You’re Getting Florida Wrong: Hurricane Edition

With Hurricane Ian finished drowning most of Florida in the ocean, I thought we’d go over some basic facts about hurricane so your script won’t make me want to drown myself in daiquiri.

Hurricane Parties Are, In Fact, A Thing

But you know what’s also a thing? Tropical storms and Cat 1’s. Storms that have enough wind to blow over a poorly-anchored lawn flamingo and enough rain to make driving on any road feel like I-4 in rush hour. Okay, wait, I need to make a few detours.

It Rains, Like, Every Day in Florida

I know, I know. It’s the Sunshine State! How could they lie? I don’t know, ask Greenland. Yes, there is a lot of strong sun (again, Brits: put on your fucking sunscreen) but it’s also the subtropics so there’s a lot of fucking rain. Pretty much every afternoon between three and five you can count on a soaker lasting at least twenty minutes. And sometimes that rain and wind come out hard. One time I was trying to cross a parking lot in my car during a squall and I got caught behind a shopping cart doing ten miles an hour down the center lane.

Basically, for a lot of Floridians, a tropical storm is an afternoon storm that lasts a little longer.

People Can’t Fucking Drive in Florida, and It Gets Worse in the Rain

I lived in Orlando, which meant I was constantly surrounding by a healthy mix of:

  1. UCF students who were almost definitely driving drunk/distracted
  2. Old people with the reaction time of a sloth on quaaludes
  3. Gearheads who tricked out their shitty 1996 Honda Civic and continually scream past you going twenty over only to get stuck at the next red light
  4. Tourists who don’t understand that Florida is Death Race and our yellow lights last six seconds. Six fucking seconds, Marge, six. You do not need to slam on your brakes the second it turns yellow. You need to hit the accelerator. Not only are you making it, the next ten people are, too. For fuck’s sake.

Take all of that and pour thousands of gallons of rainwater on it and see what happens. Actually, I’ll tell you: a bunch of people are going to slow down to twenty miles an hour and put their hazards on and a bunch of other people are going to take that personally and start doing twenty over, tailgating everyone and fucking Tokyo drifting around grandma in her beat to shit Chevy Tahoe.

I-4 Is the Worst Interstate in the Country

I know everyone says that about their nearest highway, but everyone besides Central Florida is wrong. I would rather go down I-95 blindfolded with my foot hot-glued to the accelerator than drive I-4 during rush hour.

Hurricane Parties: You’re Not Going Anywhere, Might As Well Get Drunk

Nobody is partying during a category five. Hell, maybe not a category three. Floridians do have some sort of self-preservation instinct, even if it is beer-battered and sauced. Hurricane parties are strictly for those storms that obviously won’t do much more than overfill the pools.

Now, do Floridians have a higher threshold for where they consider the line between ‘whatever I’m getting fucked up,’ and ‘oh shit oh shit oh fuck shit shit shit?’ Probably. But these are the same people who, if it snowed enough to stick – even just a thin layer of powder – would immediately start screaming and crash their car into a palm tree. It’s all a matter of where you’re from and what you’re used to.

The Week Leading Up to the Hurricane is Pure Anxiety Hell

Imagine, if you will, NASA decides to host a press conference. In this press conference, they admit that they have discovered an asteroid heading toward earth. And then the NASA guy just sort of…stops talking.

Reporter: So, how big is the asteroid?

NASA: Oh, impossible to say at this time. It could be a planet killer and destroy everything, or it could break up completely in our atmosphere. Not really sure yet.

Reporter: And it’s definitely going to hit us?

NASA: I never said that! We’re not sure where it’s going. It might hit it us. It might skim by. It might miss us completely. Actually, it might simply explode in the middle of the space and never get close enough to even be a bother. Not sure why I brought it up so soon, actually.

Reporter…how high are you right now?

NASA: About 238,900 miles up, why?

Then for the next week, the reports out of NASA change every fucking day. It’s a planet killer heading right for us. Actually it’s going to stay out in space. No, wait, we now see it will hit us but it’s only going to cause some coastal flooding. No, wait, new reports say…

Over and over and over again for a full week. That’s hurricane prediction. Your brain switches back and forth between, “I’m a Floridian, I can ride this out!” to “NOTHING IN ORLANDO IS RATED FOR MORE THAN A CAT 2 WE’RE ALL GOING TO BLOW AWAY AND DROWN” fast enough to give you vertigo. And then if you own a house, it’s like:

Worry One: If I don’t put up my hurricane shutters the hurricane will be bad and blow in all the windows and flood my house.

Worry Two: If I put up my hurricane shutters and then the whole things blows over all my neighbors will think I’m a weenie.

The week before the hurricane can be worse than the actual hurricane itself.

Hurricanes Can Spawn Tornadoes

I know, right? Like, who the fuck even authorized this?

But it’s true. Whatever sort of windy-nonsense is going on in hurricanes is the same that goes on in Tornado Alley. I’m not going to explain it because it’s all very technical and complicated and I have no understanding of any of it whatsoever. You could be sitting in your house, wind howling and rain drumming on the roof and occasionally the whole house shifts ever so slightly, not enough to actually mean anything but enough to spike your blood pressure, and then you hear it.

The god damned tornado siren.

And, as mentioned last week, Florida homes don’t have basements. So the best you can do is find a bathroom or closet with no windows and no outside walls and wait it out. I don’t even know how you’re supposed to distinguish the sounds of the hurricane from the sounds of a possible tornado. It’s just this funnelly piece of shit, blending in with its surroundings like some sort of meteorological cat burglar, and you don’t know it’s there until half your house is on your head.

We once came out of a hurricane to find that the neighbor’s shed had been picked up wholesale and dumped on another neighbor’s front yard half a block away.

There Are Legitimate Reasons People Can’t Evacuate

Some people work for hospitals or emergency services and need to work through the storm.

Some people don’t have any family anywhere else in the US and don’t have the money for a hotel.

Some people don’t have a reliable vehicle that they can count on getting them safely out of the storm’s path.

Some people are or have elderly family members with a lot of medical equipment who can’t be easily moved.

And on and on.

Not everybody is some stubborn idiot Florida Man who’s smoking three cigarettes and a joint at the same time and crushing orange soda with vodka and staring at the TV and yelling, they don’t know what they’re talking about! I’m going to tie myself to my ATV and I’ll be fine! Most people understand but have no other recourse than to hunker down and ride it out.

So quite being a Judging Judy from the comfort of your own home.

You can definitely judge anyone you see actually in the water as a hurricane approaches, though. Those people are not of sound mind.

How to Name Locations During Worldbuilding

Hilarious Miscommunications

There’s, like, half a dozen rivers named Avon in the UK, and do you know why? Avon means river in Ancient Celtic. These Roman pieces of shit wandered in and were taking stock of the shit they now owned and they’d see a river and they’d go up to a local and they’d be like, ‘Hey, mate, what do you call that river over there?’ in their broken-ass Ancient Celtic or – far more likely – very slow and very loud Latin, and the Celts they asked would look at each other and shrug their shoulders and then say, “That’s a fucking river, moron.” And the Romans would look at each other be all, ‘Damn, that’s the eighth one named Avon this week, why don’t these people name their rivers right.’ But they weren’t paid enough to investigate further.

There’s also been rumors that both ‘kangaroo’ and ‘Yucatan’ actually roughly translate to ‘I don’t know,’ as in:

White settler: Hey, what do you guys call that thing? (pointing)

Indigenous native: I’ve told you before, I have no idea what you’re saying.

White settler: ‘Pima.’ Got it, thanks.

Indigenous native: Who the fuck is this guy?

While these stories are most likely fake, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use this situation in your own writing, especially if you have multiple societies interacting with each other and you’re one of these buckwild people who craft individual languages.

Bonus points if you never, ever specifically point out that that some town name in Society A actually means What the fuck are you talking about? in Society B’s language, and instead just like that little tidbit simmer. Until twenty years later when someone figures it out on their own and tweets about it and suddenly your novel is getting fresh interest and sales because some nerd cracked your secret code.

Nearby Natural Features

I know, I know. We all want our fiction town and city names to mean something. To be interpreted. To add an extra layer to the world building and signal something to the reader. And sometimes – a lot of the time, probably – this is the route you want to take, especially if the location is integral to the plot.

On the other hand, the capitol of Utah is Salt Lake City. Because there’s a big fucking salt lake nearby.

Guess what you can find in Big Lake, Minnesota?

Or what sort of trees grow in Aspen, Colorado?

I think naming a few of your locations like this adds a certain taste of reality to your story. Unless the world you’re creating has, like, a team of writers and creators whose sole purpose is to give every single location a meaningful and layered name, sometimes you’re going to need to toss in a Cliffside or a Seabreeze or a Big Oaks because once upon a time a bunch of exhausted travelers gave up the ghost and decided to make town next to a bunch of shady trees.

What Used To Be There

You know what’s even better than a town called Big Oaks surrounded by a bunch of oak trees? A town called Big Oaks that doesn’t have a single oak tree in sight.

Where did the trees go? Were they torn down? Did they die? Did the people who name this place want to plant oak trees but it they sucked at planting trees and none of them took? Is the town actually surrounded by maple trees and the people who named the town had no fucking idea?

The possibilities are endless!

Name Everything After Some Invading POS That is Super Dead and Maybe Never Even Went There

For a country that fought a pretty bitter war so that its people didn’t have to give a shit about royal weddings or funerals or whatever, there sure are a lot of places in the United States named after English royalty. French royalty, too, now that I think about it. And then there’s a bunch of counties that actually have ‘King’ or ‘Prince’ in the actual name. There’s a whole ass county in Virginia (named after Queen Elizabeth I) called King and Queen County. Did any of these people ever come to the US?

If your world contains a colonizing situation and you’re stuck trying to figure out what to name your eighth town today, name it anything and claim it’s the name of some stuffy, dead royal who never even saw the lands he (or she! #girlboss) stole.

Pure Vibes

This one is by far the most important.

You’ve got the primary location for your story, and you’ve picked a name. On almost all levels, it is perfect. Not only does it reference a super important battle that happened in one of your protagonist’s backstory, it also cleverly means sad song in Russian which is a running theme of your story and also your grandmother spoke Russian. This town name has everything.

And you hate it.

It doesn’t stick in your mind. Or, it does stick in your mind but primarily because of how angry you get every time you think of it. It’s perfect, it should work! Why doesn’t it work?

It’s the vibes. The vibes are all wrong. It’s got a beat you can’t dance to. The city is in the south, it’s hot there all the time, but this name you’ve picked makes you feel cold and dark. Or you’re primarily dealing with the city at night, following the creatures lurking in the shadows, and this otherwise perfect name is simply too happy and bright.

Just because you can’t pin down exactly why you don’t like a name you have chosen doesn’t mean you have to stick with it. My best piece of advice, though, is to sit with for a couple of weeks. Use it, get used to typing it and seeing it in print. Sometimes, after repeated use, it becomes the exact right name through association.

But after two weeks if it still doesn’t sit right dump it in the trash. This is your world you’re creating and you’re not at the point yet where you have to think about attracting agents and publishers and readers. You’re writing for you, so if you don’t like it, fuck it.

You’re Getting Florida Wrong

I lived squat in the middle of America’s Inflamed Penis for thirteen years so I know what I’m talking about. And I’m not even going to go into subtle or sophisticated things, mostly because those things don’t exist in Florida. All I’m talking about are barebones facts that you can Google in ten seconds and still I’ve seen so many movies and shows get them wrong. I mean, I get it, I don’t want to be thinking about Hurricane Alley anymore than I have to, either, but come on, this stuff isn’t hard.

All of this is once again bubbling up to the surface because I’ve watched The Sandman on Netflix which managed to hit, like, every single one of my pet peeves even though Neil Gaiman swears he likes Florida for whatever unhinged reason ANWAY I will be referencing the show but I will be keeping it very vague and as spoiler-free as possible because that’s not the point of this article. The point is I am entirely burnt out on Florida but if you fuck up the basics I will kill you with the complimentary shiv they gave me when I moved in.

There Are No Hills In Florida

It’s a motherfucking swamp, people. The highest elevation point in Florida is Britton Hill in Paxton. It is 345 feet above sea level and the lowest high point of any state in the country. Most of the time if you’re going up at all it means you’re going across an overpass or have somehow found yourself on top of one of Florida’s many landfills. Or you’re in the Magic Kingdom. Did you know the whole theme park sits something like twenty feet higher than the surrounding area, because Walt wanted to built ‘utilidors’ underneath for the employees? We’ll get to why he did that in our next segment.

If you can’t film in Florida or simply don’t want to – and again, I get it – you need to pick the absolute flattest area you can find. No elevation changes. No fucking hills. The only thing rolling in Florida are all the elderly New Yorkers who didn’t notice the stop sign because they were too busy actively dying.

There Are No Basements In Florida

Florida doesn’t have basements. You know what Florida does have?

A fucking water table.

I’ve seen this now in both The Sandman and Doctor Who, so maybe this is mostly an English misunderstanding. Oh, as long as I’m in the general area anyway, Brits who are planning to go to Disney World or Universal? Put on sunscreen. At least SPF 50. Reapply every couple hours. I know the sun in England is merely a suggestion but in Florida it actually does stuff, primarily make you sweat buckets and give you skin cancer. All of the most hideous sunburns I have ever seen in my life have been on once-white people speaking English in incomprehensible accents. I have to imagine that if any of you chose to visit Australia you’d simply burst into flames on touchdown.

Remember how the Magic Kingdom is higher than everything else? That’s because Walt wanted to build underground tunnels for employees to get from one side of the park to the other without breaking immersion because if a child was in Tomorrowland and saw a cowboy he’d simply go mad. He had to put the tunnels on ground level and then build the park on top because if he actually put the tunnels underground employees would be swimming to their thirty-five minute lunch break with their complimentary Florida shiv in their teeth to gank any gators that would definitely also be down there.

Don’t write basements into your script.

Florida Is Fucking Huge

Seeing how this one only popped up in The Sandman I’m going to chalk this up to your standard ‘Europeans Don’t Understand How Large The US Is.’

It’s Fucking Large.

Without getting into any real spoilers, in The Sandman characters have to drive from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to an area around Cordele, Georgia. One of the characters says they can make that drive in three hours.

Maybe if she was planning on going a hundred miles an hour up I-75 (she isn’t, by the way. She ends up giving the wheel to an old man who definitely was doing 55 mph and getting tailgated the whole time, which makes that particular detail the most correct yet). You can look on Google maps and see it takes five hours. And it’s tedious as fuck because, as previously stated, Florida is flat. All the highways are just flat, straight roads through trees and sound barriers and more trees and more sound barriers and the occasional lake and sometimes a town but mostly sound barriers. Sometimes a supercar or – far more likely – a suped up Honda flies past you going thirty over the speed limit and that livens things up for about six seconds and then you’re back to staring at the back of the pickup in front of you for another three hundred miles while praying you don’t fall asleep to your true crime podcast.

Florida Doesn’t Issue Front End Plates

Florida Doesn’t Issue Front End Plates.

Florida Doesn’t Issue Front End Plates.

Florida Doesn’t Issue Front End Fucking Plates.

This is the one. The stupid little detail that drives me into a completely irrational and inconsolable rage every single time I see it. Every time there’s a car featured in ‘Florida’ that front end license plate is always so prominently featured to the point where I think that everybody knows Florida doesn’t have them and is doing it to screw with me, specifically. We all have that thing, right? It’s not just me? We all have that stupid little thing that pops up in our lives occasionally and suddenly you’re going Super Saiyan on your unsuspecting and frankly exhausted friends who have heard this all before half a dozen times and don’t feel like dealing with your spittle and tears?

Right?

Right?

Bonus Fact: Gators? Just Don’t Go Over There

I used to live near a state park that had a natural lazy river. You rented a tube and got in the water and let the current drag you through a whole bunch of overgrown trees and banana spiders. You knew it was time to get out when you hit a bridge.

I went with a friend one time and after chilling down the river we hit the bridge. As we were crossing it, my friend suddenly cooed and pointed. Sitting in the river, maybe ten feet from where we had gotten out of the water, was a baby alligator sunning itself on a rock. I’m talking a foot and a half, maybe two feet long.

It. Was. Adorable. We stood there and gawked at it and took pictures for probably five minutes. Long enough for a couple of women who had been behind us to catch up. As they were climbing out of the water we waved them over to ‘come see the cute baaaaabeeee.’

See, my friend and I thought these women were fellow locals. The park was far enough away from the tourist attractions to avoid that kind of attention. So these women rushed up to us, probably expecting to see some baby deer or some shit, and it takes them a few seconds to figure out what we’re pointing at. It’s at that point that their looks of excitement turn to absolute gobsmacked horror. One of the women turns to us and asks in the most posh English accent I’ve ever heard:

“Is that an alligator?”

What is it with the English and Florida? Wait, England, do you like Florida? Like…like like it? Because you can have it, if you want. We’re not using it for anything important.

Anyway, we confirmed that yes, of course, it’s an alligator, and if there had been a roof over our heads these women would have gone through it. Apparently the fact that this was a NATURAL STATE PARK had slipped their attention and they thought…I don’t know, the lazy river was surrounded by alligator barriers, or something?

Point of fact, the launch pad at Cape Canaveral is surrounded by alligator barriers. They are twelve feet high and curved outward because alligators are actually good climbers. But I digress.

Gators are, for the most part, fat lazy sausage babies who don’t want to have to fight for their food. They hardly ever attack full grown humans because we’re too much hassle. All you have to do to stay safe around gators is leave them alone.

Oh, and as long as you’re avoiding stuff in Florida, don’t make eye contact with bachelorette parties.

Help, I’m Trapped on Vampire TikTok!

I don’t even know how I got here in the first place. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to go back to watching cute animals and couples pulling pranks on each other. This is not what I signed up for.

And yeah, I think they’re real vampires? I went through a whole phase of people pretending to be vampires, but if these people are pretending they are selling the shit out of it.

This whole thing started because I somehow drifted into BookTok. I didn’t think I’d ever end up there. Minute long clips of people sitting and staring at their camera and pointing at book titles they think I should read? No, thank you. Except then I came across this woman, I don’t even remember her name or tag, but there she was, sitting on her bed, trying to explain why she was Team Edward and I’m like…huh? Is it 2009 all over again? What is happening?

Turns out what’s happening is a bunch of the teens got into Twilight out of nowhere and these tiny little children are making all the same points we did fifteen fucking years ago.

Yeah, I was a fan of Twilight when I was a teenager. A big fan. I read all the books and saw all the movies and I had t-shirts and wrote embarrassing fanfics. Fucking sue me. I was a lonely and horny fourteen year old girl with no friends and no social skills so no one was going to date me in real life. I had to make my own fun.

Also, full disclosure: I started out Team Jacob because he seemed less creepy, but switched over to Team Edward after the whole imprinting thing because fuck, what the fuck is that, even?

So, anyway, I got dragged into BookTok kicking and screaming because these new fourteen-year-olds were talking about Twilight like they had just created it themselves and it was sort of fascinating. It was all the same fights and discussions I’d had back on LiveJournal in the day but they didn’t even know they were retreading worn paths. I kept thinking, pretty soon one of them is going to discover the connection to Fifty Shades of Gray and they’re all going to shit themselves on camera.

I never got that far, because the algorithm started pushing me away. And not back to the safe harbors of Australian rescue bats getting fed bananas, either. It was pushing me further down the rabbit hole. And at first I didn’t mind.

Videos started popping up about other vampire books. Mostly books I hadn’t even heard of. Some of them were actually kind of good, but I think I DNF’d more than half of them. It’s another reason I’d stayed away from BookTok in the first place. Most of these books that get all hyped up turned out to be poorly written or downright stupid. I did read a pretty good one about Dracula living on the dark side of the moon. It made no sense but it was funny, at least.

After a couple of days I noticed my entire FYP was nothing but Vampire BookTok. Even if I went searching for cute animal videos it never seemed to change my algorithm. Never showed me videos from the people I was following, either, now that I think about it. No, it was just mostly white women sitting in pleasant and overly-decorated bedrooms gushing about the latest vampire romance and how hot Lord Pillow Longwood or whatever was. I almost just quite using TikTok.

I should have.

What I shouldn’t have done is click on one called ‘My Daily Vampire Life Part 18.’ With a title like that, I thought it was a book with a fucking weird name. Instead, I was face to face (separated by the internet, thank God) with an older teenage girl, once again sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing badly applied pale makeup and clearly fake fangs discussing how hard it was for her to engage at school when she totally wanted to eat all the students and the teacher.

wtf.jpeg

Y’all, it was a solid week of these girls. A few guys, yeah, but mostly girls. And I was fascinated. I think all girls go through that witchy phase when they’re in their middle school or teen years, because adults say stuff like, ‘witches made pacts with the devil to be able to turn people into toads,’ and all girls hear is ‘witches have the sort of power you might never have in society.’ We want to believe we can look at that pervy teacher who keeps looking down our blouse when we ask for help and rip his nuts off with a simple thought.

So, same deal, right? Except these girls want to be vampires, and I get it. If you’re a vampire, you can walk down the street at night with headphones in and not have to worry someone jumping you. If you’re a vampire, they can try to jump you, and you can turn around and kill them. What a power fantasy.

The girls who worried me were the ones who didn’t really seem to understand they weren’t playing pretend anymore. You could always tell by the second or third video. It’s hard to explain, though. It’s a look in their eyes, slightly untethered. The way they say things. The tone is different. These are all teenage girls, none of them are good actors, so there’s always this ‘acting’ layer in their voice, that voice that says I’m reading from a script. Except the girls who actually believed it don’t have that tone.

Or maybe they were good actors, I don’t know.

I do know one definitely believed. And she did the thing I was afraid of – she said she was going to bait herself. Walk down dark alleys or through empty parks until someone dared try to attack her. Three days after she said that her account was gone. I still think about her, sometimes. I hope she’s okay.

Yeah, I definitely engaged with the algorithm a little too much on this. But, again, these girls were truly fascinating. Brought me back to my own weird days, wondering when Edward was going to open my window.

I was Team Jacob for Bella. No way I wanted to be a shapeshifter.

This is where things get really fucky.

I’m scrolling through my FYP. At that point it was entirely girls in pale makeup so when I saw something that wasn’t that I click on it almost out of reflex.

Again, super wish I hadn’t.

It was three people, not one, and they were on a subway train, not in some bedroom. At first, I didn’t even understand how it had gotten shown to me. It was just three people coming back from the club, making the sort of TikTok where it’s just them hanging all over each other and trading nonsense. I let it cycle three times, trying to figure out what the fuck, and then I finally noticed it.

One of the men smiles, and he has fangs.

Not Spirit Halloween fangs, at this point I’d seen enough of those to pick them out. No, these were his teeth. His actual teeth. And his two canine teeth are long. I don’t know how he wasn’t constantly shredding his bottom lip they were so long. I couldn’t tell with the other two, the video kept swinging around and they wouldn’t stop talking.

It was weird.

And then the weirdness kept on coming. The girls on edge of their beds faded out, and these new videos filled in the gaps. Just people going about their lives, really, except all the videos were at night and the pale skin and long fangs were real.

The one that finally made me realize something was really, actually, definitely wrong was the breakup one. Of course I’ve seen plenty of TikToks about messy breakups, they’re everywhere. Apparently actual vampires are making these, too, because it was like every single other one. Phone set up on the dashboard of some car. He had gotten her a surprise and wanted to show off her romantic reaction, I guess. Except she took one look in the bag and lost her shit. It was a ring with sapphires, you see, and he should know that she likes rubies. She starts ranting at him.

You never fucking listen to me. I tell you all the time the sort of shit I like but you always buy the stuff you like. You like sapphires, I hate blue! Do you ever see me wearing blue! No! Five hundred years of this, fuck, five! Hundred! And you’re still buying me the wrong shit!

He punches her in the face.

It’s a little awkward, because they’re still sitting in a car, but his fist just snaps forward, almost too fast too see, and cuts across her face. Pushes her into the window. Blood sprays everywhere. The sort of hit where, if you or I had taken it, we’d be going to the emergency room immediately.

Instead, this woman just spits blood and goes back to screaming at him. Like nothing happened.

Again. The woman was ranting at her boyfriend of apparently five hundred years, he uses all his strength to jab her across the face hard enough that her neck snapped to the side and blood went everywhere, and instead of freaking out or, you know, dying, she simply went back to screaming at him. About the jewels. Not about getting punched. She didn’t seem to care about that. Didn’t even feel it.

I’ve seen them fighting a lot, now. Physically. Always doing things a human shouldn’t be able to do.

I’ve seen them singing karaoke, showing off fangs. Sometimes those fangs are tinted red.

I’ve seen them laughing as they run down the street, phone occasionally pointed to the sky. Running home before they’re caught out in the sun.

I’ve seen them kill people.

I almost reported the first one. Three women. They were flirting with him. Then their teeth sunk in. It took him a few seconds to understand what was going on. By the time it occurred to him to scream he was dead.

I don’t think these are fake. They’re not good enough to be fake, you know? When they talk to each other, it doesn’t feel scripted. They interrupt each other. The camera sometimes isn’t pointed at the most interesting thing.

I almost reported that first one. But I was afraid. I never engage with these videos besides watching them. I’m an interloper, and they don’t know I’m here. But what if I reported it? Would they know?

Would they find me?

The algorithm won’t let me leave. Doesn’t seem to matter what other videos I watch or like or comment on, or who I follow, it’s always these same videos. Nothing else. Why does it keep showing me these? What does it want me to do? Because if TikTok thinks I’m going to buy a piece of wood from Home Depot, sharpen it into a stake, and go after them it’s buggier than a New York City dumpster.

Maybe it’s a warning. That’s how I take it, anyway. I don’t go outside after dark, anymore. I don’t know how to tell my friends to stay in, too, without sounding like I’ve gone off the deep end.

I thought wanted this to end. I thought I wanted help to fix the app’s algorithm and get me back to happy animal videos. Now I’m not so sure. I need to know where they are. What they’re doing. What they look like. I watch every single one in my feed.

I am afraid, now that I know. But not as afraid as suddenly not knowing.

Tree House of Horror

When he wasn’t in class for the third day in a row, Sabrina went over to his house. Tried to, anyway. She rounded the corner onto his street and saw a couple of cop cars, one in the driveway and one on the street. So he wasn’t home, and his parents didn’t know where he was, either. As she diverted course, walking through the intersection quickly and hoping no one would come out of the house and see her, she figured it out. If his parents didn’t know where he was, she did.

Sabrina hadn’t been in these woods since middle school, but she followed the path like it had only been yesterday. All the old markers were still there. The rock with the graffiti. The downed tree, laid across another downed tree. The little chips Nick had carved into the tree bark with his dad’s Swiss army knife, back before his father had found out he had it and beat him with an inch of his life. He’d been out of school three days. You couldn’t really see the chips unless you knew what you were looking for.

Finally, there it was. The tree house, just a cube of boards with some holes cut in the sides for windows surrounded a tree trunk twenty feet in the air. Boards nailed to the tree acted as a ladder, and a final hole cut into the floor let you in. Nick used to have all sorts of stuff hidden up there. She didn’t know what I looked like now, although she could see old blankets pinned to cover the windows.

“Nick?” she called. “It’s Sabrina.”

The wind hustled past her, making her wish she had something more than her knit sweater. School had already been out now for an hour. It was late fall, the days so short. Already the sun was close to the horizon, cutting through trees to the west. Usually she liked the fall. Even now, like this, the forest was quite pretty. A few firs stood defiantly green while the rest of the trees were almost bare, their yellow and red and orange leaves carpeting the ground.

A sound made her whip her head north. Eyes scanning, she found nothing but the forest and the cold.

But she had been sure…

“Nick, if you’re up there, I’m coming up.”

He was up there. A fact she didn’t know until she finished climbing the ladder with near-numb fingers and too-large feet and heaved herself up onto dangerously creaking boards. She pushed herself in, huffing and puffing from the exertion of climbing twenty feet into the air, the whole while thinking she must have been wrong. The only sounds had been hers.

When she finally lifted her head to look around she found him sitting in the corner.

Sabrina gasped, flinching away from him.

“Hey, Bri.”

“What the fuck,” she breathed out, leaning against the tree house floor with her palms. She looked up at him again. Pale, gaunt, bags under his eyes. Still Nick. He gave her a little wave.

Sabrina heaved herself up. “What are you doing up here, Nick? And why didn’t you answer me? Didn’t you hear me calling?”

Nick shifted in his corner and nodded. He was sitting on a chair cushion stolen from his grandmother’s house and wrapped in a couple of blankets.

“I heard,” was all he said.

Sabrina lightly threw up her hands before sitting next to him.

“What the fuck is going on, Nick? You send me that bizarre text and then you just up and disappear for three days? Don’t answer your phone, don’t respond to any messages…”

Nick swallowed. “My parents have…had…a location app downloaded onto it. I smashed it and tossed it into the river.”

Is that all this is? More family drama?

They’d been friends too long. He read it on her face and grew sullen.

“They don’t have anything to do with this. I didn’t want to be found.”

“Why did you come here, then?”

“I didn’t think you remembered this place.”

Her turn to make a face. Not remember it? After all the time they’d spent here together? Every time his parents fought. Every time her stepdad decided to get…weird. Entire summers passed with the two of them living above these woods.

“Just because I have new friends doesn’t mean I forgot everything that came before them.”

Nick sniffed and turned to stare toward the window.

“Could have fooled me.”

Sabrina sighed and put her hands up against the back of her neck, as much to warm them as to try to work out her frustration through meaningless physical movement. Nick was alive. He said he wasn’t here because of his parents. She didn’t believe him. And she wasn’t going to have this conversation again.

“Glad you’re okay,” she said, standing. “If you get too cold you can come to my place. Camp out in the basement. Gary’s on the road again and Mom won’t care.”

She was about to climb down the ladder when he spoke again, his voice barely more than a whisper of branches against a window in the night.

“I’m not okay.”

Sabrina sat next to him again, shifting to try to be comfortable on the cold boards. For the first time, she noticed Nick was clutching a photo album.

“It’s not your family?” she asked.

Nick shook his head.

“Bullies at school?”

Again.

“What is it, then?”

“You won’t believe me.”

“Maybe not,” she agreed, leaning forward. “Maybe I will. You won’t know until you tell me.”

He opened the photo album and pulled out a stack of pictures. Too quick. His hand was shaking as he gave her the stack. Sabrina stared at him as she took them.

Nick was desperate for someone to believe.

Believe what?

“Baby pictures?”

Nick didn’t say anything, only switched his glance from her to the stack to her again. Sabrina swallowed a sigh and looked through them.

All pictures of Nick. They’d be friends so long, she was in some of them. At first, baby pictures. Sitting in a high chair. Naked in the sink. In his mother’s arms. Older, then, more than a toddler. Dressed as Batman for Halloween. First day of school, the name tag with NICK written in a child’s handwriting taking up most of his chest. On a bike in front of his house. He was ten or eleven in the next picture. Out in the snow, posing on a snowboard.

That was the last of the real photos, glossy and fingerprinted. The other half of the stack were all on paper, printed from phone pics. All from the last year, too, Sabrina realized as she thumbed through them. She went through the stack twice. Thought about trying to joke, saying something like, are these for a school project or something? Saw the look on his face and decided against it. She didn’t want him to shut down again.

“What am I looking for?” she asked, straining to keep her voice neutral.

“Behind. Look behind.”

Slowly, she flipped through again. Whatever it was she was supposed to be seeing, she wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t there at all. She knew he’d been depressed. Who the fuck wasn’t? She was on her own mix of anti-anxiety meds. But maybe this went beyond depression. They were both seventeen, now, Nick almost eighteen. They’d learned about stuff like schizophrenia in health class last year. It didn’t start until the late teens. It could happen to either of them, now. Or maybe-

She was about to flip from the Batman picture to the first day of school picture when she saw it. Froze. Held the picture to her face, squinting.

The picture was taken outside, in front of the cluster of trees that grew between his house and the neighbors. The picture had been taken at dusk. It was hard to tell what she was seeing.

But she believed that one of the trees behind him was not a tree.

The next picture, the one taken out front of the school. Bright day. Almost too sunny. No woods behind the little boy, just other kids and the school and group of teachers chatting under the entrance awning.

One of the teachers looked odd. Too thin. Washed out. Sabrina couldn’t make out his face.

The first picture, the Halloween picture, she brought back to the front. Yes, yes, it was entirely possible that the thing that wasn’t a tree could have been a man. A very tall man in black. She went back to the beginning.

Sitting in a high chair. A smudge in the shadows of the hall.

Naked in the sink. A shadow through the kitchen window.

In his mother’s arm. A curious stranger facing the camera, far back behind the crowd.

On a bike in front of his house. In the woods again.

Out in the snow, posing on a snowboard. Peeking out from behind a tree.

This…man, this thing, was in the new photos, too. Even the ones taken in the cafeteria. A couple of them she really had to search, but she always found the man.

Sabrina looked up at Nick. His eyes were watery, but the look was of clear relief.

“You see him?”

Sabrina nodded and he let out a single sob before pulling himself up short. He wiped as his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt and let out a shaky laugh.

“A part of me thought I was going crazy.”

“Maybe it’s some weird artifact? A problem with the camera?”

But she knew that couldn’t be true. Maybe the ones of his younger self were taken with the same camera, but the newer ones were all taken with phone cameras. Different ones, too, she recognized a couple of the pics as ones she had taken.

“He’s not just in the photos,” Nick said.

Sabrina had to swallow a few times before speaking. Her mouth had gone completely dry.

“What?”

Nick nodded. “I used to see him all the time. Out of the corner of my eye. Through foggy windows. I was never able to see him clearly, you know? But I knew he was there.”

“Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“When I was a kid, I thought he was an imaginary friend. He didn’t frighten me. I…I got used to having him around. Then, one day, I stopped seeing him.”

Sabrina flipped through the photos, splitting them between old and new. “Around ten?”

“Uh huh. Figured I’d grown out of him. Missed him for a while. Then I forgot about him. Then…about a year ago…I started seeing him again. This time, I didn’t say anything because I was afraid.”

“Afraid you were losing it?”

“Yes, and…” Nick sniffled and wiped at his nose. “Afraid of him. He’s not the same as when I was a kid. Back then, I never got any sort of feeling from him. He was just sort of around. I used to call him the lonely man, because that’s what he felt like to me. Like that kid who hangs outside the group but is too scared to actually say anything. Then he came back and…it’s so different. I don’t understand. Every time I see him, I feel this…chill up the spine. I know, I know, such a trope, but I do, I really do. And, and, God, this feeling of…this feeling of hate. And desire. And…and I don’t know…”

He covered with his face with his hands and sobbed a few more times. Sabrina shifted to sit right next to him, patting him on his back. She’d never seen him like this before.

A year? An entire fucking year?

Had there been signs? Had she missed them? The sun was almost gone and in the new darkness of the room she played out the last year. Hadn’t he seemed a little more jumpy? A little more pale? Could she think of times she had found him staring at nothing, lost in his own mind?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Nick collected himself. Wiped off his face. Gave her a smile and patted her knee.

“He’s coming closer. He’s almost here. And I think he wants to take me.”

Sabrina struggled to find words. “Take…where?”

“I don’t know. I don’t…” He trailed off, trying to pull himself together again. He only spoke when he was sure he wouldn’t cry. “Three days ago I was getting ready for school. It was exactly like a horror movie. I was in the shower. I rinsed my hair. I opened my eyes and he was there, Sabrina. On the other side of the shower curtain. He’s never been that close. Never. I pulled the curtain open and-”

Despite herself, Sabrina held her breath.

“Nothing. He was gone. But he was there, I know it, I saw him, so close I could have touched him…he could have touched me…I knew I had to leave. Hide. Go somewhere no one else knew of.”

Despite herself, Sabrina asked, “If this…thing…has been stalking for you years, you really thought it wouldn’t find you here?”

Nick gave her a small smile. “It’s been three days, right? And I’m still here. I haven’t seen him once. I-”

A sound. From outside. A single footfall on the leaves.

“Oh, no.”

Sabrina patted his arm. “It’s got to be a rabbit or something. Squirrel, running across-”

But panic was spreading across Nick’s face like ice across a fresh lake in December. Pale. Stiff. Unstoppable.

“No, no, no, no.”

“Nick?”

“I can feel him. Oh, shit, Sabrina, he’s here.”

But Sabrina didn’t feel anything.

Or…

Had it gotten colder? But not on the outside. Their body heat had filled up the little wooden tree house and her skin under the sweater was warm to the touch.

Inside her. Inside it was freezing. Her stomach turning to stone and her heart writhing. Ice was touching every rib.

“It’s not real,” she said.

“I think it is,” he said, clutching at his stomach. “This is the worst I’ve ever felt it. I feel like I’m going to blow chunks. My heart is going to stop. Think…I can’t think, can you think?”

Yes.

But she didn’t say it. Suddenly she couldn’t form words.

“How did it find me? Three days, and it…”

They locked eyes, each realizing at the same time. Sabrina forced the signals to carry from her brain to her mouth.

“I would never,” she managed.

“I know,” he said. “Not on purpose.”

Her eyes drifted down to the photos, now scattered on the floor. Skipping over them, one by one, her mouth slowly dropping in skittering realization.

Every photo. I was there for every one.

If not in it, then nearby. Their mothers had been best friends. They grew up together. Bathed together as kids. Trick or treated together. Rode bikes together.

The gap. We pulled away. Didn’t see each other. We weren’t friends again…until last year.

Nick swallowed hard. “It wants me…but it follows you.”

His eyes went to the space above her head, the space behind her, and went wide. Wider. So wide she couldn’t see the whites anymore.

Sabrina clenched his fists in hers and refused to turn around. She didn’t want to see.

The Minor Annoyances of Reading

Books With Uneven Page Edges

I looked it up, and apparently this is called ‘Deckle Edge.’ Deckle was the device used in old-timey papermaking that limited the size of the sheet. Because it was old-timey, it sort of sucked, and you got these uneven sheet lengths.

Now, of course, the deckle is obsolete. I’m assuming papermaking is now digital, because every-fucking-thing is now digital. The iPaper is out there shitting out perfectly identical sheets of paper every second of every day and we should all be grateful because deckle edge blows chunks.

Obviously I’m not angry at actual antique books with the uneven edges. That would be like getting angry at vinyl albums for the fuzzy sound and the pops. It was the best that could be done at the time. What I do get angry with are books printed in the modern era, given the deckle edge on purpose to make them look old.

Fucking. Why.

It makes it so much harder to thumb through the pages. I am in the middle of a thought, here, quite literally in the middle of a sentence, and my brain can only stretch out the last word for so long before it begins humming in idle mode while I desperately try to separate two uneven pages from each other with my thumbnail which is harder than it should be because not only are these pages unevenly cut they’re also, like, chopped or something so the edges aren’t smooth, oh, no, of course not, they’re rough and clinging to each other like the ice cubes in your lemonade, ready to smash into your face as soon as you have the glass high enough.

And by the time I’ve finally flipped the page, I’ve totally lost the plot. Fuck.

The worst part is that they’re insidious! The inspiration for this post is that I asked for a copy of On the Road for Christmas and I didn’t realize it had deckle edges until I got it! The pictures don’t show the edges and no one is going to bother to list it anywhere and, I mean, I don’t even understand why this thing has deckle edges. It was released in the fifties! That’s not that old!

I Have Never Once Gotten A Book Back After I’ve Lent It To Someone

Has anyone? Ever? Or do we all have sleazy friends that we can’t even trust with a quarter pound of black ink on pulp?

The one that hurt the worst, for me, was the first copy of The Stand I owned. It wasn’t anything special, just the late nineties Signet paperback edition with the black and blue cover and minimalist art on the front. I’d been going through a Stephen King phase for a couple of years by the point I finally read The Stand. I was barely a teenager and apocalyptic stuff completely freaked me out beyond anything I could handle so I was steering clear. I think I caught Left Behind on the television once without any context and it really did some damage. Now I have a whole page listing all my end-of-the-world short stories. That’s growth!

Anyway, the summer after sophomore year of high school I finally decided I could handle it and read the whole thing in the space of three days. Like, wake up and read. And nothing else. I grew up in Massachusetts with no central air, so every summer my dad would put window unit air conditioners in the bedroom windows. We weren’t allowed to run them during the day, only at night so we could sleep (because the sound of a mid-two thousands window unit chunking through air with all the subtlety of an overblown Hans Zimmer score makes for some peaceful sleep). I didn’t have, you know, friends in high school, so those three days and nights glued to this crappy paperback are some of strongest memories I have. In bed, close to midnight, the room deliciously cold, the air conditioner singing the song of its people directly in my ear, desperate for sleep but equally in need of the next chapter.

And then in college I gave that copy to some ‘friend’ who turned out to be a massive bitch and I never saw her or it again. Whoops. I got myself a new copy of the same Signet printing, but I know it’s not the same one. This is why my new policy is ‘No, you can’t have that. Get a fucking library card.’

“What Are You Reading? Oh? What’s It About?”

It’s about me putting my foot so far up your ass you can see how silky-smooth my heels are after weeks of scrubbing and lotion.

I’m reading.

You know what I want to do?

Continue reading.

You know what I don’t want to fucking do?

Talk about reading.

Did I miss something? Did I miss the exact moment we, two complete strangers in an airport, became a book club of two? Because no one poured me a glass of Pinot and I think that’s just really fucking rude. So unless you want to march on down to the Chili’s Express and get me an eleven dollar and sixty-three cent glass of house white, you can go back to your uncomfortable seat and mind your p’s and q’s, Janet.

Special shout out to the creepy lady in the aisle seat who waited until I was nice and pinned into the window seat and we were thousands of feet in the air before asking about what book I was reading and using that as a segue to trying to sell me on Jesus.

Books With Movie or Television Tie-Ins

Most people like to be smug by vehemently preferring ‘original covers’ to movie tie-in covers, but I like to go a different route to fill my smugness quota:

I don’t fucking care what’s on the cover.

Look at all you people with your opinions on things I deem stupid or trivial. I can’t believe you’re wasting your time and energy  being mad that your book has a ‘Soon to be a major motion picture!’ sticker on it. I am positively shocked that anyone would bother writing a four hundred word tumblr post on why the movie cover of The Great Gatsby is a crime against the humanities compared with the original. Ooooh, look at me, I’m not getting mad about such frivolities! I direct all of my energy at very important matters, such as paper edges or the height of paperbacks.

Not only do I get to be smug about my opinion, I get to be smug about the fact that my opinion is so much more chill than your opinion. It’s a fucking smugness layer cake, and it’s delicious.

Also, my copy of The Dead Zone has Christopher Walken on it, so I don’t know, I think movie tie-in covers might be okay.

Same As It Ever Was

The problem with being an immortal was there was no such thing as a ‘mid-life’ crisis. It was just a crisis. And they happened over and over.

It was both hard and easy to leave a life.

She was over it, but she didn’t hate it. Not at all of it. Her partner. Her children. Her friends. Attachments. Sometimes she would wish she’d never walked away from them. Sometimes.

It was easy to become a persecuted woman. Die. Wait. Her favorite had been during the witch trials. It had been so easy to start the rumors. No one had traced them back to her. They’d ‘drowned’ her in a matter of weeks. Hours later, in the dark of the night, she’d climbed out of the lake and walked away.

That was five hundred years ago. Now, today, at this very moment, she was Stacey Adams in Sacramento, California. Supposedly forty-five, married to Don, three kids. A degree in philosophy she never actually used. She’s a dental hygienist. Or, she was.

It’s always the dumbest thing that trigger the crisis. Some half-snatched sentence at the market. A bad piece of art. A dream, barely remembered. This time, she was halfway down the canned vegetables aisle in the Safeway, trying to decide if she wanted to do the seven bean soup that night or the next. Maybe I should call Don and ask what he had for lunch. She always seemed to make the same thing he had for lunch, although she doubted he would have found a place selling seven bean soup.

Stacey was standing in front of the pinto beans and texting her husband when “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads came on. In seconds it was all over.

It was potentially the most ridiculous trigger she’d ever experienced. The song was over forty years old. She had been hearing it off and on for all that time. In fact, it had come out during her last life. Five years of hearing it on the radio or on MTV and it didn’t set her off once. That life she had bailed on early because she’d come home from work and found her husband with another woman in their bed.

And then this life. The one with the degree in philosophy, and Don, and the kids. Of course it had played. On the radio. In stores. In movies. She’d sung along with it. Up until now, it had just been a song.

By the time it was over, Stacey knew the soup meant nothing. She was leaving.

She finished shopping, anyway. It was all so fake. Mechanical. A set on television. She bought the beans. Make the soup, don’t make the soup, didn’t matter anymore. She found herself buying a bunch of Don’s favorite foods. Rocky road ice cream. Pecan sandies. Those awful frozen meals that he loved so much but to Stacey all tasted of salt. He’d need them. For comfort.

Her kids were already out of the house, the last one still in her first semester of college. She got their favorite snacks, too, to put in the back of the pantry. They would all come home when they heard the news.

The ‘how’ was getting harder and harder, but Stacey never entered a life without an exit strategy.

She drove home with the radio off, humming to herself. It all seemed so fake. How could she have let herself get so deep into such a situation? Boring. Mundane. A dental hygienist for the love of God. Was this really what she had wanted thirty years ago? How? What had been going on in her head that she thought a house in the suburbs was the thing for her?

It was so perfect when she arrived home. Too perfect. Sterile. Cold. Piercing. The lawn cut short. The begonias in front of the porch. The perfectly swept floors and vacuumed rugs and the pictures, so many pictures, endless pictures of the family on the walls, but every picture seemed exactly the same. Smiles. Were they real? Was any of it real?

It was real to them, she reminded herself, staring at one picture in particular. It was sitting on top of the baby grand in the front window. Her and Don and Jackson and Dakota and Savanna. At the beach. Savanna and Dakota are clutching at her, either side, overlapping arms. Don is holding Jackson by the foot, upside down. They look happy.

I was happy.

But she’s not, anymore. Just like that.

As she unpacks the groceries she wonders if regular humans have the same feelings. They must, she decides, or David Byrne wouldn’t have written that song in the first place. But maybe they fight it more. Probably, or people would be moving on every day. All the time. Some don’t, obviously. Some must find peace in their lives. Find that particular way that will let them continue with what they have built. Others don’t, but stay anyway. Burn at their houses from the inside out until all is consumed.

She won’t do that. She won’t stay. The people who stay have fifty more years left, on the outside. Nothing. Easy.

Her? She doesn’t know. She has been here since the first human. She thinks she will be here until the last. That is a long time to pretend that she isn’t over it.

The duffel bag has all she needs. New ID, passport, cash, clothes, keys to a car stashed at a storage garage on the other side of town. The knife. A normal human being simply cannot live after a certain amount of blood has left the body.

She is not normal.

She makes it gruesome. It is the kindest thing she can do. There will be no real question for her family. They will not suffer doubt. They will know she is dead. They will mourn, and they will move on, like so many other families have before them.

Same as it ever was.

The Rings of Money

The only thing I’m salty about with this new Lord of the Rings show on Amazon is the motherfucking budget and how The Wheel of Time obviously got a pittance in comparison.

And yeah, I fucking know, okay, that The Wheel of Time isn’t The Fucking Lord of the God Damned Rings (original title). It’s not. And if you think the two are comparable then you need to step away from your high piles of unread books and go talk to literally anyone who actually enjoys sports. Literally any sport it does not matter. Go up to that person, make an appropriate amount of small talk (three to five minutes, acceptable topics: weather, the President of Finland, any sort of ‘can you believe it’s already September’ sort of statement) and then ask them their opinions on Mat Cauthon.

Don’t! Explain! Who that is!

Instead, follow up with a question about their opinions on Samwise Gamgee.

I don’t even care if they have any opinions on Sam, the point is they will recognize the name. The Lord of the Rings has sort of entered the same space as Star Wars. Liking the movies doesn’t make you a nerd, it makes you human. Reading any of the books, though, makes you a Super Mega Ultra Nerd.

I am also not directly comparing Mat and Sam, please do not fucking @ me.

The Wheel of Time show looked okay. Fine. You know what it looked better than? Xena: Warrior Princess. You know how old Xena: Warrior Princess is? You don’t want to. You’re only going to get depressed.

They did okay with their shitty little budget, but it was obviously shitty. It was like Amazon was paying for it with whatever money they could fish out of their collapsed employees before slapping them awake and propping them up in front of a nightmarish, ever-expanding series of boxes that will one day become sentient and devour the planet whole, ready to be shipped to the next galaxy over covered in tape advertising The Rings of Power.

Lots of shows have shitty little budgets. Lots of fantasy shows have shitty little budgets and it works just fine. I think it cost the Kelly Bluebook value of a 2017 Kia Sorrento to film all of Jessica Jones because even though she’s a superhero (question mark??) she’s just super strong. That’s the easiest shit to work around. Krysten Ritter throws a punch, cut to someone flying away. Boom. Could do that shit in my sleep.

But those fantasy shows are urban fantasy, or low fantasy. They take place on Earth, usually in modern day. You shut down a street in Toronto for a week, boom, you have your set.

The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings are both high fantasy. Strictly speaking, the main difference between low and high fantasy is that high fantasy has a much more rigid and defined magic system, but the other bigger difference is that high fantasies take place almost exclusively in some sort of magical England, with all sorts of villages and glades and, like, bogs and fens and shit. Now, the easiest and most obvious way to do high fantasy is to just build practical sets directly into New Zealand, but I think they must be running out of space or something because there was a lot of CGI in both shows and The Rings of Power looked alright and The Wheel of Time looked…

Bad. It looked bad a lot of the time, let’s just be real. And not just the computer graphics. Even the physical sets looked flimsy. Cheap.

And yet, I’m learning that apparently the budget was around $80 million? What did they spend it on? Snacks?

Oh, but The Rings of Power had a budget of anywhere between 700 million and a billion with a God damned B so, yeah, no wonder they were advertising this shit so hard. Even Game of Thrones only cost around 100 million per season.

It’s suddenly sinking in how much money goes to art. I’m not saying humans don’t deserve art, but…millions of dollars? For television shows? Flashing lights on a screen? Pixels? We are spending the GDP of smaller countries on flashing pixels that are mostly showing nonsense?

Christ on a bike. And everyone thinks mattress stores are fronts for laundering money.

I mean, they are, but I’m saying Hollywood is, too. The whole fucking thing. If you’ve ever taken a picture of your family in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, congratulations, you can now be convicted of tax fraud.

What if Rings of Power is good, actually, and Amazon has to go this hard in the paint with their money for God knows how long? Do they have an exit strategy? Or five years from now will all of their profits go to making sure Sauron’s hair is flaming exactly right or whatever? Will they have to starve their C-Suite because everyone is demanding that they hire Orlando Bloom to play a baby Legolas and it’ll just be Bloom’s face superimposed over a baby, What We Do in the Shadows style?

What if Rings of Power is so fucking in demand the entire industrial, capitalistic, nature-destroying, surveillance-state-creating company collapses in on itself and dies a bitter death because they had to spend all of their money on realistic hobbit feet.

I mean, JRR would enjoy the shit out of that, I can tell you that much.

Love Across the Universes, Part Two

Part One

Joel’s ears were ringing like he was buzzed, but a man of his size couldn’t get buzzed off two glasses of wine. He wasn’t tipsy. He was fucking confused.

Sherman leaned over the table, and Joel unconsciously followed suit.

“Every morning, I wake up in a different version of the universe,” he said.

“Every morning?”

“Yes.”

“You wake up…”

“In a different universe. Yes. Like I said, I know it sounds crazy.”

“And you said it anyway.”

“Because it’s the truth,” Sherman said. He glanced around to make sure they weren’t drawing attention before continuing. “It started almost two years ago now. At least. At first, the changes were so subtle, I don’t know how long it was happening before I noticed. And then…have you ever heard of the Mandela Effect?”

Joel sighed. “What, you mean those crazies who think they changed universes because they forgot the name of a children’s book or something?”

Sherman nodded. “Yeah, exactly like that. I didn’t actually believe I was shifting universes, not with shit like that. Probably forgot, or got confused, whatever. No, I didn’t think anything was really happening until my car changed.”

“Your car changed?”

“Same car I’d had since college. A Honda Concert hatchback. But one day I go out to the car, and it’s not a Concert. It’s a Civic. A Honda Civic. And as I’m oh-so-casually asking around, everyone calls it a Honda Civic. No one has even heard of a Concert. And neither has the internet.”

“I haven’t.”

Sherman shook his head. “They’re Civics here, too. Other stuff started popping up, every day. Brand names kept changing, I guess maybe because there’s always so many decisions on what to name shit? I don’t know. I think I’ve seen about thirty different names for Razor crackers.”

Joel had no idea what Razor crackers were supposed to be, and honestly didn’t care all that much. The good date was over. His good feelings were gone. Sherman had finally revealed that he was just another internet disappointment. At least now Joel could get Taco Bell on the way home and eat his feelings.

Sherman gave him a thin smile. “You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t.”

“You think I’m another internet crazy, and you’re at least relieved you can get Taco Bell on the way home.”

His face was painted with shock. He was sure of it. There was no amount of preparation that would have helped him keep his face entirely straight. To hear your thoughts as words from someone you’ve only just met…

“What.”

“This is the part where I really need you to not freak out.”

Joel only nodded. What the fuck was he supposed to say to that? Sherman already said he was from a different universe, and now Joel wasn’t supposed to freak out?

“This is our first date,” Sherman said, gesturing to the two of them. “But this is not the first time I’ve dated a Joel.”

A Joel. As in, one of many.

Multiple universes.

Not just a bunch of different Spider-Mans swinging over and around each other. The whole world. Everything around him.

Him.

An infinite amount of Joels.

“This is insane.”

Joel had started carrying cash to these dates for this exact reason. He pulled a handful of twenties out of his pocket, hopefully enough for the amount and tip, and dropped them on the table.

“You need therapy.”

“Joel, wait.”

He was outside on the curb long enough to get the Lyft app open before Sherman was next to him.

“Just listen to me.”

“Nice night. Think I’ll walk. Don’t follow me.”

Sherman did anyway.

“I’m sorry. I don’t like doing this part. But I think I was making things worse when I didn’t,” he said. Joel had about a half foot on him, and Sherman was practically jogging to keep up. “I realized it a few months ago. I…Joel, please…please, just stop, and give me thirty seconds…twenty seconds! Twenty seconds to convince you! And if I don’t, I’ll leave. I’ll leave you alone.”

They were at an intersection now, anyway. Joel sighed and rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hands.

“You’ve got until I can cross the street,” Joel said, nodding over his shoulder. The sign was currently counting down from twenty-three.

“Okay, that’s more than I need.” Sherman took a big breath. “Your name is Joel Jeremiah Carter. You list your birthday on the internet as November first but it’s actually the third. You think that can help you protect your identity. Your parents kicked you out at eighteen when your shitty sister outed you, but your dad secretly tries to keep in touch. You don’t know how you feel about that. You’re the only person I’ve ever met you likes plain frozen yogurt, and that’s true in every single universe I meet you in. You tell people you don’t like sitcoms, but whenever you’re sick the only thing you want to watch is…well, the show changes depending on the universe, but it’s always some show you otherwise pretend to hate.”

Friends.

The crosswalk countdown hit zero. The walk sign illuminated across the other street.

Joel didn’t move.

“How do you know all that?”

“Because in the universe I left…my universe…Joel, we were married. We met when we were in college, at a party thrown by some gross frat. I don’t know, I might be too far away from home now, maybe you never went to that party…”

“Kappa Sigma, junior year,” Joel said, barely aware he’d moved his lips at all.

Sherman nodded, his hair flying. “That’s the one. We both got dragged by stupid friends. I was hiding in the kitchen looking for an out and you followed the pizza delivery guy into the kitchen. You were going to pick a pizza and take it home with you.”

“Wow…I haven’t thought of that…I did do that. I don’t remember…”

“The first dozens of universes I passed through, we were still married. And then, one day…I woke up and you weren’t there. The odds of us meeting that night weren’t good, I guess. If you went into the kitchen here, I didn’t.”

This is insane.

But that voice was quieter. Unsure. The things Sherman knew…the instant spark they had.

“So, what, you want me to, like, come with you?”

Joel would never admit it, but it was the smile Sherman gave him at that exact moment that made him believe him. There was so much in that soft curve of the lips, the crinkle in his eyes. Affection. Gratitude. Sadness. Loneliness.

“I appreciate the offer. But you can’t. Or at least, I haven’t figured out how yet. I’m not doing this for me, Joel. I’m doing this for you. I am not the Sherman who belongs in this universe, but there is a Sherman here. And when I leave tonight, he’ll be back. He won’t remember this date, I don’t think. Tonight will be…fuzzy. But you’ll still have him matched in that app. Reach out to him tomorrow. Start fresh. Like tonight didn’t happen. Because for him, it didn’t.”

Joel hesitated, leaning back a little. Sherman put a hand on his shoulder.

“Before I said all this, it was going well, right? Really well?”

Joel said nothing, but knew the ‘yes’ was painted on his face.

“Well, imagine meeting a version of me that doesn’t have all this weird baggage.”

He couldn’t help it. He laughed.

Sherman’s hand was still on his shoulder. They both realized at the same time. Sherman pulled it away. Joel wished he hadn’t.

“Do…do you want to get a drink?” Joel asked.

After a bit of hesitation, Sherman shook his head. “I shouldn’t. I know what happens and…it hurts too much. Message him in the morning, okay? As soon as you wake up. He…I…we’re always awake before you.”

Then he was gone, working his way through the streams of people. Joel managed to follow him through the crowd with his eyes until he turned a corner.

Chase after him.

Demand more answers.

Kiss him.

Joel turned around and went to find his car.

In the middle of the night, staring at his ceiling, it was easy to believe the whole thing had been some tragic joke. This Sherman person was nothing more than a bizarre conman. The things he knew could have easily been found on the internet. Educated guesses. Emotional lies. Just another terrible internet date.

But the next morning, when he finally rolled over and sat on the side of the bed, he picked up his phone.

Love Across the Universes

For an internet date, it was going really well.

Like, really well.

Better than any of the other internet dates Joel had been on.

As he washed his hands in the bathroom, his mind drifted away from counting to twenty and instead began counting his bad times with men he found on Tinder.

There had been Damian, with the hungry eyes and the empty brain, who had insisted not ten minutes after meeting that bread and toast were not made of the same things.

Tyler, who ‘figured out he wasn’t gay’ halfway through the meal and left Joel with the bill.

That gymrat Vic who had asked way too many prying questions way too fast, like, you do not need to know my exact address before the appetizers get here, man, fuck.

And those were only the ones from the last couple of months.

“I just want someone to have a life with,” he muttered to himself in the mirror as he dried his hands. “Please tell me you sent me a normal one, this time.”

He didn’t know who he was talking to, and he didn’t much care. The man sitting out at the little two-top by the window was…well, Joel didn’t usually like talking like this, but…he was perfect.

Sherman. Cute, with short hair and an absolutely dreamy smile. Funny, charming, talkative but not too talkative. They were having an actual conversation, instead of him droning on and on about himself (too many previous to list them all) or asking normal questions and then staring directly into Joel’s eyes with the sort of intensity usually reserved for interrogations and saying absolutely nothing while Joel tried desperately to figure out how else to answer the question ‘where did you go to college’ (Garrett, three months ago). They were having fun. They were vibing.

There was a spark.

Before he went back out into the restaurant, Joel made himself take a few deep breaths. He stared at himself in the mirror again.

“Do not want this so badly you ignore the red flags,” he told himself. “They could still be there. If you see one, walk-”

The door to the bathroom swung open behind him and Joel darted out the door before he could make eye contact with whoever caught his pep talk.

All of his own good advice blew away like dandelion fluff the second he saw Sherman again. The sun was setting, and the way the light fell on his face through the window…ugh, Joel was going to melt into a puddle in the middle of this restaurant and for the rest of the night the waitstaff was going to have to direct everyone else around him.

Get it together. You’ve been burned before. Fuck.

“Hi,” Joel said, hating the way his voice squeaked.

Sherman smiled at him. “Thought maybe you fell in.”

“No, just…powdering my nose,” Joel said. He realized what that could sound like and the color drained from his face. “It was a joke. I wasn’t doing cocaine or anything. I don’t do that…I mean I did, back in college, a few times, and if you do, that’s not really a problem or anything, I-”

Sherman was laughing, but it was gentle, and as he did, he reached across the table and put his hand on Joel’s hand.

Joel died for roughly three seconds before coming back to life through sheer force of will.

“Um, anyway,” he said, opening the menu with his other hand. “Did you want dessert? They have a great pecan pie here.”

“Actually, Joel, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Happy feelings gone. The restaurant crashed down onto Joel’s head. The menu burst into flames. Joel took his hand back.

“Fuck,” he said, “You’re a republican, aren’t you?”

Genuine surprise and confusion crossed Sherman’s face. “What? No! A gay republican, how does that even work?”

“I don’t know, ask those fuckers over at the Log Cabin or whatever. Look, whatever it is just spit it out so I can order that pecan pie and eat my feelings.”

Sherman shook his head and muttered something to himself. Joel couldn’t quite hear it, but it almost sounded like it’s different every time.

“Okay,” Sherman said. He clapped his hands softly and rubbed his thighs under the table. In the way people do when they’re nervous.

Oh, fuck, this is going to be a doozy.

Joel stared at his empty wine glass.

“This is going to sound completely crazy,” Sherman said. “But, based on the way this has gone before, I think you might actually believe me.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Okay?” This wasn’t going the way he thought it would.

Sherman paused, looking like he was standing on the edge of a cliff.

“Have you ever heard of the multiverse?”

Not how he thought it would go at all.

Joel shrugged. “What, like, in the MCU?”

Sherman nodded. “Something like that, yeah. Multiple versions of the universe with variations big or small stacked on top of each other over and over and over until infinity is filled and then it starts all over.”

Joel nodded like he understood. “Okay.”

“Right, well…that’s a real thing and I’m stuck in it.”

He glanced around the restaurant, hoping that maybe someone had a sign taped to the back of their chair that would explain what the fuck was going on. He found nothing. He turned back to Sherman.

“Eh?”

Part Two on Friday