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peeppeephellofatface · 6 years

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In an unexpected turn of events, I’m putting the fic about Duke and Henry up.

Nothing kinky. It’s more angst than anything. Like uh, blatant talk of visceral hatred of other engines, scrapping, and lots of self-deprecation. It’s very out of tone for this blog but dammit, it came out well and I wanted to post it somewhere.

While the television show did not come until years after steam had ended in Britain, it was undeniable that most engines knew of the stories of the Railway Series. At some point or another, they all had heard crew or passengers talk of various fictional steam engines amongst each other, and in turn told other engines about the same tales while they stood side-by-side at stations or were gathered in roundhouses. And over time, these stories took on almost folkloric qualities amongst rolling stock. Many smaller or weaker engines were enamored by the absurd fantasy of an E2 actually able to travel faster than walking pace, let alone pull a passenger train without running out of coal, and wondered if they too could someday overcome the restrictions of their design like that. The morals explained to human children through the stories were shared more literally to new engines. Banking engines would mutter the words of Edward or the Little Engine that Could as they went about their jobs. And in the late days of steam, some engines would dream of being bought by such an idyllic railway where nothing would ever permanently harm them and everything seemed to go right. Some even began treating the place as an afterlife, due to the fact that so many of the locomotives there were of classes long or recently extinct.

The one that had particularly stuck with the Duke of Gloucester, unsurprisingly, was the story of Henry. Both had been botched engines with disappointing performance due to poor steaming. The main difference was that Henry's controller and crew had shown some inkling of care for him, and in typical deus ex machina fashion found a miraculous way to turn him around. Well-meaning engines would try to reassure the Duke with this, but after hearing the same thing so many times, he grew to hate that fictional Henry. How others assumed such fundamentally flawed engines always had some easy fix to make them useful again and that everything would be well in the end. How everything eventually went well for that bloke and damn near everyone else on that nonexistent island that must have been off the coast of lalaland rather than England, while everything was going so wrong for himself. He was destined to be an only child by the onset of dieselization, and knew he was little more than a cheaply-made stopgap made to fill in for a vastly superior engine and would soon be disposed of and replaced by another vastly superior engine. He spent life as a widely disliked backup for failed engines that crews hated to deal with and more than wasted the money saved on his construction by the excessive fuel he needed due to his draughting issues. And he knew they'd never care enough to fix him- it wasn't just self-deprecation, but fact, and he refused to lie about such a thing to himself. And the resentment only grew to hatred as his fate was sealed and he was sent off to some scrapyard after a museum took his cylinders and left the rest of him to rot.

That time was one of the worst times in his life not because of what he saw, but how aggravating his powerlessness was. He knew the inevitable was coming and just wanted to hurry up and happen instead of having to sit around in utter boredom surrounded by the other rotting hulks. After a while, he couldn't even be bothered by the sight of them he'd grown so used to it. Sure, other engines were being saved but there was no way anyone would want something as worthless and incomplete as him. It was a matter of waiting, and wait he did, as the scrapyard had chosen to process the old wagons first, and his wait stretched from months to years. Leaving him to stew in his aggravation and regret, knowing how his only chance at life had been so short and squandered and miserable while the old tales of that idyllic island continued to echo inside him. At times he found himself looking at the other engines there and imagined them as those infernal machines from that island, their bright paint overcome with rust and repenting for their past snottiness and blatant lack of care for their duties. They got away with all kind of accidents and laziness and constantly were spared by their controller, why wasn’t it the same for the other objectively better engines dying around him? Why wasn’t it that way for him? Though he always cut off that last thought with the obvious. The others were mostly perfectly serviceable. He was a nothing but a defective back-up. Still, that Henry was defective and he got to live, yet he kept on whining and causing trouble. He'd never do such things if he'd been in a place like this. Jealousy burned within him. It brought him sick pleasure to imagine that engine languishing there, repenting and begging for mercy.

------

But as many know, miraculously, the Duke was recovered and finally rebuilt more or less as actually designed with some improvement, something he'd never considered, let alone dreamed of previously. And it was in the 90s and 2000s that he began to catch up with the world beyond the scrapyard and workshop. Most notably, one day he realized that Sodor was indeed a real place after he was sent on a run there. It wasn't that nobody knew it existed or that it suddenly came to be, it was just something largely kept secret amongst those that had been there for the sake of maintaining some privacy.

Duke felt ill whenever he thought about those old stories because of how inseparable they were from his dark years. He still couldn't believe the things he thought then, but still he remembered and understood that mindset far too clearly for comfort. He'd tried to shove those stories all aside and forget about them and just focus on his own noises or whatever small details he could see within his narrow field of vision whenever people talked about them. On his way to the island, he couldn't stop thinking about it. His driver was getting aggravated with him making the train late, as he wasn't running his best with the mental state he was in.

"Duke, what's gotten into you?"

"Nothing, nothing. I just need to go harder. You know how I can be. I need to be pushed. It's okay, I'd rather people be too harsh on me than too lax. It's really quite difficult to be that way with me, actually.."

"That's understandable."

Duke enjoyed being run hard, and the exertion helped cloud his mind and blur the scenery. But inevitably, he did arrive at his dreaded destination. He knew it had to be the place by the bright green engine standing at the station he was approaching. He knew he'd never see mainline engines that vivid anywhere else. He could only hope it wasn't Henry, as the thought that all these years the object of his aggravation had been real made him feel so... profane. He couldn’t remember what color he had been, though. He was ready and plotting try to find some excuse to just get the job done and get out of the place and never have to meet the engines there and just bury that part of his life again.

As he approached the engine, he caught a brief glimpse of it before his smoke deflectors blocked his vision. He wasn't familiar enough with the finer points of most engine designs to tell them apart but he was certainly one of the classes of unremarkable mixed-traffic ten-wheelers. That was reassuring. Supposedly, Henry had been some sort of Pacific to start with and this clearly wasn't one. He heard a soft voice beside him as he stopped.

"You're the visitor?"

"Yes."

"You're an interesting looking fellow, who are you?"

"A-A Standard."

"I know that, but what's your name?"

"It's irrelevant."

"Well aren't you friendly? I was just wondering who you were. Ages ago I swore I saw an engine around Crewe with odd valve gear like you."

"Pfft. Plenty of Standard 5s with that. Caprotti valve gear's not that unique."

"Oh. I could have sworn it had smoke deflectors like you, but it was awfully long ago. I'll leave you be. I understand. I'm that way myself oftentimes."

Duke was silent for a second while passengers got on and off the trains and photographs were snapped of the two engines. As he realized that he was going to be here a while, he decided he may as well kill some time with that other engine. He really didn't want to, but he couldn't see it and the lack of visible face calmed him a little. He could just pretend it was another regular engine or even a very loud human.

"So this is a the fabled island of Sodor?"

"It's funny how you folks from the Mainland never believe this place is real."

"So how accurate are the stories?"

"The books are fairly close. The show not so much, the creators seem dead-set on showing all my worst traits and it's horribly embarrassing."

"Shame about that. Hope the workers here know to look past reputations. I've dealt with plenty who didn't. But that was the past."

"Usually once people are at that sort of skill level they know well that the show is often just a load of rubbish. It's more the general public that irritates me."

"I'm sure glad there's not too much out there involving my early years. I'd be happy to forget them all entirely and trick myself into thinking I'm a new build."

"If only they could forget about mine. It was ages ago but it's the early stories that most seem to be familiar with, and they'll never shut up about mine and how "inspirational" I was. Oh, please, there's nothing inspirational about going from being a disgrace who can't do anything to just a regular disgrace."

"I was so awful I didn't even have any classmates."

"I'd be impressed by that if I weren’t a one-off myself for that exact reason. Used to be, at least. I'm still not sure what they did to me to make me what I am now, but I'm not complaining."

"I know all the details about what they did to me, but I'll spare you from it all, it was.. certainly a lot. Unless you absolutely insist."

"Not really. This is probably a bit sudden, but I kind of like you, whoever you are. It's rare to find someone who'll take me seriously and understands me. Funny how we're so similar, unless you're full of rubbish."

"Yes... same here..."

Duke trailed off, becoming increasingly concerned about who this was. Plenty of engines had been rebuilt before. This didn't have to be who he feared.

But then he said exactly what Duke had been dreading.

"It's been nice to meet you, I'm Henry."

His eyes went wide in panic and he had to clench to keep the rest of himself from doing anything that could alarm the passengers or... him. He had had never been more thankful for having his smoke deflectors.

The two sat there, silent, while Duke felt too sick and horrified to respond. This was the Henry he wanted to see rot with him so long ago. The one he so despised. He was real and right here and now he couldn't stand the guilt of his conscious for his invisible crimes knowing what he did. And there was no escaping, he couldn't just outright tell him while they were little more than strangers but also couldn't bear with being around him with that cloud hanging over him all the time. Thankfully, the whistle was blown soon and he was off. Henry tried to whistle to him as a farewell, still confused by his silence, but Duke did not respond. He was wordless on his way back as well, even when questioned by his crew.

"What happened between you and that other bloke? One moment you two seemed to get on fine and then that sudden silence? What's gotten into you?"

Duke wouldn't answer.

To this day, Duke has never returned to that island, for fear of seeing him again. There was too much that he knew that Henry didn't and he didn't think he could ever speak to him again without it coming out and souring things further or pressing that kind of guilt on him for something that may have been augmented or entirely fictional even. And a thought lingered in the back of his mind. What if Henry knew of him? What if he quietly had the same resentments about him and was just as paranoid about running into him as he was? That felt like too strange of a coincidence, though. His life had already been a string of miracles and luck, there was no way something like that would happen. Most likely Henry had never known who he was, or only been told about him once or twice because their experiences had been similar. He was overthinking all of this. All he could do was cram it away in the back of his mind. No way could he make up for that sudden departure. Best to forget that island ever existed and fake whatever illness needed to not go back. Thank god he never told him his name.

#pphfffics

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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This Is What Latinos Think Everyone Got Wrong About El Paso

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/this-is-what-latinos-think-everyone-got-wrong-about-el-paso/

This Is What Latinos Think Everyone Got Wrong About El Paso

As a reporter, I’ve talked to immigration activists for the better part of a decade. They don’t often cry, at least not in front of me.

But all day on Sunday, the day after the shooting in El Paso, hardened advocates became emotional while explaining what it’s like to live in the United States after a killer drove 10 hours to kill Mexicans, Latinos and immigrants. The next day I still felt restless after a conversation with a friend. She had been crying because her husband overheard white men at the community pool remarking that while they didn’t agree with the killings — how magnanimous — they, too, didn’t want white people to be “wiped out” and for Hispanics to “take over.”

Story Continued Below

Where was this said? The deeply Republican city of Los Angeles, of course.

“He openly was discussing this like it was sports talk,” she told me, furious. “After 20 people are dead.”

The news media’s approach to its coverage of the El Paso shooting has obscured what made it uniquely horrifying for the Latino community. From the moment the shots were fired, this was a trend story: Another mass shooting, so let’s restart our debates about gun control and mental illness, maybe pull up some video game b-roll. And after so many shootings in recent years, journalists have decided it’s wrong to give too much attention to the shooter, so we downplayed his name and face, his bizarre and hateful manifesto.

But the media’s desire to erase the shooter and his ideology ended up erasing his victims and their community, too. While the news media successfully portrayed this shooting as part of a national epidemic of mass killings, we failed to accurately convey how this one was different. The visceral emotions of the Latinos I spoke with should have been—and should still be—front and center.

After years of covering immigration, I thought I understood how immigrants felt, because of our similar backgrounds. But I didn’t, not really. I’m Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian and from New York. Like many Hispanics, I’ve known undocumented people, but while I could empathizewith immigrants going through hardship, that’s not the same as sharing their experience.

This killer expressly traveled to a city filled with Mexicans and immigrants. This is new territory. The El Paso shooting isn’t just a sad moment that will pass, but the culmination of an anti-immigrant four decades in politics that ratcheted up in the 1990s and 2000s and has become only louder, emboldened and unchecked by American leaders, led by the president but certainly not just by him.

Of the 49 victims three years ago at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, 90 percent were Latino. Almost half were Puerto Rican. Others were Colombians, Mexicans and Dominicans. But what makes El Paso different is that people were targeted, not by someone pledging themselves to ISIS, but to white supremacy.

“Now Hispanic Americans have been targeted, some who are immigrants, and all who have limited political power,” I wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “That’s what’s going on. And people are terrified.”

Then the messages starting coming in.

I received more than 160 private messages on Twitter along with some emails and texts from people who told me they didn’t have a safe space to share these stories.

They were from immigrants and people born in this country just like me. They were from older people scared for their children and grandchildren, but also from teenagers, heartbreakingly young teens of 16 and 17, who shouldn’t have to worry that someone is going to tell them to “go back to Mexico” and threaten to attack them while walking their dog if they don’t cross the streetnow. They were from people in red states and blue states, the united states of hating immigrants and people who just look like they might be. They were from biracial people, but also from white people who explained that their sister had married a Latino man and that means they have two Latina nieces, or a grandson, and they’re scared of the ways their neighbors might try to hurt them — with words they won’t forget or violence that could take them away forever.

A Latina in a predominantly Hispanic border city “very much like El Paso” told me she has a new job, overseeing a team of mostly Hispanic staff, with her name on the door — something to really be proud of. But instead she’s terrified, she said, because the office is marketed toward Latinos and that means she feels like a target.

A Dreamer in Texas told me he was terrified of taking his son to stores or crowded places, and said he warned his parents not to speak Spanish in public. A first-generation Salvadoran man with a wife who is white said they just had a baby boy four weeks ago. He said he has told her he hopes the baby doesn’t have dark skin.

A white man said his Latina wife from the Rio Grande Valley broke down after reading the shooter’s manifesto. She told him she’s sorry if their future kids are targets because of her.

There were people who said they wish they didn’t have an accent so they could pass as white, and others who said they are ashamed to be relieved they can pass as white. “We’re not fine,” a resident of a border town wrote to me.

And then the process started all over again. A massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at seven food processing plants in Morton, Mississippi, led to the arrests of 680 undocumented workers, a record. Children cried outside the gates for their parents. Wives came to the scene to say goodbye to their husbands. It was a new method for separating families, but with the same result.

At first I didn’t watch the video of 11-year-old Magdalena Gomez Gregorio tearfully begging the government to release her father every time it popped up online, because while as a journalist I understand the news value of these images to show the human cost of Trump’s immigration policy, I’ve personally found it hard to continue looking at haunting images like it. I remember little Jakelin, 7, who died of dehydration in U.S. custody last year, or Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, face down in the Rio Grande in June, their tragedy transformed into a small part of the perpetual motion machine of online content. But I watched the video as I wrote this paragraph, of her asking the government to “please show some heart,” between sobs, while adding that her father is not a criminal.

Like her, many Hispanics are worried. They live in parts of the South where there aren’t many Latinos, but also in majority-Hispanic areas where the actions of an outsider coming to a border town to kill means the cocoon of community doesn’t present the sense of protection it once did. But even in this dark moment there are hopeful signs.

The Latino community in the United States is not monolithic. At most, we have a shared language that not all speak. But I’ve seen a growing awareness of people sticking together online, as people check on one another on Instagram, in person and on the phone. There is fear, but people are also resolute that things will get better. And some wanted to make clear to me that while they’re well aware of how deeply awful this moment is, they still stand in defiance of those who would instill fear.

“I am done being terrorized,” one young man wrote to me. “My stepdad didn’t march and organize in the Chicano movement for our generation to live in fear.”

And while I think the news media should do better to contextualize the El Paso attack as a toxic brew of American gun culture and hatred of Latinos, there has been a lot of good coverage, too. Univision preempted its programming with a prime-time special by Jorge Ramos and Patricia Janiot titled “Hispanics in the Crosshairs,” and Telemundo’s José Díaz-Balart interviewed El Paso victims from the hospital, sharing Spanish-language texts exchanged between a mother and her daughter. Cassandra Jaramillo and Alfredo Corchado of theDallas Morning Newsfiled big-hearted stories from El Paso that centered on local heroes and spotlighted the community’s pain, and theLos Angeles Timesreporters Esmeralda Bermudez, Paloma Esquivel and Cindy Carcamo elevated the voices of Latino residents and grappled with the Trump factor. CNN’s Nicole Chavez covered how “Walmart united Americans and Mexicans in El Paso for decades” and the network’s Nick Valencia convened a round table of Hispanics from El Paso about “The Impact of Trump’s Rhetoric on Hispanic Americans.” For the “CBS Evening News,” Manuel Bojorquez spoke to a roundtable of El Paso Latinos, one of whom said Trump “has been poisoning so many people with his words and targeting us Latinos when all we do is work.”

I believe in and am still awed by the power of journalism, of documenting people’s stories so better-informed citizens can rally around their neighbors and cast out the ignorance that led to this shameful stain on our country’s history. As one person, who came to the country legally at the age of 19, wrote to me, the pain is relatively recent, but there is an antidote.

“It is really the last few months that I feel not wanted by my fellow Americans and it hurts,” she wrote. “It hurts because we contribute to the economy, to the food and the culture. I know the vast majority of Americans do not feel this way about us, but we will need you to speak up.”

#About #Foreign #Politics #wrong

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