#it’s been legit 4 years since I made this weirdo I can’t wait to share my pain with you guysss

[arabellaflynn]

One of the more amusing family stories I sometimes tell is about a relative of mine, a few generations back, who moved in with another man after his wife died. Ooh, everybody goes. Salacious family gossip! Except the little town they moved to was actually Lily Dale Assembly, in upstate New York, which so far as I know is still one of the oldest continually running Spiritualist communes in the United States. Harry and Edward moved up there so that Edward, ex-model and former elder in the Presbyterian church, could start on what I think was his third career as a spirit medium. He channeled the spirit of an Edwardian actress named Lillie Langtry, also known as "the Jersey Rose". At this point, the whole 'shacked up with his boyfriend' thing has become the least interesting part of the story, and people begin to look at me funny. My parents fucked things up in many respects, several of them so egregious that I haven't spoken to them in years, but I want to give credit where credit is due. They never sat us down to have a talk about how some boys like boys and some girls like girls, and they were all people just like anyone else. It was stupidly obvious. My mother talked about "Harry and Edward" in the same tone she used for "Aunt Helen and Uncle Bob". Except friendlier, as Uncle Bob was known to be a lecher who eyeballed the teenage cousins, and we mysteriously saw a lot less of him after I was about twelve. I was probably in college -- so, old enough for my own friends to start coming out -- before I thought about it long enough to realize how unusual this was. There are a lot of families where I never would have heard about Harry, because they would have disavowed any knowledge of his existence as soon as they found out about his "friend". Tracing LGBT+ relatives can be tricky. They tend to lack a lot of paperwork that straight couples would have. Not just legit marriage certificates -- which don't always exist -- but a lot of other records that are predicated on the assumption that there is a marriage certificate, somewhere. Fifty years ago, John Doe and Roberta Roe could move halfway across the country together and apply for an apartment as "Mr. and Mrs. John Doe", and nobody would ever check. The only way to get that information, pre-internet, was to find out where the marriage would have been officiated, write to the appropriate county clerk (with a processing fee enclosed), and wait 4-6 weeks to see if you got an illegible photocopy or a 'no such file exists' form letter back. No landlord was going to do that. They'd look at you, make a snap judgement on whether you were likely to grow forty tons of weed in their rental property, and ask if you had first, last, and deposit. After you have a lease as "John and Roberta Doe", you can start getting utility bills, phone lines, library cards, checking accounts, even state IDs, depending on where (and when) you were. My own parents are a good example of how this works. My mother used her maiden name right up until she was lying in a hospital bed with a newborn (me), and the nuns filing the paperwork were confused by the concept of putting a different surname down for mother and child. My mother, who was understandably short on patience, finally relented and told them to use Dad's name for everybody. (In her words, "I was afraid they were gonna lose you.") They weren't legally married until I was three, and they only did it because we had moved from Little Canada to a state that even today spits in the face of social progress, and Dad's new health insurance wouldn't otherwise have covered anybody else. Mind you, my college FAFSA papers said they'd been filing taxes as married since 1978. My mother was never one to let a little thing like federal tax law prevent her from doing as she damn well pleased. In Harry and Edward's case, we do have some documentation: Harry wrote memoirs. My mother had a copy, and I've read it. They're mostly about the spirit medium stuff, but there's a fair bit about life as well, and they were hilariously domestic. You would have to engage in mental gymnastics of a phenomenal order to read the two of them as anything but a couple. I seem to recall Harry's daughter either writing to or visiting them in Lily Dale; according to the family, she was mainly just happy her father had settled down with someone who could cook, so he'd stop living on scrambled eggs and spaghetti. I've had no luck so far finding a copy of my own. Partly because it was privately published by someone who evidently went out of business 30+ years ago, but mostly because I didn't have any full names for anybody. The family has only ever referred to Harry as "Uncle Doc Harry". He wasn't a doctor of anything, but he did have an MSW, and for that time and that branch of the family, that was a pretty high-falutin' education. I'm still not sure if he was my great-uncle or my great-great-uncle. My grandfather was from a gigantic Irish Catholic farm family, where there were so many kids with such a range of ages that the eldest grandkids used to babysit their youngest aunts and uncles. It was without a great deal of hope that I prodded the Lily Dale Assembly at about 2 am one night, via their Facebook page. Yes, they have a Facebook page. Of course they have a Facebook page. Another thing you have to consider when nosing around after your queer kin is how to frame it. Somewhere conservative, I probably would have inquired after Harry, mentioning at some point that he used to share a house with someone named Edward. The Assembly, though? The Spiritualists are justifiably proud of their history of being early adopters of things like women's suffrage, feminism, and universal civil rights. They attract a lot of weirdos because they treat the weirdos like valid human beings. I was asking after people who would still be in the living memory of older residents, and a town like Lily Dale would have remembered them as the boring middle-aged married couple. So I just asked about my relatives, plural, Harry and Edward, and mentioned the ghost actress, figuring it would have been pretty unique even for a place like that. I expected to get a teenage intern, who had no idea what I was talking about, but could at least give me some way to get in contact with the town registrar or whatever a Spiritualist commune has. No. Oh, no. Whoever was answering their messages knew exactly who I was talking about, because they used to live across the street. Not only told me where the two of them went, but described the house they bought when they moved out of town in the early '90s. What the actual fuck. Thus armed with useful things like surnames, I went off to Google some more. I still haven't had any luck finding the book; when I first read it, online shopping was already a thing, and I found it eerie as hell to be physically holding a book that had no listing on Amazon. It has an AISN now, as someone evidently sold a signed copy on Amazon once, but no ISBN, and therefore no WorldCat entry. If it exists in any library I can get to, I'm not sure I have any way to ask for it. I can't find their obituaries, either -- my guess is they ran in the newspaper of the small town they lived in after Lily Dale, but the online archives have a big gap between 1989, when their microfiche scans end, and the 2000s, when someone bothered building them a website. If they have headstones, nobody's taken pictures of them for FindAGrave.com. I threw their names at Spokeo and WhitePages and the like, to see if whoever survived longest had moved elsewhere to be with other family, and made an interesting discovery. Directories like that scrape data from other places. Mailing lists, public records, that sort of thing. Most people have at least one "AKA" listing, where they did or didn't use their middle initial for something, or went by Kathy instead of Katherine. Harry seems to have really been Harry, never Harold, which fits with the family naming habits. I did dig up a middle name, and it does tally with the one on the picture of the book cover on Amazon out-of-stock listing, so at least I know I'm tracking the right guy. So far as I can tell from his AKAs, Edward never went by Ed or Eddie -- but he did, at some point in his life, go by Harry's surname. It's exactly the sort of middle finger to convention I would expect from any relative of mine, really. Fuck you, mainstream society, we're married. One of the places it's noted is on a profile for one of the ancestry services that says it was created and maintained by his brother, so at least some of his family seems to have treated them the same way Harry's did. It actually makes me wonder if they had some sort of commitment ceremony at some point. (Beyond signing a joint mortgage on at least one house, I mean. Those are way harder to get out of than a marriage.) There wouldn't be any records filed with the State of New York -- although there's always the chance they were smart enough to file legal papers giving power of attorney and leaving their estate to the other one -- but if it happened in Lily Dale, the Assembly might have noted it. from Blogger https://ift.tt/2zVc9Bw via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

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[c9sneaksen-blog]

on a heartstring [4 - part one]

Word Count: 2753 words

Chapter 4 is actually going to be super long, so… I’m cutting it up into two parts! (Second part coming next week as it follows like a regular chapter).

I tried really hard to get this in on time and failed… seems like time’s been chasing my butt this whole week. So, I am sorry for being late! [T~T]

You wanna take it from the beginning? [=^w^=] part one / part two / part three

—

Zap.

  Come on.

  Zap.

  Come on…

  Zap.

  “Fuck’s sake,” Zach muttered to himself (a little too loudly, actually), as he fiddled around with the circuitry in one of the school’s ancient, shitty speakers. Usually, he enjoyed fixing all of the shit equipment and finding an innovative way around the issues– but he had spent over 15 minutes on this singular speaker already. It was like a game, where the levels became progressively harder– and he, being a senior, was on the last one– and the thing just had so much shit wrong with it.

  Maybe it was on its last leg.

  “You okay over there?”

  “Uh– heh– yeah.” Zach stifled a growl of agitation in his throat, feeling the rage dissipate beneath the pressure of social interaction. He hadn’t been the only tech staffer who decided to stick around after school– a lot of the new tech freshmen stayed after, most of them being led by upperclassmen to show them the ropes (literally– they showed them the ropes that pulled and shut the show curtains). Some of his senior tech buddies had stuck around to also help out with equipment– but by four years, the lot of them had figured out that Zach was the sort who worked best alone. And everybody was mostly okay with that.

  “You need any help, just ask,” Zach heard the voice of one of his fellow tech kids fade out, distantly– they must have been going even further backstage. Now he sat all alone, out on the front of the stage, having taken the speaker out beneath the stage lights– all alone with this shitty speaker, and shitty equipment, and dim yellow lights.

  He shifted his weight beneath him, shuffling his legs into a position where he could sit on his knees, and leaned over all of the wires in the speaker again, trying to figure out just how he was going to revive it. (It was actually functional– but made a lot of static-y noises. Basically, it sounded awful.) Zach reached in to untangle one of the wires, accidentally made contact with one of the nails used to screw the lid on– and was very quickly met with the tiniest little spark.

Instantaneously, he recoiled from the shock– although little, it was surprising– springing up from his spot, the floorboards making a satisfying creak beneath him.

“That looks scary.”

  Briefly, Zach looked up– not too sure of who he was really expecting to see– maybe one of the freshmen– and was met with a foreign student instead. He shrugged.

  “It was, freshmen year.” Not wanting his gaze to linger upon him for any longer than it had to (he felt a little bashful due to that little spring back from the tiniest little spark, anyways), Zach returned to troubleshooting the speaker.

  “So you’ve been doing this since…,” Jensen paused, this gaining a look from Zach, “sorry, I– what did you say?”

  Confused, Zach repeated, “‘It was, freshmen year’?”

  “So you’ve been doing this since… er, your first year… here?” Zach could not help but to smile and cock one eyebrow, the bottom corners of his eyes crinkling.

  “You tell me?”

  Jensen laughed, then spoke, very carefully. “We don’t have terms like that in Europe, okay?”

  Zach attempted to stifle his grin– didn’t really work, ended up being a smile– and turned back to his work after blinking once or twice (the lights seemed much brighter now, somehow). “Yeah, we, uh… Americans are kind of extra.”

  Jensen shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Even this slight movement elicited a creak from beneath him. “So what are you doing?”

  Zach snorted. “Trying to fix this school’s shit equipment.” Failing to fix this school’s shit equipment, more like. “And I could ask you the same thing?”

  “What?”

  “Like, what are you doing here?”

  Jensen squinted, as though momentarily contemplating the consequences and rewards of his upcoming answer. He then decided upon his response. “Honestly, I missed my bus.”

  “Oh, damn.” Zach scooted away from the speaker– he wasn’t going to make any progress on it by aimlessly tinkering with it, anyway– and entered a criss-cross sitting position. “Is your locker on the third floor?”

  “No, it’s ‘cause–”

  “Oh– is your bus really far out?”

  “Yes!” Almost within the same time frame of this confirmation, Jensen’s eyes lit up, almost as though he were excited about the tangent he was about to go on. “No offense, but what the fuck is wrong with this school!? Why are the buses so far out? It’s, like, outside of the school!”

  Zach laughed, mirth bubbling from his throat. “Yeah, it’s fucked up. I’ve missed the bus the past four years more than I have… fucking… yeah.”

  He was trying to go for something funny at the end there.

  Despite the (admittedly) lame ending to Zach’s reply, Jensen seemed to think it was funny anyway, and laughed. “So you’ve missed the bus a lot of times, I take it.”

  “Yup,” is all Zach said in reply, popping the “P” and sticking his tongue against the inside of his left cheek. He was met with a sudden sense of nervousness and dread, this manifesting in his throat as his next wisp of a sentence died off– as he realized he had nothing funny, witty, intelligent, nor interesting to say.

  Jensen didn’t seem to mind, and, sensing the air of pervading and slow-crawling awkwardness coming in, flung his backpack– that really could not have weighed any less than at least 10 pounds– into the seats of the auditorium, off of the stage. Zach watched in mild horror (and delight) as it landed two rows from the front, unceremoniously hitting the rim of the tough and dirty cushions, then falling to the floor in an equally ungraceful manner.

  “So,” he inquired, “tech. Why?” Then, he turned and smiled at Zach.

  “Okay, well,” Zach began, not even sure where to start– and beginning to feel awkward from the height difference, so he stood up, and faced the recently-ended catastrophe in the rows of seats– “first of all; what the fuck.” He took some amiable– and cautious– steps over to Jensen. “Second of all– I just like computers and shit.”

  “Sick.” Jensen commented, shifting the weight from one foot to the other again, “And I don’t understand what you mean?”

  “What do you mean, you don’t understand what I mean?”

  “Like, what you mean by ‘what the fuck’?”

  “Like, what the fuck, why did you do what you just did?”

  “Did what?”

  Zach opened his mouth, preparing a response to fire back, then promptly shut it. He watched Jensen stifle a grin, his tongue slipping out for a brief second– weird thing of him to note, but whatever. This guy is so troll. And Zach found that he enjoyed that.

  Very carefully, avoiding externally displaying this new-found amusement, Zach said instead, “… Okay. And, why are you an actor, then?” Despite being careful about it, Zach can’t help but think it came out in a somewhat hostile manner.

  If it did, it didn’t bother Jensen. It was like nothing fazed this weirdo. “I like acting?”

  Zach squinted. “But why.”

  “Hey, bro,” Jensen raised his hands in defense, “I didn’t go that far when I asked you. Equal measure of depth here.”

  “‘Equal measure of depth,’” Zach repeated, the words sticking in his mouth in a funny kind of way– too big for his mouth, and too small to make him feel as though he’d contributed enough to this conversation, “very… analytical… intelligent statement. Of yours. That is.”

  Jensen grinned– almost uncontrollably so. “Yes,” he exulted, “it is. Because it’s me.”

  Zach doesn’t recall getting much done with the equipment that day.

  —

  “Is there a reason this room always smells like somebody’s died in it?” Jensen kicks at a particularly large dust bunny, sending the particles scattering over the particularly molded and older floorboards backstage.

  “You know,” Zach said, pulling an unidentifiable, fur prop out of one of the chests backstage– he scrunched up his nose as he tossed it into a plastic bag– “I was just thinking about it earlier today– there were rumors sophomore year that somebody legit died in here.”

  Jensen’s eyes widened. “Wait, seriously?”

  It was eighth period the next day, and the two were hanging around backstage– Mr. C had enlisted the class to “clean up and clean out” the auditorium’s “resources” … which usually just meant that the kids could take out almost every prop they’d had since the 80’s and destroy it however they liked out back.

  “I trust you kids to use your judgement as to what’s unusable now,” he had proclaimed, proudly, voice booming off of the yellow-lit stage as always, “and besides– it’s a time for you all to be destructive!” Zach and Jensen had shared a more unsure than gleeful chortle at that one– and then, exchanged looks of curiosity and mild terror when Jack pulled out his lighter.

  “What?” He had said, to all of the freshmen who had gathered behind him, staring in similar fright at the object, “He said we could do it any way we wanted!”

  That being all said and done, most of the tech kids had taken the time to perform more troubleshooting and checks on the equipment– there were more than enough actors and more stage-crew oriented tech staffers to deal with destroying things. Zach had wanted to show Jensen around the stage properly, though– finding that he would probably be the best oriented at showing the new actor around. Besides, tossing things into a fire out back and screaming wasn’t all too boring– and every group of statistics needs their outlier. It just seemed that he would be the one that year.

  Chuckling (though it was more of a giggle, really– Zach’s laugh be damned), Zach shook his head. “They were just rumors, you know.” He sucked in his breath when he happened across the bottom of the chest, were a pair of dead mice lay. “Looks like the mice weren’t, though. Rumors, I mean.”

  Jensen took one look in the chest, before balling his hand into a fist and shutting it– an almost instantaneous reaction– Zach had barely gotten more than a look at the mice. “That’s… enough of that. Should we tell Mr. C?”

  “Let’s just leave it up to somebody else,” Zach gulped, feeling incredibly wrong in his stomach as he tried to not just think about the plastic bag of props he was just a minute ago prepared to take out back, “do me a favor, newbie. Take that out back for me?”

  “You don’t wanna come and watch the incinerating?” Maybe it was just his imagination, but Jensen almost looked a bit disappointed– though it was probably just his imagination. His pout came off as more of a mock tan anything. As he thought this, Jensen– very carefully– picked up the bag, careful to avoid the bit of fur poking out.

  “I’ll pass,” Zach squeaked– he then cleared his throat, passing it off as a cough– “I’ll just– I’ll just be waiting for you. Where the equipment is. Over there.”

  “… Alright,” Jensen said, his hesitation seeming to be directed more at what was in his hands than the recent exchange between the two. He slipped out back, pushing open one of the exit doors (that they otherwise would have been prohibited to go through, but Mr. C was not one to really prohibit much). Zach could hear some hoots, hollers, and cheers, accompanied with with some slow crackling.

  Maybe he ought to not go out and partake in all of that, he figured, as he headed towards the cramped and crowded closet of failed and never-used equipment alike (you’d think that the tech crew would be a bit smarter about organizing their shit, but like school like students, Zach could only guess). Smoke gave him headaches, anyway.

  “So,” Jensen had begun when he came back inside, squeezing a particularly large dollop of hand sanitizer into the palm of his hand, “why’s all the equipment so shit?” He was about to kick at something old and faded– an old radio prop that had been misplaced in the closet, before Zach shot him a look and he reevaluated his decision.

  Zach twirled some cords around in his hand– somebody had misplaced the extension cords again– and walked over to an area with large bins, clicking his tongue with dissatisfaction when he saw that the labels had since worn away. He needed to replace them. “You ever been to any other school in America?”

  “Nope.”

  “School funding tends to be shit here,” he said, and supposed it was probably the most intelligent thing he had mustered up the entire day.

  Jensen opened his mouth to say something– before something had crashed loudly outside, to which most of the people backstage turned their heads towards, before returning to their tasks. Skillfully avoiding eye contact, Jensen said, “Well, good thing we have you?” He swiped at something on his left cheek– probably an itch, Zach supposed.

  “Er, I guess,” Zach had mumbled back, a little too absorbed in all of the work he had to do in the moment. Definitely not the pinkish, yellowish, rosy and warm feeling that was rising in his chest– almost like a hot air balloon. Don’t be so weird about this, he scolded himself, it’s just a compliment.

  Jensen blew air out of his nose– a poor man’s laugh. Zach could feel the cold air emanating from his body– watched bits of dust particles fly about when he kneeled down next to him, studying the bins with him. Almost with an unintentionally soft nature, he turned to him, blue eyes meeting blue– “You guess?”

  And, caught up with sea green blue, and dust, and mice and other similar horrors to be found in the seclusion of a filthy closet with cords and wires entangled, blues and blonds intertwined– Zach found that he could not quite really give an answer back.

  Almost as though he had sensed that he was not going to get an answer back (and for possibly a good reason– if there was a bit of reason or rationality to be found in a cramped closet), his eyes darted all over– first over Zach’s canary blue eyes, then his face, and the soft, round, pudginess of his cheeks, and his soft-looking, dirty blond hair, and then across walls and walls filled to the brim with dirty equipment and yellowed and browned walls. As though something had just kicked in, Jensen kneeled further down and pulled a bin out, “I’m pretty sure this is the one you’re looking for, by the way.” He spoke quickly– almost with the same speed as that of a peppy, high-energy cheerleader.

  “Oh, shit,” Zach jokingly gasped in amazement, tossing the extension cord (carefully) into the bin before sliding it back into place, “thanks.”

  “Right,” Jensen mumbled, “right.”

  Maybe it’s just the dust whispering, but, Zach feels as though– something may have just shifted in reality for him– that a switch might have just been turned, and that something– inside of him– had just lit up, had just inflated and flew away, no brakes applied, no stops, no ending mechanism.

  Why was this so… weird? And… such a bizarre feeling accompanies the alien weirdness behind this strangeness.

  It’s a normal conversation, Zach tried to reason with himself, almost as though he had to level with the irrationality surging through his head, I didn’t say anything wrong.

  Beeeeeep!

  “W–well,” he stuttered, slipping past the curtains to hop down from the stage, intending to retrieve his backpack, “there’s the bell.”

  “I– yeah,” Jensen replied, “so…”

  Zach wasn’t too sure why, but he was feeling a whole lot more high-pressure about socially interacting then he normally did– or than he was just feeling. And he wasn’t too sure about this high-rising feeling of urgency threatening him– but he knew he probably needed to act on it– needed to just pull himself together, and just fucking do it, and get through this exchange– or he’s going to think about it later that night and smack himself with something or whatever.

  “… So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow!” He ended, not very convincingly gleefully– but, well, fake it ‘til you make it, he guessed. He could feel his voice rising by the second, so he turned to leave.

“… Same,” he could hear Jensen say, as he rounded the corner– heart floating on something mysterious.

#submission #fan work #Sneaksen fic #tianhuo #on a hearstring (4 [prt 1] / 15)