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sinkingorswimming · 7 years

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"Sunrise" of the In the Heights OST

*these are just all gonna be the x-men au now, i got eaten by it, i have no control anymore sorry*

“I have no idea what to do with this,” Celestino admits an hour after the commotion at Webster Hall with a vague wave of his left hand.

This being Longshot, who smiles at him, his mouth shaping into a pink heart.

“It’s why we brought him to you,” Phichit says. “You’re the one who knows weird.”

Celestino gives Phichit a sigh and an exasperated look. “Television,” he says as he absently ties up his hair. “A dimension ruled by television.”

Longshot shrugs with a softer smile.

“Well,” Celestino says. “We’ll find a way to get you home, Longshot, since your revolution sounds like it can use all the help it can get.”

Longshot nods with a combination of gratitude and resignation. He folds his hands over his mouth, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

It’s Sunday in the West Village loft Phichit and Yuuri call theirs. They share bunk beds so Yuuri can have a workspace for his studies and his writing and so Phichit has space for his rigs. Phichit’s an NYU student too, he’s in Tisch, and he single-handedly keeps the corner bodega in business because of an addiction to their egg sandwiches.

Celestino gets up, and he makes a face like he just recalled something. “Right,” he says. He picks up a large shopping bag that says Intoxicated by Giacometti on the side. “Chris had prototypes for Fall ‘18 lying around. Longshot looks like he’s a sample size—he said he figured he shouldn’t draw as much attention in these.”

Longshot takes the black bag with metallic blue and purple writing. He holds up a grey and black sweater, pawing at its fabric like he’s a stranger to the concept of wool.

He may be, Yuuri realizes. “We’ll get you showered and prettied up,” Phichit says to Longshot with a wink.

“I’m already pretty, it’s part of my design,” Logshot says with a raised eyebrow.

“You have a mullet,” Phichit counters. “No one in New York City has a mullet. It’s gotta go.”

Longshot gives Phichit a confused stare, and Yuuri clears his throat. “He means you need a haircut. Between the color and the style, you’ll stand out too much. It’s either we dye it or we cut it.”

Longshot touches his hair, the strands sliding through his (four still how the fuck) fingers. “Cut it,” he says after a few minutes contemplation.

Phichit smiles and Yuuri nods. He leads Longshot to the bathroom—it’s surprisingly decent for its size, no bathtub though. Just a decent shower and pair sinks. Yuuri gets a spare towel and wash cloth of him. “Okay my soap is the white and green bar, Phichit’s the blue one—mine smells like cedar, is flowers and—”

Yuuri stops and swallows like a huge rock is in his throat. Longshot’s already mostly naked, and yes he’s beautiful, like a Greek statue, but his spine—

Instead of a subtle ident curving down his back, his vertebrae protrude like if an invertebrate made him. Yuuri stares, partially because it’s a new sight, but also because it’s…appealing “Do they hurt?” he asks before he can stop himself.

Longshot looks over his shoulder at him. “Not really,” he replies. “You can touch them, if you like.”

Yuuri comes close, reaches to the one at the base of his neck, and runs his hands over it, the holographic teal glitter nail lacquer bright against Longshot’s pale skin. It feels like a really large knuckle, but on his back. His skin is warm, smooth, and soft.

Longshot smiles over his shoulder. “That feels good.”

Yuuri clears his throat and takes two steps back. He clears his throat. “Well, um—” He turns to the sink, grabbing the MAC wipes and his glasses. He deals with his make up at his desk since the light’s better. “Hot water runs out after fifteen minutes. Try to be quick.”

He hightails it out of the bathroom with his face like a tomato, falling gracelessly into his make up chair and wiping his face down. Once there’s only a touch of blue in his eyelashes, he throws the used towelettes out and groans.

Phichit hangs upside down from the top bunk by his tail. “Your merch sales are improving,” he says. “We’re out of a few t-shirts and some posters—should I restock or should we make new designs? We have that one photoshoot we did with the blue and gold jacket—”

“The alternate take of the indigo outfit with the crystals,” Yuuri answers as he removes the purple lenses and puts on his blue half-rimmed eyeglasses. He shakes his hair loose out of his stage style and puts on a plain lip balm flavored like melons.

“Oooh yes!” Phichit accesses the file on the cloud and sends it to their printshop. “Perfect.”

Yuuri puts on a pair of skinny denim jeans and a slightly-oversized oatmeal and navy striped sweater. His socks are navy with cream colored dogs on them. The water cuts off and he grabs his clippers and a pair of scissors. Phichit flips upright into his bed. “I’m gonna nap.”

“Kay,” Yuuri answers. He knocks before entering to a Longshot in a burgundy t-shirt with a silver abstract print and dark gray denim. Chris provided him a pair of Chuck Taylors the same color as the shirt, and there’s a soft looking leather jacket on the back of the toilet. “Sit please, back to me.”

Longshot does. Yuuri combs out his wet hair, then gets to work shearing off the length first and then clipping down the sides and back, leaving it long in the front and on top. It’s a respectable yet fashionable hairstyle. Yuuri uses the blow-dryer phichit uses for his body and when he’s finished, he puts a bit of product in it.

His hair is soft and smells like Yuuri’s shampoo, and Yuuri has to step back a second time.

Longshot stands and looks in the mirror. He nods with approval. “You do good work, beautiful,” he says.

Yuuri gives him a strange look.

“You look good with the make up,” Longshot elaborates. “But this is better.” He rakes his eyes up and down Yuuri.

Yuuri stammers with his eyes wide. “Pancakes.”

“What?” Longshot asks.

“Breakfast food,” Yuuri manages. “Uh—eating? We…eat. Yeah.”

He turns away and scoots out of the bathroom, Longshot following. Yuuri texts Phichit that they went out so he’ll see it when he wakes up. He locks the door and they walk down the six flights of stairs to the street. Empire Diner’s not a long walk, and Longshot keeps looking up and around as they head to the restaurant.

“What’s that?” he asks. It’s a building with a red awning, bins of bright flowers in the front, and smells wafting from it.

“A bodega,” Yuuri replies.

Longshot gives him a curious look.

Yuuri blinks. “Right um—it’s a Spanish word for corner store, basically. They sell flowers, groceries, sandwiches, beer—it’s easier than a big grocery sometimes.”

“Gro-cer-ies,” Longshot sounds out. “I don’t know—”

“Food,” Yuuri answers, kind of taken aback. “We have to buy food to cook and live off of. A grocer provides it.”

“Major Gosha fed us,” Longshot says. “When we’d be taken out of stasis to perform for Yakov’s shows. He’d wake us, give us the food, wardrobe, hair, and make up, and then showtime!”

“Well, we make three meals a day or buy them from a restaurant,” Yuuri elaborates. “Restuarants are expensive, but I got paid for the show last night even though—well you were there. Anyways, I’m buying you brunch. My treat as a Welcome to Earth, Longshot! gift.”

“Victor,” he says. “I want you to call me Victor. The others can call me Longshot—but please, beauitful, call me Victor.”

Yuuri feels the heat flood his face. He bites back an awkward reply, opening the Diner’s door instead. They’re shown to a window-side booth, and Victor looks up and around with wonder like a child.

The waitress comes over. “Hi guys, what’ll it be to drink?”

“Coffee please,” Yuuri answers. “Two of them.”

Long…Victor gives her a bright smile. “Yes this…coffee!”

She flushes and giggles before leaving, and Yuuri’s less flustered the next time his dining compainion smiles at him. He does it to everyone, Yuuri realizes.

Okay.

“What is…a waffle?” he asks, saying “whuffle” instead of the correct pronunciation.

“Waffles are like a bread thing that’s sweet,” Yuuri explains.

“Avocado?” he’s asked.

“It’s a vegetable that’s soft and green on the inside,” Yuuri says, feeling like Human Google.

His companion keeps looking. “We just eat this Nutrient drink; it’s peach and flavorless. This is all very complex.”

“Wait you’ve…never had food?” The disappointment vanishes because what the fuck?

“The Spineless Ones get to have the food,” Victor says. “Entertainers get nutrients.The Spineless Ruling Class eats real food.”

Of course Yuuri’s heard of socities like this—pre-Revolution France, third world nations—but it’s different knowing someone from one, seeing them in real life and hearing them discuss it.

Especially since he sounds so calm and matter-of-fact.

“Order whatever you like,” Yuuri says. “However much of it you want.”

Victor looks at him, but he doesn’t seem to understand the bit about the financials. His eyes are confused but grateful, like he understands Yuuri’s gift but doesn’t at the same time. The server brings their coffee and asks for their orders—Yuuri gets the salmon pastrami avo toast, and Victor orders both the pancakes and the waffle.

The way he lights up when he gets his first bites, the happiness and excitement in his expression and voice—risks to himself be damned.

Yuuri’s gonna help him.

#Anonymous #asked and answered #dazz and longshot au #dommi's fic #victuuri fic #yoi fic #dazzler!yuuri #longshot!victor #lost in your light #sexy haircut is sexy #sexy pre-shower is sexy #yuuri misunderstanding again

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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The 2008 Class that Explains Elizabeth Warren’s Style

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-2008-class-that-explains-elizabeth-warrens-style/

The 2008 Class that Explains Elizabeth Warren’s Style

In the middle of the volatile fall of 2008, with foreclosures skyrocketing and companies failing and unemployment spiking and the stock market sinking, 80 rattled first-semester Harvard Law School students stood outside a classroom and watched the Dow plummet yet again. Then they stepped inside and took their seats for their contracts course with professor Elizabeth Warren.

“And professor Warren’s like, ‘We’re actually not going to talk about contracts,’” former student Danielle D’Onfro told me. “‘We’re going to talk about what’s happening in the world.’”

Story Continued Below

Warren ditched the syllabus and instead gave a lecture on the cratering economyand its causes, encapsulating the collapse as she understood it. In interviews over the past couple weeks, her former students described it as “riveting” and “engaging” and “eye-opening.”

“She basically proceeded to explain the financial crisis as it was happening,” Nigel Barrella said. “It was pretty amazing—at a time when no one else, really, seemed to have answers like that—that she would come in and talk about credit default swaps and collateralized mortgages, junk mortgages, carved up into tranches, and sold to financial institutions as high-quality financial products.”

Her impromptu primer on the crisis spanned two days, November 12 and 13, according to the calendar of one of her students, and their takeaway was twofold: (1) Professor Warren sure had a knack for talking about this stuff, and (2) this skill might take her somewhere beyond even the august confines of HLS.

“I think for all of us sitting there at that moment,” D’Onfro said, “we realized that, you know, this person is not just going to be our contracts professor.”

They were right. Warren’s gift for explication has led her almost inexorably from there to here—from explaining at Harvard, in classes, in a reading group, on a blog and on panels of academics and in the popular press, to explaining in Washington, where she came to prominence as a piercing watchdog before she was elected to the Senate. And on a historically crowded presidential campaign trail, she has steadily distanced herself from most of the field with her grasp of detail and capacity to break it down, standing as the top-polling Democrat not named Joe Biden heading into this week’s curtain-raising debates.

Warren’s professorial background, and her history as a Washington player on an issue as complex as financial regulation, has led some political observers to ask of late whether this particular gift could be a mixed blessing—a talent that also defines her ceiling, especially with the working-class voters who could make the difference in a presidential election.

“She’s lecturing,” David Axelrod, the top Barack Obama strategist, recently said of Warren in theNew York Times Magazine, wondering how that approach would play with non-college-educated white voters. (“I regretted that the rest of my thoughts were excised,” he told me in a subsequent conversation, saying Warren has “phenomenal strengths.” But still: “I think this is the last big hurdle for her,” he said.)

He’s not the only one who’s consideredthis. “It’s a fascinating question,” former Jeb Bush senior adviser Michael Steel told me. He called it “a huge challenge … figuring out how to explain her policy positions, the problems they purport to address, and how it fits in with her theory, in a way that somebody sitting on a stool in a Waffle House will understand and agree with.”

Others, though, push back on just the basic terms of this conversation. Progressive consultant Rebecca Katz said in an email, “Let’s call the attack on her ‘lecturing’ what it really is: sexist.” Added Boston-based political analyst Mary Anne Marsh: “She’s beendefiningthis race.”

On the debate stage Wednesday night, facing off against nine other contenders, Warren will have a platform, if a narrow one, to make the kind of vivid and persuasive case that grabs voters. In the Democratic Party, at least, there are footsteps for an expert explainer to follow: Obama had a professor’s demeanor and rhetorical tics, and Bill Clinton laid out big ideas and policy nuances at length, all while forging personal connections with a wide variety of audiences.

Some who’ve gauged her as a candidate think Warren is honing these same skills. “I thought at the beginning of the campaign watching her that she was lecturing,” longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum told me, “and then as time has gone on, and she’s done these town meetings, she’s gotten better and better at explaining and relating what she’s saying in human terms.”

Republican consultants I contacted concur. “I think she’s a much more formidable politician than a lot of people, especially, on the right, think,” Liz Mair, a communications strategist who’s worked for Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Rand Paul, said in an email.

If Warren grabs the spotlight on that crowded stage, there’s a group of former law students who can explain why.

***

“Will the Middle Class Survive?”

In the fall of ’08, that’s what Warren called her reading group, a quasi-extracurricular klatch of a dozen students who had signed up to explore the topic at the heart of her life’s work. The reading: some chapters from a book about class, some chapters from a book about health care and some chapters from a book of her own—The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke, which she wrote with her daughter and was published in 2003. “I’m looking forward to this,” Warren wrote to the students, according to emails one of them shared with me.

It took no time at all for current events to scramble the group’s schedule.

“Class Mattersis beginning to feel a bit dated,” Warren wrote to the group ahead of its first real get-together.Class Mattershad come out just three years before. “Would you like me to talk with you about how the subprime crisis started and what might be done about it? If that would be more timely, I’m glad to do it.”

The students made plain what they wanted. “Your responses overwhelmingly favored talking about the mortgage meltdown,” Warren wrote.

The rest of the semester, meeting on intermittent Thursday evenings at Warren’s dark green Victorian house with a wrought-iron fence, Warren served them salmon and ribs and ordered in Redbones along with peach cobbler that almost every student I talked to mentioned without prompting. They drank herbal tea and talked, taking turns petting Otis, Warren’s convivial golden retriever. They discussed the reading—but their conversations, members of the group told me, couldn’t help but veer away from the pages of the texts and toward the topsy-turvy economy.

“There’s a tendency in elite law schools to just remove yourself from the realities of the world, and it was a really strange time to enter law school, when the economy was collapsing around you,” Rachel Lauter said. “And I remember feeling incredibly lucky to have her on the ground floor explaining what was happening.”

“She can talk to normal people and explain complicated things in a way that’s comprehensible,” Jad Mills said.

“That’s not always how law professors communicate,” Libby Benton said.

Neither is this: Throughout that fall, Warren penned op-eds (families losing their homes were “casualties of a financial system that saw them not as customers, but as prey,” she wrote in theChicago Tribuneon September 22), she blogged at creditslips.org (the $700 billion bailout was “keeping me awake at night,” she wrote on September 23), fired off quotes on network news shows (she called a credit card “a poisonous snake in your wallet” on ABC’s “Nightline” on September 25) and lit up panels with fellow academics at Harvard.

At one, “The Financial Crisis: Causes and Cures,” she proved to be “an audience favorite,” according to the student newspaper, describing subprime mortgages as “35-cent bananas” that should’ve cost 15 cents. She was the only woman on the panel with five men.

“They were talking, just trying to explain the basics of, like, credit default swaps, and what a securitized trust was, and what had happened generally,” one of Warren’s former students told me, “because no one really understood what was going on, period. And so I remember that other people on the panel would speak and everyone would sort of tune out. … But then Elizabeth started speaking, and it just, like, made so much sense, and people were, like,cheeringandstanding up, and it’s hard to get a crowd on their feet when you’re talking about credit default swaps! … It was one of the most incredible things that I had ever seen in terms of somebody being able to take these really arcane concepts and make them feel relevant, accessible andoutragingat the same time.”

Back in the classroom, in another meeting of students, Warren asked what they would do if they were in charge of a big financial institution. Hunker down, some said, and tighten up. She made it clear that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. And then students’ hands started to shoot up. The answer, actually, was the opposite. “You grow as fast as you can. You buy as much as you can with borrowed money. And you lend and borrow from as many other large institutions as possible. Because then the government can’t afford to let you fail,” Warren would recall a student saying. “It took my students about two minutes,” as she put it later, “to see how to build a bank that would be Too Big to Fail.”

Warren’s teaching style was amped-up Socratic, fostering lightning-quick dialogue one student I talked to likened to dodge ball and another compared to machine gun fire. Her teaching assistants kept index cards to track who’d been called on how often, and it was standard, according to former students, for every one of them to be called on once if not twice every class. “Very demanding,” Marielle Macher said. “It was the class that we were all the most prepared for,” Caitlin Kekacs said. Warren’s classes, Charles Fried, her Harvard colleague who served as one of Ronald Reagan’s solicitor generals, told me, were “electric,” and her student evaluations were effusive. And she was known, at least inside the law school, specifically forneverlecturing. So what happened on November 12 and 13 was decidedly different from what she usually did. Mainly, on those days, she just talked—and her students just listened.

In its way, many students told me, Warren’s lecture was strangely comforting.

“The world’s ending,” Dan Mach remembered. “And here was a professor who knew a lot about it and could explain it better than other people,” Dave Casserley said. It was something they mostly weren’t getting from their other professors.

Larry Tribe, the preeminent constitutional scholar and Warren’s Harvard colleague, told me he heard this sentiment from students that fall. “That has stuck with me,” Tribe said. “It’s also stuck with me partly because of my own memory when I was a law student at Harvard when dramatic, terrifying things would happen. I mean, I was actually a first- or second-year law student when Kennedy was assassinated, and I remember coming to class the next day, barely able to hold myself together. And the professor, who was someone I really liked and admired, not only then but years after, barely paused. He basically said, ‘Terrible things are going on, but we have our work to do.’ And then he went right back to discussing complicated issues of civil procedure. And that was kind of an inhuman and inhumane environment. And in some ways Elizabeth Warren is … the absolute opposite of someone who would treat legal education as an insulated bubble separate from the world.”

Tribe told me, too, about the way Warren at the time helped the woman who would become his wife. Elizabeth Westling was going through a divorce, riddled with worry, when her therapist gave her … books—The Two-Income TrapandAll Your Worth—by Warren. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is ridiculous. What would I need this for?’” Westling told me. “But I went home, and I read them, and lo and behold, it really transformed my psyche, I think, because what it did was give me a sense of empowerment and confidence.”

It’s something I heard from many of the 19 former Warren students I talked to for this story. What they got from her in 2008 was not only edifying but also eased their anxieties about the economy. She helpedthembecause they felt she maybe could be a part of helping to fixit.

And on the evening of November 13, hours after finishing her lecture on the economy to her contracts class in Pound Hall and minutes before hosting a third of them for the first of three straight nights of dinners with students at her house, she got a call from Harry Reid. The Senate majority leader asked her to take the oversight position. And she was off to Washington. “Harry Reid,” she would say, “forever changed my life with that phone call.”

The next day, Reid made the announcement about Warren’s new role.

That afternoon, she sent an email to her students. One of them shared it with me. It was … not about her new role.

“Some of you have met Otis, the 100-pound golden retriever who lives with us,” Warren wrote. “He’s sweet and he’s lonely right now—desperate for someone who would like to play. If you are around and would like to have some puppy love, would you drop by to get Otis?”

***

Midday this past Saturday, in Columbia, South Carolina, I stood near the rear of the main hall of the convention of the South Carolina Democratic Party and took in what quickly turned into an episode of the prosecutor versus the professor.

Kamala Harris was first up among the catalog of 2020 Democrats, and she gave a spirited personal statement to the near-capacity crowd of 1,800. She said she knew how to “take on predators”—she didn’t need to say the name of the person she was talking about—and then built to a crescendo. “I’m going to tell you we need somebody on our stage when it comes time for that general election who knows how to recognize a rap sheet when they see it and prosecute the case!” she said. “Let’s prosecute the case!” Her speech elicited raucous cheers.

Warren came on some 20 minutes after Harris. She introduced herself as a practically accidental politician, self-identifying from the start as a teacher, although she didn’t mention Harvard. “Teachers,” she said, “understand the worth of every single human being. Teachers invest in the future. And teachers never give up.” In a checklist rundown of her “big plans,” she said her proposed 2 percent tax on net worth above $50 million could pay for universal child care and pre-kindergarten, tuition-free college, zap student loan debt, make billion-dollar investments in historically black colleges and universities, and provide higher pay for teachers. But her seven minutes on stage felt a little rote and a tad flat. As Warren spoke, I stood next to the raised platform made to be an MSNBC set and watched Harris get interviewed live.

Something that’s helped Warren vault past Bernie Sanders and others in the polls and into that second slot behind Biden? Her town halls. In Iowa and New Hampshire and other early states. Even in places like West Virginia. And on CNN and MSNBC (but not on Fox News). She’s generally better, most observers and analysts agree, interacting with voters rather than delivering speeches. “I’ve seen her be very effective in small groups,” Axelrod told me. It’s the sort of setting that allows her to delve more deeply into her myriad detailed policy proposals.

An hour or so after her convention appearance, just across the street, Warren bounded into the homier, more intimate environs in the building hosting Planned Parenthood’s “We Decide” forum. In front of a gathering perhaps a quarter of the size, sitting between two women asking her questions instead of standing behind a lectern, Warren was kinetic in a way she simply hadn’t been at the convention. Here, she answered questions from people in the crowd. Here, she came off as a teacher but also as a fighter. Asked aboutRoe v. Wade, she was nothing if not animated. “The truth is,” she said, “we’ve been on defense for 47 years. And it’s not working. … I say it is time to go on offense!” She held her microphone in her right hand and gesticulated energetically with her left. She sat on the edge of her seat. She dropped a “by golly.” She left to a standing ovation.

A little later, up one floor, Warren darted into a small room set aside for candidates to talk to reporters if they wanted to and plucked a grape from a picked-at tray. She popped it into her mouth and faced the hasty half-moon of cameras. She was asked about Donald Trump. She dinged him for his “ineptitude.” She was asked about Pete Buttigieg and his trouble at home. She said she wasn’t going to criticize her fellow Democrats. And then she was asked why people should trust her. She gave an answer that would have sounded familiar to her first-semester law students in the fall of ‘08.

“This is a fight I’ve been in for all my life, long before I ever got engaged in politics of any kind,” she said. “I’ve spent my whole life on exactly this issue. What’s happening to working families in this country? Why is America’s middle class being hollowed out? Why is it that people who work hard every day find a path so rocky and so steep and for people of color even rockier and even steeper? And the answer is a government that works better and better for billionaires and giant corporations and kicks dirt in everyone else’s face. Well, I say: In a democracy, we can change that. And that’s why I’m in this fight.”

At that, it was time to go. It was her 70th birthday. She had a flight to catch to get home to continue to prepare for Wednesday’s debate. She reached for another grape.

“We got cake in the car,” a staffer said.

“We got cake in the car!” Warren said.

#Foreign #Politics #Style #Warren

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andychwe-blog · 6 years

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Canned Peaches (Part 3)

“Has the moon not waned five times since our last visit?” The shaman inquired.

“Nay, the crescent has fallen to the shadow five times. A new prophecy shall be set.”

The shaman rustled his sermon, adjusting his glasses in the process. “The manifestation of eternity began as an amalgam of the soul...under the boughs of the cryptomeria lies the secret of the conception of the transcendental field.”

Without instruction or hesitation, the shaman’s adherents stood up, one of the shriveled women announcing: “Under the feathers of the cedar sleeps the key to divine knowledge. The aura of the shaman will yield this tree near.”

The shaman hastened after his devotees, who had already exited his flat and were marching down the damp stairwell. They were half sprinting, half scanning as they approached a compact park, which had turned a loathsome kobicha as mud began to run down the sharp slope of the park. Under the weak glow of a mercury-vapor lamp lay a deplorable cryptomeria, half of its needles sprawling around its bases. Without discussion, the shaman watched as his cortège scrambled to find the key under the cascade of mire engulfing the cedar itself, which measured at two feet. They chipped their nails on empty snail shells and cut themselves on discoloured bottle caps, yet they searched diligently without complaint, even when they didn’t know what exactly they were searching for. Pure desperation guided them through the encroaching sludge, and the shaman shook his head at their stupidity. Slowly, they pulled out a cylindrical object the length of a stapler, their simpers unable to be concealed by the grime splattered on their face.

The shaman paused for a moment, staring at what seemed to be a jar, then thrust his limp arm up in a staged fervor. “Yes, now I recognize it: this is the key to the unabated rivers up above.”

Countless hands pounced on the jar, sliding the mud off of the varnished sides with quick flicks of the wrist. Before long, the surface seemed to be almost polished, revealing the contents of the “key”: an entity with portions not unlike the apricot the shaman ate earlier, floating in an ambiguous liquid a few shades of orange darker than the oblong chunks accumulated at the top. With one glance the shaman could tell it was a can of peaches, but this assumption was not shared by his devotees, who eyed it with a certain bewilderment- a look of the highest acclaim, yet coveting at the same time.

“This...this is astral jelly.” The shaman proclaimed, tracing his thumb around the jar’s edges. “If I combine this one someone’s body, they’ll make a spiritual bond with the universe.”

His followers approached him shyly, their bulging eyes scrutinizing the canned peaches. One by one, each follower dug their forefingers into their chest, poking at the skin until it broke and their raw tissue met the air. Digging deeper into their chests, they widened a space right next to their hearts, so that they made a convenient pocket between the ribs.

“Come here and place the jelly in us so that it may become incarnate.” The followers beckoned the shaman to come closer to them.

The shaman winced at the spectacle he had just seen, yet kept his calm and undid the lid of the jar, cupping his palms to scoop a share of the peaches. He casually smeared this into a follower’s “pocket,” repeating the ceremonial smearing until each of them had a heap of peaches resting right underneath their lungs. Soon thereafter, they folded up the flabs of skin hanging loose at their sides so that they hid the canned peaches.

The shaman couldn’t help but notice that the space next to his followers’ hearts seemed to be previously created, just like the way their protuberant eyes appeared to be concealing something. It was as if they had an emptiness inside of them, a deep longing that forced them to believe that canned peaches were the secret to the cosmos.

The shaman stopped thinking as he watched his followers more attentively. They were gathered in a circle, skipping in the mud and radiating with joy. An abrupt stop in the rain , however, led them to silence, and later, to a trip to the heavens. It began with the wharfie, whose battered sneakers fell first into the sludge, then began to levitate- first only at a rate of one or two inches a second, but steadily gaining until he was flying at breakneck speeds. The others joined him, as if they were being hailed by the angels, leaving only their shoes in the mud that they had stood in only minutes ago.

The shaman looked toward the clouds, wondering where they could have gone. He stared at the jar of canned peaches, still half full, then threw it into the sewer. The prophecy he had found at two in the morning the Tuesday before, finding a random text in a forgotten corner of cyberspace- had he encountered a manifestation of the cosmos on that lonely night? The shaman thought back to his followers, who were probably nearing the Kuiper Belt at that point. Their protuberant eyes and the spaces next to their hearts- yes, they were signs of emptiness, yet they were also secrets. Secrets that were entwined into their flesh- just like the shaman’s chrysalis.

We all have secrets. The shaman thought, slowly walking down a desolate alley.

Eight feet below the asphalt, the canned peaches rolled over the slick concrete of the sewer, only to shatter after bumping into a discarded refrigerator. The peaches leaked out of their vessel, immediately attracting a horde of rats. However, they forgoed the peaches after nibbling only a few bites out of the peaches, for they had found a greater knowledge that placed them higher in rank than humans in apprehension. The rain pushed the peaches farther into the subterranean world, yielding its secrets to whoever came before it.

Above ground, the clouds began to clear, revealing the evening Sun as it cast its final beams before the onset of the moon. Completing its mundane routine, it set in the east, just like it did, just like it does, and just like it will be for eons to come on this gaunt planet.

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