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debunkingtherightwing · 1 month

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Satanism, old photos, a defamatory clairvoyant, and Emmanuel Macron's pink tie: A look into Candace Owens' insanely stupid "transvestigation" into Brigitte Macron

Just when I thought the Daily Wire couldn't get stupider (source: Candace Owens on Daily Wire)

Candace Owens is descending into pure wingnuttery before our very eyes. Last week she declared that there is a secret "Jewish Gang" in Hollywood committing horrifying acts on people and now she's really really descending into Alex Jones territory by declaring that Brigitte Macron is secretly a trans woman, no I'm not kidding.

I'm not familiar enough with Candace Owens to know if this kind of brilliant insight is the norm for her, however I'd just like to state for the record that if Candace Owens is always this insane you'll be seeing a lot more of her on the blog. Lets get into it, strap in folks because this is truly one of the most insane things that I have ever covered on this blog.

03:00, Candace Owens: "So let me tell you about how I happened upon this story. There was just an article that was published in the Daily Mail, here is the headline. 'The proof France's first lady wasn't born a man'."

Here's the full headline that Candace displayed on her show. It seems like she suffers from selective eyesight and could only make out the words "France's first lady" and "born a man".

Yeah, you really shouldn't display an article debunking a conspiracy theory up on the screen before promoting that exact same conspiracy theory as a 100% factually accurate bombshell. This is just pure laziness.

03:15, Candace Owens: "So I of course instantly read it because what a bizarre thing that you need to provide proof that Brigitte Macron was not born a man. And embedded within the article they showed two photos and I'm going to show you right now. This is the first photo, this is allegedly Brigitte Macron when she was a little girl sitting on her moms lap but when I saw this photo the first thing I noticed was that the person on the far left, the boy, that actually looks like Brigitte Macron."

Ok, so Candaces brilliant evidence for her theory that's supposed to prove to me that Brigitte Macron is trans is....that Brigitte has a familial resemblance to her brother.

I'm not sure if Candace realizes this but there's this thing called "genetics" that also explains why Brigitte's brother looks similar to her. Does Candace just assume that every woman who has a brother is secretly trans because that woman's brother brother looks kind of similar to her? I am honestly floored that a grown woman is floating this junk as a serious possibility.

If you're reading this and you take the Daily Wire seriously, consider this your wakeup call because this might take the crown for the stupidest video I have seen in my lifetime. Also, here's the photo in case you're curious.

03:42, Candace Owens: "I'm taking you guys through my thought process."

Candace Owens: A Portrait of Insanity.

03:48, Candace Owens: "Maybe she's a dead ringer for her brother but I don't see any resemblance there with the little girl."

Maybe because that photo was taken when Brigitte was extremely young and had yet to develop any particularly defined facial features? What kind of dumbass argument is that?

"Oh, Brigitte's older brother who had more defined features than her in an old black and white photo has a familial resemblance to Brigitte. Must be because they're secretly the same person!"

And if Brigitte's older brother is in fact trans, who's the girl sitting on Brigitte's mothers lap? A secret relative? Is Brigitte's older brother a trans male? How deep does this go?! New theory, every person on the planet is trans!

03:51, Candace Owens: "Let me show the second photo, debunking --- another young photo allegedly of Brigitte Macron. What I thought when I looked at this photo is that this looks way too new to be a photo of a 70 year old when they were a child."

No it doesn't. In what world does this look like a newer photograph?

Think about it this way, if Brigitte Macron was a trans male that would have left a paper trail. If Macron met her as a female, which by all means he did, then Brigitte would have transitioned before she became a teacher. Surely this would be documented somewhere. She presumably went through some training to become a teacher, maybe there would be records of her attending college there pre-transition.

Also, if Brigitte is indeed trans like Candace is speculating here, the amount of effort it would take to cover this up would be insane. It's totally unrealistic. Too bad the cover-up got exposed by Candace Owens noticing that Brigitte looks kind of similar to her brother!

04:34, Candace Owens: "So the quote-on-quote 'conspiracy theory' is actually a three year thorough investigation that was conducted by journalists that were working with genealogists. It was published in six issues in Faits Et Documents, I'm sorry my French is not that good but yes, they published six issues unpacking what they had discovered after a three year investigation."

Faits Et Documents (Facts And Documents in English) is absolutely not a credible source of information. It's essentially an Infowars-esque far-right magazine that regularly goes on antisemitic tirades about how Jewish people and freemasons control the world. It claims that it's the only French publication to deal with "masonic meetings".

The person who founded it is named Emmanuel Rattier and he is, in the kindest terms, an antisemitic raving lunatic. For a while Rattier worked as the "occult editorial advisor" at Kontre Kulture. Kontre Kulture is a publishing house that has unapologetically republished things like The International Jew, an antisemitic propaganda piece published by Henry Ford in the 1920's that Adolf Hitler himself praised.

Rattier's own publication has also published antisemitic screeds and generally engaged in crazed behavior. Rattier apparently would send his underlings to infiltrate freemason meetings, presumably in the hope that they would discover an occult conspiracy.

The article that Candace links is essentially a blog summarizing Fait Et Documents "findings". It was written by a guy named Lionel Labosse. Here's how he describes himself.

"My interest for this investigation comes from converging coincidences. On the one hand, I am an anti-communist from the beginning. I started the series of now 11 articles chronicling national-covidism at the beginning of March 2020; secondly, I subscribe to Faits & Documents, so I didn't waste time wondering if it was a serious journal; thirdly, I am altersexual (a word of my own invention), so this investigation was particularly relevant to me, and I was relatively expert in this field, and able to distinguish between what falls under transphobia and homophobia, and what falls under the public interest."

So this guy, who is a self-described "anti-communist" subscriber of Fait Et Documents and has written numerous articles concerning something that he calls "national-covidism" is the writer of this post. Don't worry though guys, he's altersexual, which by the way is absolutely not a term that he coined, so he's able to parse through what's transphobic and what's of public interest. I don't see how you can read that and not see the writings of a raving lunatic. Candace Owens however seems to find this all very compelling.

The "genealogist" isn't even a licensed genealogist. His name is Alain Beyrand and he's a self-proclaimed "amateur genealogist".

What he did to merit the description of "genealogist" remains a mystery to me and everyone else in the reality-based community.

The two "journalists" who were involved in this investigation are Xavier Poussard and Natacha Rey. Now, there isn't much information about these two on the internet so I'm only going by what I could scrape together in what amounts to a Google investigation of a bunch of documents written in French conducted in the hallowed hall of journalism that is my tiny apartment. From the looks of it, Xavier is the publishing director for Faits Et Documents and he's also an occult obsessed weirdo, as is Natalie. In the document that Candace Owens cites, he delivers some truly crazed analysis of Brigitte and Emmanuel's wedding.

Of course, how could I not have realized that because Emmanuel Macron wore a pink tie to his wedding and their wedding cake had candles on it, him and his wife are secretly satanists....and his wife is trans. This is all very sane and non-transphobic by the way. God, these people are so profoundly stupid and bigoted.

So, Candace's source of information is a completely insane blog sourced from a completely insane magazine that's obsessed with wingnut satanic conspiracy theories. If I was Ben Shapiro, Candace would be fired so fast that her head would spin.

05:03, Candace Owens: "This is what they have published."

They've also published that Emmanuel Macron wearing a pink tie is somehow proof that he's a satanist. As I said prior, the people writing this are clearly completely insane.

05:04, Candace Owens: "Their theory is that the first lady, Brigitte Macron, was actually born Jean-Michelle. So Brigitte is actually Jean-Michelle. Jean-Michelle lived as a man for thirty years, fathered five children, OK? And then transitioned at the age of thirty to become Brigitte."

Ok genius, who was the mother? It's not like Brigitte just planted child seeds in the front yard and the next day a kid sprouted out of the ground, someone had to have carried those children. Who was that person?! The timeline doesn't make sense, the missing child on the lap doesn't make sense, none of this makes sense!

05:26, Candace Owens: "Now, I'm just gonna show you this before and after photo, just right here. They actually used as a part of their investigation, Chinese software. Uh, and this is a side by side. It is such a dead wringer, it's crazy to me that you would not say that these two individuals look alike."

Here's the picture Candace shows. Lets unpack this:

Alright, so we've got a part in the hair that looks kind of similar and a facial structure that can basically be explained by the fact that Brigitte is related to her brother. The hair part in particular makes absolutely zero sense. It doesn't even look that similar and guess what, hair styles aren't inherently coded into our biology. Hair can be styled and parted in different ways and there are probably hundreds if not thousands of people out there with similar hair to me. Plus, your hair looks way after you've aged over 50 years.

Hinging your entire conspiracy theory on "Well, this person looks vaguely similar to her brother" is so stupid. Also, if you look really closely you'll notice that the eye colors are different. I guess she just found a way to magically change her eye color for....cosmetic reasons?

05:52, Candace Owens: "Now, I will tell you why this has legs and why I'm going to encourage you to read the very long document that I read which we will include in the link in bio."

I am absolutely horrified that Candace Owens basically ensured that a legion of people will believe that Brigitte Macron is a transgender satanist because she has a familial resemblance to her brother and Emmanuel Macron wore a pink tie to his wedding (which Candace strangely enough doesn't mention, TieGate remains uninvestigated and must be exposed to the world at large!).

06:00, Candace Owens: "The first obvious thing, first obvious reason, that I am very much believing what they have published is that the first lady is simply unable to produce any photos of herself throughout the first thirty years of her life."

Well, she did. Unfortunately in Candace's opinion those are faked so I guess Brigitte technically hasn't produced any photos of herself in the Candace-verse. The thing is that no matter how many photos Brigitte produces, these guys are always going to find some hair tuft that looks kind of similar to her brothers and declare that photo as more proof for their insane theory.

06:46, Candace Owens: "Instead, the only photos they have produced that are circling in the media are the photos that I just showed you and as I said, the first photo, she looks more like the Jean-Michelle who she claims is actually her brother, who she won't just present to the public."

The notion that Brigitte Macron has the obligation to "produce" her brother because of Candace Owens and some insane blog is completely ridiculous.

And even if she did, Candace would probably just say that he's a paid actor and keep pushing this theory. All of Candace's evidence is "Oh, well there's no evidence that she isn't trans". By that logic I could say that a lizard person has possessed Candace Owens and when she protests go "Oh, yeah? Well show me the proof that you're aren't possessed by a lizard person".

07:20, Candace Owens: "So, Jean-Michelle existed for thirty years, according to the genealogist, ok? And then Jean-Michelle stops existing and Brigitte exists, but Brigitte doesn't exist for the first thirty years, ok?"

If Candace or Alain the amateur genealogist can provide any proof of these people vanishing and appearing from and into existence, I'd be happy to review it. Until then there's absolutely no proof of any of this outside of "I said so!"

07:29, Candace Owens: "The second photo, the one that I said to you looked a little too recent for an alleged 70 year old, well yeah they were able to debunk that. That's actually a photo of her daughter. Her daughter Tiphaine, you can see now side by side. Of course that is her daughter, it's a dead wringer for her daughter. So why would you colorize a photo and make it black and white and try to pass it as yourself when it is in fact your daughter?"

Woah, a daughter looks like her mother, that's never happened before. Must be a conspiracy! Also, I guess Brigitte (who is secretly Jean-Michelle) is the first transgender woman to have given birth because that's the only way to explain how she has a daughter in the first place.

God, this is so monumentally stupid.

08:06, Candace Owens: "Here's the second reason that I would say, major red flags. Rather than just producing what should be ample evidence of your existence for the first thirty years of your life, they're suing. Yes, the first lady actually sued two of the journalists who were involved in producing the story."

The people that Brigitte Macron sued were Natacha Rey (told you we'd come back to her!) and Amandine Roy. They got sued for producing a four hour video alleging that Brigitte is secretly trans.

This story gets even stranger when you look into Amandine Roy because apparently she's a self-described clairvoyant and Amandine Roy isn't actually her name, not even joking. Her real name is actually Delphine Jegousse and this isn't the first time she's gotten in trouble with the French government.

In early 2023, the office of the President of the Republic filed a complaint against Roy for posting drawings depicting Macron wearing a Nazi uniform on Twitter. It seems like this woman can't stop getting dragged to court for defamation. She was hit with a fine for the stuff about Brigette being trans but I couldn't find anything about the Hitler drawing. Regardless, these two people are clearly as nuts as some of the other characters who are central figures in this conspiracy theory.

Also, a lawsuit is actually really unhelpful to the conspiracy narrative because a lawsuit would force Brigitte to prove that she isn't trans. If there is indeed this massive lack of evidence of Brigitte being born a woman and she wants to cover that up for.....whatever reason, her taking this to court is probably one of the worst decisions that she could make.

08:32, Candace Owens: "Something to note is what exactly Brigitte is suing for. She's suing them for 'violation of privacy and fundamental personal rights' plus 'illicit use of her image'. But what does that mean? That doesn't mean anything."

I don't really know much about French law and neither does Candace Owens. However, they definitely did use her image illicitly judging from the information I could find about privacy laws in France. In France, people have the exclusive right to their own image. What this means in simple terms is that you are in full control of the redistribution and use of pictures that are taken of you and if somebody uses a picture of you without your consent you can sue because in France that's considered a violation of your privacy.

I figured this out in the roughly five seconds it took me to Google "right of image, France" and the two minutes it took me to read an article on a public service website. If I can do that on my budget of zero dollars, Candace Owens can do that with the massive budget that the Daily Wire provides for her.

09:06, Candace Owens: "Now, the two journalists being sued by the way are Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey and they were eventually punished with symbolic fines for, I guess, invading the privacy of the first lady. It's gonna get even crazier though because journalists that worked on this case were also threatened. They sent the police to threaten them while they were conducting research. Natacha Rey, the woman that was punished with a symbolic fine, as she was conducting research she reached out to somebody to ask questions about the first ladies upbringing, the first 30 years of the first ladies life. And then what happened as she was examining these inconsistencies in the story was the police burst into her home on July 13th, 2021. They then took her into custody, without being summoned, on the pretext of a complaint that was filed by one of the individuals that she had reached out to."

There are two places where I have heard this claim being made.

1): The Candace Owens Show

2): The blog that Candace links that also claims that Macron wearing a pink tie is a sign that he's a satanist. The blog also doesn't provide any evidence that this arrest actually took place. How do I know that Candace got this from the blog? Because she basically read what the blog said verbatim.

Unless there's hard evidence that any of this took place, I'm throwing this in the bullshit pile.

10:40, Candace Owens: "They similarly arrested a man named Éric Verhaeghe, another journalist working on the story. Similarly had no charges, they just wanted to question him."

Candace left the a couple parts out of this. Such as the part where Eric Verhaeghe is a writer for the Russian state funded propaganda outlet RT and unapologetically repeated a Russian state TV outlets claims that Donald Trump's "secret file" contained dirt of Brigette Macron. If this guy doesn't have Russian asset written all over him I don't know who does.

If this alleged arrest did actually occur, it was most likely because this guy works for Russian state media and was spreading disinformation about a prominent politician. Plus, even in his story it's not like anything really came of it. He was arrested and then let out, allowed to carry on his investigation as if nothing happened. If the French government really wanted to suppress this story, surely they wouldn't have let him out.

11:21, Candace Owens: "What keeps happening throughout the years of her being the first lady, so since 2017, every time the first lady tells a story about herself in her childhood the math doesn't quite math, right? For example, she recalled living alone in the United States during Neil Armstrongs moon landing in 1969. The only problem is that she would've been just sixteen years old."

What a shock, a 70 year old woman doesn't have a perfect memory of every detail in her life. My grandmother fully believes that she was able to drive stick, the only problem is that my three uncles and my father all have told me that she never touched a manual transmission in her life. Your memory starts to go when you're older.

Conclusion:

Somehow, that was even dumber than I expected. One thing it was thought was an absolutely wild ride. I expected things like the photos, what I didn't expect was a conspiracy theory declaring that candles and pink ties are satanic that was written by a raging antisemite being used as a primary source and one of their other primary sources being a guy who works for RT.

Also, I've never seen pictures of Candace Owens as a kid. Clearly this means that she's transgender. It's even though because she's never seen pictures of me as a kid meaning that I'm a transwoman. All this theory proves is that the right is rehashing conspiracy theories that weren't even that good to begin with, is Michelle Obama still a man? I guess so. Everyone that Candace Owens doesn't like is trans, which naturally makes all those people that much cooler in my eyes.

Cheers and I'll see you in the next one!

Sources:

Original Episode:

Candace Owens. “Ep. 299 - INSANE. This Is the BIGGEST Political Scandal in Human History.” The Daily Wire.

Brigitte Macron Transgender Conspiracy Debunk

Roberts, Rachel. “How Emmanuel Macron’s Parents Discovered Their 16-Year-Old Son Was Dating His 40-Year-Old Teacher.” The Independent, 23 Apr. 2018.

“La Lettre d’Extrême Droite Faits & Documents Bénéficie d’Un Agrément de “Publication de Presse” Du Ministère de La Culture.” StreetPress.

“Antisémitisme : Des Livres Édités Par Soral Censurés.” Europe 1, 13 Nov. 2013.

“Ford’s Anti-Semitism | American Experience | PBS.” Pbs.org, 2012.

Saxena, Astha. “Emmanuel Macron Breaks Silence after Wife Sues over Claims She Is Transgender.” Express.co.uk, 9 Mar. 2024.

“L’avocat d’Emmanuel Macron Porte Plainte Contre Une Voyante d’Angers Pour Injure Publique.” Le Parisien, 6 Jan. 2023.

“Right to the Image and Respect for Privacy.” Www.service-Public.fr, www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F32103?lang=enx

#right wing bullshit #conservative bullshit #fact checking #journalism #candace owens #brigitte macron #transphobes suck #fuck transphobes #bad takes #conservatives #disinformation #politics #debunking #daily wire #petition for Candace Owens to expose the satanic undertones of Emmanuel Macron's pink tie #and for her to expose where I can buy my own satanic pink tie #french politics #france

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kelyon · 2 years

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Live Wire Prologue: Being A Ghost

Belle is an electricity ghost haunting the house where she died. Read on AO3

The thing no one tells you about being a ghost is how much energy it takes. That’s why most people don’t do it when they die. If they try shortly after death, they often only show up as brief flashes that are see-through and hard to recognize as human. The ones that stick around usually have some almighty grudge or a score to settle. A lot of hauntings are about the search for justice, or at least compassion.

Once you summon enough strength to appear to the living, there’s no controlling it. You become formless, sometimes thoughtless. Not even a soul anymore, just a force so powerful that most living people can only perceive you as something evil. Sweet old grandmothers who just want to check in on their descendants have to tune in to raw, primal rage in order to cross the veil. When they do, they often end up scaring the pants off of the very family they wanted to comfort.

It’s kind of sad, being a ghost.

****

What remained of Belle French had the opposite problem of most other ghosts. She was full of energy. Several thousand volts of it.

At the time of Belle’s death, electricity had been new. Everyone was pretty sure it was just a fad. It would burn itself out in a few years. But they couldn’t deny that Mr. Edison’s incandescent lamp gave off a brighter and steadier light than gas lamps ever could. So even if it was a folly, at least it was a useful novelty. Maybe it would be worth keeping around.

Maurice French had believed in the merits of electricity. After seeing the electrical displays at the White City of the Columbia Exhibition in Chicago, he had made his fortune by investing in progress. When he had his new house built in a coastal town in Maine, he insisted that the whole building should be wired for electric lights. The builders were pretty sure that Maurice was crazy. He had already decided that the house should be painted pink and green. But he was paying the builders five thousand dollars. The money was good, so they did what he said.

Belle had followed in her father’s footsteps with tinkering and inventing. Book learning would only take a person so far, her father said. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to really know what you’re dealing with. Belle was always eager to take something apart and put it back together in order to understand how it worked.

Unfortunately, electric wiring works by having enough power to stop a human heart.

She didn’t remember dying. One day, she had removed a panel of her bedroom wall--with every intention of hammering it back into place when she was done--and had been carefully examining the ceramic tubes that surrounded the copper wires. The tubes were nailed into the wooden wall supports, and the wires went through them in a giant web that went all over the house. At some point in her exploration, there was a flash of light, and a burning smell, and then Belle was looking at her body from inside the wall.

For the first few decades, she was stuck in a limited circuit. Though the house had been built with electricity in mind, most of the bedrooms only had one wall with wires where Belle could exist. The parlor and drawing room downstairs were slightly better set up, with outlets and electric lamps on all four walls. Wires connected the house to the telegraph pole outside, but Belle was never able to get very far. Something tied her to the house.

She could stay inside the wires, but the back of a wall was never very interesting. It was much better to reach out into an electrical device. When she went into lamps, she could see whatever the light bulb saw. Usually it was a motionless view of the floor or a scrap of a table. The inside of a lampshade was about as interesting as the inside of a wall. The only rooms with bare bulbs--where she could see the whole room--were in the basement and the attic, where no one ever went.

Her favorite light bulb was over her father’s work table. She spent a lot of time watching him fiddle with his inventions or draw up plans. When he read at night in his study, she went into that bulb. From over his shoulder, she caught fragments of words from books and the newspaper.

Being with her father was the only time Belle missed being alive. When she saw a screwdriver roll off a table, she was never able to pick it up for him, or even tell him where it was when he started looking for it. She would try to get his attention by flickering the light, but he would just twist the light bulb and look annoyed. When he read, she tried to make the bulb a little brighter, a little warmer on cold nights. She imagined she was standing behind him or sitting at his bedside like a guardian. She couldn’t do anything for him, but maybe she could let him know he wasn’t alone.

She didn’t see him die. Over the decades, her father grew older and more frail. He spent more time at home, then in his room, then in his bed. A nurse lived in the house. She served him meals and saw to his needs. Belle heard the tense conversations between the nurse and the doctors and her father. Then one day, some young men in white came to the house. They carried him down the stairs and set him into a wheelchair. They took him away and he never came back.

If he had died at home, could they have seen each other again? Just for a moment? Could he have stayed behind, like her? Could she have gone with him to whatever fate awaits souls that don’t become ghosts?

She would never find out.

It’s pretty sad, being a ghost.

****

After her father died, Belle faded into the walls for a while. People came into the house, but they weren’t worth watching. Strangers unplugged the lamps, switched off and on the overhead lights as they came and went. Belle felt the surges of power, but they went through her. She didn’t want to be part of it, so she wasn’t.

New people came in, people she couldn’t bring herself to care about. She only noticed them when they used electricity. The young woman had a device that curled and crimped her short hair. Her husband had a razor that plugged into the wall. They liked to dance together while listening to music on the radio. They liked to make love with the lights on.

Belle watched it all with insulated jealousy. Seeing this couple--so young, so happy, so alive--made her mourn the loss of her own life. She would never make love to anyone. She would never love anyone. She would never know anyone. Ever.

She would never travel and see all the places she had read about in her books. She would never hold a book in her hands again. She could hear and see, but she would never taste, or smell. She would never be anything other than an observer of the living.

She measured time by the currents that ran through her. The most sudden change was the day the icebox in the kitchen was replaced by a refrigerator. It drew more power than everything else in the house put together. The man called in men in overalls to install a new circuit breaker. He was doing well, it seemed. He had all kinds of plans to fill the house with new “appliances.”

More appliances gave Belle more areas to explore. The oven and stove, the various mixers and blenders in the kitchen. Inside the refrigerator was interesting, because it was always changing. The people who lived in her house took food out of the refrigerator all day, and often put new foods in. When they kept the door open and pondered what they wanted to eat, it was the longest look Belle ever got at their faces.

The machines for washing and drying laundry quickly became her favorites. She liked the sensations they produced. Rhythmic thumping, rapid spinning--they made her feel physical. It was almost like dancing, like feeling her own feet pounding on the cement basement floor. It was almost like having a body.

There were children in her house now. The not-so-young-anymore couple bought small lights to shine on them while they slept. It was to protect against the fear of monsters. Belle was the closest thing to a monster in this house and she spent all night looking over them. They weren’t afraid.

Sometimes the children amused themselves by playing with the lights. Chubby fingers pushed the heavy buttons on and off again and again. To Belle, it almost felt like they were inviting her into their game. It was the sort of thing a child would believe, wasn’t it? These children might well think that electricity was really just an invisible woman who wanted to be friends with them.

In a moment of hope, Belle tried to touch them back, but it only ended up shocking a child and making all of them cry. Their mother said it served them right for wasting electricity.

It served Belle right for trying to reach out to living people.

At Christmastime, the house was strewn with lights. Belle twinkled through her home, seeing the rooms through colored glass--red and green and gold. When the lights were set up by windows, she got to look out at her neighborhood for the first time in fifty years.

The Christmas tree became her winter residence. From inside an electric star, she watched the children put up ornaments and open presents. Their eyes went wide every year when they saw the tree lit up for the first time. Belle pretended their joy was for her.

Being inside the vacuum cleaner gave her a chance to explore the house again. From the ground level, she saw the modern furniture they’d put in her house. The children left shoes and toys all over the floor. Sometimes the mother used an attachment on the vacuum cleaner to take dust off of the walls, so Belle got a good look at the new wallpaper and paint. She saw everything better when she wasn’t limited to a fixed position in a light bulb.

They also bought a big box they called a television. They put it in the living room and almost never turned it off. The mother watched the box while she ironed and folded laundry and bustled about the house during the day. The children lay on the floor, staring up at the screen in a trance. The father would shoo the children out when he came home in the evenings, so he could sit in his easy chair and smoke cigarettes and watch television alone.

But he wasn’t alone. None of them were. The ghost of Belle French was their companion any time they flipped a switch.

****

The children grew up quickly. One Christmas, a girl got something she called a hair dryer, which she plugged in as soon as she could. Belle settled into the strange dome while the girl sat beneath it. Together, they read magazines while Belle coiled around the girl’s hair curlers, a blanket of electric warmth.

A few years later, a boy received a new type of lamp. The bulb was perfectly ordinary, though there was some bright blue goop above it, blocking the view. If Belle stayed in the bulb for a while, she would see the goop rise away from the bulb and float up into a tube of green water. It was hypnotizing. She would spend hours in that bulb, watching the blue goop form and break apart and reform in the green liquid. It reminded her of something she’d read about happening in Polynesian islands--lava.

These weren’t toys, Belle realized. The children didn’t play with toys anymore. They brought home “dates,” even when the parents weren’t home to supervise. They would turn off most of the lights, but not all. They left the television playing, as a quick excuse for what they were doing so close to each other on the sofa.

Once, the girl brought home a boy she clearly didn’t like. Or at least, she didn’t like him sticking his hand down her blouse. She tried to be nice about it, but there was no hiding her relief when the porch light turned on--which clearly meant that her parents had come home. Only, when the girl leapt off the sofa to open the door, her parents were nowhere to be found. The porch light, apparently, had turned on all by itself.

One by one, the children grew older and left the house. The woman kept them close in her heart, making care packages with homemade cookies. Those foods always mixed consistently, and never burned in the electric oven. She used an electric typewriter to write letters that went with the gifts. Belle poured herself into the keys and levers, as their mother gave them her love.

Every year they came back for Christmas. Every year the father found some new light-up decoration he could put outside. As long as the extension cord had one end plugged into the house, Belle could go outside and see the snow. The children helped their father set up the lights, climbing ladders and going up onto the roof.

Every year, it was the brightest house on the block.

In time, the children had children. Belle loved it when the grandchildren came to visit. By now, the man and the woman had become set into a routine. They puttered in and out of the same rooms, turned on the same lights and devices day in and day out. But every time the grandchildren came, the world was thrown into chaos. They stayed in rooms that hadn’t been opened in months, turning on lights that even Belle had forgotten about. They went into the basement and the attic to tell frightening stories. The littlest ones always insisted that they were not scared. On those nights, Belle made sure to keep the night-lights extra bright in their rooms.

More quickly than she would have thought possible, the grandchildren were growing up too. Now when they visited, all they wanted to do was watch television or play games that they attached to the television. From inside the wires, Belle couldn’t see what they saw on the screen. She only knew the rapt faces and the furious pushing of buttons. They competed against each other, four at a time. Any extra children were left watching and begging to play the winner.

As it turned out, the game device was just another machine that plugged into the wall. The main body was a sort of plastic box, like a cabinet. It held circuitry more advanced than anything else in the house. Wires connected the cabinet to smaller devices that each child held in both hands. They pushed buttons with their thumbs, and nudged a plastic stick in the center of the device. She couldn’t put herself in all four devices at once, so she went back and forth between them. Whichever child held her found that their buttons pressed down just a touch easier, and that their plastic stick was just a little better to handle.

She liked to make sure the little ones won the game sometimes.

****

The man died first. Belle saw him collapse one day, while he was moving boxes alone in the basement. He was still alive when Belle rushed up the stairs to find his wife. She was sitting in a sunny window on the second floor, looking at a box of old photographs. No lights were on near her, no devices of any kind. Desperate, Belle went into the doorbell. She made it ring, over and over. The old woman shouted for her husband to answer it. When he didn’t, and when she shuffled to the door and found no one there, she cursed those darn kids nowadays and went right back to her memories.

When Belle looked down at the old man again, he wasn’t breathing anymore.

The children came for the funeral. There was no joy in this visit. Even the grandchildren were subdued. Belle looked on at them all, feeling more helpless, more isolated than she ever had before. She had known this man for most of his life. She had been in the oven while the cakes had baked for every one of his birthdays. Chocolate cake, that was his favorite. Dark chocolate with whipped cream on top. She’d been in the mixer, whipping the cream, every year.

Unlike the celebrations Belle had spent with this family, she couldn’t take part in the wake. When they were happy, she had learned how to become a part of their happiness. She watched them as though through a window but still took their joy into her own heart.

But grief wasn’t like that. In grief, these people had each other. They could speak of the departed, tell stories and share memories. They could laugh through the tears, comforted by the fact that they weren’t alone.

Belle was alone. Belle had no one to speak to, no one to comfort her, no one that she could comfort or listen to. Her grief had no outlet.

Then the house was empty, except for the old woman, and Belle. She took to following the woman around, as she used to do with her father. Belle used the lights to warm her, or dimmed them when they were too bright for her old eyes. She lowered the temperature on the stove when food was at risk of burning. She made sure the refrigerator was cool, to keep the food fresh longer.

She wished she could do more.

The woman died six months after her husband. This time, Belle saw it happen. A living person wouldn’t have seen it, and not only because they wouldn’t have been watching her sleep all night with no need to blink. It was the briefest flash. The old woman exhaled. Then, for less than an instant, she glowed and became the beautiful young woman she’d been when she’d first moved into this house. Then she didn’t inhale.

Belle didn’t get a chance to talk to her. She didn’t get to let the woman know that she’d been watching over her all this time. The soul that exited the woman’s body didn’t even look at Belle. She looked up, to the sky, with her arms outstretched and her face beaming.

Belle could only hope that whatever came next was as joyful as the woman seemed to think it was.

She would probably never find out.

****

The children and grandchildren came to clean out the house. All of them lived far away from Storybrooke, so none of them wanted to stay here. It was only then that Belle realized that she would never see them again. Any of them. Ever. Their lives had taken them all over the world, but she would never leave this house.

All their lives she had been watching over them. She loved them, spent time with them, given them everything she had the capacity to give. And they never knew. She would never get to say good-bye to them. After all, she had never said hello. When they left this house, they would leave her--forever--and they would feel no sorrow.

They prepared to sell the house, the children and grandchildren. They took their heirlooms and the furniture and the electric devices. Much of it was declared junk. They couldn’t imagine why their parents and grandparents had held on to these relics. They said the wiring was faulty. They said it was a miracle the house hadn’t burned down.

They would never know that it wasn’t a miracle.

They shut the door for the last time. Belle watched them leave from the light bulb on the porch. None of them looked back.

They left, to live their lives together. Belle stayed, to live her death alone.

It’s a God-damned tragedy, being a ghost.

#live wire #rumbelle #rumbelle fic #belle french

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