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coffeeandcalligraphy · 3 years

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Land Mammal | Feeding Habits Update #7

Hello! We are back for another Feeding Habits update, but this time we’re chatting chapter 8, aka Land Mammal.

Just a reminder: This is my original work and plagiarism of any form will not be tolerated.

Scene outline & excerpts under the cut because this one is a long one! If you missed previous updates or are new to the project, check out the novel intro page (which links all the updates) HERE!

Taglist (please ask to be added or removed): @if-one-of-us-falls @qatarcookie, @chloeswords, @alicewestwater, @laughtracksonata, @ev--writes , @jaydewritesfiction, @jennawritesstories , @august-iswriting, @berinswriting

Scene A:

After Harrison enters his apartment to find his ex Lonan hanging out in his kitchen in chapter six, he nopes to his room and tends to his German Shepherd puppy, June.

His mother, Suzanna interrupts him and attempts to explain that he can’t run away from his problems, and after the two argue, Harrison exits his room to find Lonan mopping up Harrison’s tracks of seawater from chapter six.

Scene B:

Harrison brings Lonan to a kiosk for canoe rentals and rents a canoe. Harrison sets up their journey whereas Lonan refuses to enter the water after subtly announcing a new fear of it. Instead, he collects beach stones from the sand. They have their first conversation in months where Harrison eggs Lonan on until he finally gets in the canoe. They set out on the water where Harrison questions Lonan regarding his relationship with Eliza (who he presumes he’s still in a relationship with) who is not there with him. Harrison accuses Lonan of murder and subsequently capsizes the canoe so they reunite underwater.

Scene C:

Harrison wakes up alone the next day on a hay bale, having stolen Lonan’s money (and shirt tea tea tea). We can assume he’s abandoned him and has travelled to the barn mentioned in chapter six. Here, he decides he needs an excuse for why he’s there early to the homeowners. He decides, since they hired him to fix up their barn, he’ll just say he was trying to be a good worker and get a head start.

However, as he approaches the farmhouse, the door is opened for him by Sharleen Harvey, his boss’ wife. He bullshits his excuse for being there so early just as Sharleen leads him to the breakfast table where Lonan sits (lol). Everyone there knows Harrison is clearly lying.

Scene D:

Harrison eats pancakes on the porch with the Harveys’ dog when Lonan joins him.

Scene Ea:

We dive into what happened after Harrison capsized their canoe. Harrison gets a lil unhinged and things get a lil murdery oops. This leads to shenanigans!! That is all I will say!!!

Scene Eb:

A very short, poetic paragraph that collects details from sentences in scene Ea that follow a Blue [NOUN] structure.

Scene Ec:

A two-sentence nudge at the ~the shenanigans

Scene F:

Harrison notices Lonan wears the ring he and Harrison tracked Eliza down to retrieve, and questions him as to why he didn’t propose to her with it. He goes on a desperate rant on why they should’ve gotten married before Lonan insists it’s now time for him to bring him home. The end of this scene signals a very slight glimpse of Harrison finally humanizing Lonan after a chapter of demonizing him (and also Harrison’s failing mental state).

Scene Ga:

Harrison falls asleep on the car ride back to his apartment in the city and doesn’t wake up until a day later. In this time, Lonan has stayed with him. He eventually wakes up and immediately notices Lonan fiddling with the guardian angel pendant he gifted him. Harrison seems to finally realize the weight of Lonan’s humanity in this scene and allows himself to trust him once again to some extent.

Scene Gb:

A second poem paragraph that references the water shenanigans that occur in scene Ea

Can you tell I’ve been really into poetry lately the poet in me said hello!

Excerpts:

This is a ~tender excerpt that explains Harrison’s mindset!

Suzanna is prettier in bad light. The tungsten of his bedroom’s cheap lightbulb cratering her waterline so the smudge of kohl shifts, the zip of her crow’s feet, the shimmer on her cheeks, all the soft things about her. She holds a beach towel, cactus print. This new life a second try neither asked for but committed to, this move back to the east their thing. Window-shopping for kitchenware on Sundays, snatching samples of bratwurst and sauerkraut for each other at the market, sharing each other’s toothpicks, burning caramel popcorn and renting the wrong DVDs, inventing new takes on boeuf bourguinon, sending postcards to each other even though they share an address. Undeniably theirs. A life unappreciated, and yet what he says next is “Where’s Eliza?” instead of I don’t want this life to end. Harrison pets the dog.

The following is the entire scene of the boys’ first interaction in months. TW: homicide, religious content, suicide, nods to self-harm

A canoe-rental kiosk ruching the Hudson River. Harrison pays for a two-hour timeslot with the last of his savings and lugs it to the shoreline by himself. It is nearly midnight, the sky clogged with fog and moonlight.

Lonan will not enter the water. Back near the kiosk, he fiddles with a beachstone, bathing in tungsten from the streetlamp above him. He gave no reason for his rejection, just picked stones as they walked along the boardwalk, through the parking lot, to the kiosk. As if he’d polish them, feed them through a rock tumbler as if he has the patience for that, tend to them like infants, shape, polish, burnish, sell them for thirty dollars a piece and donate the money to an animal sanctuary, as if has the mind to.

Harrison shifts the canoe perpendicular to the water and steps in. The boat cranks under his weight, its coldness seeping through his jeans.

Lonan stoops for more stones. His knees luminescing in white sand. His hair oilslick, cropped to his scalp like blunt grass. His fingers arrowing through sand, a raven filching seed. He unearths the stones with urgency, a paleontologist, a gravedigger.

“You’ll never make a sale on those,” Harrison shouts from the canoe. His voice splinters the night and puffs with the sand.

Lonan nearly drops his handful of stones. It takes him a moment to look up, and when he does, he searches the treeline first, the windows of a parked SUV, the gaps between a thicket of lifejackets before reaching Harrison, and he’s so deerlike, Harrison thinks, he’s so limp, so feeble, so susceptible. His hair jutting briefly from his scalp like an accordion, badly cut probably because Eliza likes it that way. His skin nearly lilac in places, a gauntness in his face, a hunger.

“My mother tells me you like her cooking,” he continues. “That you’re here for your sister. That you’re here alone.”

Lonan reaches for another stone.

“Eliza wants you to look like a deacon.” Harrison frills a hand toward his hair, snaps his fingers like scissors. “So holy. I could ordain you right now. Make you born-again. There’s so much water.”

“I don’t swim,” Lonan says. He reaches for another stone, then another so his palms turn into one.

“You don’t? You’re a land mammal. Rhinoceros. Hippopotamus. Is it the stones? You’re afraid they’ll sink you?”

“I’m not keeping the stones.”

“Then why search for them?”

Lonan sets the pile down. They clatter into the sand and toil into new holes, a sand cloud disguising them in the minute he rises, dusts himself off, limb by limb, and walks toward the canoe.

“Is it supposed to be avant garde?” Harrison asks as he gets closer. “The hair. So avant garde. So high fashion. Everyone wants you.” And then, “You’re scared of water now. The last time I knew you that’s where you wanted to be buried. It’s a good opportunity. Take the stones with you. Company that serves a purpose.”

Lonan hikes into the canoe. He takes a seat opposite Harrison and grips the paddle as if it’s a murder weapon ready to save him.

“She might be dead,” Lonan says. They push from the shore, and Lonan scores the water with the paddle until the kiosk shrinks. His hands jitter, unsteady, but takes them through the water. “She’s not with me.”

“Are those things related?” Harrison shifts closer to him, that haunted, lilac, hungry face, the edges of him he knows, he’s touched, the nose he’s nudged, the eyelids he’s dabbed, the ears he’s breathed into and out of, the mouth he’s spoken into and spoken out of. That hunted lilac hungry face, searching for a place where he can be sustenance, a place he knows, a place of comfort. The holes all closed. Those pores no longer constellations he’s memorized. That haunted lilac hungry face no longer his. “How did you do it?” Harrison asks. He stares at Lonan’s hands, the hands he should know, nailbeds he’s scored with his own, fingers he’s matched with his own, palms he’s stamped with his own. “Asphyxiation? Death by drowning. Death by land mammal.” He tries his wrist next, tendons flexing with the paddle, that expanse of skin a flute of ivory, those veins he should know, where they conjoin, where they branch like an oakwood. Those scars he knows the stories of—accidents, non-accidents, safety pins, lighters, cigarettes, ballpoint pens. Harrison could recite those stories a year ago and now they’ve dissolved, unmemories.

“It was an accident.”

“You’re a murderer.”

“I’m sorry.”

They’ve paddled so far from the kiosk, it’s like they’re on their own planet. A planet of only water. A planet uninhabitable, where land mammals sink and never come back up. Lonan’s eyes glisten with moonlight, and his waterline should be recognizable, dampening now, cattled with wet eyelashes, should be memorable, what it felt like to touch their ledge. All foreign. He’s foreign. So foreign. His anti-hair, anti-face, anti-hands, anti-wrists. He’s crying and immemorable. He’s crying and sorry.

Harrison shuffles forward until their knees touch. He reaches. He makes contact. He touches his skin. He touches his ear. He touches cheek. He touches eyes, fingerprints his irises, wrings the tears from his waterline, pulls his face by the jaw, cradling his land mammal. He is crying. They should both cry. They are both crying. Their own lake puddling in Harrison’s palm. Theirs as Harrison dips his free hand into the water. Theirs as he hushes Lonan’s writhing. Theirs as he christens him, the water gorging his eyes, his nose, his mouth. Theirs as he promises it will be okay. Theirs as he says he will get to know this stranger. Theirs as they promise to both regrow. Theirs as Harrison jerks the canoe. Theirs as they capsize. Theirs as they reunite in fizzing tide, caught in the river, both animals trapped in amber.

Tea:

The next time he is dry, he is lying on a bale of hay, wearing the wrong shirt, a hundred dollars richer. All of these things are related. The hay only because he paid for a cab with money he only has because of the shirt, five twenties easily slipped into the breast pocket when Lonan wasn’t looking. Twenty on the cab ride to Brooklyn, and now he’s face-first in a spool of hay that is better than sleeping in his own bed.

Harrison being chaotic and embarrassing lol:

A seagull on a ceiling beam gorges on a French fry. It eats with conviction, the fry lost in its throat before he even blinks. It flies through the hole in the roof as Harrison rises off the hay bale.

He did not announce his arrival to Theodore Harvey. In fact, he entered the property like it was his own, picked the barn’s lock with the edge of one of Lonan’s beachstones—he did keep one, in the pocket with his shirt, right behind the money—and slept without worrying what his mother would think. His third life is no longer necessary—it has already been disturbed. It is more efficient to deescalate than renew.

He decides he will not tell Harvey of his stay but lie and say he arrived at the farm early, 6AM, a good man trying to start his work early. Trying to impress. He’ll lie, say he tried picking up a tray of raspberry danishes from the bakery but it was too early for anyone to have opened. He’ll lie, apologize to Harvey’s wife Sharleen for showing up empty-handed. It’s rude to bring no offering.

Harrison fixes himself in the reflection of an overturned wheelbarrow, its silver belly clouded with rust. He exits the barn dry, well-rested, a richer, more fashionable man.

Before he even finishes ascending the veranda of the Harvey house, Sharleen opens the door. Her white hair is pearled into a bun. She wears a paisley patterned apron, chartreuse.

“Raspberry Danishes,” Harrison says. “All I wanted was to bring you some fresh raspberry Danishes, but all the bakeries were closed.”

Sharleen rolls up her sleeves. Her hands are caked with flour and fat.

“I considered tulips, but realized I’ve never asked for your favourite flower. Is it tulips? Hydrangeas? Chrysanthemums?”

Sharleen juts open the screen door and holds it open for him. He enters the foyer, and it smells like cinnamon, like sugar.

“I’ve heard marigolds are helpful for warding off squirrels,” he says, taking the hand she offers for his jacket. Sharleen doesn’t jump when he runs his finger across her wedding band and pecks her knuckles with his mouth. She doesn’t even speak. “Is that true?” as they usher toward the kitchen. “Pretty and purposeful. Sounds fake.”

Sharleen dusts her hands on her apron and jars open the kitchen door.

“Could be a double whammy. Or a scam. Or an old wife’s tale,” Harrison is saying as they walk into the kitchen, so occupied with the marigolds he does not notice when Sharleen returns to the stove to flip a pancake, so occupied, when he turns to the kitchen table, expecting only Harvey but seeing Lonan, all he says is, “Sounds too good to be true.”

Lonan joining Harrison on the porch after the above:

Harrison eats his pancakes on the porch. The Harveys’ dog joins him, a golden retriever named Leila. He cuts her a rift of cake and slots it into her mouth when she whines. One bite for him, another for Leila. Him, Leila, him, Leila. The good news is since he fixed their coffee machine, he now drinks drip.

It does not take long for Lonan to follow him outside. Harrison’s known this was inevitable and has dreaded the last five minutes because of it. He slits another triangle of pancake and feeds it to the dog.

It’s too cold to be out without a jacket. Wind nips Harrison’s ears and icicles his fingertips. Lonan’s shirt, the pale blue button-up he nabbed knowing he’d have cash, brays under the breeze, barely denser than a tissue.

TW: This gets a bit murder-y!

Suspended in water, Lonan was aquatic. Blue eyes turning into blue skin into blue lips into blue throat, chest, wrist. Shards of his sheared hair slung in sheathes of bubbles, his face blissfully marred by their movement. Blue collarbones, blue earlobe, blue shoulder blade, blue pinkie finger.

Harrison pulled him by the shirtsleeve before he could swim back to the surface, contorting them under the hex of the overturned boat. Him and the water a double team as they took Lonan by the shoulders and held him underwater, an insect stilled and ready to be inspected. Saltwater burned Harrison’s eyes as he stared, but that wasn’t a deterrent. If he only had a moment to look, he wanted it to be in stillness, in a place time unravels. Blue knuckles, blue abdomen, blue forearm, blue tibia.

When Harrison dragged them toward the six-inch gap between the water’s surface and the canoe’s dome, he held them both there, sheep and shepherd, slain and slaughterer. His hands cupped around his throat like butterfly wings, holding him there for safekeeping. Blue nose-bridge, blue sclera, blue cheekbone, blue teeth. He coughed water.

Iconic dialogue (TW: this is also a bit murder-y!):

“Pull me under,” Lonan said, spitting water, his voice grating under pressure. He trembled, his limbs his betrayal, tremoloing in the waves.

And Harrison did. Dousing him by the shoulders and holding him under so only he floated in the miniscule gap of air, Lonan a sunken, thrashing speck. It was thrilling, holding a body in his hands, determining its fate. And equally as thrilling to hold it as he lulled Lonan back up and over his shoulder where he deflated, gasping. At first Lonan coughed, once twice, heaving saltwater and saliva. But then a birdlike sound, compact but jittering, the wisp of a laugh, and Harrison couldn’t help but wonder if he was thrilled, too

“Do you feel accomplished, Harrison?” Lonan asked, his teeth prattling like an accordion. His hand trailed up the tail of his jacket, scrawling along the soaked leather. Lonan shifted, his body dead weight nearly drowned. And there was the sound again, chirping, “You’re not the first person who’s tried to kill me this year. Congratulations.”

Harrison angst in its prime:

Harrison adjusted his grip around Lonan so one arm supported his torso and the other scored his jaw. His fingers pressed against the skin there so it paled, exploring along that blue skin, blue mouth. The facts were: Lonan was not there for him, or so he told Suzanna, and so he was a changed man, uncoupled, unromanced, a clean restart. They would get out of the water. Harrison would climb into the backseat of the car Lonan drove instead of the passenger’s side because he wouldn’t want to look at him, and they would return to the apartment and not speak again. Suzanna would intervene in the next morning, maybe get up early to make breakfast, French toast, or crepes, or single-serve omelettes, and they would look at each other and it would be easier to forgive Lonan for a decision Harrison made. Suzanna would say he shouldn’t feel rejected when he was the one doing the rejecting and apologize a few hours later, blame it on the side effects of her cough drops. So it would be fine. They would be friends, or whatever they were before Eliza, and Harrison would live his cyclical life with a new-old person who didn’t come searching for him. Glamorous.

This is scene Ec if you were wondering what that looked like:

After, in a wash of cattails, saltwater in their mouths. Their bodies keeling over the other’s like the matrix of a ribcage. Snowmelt turning them both blue.

I find this description v cute ok I need a Harrison flannel:

Lonan is on his fifth button. His skin crests from underneath the squares of orange and red. The fabric smelling dangerously of Harrison: cigarette smoke, cinnamon.

Harrison badgers Lonan about not marrying Eliza and then it gets PURE:

“Why won’t you marry her?” Harrison asks. “You could have children. A honeymoon.”

Lonan stuffs his free hand into his pocket. His breath fogs with every exhale, his nose pinkish with cold. Harrison doesn’t feel any of it, the breath, the cold, his hands. He doesn’t move to button up his flannel. He doesn’t want to move.

“You’re going back to her. You’re here to check on Reeve, and then you’re going back. To get married. To have children. To honeymoon forever.”

Lonan’s hair is awful. Spoking from his scalp like a raven’s wings, some sections ragged, uneven. Not a haircut, but punishment.

“You’re perfect,” Harrison says. He should being shivering, be freezing, but he feels nothing. “Why can’t you say you’re perfect?”

Lonan moves first. They could reabsorb. Go back to blue. But Lonan only reaches for the flannel with his free hand and drapes it around Harrison’s shoulders. Arm by arm, slotting them through the sleeves. Button by button, securing it up his abdomen, his chest, right up to his throat. If Harrison looks closely, one of his eyes is rimmed with scarlet, like a vessel there popped, and a pool of lilac simmers, almost undetectable, across his temple.

“You could’ve married her,” Harrison says. His voice has dropped to a whisper. Lonan swings his jacket around his shoulders, securing his arms through each loop of leather, one, two. Zipping so his exposed skin may rewarm.

“I need to take you home,” Lonan says. Lonan with the broken eye. Lonan with the blackberry skin. Lonan with the teeth-shorn shirt. Lonan with the mowed hair. Lonan with the burned palms. Lonan with the wedding ring that was never really a wedding ring. Lonan who looks as if he’s always prepared to blink, just in case something comes out to get him.

The following is from scene Ga:

Harrison sleeps in the car on his way back and doesn’t wake until the next day. In that time, Suzanna slots takeout boxes through the unrolled window, three full meals: sweet corn and tomato fusilli, beef stifado, meatless cassoulet. What she doesn’t know is they sit, untouched, under the passenger’s seat, not because Lonan is averted by her cooking, but because he’s saving them to share, just in case. She brings a vacuum sealed bag of extra comforters the first evening when flurries dot the windshield, Harrison is swathed in them all by the time the snow reaches half an inch. One lined with Sherpa closest to his skin when he stirs, the bulbs of fabric like cottage cheese. In the time he’s in the car he dreams. Of driving into the ocean. Of haircuts. Marriage.

When he opens his eyes, Lonan is nuzzled against the windowpane, his arms folded over his chest. He wears only the corduroy jacket, the layers of blankets piled over Harrison’s arms in dense tufts, like the Pasteis de Nata he and Suzanna watch the bakers laminate at the local bakery.

The only valid thing about snow is that I can get these descriptions out of it:

The snow has levelled to a healthy four inches. In sunbeams, it griddles with light, fractals picking the windshield, Lonan’s eyes. And for a few minutes, this is it: the blanket life-ring, the sun coiled in the space between them. Suzanna makes apple cider in weather like this. Cinnamon to pair with the subtle remnants of winter, cloves to warm, turmeric and ginger to surprise. Inside the apartment, Harrison imagines her stirring a saucepot bobbing with fruit and rind, skinning oranges, lemons, turning the kitchen lights on, off, on, off, until her son comes home.

And to end this update, here is the final “poem-y” paragraph:

Land mammals in the water. Spitting bubbles and rims of wave. Their mouths caverns, limbs rattlesnaking, lungs inflating. Land mammals in the water. Coasts apart now re-seamed, kicking up sand, knocking teeth, touching spines. Land mammals in the water. Eyelashes drowning, mouth to mouth. Land mammals in the water, gaping at each other’s throats.

Thank you for reading! Hope y’all enjoyed this very chaotic chapter!

--Rachel

#writing #amwriting #writeblr #writerblr #writingupdates #fostered #feedinghabits #mothwork

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