#julie screaming EDIE EDIE EDIE CATCH ME

[gaybyevening]

edeleth writing exercise

once in a while to get over writer’s block i do this exercise where i shuffle my playlist and write something about my chosen pairing, based on the song, and only through the duration of the song! it’s a lot of fun.

i wanted to do something for Valentine’s Day, but... huh. I don’t know. Maybe if I put my intentions out there I’ll be more motivated to follow through, who knows.

i think i’ll do another instalment of this in edeleth and doropetra and then i’ll write something more substantial in honour of valentines day. who knows. not me.

warning for nsfw content (nothing major though. no smut. maybe smut-adjacent)

1.    Aly & AJ – Take Me

Edelgard will not apologise for her crude language, and it needs saying: Byleth makes her horny. The attraction isn’t entirely physical, of course, but right here, right now, she just wants Byleth to push her against the door and devour her whole.

The problem is… she doesn’t actually know what they are. They’ve been texting back and forth for a few months; they’ve hung out (alone, she should add) multiple nights every week, and… huh. It’s kind of frustrating. Does Byleth not see how much Edelgard wants her?

 2.    5 Seconds of Summer – She’s Kinda Hot

Edelgard has a folder in her phone, full of candid photos of Byleth, sent to her by her friends. So far the most prolific contributor is Dorothea, followed closely by Ferdinand, of all people (and much to her horror. How could Ferdinand, of all people, notice her crush on Byleth? It’s okay, Edelgard thinks, because she can retaliate by sending him pictures of Hubert during their study groups.)

(Unfortunately, even Petra, Linhardt and Bernadetta have joined in on the fun.)

It’s two in the morning and there’s a text from an unknown number. It’s a picture of Byleth in her glasses, descaling a fish with stern concentration all over her face. There’s a blur of green near the edge of the picture.

Greetings, Edelgard. I thought you’d appreciate this.

Oh, no. Not Flayn.

 3. The Turtles — Makin’ My Mind Up

Her suitcase is filled to overflowing with her clothes and other knick-knacks that have brought her joy over the years. The day is finally here: she’s finally able to run away with her beloved, just the two of them.

Byleth had brought her to the countryside once six months previously to look at the small and humble cottage they were going to move into soon, and the thought of a simple live delighted her to no end.

Days of idle and nothing nothing nothing with Byleth and maybe her friends whenever they stop by.

 4. Elvis Presley — It’s Still Here

It’s hard to be broken up and stay broken up when the ex-girlfriend involved is your bodyguard. Edelgard feels a migraine fading into existence as she sits at some corporate event, Byleth by her side.

She looks away when she catches Byleth’s eyes, her own face becoming redder. It’s the same look she’s given when they’re about to absolutely desecrate Rhea’s office.

 5. Sleater Kinney — Gimme Love

There’s a desperation to how Byleth peppers small kisses down her girlfriend’s neck. Perhaps it’s the fact that Rhea may enter her office at any second. Perhaps it’s the fact that they haven’t done this in a few months.

Perhaps it’s the fact that she still doesn’t know what any of this means.

“Byleth, I think I l-” Edelgard is cut off by Byleth’s lips on hers. Well, she never finished that thought anyway.

 6. The Cure — Secrets

In the dead of night Byleth strokes the side of Edelgard’s cheek and the younger woman stirs, slowly opening her eyes.

“Yes, my dear?” she asks.

“Nothing. I’m sorry for waking you up,” Byleth answers with a kiss on her cheek.

Edelgard wants to snuggle into Byleth’s chest, but perhaps the grogginess isn’t letting her. Perhaps it’s something else, she doesn’t currently have the mental capacity to analyse every single action. That can happen when the sun is up.

Byleth sighs. In a few moments she will dress and slip out and into her own bed.

 7. Brian Eno — Shell

 Little Maude laughs as she picks up another seashell and puts it into her bucket. She inspects it and deems her collection sufficient and waddles towards her parents, handing her bucket to Byleth.

“Make my castle pretty, please Mama, Mommy,” she says with her best puppy-dog eyes, and Edelgard starts arranging Maude’s seashells on the girl’s sandcastle.

 8. Lush — Desire Lines

Byleth murmurs in her sleep. Edelgard finds that out the third time Byleth sleeps over, much to her delightful surprise. The older woman is almost always composed and cool that at first Edelgard almost bursts out laughing when she realises it’s Byleth making small noises.

“You murmur in your sleep,” Edelgard says the next morning with a gentle, mirthful smile. “It’s very cute.”

There’s a blush forming across Byleth’s cheeks, red almost as furious as Edelgard’s covers.

(A few nights later she finds out Edelgard lightly snores in her sleep if she is very thoroughly exhausted.)

 9. Julie London — Easy Street

 There’s a signature frantic knock on the door. Edelgard knows instantly who it is. “Go away, Ferdinand,” she sniffles.

“Edelgard, I still don’t have your part of the assignment yet, and it’s due in two hours,” he says, a hint of panic in his voice.

“And if you’d let me talk, you’d know she’s sick today and has passed her part onto me,” Edelgard hears Hubert’s voice in the hallway.

“Ah! My apologies, Hubert. You know this class is important to me and I forgo any thinking at the thought of missing deadlines for it.”

“It’s quite alright, Ferdinand; although, you can make it up to me by buying me my favourite coffee.” Edelgard is absolutely disgusted. She’s alone this Valentine’s Day and the two are out there… doing that? Unacceptable—

She receives a text from Byleth. All is well again.

 10. Years & Years — If You’re Over Me

This what-are-we relationship is going to be the death of her, someday. Technically, they’re broken up. They’ve been broken up for almost half a year now. (And yet, in that period, they have slept together a total of fifteen times. Shamefully, Edelgard has kept count.)

There’s just… something absolutely irresistible about Byleth in her bodyguard uniform, looking all stoic, accompanying her everywhere.

She’ll continue thinking later. For now, all her focus is on Byleth and her lips on Edelgard’s clavicle.

 11. Purity Rings — Shuck

The only light in the room is from the moon, shining through the curtains. It hits gently on Edelgard’s face, and Byleth stops her ministrations for a while to admire her wife’s face. All she can think is beautiful beautiful beautiful and all she wants right now is to let Edelgard know that she is utterly and thoroughly loved: the good and bad parts.

Byleth smiles, all happiness and love, and continues undressing her wife and she is stuck in worship all night.

 12. Hayley Kiyoko — Ease My Mind

Edelgard has been weird all month. Dorothea can see that. She’s been smiling at her phone, and yet weirdly refuses to share what’s so funny. She’s been sneaking around the post-grad dorms early in the morning and in the dead of night.

“Edie, can I talk to you about that assignment from last week? I can’t seem to find the right answer for this question right here…” Dorothea rambles, while a shadow sneaks behind Edelgard.

“Dorothea, who is this B.E. person? They seem to be sending lewd texts to Edelgard.”

“Byleth?”

“You roped Petra into this?”

 13. The Radio Dept — This Time Around

They shouldn’t even be here.

Here is the ruins of a monastery ruined by a war thousands of years ago. Byleth doesn’t know how she ended up here. (It’s the voice in her head. The same one that screams that this face is a familiar one.)

“Come here, Kid! I got something to show you,” Jeralt’s gruff voice snaps her out of her thoughts.

“Miss von Hresvelg?” A man’s voice carries through the grounds and everything grinds to a halt.

 14. Derek & the Dominos — I Am Yours

Byleth is in Brigid to consult on something. That is, at first. One thing led to another and she’s stuck there for another month. This would be a total disaster had it not been the letters they’ve sent each other back and forth.

As it is, it has been two weeks since the last letter and Edelgard is on the edge of her seat waiting for the next one. She’s been restless, every day asking Hubert for any new correspondence.

“I truly do miss her,” Edelgard says, sipping her tea.

That comment broke Dorothea. “Goddess, Edie, just text her like a normal person, I’m begging you.”

 15. Sparklehorse — Heart of Darkness

Byleth has an unbeating heart and a darkness that follows her wherever she goes. She also has a goddess’s voice berating her when she misses the chance to kiss Edelgard.

As it stands, everything is alright, she reckons. Edelgard isn’t in the best place for romance: she’s busy with her final year project thesis and she’s in preparation to inherit her family’s company.

She’ll just be there, a shoulder to lean on, when Edelgard is tired from carrying the weight of the world.

#edeleth #byleth eisner #edelgard von hresvelg #my writing

[chloecarsonwrites]

What Joey Left Behind

TW: descriptions of kidnapping, infidelity, and brief mention of the corpse of a child.

Word Count: 4.5k

“Natalia...it’s time. You and I both know we can’t keep living like this.” My heart paused, then started beating twice as fast as before. I could feel the tips of my ears grow hot, and I knew that they were bright red. I gripped the countertop at the kitchen sink so hard my knuckles went white, staring out the window at a single blade of grass in the yard that my eye had fallen on to ground myself in the midst of what my estranged husband had just said. I looked over my shoulder at him where he was sitting at the kitchen island, the sweaty glass of ice water I had poured for him remaining untouched. He looked up and caught my eye; I immediately averted my gaze as if he was a stranger that had caught me staring at him. “So this is it then,” I sighed, trying to keep my voice steady. “What now? We go to an attorney or something?” “No...I think we can settle most of it ourselves. I mean, we’ll have to go to an attorney to settle the logistics and legality of it all. But I think that we both know that we can’t afford a legal battle between the two of us over money, property, and custody. I’ll make is as easy on my part as possible, if you agree to do the same. You can have the house. Hell, I basically live in the motel on 5th street as it is, I’m sure I can stay there a few weeks until I get an apartment.” I could see the gears turning in his head as he spoke. “All I ask for is joint custody of Edith. I know that I haven’t exactly been...there for her these past couple of years, but I still love her just as much as you do. We can discuss how often we each have her for, but I can’t just give her up altogether. It would ruin me.” I turned towards the fridge, focusing on a lighthouse magnet holding up a picture of Edith and her kindergarten teacher on the first day of school. I didn’t want him to see me brush away a tear that I hadn’t been able to keep in. “Yeah, you’re right...this...isn’t how married people should be living. My brother has a friend who he went to law school with. I’ll call him tomorrow. Maybe we can get a good deal and only be out a small fortune rather than a large one.” - Joseph was seven years old when he disappeared. Everybody in our 2,459 person town was a suspect, and all 2,459 people suspected each other. Losing the dynamic of trust between us all was foreign and filled us all with paranoia. Was there a kidnapper or a murderer living among us? People just didn’t go missing in little towns like ours in the middle of northern Michigan, which felt like an oasis in the middle of a world run rampant with terror. Parents let their children run around town until after dark and only worried if they didn’t return for dinner. To this day, I wonder if that’s where we went wrong. That night was like any other. It was the middle of July, and even though the sun had retired for the night, the summer air was in the upper 80s and thick with humidity, the kind that sticks to your skin. The backyard was illuminated by the fireflies that sparkled like droplets of dew when they catch the sun. I remember exactly what he was wearing the last time I saw him: old, faded denim shorts covered his pale and freckled legs; his favorite yellow t-shirt printed with pawprints hung off of his thin-framed shoulders. He also wore his purple sneakers that were always caked with dirt and mud because of how much he loved to adventure in them. The search party found one of them, the left one, less than 200 meters from our house in a stream just past the tree line. They gave it to Benjamin and me, said they thought it would help us get through the hard time. Once they had milked it of all the evidence they could, I hid it in the attic and never went back for it again. They say that the first 72 hours during a missing person case are crucial, that after those 72 hours, the chances of recovering said missing person alive decrease to nearly impossible odds. I remember watching the clock as the 72nd hour faded into the 73rd, begging with time itself and whatever higher power was out there to make that stovetop clock stop ticking, to give us a little more time to find our son. I had seen the missing person postings, the ones that described men and women who had disappeared as children and had been missing for 10, 20, 30 years. How did their families cope, knowing that they were more likely to find their children dead than alive? Joseph was our only child. After his disappearance, there was a kind of hole left in our family, if you could even call us that anymore. Two and a half years later, around the time that Joey would have turned 10, we had another child, a daughter, and named her Edith. We told ourselves that we weren’t trying to replace Joey, but deep down, I think we both knew that we were. We had never planned to have another child. We were both well into our late thirties. I was past my prime childbearing years. We never gave up hope on finding Joey--but I had hoped against hope that once we had Edith, I could finally be at peace. I should have known that peace never comes to the parents of missing children. They suspected that he had drowned in the river on the edge of our town, hidden from all eyes by the trees and brush, and that his body had floated down to the reservoir and sunk to the bottom. It, of course, was too expansive and deep to scour the entire thing, not that they didn’t try. I, however, had theories of my own. Had someone swept into town that day and plucked him off of the jungle gym at the park and was across state lines before we even knew something was amiss? Had he been lured into some trap under the guise of promised sweets and toys? He was only seven, after all--he was too young and innocent to know that there were people in this world that didn’t have good intentions. Benjamin dismissed my ideas with little more than an eyeroll and a wave of his hand, arguing that kidnappings “simply don’t happen here”. But lack of occurence doesn’t mean lack of possibility. Edith’s childhood was far different than Joseph’s, to put it lightly. She would run up to me, begging to go outside and play with her kindergarten friends at the river. I would open my mouth, about to say, “of course, Edie, you can go”, only to find the image of Joey’s body at the bottom of the reservoir, bloated and waterlogged, taunting me from somewhere in the deepest part of my brain. It felt wrong to shelter her so much, like I was doing a disservice to such an adventurous spirit. Edith was the type of person who couldn’t be chained--she saw our fence as a cage rather than protection. She ran our yard in her princess light-up Sketchers from dusk until dawn, when we finally coerced her into coming inside, or until she tired herself out. I wanted to let her explore our little town--which, to a child, seems like the whole world. But whenever I was about to let her go beyond that freshly painted white picket fence that now bordered our yard, there Joey was, thrashing about in the river’s rapids, or crying for help from the back of a stranger’s van. I went over that day in my head, time and time again for months. Who had been the last adult to see him? It was concluded that it was myself, when I sent him out to play after lunch. He said he was going to the park to play with Harriet and Lucas from school, and was only supposed to be half a mile away. “You know the rules, Joey, be back for dinner at 6,” I reminded him as he skipped off, his orange hair bouncing atop his head. “I know, Mommy, I will!” he called back, barely looking back at me over his shoulder. “I love you, honey!” “I love you more, Mommy,” I heard him respond, even though he had already rounded the corner. The authorities were never able to conclude whether he ever got to the park or not, because his friends had apparently forgotten about their play date. Did he see that his friends weren’t there, and decide to go play in the river instead? Had he wandered just outside of town and gotten lost? Too many factors were missing to conclude anything, and we had to live with the unknown. I can’t place the day that our marriage began to crumble. Neither of us wanted to admit it, of course, that when Joey had left us he had taken with him our entire family dynamic and nearly all of the love that Benjamin and I had once felt for one another. We tried to keep it together, for Joey’s sake, as if he would be hurt to know that his parents’ marriage was falling apart because of him. Around a year and a half after Joey left, we sat at our worn kitchen table, only two out of the three chairs occupied. We sat across from each other in a tense silence that was screaming the things we wanted to say. We hadn’t spoken in days, and hadn’t slept in the same bed in over a month. We had fallen into some kind of unspoken agreement where we would take turns sleeping on the couch. “How...how have you been?” I timidly asked. His head shot up, a look of genuine surprise that I had spoken painted on his face. “Oh, you know...fine. The usual.” I nodded slowly and turned back to my plate, feeling as though I had just spoken to a stranger. I poked at my pasta with my fork before dropping it onto the ceramic and blurting out the words I had been dying to say. “You know, we don’t have to be this way with each other. I don’t want to be this way. Please, talk to me. I see you every day but I miss you like you’ve been away for months.” He sat there in silence, but I could tell that he felt the same. Ben was never good at vocalizing his feelings, so I had become very good at deciphering his body language over the years. “Why don’t we do something?” I was practically begging. “All we do is sit in this godforsaken house and wallow in our self-pity. We’re never going to get  better if we don’t start communicating.” And so we did. We began going to church even though neither of us were very religious, sitting in the very back pew, a foot apart as if we were strangers. We took a three-month long trip to the Canadian archipelago, to a secluded cabin on Baffin Island where Edith was conceived, just to escape the whirlwind chaos that our lives at home had become. For a few years, it worked--we were as close to happy as we could be, tackling each new day as they came. But the euphoria of our revitalized marriage was only a facade. It started a year after our trip to Canada, when Edith was only a few months old. Benjamin stopped coming home after work, instead escaping to the amnesia that was offered to him by the bottle and the company of other women. He never told me outright that he was unfaithful, but I knew from the way he stumbled through the front door at 3AM smelling like whiskey and a perfume that I didn’t own, and the purple bruises that I didn’t leave starting to show under his right ear and just above his collarbone. “Ben,” I started, trying my best to keep my voice steady. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried out of my mind.” He placed a wet kiss on my cheek and called me a name that I didn’t know, Iris, before trudging off to Joey’s room in his drunken stupor, already asleep before collapsing onto the twin bed that was covered in a thin layer of dust from disuse. I let out a shaky breath and wiped away the tears that escaped before going to Edith’s room to put her back down, as she had been awoken by the ruckus. This happened, more and more frequently, until around five months after that first incident when Benjamin stopped coming home altogether, instead appearing randomly on a Saturday morning or a Tuesday night and staying for a few days before leaving again to chase whatever escape he had learned to occupy himself with. We lived like that for years, exchanging words maybe once every few weeks, and they were never kind. I would ask him when he next planned to come home--usually because I wanted to rekindle the romance we once had. I wanted us to cook a nice dinner and have him see the daughter he barely knew, but the truth was, we barely knew each other anymore. I imagined our kitchen table with all the seats occupied, Edith filling the spot where Joey once sat. Me, setting the table, and Ben putting dessert in the oven. We would discuss Edith’s school friends and Ben’s work obligations. That was never the case, though. “I don’t know when I’ll be home again, Nat. Maybe if you didn’t bitch so much when I was here, I would like coming home a little bit more,” he said, speaking to me as if I was a small child that needed to be reprimanded. “No Ben, you would like being here if you could drink and sleep with women who aren’t your wife, but you can’t. That’s why you leave for days on end and then show up unannounced, not because I’m a bitch.” With that, he launched himself out of the worn armchair and marched towards the front door that he had stumbled through only 45 minutes prior. He slid his boots on, not bothering to tie the laces, and was gone again without another word. - A month after Ben brought up the divorce, we sat at our old kitchen table, in front of the papers we had drawn up concerning the division of our assets. I wore a pair of painful black heels and a blouse with the top two buttons undone, a part of me hoping that he would see me the way he did when we first met and decide to repair what was left of our relationship, or at least, what was left of it. I was seeing Benjamin for the first time in a month and a half; his longest boozing trip away from home yet. When I saw him, however, he looked like he hadn’t spent those six weeks wasted in a dirty motel room with a woman whose name he didn’t know. He was clean-shaven and had cut his hair so that it no longer brushed his collar, and he looked strikingly like the man I had once been in love with, the one who had painted the walls of the house we no longer shared and made mud pies with the son we no longer had. I had almost forgotten what he looked like under the scruff and disheveled hair, and it was uncanny how much of him I saw in Edith, from the pointed nose to the green eyes and chestnut brown hair. I wonder if he saw it too. He had always been jealous of me for having so much resemblance with Joey while his own features were nowhere to be seen in our son. Was he happy now, that he had a child who was so clearly his own? My handwriting was shaky due to the trembling of my hand. I was overflowing, bursting at the seams with things that I wanted to ask and say to him. I felt like it wasn’t right though, that he was a stranger, and that I had no place asking him the things I so badly wanted to. Eventually I broke. “What happened to you?” I suddenly blurted out, the first sentence spoken between the two of us in 20 minutes. “What do you mean?” he responded, meeting my eye with his brows quizzically furrowed. “I mean how you look. Last time you were here you were unrecognizable. Is there a reason that you’ve gotten all cleaned up?” Part of me hoped it was for me, an attempt to win me back. “I guess I just needed a change. Especially for the...occasion. It didn’t seem like the type of thing to show up to looking like a mess.” I fought back a chuckle at that, the implication that this was an “occasion”. It was just us in our kitchen under a single dim overhead light. He hadn’t put any effort into his appearance around me for the past six years. What reason did he have to start now? But when I thought about it, I had also dressed up, only I was trying to win him back. Something was telling me that Ben had dressed up to salvage my view of him, not to make me swoon. He noticed my smirk. To my surprise, he didn’t immediately become hostile. “What’s that look for?” he asked with a grin. “It’s nothing, you just haven’t been this cleaned up in God knows how long. I wonder if Edith even recognizes you,” Edith probably hadn’t seen her Dad looking like this in over a year, and to a six-year-old, a year feels like a decade. “Speaking of her, where is she? I’ve been here for nearly an hour and she hasn’t come down to see me yet.” Despite the demons he was battling with and all the pain he had put me through, I knew that Ben still loved Edith more than anything in this world. My stomach sank a little at his question. The truth is, Edith wasn’t sure if Benjamin actually wanted to see her. It had been a while since he made time for her. I knew that she was probably upstairs, playing with her Dreamhouse and trying not to cry. My heart squeezed painfully at that the thought of her little six-year-old cheeks shining with tears because she thought her daddy didn’t love her. In all honesty, I didn’t know if he did, either. “She’s upstairs in her room. I can call for her, if you want?” I offered. “Yes, please. It’s been so long since I saw her,” he replied, nodding. I got up from my seat and walked to the bottom of the stairs. “Edie!” I called, “Do you want to come see Dad?” I heard the tiny gasp of excitement and the footsteps running to the stairs as her compact body came into view. She skipped down the stairs, holding two Barbies in her hands as her brown waves and pink tutu bounced around her. She had a huge grin on her face, revealing her two missing front teeth. It was remarkable how similar her mannerisms were compared to Joey’s. She was reaching the age he had been, and even though Joey was shy and timid and Edith was firey and bold, I suppose that some things between all children are constant. “Daddy!” she exclaimed in a high-pitched screech, running as fast as her little legs could carry her and jumping into his arms. I grinned at the sight, allowing myself to pretend that we were a normal family of four, and that a teenage Joey was upstairs sulking in his bedroom, never having disappeared. I was forced back to reality when I heard Edith’s voice. “Daddy, what are all these papers for? Are you doing homework?” “Ah, Edie,” he chuckled, picking her up and letting her sit on his lap, “I guess you can say it’s homework. Homework for grownups. I’ll bet your homework from school is a lot better than this.” “Maybe,” she replied with a giggle. “Ms. Jane is teaching us how to add and subtract numbers. It’s not that hard though.” Benjamin laughed. “Well, I’m sure it’s not hard, especially for a girl as smart as you.” - A few hours had passed, and Edith was now lying asleep on the kitchen floor, her dress-up clothes scattered around her sleeping form. Benjamin and I had taken a few hours to play with Edie, and for that brief time playing with Barbies and dress up clothes, I felt like we were a stable, healthy family. Some of the tension from before had faded away. With the air less thick with anger and unspoken words, the questions started to creep back in. “Ben,” I started, my voice shaky. “What...happened to us?” He stopped writing and set down his pen, the hostility I knew all too well flashing briefly in his eyes before fading away. “Honestly, I don’t know,” he said with a sigh. “I guess, you know...after Joey, it just hit me hard. That’s the kind of thing you hear about and forget because you think it will never happen to you. But then it happened. And I didn’t--still don’t--know how to handle it. And I suppose I took it out on you because you remind me so much of him. The pale skin, the red hair...every time I would look at you I would see his face, in that river or in the back of someone’s van, with a look on his face that terrified me because I knew I wasn’t there when he needed me the most.” I could feel my eyes pricking with tears. “Why didn’t you tell me? I was hurting too, I could have helped you. We could have helped each other. But you didn't want that, did you? You wanted to chase other women and the bottom of a whiskey bottle. That is why you never got to heal. Because you chose to numb and suppress it instead of confronting it. And I never got to heal because in my worst moment, the person who vowed to stay with me through it all wasn’t there!” I was choking back a sob, years of pain bubbling to the surface of a wound that never closed. To my surprise, Benjamin was crying, too, a sight I had never seen--streams of tears rolled down his cheeks and choked sounds erupted from his throat. “I know, and God, I’m so sorry. I loved--still love--you so much, and I wanted to heal and learn to cope with our loss. But I ruined it. I fucked it all up--our marriage, my relationship with my remaining kid, my own mental health. And I don’t think any of it can ever be okay again. And it’s my own damn fault! What am I, besides a deadbeat father and a borderline alcoholic? I’m nothing! And Joey...well, at least he never had to see me like this.” I tried to push back the tears, I did--but the years of pain that I had kept inside for so long were all coming out. How could I have been so blind, to think that Benjamin wasn’t hurting as much or in the same way as I was? He was a parent, too. Joey was as much a part of him as he was a part of me. For a while, we cried together, mourning the loss of our son and what our lives could have been. We both knew that it was over--there was no repairing our marriage, it was in too many pieces for the reconstruction to occur. All there was left to do was to gather them up and use what we could to heal and forgive each other. When I didn’t have anything left within me to cry, I rubbed my hand up and down Benjamin’s back. “You know,” I sniffed, “his class graduated this past weekend. He would be heading off to college, or to the military, or to start his career. What do you think he would be doing?” “Definitely not the military,” he snickered through his last few tears. “He was always too soft and shy for that kind of thing, he wouldn’t survive basic--he would probably be going off to some big campus somewhere to study literature. You know, because he always loved those fantasy books.” “Yeah, or maybe history, because he always wanted to watch those documentaries about medieval Europe, even though they were too mature for him.” The memory came back to me and hit me hard: Ben and I on the couch, Joey wedged between us, begging us to let him watch the History channel. If I had known that three months from then the spot where he always sat would burn with his absence, maybe I would have let him watch. “Do you think him and Edie would have gotten along? Ya’know, if the circumstances were different, if we had planned for two, and they were born only two or three years apart. Edie’s so fiery compared to him, of course she would be the one bossing him around.” He had this kind of bittersweet smile on his face, as if he were reminiscing on a time that had never existed, an alternate reality where, maybe, a different version of us in another universe were living. “She would probably make him play Barbies and dress-up. They would have tea parties together. But then, Edie would want to make it up to him, so they’d go outside and play in the mud together, not that she doesn’t already enjoy that.” The thought brought a smile to my face. Edith still didn’t really understand that she had a brother she never met; there was no good way to tell a child about the disappearance of another. One day we would tell her about Joseph, about the kind of boy he was and how much they would have loved to grow up together. A comfortable silence fell between us. We both found ourselves staring down at the yellow legal pad sitting on our worn kitchen table, our fingertips covered in blue and black ink stains. There was an unspoken question lingering between us: how did we end up here? Both of us were allowing ourselves to imagine the possibility of trying to start over, wondering if we were really broken beyond repair. Maybe somewhere, another version of us was sitting at an old kitchen table, only they were a healthy family of four rather than a broken one of three. Despite our shared desire to try to be that family, or at least some skewed version of it, neither of us were brave enough to voice it. So instead, we picked up our pens again and got back to work, only now each of us had an understanding and respect for the other. It was unspoken, but present nonetheless.

#writing #short story

[engl699readingjournal-blog]

Mateja was from Nürnberg and had been scouted as a model in her mid-teens. Like most slim male models with androgynous faces and slender figures, her entire career had been from the very beginning sculpted by her agency as informed by the archetypes she could already be placed into, prefabricated and predestined, as laid out for her as the clothing items themselves. She had done H&M campaigns in effete floral blouses, clad in bell-bottom pants and donning Quentin-Crisp-esque scarves and broad-brimmed hats, round sunglasses, ethereal photoshoots standing in meadows, wreathed in lavender. Tresses intertwined with leaves and open shirts slipping off of pale bony shoulders, a glamorous pastoral in which a certain suspended belief in the existence of masculinity was engineered by an industry presently dominated by Andreja Pejić pre-transition. At the height of Mateja’s career, the industry had only just realized that androgyny was lucrative, apparently, because even before I had met her I knew her. Pictures of her crossed my Tumblr dashboard from time to time. She blended in with the other thousands of models being styled exactly as she was, but she was there nonetheless, a part of this bizarre vision someone was curating, the ultra-wispy waifish male model clothed in these strange Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits as if he had himself been dressed by some Victorian nanny, given dissolute-1920s-schoolboy floppy haircuts. At one point I felt like a day couldn’t pass by without me seeing someone reblog a picture of one of these models in a sheer button down that showcased his ribs and collarbones, one blue eye peeking at the camera because the other was covered by the hair flop, a boater hat perched on top of that, cultivating the kind of gossamer construct Thomas Mann might have chased through Venice in a 1913 fantasy. Spindly hands, hollow cheeks, emphasized undereye circles that reiterated the eternal toxic marriage between the anemic image and the marketable queer one. The only way to be androgynous: rail thin, white as Christmas in Finland, consumptive. Models were scouted, packaged this way, then disposed of once they had aged out of the fey aesthetic. Something about seeing them years later on Instagram, sloppy, weird, greasy, chainsmoking, partying, was satisfying, the shedding of the artificial skin and the assumption of the unmarketable identity, the inundation of the Instagram account with memes instead of photoshoot outtakes, the gaining of weight and the growing of patchy beards, the eschewing of the sheer blouse in favor of kitschy t-shirts with stock photos of European-Union-themed nail art silkscreened across the front. High-waters paired with dirty running shoes. If Thomas Mann had seen them all now he may never have written Der Tod in Venedig. This is what his Tadzio would become? A smelly Prenzlauer Berg hipster in Dahmer glasses? Good.

Mateja was of a slightly different variety of industry pariahs, though. Once she left her representing agency, she grew her hair out, started wearing PVC skirts over black leotards, changed her name, started her own modeling agency for trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, and otherwise non-cisgender people. That was how we met. “The agency is called Das Modell,” she said as we sat at Südblock, casually inhaling an entire Flammkuchen while we talked about her work. “With two L’s. You know, like a concept, a theory, not like a person. And das, because it’s neutrisch. So is das Model, but the meanings are not quite the same.” I thought about the song by Kraftwerk and its rudimentary lyrics – “she is a model and she’s looking good / I’d like to take her home, that’s understood” – and how I had seen the German title of that song spelled both ways, with and without the extra L at the end. Of course, obsessed with all things robotic and scientific as they were, it would have made sense if the same wordplay had been intended there. “I just got sick of many things in this mainstream fashion industry,” she went on. “I left this agency because I told them I was not a male and they didn’t know what to do about that. They wanted to make me like Andreja, but I wasn’t like her. She knew she was a woman for many years, you know. She just didn’t come out because she knew she could make more money as a male model who looked like a woman than she could doing the same thing but identifying as a woman. Her whole career was relying on this one difference. I told them I was not this. They had no use for me. So I started my own agency.”

We had done a few photoshoots, all of which involved me in all black with my silver-blond hair, gaunt face, and crooked left ear front-and-center. I was not shaping up to be a Tadzio. I was 5’6”, my personal brand of androgyny was more evocative of clear and present illness than of foppish wastrel, my head was the size of a jovian planet, I had tattoos that I didn’t feel like showing, I wore drapey clothing that managed to convey the suggestion that I had a body somewhere without actually having to show it. My hair, which had held the same side-part for my entire life, would not do anything except lay exactly the way it wanted to. Mateja had been putting me in all-black turtlenecks for our shoots because they apparently emphasized my jawline. I hated turtlenecks enthusiastically, but I liked Mateja, so I endured. By the time we were halfway through one of our photoshoots, a roll of film in an empty room at the Neue Schule für Fotografie, filled with cracked mirrors that refracted the late-afternoon sunlight across the distinctly DDR parquet flooring, I was ready to shave my hair off and go around for the next months wearing a scarf-wig, Little Edie in Grey Gardens style, clad in a monk’s robe. I had seen myself standing in every unflattering angle I could possibly achieve in every cracked mirror that shot beams of Minority Report lighting across my face and washed out my nose. I sat on a dinosaur of a desk that had been pushed to the wall while Mateja changed a film roll, squinting out at the sunset over a particularly dingy part of Mitte. I had shown up to the photoshoot with only the clothes I was wearing, an attempt to avoid the bringing-up of a tight black turtleneck. The shirt I had chosen had a band collar and was loose. She did not express disapproval of it, but it was most likely not what she would have chosen, either.

“I think what we concentrate on the most is your face and your hands,” Mateja said. She began to take photos of me as I sat on the desk. “These are your best features.” My hands? They were German Expressionist monstrosities disproportionate to the rest of my body, but I did like them. My face, though? At times I was at peace with it, at other times I wanted to take my fingernails and gore it into unrecognizability. I had strong bone structure because I was sick, not because I was effortlessly beautiful like the Tadzios. None of this would have been interesting to Mateja, who simply commented on how good I was at sitting still and catching the best light with the slightest inclinations of my head. I was just trying to hide that damn ear.

Later that summer, Mateja asked me if I was interested in doing a group photo series for a fashion publication called Achtung, shot by a Köln-based photographer named Eva, centered around Mateja’s fashion endeavor and showcasing some of the agency’s talent. As it happened, the photoshoot was to be the day Sam and I left Berlin for our overnight through-the-whole-Czech-Republic odyssey to Vienna. “Eva says she wants to do some shots of us individually, then as groups, just in the apartment, then at night to go out and photograph us at some bars,” Mateja said. “I explained to her and the magazine what we expected of pronouns, proper language, things like this. They told us to bring several pieces of clothing that we feel the most comfortable in, our favorite things to wear.” I agreed to the daytime photoshoot, noting that I would not make the evening half of the project because I had a bus to catch with a friend.

It was July and a massive heat-wave was preparing to seize all of Germany by the throat and hold it fast all the way until the end of August. It was already smoldering in Bavaria and Austria, but had not yet crept up to Berlin. I could still comfortably spend a day outdoors in black shitkicker Docs, heavy black knee-socks, black schoolboy shorts, a white collared button-down, a crust punk neckerchief, and a black blazer with the lapels covered in buttons and brooches, inspired by Rik Mayall’s moody anarchist character from The Young Ones. In Berlin nobody looks twice if you wear the same outfit for a month. It felt only right that this should be the ensemble I brought along.

I think I was the most difficult to style. In attendance were Mateja, a young transwoman from München named Kim, Mateja’s genderqueer roommate whose name I don’t remember, a model and fashion designer named Leni with a look and backstory very similar to Mateja’s, and myself. The two stylists from the magazine looked at what I was wearing, evaluated my face, and made an executive decision: turtlenecks. Put him in turtlenecks. I wanted to scream. My foray into modeling was shaping up to be one backless infinite wardrobe filled with Hermès turtlenecks. “These make your face look incredible,” said the stylists to me in German. “Much more masculine jawline.” I didn’t want a masculine jawline. “Was für ein Gesicht,” Eva said as she snapped photos.

Exactly none of the clothes I was put into were clothes I would wear in any setting ever. Giant 1970s flared pants with platform-heel boots and turtlenecks, awful leather pants and Gucci jean jackets and turtlenecks, everything shot from the front to avoid acknowledging that Sam and I had cut my hair the night before with what could have been a chainsaw and a cheese knife, the crooked ear front-and-center again. I wanted to demand to know why my own clothes didn’t suffice. No, it wasn’t sleek, but neither was punk, neither was queer. I thought about the crust punks who hung out around Warschauer Straße with their dogs and their witty cardboard signs, about the squatters who tromped around Kreuzberg in their boots and bandannas. Did the people from this magazine know nothing about this?

After the main shoot began wrapping up, I got back into my clothes while Mateja and everyone else suited up for their night out, choosing other clothes to bring along for wardrobe changes. Mateja’s first outfit was a slim-cut suit with no shirt underneath, and Leni put on a matching ensemble. Together they put on music and danced while Eva snapped photos, them waiting for it to get dark enough for phase two, me waiting for the right time to leave. They moved like cats, tossing their hair about and embracing each other. I stood to the side, watching and holding my backpack which held enough CLIF bars to last Sam and I through our entire Austrian trek in the coming 36 hours. At some point Eva noticed me, my buttons, my boots, and called me over to snap a picture of me, just standing there, still holding my backpack, in front of this wall, dance music still blaring. Somewhere out there that picture exists. Months later, when Mateja met up with me to give me a hard copy of the magazine, she sighed and simply said, “I don’t know if I’m happy with this series. Eva did very well shooting us, but I think the magazine missed the point.”

[firstjustgoin]

The End

10. Start with the end.

The End

Edie sits outside in the waiting room for fifty-two minutes before she pushes the door open, cringing as it shrieked with every inch. Her sister does not turn to face her when she enters. Cleo cowers under thick, cream-colored blankets, the skin on her arms and neck pooling with pockmarks and fissures. If Edie hadn’t double and triple checked the room number with the nurse at the frontdesk, she might have thought she was in the wrong room. The air heaves with a rotten, stale scent. She does not know where to put her hands or feet or eyes, so she stays hovering in the doorway for minutes, not murmuring one word. When the doctor arrives in a rush of movement and frenzy, pumping and pressing and prodding against Cleo’s sallow, shallow body, Edie turns away. A protracted, shrill beep fills the room and for a moment before she turned to face her late sister, she feels herself thrust into the bottom of that swimming pool, her eyelashes fluttering and fingers reaching desperately for air.

Growing Lungs

They find bubbles magical –– how they float and glisten and pop. Cleo can blow them bigger than Edie so Edie sits on the velvet loveseat and props her head up in her hands to watch as Cleo spins in circles amidst the shimmering orbs dancing in the air, sometimes reaching the ceiling or floor before they explode quietly and swiftly. “You’ll be as good as me one day,” Cleo laughs. “Once your lungs grow as big as mine.” Edie practices sucking in deep breaths and holding her breath in her bedroom mirror, watching as her eyes pops and skin goes white. Thirty seconds then a minute. She read a story about someone who could hold their breath underwater for twenty-two minutes but she can’t understand how the body keeps working even when it isn’t doing any work.

Lightning

At dusk, they catch fireflies, the only sport at which Edie excels and Cleo flails. “The trick,” Edie says proudly, “is to stand so still, they think you’re just part of the air. Then they’ll come to you like that.” She snaps her fingers and watches in delight as Cleo adjusts her shoulders and feet to match hers. They hold out their palms so far away that their fingers disappear into the night and they wait for the yellow lights to hover above the jar. The grass tickles their toes. Even after teaching Cleo her ways, by the time their mother calls to them from the front porch, Edie’s jar is full and pulsing with the tiny moving flashlights and Cleo’s is nearly empty. Cleo digs her heels into the thick shag carpet of their living room and pulls every muscle of her face inwards like she’s trying to get her eyes to touch her mouth. It is the only time Cleo is not beautiful. It is only when Edie steps back onto the porch and unscrews the mason jar top that Cleo’s face relaxes back to its calm beauty –– her blue eyes tracking each firefly as it bursts into the sky.

Remnants

“I don’t think we should be sisters anymore,” Cleo announces one day while she is painting her toenails a screaming shade of pink. “No offense but it just doesn’t make any sense. Doesn’t it just make the least sense?” Cleo has a way of twisting and turning phrases to make them impossible not to agree with. But when Edie looks at her sister’s face, she sees the same slope of her own nose, the round freckled cheeks, the same dipped hairline, and frizzy dark brown hair. What else are sisters but two people who share remnants of one another like mixed up pieces of the same puzzle? But Edie nods and gives a half-smile and says, “I suppose you’re right. It just doesn’t make any sense.” Cleo replies with a far-off smile as she carefully applies the pink polish to her big toe. “I knew you’d get it. I just knew it.”

Tornado

On the bus to school. Edie and Cleo sit on opposite ends, sandwiched in by other friends. Cleo’s loud, showy laugh winds its way to the back of the bus where Edie is sitting, half-listening to a classmate talk about an upcoming history project. “––’spose we could each do a part? Like, I’ll do the diorama about King Tut and you can do the other stuff, you know, the writing parts.” Edie strains her open ear to hear what Cleo could be laughing at, pulling at each disjointed sound and syllable trying to place it in an order. And she was...pirate...avocado...hilarious. That can’t be it, unless Cleo has started speaking in a code that Edie can’t understand. Most days it feels that way anyways. At the dinner table Cleo speaks in gruff nods and sideways stories. “Did you hear mommy, I’m going to be Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz play? Doesn’t that just make you the most proud?” Edie knows that Cleo is talking to her as much as their mother, reminding her of her place as Failed Sister, but what can she do but push the peas around her plate and pretend it is all okay?

The Siren

The night Edie bears her first child, the wind whips through the Sound, lashing anyone who dares to go outside. This is how she quiets herself, clamps down the pain. Her mother has been dead for twelve years and will never see her child grow; her sister is sitting somewhere in a white-walled room, humming tunes of her childhood past, eyes staring out at nothing. Edie cradles her newborn baby girl, with her apple round cheeks, the same slope of her own nose, whispers of freckles along her jawline and although her daughter looks exactly like a miniature version of herself all she can see is Cleo. She writes the name Cleo on the birth certificate before she can change her mind, before her husband awakes, as an empty siren call into the tempestuous night.

Mountain Air

They visit their father in Long Beach over Fourth of July weekend. It’s the first time they are allowed to take a flight by themselves they are squirming with excitement. Cleo helps Edie pick out her best plane outfit –– a newly starched white and blue striped pinafore dress, black Mary Jane’s with the slightest heel, a ruffle white shirt underneath. When they board the plane with the assistance of a glamorous flight attendant, they feel like pop stars waving at thousands of invisible fans. They eat blueberry muffins for dinner and giggle while watching the large man beside them drool out of the corner of his mouth as he sleeps. The flight attendant with the dramatic fake eyelashes and barrel curls leans down to point at the Rocky Mountains as they fly over, and they take turns devising stories about their future lives in the mountains.  

Caught Up

Their father’s new life is filled with shiny, stainless steel and big glass windows and sliding doors. Their mother warned them not to get too “caught up in all the fancy” while they were out there, but her pleading goes in one ear and out the other by the time they walk across the threshold for the first time. Their father owns not one but three technicolor television sets and a dishwasher and a swimming pool the size of ones they’ve only seen at the Y. He talks to them about his bad golf habit and the vacation he and Magdalena took to Havana last month –– “They aren’t even letting Americans in, we were walking down the street and I swear to you folks on the sidewalk just stared at us like they knew.” They had always heard their mother grumbling about how their father didn’t know how to talk to kids but it wasn’t until they got there that they realized what that meant. He sounded like the realtor Chuck their mother had used to sell their house before they moved into the apartment. “He’s so cool,” Cleo gushes when they drop their bags in the room. Edie nods in agreement but isn’t sure why dads need to be cool, anyways.

45 Seconds

Edie is lying in the shadows of a palm tree on day four of their California adventure while Cleo lounges on a pool noodle. For days, Cleo hasn’t stopped bragging like she’s in pursuit of her father’s sole affection. And it’s working. “Daddy did you know that I’m top of my class in school? I didn’t miss a single day of class last year, even Edie missed but I still went.” And their father’s face would light up as he picked up Cleo and swung her through the air. With every “That’s amazing, sweetheart,” Edie feels another knife thrust into her abdomen. She clutches her knees to her chest and rocks back and forth –– “like a crazy person,” Cleo has told her a thousand times –– but it’s the only thing that can center herself again. On this day, not even the most vigorous rocking can bring her back to center. Her muscles freeze and her heart pounds against her chest with the force of a bottle rocket. She stands and runs and then jumps into the pool, before her mind can catch up with her body. She is jumping and she is swimming and she is pushing. She watches her sister’s hair float above the water as her fingers frantically stretch and scratch at whatever she can grasp. Edie feels the sharp sting of fingernail against flesh but it does not awaken her, does not sway her. She watches her sister’s eyes, so blue, and the bubbles pop against the surface of the pool. Cleo has not been practicing like Edie has; she can only hold her breath for 45 seconds. Edie does not let go until she sees her sister’s eyes close. Only then does she feel the heat rush back to her body, her mind gasping as it catches up with her. She is not dead, she cannot be dead, her mind tells her as a barricade against a panic attack, but in those moments right afterwards, she does not know if that’s true.