#me chanting to myself: i love this job i dreamt of this job as a kid i love this job i dreamt of this job as a kid i love

[lvrby-katsuki]

why do i always get stuck with draining urine bags <//3

#medical clerkship #me chanting to myself: i love this job i dreamt of this job as a kid i love this job i dreamt of this job as a kid i love #knowing DAMN well i'll be stuck taking everyone's lunch order 🤡 #anyways i spent my 4 min breather typing this out lol #i'm gonna assist a resident in an operation this evening #it's my first time and I AM HYPED 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩 #(yes realistically speaking i'll only get to retract the suture IF IM LUCKY. but idc. i want it.) #🍞. ∾gie talks

[embracehappy]

Tour starts today! and I had a dream (AU vibes)

HAPPY DAY 1 OF TOUR! We love our dude and he even managed to sneak into my dreamland last night. I hope you all get the opportunity to see Shawn at some point over the next year! This tour is gonna be so good!

So this is silly, but here’s what I dreamt last night:

So somehow I had gotten tickets to the opening show - on the floor, in the center, second row from the stage. And somehow I had gotten there really early before like almost any crowds had started filling the arena. And suddenly a few stadium people come out and they started taking down the seats in the front row. I ask what they’re doing. They said that it was confirmed the whole first row wasn’t coming and the since show starts soon so they’re just removing the seats and giving the second row a better view. (weird) So now I’m sitting first row with some space for dancing right next to the stage. I take note of my surroundings. The arena has started to fill up, but not really. Also the person seated to my left is now here. (We’ll name him Tim) I knew him in high school and quit frankly I didn’t and still don’t like him that much. He’s annoying. But he starts trying to make small talk with me and since I’m about to have to spend this whole concert next to him, I decided that I should be nice and talk so that I can act like an idiot later when I’m singing and dancing along - No bad vibes at a Shawn concert allowed. So after a bit, the arena still isn’t as full as I think it should be (I must’ve gotten there way earlier than I thought I had. Like first in the doors when they opened or somn.) This is when it gets exciting. 

Out of the corner of my eye I see a figure in a black hoody overseeing the removal of the last of the chairs. He’s on the stage but somehow almost unnoticeable. And then we make eye contact. It takes a second to register, but I quickly realize that it was indeed Shawn Mendes. I smile because I was genuinely having a good time watching the buzz in the arena grow. And then I couldn’t believe what happens next. Shawn smiles back. Then he crouches down and tells one of the arena workers something. He moves across the stage and sits on it’s edge directly in front of me. Somehow NO ONE in the arena is bothered to care that Shawn is on the stage. I walk up to the barrier with a confused look on my face and Tim follows suite. Shawn says “hi welcome to the show!” and his smile gets a little bigger and he does his grabby wave thing. 

“oh! hey! Shouldn’t you be like backstage doing a meet and greet or something?”

“Oh no! It just ended and I wanted to come out and see how the crowd is forming.”

“Well this is a sold out show. So you’re crowd will love you no matter what.”

Shawn blushes and looks away. 

Concern crosses my face. “wait, are you nervous? You have nothing to be afraid of we’re literally all here to see you. And honestly, even if you sound terrible and the stage falls apart, we’ll still love you and have a great time.”

Shawn chuckles. “I know. It’s just this is the first show and I want this tour to be amazing-”

“You’re going to be great.” I cut him off with a soft voice.

Shawn chuckles again. “I definitely will now that I have a friend in the front row! What’s your name?”

“Jackie” (NOT MY NAME I HAVE NO IDEA WHY MY DREAM CHOSE THIS NAME)

“Well, Jackie - When I need a familiar face I’m going to look at you during the show.” 

“I’ll be here” 

Shawn turns his attention to Tim, slightly curious and afraid suddenly. Almost like he just noticed the dude standing next to me. 

But before Shawn can say anything, Tim slaps my shoulder and says “ Don’t worry man, she’s here for you.”

That must’ve been sufficient for Shawn, because he gives a nod to Tim and then winks at me before getting up and running off off the stage. 

Tim promptly turns to me and freaks out. “Oh my gosh you just got hit on by Shawn Mendes!!” 

I run a hand through my hair. “Don’t broadcast it! Who knows what kind of crazys are be listening!”

“Well, by the end of the show, they’ll all know that Shawn has eyes for you. If the concert goes anything like what just happened., Shawn will barely take his eyes off the front row.”

I blush and laugh, hiding my face. “He better not. Andrew is going to kill him”

Αnd that’s when I feel a strong tug on my arm. And then it cuts to black. 

_____

I wake up and there’s beeping white.

 I’m in a hospital bed. I reach for my phone and see a slew of text messages from Tim. 

“Hey are you okay?” “you said you were fine when you walked out” “Where are you?” “I can’t find you” “the show starts in 5″ “Alessia is on stage” “Where the fuck are you” “Alessia is off stage and the crowd is chanting” “Shawn will be out soon” “Shawn’s on stage” “are you okay?” “Shawn looks heart broken”

And thats where the messages stop. The last one sent 15 minutes ago. I text back and let Tim know I’m in a hospital but have no idea what happened. Tim explains someone pulled my arm and I fell and hit my head. I claimed I was fine and just wanted to go splash some water on my face, so I walked out to go find a bathroom. 

I must’ve passed out somewhere along the way. 

A doctor walks in saying that I don’t have any sign of concussion and that I’m free to go. The excitement must have just been to much for me and I passed out, not necessarily because I hit my head, but more likely because I was overwhelmed. I make my way back to the arena. 

____

At the gate, the security won’t let me in because I’ve already scanned my ticket and reentry isn’t allowed. Suddenly I recognize someone from Shawn’s team walking by. I call out and frantically explain to them that I fainted and was taken to the hospital, but was cleared and I really just wanted to watch the final portion of the concert but I can’t get back in. 

Shawn team member look confused and pulls out their phone. “let me just make a quick call.” They walk out of earshot.

The team member hangs up and walks back to me and the security guards. “Okay so I just called Andrew and his description of the fainting girl looks like you, so I’m going to let you back in. But you can’t go to your seat you have to come with me.”

At this point I’m just glad I’m being allowed back in. I follow the team member around the arena and then up a bunch of stairs. Eventually we come to a door and the team member lead me inside. 

It’s a box. But not just any box. It’s full of random lower level team members that don’t have jobs during the actual show itself and have no reason to be backstage. I read some of the name badges and see mostly truck drivers, but I did spot a personal trainer. The view was pretty bad considering I was originally front and center at first row, but these definitely aren’t the worst seats in the house. I shoot Tim a text with an update. 

After a while I’m comfortable. Or at least as comfortable as I could get in an uncomfortable situation. I really did just want to be back on the floor. I get a text from Tim saying “he keeps looking at me, looking for you. I’m going to point to your box.” 

The show continues and then when Shawn is running across the stage during the bridge of Mutual, I hear it. 

“Jack come down!” 

The arena screams in confusion. But I know who he’s talking to. My phone pings, no doubt a message from Tim. I’m shifting my weight trying to decide the best way to get out of the room. Mutual ends and the pause between songs seems a little longer that it should be, probably just first show hiccup I think. 

Half way through the next song, Andrew busts into the box. His eyes are quickly darting around. “You! Jackie! Come on!” Andrew walks out of the room quickly, assuming I’ll follow. And he’s right, I run after him, suddenly very afraid that I’m about to get thrown out. 

Andrew is mumbling something under his breathe about “of course Shawn would meet the one that faints” or something along those lines. Once we’re in an empty area, Andrew turns to me. 

“Okay so here’s the thing. Shawn seems to like you I don’t know how, because there wasn’t a meet and greet and I told him directly not to go on stage prematurely. But anyway - You’re going to go back to your seat on the floor, and after the concert you’re going to stay there and not leave. Someone will come get you. Okay?” 

“got it” 

Andrew points to the entrance to the floor. And I walk that way holding up my floor wristband to be allowed back in. 

As soon as I walk in I feel like Shawn’s eyes are on me. He follows my walk all the way up to me seat. Where Tim had to help me reclaim dominance of the spot. Considering that I was absent for the whole show, people moved in. But once I’m standing and moving to the music I see Shawn smile as he looks away, giving the arena his attention again. 

Throughout the remainder show he would occasionally look down and make eye contact with me, and I could usually see that he was trying to suppress a goofy smile, saving it for when he looked back at the crowd.

At the end of the concert, right before Shawn ran off stage he looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. And the movement was so small, but I’m pretty sure he mouthed “stay” too. Clearly not giving a fuck about the rest of his fans anymore. 

I stood and I waited. The bottlenecked exit made the crowd take forever to disperse on the floor. Tim even disappeared at some point, leaving me all by myself, yet surrounded by people. After the crowd finally broke up more, a arena worker in all black comes up to me. “Jackie?” 

I nod my head. 

“follow me.” I follow them through a series of boundaries and hallways. All empty, until suddenly busy. 

“I was told to bring you here, this is the green room. Theres couches you can sit on” 

I walk into the room and find a few of Shawn’s team members in there. Most notably, Brian. I avoid them all and sit on a couch in the corner. After a few minutes Shawn busts into the room in sweat pants and a t shirt. He must have just showered really quick once he was off stage. He also has more people in tow.

He makes his way over to Brian and the crew but he’s looking around the entire time. He hugs every member in the cluster and gets pushed around by Brian and Josiah He eyes fall on me and he smiles calling out “Jackie!” Everyone turns to look at me and I see Andrew roll his eyes. 

“oh hey!” Shawn walks over and grabs my hand pulling me off the couch and towards his friends. 

_________

That night when checking instagram, I receive a dm notification from Shawn. It’s only one line but it stole my breath (and made me wake up)

“Do you want to come on tour?”

#shawn mendes #dream #shawn mendes au #shawn mendes fic #shawn #shawn mendes fanfic #mendes #Shawn Mendes Imagine

[authorlaneblevins]

The Conjurer

*This is a short story I wrote a very long time ago. Warning: some bad language and sexuality throughout. Enjoy!

“I, of the savage kingdom, will guide you to glory!”  The sound of a Big Easy traffic jam punctures the steady scream of her words, a few of the syllables slipping out into the never-was.  “ ‘Court not death by your erring way of life, nor draw to yourselves destruction by the works of your hands!  Because into a soul that plots evil, wisdom enters not, nor dwells she in a body under debt of sin!’”

The hint of Russian singsong gives her away.  I know her voice better than I know my own.  They say that, no matter how early one is separated from one’s mother, the mind is imprinted with the sound of her voice and conditioned to hear it again; and while decades might pass without hearing it, the lost child could still detect the mother’s voice out of a tapestry of hundreds.  Because it was the first sound, the first pitch and tone and coo to ever have existed.  It was the sound on which all other sounds were based.

I’m sitting on the bench across the street, watching her, the only one watching her.  Ilyena Tracy, still the magician; the way she moves her hands, pushing the air away with them, drawing people inward while keeping me confounded on this frayed bench, wondering how this could’ve happened.

Some small moments are nothing, they don’t snowball into the rest of your life.  But some of them, they’re gods, they own you.

I imagine that, at one point, she lured crowds on the corner with her flailing Fascist body movements, jerks of her arms and a twist of her neck that mimicked cerebral palsy or spiritual ecstasy.  Whenever she bellows the word “sinners,” her face sinks downward toward her neck, and small bubbles collect at the corners of her mouth.

I can’t stomach the battery-acid taste of the coffee anymore, and I hold the cup close to my face as if I’ve paused mid-sip, just to feel the steam siphoning through the lid.  I tear confetti-sized pieces from the letter that Rita slipped into my pocket the last time I saw her.  I’m waiting for my shift in telemarketing purgatory to start, in which I try to ignore the chorus of ringing, chatter, staplers, scribbling, and gnashing of teeth, and push our patented stain erasing formula.

This is my ritual: sit on the bench, mesmerized, my heart a rabid dog begging for the bullet.  At work, I empty the letter-confetti from my pocket and forsake the names on the list, instead calling Rita, wanting to tell her, wanting for her to tell me what to do.  For the past week I’ve only gotten her machine and her husband.  I hang up, playing with the idea of asking her husband what he would do: he seems like the type that would know, with his voice calm and British asking me who’s there, who is this; talking quietly as if he’s in a glass room and he doesn’t want the walls to crash down on him.  At this point, I’m usually lectured by my telepathic boss, always privy to when I’m not being productive.

Yes, I know I have a job to do, sir.  Yes, I know that I’m not doing it.  

Then, I study my reflection in the computer screen, trying to find a feature my mother would be sure to recognize, though so many have changed.  A narrow nose broken in one of several foster homes.  Glasses are no longer there to hide greenish eyes that bear the constant squint of non-trust, having been replaced by contacts.  

The dimpled chin is the only thing that’s stayed the same.  Is that enough to remember a son?  Should I buy a pair of glasses?

I start writing a letter to my mother that I plan to slip in her Bible when she’s distracted by the Rapture.  I mull over trivialities, whether or not my signature will exhibit my shaking hand.  After work, I stand beside the bench, pinching my thigh in hopes of triggering a muscle spasm that might force me into my first step to her.  I pay the cab fare in sweat-dampened singles, always pausing, everyday choosing inertia.  On the ride home, I make the resolution that I’ll approach her tomorrow.  I’ll get it over with tomorrow.

I sleep, impervious to the fact that I am a liar.

˟˟˟˟˟

I should’ve had her figured when I was six years old and realized, seemingly for the first time, that she had really, truly, actually named me Balthazar.  After kindergarten giggles and with no middle name to fall back on, I told everyone to call me by my last name, Tracy—a fragmented version of the original Tratzinsky, cleaved in half somewhere on the Atlantic.  For ten years we lived like gypsies.  We stayed with her friends, friends of her friends, occasionally having to squat in an abandoned warehouse.  I knew better than to complain.  I had no voice.  I was her baggage, her immigrant suitcase.

She preached differently, back then, gracefully performing tricks of prestidigitation, making things disappear—wallets, mostly.  Every incredulous question of “How?” was answered with “Magic!”  A firm believer that the world might end in twenty-five years, she called America a “savage kingdom,” place with too many machines and too many brands of detergent, place where people too easily loosened their grip on time.

She talked to me sometimes about Omsk, her home, about how she was the statue of fear to all the other women.  In her youth, she was a breathy scandal of a girl, running around with nomads, traveling sideshow acts, literary fugitives and Trotskyites who had escaped the purges and lived in paranoid old age.  Her very footsteps caused neighborhood elders to gasp and cross themselves: her tracks, they swore, were hooved.

She had a laugh that unsettled concrete, a devil-may-care that made onlookers think that if the devil did care about anything on this lonely dull planet, it was her.  His Persephone.  His awful queen.

I craved her stories, her Omsk, her random switches between English, Yiddish, Russian, as if she had three tongues housed by one mouth.  I felt that the stories I heard at school were lackluster in comparison, always about little brothers or missing puppies.  Never in those skinny illustrated books were there stories of black markets, or missile crises, or gypsy circuses where the Conjurer carried the Lone Torso on his back.

When I couldn’t sleep she’d wave me over to her.  “Bad dream, boytchik?  Here, take mine.  I’ve dreamt this one before,” she’d say, putting her hand on my forehead and describing her bargained reverie to me so well that I saw it all for myself, could’ve dreamed of nothing else.  And when I had horrible fevers, she used to remove my dingy glasses and place her hands against my eyes, applying the slightest pressure, invoking cold with her tiny palms.  She would whisper to me, her breath in a flustered hurry, a mother’s hysteria, her words leading me to Siberia.

She had bad spells, too.  Anxious days when she’d look at me as if wishing I might disappear.  She would watch me intently as I ate her pungent food.  And then she’d abruptly stop me from eating and scrub the food off of my plate like dead skin.

For ten years this is how we lived.  On the fourth night of that year, she ushered me to sleep, her palms over my eyes as she kissed my forehead.  I woke the next morning alone, a note on my pillow.  “I’m sorry.  I’ve stopped paying for this mistake of mine.  I have to set you down, Balthazar, I can carry you no longer on my back.”

I cannot claim uniqueness in abandonment: the history of the act stretches back to the Alpha, to the foundation.  Think of the Jews sold out by former friends, sniffed out of their hiding places and ritualistically unpersoned.  Think of leftovers, discarded ideals, uncompleted revolutions, the Rosenberg’s, Charles Foster Kane.  Think of Abraham’s son, Isaac, who feigned dignity under the knife when all he wanted was for his father to say “You are more to me than God.  Run from here and live forever.”

Or a man quietly in love with a sadist, wanting to tell her that he didn’t mind how she wounded him, just as long as she would stay.

Think of a ten year-old boy in a warehouse left suddenly, irreversibly alone; a boy discovered two days later, hungry and dirty, by one of his mother’s Bohemian cab-driver friends, who dropped him off at the nearest police station without a “goodbye” or a “good luck.”  A boy who will never know why.

After that day came too many homes, and never enough time in them to get comfortable.  Fourteen placements in eight years, the same life lesson from all the pseudo-fathers: go to school, get a job, get a wife, get a house.  Obtain more possessions than those smudgy glasses and the clothes on your back.  Possessions are reality.  Possessions are identity.  I was whittled to fit this new consumer’s world, where living in a warehouse is generally frowned upon, sleight-of-hand is only a profession in Caesar’s Palace, and dreams are non-transferable.

Before the day she left, we had been each other’s world, a cult of two.  It sutures, that kind of companionship.  Without it, you have a hard time figuring out where the wound starts and where it ends.

˟˟˟˟˟

I’m fifteen minutes late for work.  The boss told me yesterday that if I continue to be late and unproductive, I’m out.  Still, I can’t stand up from this bench, opting instead to stare at her.  “…For touch is the most demystifying of all senses, unlike sight, which is the most magical.”  I tell myself that this explains everything that I am incapable of.    

She slaps her hand against her ragged leather-bound Bible to emphasize a point, closing her eyes and chanting western prayers.  I try to fathom a holy man skillful enough to have converted her from unstated paganism, a believer so pure and apotheosized that wherever he walked the blind cried “Messiah” and corpses sprung from their graves, coughing up dirt.

But preachers of this faith, they’re a realm away from the things my mother used to believe in.  A woman like her would’ve been impenetrable to brainwashing.  My best theories on her radical change involve lobotomies and Doppelgangers, or the rootless guilt she’d passed on to me.

I want her to know about my nightmare where in a room, exquisite red, we face each other, and she laughs at me, the sound bouncing from wall to wall.  “In the old days, you know what they did to spineless boys like you when they were babies?  The villagers saw one weakness, one defect and you were fed to the pigs.”  She places her hands over my face, and when she pulls them away my eyes are viscous spider-eggs.

When I was young, I’d never had a bad dream.  I’d pretended just so that I could steal hers.  So she would tell me her sole parable one more time.

“I tell you story, boytchik, just this last time; the short version because I’m too tired for more.  In village not too far from Omsk, the gypsy circus came once a year bringing always the sound of drums, and people would stop from their working so they could go to see it.  It was a wonderful spectacle, a lady with two heads, a man with a face that has grown on his stomach with real eyes that blinked, a man with red fists that sprout from his shoulder-blades.  And of course magicians and dare-devils and cannibals and fire-breathers and people with tremendous talents.  One woman, she could fit herself in a shoebox.  It’s true.

“The Conjurer was called this because he could beckon the dead and make them visible to all, he could make those that have vanished reappear, but he could never go to cemeteries because with all the dead begging from him his attention, he would never leave.  He was quiet man, pale and thin and dressed always in black cloak and black felt-hat like peasants used to wear.  And the Lone Torso, he was named because he was born without legs, but this was not an appropriate name since he still had arms that he could walk around on.  He was a very gentle person, and the two became comrades.

“During all the travels, the Lone Torso was harnessed on the back of the Conjurer so that they could talk all the way, and so that the Lone Torso didn’t hurt his hands.  They walked this way so often that they became fused together by their backs, from the cold.  They wanted to fix it, but the medicine man said that their spines were no longer their own, and to become separate one would have to do without.  This was just not possible, so they got used to the idea, and remained comrades, walking everywhere together.

“But then one day they were stranded from the group, and the Conjurer died.  The Lone Torso had to haul both of their bodies with his arms.  Nobody imagined he could make it, they underestimated his strength.  His hands grew blistered from the road but still he pushed onward.  Doing for his friend what his friend had done for him for so long…”

At this point in the story, I usually fell asleep; she so expanded on details unexplored in the previous telling that I never got to know what happened, how it ended.  That was just like her.  So I made up my own endings.  Back then, I liked to believe that the Lone Torso absorbed the Conjurer into his body, assuaged the pain without ever losing his comrade.  As a teenager, I hoped that the Torso found a carpenter who sawed the cadaver from his back, and he was then able to move without the crippling weight of his abandoner.

Now I imagine the most realistic of endings: the Lone Torso, arms shaking, giving in and falling to embrace the windswept earth for the final time, breathing the dust until his lungs were crushed and it was done.

˟˟˟˟˟

A pack of teenagers gathers near her corner, laughing and elbowing each other.  The kids are dressed all in big black clothes, fishnet gloves, spiked collars.  Goth kids, convinced that they took the class on suffering, have befriended the beast in their sixteen years of existence.  I was like that when I was their age.

A fat kid with blisters of acne along his jaw is the one to move toward her.  I lean forward, a vigilant watchdog, one hand still pulling at the shredded corners of Rita’s letter.  I swallow cigarette smoke, watching my mother crossing him with her unbendable arm.

Would she do the same if I walked up to her, baptize me, bless me?

The kid’s shirt says “I’m not prejudiced, I hate everybody!” and I picture the forty other kids wearing the same shirt all over the city, thinking that absent words alone can generate your own statement, your middle finger to a world that is indifferent to middle fingers.  He’s smirking at her, getting too close.  He glances back at his friends for encouragement, their black-lined eyes glittering with laughter.  His breath, it must stink of pot and sugar.  Gripping the edge of the bench-seat, my chewed fingernails aching, I whisper “Please” in my head over and over, but I have no idea what it is I’m asking for.

“Hail Satan!” the kid says, raising his fist in the air.

She spouts psalms about the heretics and the nonbelievers.  He laughs an obscenely girlish laugh, and slaps the Bible out of her hand.  I stand, a reflex, my thumb twitching.  I have that post-invasive-surgery feeling that I’ve read about, the mysterious and besetting ache of the violated body.

I imagine the Goth kid shoving her, her head cracking against the curb, the garnet trickle on the pavement; all the pain I’d let her go through just to be her savior, so that I could pick her up from the ground like Simon.  I would quietly tell her in a flood of syllables that I can help her, she needs help, I’m sorry and I forgive, goodbye and goodbye, that I can carry her no longer on my back, that still, I push onward.

I picture her shaking off my help, pointing her finger at me and screaming wildly, seeing past my skin straight to the muddy heart.  

But the kid backs away, laughing with his friends.  “Go back to Germany, you old cunt!” he shouts.

Still standing, I seem to be having trouble producing saliva.  This kid, this nothing, had the guts to approach her.  Having no idea who she is, that’s how he managed it: because he didn’t know that this is a woman who had somehow broken out of an inescapable country.  A woman who could paint a beautiful world for you, and trick you into becoming Atlas.

˟˟˟˟˟

This is important.  This is the catalyst.  This is the prologue spewed by her God, who has stopped concerning Himself with linearity.

I was with Rita the night my car pulled its disappearing act.  She’d called me at work, set up the usual time and place.  Her name wasn’t really Rita, I just called her that because she was a meter-maid.  I’d seen the grin on her face when she scribbled the violation and the cost in her little leather booklet, bearing down so hard on her pen that the indentation left sort-of words on five carbon copies.  She was a parking ticket sadist.

Rita often voiced how she wished our year-long arrangement was legitimate, so she could tell the story of how we met to strangers.  It was a hot August day, a brownout.  Due to the jadedness I’d gained in telemarketing purgatory, I visited the Woodward, Wight, and Co. warehouse that used to be home to me.  But it looked the same, the glass and concrete and slats of light.  There was no magic to be found, only half-empty cans of beer and heroin spoons.  I smoked a cigarette, singeing the edges of the letter my mother left on my pillow with the lighter, naively thinking this was my moment of release.

When I left the warehouse I saw Rita leaning against my car, gripping her ticket book and staring at the meter.  Waiting for the time to run up.  She watched so tensely, hunched forward, like one of those students in art school scrutinizing a nude model.

I saw her right then: a woman who served the great god of Time, she would never let a moment circle the drain.  Her every word meaningful when so many of mine, vague and unheard, were milled under the slightest wind.  Life, to her, was too short for a job you hated, regrets, procrastination, one lover.  Sleep was an unnecessary diversion.  The world might end in five years.

Underneath her glacial civil servant surface lay a closet-genius; a concert pianist by fifteen, enrolled at Lafayette by sixteen, where she studied everything indiscriminately.  She knew two other languages, spoke them fluently.  And then she suddenly dropped it all for this mediocrity, renouncing all her frightening potential.  She never told me why.

Rita had been married to some insurance salesman for two years; I had the slightest feeling this career she gave him was a calumny or a metaphor of some sort, she said it like it was a private joke.  She liked to fuck with her wedding ring on.  She constantly smelled of lemony wood polish, her hands forever smudged with ink.  She looked like Grace Kelly’s evil twin, only brunette and with dark gray eyes.  Her favorite phrase was “As I do to you, so do I to me.”  Her status as proud atheist was challenged nightly when she called out to Jesus during sex; I’d never heard his name sound so sweet, so full, than the way it sounded in her voice.

She became docile before sleep, self-exposing, expressing thoughts so eloquently I couldn’t tell the difference between her words and the memorized quotes of long-dead lyricists.  I told her about the Conjurer, the story without an ending.  She confided in me her dreams of escaping the human zoo, becoming a recluse or a migrant or both, shedding her skin, her marriage, her vices.

Yet another prone to flight.  My life filled with Houdini’s.

Rita picked the worst places on Old Gentilly to meet, places with neon signs boasting color-TVs that never worked; places with heart-shaped beds in which we were the tender arrows digging ever deep, pushing toward an exit-wound.  She said that, statistically speaking, men who cheat on their wives go all out in lavish hotels, expensive restaurants, maxing out credit cards on lingerie for their mistresses.  Women, on the other hand, tend to do the opposite.  Slumming it.  Loving the fuck even more for its taste of dirt.

Afterwards, I lay on top of her, doling out puffs of cigarette, holding it just far enough so that she had to strain her neck to take a drag.  Maraschino light came in from the window, it pulled all her thorns out.  She strove for the cigarette, breathed it in, held it between her dry lips.

I knew that what she felt for me was amusement, at most.  Our connection could best be described as a volute, an exchange of power that coiled downward until we were both left without.  It was a shocking thing to discover: that she was what I’d been looking for, the romanticized destroyer.

I put my hands over her eyes, feeling the moth-like flutter of her eyelashes.

“You should leave him.  Leave the city with me.”  I took my hands away from her eyes, feeling the burn of her incredulous stare.

She paused, then slowly, intentionally blew smoke in my face.  She so expertly recovered all her thorns, I had to smile.

“Let’s not get poetic or anything.”  A typical rejection, it meant she was far from sleep.  “You say it, but you’d never leave.”

“You don’t think I could leave?  Why not?”

“Unfinished business, maybe; or a talent for misery.  Something you’re attached to.  All the same, it’s a dreadful city, Tracy.  It suits you.”

“Why haven’t you left?”

“It suits me, too.  Besides, Phillip’s going places with his life.”

“I’m going places.”

“Phillip’s going good places.”

I stared at her for a second, waiting for the sting to dull before I got up to leave.  I couldn’t stand the stink of the room, like Pinesol and gunpowder, the grimy red neon turning everything into doomsday.  And the sounds of our temporary neighbors.  All the pilgrims in other rooms screaming for that brusque high, that scavenging cock, all the pilgrims curled up in bed dreaming up Mecca.

The dusty spider legs in dresser drawers clinging to Gideon’s Bible.  Motels, motels, never any home.

She talked while I got dressed, gripping the complimentary motel pen tight in her fist as she smiled.  “Come on, Tracy, come lay back down, don’t throw a hissy.”

“I’m not.  I’ve just gotta go,” I said, pulling on one boot, then the other.  She lit a cigarette and waved the match until it curled up, bent its head, a gray shamed child.

I opened the motel room door.  Lo and behold.  All the energy spilled out of my body at once.  A man with a black coat and a satchel on his back was strolling through the white lines of the parking-space where my car once waited.

And the new concrete world established its strictest law to me: don’t get attached to anything, son, if you gained it you’ll lose it someday.  Just you wait.

“What are you standing there for?  Is this a pivotal moment where you make some life-changing decision?” Rita asked with a nasty little laugh.

“No.  My car’s gone.”  I looked back at her, numb.  She furrowed her brows and waited for the “Just kidding,” but it didn’t come.

“Well.  Huh.”

˟˟˟˟˟

The next day I took the streetcar to work for the first time ever, the taste of Rita a film on the roof of my mouth.  Across from me a woman bounced her lemur-eyed baby on her knee.  The old man beside me waved at the baby, made silly faces.

After reaching my stop in Downtown, I walked along the pavement on a stretch of O’Keefe I’d never walked before, brushing past workers and businessmen who seldom looked up.  Someone was whistling.  Everyone chatted on their cell phones.  And somewhere in that latticework, a familiar voice.  A phrase I’d only heard her use.  “America, the savage kingdom…”

Realization fell down my spine, like a body crashing through water, the slow sink once the surface was breached.  My brain a knot of electricity, I told myself to run, but it seemed to take whole minutes for my legs to receive the message.  Then, once I was moving, there was no clarity of thought, just jumbled noise in my head, sounds without source or meaning.  Animal sounds, industrial drones, the chant of “Please.”  Hope and hell and motion.  I drafted new endings for the parable: the Conjurer suddenly waking from a skein of beautiful dreams, the Lone Torso relieved of his bleak loneliness.  Carried, defined, once more.  The weight fading in the descending night.

My limbs were pushing through the crowd without any real instruction, pushing me against the current.  And then the sea parted and I saw her, in a black frock, surrounded by candles, a great nuclear fallout come down on this city.  Every incredulous question of “How?” now answered with “Jesus!”

She was across the street, on her knees, her hands pressed together in shouted prayer.  She looked so old, nothing like how I remembered her.  She had the face of a shrinking rose, dry and curled around the edges.  Slender, bird-like shoulders.  Eyes like a jack-o-lantern’s, scooped out and empty.  Her silvery hair butchered.  This was not her, this woman with her eyes blinking at the sun.  My mother knelt for no one.

How little I knew her, how much of myself that had been lost in the transition, new weight that I couldn’t take.  The Lone Torso, lugging the Conjurer and a cross on top of that.

Drained.  My breath a ragged joke, my throat like stretched leather.  Wanting nothing more than to fucking scream, I sat on a bench.  I haven’t gone farther than that.

˟˟˟˟˟

I’m an hour late for work.  I smoke a cigarette on the bench, not caring what time I show up.  The new world has collapsed.  I can’t sit through that purgatory anymore, selling a product that erases stains, all the while wishing I could take long harsh swigs of it to cleanse or to kill, if there is any difference.

I feel the corners of Rita’s note in my pocket rubbing against my leg.  I pull it out of my pocket, resisting the urge to tear a piece away, and unfold the surviving paper.  After my week of picking at it like a scab, all that’s left are the last few lines: “Goodbye is for funerals, yet I have thought it every time I saw you.  What you fail to realize is that there is not one of us without a corpse on our backs, and only the weakest of us need some third party to remove it.  The strong can be their own carpenters, they are the ones who push unremittingly and let it decompose and turn to dust, as all things do.  For your sake, I hope that it does.  P.S. Sorry about your car.”

Because the god of Time can be vengeful.  Because I’m tired, my own weight is enough.  Because the world is in a constant state of ending, I flick my cigarette out toward the street and stand on quietly shivering knees.  I suck in a deep, lightheaded breath, relaxing my clenched jaw like an animal letting go.  I brush past strangers.  Her voice grows closer.  My head feels staticky, like I’m dreaming a dream I stole from her.

My feet are warmed by the vicinity of her candles of all the futile saints.  She shouts after discreet prostitutes a corner away.  “‘Depart from her, my people, so as not to take part in her sins and receive a share in her plagues’—”

She glances at me for a second, her eyes squinting until they’re beady and hawkish.  I half expect her to single me out as supreme Blasphemer, Beelzebub, Judas.  But her eyes, the master copy of my own, stare with the faint recognition usually reserved for strangers who frequent the same grocery store, who offer that pleasant, noncommittal smile and don’t say a word, and keep pushing their carts down the aisle.

She turns away from me, shouting her verses.  “‘Depart from her…For her sins are piled up to the sky and God remembers her crimes.’”      

There is only one ending: the Torso does not stop crawling.  He pushes onward, alone, toward some unknowable dot at the belt of the horizon.  As he crawls, the Conjurer is slowly erased, picked up by the wind, disseminated like seeds.  The corpse breaks down, back to the elements, to the dirt of it all, and a stain of gray atoms that will trail the Torso wherever he goes marks the long passage to Omega.  This is how she would have told it.  This is what she would have wanted me to know.

She pauses in the middle of a verse, some further slander against Babylon.  I can see the twitch in the back of her neck as she finally realizes, as the weight settles.  She is silent and stiffened.  Her fingers tighten around the Bible’s throat, as she grabs at a deep and stuttered inhale with her mouth open.  I see her slowly start to turn her head.

She will not turn around before I do.  She will not follow as I walk away.

#my writing #short story #magical realism #writers on tumblr #writeblr #horror

[shystoryrebel]

LOVE SEX &TIME PASS

It was still dawn when I stepped out of the cab and walked towards the entry gate of the Delhi airport. The early morning February air was pleasantly cold. I was travelling to Bengaluru to attend a college friend's wedding. It had been four years since we graduated from the same college. This wedding was also going to be a reunion of our batchmates. But what I didn't know was that the reunion would begin much ahead of time; right in the queue in front of the airline counter. I was almost sure it was she. Same height! Same long hair! Same complexion! Curiosity had my eyes glued to her. And then about 60-odd seconds later, when she turned, she proved me right. My ex-girlfriend stood two places ahead of me in that queue. We had never met after the college farewell.

I tried to reach near her to see her more clearly. She was eagerly waiting for her number in the ‘Q’, unaware of my presence.

My heart was beating very fast. But there was no other way to escape the ordeal. I almost reached by her side.

I was just an ordinary human being like anybody else. I could not resist the temptation of meeting my ex-girlfriend. I was hundred percent sure she was Shweta, my ex-girlfriend, my ex-beloved.  

I tried to speak to her but could not open my mouth. The cool air flowing outside made no noise. The dry leaves of banyan tree outside rustled. Somewhere an aero-plane roared. And my eyes could not see anything in the day. I was looking at Shweta without uttering any word or blinking my eyes, in all awe and affection. Only she looked more serious, mature and tired than usual, and there were lines of care on her lovely and graceful face.

The huge college campus was surrounded by the thick triangular grove. Far away from the maddening crowd and hustle and bustle of the city, right in the center of the campus, our abode of worship was located very beautifully in an appealing complex, strictly for the students and teachers who were commandos of punctuality. Teachers and students reached much before than the class timings.

Some used these extra minutes to chat with their friends and some with their girl friends, and some used these waiting minutes to visit Goddess Sarswati temple situated in the campus. All this was almost unaffordable near their hostels, for fear of reaching the class room late, apprehension of the any unforeseen event generated by the traffic jams on the compressed roads crying for air and space due to massive encroachments.

As Hindus are not very religious and regular in visiting temple, there were very few to be seen of such devotees in the secular universities in this country. This college temple was free from chaos and crowd and always looking for visitors and offerings from the devotees but the beauty of this temple was its peace and serenity which added to its spiritualism and mysticism. But temple as well as priest was always living on penury.  

A still, spiritual and meditative tranquility rested here, but, for a rare soul of devotee, visiting after a long and silent period of break and desertedness. During these silent moments, the hymns from the temple loudspeaker mesmerized the students and teachers at a distance along with the melodious chanting of koels, parrots, sparrows and several other birds that sang, shrilled, twitted, or chuckled everlastingly in the courtyard of the temple, while hovering and hanging on the branches and groves of peepal and banyan tress, merrily and safely.  

A white colored cow always strolled very proudly, without any fear, with her young cute white calf, roaming over lush green fields of the college campus, in search of her tasty grass and fodder. Then there were ubiquitous parrots, pigeons, squirrels and the monkeys who guarded the field, trees, campus as their personal empire. Surprisingly, they were least afraid of the presence of teachers and students near them as if they were their friendly companions. They survived and thrived on the offerings from the devotees in form of fodder, bread, fruits, and other eatables, to this sanctuary of peace, harmony and devotion amidst of students, researchers, scholars and professors. The serene air was always fragranced due to the offerings and agarbattis burnt by devotees. In front of the idol of the Goddess, there was an incense stick holder, in which at all times incense sticks kept burning.  

I was treated by Shweta as a member of her family. After classes, I used to discuss with her about our studies. Shweta was a very simple and innocent girl. All that she could do was to copy my notes and sometimes give comments about them. But her mind and attention was completely in studies. All practical affairs of life seemed very difficult to her; such a simple matter as getting refreshments, or buying a book or getting an accommodation was a colossal task. Perhaps she nursed a desire to have someone to care for her practical life for her day to day needs and protection.

Perhaps Shweta was a neglected girl at home. Knowingly or unknowingly, she was in search of a man to care for her, to love her and to protect her. She herself was a dreamer. Perhaps she dreamt about a suitable man in life. She would have greatly benefited by a man like me who could care for her career as well as fill the vacuum in her heart and life. It was here that a simple and innocent man like me proved invaluable and priceless. She became completely dependent on me and I too gave up all my other work in order to give her all my care and affection.

She stayed in the college for four years for her B.Tech degree and I was in complete charge of all her affairs. Shweta never opened her purse as long as I was with her. But she still kept her room in the hostel. I was permanently with her, for the entire day. We always moved together. Our friendship was famous in the entire campus. I looked after Shweta so well that she almost stopped thinking even about her family. I also felt it as a pious duty to look after her and her needs sacrificing any other work I might have.

She never paid me back for whatever I spent on her. My regular job now, which was very important for me, was reduced to keeping Shweta’s company and to please her. Once in a week or so she went up to meet her family. She also started showing extra affection for me. Now, she had become very possessive about me. I was also very careful about her.

As we reached the lecture room, everyone kept throwing glances at us. I was nervous of being alone with my class-mates and felt relieved as long as their nature of conversation confined to studies. They would begin with studies but soon get mixed up with our relationship. It made me uncomfortable and I tried to turn the topic skillfully. They all mumbled that I was not the old friend I used to be. It was the reality too. I was losing a great deal on my mental peace. I was obsessed with my love for Shweta.

I was always lost in thoughts of Shweta.  I felt lost in memories of the hours and days I had spent with her last or in dreaming about what I’d be desirous to do with her. But I always felt great hesitation to fulfill my dreams. She was the least of them. She never resisted me but I always had the fear of losing her if I touch her. She was a very nice decent girl, completely dependent on me, probably a girl with an abnormal capacity of trust and love. As our friendship became older, so grew my anxieties and nervousness. Suppose, suppose and suppose? What next? I myself failed to understand and specify. I was gripped in an unknown fear.

It was a very critical and tensed period for me. Even I could not understand my own worries and preferences rightly. I was in a state of utter confusion. I was suddenly seized with panic and indecision, that I did not look handsome enough for my sweetheart to tempt her. Sometimes I was obsessed with the thinking that with a beard I would appear more handsome or if I grew a moustache I would be more attractive to her. The sky blue shirt and blue trousers were being over used and old fashioned. She might shut her door for me because I was not modern enough for her.

But it was not the last idea. She shattered the musical peace by her sweet voice. The temple loudspeaker was still singing the hymns in a melodious tune. Shweta emerged from somewhere, breaking my chain of dreams and fears. She was looking gorgeous and beautiful, clad in a pink silk suit, covering her pointed attracted breast by a thin but embroidered duppata. She loudly clapped her hands and thumped my back to inform about her arrival. All were surprised or rather jealous, treating me as a beggar or as a mystic Hindu saint getting away, a temporary halt to a pilgrimage.

Her beauty and grace developed an inferiority complex in me. This made me rush to the best tailor near the college to have a few dashing clothes according to latest fashion. I also started wasting money on haircuts, hair-and face lotions and branded perfumes of all kinds. My teachers and friends were amazed on this transformation of a country boy. My expenses were touching sky. Money-order from my farmer father was my only source of income. My parents always warned me about my mounting expenses. Thanks to my father’s caring habits, I had a bank account.

Now the only reality and consciousness in my life was Shweta. All my mental powers were now centered to keep her within my reach, and keep her happy and smiling all the time, which was a very difficult task. I always tried to hang around her all the time, like a loyal guard; but in the hostel it was very difficult. There was always an apprehension that the clerk at the reception desk and the maids at the hostel were keeping an eye on us and always talking about our relationship. I did not like people talking about us and observing my visit to Shweta’s room. I was becoming very self conscious about this entire affair. I wanted to take Shweta far from the eagle eyes of the people. I did not like the way people looked at us whenever we passed. Even if people laughed, I thought that they were laughing on us. I sometimes toyed the idea of changing the college. But it was impossible.

Both I and Shweta seemed to be tied with this college for four years. But frankly speaking, I failed to understand the girl, although I was with her all the time. I found as I went on with her that she was fast losing her reserve and innocent manner of her earlier days. She was now more interested in making love with me and of course, but she would also showing excessive love and concern for me. In the midst of my cuddling and embracing, she would suddenly become very aggressive. My knowledge about girls was very poor and restricted to only one. I could not understand her behavior and changed aggression in love.

Her eyes lit up when we talk about marriage and children. She was deeply interested in marriage and children to complete the lovers’ life. Her joy of shopping, cinema, and caresses made her forget that we were still unmarried. In cinema, I helped her to day-dream. I found the hint of her love and utilized it to my advantage. She was full of plans. Now, she was in an unbelievably cheerful mood. She greeted me with much more intense warmth than ever before.

Days passed, weeks passed, months passed and years passed. We both reached eighth semester means last year of the course. We started applying and filling the forms for placements and jobs. I used to fill her forms too and kept on paying fee for her too. Ultimately we both got good placements. I was selected in Tata Computer Services, Delhi and she got placement in Caterpillar, Dubai. Our final semester results were also declared and we both passed B.Tech in ‘A’ Grade.

Ultimately the departing day came. It was 30 April 2012. Next day we all have to leave the campus to join our companies. It was a very sad as well as very happy occasion. We both were entering a new world, for which we worked very hard. With tearful eyes Shweta and I departed to our hostel rooms last time.

Next day I waited for Shweta but she did not come nor did she call me. I sat down on the bench in the garden outside waiting for Shweta. I wanted to at least have a last chance to talk to her, to touch her and to give her a departing hug. An hour passed thus. There was no sign of her. I tried to peep into her room. I hesitated for a second. I pushed the door forcefully. Shweta was lying on the bed with eyes shut as if she was faint. She was in a miserable condition.

Shweta opened her eyes. They were swollen. She had large, chirpy eyes, but today they looked tired, bulging and red. She was in a miserable condition. She got up and told me in a heavy, curt and crackling voice, “Don’t spend any more time with me. Go back. That’s all I have to say.” Her voice stammered a little and again sad, “I mean whatever I said. Leave me now.”

I was taken aback. This girl who had been in my arms twenty four hours ago was throwing me out.

The disciplined and punctual punditji resumed their morning prayer with holy hymns, burning of agarbattis and prasad rendering the air fragrant and scented. The bells rang the beats of the holy hymns invoking the Gods……

Somebody thumped my back. It was Shweta. In a very tired and low voice she said, “Hello Yogesh! How are you? Meet my husband Tahir and son Rehan, clinging in his arms.” Now she was Zaib-Un-Nisha.

Even she changed her faith. I breathed with effort.  The morning sun was out now; a bright shaft of light illuminated the airport. But for me it was complete darkness. It was difficult for me to stand on my feet. I sagged down.

[justsomebucky]

Cinderella (Part 1)

Summary: AU. After the tragic passing of reader’s father, reader is left with a cruel stepmother and two miserable step-sisters, who not only don’t care about her, but they use her for their own gain. Will a handsome stranger offer her the freedom she longs for?

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x fem!reader

Word Count: 2,416

Warnings: mentions of death, angst, sadness, mentions of crime, mentions of murder

A/N: This is a RE-POST of my entry for the @stories-from-stark-tower ‘s AU movie challenge. It’s based off of the 2015 Disney adaptation of Cinderella, only with a bit of my own spin on it.

“Once upon a time, there was a girl called Y/N,” your mother began, her hands stroking your hair gently.

The two of you were sitting on a blanket in the meadow behind the house that your family had owned for generations.

“But that’s my name, Mommy!” You made a face at her. There was no way you and the little girl in the story had the same name.

“It’s her name, too, sweetness, I promise you. As I was saying…once upon a time, there was a girl called Y/N, and she saw the world not always as it was, but as perhaps it could be...with just a little bit of magic.”

“Magic isn’t real, Mommy.”

“It is too, silly girl,” she leaned over to nuzzle you, and you giggled. “You’ll see, Y/N. Someday you’ll need a bit of magic, and if you keep believing, it will be there for your taking!”

“It will?”

“Yes, love, as long as you remember one thing.”

“Remember what, Mommy?”

“You must always have courage and be kind. Can you remember that my darling?”

“Have courage, and be kind,” you repeated carefully.

“Yes, love, that’s it.” She gave you a nod.

“What happened next, in the story?” a familiar voice asked.

You both looked up as your father walked over. He sat down on the blanket beside you and pulled you into his lap, giving you a big hug. “I want to hear more about beautiful Princess Y/N.”

Your mother gave him a warm smile. “I suppose I should continue, shouldn’t I?”

“Yes!” you squealed happily, leaning back against your father as she resumed her story about the little girl who shared your name.

You awoke suddenly, sitting straight up with a gasp.

It had been so long since you’d dreamt of your mother and father.

Your hands brushed away the tears on your cheeks as you glanced at the clock on the nightstand beside you. It was three in the morning again. You had developed a habit of waking up before you were needed.

Might as well stay up, you thought to yourself. Your step-family would be ringing for you soon, anyways.

The very thought of them made you cringe.

You were only ten years old when your mother fell ill and passed away. You’d thought the pain would never end. The loss of a parent at a young age is not something you get over quickly.

Time passed, though, and pain turned to memory.

Your father had looked after you as best he could, but he’d been so lonely, and you were never one to deny him his happiness. He’d found another partner, someone to call his wife, someone to be your stepmother.

She was an angry, cold woman with two daughters of her own, Drisella and Anastasia. Your stepmother had apparently known grief herself; she’d told your father that her first husband, a successful businessman, had died of a heart attack.

It wasn’t until your own father had passed on that you learned the truth.

She’d killed him herself.

Stepmother had wanted to take over her husband’s business, which as it turns out, wasn’t a coffee business at all. He hadn’t been making trips overseas to sell Columbia’s finest; no, he’d been a professional thief.

He was often hired by very wealthy people to steal very specific items for their collections. Sometimes it was famous artwork, sometimes it was an antique or two, but most of the time, it was jewelry. Gold could be melted, gems could be refitted…yes, the black market for heirloom jewels was booming for him.

She told you all about it the day she threatened to kill you (if you didn’t do what she wanted).

Her method of choice had been poison. It was a refined woman’s weapon, she’d told you. One moment, her husband was alive and well, sitting down to dinner with his family. The next moment, he was choking on his food, turning all shades of blue and purple, until he was gone.

No one seemed to care. There was no investigation, no arrests made in the case.

The royal guards were thrilled when they heard he’d kicked the bucket. They’d been after him for years and years to no avail.

What they never anticipated, though, was his wife picking up where he left off.

Not that anyone suspected her. No, never her, with her fancy outfits and ladylike mannerisms. She would never be that way, they said. She was the real victim here, they said.

The moment she recounted her story to you, it struck you that she’d probably killed your father, too. He must have known too much, must have seen something incriminating.

She’d simply needed him for a new name and a cover story.

And now she needed you to clean up after her and her two daughters.

Every time they had a new job, they’d take up the entire dining room table. Blueprints of buildings and timelines and everything they needed, including weapons and tactical gear, were always laid out as they checked things off their lists.

It always started the same:

Know your mark.

Prepare a plan.

Execute the plan.

Clean up.

That last one was always your job. They’d even nicknamed you Cinderella just to piss you off, after you’d come back from a job covered in soot from a  fireplace.

You had no experience with an actual heist, but you were skilled at removing any evidence. If you slipped up, one of them would kill you. If you refused to comply, you were dead.

There was no way out.

The one time you’d tried to run away, you’d tripped their security system (that they purposefully didn’t tell you about), and they’d dragged you back, locking you in the attic. That’s where you’d been living ever since, alone with your thoughts and misery.

You leaned back against the cold wall that served as the headboard to your bed, your breathing finally evening out.

Clean up…what a joke. Getting rid of fingerprints, evidence, sometimes even blood…you weren’t meant for this life. You longed for the days where magic was still in the air, and your parents were protecting you.

There was no magic in this world, not any longer. It was a bleak existence, indeed.

You heard your phone’s alarm go off at half past three.

“Time to start another day,” you muttered, slowly throwing off your threadbare covers and stretching your arms and legs. You grabbed your change of clothing and made your way to the guest bath downstairs.

“You’re late, Y/N,” your stepmother snapped. She was leaning over photographs that must have been from Drisella’s reconnaissance mission, tapping her finger urgently. “We have a new mark.”

“Useless Cinderella,” Anastasia added with an exaggerated eye roll. “You had better not slip up! We need this job.”

“I won’t,” you told her calmly. It was mornings like this that made you keep your mother’s words in your head; have courage and be kind. Even if they don’t deserve it in this case, you were still inclined to listen. “What’s the mark?”

“There’s a home not far from the hunting grounds, the one made of brick with the little blue shutters,” your stepmother began, shuffling some of the pictures around. “This one.”

You peered over, recognizing it immediately. “I’ve seen it before. What do they have?”

She looked up at you with her icy glare. “Our client is in desperate want of a very precious, very rare coin that the owner of this house keeps locked away.”

“Won’t that draw suspicion when the client takes it to the buyer?” you asked.

Didn’t people ever learn? You always get caught trying to resell the rare items.

Stepmother waved a hand at you. “That is none of our concern. We are simply going to retrieve and…reallocate the item.”

“Fine,” you said impatiently, biting your lip to stop from being snarky. Be kind, you reminded yourself. “Who is going in first?”

“Anastasia is. You will be her secondary.”

Your eyes widened. “I’ve never – I’m not ready for that. I just do cleanup!”

“You’re her secondary, Y/N. Do not make me repeat myself for a third time.”

You looked down at the pictures, your stomach churning. “Yes, Stepmother.”

“Good.” She righted herself and motioned for you to follow her. “Anastasia is waiting. The two of you will go on foot.”

“Won’t our tracks be fresh, then?”

“That’s your job to worry about, not mine.”

Your eyes met Anastasia’s as you walked into the foyer behind your stepmother.

“You ready, Cinderella?” she asked with an evil grin. “If you screw this up, Mother says I get to kill you myself.”

You ignored her and looked down at the gear you had to put on.

Your main pieces tonight were night vision glasses that were way too worn out for the sort of precision you needed, a harness with a grappling hook in case you needed to scale the side of the house for a quick exit, and of course, your earpiece for communication with your nutjob stepsister.

You snapped your gloves on and pulled your hat further down over your ears. With a nod, Anastasia pushed the front door open, and you followed close behind.

Have courage, you chanted in your head, over and over again. The kindness part wasn’t applicable this time, because it wasn’t kind to steal. It made you feel dirty and unkind...it made your heart ache.

So instead of focusing on that, you just kept up your mantra. Have courage…have courage…have courage…

“Y/N, you had better move a little faster,” Anastasia hissed.

She secured the coin from a downstairs den, where it had been nestled in a fire-proof safe. You replaced the real coin with a fake, and with your black light you retraced your footsteps, wiping the room for any prints or hair or anything that might give you up.

“Come on!”

You shoved the light into your pack and slid out the window, closing it behind you as quietly as possible. Since the house was only two stories, you were able to climb down a bit further before you could jump to the ground. You landed as nimbly as a cat, immediately bolting for the cover of the trees.

“Out of sight,” you whispered to Anastasia via your earpiece. That was the code phrase to let her know you were done.

“Out of mind,” she replied coolly. You knew she didn’t care if you made it back okay. She had the coin secured in her backpack. She was probably halfway home by now.

You knelt down near a large oak tree, shoving your earpiece and the rest of your gear into your bag. The hat and gloves followed, since it wasn’t a cold night by any means and you didn’t want to raise anymore suspicion than you already would if someone found you.

When you stood back up, you turned around to head back home, and nearly ran into someone.

Good timing, you thought to yourself, trying to hide your nervousness.

“Excuse me, Miss,” a deep voice apologized. You squinted and made out the figure of a man in front of you. “I’m sorry for frightening you. But I have to ask, what are you doing in the woods before dawn?”

You stared at him, heat rising in your cheeks.  “I’m very sorry for nearly running into you, Sir. I’m out for a walk to clear my head. I’ve had a nightmare, and couldn’t fall back to sleep.”

His beautiful blue-grey eyes glinted with sympathy as he came a little closer, errant beams of moonlight shining on his features. “Ah, we’re out here for the same reasons then.” He motioned for you to walk, and quickly fell into step beside you. “What do they call you?”

“Never mind what they call me,” you replied softly, looking away from him. He was almost too beautiful to be real.

Each step you took was hesitant, because you knew you had to get back. You weren’t quite ready for farewell, though. There was something about him…

“You shouldn’t be this deep in the woods alone, especially at this late hour.”

“I’m not alone, I’m with you,Mister -?” You realized that you hadn’t caught his name, either. “What do they call you?”

The stranger chuckled. “You don’t know who I am? That is, they call me Bucky. Well, my father does, when he’s in a good mood.”

“And where do you live, Bucky?” You gave him a side-glance, knowing that if Anastasia saw you right now, she’d definitely squeal to her mother. You hoped she was home already.

“At the palace. I, um, I’m taking after my father, I guess you could say.”

Your eyes widened. “Oh, are you both in the King’s guard? That’s amazing.”

Bucky gave you a genuine smile. “Something like that.”

“Do they treat you well?” you asked, your voice uncertain. “That’s not why you have nightmares, right?”

“I’m treated well, better than I deserve, most likely. My nightmares are somewhat related, but not entirely.”

You knew he didn’t want to speak about them any longer, so you stopped your line of questioning.

“Are you treated well?” he asked gently.

You wanted to scoff, to tell him no, to beg him to bring his fellow guards and save you from your nightmares, but your mother’s mantra echoed in your head again. “They treat me as well as they’re able.”

“I’m sorry.” His brows furrowed in concern. “I highly doubt you deserve that.”

“I just try to have courage and be kind,” you told him, attempting to smile.

He was about to reply when a tall man dressed as a King’s guard stepped in front of you both.

“There you are, Pri-“

“Bucky!” he called out loudly. “Yes, here I am! Give me a minute, I’m right behind you.”

“Oh, no,” you said with a small smirk. “Looks like your fellow guard has discovered you at this early hour.”

He turned back to you with his own sheepish grin. “I’m afraid so.” Bucky took a step backwards, away from you. “I hope to see you again, Miss.”

“And I, you.” You gave him a nod and a wave, and then turned to walk the edge of the woods, back towards your home. You checked your watch, groaning to yourself when you realized how long you’d taken with Bucky.

If you weren’t home in five minutes or less, there would be hell to pay.

Part 2

no tags because it’s a re-post from December 5th, 2016. I am moving it from another blog. It was probably the second thing I ever wrote for this fandom so please forgive me in advance.

#bucky barnes x reader #bucky x reader #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes drabble #bucky barnes cinderella au #jsd cinderella

[expensiveowl]

Rebecca — Wrestling with the Ghosts of Past

[ Originally posted on October 26, 2020 ]

I’ll preface this by saying that hammering a film out of a beloved, timeless masterpiece of a novel is a doggedly difficult feat, and bound to leave book fans in the dust if done wrong. Director Ben Wheatley has said as much himself, having Daphne du Maurier’s book to contend with rather than any previous film adaptations. And that is no easy feat.

For starters, I’ll list what I felt went wrong with this particular adaptation. A chief problem I found was in the film’s pacing. Many modern adaptations suffer this curse (Gerwig’s Little Women, anyone?), where they try to stay uber-faithful to the source material, cram as much of it into the movie as possible, and then it feels like you’re watching a highlights reel at 1.2x speed. Rebecca suffered from this at points, making me feel like I was watching a season recap of a long-running show.

The Monte Carlo segment felt all too brief, yet clocked in at a solid half an hour by the time the characters depart for Manderley. Rebecca is the sort of novel where time plays tricks with you, things move far too slowly for too long, and then a lot happens all at once. This pacing could not be felt here, at no point could the characters catch a breath or simply be in the moment. It feels like a train rushing from plot point to plot point to make sure you don’t miss any. One could argue that not many would be willing to sit through a 3 hour, 46 minute Gone with the Wind affair (though, personally, I would have been delighted), but even so, its two-hour runtime is enough that it should not have felt like most of it whizzed by.

[ SPOILERS BELOW! ]

Aside from pacing issues, there were liberties taken with the story I felt were for the worse. Mrs. de Winter becoming a take-charge personality, far more than she ever should have been, was in my eyes a mistake. In the novel, it is the townfolk who pressure Maxim into throwing the ball, and Mrs. de Winter goes along with it. She never fires Danny, nor grows more bold in her actions by the minute, in fact, staying a rather passive figure until the very last page.  If Mrs. de Winter was bold at any point, it was in feeling secure in her knowledge that Maxim loves her at last, and nothing more. The decision to have her drive solo down to Dr. Baker’s was another bold misstep, and the way the cancer plot twist revealed itself more like a cheap, predictable reveal than anything as anxiously nail-biting as the novel meant it to feel.

Now, the performances. I confess I am slightly biased by being totally and utterly in love with Lily James, and have been for as many years as I have watched her career blossom. Her performance was quite apt, her inner turmoil as the beleaguered Mrs. de Winter palpable and nuanced. Armie Hammer made a tolerable Maxim (though of course, no candle held to Laurence Olivier), and his accent did not bother me as much as I had expected upon watching the trailer. Ann Dowd turns in a respectable performance as the toady Mrs. Van Hopper, and Sam Riley does an excellent job of bringing greasy Jack Favell to life. But of course, the star jewel of the piece is Kristin Scott Thomas’s turn as the story’s antagonist, Mrs. Danvers.

It is clear that this adaptation took extra pains to humanise Mrs. Danvers to a point where we can feel deep empathy for her, regardless of her fanatically obsessive devotion to her deceased charge, Rebecca, and even when she’s being her most monstrous, driving Mrs. de Winter very near to the brink of suicide. Initially I felt that this could be to the film’s detriment, since one doesn’t want to cheer the film’s the villain on too much, but on deeper reflection, it made me realise that there is no villain in the film. There are merely people, and their sides of the story.

Hitchcock’s Rebecca was more black-and-white in this regard with its classic, gay coded villain of Mrs. Danvers (and very deserved Academy Award nom for Judith Anderson for her chilling performance). Here, Danny is seen as human, as every bit a person in her own right as Maxim and Mrs. de Winter, her faults all too human and her anguish real. In feeling for her this way, we’re pulled into one of the central moral dilemmas of the story: do we wish for justice to triumph, or are we cheering on a couple to get away with literal murder? If Daphne du Maurier made us an accomplice, Ben Wheatley shows us how in our rooting for the protagonists, we too are culpable of guilt.

In a terrifically effective scene near the end, Mrs. de Winter finds Danvers on the edge of the cliff. It is a gut-wrenching moment where for a second, we truly feel on behalf of Mrs. Danvers. In the novel, her fate is left unsaid, in Hitchcock’s version, she stays to perish inside the fires of Manderley. Here, she flings herself off of a cliff to face a watery death — a fitting and metaphoric parallel to the fate of her beloved Rebecca.

A few more positive points of note. The atmosphere of the film, punctuated by the brilliant score and eerie sound staging throughout, worked brilliantly to its favor. Any time that the story veered off course to depict a tangible, palpable feeling of dread that Mrs. de Winter experiences, we experience it, too. None so effective as that sultry, sumptuous ballroom scene, almost feeling like an acid trip that culminates in the guests cultishly chanting “Rebecca! Rebecca!”. The sleepwalking, the nightmares of being taken alive by ivy, all of it rising to a feverish pitch, masterful parts which bring the palpable feelings of unease and dread from the novel right to life. The end scene, especially the final speech rings a little bit cheesy, but I’ll take it just to see the de Winters finally at peace.

This film’s strengths lie where it dares to take creative liberties, the ballroom and nightmare/dream sequences, that deal in abstract and fantasy. I only wish it could have been more bold to step more into that experimental area, to fully go off the rails on some type of Belladonna of Sadness trip. For the novel itself is as much of a sustained feeling of dread as it is a linear story, and that dread is best deserved through the abstract, less so in its protagonists’ feverish declarations of love for each other. Alternately, certain parts could have benefitted from being more rigidly Downton Abbey-esque, for sometimes I was left feeling unsure whether this film was taking place in 1936 or in current modern times, with the way some of the pacing and dialogue went. Lastly, a good measure of a film is whether you ever wish to revisit it again, and I can certainly see myself watching it in the near future again, to luxuriate in its sumptuous colours and haunting atmosphere once more. “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” our protagonist laments, and now, thanks to Ben Wheatley’s skilful adaptation, we can too.

Verdict: ★★★½

#film review #rebecca #ben wheatley #lily james #armie hammer

[thegreatlarryfisherman]

Shannon Leto Drabble: “Maybe You Could Use Me.”

“Shannon, will you cut it out!” I exclaimed at my best friend who frowned as he picked up another balled up piece of paper and flicked it into my hair. I sighed as I pushed my face in to my hands. Usually, I loved having Shannon in my office. The secret crush I had on him made seeing him the highlight of my day, but today I had a heavy workload and he was being a bit more obnoxious than usual.

“You seem tense babe.” He rolled his chair over to me and began to squeeze my shoulders. “Holy shit. Yeah, you’re all tightened up. Relax.”

“I can’t. I have this paper--”

“--That’s not even due till next Wednesday and you already have the entire first, second and final draft up. You’re just doing that thing you do where you don’t take a break.”

“What can I say, Shannon? Everyone doesn’t have a a job as a rockstar where they can just sit around all day!” I exclaimed and instantly regretted it. It was wrong. Shannon had it worse than me because even if his brother wasn’t a perfectionist, Shannon’s nickname may as well have been the percussionist perfectionist because he was always slamming at the drums. 

“I’m sorry.” I bit my lip. “I didn’t mean that.” 

He reached over and picked my phone up. “Shannon. Give it back.” I started with the best menacing tone I could muster. “What are you doing?”

“Deleting all your emails and telling your boss that you quit because that was literally the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me and--” He paused to pout dramatically. “My feelings are hurt.”

“I’m sorry. Now give me back my--” I reached over and he stretched himself out of my reach. I sighed as I leaned over in my chair, planting my hand on his chest to give myself some leverage.

“Whoa, someone’s determined.” He chuckled as he grabbed my wrist with one of his big hands and pulled me closer against him until I was in his lap. “You know...” he slowly sat my phone down before allowing his other hand’s fingers to ghost against my spine beneath the dress I was wearing. “I feel like.. there are ways... we can get rid of that nasty work bug of yours.”

I felt something solid hit my thigh and my eyes widened. “SHANNON.”

“What? You’re stressed. I’m available. Use me.. Just...” He slowly placed both his hands on my waist. “Take off all your clothes.” His eyes never left mine. “Grab my rock hard cock, which is like this because of you... and just... Use it. Fuck it. Put it against that pretty little clit of yours until you start throbbing with need.”

I tried to squeeze my legs shut to hide how wet I was but he shook his head as his finger hooked on the waistband of my panties underneath my skirt. I bit my lip as his fingertip simply grazed my clit and I moaned loudly. “See. You’re already wet for it... Wet for me.” He slowly leaned forward and his soft lips made contact with my neck. My head fell back and he chuckled against my neck. “There you go. Fuck you smell good.”

My hips rocked against him and he murmured against my neck words of encouragement. “Make yourself come for me, girl. Let it go.”

“Fuck. Shannon. Don’t stop talking to me.” I wrapped my legs around his waist and he leaned back in the chair, putting his hands behind his head as I gripped his shoulders and ground myself against the bulge in his pants. “Fuck.” 

He was chanting my name now.. softly. Again and again until it was getting louder. So loud it invaded my eardrums as I closed my eyes and felt my orgasm building up quickly. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, after all.. we were still in my office. Just as I was about to go over the edge, I felt him tightly grab my shoulder and shake. 

I opened my eyes quickly and Shannon was standing in front of me. Something in my hand was hot and I slowly looked down. My phone. I had been gripping my phone so tight that it was sweating. I was daydreaming... Oh God. 

“Wow. Someone was having a sexy day dream. Who was it this time? Leo DiCaprio? Your ex boyfriend.. NO don’t tell me, Jared in leather pants.”

I started to tell him... After all, it was the fifth time this week I’d dreamt of fucking my best friend and it was only Tuesday. I bit my lip and shook my head, forcing a smile. 

“All three of them.” I winked and he scrunched up his face in playful disgust before he flung himself into the chair we’d just been going at it in inside of my dream. 

“What?” He frowned and I shook my head as I quickly returned to my work.

#Shannon Leto #Shannon Leto Fan Fiction #SF #Drabbles #shorts

[livealittleproject-blog]

Sweet 16

This is a brain dump of my thoughts lately. It includes some heavier topics, but only allusions to them. Read at your own risk. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It is my 16th birthday. My sweet 16. One of the major birthdays, the one where you throw a huge party and invite everyone in the school. Yet on this day, this beautiful day with crisp air and sun barely beginning to streak the horizon, I am alone. I wake up with a pang in my heart. I didn't want to wake up. Looking around my room, everything is normal. No fairy godmother come to make my dreams come true, no Peter Pan come to take me away to Neverland. The blue walls are faded and covered with old posters. It smells of balsam wood, the smell of your grandmother as she would hold you tight as a baby. The day starts early, and I snooze my alarm twice. It is too early. Getting out of bed is no small feat when every breath you take is labored and purposeless. I skip taking a shower, and wear the same grey adidas hoodie and jeans that I have worn for the past week. I lie in bed for half an hour, ignoring my mother calling me down for breakfast and telling me I'm going to be late for school. It doesn't matter. I much prefer to waste away looking at my cream colored ceiling than waste away in a room full of strangers who all seem to be friends. The 20 minute walk to school takes me an hour. My time passes slowly, and I hop off of the path frequently to kick rocks and pet cats. They run away from me sometimes. My hoodie is not enough to keep me warm on a January morning, racing against the sun to see if I can make it to school before it can rise. The air is cold. Wind whips against my face. It is eerily silent, the only noise being every single sound that is coming from cars passing by and children laughing. If I was listening, it would have been a cacophony of sound. The only thing I can hear is the dull thud,thud,thud of my heartbeat ringing in my ears. It is my birthday, and here I am studying. When a student is in school, time is no longer a fixed amount. Seconds are hours, but when looking back hours are merely minutes. The day is a hurricane of nothingness. The only thing we learned today was everything. This is the same every day. It is my birthday. No one stops me in the halls to tell me so, no teachers force the class to awkwardly cough out the lyrics to a familiar tune. I myself by the end of the day have forgotten that supposedly, something wonderful happened exactly 16 years ago. I wish it didn't happen. I spend the day staring out of windows looking at traffic. My brain is destructive. The words coming from the instructors mouth are lost to the incessant chanting of my brain; go into the road, you see. Just because. I cannot stand near the edge of a cliff without fear that my mind and common sense will not agree and I will end up toppling over. However, sometimes my common sense agrees with the irrational behavior of my mind. It is my birthday. It is an empty day, an extra unextraordinary day. A day so mindblowingly average that one is left reeling at the sheer nothingness of the events on this day. The most dangerous thing in life is routine. Once you get into a routine, life becomes meaningless. Days get shorter, elatedness turns to satisfaction, then approval, then it becomes like the slight recognition you get from someone who isn't listening to you speak. The small head nod, 'yes, I hear you, but I am not listening. You are of no importance to me at the moment'. It is my birthday, and it feels just like any other day. The loneliness comes in waves, each strong enough to knock you over and determined enough to hold you under while you struggle. The emptiness is far worse, the feeling that there is nothing left. You are bored. There is nothing to look forward to. Holidays are like any other day, you have no friends to spend the weekends with. You have nobody to spend the weekends with but your common sense and irrational mind. The boredom is far worse still, the ever present thought that there will never be anything to look forward to. You have plans in the future, yes, but those plans take place two years into the future, where you go to college and get your dream job and marry a beautiful woman and be loved and happy forever. It is simple. It is ideal. You cling to this thought like it is a golden thread tied around your waist holding you over the edge. It is only a thread, so thin and so far away. Is it really enough to keep you from falling? It is my birthday, and the future I have always dreamed of no longer matters to me. Even if I was to get there, if all the pieces on the chess board were laid out just right, if no holes were found in my plan, I know it would not be enough. Nothing is never enough. I know that the things I have dreamt of will not happen, and if they did they would not make me as blissful as I dreamt they would. I'm all honesty, I am not even sure what that would feel like. It's my birthday, and I am scrolling through my phone's contact list trying to find someone, anyone, who would want to talk to me. Maybe they might even have remembered that today was my birthday? In the same way that we put our playlist on shuffle yet skip to the song we want, I shuffled through my contacts looking for the one person I wanted to talk to, ignoring the 20 or so others. The one person I had in mind was the only person who might be able to make me feel slightly better on this day that is supposed to be great. I find the number, and I press it. "Why do you keep calling me?" -Silence- "Leave me the fuck alone." -What do you mean?- "You're fucking crazy. You're manipulative. You're a liar. You're fat and disgusting and no one loves you. Why do you keep calling me? How many times do I have to tell you that you disgust me. It would be so much easier if you actually did what you said you would and just killed yourself already." They stop talking. I do not hear a beep signaling that they have hung up. I look down at my phone and realize, there is no number displayed on my screen. I had not been calling anyone. It is my birthday, and my mind and common sense have come to an agreement. It is my birthday, and I am tired. So very tired, although my body is well rested. It is my birthday, and I write a note. Nothing complicated, just a little 'I love you, I'll see you soon' It is my birthday, and I'm on a roof. I'm hit with a blast of cold air and my adidas hoodie isn't enough to protect me from it. Faintly, I believe I can smell Balsam wood when a particular gust of wind comes along. The noise from the city below comes together to form a harmonious nothingness. Seconds are minutes, minute are hours. Traffic goes by below me. It's my birthday, and the golden thread around my waist snaps. The day is still extraordinarily average.

#writing #depression #anxiety #social anxiety #sad #depressed #brain dump #16 #suicide

[grumkin]

Early, Brooklyn, Present Day

I decide to ride my bike to the cemetery. The breeze will cool me down. Last night I dreamt of Grandma Klara and it seems like a good time to pay a visit.

I’m not a goth, but there is something I love about cemeteries. The inscriptions, the mausoleums, the crazy angels and plinths. All those bones beneath the grass, the years they’ve lasted. There are lots of trees in the cemetery, too. It’s kind of like hanging out in a sad, quiet park.

I lock my bike to the fence and wander down a side path. Some of these graves are from the 1800’s. Why do people bury their dead? This place is like an underground neighborhood, coffins stacked on coffins, bones taking up space. My mother’s mother, Grandma Klara, is buried here. She died two years ago. I loved her. I miss her. Before she died she was obsessed with her funeral, with who would be there, what Scripture she wanted to have read, what her headstone would say. She got it just how she wanted it, a Catholic ceremony, the tolling church bells. The only thing she wanted that she could have was to be buried in the cemetery in Gdansk, right next to Grandpa Peter.  The first reason she couldn’t have this was that Grandpa Peter wasn’t buried in Gdansk. He wasn’t buried anywhere we knew of. Klara believed they would be together in heaven, though. She was the one who made sure I was baptized, that I had my first communion. She made me go through confirmation too, which I did only because I loved her so much, biting the insides of my cheeks the whole time.

My mother Agatha grew up Catholic, but now she’s new-agey; she insists we Gorski women have witch blood. She gets all worked up about the patriarchy of the Church, things like that. She majored in Women’s Studies, was working on her dissertation on Women’s Religions. Then she had me, an accidental detour from a life of academia that never quite got back on track. Grandma Klara wanted her to be an English major, so proud of her ambitious American daughter. But Mom has never been known for doing what other people want her to do.

Grandma Klara once told me privately that my mother entered college as a literature major, but was seduced by the chair of the literature department. “Then,” Klara said, taking a deep breath, “Agatha, she got pregnant, by Chair of Literature. And then, Early, your mother did very sad thing.” Klara pressed her lips together. Tears stood in her eyes. “Very, very sad thing.” She sighed, sniffed, flicked her hand. “And then, Vomen’s Studies.” Klara thought I was a miraculous child, sent by all-forgiving Jesus as a healing gift to a woman who committed a grave sin. “Your mother so lucky to have you,” she told me all the time.

My grandmother’s headstone is the kind that lies flat on the ground, and I like to stretch out on it, especially in the summer, when it holds on to the coolness of the shade of the small pine trees that stand overhead. I don’t think it’s disrespectful. I see it as a sort of an afterlife cuddle.

Light comes through the pine needles above, flaring as the tree limbs rustle in the breeze.

Grandpa Peter died before I was born. I only knew him from the pictures, him with Lech Walesa, under the banner of Solidarnosc. Once, when I was nine or ten, Grandma Klara told me he was murdered by Communists, but I didn’t know what that meant. She was always promising to take me to Poland with her to see the old town of Gdansk, the Golden Gate that her father helped rebuild, piece by piece, after it was destroyed by the Nazis.

We never made it to Gdansk, I think, staring at her grave, and now I’m going to die never having seen it, not knowing my roots on either side, all that history that made my ancestors who they were and that makes me who I am.

I lie on her headstone, staring up at the sky, and calculate how much it would cost to get to Poland within the next forty days. A thousand dollars for a week there? Where can I get a thousand dollars? I picture going to Grandma Klara and saying, Grandma Klara, I’m going to die. How can I get a thousand bucks, quickly? She would laugh and elbow me and suggest I get a job. You gonna die, you better get job so you can afford funeral.

So. I won’t be going to Gdansk.  Where else will I never go?  If I die on my birthday, that is. The Dominican Republic, where who knows, I might have a whole half-family waiting for me. Budapest, where my great Aunt Julianna, Klara’s sister, moved after their mother died. Among many, many other exotic places that I can’t think of right now, not to mention the other 49 American states. Things I’d like to see but will never see, if I die on my birthday: the Nile, the Amazon, the Eiffel Tower. Among countless other things. I’m going to have to start another list, an “If I Live” list.

Feeling restless, I stand, say, “Bye, Grandma,” and keep walking, heading towards the center of the cemetery.

I scout the graves of children. It’s gloomy business. Some of them just say ‘Baby’ and the dates. One tomb has two sons lying next to each other, born ten years apart, each dead within in their first year. What are the chances? The epitaphs are all tearjerkers: So small, so sweet, so soon. And, Sleep, my little one, sleep. One tomb features a sculpture of a little girl sleeping, her golden retriever puppy asleep in her arms. Louisa and Puppy.  I have to wonder, is the dog in there with her?

What will my grave say? I assume they’ll bury me. I guess I could request to be cremated. Mom will never go for it, though. We bury our dead, she’ll say. Absolutely no cremation for you, young lady. The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, according to Grandma Klara. That’s why you bury it in the dirt instead of burning it. That’s why Grandma Klara hated it that Mom smokes; it desecrates the temple. I personally have never felt a whole lot of Holy Ghost up in my own body, but I’m assuming that will change when I start having sex. I mean, with other people.

One grave, with a brass marker, just reads: VIRGIN. 1911-1923.

By the time I unlock my bike from the fence and leave the cemetery, the sky is reddening and I am thoroughly depressed. I miss my Grandma. And I’m suddenly very worried about the status of my virginity.

 My mother calls herself a Catholic feminist. She works at the community college and holds women’s groups at our apartment. Some of the ladies come from the neighborhood and some from the university. A few even from as far away as the Bronx. They are of all stripes, but they all love the Virgin Mary. And most of them have a pretty strong crush on Jesus, too. Mom definitely does. But they are also into Oshun and Santeria, and there’s a lot of chanting and incense burning. I make it a point to avoid these little gatherings. Drama.

Grandma Klara was very religious and superstitious, afraid of the evil eye and bad omens, which can be found constantly, anywhere. Passing someone on the stairs? Bad luck. Walking under a ladder? Puts one in league with the Devil, automatically. Put your shirt on inside out? Bad luck. Breaking a mirror, singing before breakfast, putting a hat on a bed, putting the button in the wrong buttonhole, an owl hooting three times, all these things are bad luck. Very bad. Conversely, sneezing three times on an empty stomach, putting your dress on inside out, getting your hair cut during a storm, an itch on the top of your head, all these are good luck. No wonder my mother is crazy, given her upbringing.

My own childhood was fraught with prayers to guard against the evil eye, Tibetan singing bowls, and creative visualization techniques. As a result, I can change stoplights from red to green by simply visualizing it, and I almost never go to church any more. I mostly keep the stoplight thing to myself—I’m not a freak, and I don’t want people thinking I am. I can do the same thing with trains, though, especially the j-m-z, which is my bitch. So people like hanging with me, ‘cause it’s convenient. I just have to make sure I don’t talk about it.

Lying in bed that night, I can’t sleep. The summer night wind blows my curtains gently up, and they float down again, making the slightest rasping noise across the carpet. The rasping has gotten louder and louder and it’s keeping me awake. Besides, there is something else bothering me. VIRGIN. She died without losing it. What is it they say about the Virgin Mary? She doesn’t die, she just goes to sleep. Like a Disney Princess.

So to some people, dying a virgin might seem like a holy thing to do. The purity of it. Unspoiled by human (male) hands. How did they know, though? How did those folks who put the VIRGIN grave marker over their dead daughter know for sure she was one? Did they have her hymen checked, post-mortem? Maybe she was one of those holier-than-thou Catholic school sluts who did it in every hole except that one. Or the kind of girl who had sleepovers with her girlfriends and they experimented in bed together, not that I would know anything about that. If you asked the dead girl what she wanted on her grave marker, VIRGIN might not be the first thing she would have picked. I myself have found the excuse of “I’m saving myself” fairly all-purpose when it comes to boys. But that was before the prophesy.

I do not intend to die a virgin.

Birthday List:

Good hair

Have sex

 I could have lost it before now, I guess. I know a lot of girls who have. Boys have wanted to do it with me before. My last boyfriend almost talked me into it, but I chickened out at the last minute because I was afraid his mom would come home and catch us. Irrational, since she was in PR and not due back for a few days yet, but I became obsessed with the idea that she might decide to come home early and surprise Justin, and catch us in the act. I hated the idea that Mrs. Torres could know something about me, anything at all. That if she saw me on the street, she might whisper to her friends, I caught that little puta in bed with my Justin.

Maybe I just wasn’t ready to do it. Justin was kind of a dipshit, when all’s said and done. He whined at me the rest of the night.

The curtains rasp across the rug, whispering virgin, virgin, over and over all night, and I toss and turn and wonder whether or not I can find someone worthy of deflowering me in the next 39 days.

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