In a Dingy Diner at 1 am

Shaun walked into the diner where Honey had been waitressing and glanced around.

He wasn’t exactly a fan of her working, but he was a fan of staying in not-abandoned places that had reliable electricity and heat, and anyway Honey needed food so that was that. Turned out getting jobs under the table was easier than he thought, anyway, as long as you knew where to look. Some mom and pop diner that didn’t even appear to have a name was a good place to start.

He let the door close behind him, making the bell above tinkle, and then walked to the counter.

Honey had sat him down after her shift the night before, still in her uniform. He knew something was coming because she was controlling her heart rate and she only ever did that when something was going on. It was still strange. She had sat down with her lips drawn into a straight line and her hands gripping the sides of her skirt, obviously nervous, but her heart calmly went about its business at sixty-five beats. She couldn’t tell him how they’d taught her to do that, because she didn’t really know.

“I found one for you,” was all she said. At first, Shaun didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

And then he did.

“Honey, I told you-”

She’d held up her hands and quickly talked over him. “Just let me explain before you get all weird about it.”

“…I don’t get weird…”

“You do.”

They’d sat in silence long enough for Shaun to stew about being ‘weird’ and Honey to make sure Shaun was going to let her talk.

“Now, I know you told me you didn’t want me…helping with this. But I didn’t go looking for one. I just…sort of found one, so I figured this didn’t count. And you don’t have to do anything you don’t want, I haven’t said or done anything about it. And I won’t. You will.”

“I will?”

Honey nodded. “You’re coming to the diner tomorrow night. Around one o’clock. You are going to go and sit at the counter, and you are going to talk to Layla.”

Shaun had groaned. “That’s too close.”

“It’s not Layla. It’s someone she knows. When Layla and I work together I take the tables and she takes the counter, so that’s where you’re going to sit there. And we’re just going to pretend we don’t know each other from Adam and Eve. All I’m asking is that you talk to her.”

“What am I even looking for?”

“You’ll figure it out pretty fast. I think. You can be smart when you want to.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Just come. Please? Best case scenario, you find one. Worse case, you sit in a dingy diner for an hour.”

Honey may have been weird (Honey was the weird one. Honey. Not him), but in the few months they’d known each other she’d proven to have good instincts, so here Shaun was, sitting at a diner that truly was dingy at one in the morning. A couple of tables were full, wait staff from the restaurant down the street. As he sat, another man put a ten on the counter next to his empty plate and left. The lights above were at half power, giving the place a smokey feeling despite the No Smoking Allowed sign on the wall. Every single breakfast and lunch smell Shaun could think of was mingling together in the air. Honey came out from the back with a tray but kept her eyes on the tables. And then there was Layla.

Around Honey’s age, that made her mid-twenties. Curly blonde hair pulled into a tight bun. Heavy makeup, all red cheeks and pink eyelids and lipstick. Some sort of wrist brace on her right arm. She had been leaning against the counter, watching a rerun on the TV mounted high above the window to the kitchen. She smiled as she went for the coffee pot.

Something’s wrong.

But he couldn’t tell what. Not yet.

“Coffee?” she asked, holding the pot up like maybe he hadn’t noticed it yet.

“Yeah, thanks.”

After his mug was filled up with the smell of something bitter and burnt she put a thing of creamer and a container of sugar packets in front of him, and then presented him with a menu.

“I haven’t seen you before. You passing through?”

Usually Shaun would have preferred stepping into heavy traffic over engaging in small talk, but Honey was somewhere behind him and he’d promised to talk. So he would.

He’d try, anyway.

“Uh, yeah, actually.”

“Long haul?”

“Sure,” Shaun said, not knowing what that meant.

But she smiled knowingly at him. “Got a cousin who does that. Tough work.”

“Um…yes.”

She said she’d give him time with the menu and went back to watching the television. He opened the large, plastic covered sheets but instead studied her. There was nothing about her that made Shaun pause. Well, something about her face. The makeup was perfect…too perfect? Something about it…

Otherwise there wasn’t anything to make of the woman. What was he supposed to do, start grilling her for information? Miss, is there anyone in your life you’d want-

“Layla,” Honey said from a little ways down the counter, expertly ignoring him. “Can you get me one of those ice cream glasses from up top?”

“Sure thing, hon.”

There was a shelf next to the TV running the length of the wall, stocked with boxes of straws and napkins and tall, curvy glasses. It wasn’t too high that Layla couldn’t reach it. But high enough that she had to stretch. And just when she had her hand all the way over her head and had stepped up a bit, she stopped and stepped back like she’d been punched. Her hands went to a spot on her right side, just under her breast.

Bruised ribs.

He glanced again at the brace on her right wrist.

“Pick something?” she asked after handing Honey the glass.

“Oh, uh…pancakes?”

“Short stack?”

“Sure.”

“Side of bacon?”

“Why not?” He wasn’t going to eat any of it, anyway.

“I’ll put it in,” she said with a wink.

“I noticed you wince there, when you were reaching,” he said as soon as she turned back. He pointed to where she had held herself. “Bruised ribs?”

Her face turned red from embarrassment, but she forced a smile and nodded. “Oh. Yeah. How did you know?”

“Done it myself,” he said. “Got in a stupid fist fight a few years back, took a blow right there. I’m guessing that’s not how you got yours?”

She laughed a terrible, ugly, small laugh that told Shaun a fist was exactly how she had gotten her ribs bruised.

“Oh, no no no. Of course not. It’s….Oh, my god, it’s so stupid. We have one of those doors, see, at the house that split in two? And the top half was open and the bottom was closed and I just wasn’t looking…”

Holy shit, is she actually trying to tell me she walked into a door?

He kept from glancing at her wrist again, no matter how much he wanted to. Finally, he saw it.

Her makeup was fine. It was what was under that was off. The left side of her face. Puffy. Slightly unmoving. She’d covered up a black eye.

Shaun opened his mouth before realizing asking who had done that to her shortly before that person turned up dead was a bad call.

We’re not necessarily doing this yet. I don’t know anything about who’s hurting her. Maybe they’re not so bad. Not bad enough to die, anyway.

This was exactly why he hadn’t wanted Honey to help with this. Well, part of the reason, anyway. The primary reason was she shouldn’t have been involved in getting people killed, no matter how terrible they were. But this, too. Now he was in a predicament. If someone was beating her that was definitely a reason to follow up, but he’d have to do more research. Find whoever it was. Follow them around. See-

The tinkling of the bell above the door cut off his thoughts. He turned to find two gruff looking men in blue uniforms walking in.

Cops.

One of them headed to the bathroom. The other made a beeline for Layla.

Her heart was already racing.

“Hey, baby,” he said, leaning on the counter.

“Hey, Ray” she said back, giving him a smile. She pecked him on the cheek, and then began to pull away.

He grabbed her wrist. The one in the brace.

“That’s all I get?” he asked, ignoring her wince.

She leaned back over the counter – fulling putting weight on her bruised ribs – and gave him a deeper kiss.

Or, at least, let him give her a deeper kiss. Her eyes strayed to Shaun, and darted away again.

Not before he saw the look in them.

Trapped animal.

“Get me pancakes and bacon. Oh, look, it’s like you knew!”

The cook in the back had put Shaun’s pancakes and bacon on the silver serving counter. Layla glanced at the food, then at Shaun, and then back at her husband.

“That’s not for you. I have to put a ticket in.”

“You knew I was coming, why didn’t you put something in?”

It was like someone flipped a switch, and now a live wire was running through him. The muscles in his neck were taut. He was leaning further on the counter, on his toes now, looming over her. The grip on her wrist had tightened.

“I didn’t…I didn’t know if you’d come…I can tell Leon to-”

Ray let her go and pushed her slightly. “On a first name basis, huh?”

“Ray, I work with him, is all.” She was rubbing her arm below her wrist.

Ray, master of detective work, finally noticed Shaun was watching. He only grunted at him, leaning on the counter towards him. Apparently, all of his best work was done leaning.

“What the hell are you looking at?”

Shaun sat up and put money on the counter. “Go ahead and give him that shortstack, miss. Something’s come up and I’ve got to run. Officer.”

He could feel the man glaring at him as he walked out the front, but he knew he wouldn’t come after him. Not with Layla there.

Honey came back to the apartment four hours later. Shaun was sitting at the little table in the kitchenette, nursing a jar of blood. The last jar in the fridge. She locked the door behind her and leaned against it. The smells of the diner had followed her.

“Pegged it the first time I met her,” she said. “That look you get in that situation…you never forget it. I teased some of it out of her slowly. Her family lives two states away. His, twenty minutes, and he’s their golden boy. Can do no wrong. The rest…well, you saw. He shows up every night about the same time. I didn’t even have to ask.”

“You never asked her directly about her husband?”

Honey slowly shook her head. “She thinks she’s hiding it.”

Shaun looked again at the last jar. Half empty. There was a reason the vigilante type usually didn’t last long. Hard to find people the world wouldn’t miss.

“You got their address?”

More Favorite Video Game Music

Almost a year ago now I did an article going over some of my favorite video game music. Well, a lot of games have come out since then, and I have played some of them.

‘Played’ here can mean one of two things: I actually played it myself, or my husband played it while I sat next to him and crocheted. I count both, therefore I, personally, am inches away from platinuming Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. I just need to figure out how to get the credit on my PlayStation account.

Let’s look at the music of the last year that made me feel things!

Minor spoilers for, like, the first twenty minutes of Disco Elysium.

Disco Elysium: Red Rock Riviera

Disco Elysium is one of the games that, if you want to be super specific and technical about it, my husband is playing. The controller is in his hand. The game is under his PS account. Whatever. This one we actually are playing together, as I get just as much decision making power as he does. Who’s idea was it to ditch the pants that were lowering Detective Raphael Ambrosius Costeau’s Savoir Faire and simply walk around in dingy off-white underpants?

All me, bay-bee.

Let me set the scene for you. We’ve been playing for roughly twenty to thirty minutes. In that time we’ve explored our room, tried (and failed) to get our necktie off the fan, managed to look in the mirror to find we are making the expression, gone out of the room and downstairs where we got into a verbal slapfight with that prick running the cafeteria, and met Kim Kitsuragi, the Patron Saint of Endless Patience for Gin Blossomed Assholes. It’s weird. It’s light. It’s heavy. It’s fun.

And then we finally step outside the Whirling-in-Rags to continue our investigation and this happens.

I’m a thirty or forty year old woman. I grew up in the suburbs outside of Boston with a nuclear family in a nice house with a huge backyard. I didn’t have many friends but I was okay with that because I knew high school was essentially just treading water until you reached escape velocity and blasted out of your shitty hometown and society randomly decided you were an adult and you could do (almost) anything you wanted. I graduated high school with fine grades and immediately fled to Florida where I got an English degree and met the people who are still my friends to this day. Spent a year in Cheyenne. Decided Wyoming sucked and went back to Florida. Dated around but nothing stuck. Went back to school for a nursing degree. Met my future husband. Decided Florida sucked and moved to Colorado. Quit nursing when the pandemic began and have since been struggling to find footing as a writer.

My life has been a comfortable mellow middle ground, a long float down a lazy river that has had some little turbulence here and there but no waterfalls. There is no great tragedy to my life, no suffocating loss or squeezing regret. I have had sadness and shock and fear and questions, of course, as any life does, but nothing worth reporting. No sad memoir sits within me, waiting to be written. If I were feeling particularly uncharitable I might call my life bland, but that’s not it exactly. All I am saying is that there are some lives that become dominated by a great tragedy, and I am lucky enough that my life is not one of them.

I am generally content.

So I would greatly appreciate it if anyone out there knew why the second those horns started playing I was stabbed in the gut with emotions so great I didn’t have the space to put them anywhere. I was sitting there, enjoying my Thanksgiving weekend, thinking nothing more of the game and maybe if I wanted a little snack, and then those horns played and I froze. Literally froze, hand gripping my water glass as though I could simply smash the glass and absorb the hydration through my cut hand. My hearing fuzzed at the same time my sight grew sharper, and all the while my heart is beating cold and my stomach is moving down, down, down, trying to make room for all the nameless emotions that have arrived and are now jostling for attention.

But I can’t pay attention to any single one of them because I don’t know what they are. They are negative and painful but they make no sense. There is nothing in my life to make me feel that way. It is as if the horns of Revachol have torn open a passage to another universe, one where Something Happened. Something Bad Happened, and I am being forced to relive it all over again, all the hurt and anger and sadness and regret and ennui and moving on and getting stuck and wasting away and all of these things are coming for me but I have no context so the fight or flight instinct kicks in and I freeze because I don’t know where or what the danger is and I can’t see it coming but I can hear it. Oh, how I can hear it.

And then my husband asked if we should go see the dead body and I somehow speak. The spell has not been completely broken, but I am pulled from that swirling torrent of emotions that do not belong to me and I am sitting on the shore. They are no longer inside. But they are close. They will always be close. Even now, months later, when that theme begins to play as we pilot our pantsless detective around a ruined city, I can still feel those emotions like a cold river in the dark. They are not my emotions. But they want to be.

They want to be.

A Few Hard Days’ Work

About ten years back Quick had gotten kicked in the head by a spooked horse.

It wasn’t a direct hit or nothing. Quick had figured out what was happening just a second too late. The horse kicked anyway. Quick was bending back. The hoof caught him just above the eye but didn’t go into the skull on account of the angle. Instead the hoof skinned him, from eyebrow to hairline and about four inches across. Half his forehead. There ain’t no real medicine on the road and not enough money in the kitty for the sort of doctor Quick would need, so for almost a year Quick dealt with it with nothing more than a soft cap and a lot of bandages. The skin came back, sure enough. Ugly, though. Quick wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests. Not that he was going to before, neither.

It was on account of the way of his head, plus his tall and wide frame and hulking demeanor, that Quick had a second job to his usual one. It wasn’t one he much liked, but it never lasted long and anyway Quick wasn’t the type to complain.

It worked like this: kids got mad at their parents for stupid reasons. Then the carnival came into town, and they’d get the same idea every kid gets, only they’d think they was the first person to ever have it. So they’d pack up their little school  bags and take a bus or just walk and show up in Mr. Carson’s office. Mr. Carson would hand the kids off to Slim. And Slim would walk them over to Quick.

They’d barely pulled into town and were still setting up when Slim brought one over. Quick saw them coming and made himself look extra scary by hunching over and taking his cap off. Sometimes they took one look at Quick and ran home to their mommas.

Not this one. This boy, looking no more than eight or nine, stared at Quick with wide eyes under a mop of black hair and didn’t make no moves to hide behind Slim or run off or nothing. He stood next to the scrawny man, sinking in the mud, not even twitching.

“Got one for you, Quick,” Slim said, then bent back and hawked a loogie that went further than Quick’s eyes could follow. “Says his name is Sam, and he wants to join up.”

“What’s he want to do?”

Slim shrugged dramatically. “Said he doesn’t really care, so long as he can stay. I told him you were looking for help, so here we are.”

It was a practiced conversation, and Slim didn’t stay for much longer. With a lingering glance at Quick’s scar he wandered off, to do whatever else it was Slim did. Quick couldn’t say. He was left with the boy.

Small, dark hair, bright eyes, wearing faded jeans, dusty boots, and a shirt a size too small. Must have been wash day when he ran out the house. Quick stared at him without speaking, trying to make his face as scary as he could. If he ran off now Quick could go back to doing his work alone with his thoughts, which was how he liked it.

But the boy didn’t budge. Oh, sure, he wiped at his nose and looked around some, but his feet stayed planted.

He thinks he can handle it. Anything has to be better than home, where they yell at him to wash before dinner and do his homework. Well, kid, I’ll show you a thing or two.

“I work with the animals,” Quick said. “Feed ‘em. Water ‘em. Brush some of ‘em. But mostly what I do is muck. You know that word? Muck?”

To his surprise, the boy nodded.

“Getting out the cow pies,” he said in an impossibly small voice. “Or whatever you call it when it ain’t cows.”

Despite himself, Quick nodded. “That’s right. Got to keep their spaces clean so no one gets sick or nothing. Come on, let’s get you a shovel.”

Quick’s job was the other reason the kids got sent to him. Them kids from those rows of houses surrounded by grass and sidewalks and nothing else of concern usually hadn’t ever seen animal shit bigger than what the family dog put out. Sometimes they’d take one whiff and would leave then, dropping the shovel and running home. Quick hated that. Meant he had to wash off the handle.

But the boy walked into the pens and didn’t even blush or hold his nose or nothing. He took the shovel, and when Quick showed him where to take and where to put, he got to it with no complaint.

“You ain’t going to be sick on me, now, are you?” Quick asked after a few minutes.

But Sam only shrugged. “I was on a farm. I had to muck out the barn every morning. Don’t bother me none.”

All day, Quick kept checking him, sure he was going to call his bluff. Quick’s job wasn’t just mucking out cow pies. There were four donkeys for hauling and some show horses for trick riding and all the petting zoo animals like goats and llama and that mean old ostrich and then the exotics, of course, the monkeys and the lemurs and the pair of tigers and it all added up to a whole host of smells and textures and angry animals the kid had almost certainly never seen before.

The kid didn’t say a word all day, complaint or otherwise. Just kept his head down and his shovel going, working where Quick told him to. Sometimes he’d be so quiet Quick would forget he was there and then he’d turned around and just about have a danged heart attack finding the boy a few feet away.

“Dinner time, kid. We feed the animals first. Then ourselves.”

No other runaway had ever made it this far. The others did double takes as they nodded to Quick and then found a small boy trailing after him. They got their dinner – stew and milk and a biscuit with no butter – and Quick showed Sam where he usually ate. A small table by himself. The others said his smell put him off their dinner.

Not Sam. The kid was shoveling the stew into his face so fast Quick was sure he was going to choke. And Quick knew damn well the stew wasn’t good. Slop, really. He had been prepared with a simple remark: Not like your mama makes, huh? He had been sure the food and that question would have been enough to send Sam packing.

Instead the kid cleaned his plate and stared at Quick’s. He pushed it over.

“You like that?” was all he could think of to say.

“No,” he said between bites.

The nice part about everyone thinking he smelled like shit all the time was he got a room to himself, off by the animals. He got a cot from Mr. Larson’s assistant and an extra blanket from Dorrie, the trick rider who spent her free time knitting.

“We up early,” Quick said. “Gotta feed and water before dawn.”

“Okay,” was all Sam said.

By God, the next morning the kid was still there. Sleepy, yawning, but going about doing what Quick told him to do without complaint.

“How hard they work you at that family farm?” Quick finally asked when they stopped for lunch.

Sam shrugged. “Harder than this.”

Quick smiled. “Don’t let the bosses hear you say that. They’ll give you extra jobs. You just make like you’re drowning in shit at all times, hear?”

Sam gave him a weak smile back. “How come they call you Quick?”

“Cuz they think I ain’t.”

Quick pointed at his forehead, only realizing then that Sam hadn’t stared at it once since the first time.

“I got kicked by a horse. I almost dodged it but I was too slow. Only lost skin. Didn’t break my skull. But no one wants to believe that. They all think I got damaged somehow.”

“Why don’t you try to prove them wrong?”

“What’s the point?” Quick said with a shrug. “I spend my days shoveling shit either way. If they think I’m too dumb to think they don’t ask me to do anything else.”

“Don’t you wish you did something different?”

“Nah. It’s an important job and no one else wants to do it. People always say the job ain’t dignified, but that’s the point. If I didn’t clean up after the animals, nothing around here would be dignified. Animals deserve to not have to live in their own shit.”

Sam thought about it for a few seconds. “You’re a nice man, Mr. Quick.”

“Ain’t no Mr. here, son, ‘cept for Mr. Larson. And Mr. Tiny the monkey, I guess.”

Sam stayed the whole time they were in town. Three days. Unheard of. By the end of it even Slim and Mr. Larson was giving the boy appreciative glances. That didn’t matter none. They’d never left town with a kid. And today wasn’t the day to start.

“It’s been nice, kid, having a helping hand. But you can’t stay here.”

“Haven’t I been doing a good job?” Sam asked, his face pained.

“Well, sure you have. Sure you have. But this ain’t no place for a kid. And leaving with you will bring the law down. We can’t have that. You have to go home.”

“I ain’t got one,” Sam said. “Not one I want to go back to. You send me away, Quick, and I’ll just keep wandering until I find someone else who will let me work.”

Quick shook his head. “Kid, whatever you think is so bad at home, it ain’t. Two weeks down the line, three weeks or four, you’ll get homesick.”

“I won’t!”

“Or tired of the work, or you’ll want normal back. You can’t come kid, so go home while we’re still here. I said go.”

Quick pushed him. A little. Nothing more than a nudge, really, right in the middle. The boy clutched his chest like he’d been punched, his face all screwed up and a sharp whistle of air cutting through his teeth.

The two of them stared at each other for a few seconds, nothing but blinking.

“Let me see,” Quick said.

With only a little hesitation, Sam unbuttoned his shirt.

His chest and arms were constellations of pain. A huge bruise right in the middle of his chest, deep red. More bruises. Cuts. Cigarette burns. Scars.

Quick stared for a while, and then sighed.

The rules were very clear. There was no taking kids from town.

The carnival got stopped outside of town anyway. A line of cruisers, all with their lights blaring as though the caravan might miss that the road was blocked. And a smug, fat sheriff standing at the front.

“Quick!” Mr. Larson called from the front, and Quick went up about as fast as he cared to.

“You seen this boy?” the sheriff asked, shoving a picture in his face. It was Sam, of course, looking a little younger.

“Sure,” Quick said. “He’s been working with me these past few days. Wanted to run away.”

“But we don’t allow that around here,” Mr. Larson cut in. “We let them stay around for a few days, see how tough the work is, and they usually run off before we leave.”

“And that’s what this boy did?” the sheriff asked, his eyebrows raised. “Because his mama and daddy say they haven’t seen him in a week.”

“He wanted to stay, but I wouldn’t let him,” Quick said.

“We all know the rules, officer,” Mr. Lawson said. “We don’t take kids with us. Quick sent him off back home. If he didn’t go, that’s not on us. We don’t run him or nothing.”

But the sheriff had been given a golden opportunity to rough up a bunch of carnies and he wasn’t going to let it go that easily. The next couple of hours were spent standing idly around while the sheriff and his deputies tore the place apart, bit by bit. Wasn’t nothing they weren’t used to.

Those deputies steered cleared of the animal trailers, of course. The smell. It’s always the smell.

“Stay out of the trouble,” the sheriff said before climbing back into his car. As if they hadn’t done just that.

They was twenty miles out of town when Quick finally said, “Okay, you can come on out.”

The pile of blankets was between two of the horses in the trailer. Smelled like shit. Ain’t no way a proper officer of the law would have gone anywhere near those horses, or those shit-smelling blankets. You get near those blankets, you smell like shit for a week never mind how many baths you take.

Sam let the blankets fall of him and grinned at Quick. Sometimes, smelling like a shit for a week, a month, a lifetime was better than the alternative.

My Favorites Pop Culture Things from 2022

Congratulations, everyone. We made it through another year. I think we can safely say that out of all of the years known to man, 2022 definitely was one.

A bunch of shit happened this year, and I thought I’d try my hand at making a Top Ten List. The only thing I’m really qualified to talk about is shit I like, so that’s what this is. Top Ten Pop Culture Things That Happened That I Really Enjoyed. Except there isn’t ten. There’s seven. Actually, there’s six and a single Worst Thing of the year. Let’s get started!

Spoiler warning for: Peacemaker, The Batman, Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West, Our Flag Means Death, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Andor. In that order, and all spoilers are contained under their individual headings so you can jump around if you want.

kweh

Peacemaker Opening Credits

Oh, my God, I did not want to watch Peacemaker.

For anyone on the outside of this particularly barf-inducing loop, in 2016 WB released Suicide Squad as an entry into their burgeoning/flailing DCEU and it was, to put it lightly, really very bad. An obvious victim of ‘movie by committee,’ it’s a terrible mess of rewrites, heavy-handed pop songs, and some of the most baffling editing choices I’ve ever seen in a movie not featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Meanwhile, over at the MCU, fucknuts on the internet managed to trick Disney into firing James Gunn from his involvement in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies by pretending people still gave a shit about some edgelord tweets Gunn had made over a decade earlier and had already publicly apologized for. WB smelled blood in the water and pounced like the fat, erratic shark it is, and managed to get Gunn to sign on for another Suicide Squad movie, one that promised to fix the first shitty one.

So Gunn’s The Suicide Squad came out in the summer of 2021, and it was good. Not great. Not bad. Certainly better than the 2016 version. The Suicide Squad ended up being a direct sequel to Suicide Squad, featuring some of the same characters albeit this time in an entirely enjoyable way. One of these characters, Colonel Rick Flag, went from a block of wood whose only redeeming quality was uttering one of the greatest/worst monologues in cinema history to an actual character with depth and pathos. And then of course after a whole movie actually making me like this character he gets killed in the end by one of the new characters.

That character, of course, was Peacemaker, played by John Cena. I don’t particularly care about Cena as an actor, and I was pissed at this character for killing Flag, so when I heard about the show I was like…hard pass.

And then my husband said a single sentence.

“But it’s by James Gunn!”

That’s right, the WB had managed to not only get Gunn for The Suicide Squad but also a few other projects before Disney finally pulled its collective head out of its Mickey shaped asshole and signed him back for the final Guardians of the Galaxy, which is good because while my mom tolerates most MCU movies she absolutely adores the Guardians and she’s already mega-pissed the third one has been delayed by all these shenanigans.

Anyway, that sentence was enough to convince me to at least try the show as I generally like Gunn’s work. I was still ready to not like it and the first scene was sort of funny but mostly awkward because I didn’t understand what this show was even supposed to be.

And then this happened:

Yeah, so, my brain shut off for a full minute and a half.

‘Delight’ isn’t a strong enough word but that’s basically how I felt. I was a kid on Christmas. Nothing in the first five minutes of this show led me to believe that there would be an opening credits sequence, let alone one where the entire cast expertly goes through a perfectly terrible dance with completely blank of faces while Norwegian glam metal played.

I can’t think of a single show opening from the last five years I like more. Ten years? Twenty? This may, in fact, be my favorite opening ever. I definitely cannot think of another one I’ve watched more on YouTube than this. It both reveals absolutely nothing about the context of the show while explaining exactly what goes in Peacemaker’s mind at any given time and really sets up the tone for the series which, to put it in an incredibly reductive way, is essentially an R-rated Guardians.

This shit slaps.

The Batmobile Reveal in The Batman

Forget Superhero Fatigue, we are clearly in the middle of Superhero Movie Naming Fatigue. Can’t figure out what to name the tenth iteration of this character? Either add or subtract a ‘the’ and you’re all set! I’d say maybe we should start naming these things after the villains since those seem to change more but we already have a Joker movie and that fuckface shows up in everything so all that means is strapping in for The Joker. Can we at least change to a demonstrative? Next time it can be That Batman.

This wasn’t necessarily my favorite Batman movie, but it’s definitely my favorite Batmobile, and the scene where it’s revealed rocks so fucking hard.

It sounds like a fucking jet engine because there’s apparently a fucking jet engine strapped to the back. When the engine started revving in the movie theater it was so fucking loud everything was shaking and my ears hurt. And then the little fake-out it does like it’s an animal with a mind of its own.

And then to put the actual chase in the middle of end of day rush hour traffic is a fucking chef’s kiss all it’s own. You know, in a movie. In real life if I’m going to be killed in my car because a rodent-based vigilante is chasing a bird-based criminal I’d want it to be before I put in a full eight hour day.

Which leads me into my Worst Pop Culture Moment:

Worst: The Joker at the end of The Batman

Can we fucking not.

Please? For the love of everything that is green and leafy and fluffy and cute on this dying planet, can we please not have another Joker?

I fucking get it, okay. He’s an icon. Clown Prince of Crime. Mayor, in a situation that would have been baffling to me ten years ago and now makes perfect sense. There’s something about the Joker that speaks to the heart of unstable teenager boys better than Tyler Durden, Patrick Bateman, and whatever sexist prick is hot on TikTok right now combined. I, too, loved Heath’s performance.

But enough is enough. Let’s get over it and focus on literally anyone else in Batman’s villain cabinet, because I’m sure if you just pawed around in there for more than two seconds you’d find entire swaths of colorful insane people who are fired up and ready to do their part in keeping the rent in Gotham low. I was thrilled when the Joker didn’t show up in The Batman, right up until he did.

For 2023, I’m calling for a Joker moratorium. Unless someone wants to go back to the Cesar Romero type Joker, I don’t want to see it.

The Ted Faro Reveal in Horizon: Forbidden West

By the end of Horizon: Zero Dawn you learn that thousands of years prior to the game’s story some billionaire in charge of a robot company made a line of robots that are both capable of self-replication and use biomass for fuel, biomass here meaning ‘every single fucking thing on the planet made of carbon.’ To the shock of absolutely no one, the system glitched out and suddenly these robots had no control and started replicating and eating dolphins with wild abandon to the tune of the entire planet being completely lifeless in the space of fifteen months. Oh, and then just for a little added spice, the same guy who created the problem that killed the world also killed all of the people in charge of saving what they could (the Alphas) and destroyed the bank of collected human knowledge just so future generations wouldn’t make the same mistakes.

In short, fuck Ted Faro.

In the first game Ted Faro is painted as a clear villain, albeit a more realistic and down to earth villain than Hades, the killer AI that wanted Aloy dead for Computer Reasons. Which is why for the five years between games I was mildly terrified that in the second game, Guerrilla would try to humanize him. Show things from his view. Try to give us an understandable reason for creating the killer robots he unironically called ‘peacekeepers.’ It’s exactly the sort of storytelling that’s hot right now, and I wouldn’t have blamed Guerrilla if they went in that direction, even if I wouldn’t have been happy with it.

Imagine my relief and delight when Guerrilla did none of that. Instead, there is an extended questline in Horizon: Forbidden West where you go to Faro’s personal end-of-days bunker Thebes (jerk-off motion intensifies) and learn:

  1. Ted locked himself into a bunker with a bunch of girls for a ‘harem’ and a doctor whose sole project was to find a way to make Ted immortal.
  2. He had all of these people implanted with ‘kill switches’ in their brain and would kill people when they figured out that he was the one who killed the Alphas.
  3. He killed the Alphas not to give future generations a clean slate like he previously said, but because he wanted to hide that he was the reason the previous world failed and planned on revealing himself to these future generations like some sort of god-king.
  4. The doctor making Ted immortal eventually realized everything was shit and killed himself in the middle of the project.
  5. Ted was effectively immortal but a large part of what the doctor was doing was stopping rampant, cancer-like mutations.
  6. By the time he’s found, a thousand years later, he has mutated into some sort of fleshy monster appropriate for a Resident Evil game, has gone completely crazy, and as soon as these future generations he had waited for so long to meet and lord over find him they immediately set him on fire.

Some people weren’t entirely happy with this outcome because you don’t really get to see Monster Ted, just a holographic image of him, and Aloy doesn’t get to run him through with her spear. Both valid complaints. But I don’t care because, again, he lived a thousand years in insane agony and then got immolated to death. I really can’t ask for more.

Our Flag Means Death – The Kiss

Queerbaiting is a term describing creators of television and movies continually hinting at a potential romance between two same-sex characters and then never actually having the characters get together. It’s a new phenomenon that seems to have started around the turn of the century, around the time the LGBTQ community started getting rights and respect, but, you know, not too much of that. It is seen as a way for creators to exploit queer people for their attention without ever having to actually show a queer relationship and scare off other viewers and advertisers.

The waters around queerbaiting are…murky. Fans will ship any two characters regardless if any sort of context clues for a relationship actually exist in the show, sometimes going to great lengths to defend it. On the other hand plausible deniability is baked into the scheme – giving a sly thumbs up to your queer fans while wildly shaking your head for the benefit of others is basically the whole thing.

Anyway, Supernatural is a show that exists so go watch fifteen seasons of that if you’re not convinced it’s real.

Usually when a show is going to feature prominent queer elements it gets advertised that way, and since the ads for Our Flag Means Death had exactly zero mention of a potential romance between lead characters Stede Bonnet and Ed ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, when the two of them had a conversation straight out of a rom-com I internally rolled my eyes hard enough to make them bleed and thought, here we go again.

And even though the show was going about it differently than most, I still didn’t believe it. Sure, it turns out a lot of the crew is queer. Sure, we have a non-binary trans character that is treated with respect concerning their pronouns. Sure, we weren’t just talking about a palpable-yet-hard-to-define chemistry between the two actors, but actual rom-com tropes, like the characters trying to fit in each other’s worlds and an obnoxious ex trying to split the two apart. I’ve been burned before. I wasn’t going to get tricked so easily.

I was more inclined to believe that something might actually happen when, in episode seven, after watching Ed and Stede have the most married couple discussion ever, Lucious softly exclaims, Oh my God, this is happening.

And I thought…oh my God, is this happening?

Still, I didn’t want to let myself believe and get let down again.

And then…

The whole show is honestly such a fuck you to queerbaiting tendencies that I thought it had been done on purpose, but nope! Creator David Jenkins had no idea that so many of us had been traumatized by previous shows and simply wanted to make a lovely gay pirate show.

And we thank him for it.

Can’t wait for season two! And if Lucious is really dead we riot.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Hey, you know how sometimes being on the internet is like sitting in the middle of a blender filled with everything and everyone and every single shitty thought they’ve ever had? Sure you do! Because it is! All the time!

Director duo The Daniels knows it, too, and Everything Everywhere All At Once is an ode to focusing on what’s important whilst standing in the middle of a technicolored shitstorm.

I spent the entire last half hour of this movie crying. Which isn’t that out of the ordinary because I’m a big crier in movies, but you know what kicked off that half hour of crying?

If you know, you know.

At the same time, this movie also managed to draw out the loudest laugh I have ever loosed in a movie theater during the butt plug fight.

Again: if you know, you know.

My favorite part about this movie is that it manages to capture the optimistic nihilism I’ve been living under for years. There is no greater purpose. There is no God. Life is undeniably hard and weird and silly and overwhelming and it was all an accident and none of us should be here except a few billion years ago a bunch of hydrogen atoms got a little too big for their britches. Nothing matters.

And that’s a good thing. Because that doesn’t mean nothing matters. That means the only things that matter are the things that matter to you. You have both the freedom and the responsibility to decide what in your life matters and sometimes its hard work blotting out all of the distractions but the work is worth it. Life is beautiful not because there’s some sort of pre-destiny and an afterlife, but because it’s all sort of a chaotic mess and then it ends.

Also, there’s a universe where raccoons can control Teppanyaki chefs and “(Absolutely) Story of a Girl” by Nine Days might be the key to the universe.

Andor

The quality of the Disney+ Star Wars shows have ranged from ‘fun but not great’ to ‘why is any of this happening I am confusion Kathleen explain.’ And believe me, no one thought Andor was going to be the show to change that. Back before Obi-Wan Kenobi came out Disney released promotional photos of the casts of their new productions and people were actively making fun of the Andor cast for even bothering to show up because no one thought this show was going to amount to anything. And I mean, I was right there with them. I’m not a fan of Rogue One so a show about one of its characters wasn’t exactly sparking any interest.

I was wrong. You were wrong. We were all wrong.

First, there’s all the things Andor gets right that the rest of the Disney+ shows and, frankly, the Disney released movies get wrong. The show doesn’t focus on the same fucking people nor the same fucking planets. We aren’t taken to Tatooine one single, sandy time, and none of ‘the old fan favorites’ manage to squeeze their dumb faces into it. It would have been so easy for the higher-ups at Disney to insist on having a scene where Mon Mothma has to take a meeting with Papa Palpatine and thank God they didn’t because there was no fucking reason for those two people to be in the same room at any point because while Mothma is important to us, the viewers, to Palpatine she’s just another pain in the ass senator from some backwater he couldn’t give two shits about.  And, as I stated in a previous article, this is the first Star Wars production from Disney where it doesn’t feel like everyone is just a little kid playing out their wildest Star Wars fantasies and giggling about it the whole fucking time.

(Quick aside: this criticism does not extend to Pedro Pascal who has been playing Mando with a completely straight face and I love him for that.)

But Andor goes beyond avoiding the pitfalls of the others. It finally digs into Star Wars in a way previous movies and shows have not. There’s not a single lightsaber. All the Jedi are presumed dead. The show is not interested in once again showing the light side and dark side of the Force and splitting up the world into a binary black and white. After all, we’ve known since the beginning the Empire is fucking huge. Are we really supposed to believe that every single uniformed jabroni, from officer to Storm Trooper, is as plainly evil as Palpatine?

This shows says of fucking course not and then rubs your nose in it for twelve whole episodes. The Empire runs as efficiently as it does because fascism. Dedra Meero doesn’t have a lightsaber, just the sort of the ambition that doesn’t care who else gets hurt in the process. Syril Karn isn’t a Sith, he’s some incel with mommy issues who desperately wants to be more important than he actually is. This is functionally the show’s mission statement: these banal sorts of the people are the actual weapon of the Empire. If you’re some schmuck on an Empire-controlled planet, you are far more likely to be killed by someone like this than you are to get mind-choked to death by Darth fucking Vader.

And the show is saying the same things about the Rebellion, too. None of the people we meet on the side of the rebels have magical powers. They’re just people, pissed off about the situation and willing to do something about it, even if that thing they do about it is smash a gravestone into the fat fucking face of a fascist.

And it’s great.

I liked keeping a list all year, so I’ll do it again in 2023. TBD if I’ll share it with you or not, though.

Video Journal of a Mad Woman, WHAT THE FUCK IS ANY OF THIS

Entry 11

Private YouTube Video titled WHAT THE FUCK IS ANY OF THIS continued, uploaded by user Michelle1980 on December 25th, 2015.

Michelle enters the house. It is small, and there are toys strewn about. The living room is next door to the front hall. There is a Christmas tree with presents underneath. The fireplace is going, and the television is on, showing the football game. As Toby closes the door he calls into the house.

Toby: Hey, Merry? Come see who’s here!

A woman Toby’s age comes into the hall, presumably from the kitchen. She had red hair in a braid, and is wearing sweat pants and an ugly Christmas sweater. Her face lights up when she sees Michelle.

Meredith: Michelle! Holy hell, what are you doing here?

Meredith hugs Michelle, making the camera go dark and the sound fuzz.

Meredith: Wow, you’re cold! Is this all you’re wearing? Do you want a sweater? I have a bunch.

Michelle: No, I’m good, I’m good. Long car ride, that’s all. It smells delicious in here.

Meredith: Come on, come say hi to the boys and get some dinner.

Michelle follows Meredith and Toby back through the hall, which does lead to the kitchen. Three boys are sitting at the kitchen table. One looks to be roughly fifteen, the middle child about ten, and the youngest about eight. When they see Michelle they all launch out of their seats, surrounding her for individuals hugs.

There follows close to an hour of the family and Michelle catching up and eating. The family is eating. Michelle continues to tell Meredith she is not hungry and doesn’t eat anything. Finally, while the kids start clearing the table, Michelle pulls Toby aside.

Michelle: Can we talk? Alone?

Toby: It’s a vacation, Michelle, I’m not-

Michelle: It’s not work. Not exactly.

Toby (intrigued): Okay, fine. Merry, we’ll be right back.

Toby brings Michelle around to the living room. Michelle closes the door between the two rooms. When she turns back to Toby, he has an eyebrow raised.

Toby: What’s with the secrecy?

Michelle: How do I look to you?

Toby: Skinny and mean, as always.

Michelle: No, it’s a real question. How do I look to you?

Toby actually takes a second to look her over. After four seconds, he shrugs.

Toby: I don’t know, like you usually do! I guess sort of pale. Really pale. Where the hell have you been?

Michelle: Montana.

Toby: Montana in winter? Yeah, that’ll do it.

Michelle: You don’t see anything else worth commenting on?

Toby: No. Michelle, fucking loop me in because I’m at a loss her.

Michelle: Do you remember that conversation we had in Toledo? At that bar in the bowling alley?

Toby looks at her quizzically. He opens his mouth to say something and then shuts it. It is clear from the way his face changes that he has remembered the conversation Michelle is referencing. His eyes grow wide and begin to dart all over her. He glances toward the door behind her, toward the kitchen. He takes a step back.

Toby: You didn’t.

Michelle: I did.

Toby is a man in shock. He takes a few more steps back until he finds the couch. He sits down hard. Behind Michelle, the rest of his family is laughing as they clean. Toby stares at her for twelve seconds, before finally saying something.

Toby: And you came here?

Michelle: Toby-

Toby: To my family? What are you trying to do?

Michelle: I’m showing you that I’m okay. And I am. I just had a whole meal with your family, and nothing bad happened. I kept control.

Toby wipes his mouth with his hand. He’s practically hyperventilating.

Toby: When?

Michelle: I did this back in October, Toby. Two months ago. I’ve been working on control, okay? That’s all I’ve been doing. And it’s been two months. Two. Months.

Toby (raising an eyebrow): And you haven’t…?

Michelle: No. Not once.

Instead of this information calming Toby down, Toby now looks even more panicked. He stands up quickly. He takes a single step toward Michelle. His eyes dart to he fireplace before going back to her.

Toby: You have to leave. Now.

Michelle: Toby-

Toby: Get out, Michelle. I’m not kidding. If you leave now…if you leave my family…I won’t call the others. I’ll just let you leave.

Michelle: Call the others? Toby, you’re not listening to me. I’m fine. I’m stable. I don’t need blood!

Toby: Yes, you do! My God. You asked me if I remember the conversation in Toledo. Do you?

Michelle: What does that mean?

Toby: It means just that – do you actually remember the conversation?

Michelle (hesitation in her voice): Of course I do! Most of it, anyway. The gist. We had been drinking-

Toby: No, because if you even remembered the gist you wouldn’t have done this stupid, stupid thing.

Michelle: Toby, you’re not…fucking…listening to me. I haven’t had any blood! I haven’t touched anyone. The addiction is the dangerous part, and I’ve got it handled. As long as I don’t touch anything…

Toby starts laughing. It is impossible to determine emotions in the laugh. Similarly, Toby’s face is completely blank.

Toby: …addiction…addiction.

Michelle: What?

Toby: Michelle, you need to leave. Now. We can talk about this later. Over the phone. I need to process. Okay? Later.

Michelle gathers herself up, and appears to be getting ready to go. She takes a few steps toward the front door, but stops in the door frame to the hallway. She turns back to Toby, who is now standing up.

Michelle: You know, I knew the others weren’t going to accept this as a success right away. I knew I’d have to convince them. I just thought I’d have you next to me to help.

Toby: Michelle, please-

Michelle: Don’t please me, for fuck’s sake. We’re supposed to partner’s Toby. We’re supposed to have each other’s backs.

Toby: Don’t give me that shit. If we were partners you would have told me what you were doing. You knew I would react this way, that’s why you did it in secret.

Michelle: Because I knew this would be your reaction! I knew you’d think I was a failure, just like you always do. I know you make calls behind my back to the others. Telling them all about how you to save poor little Michelle again.

Toby: What? I-

Michelle: She just got away from me again, running off to save the day! She thinks she’s so strong but really she’s just a nuisance! You were never my partner, you were my fucking babysitter!

Michelle is fully screaming now, loud enough to ruin the audio. Toby is taking steps back toward the kitchen. The door to the kitchen opens enough for one of his kids to stick his head in. He’s quickly yanked back and the door slammed shut.

Toby: Michelle, please. Just go. We’ll talk about it-

Michelle: Talk about it when you’re ready. It’s always about you.

Toby: I don’t know what you’re talking about! Please, Michelle, it’s the heightened emotions, that’s all. They’re messing with your brain. You have to calm down. You have to-

Michelle: That’s where you’re wrong, Toby. I don’t have to do anything anymore. This world sucks, but fuck it! I’m not a part of it! I’m above it. I can go faster, see farther, I can-

Michelle doubles over in pain, groaning as she bends at the waist. The phone falls from her shirt, flipping so the camera is pointed at the ceiling.

Toby: Michelle?

Michelle: Ughhh….Toby? My stomach, I…

Toby: You need to leave. Now.

Michelle: Leave? Leave? You see me in pain like this and you WANT ME TO LEAVE?

There is a blur as Michelle lunges over the phone and across the room. Toby screams.

The next six minutes is a cacophony of sounds, mostly screams and things breaking. Occasionally something moves over the camera, but for the most part all we can see is the ceiling. After four minutes, the ceiling is sprayed with blood. Some of it drips near the phone, but not on it.

Everything becomes quiet again. There are footsteps. They come toward the camera. Michelle appears in the frame. She is splattered with blood. Her canine teeth have turned into fangs and lay over her bottom lip. Her skin is no longer pale. It is pink, and glowing. She does not stop for the phone, or even notice its there. The footsteps continue away from the camera, presumably toward the front door.

Michelle: You made me this.

The sound of the front door opening and closing. The shot of ceiling stays for another thirty seconds.

The scene then cuts to one of Toby’s sons holding the phone in front of him. He appears to be a basement. Based on the earlier conversation at the dinner table, we know his name is Chris. He is a teenager, around fifteen. He has short red hair and is wearing a hoodie. His eyes are blank as he speaks.

This is my third attempt at recording this. I just want to be done.

I found this phone before the cops came. I hid it. There wasn’t much in it at all, she obviously didn’t use it for much. But I found the YouTube account. I found her other videos.

I thought they were federal marshals.

Chris stares at the camera for eight seconds, breathing heavily.

I don’t know what my mom thought. She’s dead. Dad and Connor, too. I didn’t see any of it. I heard some of it. I heard Michelle screaming. And then I heard Dad…I don’t know what came over me. I grabbed Kyle and ran out the sliding door in the back. Just kept running. Kyle was screaming. He wanted to go back. I had to pick him up. Doctors say I have bruised ribs from the way he was kicking me.

When we came back, they were dead, and she was gone. Blood everywhere.

I thought they were marshals. I didn’t know any of this was real.

I watched all the videos. I would have thought it was some stupid fake show if she hadn’t…

There are others. She talks about others, in her videos. I wonder if they’ll come for us. If they even know what happened. I don’t know who they are, so I can’t contact them. But they better come find us. We’re at my grandparents now, only a few blocks away. I don’t know what Dad told them, but…

If they don’t find us, I’m taking all of these videos and turning them to public. Maybe figure out how to shorten a few, get them on TikTok. Make them go viral until they see and come.

I don’t understand what the fuck happened. But I’m going to.

And I’m going to find Michelle.

Video ends here.

Video Journal of a Mad Woman, Entry 11 and WHAT THE F…

Entry 10

Private YouTube Video titled Journal Entry 11, uploaded by user Michelle1980 on December 15th, 2015.

Michelle looks a bit happier in this video. And very pale. Her skin is almost translucent.

I’m doing better. It’s been a month. I kept making videos, I have the footage here somewhere, but I wasn’t really saying anything new so I didn’t want to post anything until I have something to say.

Now I do. And here it is:

I think I’m good.

She holds up her hands.

I know, I know, after that last video how could anything be good, right?

Well, I’m serious. I’ve been up here at the lodge. Meditating. Getting my head straight. Read some books, watched some videos, and I think I’ve got some methods to keep me going off the rails.

I’ve been back to town four times now. Back at that Walmart, the grocery store, the gas station…I even sat and watched a movie. On a Friday night. Theater almost completely full. I kept my attention on the movie, and I didn’t lose it once! As long as everyone around me can play it cool, and no one gets me angry, I can hold it together.

I think the most important part was just admitting to myself that I’m hungry. All the time. Like Bruce Banner in the movie, right? That’s my secret, Cap. Once I admitted that, I could address it and work on it. Instead of pretending I wasn’t hungry and almost killing an eight year old in a Walmart.

Michelle giggles.

Even though it feels like hunger, it’s still an addiction, and I have it in control. I’m basically never thinking about blood anymore. It’s not something I need. When I’m around people, I let myself hear their heartbeats, and feel the way their blood pumps, because I know I don’t need it.

I don’t.

I don’t.

She giggles again.

So great.

So, I think it’s time to leave the Lodge. I’m going to go see Toby. He hasn’t stopped calling. Honestly, it’s getting pretty…I was going to say ‘annoying’ but I think I’m at ‘infuriating.’ I wake up at night and I’ve got anywhere from two to ten miss phoned calls. So many texts. It’s like he thinks I can’t take care of myself. That he has to be my caretaker or something. Well, look at me now, Toby! I can take of myself! I can protect myself against anything!

Michelle’s voice has grown louder and louder until she’s screaming into the phone. Her hands are above her head. She looks furious.

After a two second pause she realizes her hands are in the air and lowers them. She shifts in her seat, smoothing her pants and checking her hair in the mirror. There is an air of embarrassment about her, but she ignores it and continues.

I can’t put him off any longer. We were supposed to get back together to work after the New Year. So, I’ll go early. Surprise him. Double surprise, I guess. Once he sees how much control I have, he’ll see this was a good idea. He will. He definitely will. Who knows? Maybe he’ll want to join me. I think I can do that, now.

Okay. Wish me luck.

Video ends.

Private YouTube Video titled WHAT THE FUCK IS ANY OF THIS, uploaded by user Michelle1980 on December 25th, 2015.

Video starts with Michelle still in her SUV. Out the windows we can see she is parked on a residential street. All of the houses are decorated with Christmas lights and there is snow on the ground. Michelle is beaming.

Okay, here we go! This is Toby’s place outside of Concord. Don’t know why he lives here, fucking freezing from November to fucking May. Time for the big reveal! I’m going to use a trick I saw on YouTube. Goes like this.

The camera switches from front mode to back and then starts jittering around while Michelle moves it. The sound of fabric on the microphone, and then phone stops, facing outward toward the steering wheel and the street. Michelle’s arm reaches forward to pull the sun visor down. In the mirror, we can see Michelle and the phone sitting in the front pocket of a flannel shirt. The phone is slightly taller than the pocket, and the camera sticks out above.

There, see? He shouldn’t even notice. I want his reaction to be as natural as possible. Let’s go!

There is no editing in this video. It continues as Michelle gets out of the SUV, shuts the door, locks the SUV, and then crosses around the car and down the front walk. The house in front of her is modest but well kept, covered in Christmas lights. Lights are on inside. Michelle climbs the front stoop and presses the doorbell a couple of times. She waits there for close to ten seconds before someone appears in the window next to the door. Surprise crosses his face, and then the door opens.

The man standing in front of Michelle is presumably Toby. He appears to be about thirty years old, slightly shorter than Michelle, broad shoulders, brown hair. He’s wearing jeans and a red sweater, and glasses.

Toby: Michelle? What are you doing here? Is everything okay?

Michelle: Yeah, of course everything is okay! I can’t visit a friend for the holidays?

Toby looks at her warily for another second or two, and then breaks out in a grin.

Toby: Of course, yeah, shit, yeah. Jesus, Michelle, you’ve had me worried for the past month.

Michelle: I was going through it. Got out the other side.

Toby: Glad to hear it. Come on, get in here, we’re just sitting down to dinner.

Michelle enters the house.

WHAT THE FUCK IS ANY OF THIS

Video Journal of a Mad Woman, Entry 10

Entry 9

Private YouTube Video titled Journal Entry 10, uploaded by user Michelle1980 on November 13th, 2015.

Michelle is back at the lodge. It is night, and the lobby is dark. After she turns on the camera she sits staring at it for seven seconds, hands in front of her face. Then she sits back, crossing her arms. She is wearing a tank top. Her arms and face have become paler, and are now almost sheet white.

I almost didn’t do this one. To be completely honest, I almost stopped completely. What happened…in town…

She gets up and rustles around in presumably a bag sitting next to where the phone is set up. She comes back into frame with a pack of cigarettes. She lights one with unpracticed hands and then leans back again.

Never smoked in a day in my life. Living that DARE life. But I need to do something, and the hangovers were killing me, and as I was driving out of town I went past this Circle K and I could see the racks of cigarettes behind the counter and I thought…why not? It’s not like they’re going to kill me anyway.

Michelle takes a long drag from the cigarette and blows out smoke.

I don’t know why I’m fascinated with this. I’ve been so focused on what I do have now, I guess I never stopped to think about what I don’t have. I don’t breathe. I can breathe, obviously, I can move my diaphragm and make my lungs draw in air, and then shunt it all out. But if I’m thinking about it, I don’t do it. That little part of my brain that goes breathe, dummy died, I guess. I don’t have a heartbeat, obviously. I knew that would happen. I thought, though, that I would notice it. That when I was trying to sleep I’d miss the beating, the way it got faster when I breathed in and slower when I breathed out. But I never noticed. Not once.

Another long drag from the cigarette.

I didn’t hurt anyone in town. The clerk at the Circle K probably thinks I’m the bitchiest woman to ever walk the planet, but he’s alive.

So, the camera didn’t catch it, but the damage that kid did to his arm…woof. He’s going to have scars for the rest of his life. He must have caught the corner of the aisle, you know, where metal meets metal. Just ripped his forearm open, from elbow to wrist. The back of it. He didn’t hit an artery and he wasn’t going to die. Not unless I stayed there.

Michelle finishes the cigarette and starts on another one.

I thought I would be okay. Because I’ve never had blood before. How can you be addicted to something you haven’t had before? But…

She pauses, cigarette in hand, and then takes another, forceful drag.

I could smell it the second he cut himself. The blood. Like a shark in the water. I smelled it, and I’ve never smelled anything better in my life. It was all I could smell. And the blood on that kid’s arm was all I could see. Everything else was gone. The store. The world. Every other part of me. Every…single…part of me that didn’t want…that wasn’t…

Michelle has been looking off into the distance, but now looks directly into the camera.

I was hungry.

She shrugs.

That’s what it felt like. Like I’ve been starving and I didn’t even know it. Wandering through a barren field of nothing and had finally found a burger and a beer. And as I realized I was starving, I realized that everything that was wrong with me was because of that. And I didn’t even know something was wrong with me, before then. I thought I was doing okay. But in that moment, I could feel it. I’m weak. Physically, I mean. I could be stronger. Faster. See better. Fuck, I bet the hangovers would be easier to take. If I only…If I just…

She shifts around in her seat and takes another drag off her cigarette, almost burning it down to the filter. She smiles weakly at the camera.

Yes, well. I’m not going to do that, so we’ll figure something else out. Live like this. I can get control, I’m sure of it. It’s just going to take a lot longer than I thought. I can’t freak out every time someone cuts themselves in front of me. I barely managed to get out of that Walmart with everyone still breathing. There was a single voice in my head, just one, telling me I had to run. Telling me I couldn’t. That’s the voice I need to focus on. That’s the work I need to do.

A buzzing starts as Michelle’s other phone starts to ring on the table. She picks it up and makes a face at the phone.

Why the fuck is he calling me so much? Fuck it.

She presses something on the phone. When she speaks, her voice is artificially bright.

Hey Toby, what’s up?

No, I haven’t been dodging your calls, what are you talking about?

I’ve been hiking, Toby. Great wilderness and all. I only just got cell service back today.

Nah, California. Yosemite.

I called you? When?

Michelle listens, and then mouths ‘fuck.’

I was drunk, Toby. You can’t trust anything out of my mouth when I’m drunk, you know that. I get all weepy and emotional…I was probably watching some dumb Hallmark movie. How’s Meredith and the boys?

I’m not changing the subject! I’m asking about your fucking family! Isn’t that what friends do?

And are you my friend?

So, tell me how your wife and kids are doing for Christ’s sake!

Toby, Toby, Toby, stop. I’m fine. I’m…fine. I got rejected at a bar, it brought back some bad memories, that’s all. Fuck. Stop babying me. We’re on vacation. You want to baby someone so badly your kids are right there.

She hangs up the phone and tosses it on the table. Then she stares at it for ten seconds. Finally, she looks back at the camera.

If you’re watching this, Toby, I’m sorry for lying. You’re going to freak out. I know you are. And I can handle that. But only after I’ve got my feet under me. I love you, Tobes. Hopefully, the next time we see each other, you’ll still love me.

Michelle reaches for the camera phone. Video ends here.

Entry 11

Video Journal of a Mad Woman, Entry 9

Entry 8

Private YouTube Video titled Journal Entry 9, uploaded by user Michelle1980 on November 10th, 2015.

Same lobby. The lights are on. The furniture has been cleared away. There are marks and some holes in the walls.

Michelle looks better than the last video. Sober. Very pale. Hair in a pony tail, wearing her jacket. She is smiling as she puts the camera on, but it is not the over-sized grins of before. It is a very calm smile.

Okay, so, it’s been a week since I made that last video. I decided to hold off on making any more for a while to get my feet back under me. I watched it the next morning. Most of it, anyway, I was cringing halfway through. Just posted it. Maybe I’ll be able to watch the whole thing someday, after all of this comes out.

Oh, yeah. Vampires do get hangovers, by the way. Bad ones. I poured out the rest of my booze. Not worth it. I’ve been trying other stuff. Meditation, mostly. Yoga. I used to love yoga, anyway, so it’s nice to get back into it. Now when the stomach cramps come, I’m able to work my way through them. I can keep it together. But, I’m alone up here, right? Not really a good way to test?

The image cuts to Michelle outside in a well-lit parking lot.

I’ve been needing some stuff anyway, so let’s see how well I do in here!

She turns around to reveal a twenty-four hour Walmart. The parking lot is mostly empty but as she focuses on the front door there are a couple of people going in and out and an employee sweeping snow from in front of the exit.

I’m not going to stay long. Going to get in, get what I need, and get out. Nothing fancy. No talking to people I don’t have to. This is just about being around people and seeing how I manage the stomach cramps. Ready? Let’s go.

The scene cuts again. The phone is now in the child seat of a blue shopping cart, facing up at Michelle pushing it. The Walmart is like any other Walmart in America – high ceilings, fluorescent lights, and tinny pop music occasionally interrupted by an incomprehensible announcement over the PA.

For the next three minutes Michelle doesn’t do much talking. She is shopping. Occasionally she looks at the camera and either smiles at it or winks. These are usually following passing another person in an aisle. Besides looking pale she otherwise appears fine. There are a lot of cuts, indicating that the time spent shopping in the Walmart took a lot longer than three minutes.

After the last cut, Michelle drops something into the cart, looks around the aisle, and then leans into the phone.

Okay, last thing! The only thing left to do is check out. They have self-checkouts here but I’m going through with a person. I need to talk to someone to really see how I’ll do. The door is right there, I can bail if I have to. Otherwise, so far, no cramps, no cravings, no…teeth. Anyway, let’s do it!

Without cutting, Michelle pushes her cart out of the aisle, presumably toward the front of the store. She gets only a few steps before something whizzes by her. All the camera picks up on is a dark shape rushing by the side of the cart and the sound of a child giggling. Then, a voice calls from behind Michelle.

Unidentified Male Voice: Tyler! What did I just freaking say about riding that in here so fast! Get back here before-

But it’s too late. Michelle’s eyes get big at the same time a crashing sound reaches the phone. Then a child – presumably Tyler – starts crying, practically screaming. Her face becomes concerned and she begins pushing the cart forward at a fast clip, apparently trying to reach the child to help.

Unidentified Female Voice: Oh, dear. You poor thing!

Second Unidentified Male Voice: Look at his arm! He must have scraped it up on the aisle cap.

Michelle freezes. Despite how bright it is in the store her pupils dilate. Her mouth starts opening and closing, and then her face becomes a rictus. She takes a single step around the cart.

The scene once again cuts, this time to Michelle in her SUV still in the Walmart parking lot. Her eyes are back to normal. She looks angry.

Well, I almost fucking ate Tyler. That fucking kid. That fucking idiot kid and his idiot fucking dad. Who even lets their kid get on a bike in a store, let alone ride around on it like that?

I didn’t kill him. But I came so damn close. Fucking Tyler and fucking Tyler’s dad have no idea how close they came. Because I wouldn’t have stopped at Tyler. No fucking way. I almost lost complete control in there. It would have been all of them.  All of them.

Michelle pauses, her face blank. After six seconds she starts banging on the steering wheel with both fists, occasionally hitting the horn. She’s making sounds. They are not comprehensible. They are barely human. After twelve seconds of this, she stops. Her voice is very loud as she talks to the camera.

I almost had it! It was almost a success! I was so fucking close to getting out of there with all my shit, with all my control, and then this fucking idiot kid had to go and ride a God damned bike into a shelf! He fucked it all up! He ruined me! This is all his fault! His fault! HIS FAULT! God, I’m so-

Michelle cuts off abruptly. She fixes her hair while staring at the camera. You could describe her face as serene. You could also describe it as eerie. For the first time, there is something decidedly not human about the way Michelle looks.

I need to get out of town, or I’m going to kill every last one of these fucking assholes.

Video ends here.

Entry 10

Video Journal of a Mad Woman, Entry 8

Entry 7

Private YouTube Video titled Journal Entry 8, uploaded by user Michelle1980 on November 3rd, 2015.

Still in the lobby of the abandoned lodge. It is night. The lamps throughout the lobby are off. The lamp on the table is off. The only light illuminating Michelle appears to be from the phone itself.

It is hard to make out details in the dark, but Michelle is slightly hunched over. As the video starts, she is drinking from a bottle of something. She stares into the camera for seven seconds before speaking.

So, it turns out I can still get drunk. That’s nice. I think.

I was going to…going to…shit, what was I going to do?

Oh, yeah. Talk about experiments.

She is slightly slurring as she talks. ‘Experiments’ sounds more like ‘essperiments.’

Well, this is an experiment!

Michelle throws back the bottle. In the dark, it’s hard to tell how full it was. But she drinks from the bottle for close to ten seconds before finally pulling it away. She tosses it behind her. It lands with a thud but does not break.

Can vampires get drunk? And the answer…is…yes.

Now, future self or whoever is watching this, you may be asking why am I so drunk? So pitifully, sadly…super fucking drunk. Okay…okay…okay…

A pause. Michelle belches.

Buhh, that tastes awful. Okay, I am drunk as an experiment. Not only can I get drunk, but will it hurt after. You know…you know…a…fuck…what’s the word…fuck…hangover! Will I be hungover tomorrow? Tune in to find out.

She points a finger at the camera. Perhaps she winks. It’s hard to tell in the dark. She begins to say something else before doubling over in pain. With one of her hands she grips the side of the table, splintering it between her fingers. A scream is forced out of her. It is sharp, piercing, and so high pitched the microphone cannot handle it. Michelle quickly bites down on the scream and forces herself to sit up. It is still eleven more seconds before she begins to talk again.

That would be the other reason I’ve been drinking. Trying to supplant one addiction for another. Maybe I’ll just be a drunk vampire all the time. Who knows? Not me. We’ll see.

She giggles. It is a pale shadow of the giggles in previous videos.

I should be honest in these things, right? Right. Of course. It’s my fucking journal, not some sort of performance piece. I’m putting this all down so I can know, in the future, how this went. In case I forget. Don’t know why I would forget. Well, this one I might. Fuck. Hey, Sober Michelle. How’s it going? Remember this? I bet you don’t.

Michelle sniffs.

The addiction is stronger than I thought it would be. I thought there would be mental cravings. All mental cravings. All the time. No, wait…yes. Mental. I thought it would all be mental. Vampires are better, faster…stronger…no pain, no cold…I didn’t think they felt anything bad. Ever. Once I hit one in the face with an aluminum baseball bat. It was a good hit. I mean, if his head was a baseball it would have been-

She imitates swinging a bat, making a knocking sound with her tongue to imitate the ball being hit by the bat, and then looks off in the distance with a hand shading her eyes.

Out of the fucking park. Hit right at the temple. I thought for sure that would get me at least a few seconds, you know, to get at him with the stake.

It fucking didn’t. He didn’t even pause. You know what he did do? He laughed at me. Laughed. Like I’d hit him in the face with…I don’t know…one of those long feathery things…snake. Feather snake. Something like that.

I remember being pissed. Who wouldn’t be, right? Best hit of my life and he shrugs it off. But I also remember being jealous. Yeah, jealous, that’s it. I remember thinking, what would it be like to be that strong? To be that fearless? If you could take a baseball bat to the face, you could take anything.

Michelle reaches for the bottle. She looks around, and then remembers she finished it and tossed it. She gets up from the table and walks out of frame. There is some shuffling around. A heavy thud. And then Michelle is back, holding a new bottle.

I mean, he couldn’t take the wooden stake I eventually got through his back, but, you know, nothing’s perfect.

Why the fuck was I talking about this?

Michelle counts something on her fingers, and then makes an ah sound.

This addiction to blood is far more physical than I anticipated. Sweating. Tunnel vision. These God damned stomach cramps. They keep getting worse. Bowling me over. I don’t know how they stand it. Well, I guess they don’t. They feed. And I can’t do that. I won’t.

She pops the top off the bottle and drinks heavily.

I just need more time. That’s all. To get this under control. I’ll find a way. I will. I have will, and with will, there’s a way. I just need more time. I’ll find a way. Stay strong. Stay myself. And when I get out of here, the others aren’t going to know what hit them.

She drinks again.

The other vampires. Other hunters, too, but they’ll only be hit with, like…being impressed. They won’t say shit about me anymore. Stop their gossip. Laughing about me. Can’t talk about me behind my back anymore, boys. I’ll hear it. And if I do hear it…

Michelle shakes her head. Drinks more, until the bottle is empty. This one she hurls behind her with all her strength. A shattering sound comes out of the dark.

It’s their fault, you know. All of this. They…they couldn’t…and them…with their words…and fucking Roy…at the party…their fault…their fault…their fault.

Michelle gets up and goes off into the darkness of the lobby. What follows is a series of sounds easily identifiable as everything breaking. Sometimes shadows fly past in the dark, but it is otherwise impossible to see exactly what is going on. This goes on for a minute and forty seconds. Then there is fifteen seconds of silence. Michelle comes out of the darkness and sits back down in front of the camera. She brushes her hair out of her face. Her hand is bleeding, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

Sorry. Emotions…go crazy…can’t seem to hold onto anything anymore. Maybe I’ll feel better in the morn…night. Tomorrow night. So weird.

Michelle leans forward to turn the camera off. She leans back, clearly thinking she has turned it off, but she hasn’t. She picks up another phone off the table. Stares at it. Pecks at it with her finger. And then, after a long pause, hits it once more. Puts it to her ear. Faintly, there is ringing on the other end. Then someone speaking, but it is clearly a canned message.

“Hey, Toby. It’s me. Just…wondering how you’re doing. On sabbatical. I’m doing great. On my sabbatical. Just…peachy. Peachy keen. Everything is copacetic. Wanted to know…if you were copacetic. Because I’m…not…uh…you know what? Ignore me, I’m drunk and this place is making me emotional. You know the place. The one I told you about. I… We’ll talk later.”

Michelle hangs up the phone and stares at it. After a few seconds she looks up at the other phone and frowns.

Oh, shit.

She finally turns the camera off. End video.

Entry 9

Video Journal of a Mad Woman, Entry 7

Entry 6

Private YouTube video titled Journal Entry 7, uploaded by user Michelle1980 on October 31st, 2015.

Michelle is sitting at the same table as the last video. She has apparently realized the lighting in the last video was too dark and now has a few cheap floor lamps set up around the room behind her. It appears to be the lobby of the lodge she claims she was staying at in the last video. There is a large fire pit in the middle of the room with a vent hood hanging above it. The fire is lit, although too small to throw off much light or, presumably, heat. The fire pit has a couch on either side. Beyond, there is a check in desk against the far wall. All of the décor is dated and heavily damaged or dirty.

Michelle looks much the same as the last video. She is wearing a purple tank top and her hair is down. She is much paler now, and her cheekbones are more obvious than the last time she has appeared on camera.

She smiles at the camera.

Hey, hello, to myself and anyone else who ends up seeing this. It is October thirtieth, so happy Halloween to those who celebrate. I haven’t since I was a kid. No one’s trick or treating at shitty motels. I guess I celebrate now, though. By default.

Okay, so, two week break. Biggest one between these videos of mine. I didn’t forget about you, don’t worry. I filmed all of my experiments, but then as I was editing them to put up they felt…boring, I guess? Or at least pointless. They didn’t add much. I’ve got the videos, I’ll keep them for posterity if anyone else wants to see my methods, but I think for now the only thing I’ll upload is this video. The results.

Start with the obvious…

She gestures briefly at her arms, and then behind her. There is a large picture window in the wall. Through the darkness, falling snow can just be made out.

Michelle leans over to the table next to the phone and picks up a small device. As she turns it to the camera it becomes apparent it is a digital thermometer. The read out says the room is fifty-six degrees.

Ask anyone who knew me and they’ll tell you I was a wussy when it came to the cold. I hated taking jobs north of the Bible Belt. But now, I feel fine. More than fine. Comfortable. As far as I’m concerned, it’s room temperature in here. And that’s not all.

Michelle picks up the camera and carries it toward the back of the room. The lens is pointed at the ceiling, sometimes catching Michelle. There is some jostling and then the squeak of a door opening, and the ceiling is replace with a threshold and then a dark sky. The camera adjusts to the new darkness and then Michelle holds it up again.

Fine! I feel great! And out here it’s…

She checks the thermometer again but can’t seem to hold it up to the phone camera properly.

Says it’s twenty-nine out here. Pretty balmly, huh?

Michelle cackles into the darkness. Then she moves back inside and sets the camera back up on its perch.

Michelle’s hair and shoulders are dusted with snow. It only started to melt after she came inside, and does so slowly.

For obvious reasons I haven’t been able to test extreme heat. I’m guessing that comes up a lot less. Even in the desert, once the sun goes down it gets super fucking cold. I’ve been trying to think where it stays hot at night…the south, I think? Yeah, I bet if I went to the bayou I could try out heat. See if I sweat. I’m guessing I don’t.

Let’s see, what else is fit to print…oh, yeah, how about eye sight? If there’s any light at all, I can see. Not perfectly, there is a point where stuff starts to get sort of blurry. And I can’t see in complete darkness. I guess that makes sense, scientifically. I’m still surprised, because I didn’t really think there was anything scientific about vampires, but whatever.

Actually, yeah, you want non-science? Here you go: I can see better at night. Not better in the dark, better at night. I got one of those eye charts like in an optometrist’s office and figured out how to use it off the internet. I tested in one of the basement rooms with no windows, something for storage. Used the same lamps both during the day and at night. Five minutes before sunset? 20/30. Good. Better than average, obviously, but five minutes after sunset? 20/50! At fifty feet I can see what a human can see at twenty feet. Absolutely incredible. And has nothing to do with science, so I don’t fucking know. I-

Michelle’s face contorts in pain for a fraction of a second. She bends forward at the waist a couple of inches. And then she is back to normal, like it never even happened.

My hearing is better, too. Internet says a human voice travels about 180 meters. I’m kicking myself because I should have done tests before, when I was alive. I don’t know how far I could hear then. But I’ll tell you what I do know, is that I couldn’t hear a human voice over three hundred meters away. Almost twice as far. No wonder the bastards can always hear us coming.

Smell…I couldn’t really figure out a way to test that, exactly. Not with good parameters or anything. But the other night an owl got a rabbit somewhere in the woods and I could smell the blood. I couldn’t find the remains to figure out how far away but, like…could I smell blood unless I was right on it before? I don’t think.

Let’s see, what other senses…touch and taste. Well, touch doesn’t seem much different. Taste…okay, so I can eat regular food there just doesn’t seem to be much point. And it all tastes pretty bland. I thought it would be heightened but-

Another wince, this one longer. After she straightens up, she stares at the camera for a second. Then continues as if nothing happened.

I still haven’t had any blood. Keeping my streak. And I don’t want it, either. It’s an addiction. It’s all in the brain. A vampire could live without it, and I’m going to prove it. Easy, peasy, lemon-

Another wince. Clearly frustrated, Michelle turns the camera off. Video ends here.

Entry 8