Both were her brand, not his. “Ta da! Now you don’t have to use mine and complain about how disgusting my toothpaste is every...single...time...you stay here.”

“Aww, Juaniiiin,” she laughed. “How sweet. You know your girlfriend is going to notice the suspicious arrival of a third toothbrush though, right?”

“Not if it stays in that drawer.” He pointed at the one he’d just opened and closed, and raised his eyebrow too. “She keeps all of her crap in the drawers on the left.”

“Sneaky.”

“Mmm.”

“For such a good, upstanding person, you sure know how to...how should I say it? Conceal things? Cloak your misdeeds?”

“I’m not doing anything wrong! Hiding a toothbrush is only significant if the toothbrush is a symptom of a secret affair. We’re not having an affair, and your presence here is not a secret,” Juan shrugged, untroubled.

“Then why hide the toothbrush?”

“Because it’s easier to hide it than it is to explain it,” he smiled with huge, blinking eyes.

“Uhhuh. Well, thank you. I actually brought my own this time since I knew I was staying. Aaaand I brought my own pajamas and everything. How many times do I have to stay over before I get my own drawer in the closet?”

“You girls are so needy about space. Want me to evict T from her drawer?”

“No. I don’t want another girl’s sloppy drawer seconds.”

“Then you get no drawer.”

“Each one of us must live the life God gives him; it cannot be shirked.”

“You’re talking about God to me?”

“No, I’m quoting Sophocles to illustrate my acceptance of the denial of a drawer, which is obviously very serious and significant.” Christina winked at the player who was doing a surprisingly good imitation of André’s standard confused-face, gave him a peck on the cheek, and turned around to get some things from her overnight bag so she could prepare for bed.

You know what could be fun, she asked her reflection a moment later while she brushed her teeth and he was next door in the closet. Just getting into bed and assaulting the teddy bear. He’d never see it coming. He’s been bizarrely appropriate all night. He’d be so confused if I went in there naked and started kissing him and whatever else and then just never stopped. Do I want to do that though? And would I want it to be like that? A couple of weeks ago I was wanting to have romantic, meaningful sex with him- like the earth-moving kind. But I don’t want to want that. I don’t really mind wanting to just...have some fun with him. Is that worth it? What if it gets weird? I have to spend all of tomorrow with him. I can’t just escape home. And what if it gets weird weird? Me and Schü are almost normal right now. How is he gonna feel if the first day he’s gone I come over here and do Juan?

The Spanish player walked in behind her to brush his teeth too, and she realized she’d been moving her new Crest tool over the same couple of teeth the entire time she theorized about her next move. It was time to rinse. There were always two small glasses on his vanity- one next to the left sink and one next to the right sink- and she always used the sink and the glass on the right because that was his. He took a step back to give her room to rinse. What could it really hurt, the rider asked herself. I’m not in any kind of romantic mood. His toothbrush gift did not fill my tummy with lovestruck butterflies. And having sex like everyday is doing wonders for my sleep, and really for my skin too. My skin is always better with regular orgasms.

Christina patted her face dry with a hand towel and then instead of patting some moisturizer into her dry spots and putting her jewelry in the toiletries bag, she wrapped her arms around Juan’s waist from behind. He paused his brushing for a second and eyed her skeptically in the mirror. As soon as he looked down into the sink she lowered her hands down his stomach and into his terry shorts. That garnered even more disparity in the direction of his eyebrows. She felt around over his underwear and gave the important parts underneath a squeeze.

“What are you doing?” he asked after spitting a mouthful of foam into the porcelain square.

“Saying hello,” she told him innocently while peeking over his shoulder with a pleasant and polite smile. He offered a sarcastic frown back with more foam leaking out of the side of his mouth. The expat settled back onto the flat of her feet from her toes and patted his stomach as part of her hands’ retreat from inside his clothes. Juan resumed brushing but his eyes were still narrowed and fixed exclusively on her in the mirror. “I’m gonna go change!” Her bag was on the bench at the foot of his bed.

“K,” he grunted while brushing.

What should I put on? It’s not like I packed for this. I have a t-shirt for sleeping, a tank top for under my sweater for tomorrow, another pair of boring underwear, and the bra I’m currently wearing, which is not sexy. Am I so into the planning of the execution here because I’m not that into the act in the first place? Or because I’m deflecting from some hesitation? Or because...I don’t even know. Some other thing. Should I just chill? Just see what happens? What do I actually want to happen? Just chill. This is already getting out of hand, Christina told herself. She took a deep breath, moved her curling iron out of the way in her overnight bag, grabbed her t-shirt, and tried to be calm about stripping off her jeans and comfy plaid shirt.

“Do I get to-“

“Jesus!” she shrieked, surprised by the Spaniard’s voice a couple of feet back and to the right. She’d retreated so far into her thoughts that she neither heard nor saw him pad into the room while she was folding her clothes.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he chuckled. “I was asking if I get to walk up behind you and grope you as well, or if that is only your privilege?”

“Just mine.” Christina dropped her white tee over her head and fought her arms into the proper holes, which was surprisingly difficult all of a sudden. Juan’s standing there watching her made the most practiced and mundane tasks into something she actually had to think about. He spared her further weirdness by sitting on the bed to plug his phone in on the nightstand, and by the time he’d moved over to the proper side of the mattress, the rider had successfully removed her bra from under the shirt and put all of her clothes in the bag. Her next task was to try to be “normal” again, and forget that she’d allowed herself to descend into some obsessive planning for something she didn’t even know if she wanted.

“I’m not setting my alarm. Can you wake me up at 10 to 6?”

“Yeah. Does that mean we’re leaving at 6:30? Ten minutes to avoid getting up, 30 to get ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Yuck. That means I have to get up at 5.”

“Pobrecita.”

“It’s going to be so embarrassing when I can’t talk to the kids we meet because they speak too fast and my Spanish is rusty.”

“Should I speak to you exclusively in Spanish in the morning? For practice?”

“No. I don’t do foreign languages at 6 in the morning. I barely do English at 6 in the morning,” Christina clarified as she unfolded her legs under the off-white duvet. Ahh. This bed. So squishy, she reflected happily, the featherbed absorbing her like quicksand. “Do you ever dream in English?

“I’ve had dreams where I speak in English, particularly to you, but if I think in my dreams it’s probably in Spanish. I don’t know. I don’t know how much thinking I do.”

“So you dream about me often now eh?” The rider turned on her side, a hand under her pillow to prop it up, and smiled a little.

“You’re in my dreams a lot,” Juan shrugged. He held both lips between his teeth for a second before clarifying. “Not always as the main character or event. Sometimes you’re just there. I’m not like you though. You habitually dream about me.”

“Not in a while, actually. I haven’t slept well enough for a long time to have or remember my dreams, and then when I do get really good sleep I don’t remember them either.”

“You’re sleeping better now? Lately?”

“Much. How’d you guess?” Christina smiled.

“Your face. You don’t look as tired the last few weeks.” The Spaniard got more settled on his pillow too, flattening out instead of sitting up. He had an elbow to lean on though, evidently not ready for sleep yet, or just hoping to talk more, or assuming more talk was coming. The lights were still on too. “It makes me happy, to see you feeling better, but also not so happy, because I know it’s because he’s been here.”

“To be honest, I don’t know if I’m feeling better just because he’s been around, or if it’s more because we’ve tried to sort some of our issues out, and because I haven’t had to show, or travel, and I get to spend so much time with Lukas, and now because I know I don’t have to go live in that apartment. It’s okay for you to be unhappy about the mechanism of my happiness though,” she insisted. “I get upset when somebody else makes you happy too, and then I get upset that I’m upset,” she chuckled.

“I know. Taylor is the same. I think everyone is like that.”

“Do you want to make me feel better about groping you?”

“Uh, I think you felt fine with it, cariña,” the player corrected. “That was not a guilty face you made, nor is this smirk you make at me now. It has Bad Girl all over it, not Sad Girl.” Christina let her face fall and asked a serious follow up.

“Which do you like better? Is Bad Girl way more attractive than Sad Girl?”

“They have their own...virtues.” Juan reached out to touch her nose with the tip of his finger, and then followed the arch of each brow. “They are both you, always, and I find all of you attractive, always. Except the dirt under your fingernails,” he added, in case the conversation was getting too serious. “You know, when you let your nails get too long and you don’t have color on them and get your barn dirt in there? So unattractive.”

The barn girl agreed about the barn dirt under her nails, but that wasn’t the important part of what was said. He implied that she was always at least a little Bad and always a little Sad, and she felt that was pretty true. Happiness didn’t come with an on/off switch for her. The Bad part was something she wasn’t completely sure about. There were times when she felt entirely guileless. But her sadness never went away. She was certain that Sad Girl was always part of Chris. Her friend had the right answer to the question too. He wasn’t just right about her personalities. He said he was attracted to them no matter the proportion in which they expressed themselves at any given time. He said “always”.

“Is this okay? Does it meet your approval?” She brought her left hand out from under the blanket for him to inspect her nails. They were both short and polished, in a durable satin black finish.

“Yes. I’m glad you didn’t grope me with dirt under your nails.”

“So you’re saying you’re fine with this hand- this one right here- touching you inappropriately?” Christina wiggled her fingers about and looked through them at her friend, as if to look through prison bars.

“Actually that is not at all what I said, but I don’t mind if you interpret incorrectly- if you tell me why you want to,” Juan challenged placidly. He took her hand back and tried to gently use it to hit her in the face.

“The simplest answer is that I’m allowed to. I’m allowed to sit on you,” she narrated as she tugged her hand away from him and used it to help push him over on his back so that she could sit on his rather tiny torso. “I’m allowed to touch you however I want, and to have you touch me back however I want, or you want, or I want. Whatever,” she smiled a little after installing the footballer’s hands on her hips and settling hers atop his shoulders. “I’m allowed to kiss you however I want, and you’re allowed to kiss me back however you feel like it.” Her lengthy explanation included a chaste kiss and no opportunity for him to kiss back, regardless of whichever way he wanted to. It finished with the epitome of a Bad Girl look- her left brow lifted from the middle, her mouth open just enough to show off the way her tongue swished slowly, delectably, back and forth over her front teeth, and her eyes alight with familiar mischief. “And I’m allowed to fuck you however I want, or even however you want, if you’re lucky.”

“And is that your doing or his offering?” the Spaniard inquired with fistfuls of her butt. The question gave her pause. Does it matter to him, she wondered. Does it make it better to him if I asked Schü to be allowed to do these things, versus Schü offering it first? And if it does matter, is it because of his relationship with him or me? I don’t want to be a pawn, and I don’t want to be a prize either.

“Why does it matter?”

“I’m curious why you would even talk to him about it if things are going well for you two. It’s not like you to risk upsetting anything. It would surprise me if you asked him.”

“I didn’t ask him. He asked me.”

“Just, out of nowhere?”

“He saw me swoon at the bowling alley last week when you told me about your dream, so he asked some questions and...well it’s a long story but he doesn’t mind, and he doesn’t want me to worry that it would upset him, and then consequently worry about why it doesn’t bother me that I want to do things that upset him. I actually- I want to tell you all about it, in detail, but not right now...”

“What do you want to do right now?” Juan asked flatly. Christina worried that her answers were wrong- or not wrong, exactly, but not what he wanted them to be. She worried he was only interested if she was the one seeking approval to be with him, and she was putting her relationship in jeopardy for him, or she was choosing him over doing the best thing for it. She worried that André’s effort to take his own argument away from him was some kind of disappointment to him. So she formulated a test.

“I want to connect with you,” she told him in a tiny voice, with her hip tilted forward against him and her face right above his and her hands squeezing his shoulders. The obvious answer would have been to just say “I want to fuck you” or “I want to be with you”. But he talks about the connection we have when we’re together- together, together, like in the literal sense of the word- and he gets that longing look in his eyes like I’m the whole world to him, and okay, maybe 20 minutes ago I wasn’t even thinking of this at all, and okay, maybe when I did think of it I was thinking more about the physical excitement of being with him again after so long, and being with someone different, and that...that ridiculous feeling I get when he finds that one little spot from the back that I can’t get anywhere near with toys and Schü doesn’t get to the same with his toy, but I want the emotions too. Schü said it’s allowed, and if that makes a difference to Juanin and gets rid of this hesitant skepticism I get from him then that’s what I want. Plus I just want him to have the connection. “And I didn’t know that I wanted that until 15 seconds ago, so please forgive me if my prior actions don’t seem to line up.” Her addendum was for honesty’s sake, and because she didn’t want to appear to be playing him, or making fun.

“Why? What changes in 15 seconds?”

“I remembered how you look at me, and what you said it means to you. I want you to have the connection.” Christina relocated one of her hands to touch the player’s face. She rubbed her thumb near the corner of his forehead, by the hairline. “I wanna have it with you.”

“You’re sure? This doesn’t make sense to me, what you say.” Juan shook his head back and forth slowly. He didn’t have that look of calm mixed with anticipation that she anticipated.

“You thought things would be bad between me and him when I finally said yes, and that it would mean more for you,” she surmised, kind of sad, kind of dejected. “You thought it would be the beginning of his end and the start for you.” He always said it wouldn’t be like that though, the equestrian argued to herself. He went out of his way to say that he thought Schü wouldn’t even care, and that it would just be fun, and meaningless. I’m going to be so disappointed in him if he was ly-

“No. No, no, no, baby girl.” The footballer’s head was wagging back and forth to deny the allegation, and it just confused her more. He hugged her upper body. “I just don’t understand why you would invite the feelings that come with what you say you want. I don’t understand why with your situation improving you would choose to complicate it.”

“I didn’t invite the feelings.” It was Christina’s turn to shake her head. “I was just going to seduce you,” she smiled. “I didn’t plan ahead of time. I thought of it while I was brushing my teeth. I was just going to jump you, basically, and now here I am, here like this, and the feelings are here. I didn’t ask for them. And if you stop scaring me with the hesitation and the total lack of the faces you usually make and the things you do that make me totally die inside for you, then I would like to find out what happens with the feelings. I have to. I have to find out what I’ve been avoiding all this time. Maybe this is how I...figure stuff out. And now I can do it without worrying that it breaks his heart.”

“I’m not hesitant from my side. You don’t have to worry that I don’t want you. I do. I want you to be sure though. You can’t freak out on me in the morning and not speak to me for two weeks.”

“I promise I won’t. Nothing changes like that.” That’s a lie. I can’t really promise that. I even just said to him that maybe this is how I figure things out, she thought. But either I wake up tomorrow and nothing is different between us or I wake up tomorrow somehow knowing I need to be with him, and I hardly think he’ll complain about that. It’s not like I’ll wake up thinking “That was so good and now I know I can’t have a relationship with Juanin or it’ll ruin my marriage forever,” because I’m pretty much already in that boat. Oh, I guess we’re done talking, she concluded silently since her lips were otherwise engaged. The Spaniard used one hand around the back of her head to get those lips close enough to reach with his own.

Juan could kiss. He could do the bare minimum to help get a woman in the mood to have sex, but he could also kiss her like he simply loved kissing her. The gentle way his fingers moved against her scalp and his thumb rubbed her cheekbone, the way he used his lower lip to pull at her mouth and kept his nose pressed right next to hers, and the way he attacked, attacked, attacked until she tried to get aggressive back, and then relaxed for the couple of seconds she spent wondering why he stopped trying to maul her face all combined to give life to the butterflies. They were back. They found their wings. He kept at it until it got sloppy. He clearly went from enjoying making out with his ex-girlfriend to really wanting more than that with his favorite lover. He could be forgiven for it too given the number of false starts he’d had to endure in recent months. He started almost lapping at her- the kissing became all tongue- and it grew unfocussed, both stylistically and geographically. He missed the corner of her mouth and just kissed at her cheek instead. She sat up a little when he tried to move to her neck. He did too. They both went to lift her shirt off at the same time.

“I’ll do mine. You do yours,” Christina smiled. She removed her tee carefully, like a reveal. The footballer yanked his over his head and off his arms and then chucked it somewhere. He was in a hurry to kiss all the newly available skin in front of him.

“Why didn’t-“ he started between smooches around her collarbones. “You tell me this...earlier?”

“Wha?” The rider shut her eyes to savor the exploration. Does he mean why didn’t I tell him sooner that I am leaving a wet spot above his undies? Because I just noticed when I moved back.

“Why didn’t you-“ There was hope that he might actually get a whole sentence or question out, but then his lips attached to her jaw like a suction cup.

“No hickeys...kids...” she mumbled, not yet too distracted to think of consequences. In the back of her mind that realization had significance, but not enough to break through the stuff at the front.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner that you want to do this, angel?” the Chelsea man finally asked. “When there was more time?”

“I told youuuuuu. I didn’t think of it until I was brushing my teeth. Ow! Don’t bite!”

“Never did I imagine the way to get you to want to really be with me again was to give you a toothbrush,” he laughed once he was done biting her left nipple.

“It’s really not that big a leap. You should have seen what I used to do with my electric toothbrush when I was a kid.”

“Ew. Cariña.” A disgusted expression kind of like the one that happened during the dirt and fingernails discussion made Christina laugh more. The non-seriousness was part relief and part disappointment. She wanted the meaningful, romantic love rather than the casual and lighthearted fuck, but she also didn’t want it to get so intense that she stopped feeling the physical because she was too deep in the emotional.

“It had different attachments,” she told him, defensive. “I didn’t use the same one for my teeth as my you know what.”

“How do I make your nerves go away, hm?” Juan softened, and went back to kissing her neck, slowly and more delicate about how his lips treated her warm skin.

“I’m not nervous...”

“You just told me about masturbating with an electric toothbrush,” he whispered near her ear. “You’re nervous.”

“Nope.”

“Alright.” He relaxed back down to his pillow, hands on her thighs on either side of his hips. “You’re very sure? We’re only a few steps from where you usually change your mind. I don’t want to get my hopes up.” An amused smirk did nothing to cover his true skepticism. The nearly naked girl figured it was then or never to show him she wanted the real thing, and that she wasn’t nervous or uncertain.

“Can we skip those steps?” she asked in a tiny and innocent tone that ended up far short of the level of conviction she hoped to convey. Each of her fingers picked a different part of his abs to take in, as if they were unfamiliar and unseen for a while. “I want to skip to the connection part, and you on top of me with your face here.” Christina patted her shoulder and tried to bring her blues anywhere in the vicinity of Juan’s more diverse ones. It was so much easier to take in his whole face as one. It was one she could idly stare at for hours. His beard was relatively thinned out though far from stubble. His normally pale winter complexion was warmed by the moment. His eyebrows were their tidiest. The little bit of baggage he carried under his eyes was spread out because they were squinting at her just a bit- not enough to make wrinkles at the corners. His smile was very understated, so his lips were nearly straight, and they were pale pink instead of a deeper color, and she could tell he was pushing the bottom one out just a tiny bit because it looked bigger than it should. It was part of the subtle grin. There was just the one slightly dipping line in his forehead, so there was no tension in it. He was as handsome to her as anyone could ever be, and she didn’t want to stop looking. “I promise as long as this doesn’t get weird I’ll worship you with my mouth and tongue for as long as you can stand tomorrow when we get back. I just want to skip that stuff now,” she reiterated.

The diminutive Spanish playmaker usually knew, just as he always knew the right play on the pitch, exactly what to say. His finishing was a level better than the rest of his kind too. Cazorla, Silva, Fabregas- none had the same nose for goal, for trying something tricky, for choosing a shot befitting of a top striker. So Christina expected some kind of verbal “finish”. She expected him to say something knee-weakening and heart-melting in response to her request to bypass any further foreplay. But he didn’t have any words for her, or at least not any he was willing to actually offer. Instead he sat upright again, pecked her cheek, and secured an arm around her waist so that she’d stay with him when he switched them from his back to hers. She felt as if she’d been placed gently on the pillow she’d abandoned a few minutes earlier, cool and fresh, rather than simply dumped there or even pressed down. Juan left her for a moment to push the lightweight duvet out of the way, and to push his briefs off and out of the way too. Her loosely fitting mesh pair of underwear went next, and despite the moratorium on such behavior, he was unable to resist kissing the rider’s smooth and sculpted right thigh, and the smooth and less defined area right under her navel. Logistically speaking, and unromantically speaking, and un-sexily speaking, it was not as simple to skip foreplay and go directly to the “connection” for him as it was for her. She could be so turned on by kissing and talking and thinking about what was happening that she left a real wet spot behind where she was sitting on him, and he could grow and get hard from those things too, but not the way he would be if she’d actually touched him there. He did that himself while he used those uncommitted kisses to keep her simmering. Christina thought he was just teasing, like he was unable to forego it, and that made her feel good. She liked that he seemed unable to resist. And her only nerves stemmed from expectations. She wanted what was about to happen to fully meet Juan’s. She wasn’t entirely sure what her own expectations were. Part of her wanted to feel moved and the rest hoped for something less significant. Juan was completely keyed into her thoughts.

“You’re very relaxed,” he observed after visiting on her pillow for a “hey how are you doing” kiss. “For something that has been...built up for such a long time.”

“Because I already know I’ll enjoy whatever happens,” his best girlfriend assured with first a cheeky smile and then an inadvertent lip bite that maybe undermined her facade of confidence. She circled her legs around his butt and tried to hook her feet together. I just mean having sex doesn’t have to change the world for us, she reasoned. It can just be sex. It’s always good with him. I doubt he forgot how. Is he- Instant panic struck when Christina saw a hand disappear and then felt a shallow intrusion between her legs. The anxiety was about how it was going to happen. Is he going to look down there while he does it? Is he going to, like, slide in super slow and gaze into my eyes at the same time? Is he going to kiss me while he- Her mind flicked through all the possible scenarios as quickly as possible. There really was a lot of hype about that moment. She didn’t know if she had a preference for how it would unfold, or if she could immediately analyze the significance of whichever option the Spaniard chose, or how she should respond to it. She didn’t know if she could stare back if he chose to look at her when he finally crossed the line they’d been flirting around for the better part of a year, or if she’d flinch away from whatever was in his eyes. And then it just happened before she could think any further. Juan was inside her. She felt him there. And then his lips were back to kiss her sweetly, and his hands were on the bed on either side of her, making two pillars of his arms, which tucked up against her ribcage. Her fingers wrapped around them and her chest lifted up in between. It was strange and exciting alike to feel something sort of unfamiliar there- something that wasn’t André, or one of André’s naughty gifts to her. The Chelsea player’s lips touched down on her sternum next, and it was then that she realized her eyes had been closed the whole time and she had no idea where his had been when he pushed into her. And it didn’t really matter.

“Is it okay?” he asked her when her chest never relaxed back- when her spine remained arched like something felt too much, be it physical or mental. She nodded, without opening her eyes, and let her hips relax and her legs fall away from him, drawing her knees further apart. Juan took that as an invitation to move, and he did. He also lowered down onto an elbow, and snuck the other arm under her shoulder to hang onto her, and kissed her again- first on her mouth, to suck on her bottom lip again, and then the sharp part of her jaw, and by her ear, and by her pulse, and at her throat. She held onto his head, fingers in his hair, and leaned back even harder into her pillow. It wasn’t that she was trying to get away. It just felt normal for that end of her spine to go one way when the other went the opposite. Her hips lifted to encourage her partner to go a little bit faster. His patience made her desperate. Everything felt. Every nerve was alive to the stimulation on offer. It was overwhelming, and the wave-like sensation of pleasure in the very middle of her upper body ramped up so quickly in intensity that it almost made her anxious. The player kissed her shoulder, and then dropped his forehead and his nose on it the way she said she wanted.

“Juanin,” Christina whispered as both complaint and praise. She didn’t even know what she was complaining about, or asking for, nor why she felt compelled to say anything at all. She hardly ever spoke her husband’s name during sex, or any of the other things by which she called him. It always happened with the other player though. Sometimes it was like encouragement, sometimes it was like she needed to make a noise and his name was the first thing that came to mind, almost like a meaningless mumble, and sometimes it was more like a desperate wail because she was overwhelmed, close to orgasm, and almost afraid of what was coming. Whatever her present noise was about was a mystery, to him too.

“What, baby girl?” he asked softly and without irritation. “More? Less? Different?”

“I don’t know.”

“I love you,” he told her as her hands peeled away from his head and grasped his shoulders instead. They settled with her thumbs on his collarbones, and just clung on at first. Then she summoned a little strength away from just trying to feel everything to push him away a bit, and give her even more room to lift her chest, and her chin. Making distance had nothing to do with his saying he loved her, and everything to do with wanting more leverage for her hips. Juan let go of her to hold one of her legs open even further, and it made her squirm- firstly because it was the one still recovering from the adductor strain, and secondly because the new angle of penetration felt “more”. I love you too.

“More,” she requested in the same tone as she said his name. Her blunt nails tried to dig into him too. He pushed faster, finally enough to get him breathing harder. “No. More of the I-love-you,” the rider corrected. That produced a work stoppage. Just one of her eyes opened slowly to find out why once she realized it wasn’t temporary. Both of his were fixed on her face, and they smirked just as much as his mouth did. “I love you too.” Her offered response was earnest and quiet and matter of fact with no emphasis on the “too”, and she rubbed his chest at the same time, one hand focused very much over his heart. The Spaniard leaned down to kiss her forehead and then shifted over beside her to hold her the way she’d been thinking about for weeks because André tried to do the same. He wedged himself under her right shoulder, hugged her neck with his left arm, and pulled her right leg over and back so he could slide into her again, with access to everything he wanted to be able to touch- her breasts, her stomach, her clit. Christina relaxed into the hold like it was where she was meant to be, and she reached backward for his face as soon as he brought it near so that she could kiss him and let him know she liked his intuition. His always considered and careful hand closed around her throat.

“Angel,” he whispered into her mouth while it stayed open expecting more smooching.

“Do you feel it?”

“Sí.”

“It’s what you wanted?”

“You are all I wanted. Beautiful...sexy...mine.”

“Juaanin.” Jeez that was an undignified whimper, she thought about what came out of her mouth, still centimeters from the one saying things that combined with the movement of his back and hips to bring her closer to feeling the unique kind of ecstasy to which she was looking forward.

“Keep saying it.” His hand was heavy on her throat, almost threateningly, and that was exciting too.

“Juanin,” she repeated, trying not to roll her eyes behind their lids. It was her assumption, based on the situation and on the dirty dream he told her about, that he just wanted to hear his name moaned in all the different, breathless ways in her repertoire, and probably screamed later when he grew tired of “connecting” and would tell her to switch to her knees and elbows.

“Not that.” But he surprised her.

“I love you.”

“Angel.” And moved faster, and squeezed tighter around her throat, when she said the right thing.

“I love you.” More.

“Christina.” More.

“I love you.” More.

“Babyg- ugh!” He groaned for a second before smashing his lips into hers. It was like a crash, like he forgot their mouths were already so close they were probably just breathing the same air back and forth to one another. Christina made a little moaning sound of her own because of the intensity she felt, having that heavy, constricting weight on her windpipe and then having her lips assaulted. The other intensity- the kind she felt when she realized he was even more turned on- more affected by “I love you” than she was- was deliciously all encompassing and had her body struggling to keep up. Her head tilted back the second his possessive lips relented, and she tried to take a deep breath. Juan let go of her throat and pressed the heel of his palm into her pubic bone instead, his fingers feeling around where they were joined for a way to make her feel even better, and he was delicate and careful about it. Her neck relaxed, and she opened her eyes as she brought her chin back down. The player was the one to shirk the eye contact. He nuzzled at her cheek and pecked at her jaw, all the while keeping the steady rhythm in and out of her. “I want to be good to you, angel. Not selfish.” He made her wonder if he thought he was hurting her before, forcing her to overdo it with something she maybe didn’t believe or feel as much as repeating it might indicate, and indulging the part of her that liked to be a little bit used and a little bit hurt. That was something she couldn’t get from André. He was significantly more fearful about her occasional self-destructive compulsions.

“I like it when you’re selfish.”

“But only in bed.”

“Don’t go there.”

“I won’t.”

“I love you. I love you so much.”

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