Had it Coming

Once he made sure he wasn’t leaving anything in the kitchen to catch fire Fred took his tin cup of coffee and went out to the porch.

As long as he lived, he’d never get tired of the view. It wasn’t just the rolling fields under the endless blue skies, the promise of the new day rising in the east, the grandeur of God’s love in front of him. It was that all he could see was his. His fields. His crops. The little wooden fence around the vegetable garden. The house around him, built up with his own two hands. His hands, and his wife’s. By God, he had a wife. And two children. He marveled at the thought as surely as he marveled at the view, staring down the dirt road and hoping Cassie would already be awake at her folks’ place, getting the kids ready to come home.

Fred had a life. Something he never thought he’d have twenty years ago. He began to think about his kids, and was cut off by a nearby gun shot. Incredibly close, actually. Why, whoever had fired that gun had to be…

Something wet tickled at his belly. Fred looked down to discover a hole just above where his belly button would be under his shirt. He had spilled coffee over the hole.

No, that was blood.

Reality finally caught up with the man and he sat down hard into one of the porch’s rocking chairs. Now he did spill the coffee, sloshing it over his ample belly and making that new hole burn. Fred was still staring at that hole, wondering how it had gotten there, when he heard the boots scratching on the dirt. With heavy clicks the boots climbed the stairs to his porch.

A woman stood in front of him.

She was dressed like a man, boots and jeans and a vest and a wide brimmed hat. Either her hair was hidden under that hat, or she’d cut it like a man’s, too. That was all he could see. The sun was behind her and she was nothing more than a silhouette like the ones hanging on the wall inside.

“I don’t know you.”

It was an odd thing to say. It wasn’t what he had wanted to say. But it was what had come out of him, and, anyway, it was the truth.

The woman made a noise. “That ain’t true. But it’s been a while, so I understand.”

She crossed the porch past him. At her closest he reached out to grab her. To what end, he didn’t know. Anyway, as soon as he moved the pain in his belly turned up to a hellfire burning and he was forced to sit back. Wetness on the chair behind him. Had it rained?

A creak as she sat in the other rocking chair. Then she set about making herself comfortable. Set her rifle leaning against the porch post. Took off her hat and hung it on the corner of the chair behind her. Reached into her vest pocket and pulled out a pipe. Fred studied her as she set about packing it. She may dress like a man, and cut her hair like a man, but her face was feminine. High cheekbones, plump limps, bright eyes. Hardened, but still feminine.

And familiar.

“I do know you.”

“That you do,” the woman said. She puffed on her pipe to light it and then shook out the match. Leaning back, she looked at him for the first time. “Wouldn’t be rightly surprised if you don’t remember me, but you do know me.”

“I…”

He groaned and shifted as fresh pain bloomed in his middle. He had forgotten he’d been shot. How could he have forgotten?

“You shot me.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, rocking gently. “You had it coming.”

She was probably right. The things he had done, back then. The money he had taken, from anyone who had it. The nights, awake from dusk until dawn, surrounded by women and whiskey. The never-ending anger, always there, always pulsing away somewhere in him. The good times it was just in the back of his head where the neck meets the spine. The bad days it was everywhere, filling him, pouring out of him, making him feel like he’d never die. It had been mostly bad days.

Before. Yes, before. That was all before, damn it! I’m a changed man!

He looked at her, and she looked back. Had he said it aloud, or only thought it?

“You don’t remember me,” she said. “It’s alright. You wouldn’t. I’m much changed. Not just the hair, and the clothes. It was near twenty years ago, and I was barely ten. Not much bigger than your boy there.”

Thoughts spilled out of him like the blood spilling out of his belly. This woman knew he had a son. She’s been watching me? Who was she? Fred stared at her, studying her. She only watched him, not shying away from the intensity of his eyes. Was there anything he recognized? The shape of her eyes, the color of her skin, a twitch of the mouth…anything…anything…

There. There it was. The way she scratched at the back of her neck with the stem of the pipe. He’d known another who did that. Another who shared the same angles of the face, the same short fingers. His throat had gone dry. He wished for water.

“You’re Sal’s little girl.”

Her eyebrows went up in surprise. “Daggum, old man. I didn’t think you’d actually find me in that whiskey-soaked brain of yours.”

“You’re here on account I…”

It hurt to laugh, but he did it anyway. Of all the things to claw out of the dark, dank hole that was his past and find him, it was this one thing.

“You…you’re a fool,” he said. “Poor misled lamb. What I did to your Daddy, he had-”

“He had it coming, I know,” she said. Never stopping her rocking, she went on in the same voice he supposed a stone might have. “You and Pa ran together when you was just kids, back in New Orleans. Kiddie scams and such. Then you wanted to get out. You found a girl, a rich girl, and that girls’ family, why, they was going to take you in. As a gardener, or something, anyway. But you had a plan. Not a plan to steal, for once. A plan to make something out of yourself. Only Pa didn’t want you to leave. Pa didn’t want you having nothing nice. So he killed that rich girl, and he pinned it on you. Fifteen years after that you run into him in some backwater saloon south of Amarillo. Follow him home. Kill him. His wife, too.”

Fred grunted. “I let you live.”

The woman puffed on her pipe and sighed the smoke out.

“Yes. Well. We all make mistakes.”

The sun was getting hot. Fred swiped at his forehead to pull away sweat, unaware of the blood smears he was leaving behind. Too bright. Too hot. A shiver shook him all over like a dog out of the water.

Her eyes were looking away, over his crops. His own eyes shot to her gun. Only a couple of feet away. She was distracted. Thinking. He could get the gun. Kill her. At least run her off. Get into town, get to the Doc. With a hand pressing on his belly, Fred leaned forward.

Sal’s girl was up in an instant, standing over him with the gun pointed at his face. He barely saw her move. That flat look on her face was gone, replaced with measured rage.

“I know all that because he told me. He told me and Mama everything. Even went down to the priest and told him, too. He’d been absolved. Saved. Much like you have been, it seems.”

Fred nodded wildly, his eyes sticking to the barrel of that gun that yawned at him like a new dawn. “I been saved, I been. Saw the priest. Left that life behind. I got a wife, a boy and a girl. You saw. I left all that behind.”

Sal’s girl nodded. “Just like my Pa did.”

She didn’t sit, but she did lower the gun. Leaned back against the same post the gun had been leaning and held the gun in her arms.

“That same priest who told my Pa he’d been saved, he used to counsel me. Tell me I had to let the hate go. Revenge was a fool’s game. Only kept the cycle of anger going. He used to tell me, the only way to end it, this cycle of anger, was with forgiveness. Or at the very least, forgetting. ‘Leave it, Susan,’ he’d tell me. ‘Let go of the anger and let God heal all.’ And you know what? For a while I thought I could. I really did. I’ve known you been out here for a year now. Maybe more. It would comfort me, going about my day, knowing you was here and me doing nothing about it. Letting you live. Just like you let me live.”

A breeze picked up, pushing her hair. Fred was suddenly cold and hot at the same time. Sweating and shivery. He couldn’t get a read on her. Now that she was standing with her back to the sun he could barely see her eyes. Just shadows.

“I think that’s what finally broke me,” she said. Her voice was becoming hoarse. “You let me live. You…let me live. Like it never even occurred to you I might come for you. Like…like the story ends with you getting your revenge. ‘Once upon a time a man ruined my life and then I found him and I killed him and got my revenge, and I lived happily ever after, the end.’ I got to wondering, what makes you special? What makes you think you’re the one who gets to end the story? Killing me would have shown humility. But you let me live, because you never thought the story might keep going.”

“No, no,” Fred said. He was shaking his head. He was babbling. God, he wished his thoughts would come in straight but he couldn’t think beyond the pain and that light feeling growing on his brain. “I let you live as a mercy. A kindness.”

“Tell yourself whatever you’d like,” she said. “You got your revenge on a man who’d repented. Now you’ve repented, and never even thought someone would get their revenge on you.”

A giggle rose up out of Fred. “What about you? You’ve done the same thing, now. That priest was right. All you’ve done is sign your own death warrant.”

Susan knelt down, inches from him. He wanted to reach out, slug her face, kick her stomach. He had no strength for any of it. So close he could see the upturn of the corner of her mouth and the dead look in her eyes.

“And who, pray tell, is going to do it?”

Watery panic made him tremble. He reached out and only managed to grab the edges of her vest, staining her white shirt with blood.

“Shut up, old man,” she said a few times, cutting through the babble. He was babbling, didn’t even know what he was saying. She pried his fingers off her and pushed him back. Blood bubbled out of him.

“Your family is alive. Only delayed. Cassie received a letter from you two days ago now, requesting she and your children stay with her mother for an extra day. So you could ready a surprise. They won’t be home until tomorrow, now. See? I knew very well that this is bigger than me. So I prepared. No one will know. Hellfire, no one will suspect. Unless you told them about your crimes, the way my Pa told me?”

Fred’s silence made a bitter laugh well up out of Susan.

Clouds began covering the sky. A storm was rolling in, surely a big one with how dark it was. But when Fred looked up again, he still found a perfect blue.

“I…I guess…” Fred took a large breath and found enough energy to look up at her. “I guess I’ll see you in hell, then.”

For the first time since she had appeared, barely ten minutes ago he realized, Susan looked at him with something besides stone-face rage.

Pity.

“Ain’t you figured it out yet?” she asked. “There ain’t no God.”

Fred leaned back. “You can’t know that.”

“Of course I can. If there was a God, do you really think he’d let his Children act like this?”

There was no time to argue. There was no time for anything, it seemed. Susan said a few other things. He didn’t catch any of it. It seemed a good time to sleep. He leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes. Missing his wife. His son. His daughter.

There was a God, that he was sure of it. As the darkness closed in further, invading his mind, for the first time in years Fred began to wonder if he’d actually get to meet Him.

We’re Going To Be Friends: A Body of Thieves

A Body of Thieves

At first, all he was aware of was his stomach being pulled up into his throat and the sickening, nauseating squeeze and roll it was doing. His heart was pounding to beat out of his chest, pounding so hard he could hear it in his ears even over the air rushing by. His ears and nose immediately froze and became numb. He was squeezing his eyes shut so hard he could see silent green fireworks blooming over and over and over. The panic and fear inside had become so absolute and so pure it had replaced every single rational thought with nothing but loud television static.

After some time – could have been a couple of seconds, could have been three million years – he felt a heavy jolt, as though they’d somehow hit something in the middle of open space. It drew a scream out of him, and his brain came back online with sirens and klaxons. Their descent had slowed. No longer were they plummeting toward the water. Now, it felt like a hurried drift. Clutching onto the ropes running across his chest, he dared to open his eyes. There was no sky above him, and after a few desperate seconds of thinking reality had just completely collapsed in on him, he realized he was staring at black canvas.

Maggie’s backpack had held a parachute.

The air still rushed into his face but he did his best to keep his eyes open. Maggie was no longer holding him. Her hands were on ropes coming from the parachute, and she was deftly maneuvering them to the west side of the river. Relief that he would not have to find a way out of the rushing water at the end of all this was replaced with fresh terror of the dirt rising to meet them.

“Stay limp!” Maggie shouted in his ear, most of her words getting taken away.

There was no time for Vinnie to react. The ground was beneath them. Then it was in front of them. Then it was all around, beating them up from every direction, getting dirt into his mouth and nose and eyes, surrounding them with the canvas parachute. It all happened over and over, slowing down, slowing, slowing.

And then Vinnie was lying on the ground, face up, wrapped in the parachute and staring at the sky.

“Get off me.”

He wasn’t on the ground. He was on Maggie. With practiced motions Maggie released the clasps on the ropes keeping them together and Vinnie scrambled off, trying not to put any pressure on her. Once he was a couple feet away, he stood up.

“Oh, I wouldn’t…do that.”

As soon as he was standing the world started to spin around, rising and falling. He took deep breaths and looked up to the sky, trying to get his bearings.

Up above, so far it was just a line of darkness across the stars, was the bridge.

We were on that. And now we’re down here.

Vinnie was on his knees and puking up every hors d’oeuvre he had eaten in the last few hours into the dirt before he even realized it.

As he was finally slowing down, bringing up nothing but stinging bile, Maggie suddenly clapped him on the back.

“Congrats, buddy! You just jumped off a bridge. Most people skydive a couple hundred times before they attempt something like that.”

Vinnie stayed bent over for a few more seconds to make sure he had his gorge under control, then spit out as much bile from his sinuses as he could.

“Thanks, I guess,” he said. He sounded bitter. Not bitter enough.

“Come on. We’ve got a little walking to do.”

He stood carefully, only moving to trail after her when he was sure his legs wouldn’t turn back to jelly and dump him back onto the dirt. The only light came from the stars and the half moon above. It was enough to avoid bigger rocks and the occasional branch. Next to him the river rushed by, although not nearly as fast as he had expected. He thought it would be sprinting and raging, but instead it just bubbled by, quick but easy.

“I’ve never done anything like that before,” he said, jogging to catch up.

Maggie didn’t even turn around. “Could have fooled me.”

“Really?”

That got her to stop and look at him over her shoulder, the withering look in her glare visible even in the low moonlight.

“Oh. Right. Of course not.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes. Maggie was obviously looking for something. And Vinnie was just glad to have the time to pull himself back together. He wasn’t a steaming pile of terror and screaming like he thought he would be. But he felt pulled apart, just a little, at each seam. He twitched occasionally as he walked, and every sound that wasn’t their footsteps or the river made him jump.

“Are there animals out here?” he asked, his voice cracking.

“Probably. Once we get the fire going, they won’t bother us.”

“Fire?”

“Found it.”

They had followed the riverbed up to a place where it split, part of it staying with the river and part of it jutting up eight or so feet, creating a sandy wall with roots sticking out here and there. Next to this sandy wall, almost tucked away, was a little camp. A stone ring with firewood in the middle sat next to the wall, with a sturdy metal chest off to the side. The chest was protected with a spindle lock, and as he half sat, half fell next to the fire he watched Maggie flick the lock around until it opened. She then set to work lighting the fire and pulling out a contraption to go over it. The smell hit him first. She was making coffee.

“Here. Eat something, if your stomach will take,” she said, handing him a pouch. Jerky, although he wasn’t sure it was beef. Surprisingly, his stomach rumbled, and he took the pouch.

While he ate she set up a little camp. Two bedrolls, one obviously never used before. A fabric awning spread over one side of the fire between three pikes she mercilessly stabbed into the ground. And a radio, which she tuned to an empty channel and left on low.

“How many times have you done this?” he asked.

She shrugged as she fixed one of the pillows under her. “Three or four. Different rail companies each time. Never had to take someone with me before.”

“How long have you-”

“Listen,” she said, putting a hand up. “I know with the river and the fire it feels like a little camp out and a great time to get chummy, but just save it. This is my favorite part of any job, because I get to sit here in silence.”

He felt his cheeks get hot, but something besides a blush was rising inside him. Anger. He watched her as she leaned back on her elbows, oblivious.

“This is why the others don’t like you, you know,” he said.

Maggie glanced at him but otherwise was a stone. “That’s fine. I don’t like them, either.”

“You could at least try to be friendly. Come out with us once in a while.”

“Oh, sure. Go out for drinks. Coffee. Hang out on our off days. Just be super best buds living our best lives, showing our faces to the world together over and over. No, thanks. This is a job for me. Not a lifestyle. Not a ‘family.’ Just a job. I want to do my job, and then I want to go back to my real life.”

Vinnie snorted. “Sure, because I bet the bar stool at your biker bar just gets to missing you.”

“Not as much as your ratty couch and broken television miss you.”

They each turned over on their bedrolls at the same time, showing their backs to each other and the fire.  He didn’t hear Maggie move once as he tried to fall asleep, which only made him angrier. The ground was hard. The bedroll was scratchy. His back facing the fire was too hot, but the front of him was too cold. Vinnie could have been in the luxury car of his train, trading jokes with Verna and falling asleep to the gentle rocking motion of the train. It was all Maggie’s fault. Somehow.

He slept fitfully, waking to every odd sound or any time he went to turn over. It wasn’t until the early hours that he finally fell into something more than a catnap, and he only realized it when Maggie was crouching over him, shaking his shoulder.

“Come on. They should be here soon. We’ve got more walking to do.”

Vinnie rolled over onto his back. The sky behind her was still mostly dark, but he could see the beginnings of sunrise on the other side of the river.

“I slept fine, thanks for asking.”

With an eye roll, she stood up and held her hand out. “Come on, Mr. Baby. Next time don’t get caught-”

“Peggy.”

All the thoughts in her brain scatter across the grass like leaves as something heavy and rough catches her across the face, from eye to mouth. Peggy stumbles back, working to regain her balance and stay up. Blood is running down her face and she can taste it between her teeth.

 “You’re not Aster.”

“You’re not human.”

I hope this works.

Blue light rolls out of her hands and into Aster. Not-Aster begins screaming, trying to pull away.

Aster collapses to the ground. Peggy collapses right next to them.

“-and you won’t have to rough it.”

He’d reached for her hand, letting her pull him up to standing. Vinnie looked down, found the rip in gloves, right across the palm, that he’d missed the night before. He looked up at Maggie.

“Are you okay?”

For a second he didn’t answer because he didn’t hear the question. He stared at Maggie’s face. At the blackened eye and the bruise around her lip, just barely visible now. Caused by a decent sized tree branch catching her across the face.

“Hey!” Maggie snapped in his face, making Vinnie jump. “You’re not having a delayed reaction to the jump, are you?”

“No,” Vinnie said, shaking his head. “No, I’m just…you just woke me up after a terrible night of sleeping on dirt, how am I supposed to react.”

Another eye roll. “Come on, princess. Let’s get you back to your pillows.”

She slung the bag with their stolen goods across her back and started walking up the river, not looking back at him. If she had, she might have caught the way he was staring.

You’re not human, rang in his ears over and over.

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Give Me the Fucking Instructions! The Wide Awake Nightmare of Crafting and Recipe Websites

When I decided to make my Horizon Zero Dawn granny square afghan, I started by buying a book of granny squares patterns because a) I’m a beginner and couldn’t design my own, 2) the book I bought promised 365 different patterns at one price, which definitely seemed like enough options to piece together what I was looking for, and d) I assumed that if I used squares off the internet they would be different sizes and I wasn’t skilled enough yet to start shrinking or embiggening squares to fit each other.

Turns out the book is super poorly edited and probably not proofread at all (????!?) and I ended up having to do a lot of size maintenance anyway, but going with a book still managed to be the better decision in the end for one hard, cruel fact I had yet to learn: a lot of craft websites are shit.

I Don’t Care That Candied Yams Remind You of the Last Good Thanksgiving of Your Childhood Before Your Parents Divorced and Your Mother Married a Hitchhiker She Found Outside of Twentynine Palms and Your Dad Denied Material Possessions and Moved Into a Yurt in some Undisclosed Location in New Mexico, Deborah. I Just Want to Know if I Should Use Pecans or Walnuts.

Not everyone sews or crochets, but I think at this point most of us have tried to find a new recipe only to be hit with the Wall of Emotional Baggage. All you want is a recipe. You don’t want to read the things that honestly need to be said to the blogger’s therapist. You don’t want to read multiple, obviously made-up paragraphs about their obsession with crème fraiche. You definitely don’t want to read a fucking lecture on techniques or, even worse, have them try to sell you a fucking Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer in breathless tones like no one else on the planet has discovered this miracle kitchen tool before. Just get to the part where you tell me how much of what shit I need to put in the bowl before putting everything in the oven for however fucking long and so help me Christ if everything is in grams, I am shutting it all down and ordering a pineapple pizza.

It’d be like if you went to a restaurant, but before you were even allowed to order Papa Leone himself came out and spent half an hour telling you all about how the recipe came from his great-grandfather and the memories he had back on the Amalfi coast and where they get all their produce and how he killed a war buddy in Vietnam over a cigarette lighter and how he uses the pasta maker attachment for this brand of stand mixer he’s sure you’ve never fucking heard of even though its one of the best known kitchen brands in America.

Of course, this isn’t Deborah’s fault. As always, it all comes back to the algorithm because reality is a nightmare. As this article explains, if these recipe bloggers just throw up similar recipes (because, honestly, how many different ways are there to make a Frito pie?) then Google decides they’re being little copy-cats and shunts them down the results list. They need to get some original content on that page, and no one really knows how much they need before the Google overlords decides its enough, so some people play it safe and start using their recipe blog as a personal diary.

Searching for Stitches? The Bloggers Have You Covered. Eventually.

The thing about any craft is that first you learn the basics, and then you take those basics and put them together in interesting ways to actually make something, right? I’m not telling anyone something they didn’t know? Good.

So, when you’re trying to make money off crochet, you can’t really do that off just stitches. You can sell something you made, or even sell the pattern, but if you run a website and you start trying to charge people on how to learn basic stitches they’re going to quietly nope the fuck out of there and go find someone who doesn’t wear their ass as a hat.

But these people have to be making money off their blogs, right? Late Stage Capitalism dictates that we all take our hobbies and turn them into side hustles, squeezing dollars and cents out of literally every aspect of our lives until we are technically working every second we are awake (and, for those YouTubers and Twitch streamers who record themselves sleeping, even when asleep) to Make Something of Ourselves because we’re only worth something when we’re producing and God forbid anyone just enjoy existence for five fucking minutes without making a profit.

So, you’re an intermediate crocheter who has mastered the building block stitches and you’re ready to try something more advanced. Waffle stitch is pretty cool, and you have all this cotton yarn you want to use, so it’s time to make a dish towel! You head on over to The Googles and type in ‘crochet waffle stitch’ and, of course, the first handful of results are YouTube videos. Except you mainly crochet on the couch next to your husband while he plays video games, and you’re also watching the video game and don’t want to split your attention even further, so you skip over those to find a written tutorial. Ah, there’s a promising one!

You click on the link and almost immediately this white woman – these blogs are almost always written by white women either from the Midwest or the UK, often with at least one Y-substitution in their name. Seriously, I have yet to find one by a dude or a woman of color – is immediately asking you to Pin the article to your Pinterest board (which is worthy of its own screaming rant). Don’t have a Pinterest? A) what in the Martha Stewart Autumn Wonder Wreath is wrong with you, and B) that’s okay! You can share this article on Facebook! Or Instagram! How about Twitter? Reddit? Next Door? LinkedIn? Grindr? Stack Overflow? Where ever you would like, here’s a series of buttons for you to press and easily share this great tutorial you’ve just found! Don’t worry, those buttons are going to detach from the top and follow you the entire way down, sometimes covering the exact words you’re trying to read! Yay!

Okay, now that we’re done with the housekeeping, it’s on to the disclosure! Yes, many of these websites have a disclosure at the top that these blogs have affiliate links, and if you go there and buy something they’ll get a cut! Super fun! Keep squeezing all the pennies and dimes out of your hobby as you can, ladies! #bossbabe! 🤑🤑💪💪

Finally, we have gotten through the sharable links and the affiliate disclaimer, so let’s move on to the advertisement for their free printable crochet planner! All you have to do is sign up for their newsletter! SEVENTEEN PAGES OF PLANNING, Y’ALL.

And then, finally, you have reached the content you want: the actual fucking tutorial.

I want to stress here: I am not placing any blame on these ladies for the structure of their web pages. I don’t know what their lives are like. Maybe they live off this money, maybe it’s putting their kids through college, maybe they just enjoy have that little extra scratch. Just because I’m eternally exhausted with the planet we live on doesn’t mean they are. My ire is entirely with the Side Hustle culture that has made all of this possible.

Also important to note: once you do hack your way through the thorny maze of Maximizing Profits, you generally find excellent tutorials, usually written both as typical crochet pattern instructions and in full-sentence instructions that are easier for beginners to follow, complete with pictures. Getting to these stich tutorials is mildly irritating but at least you end up with what you want.

Trying to Read These Pages on Your Smartphone is Like Trying to Decipher the Rosetta Stone With a Bunch of Ads in the Way.

I crochet on the couch and I cook (obviously) in the kitchen, so instead of dragging my desktop down and setting it up on the coffee table or next to the microwave I, like every other sane person, pull up whatever I’m looking at on my phone.

And it’s the fucking worst:

  • Cookies: Hey, we use cookies like every other website since about 1996 is that okay or do you want to turn some off you can do that here but please don’t because we want you to have all the cookies
  • Alerts and Location: Hi, can we know your exact GPS location even though we can’t give you a good reason why we would need that (except for targeted advertisements but sshhhh) and you can’t think of a good reason? Also, would you like to get super annoying alerts through Chrome that you’ll never figure out how to turn off?
  • Won’t You Subscribe to My Newsletter? Don’t you love me? *sniff* I’ll give you a free planning calendar…
  • Social Media Buttons That Follow You Down the Page: I noticed you haven’t clicked the button that will Pin this page or post it to your Facebook, so I’m just going to send these buttons along with you so they’ll be there for you (covering up the text) when you decide you want to help me instead of just USING ME LIKE EVERYONE DOES
  • Ads: Here’s a video ad at the top of the page. Oh, you’re already scrolling down? That’s okay, I’ll put it at the bottom of the screen so it will follow you! Well, not the very bottom. That’s where another ad lives. Oh, you don’t like them? That’s okay, you just have to hit the X button at the corner of each one that’s about the size of a pencil eraser. Careful you don’t miss it, or you’ll open the ad and invite all sorts of potential viruses, tee hee

Want To Find a Pattern? Follow This Trail of Links That May or May Not End in What You Want. Also Fuck You.

Patterns are where things get super fucky. People went to the trouble of designing, troubleshooting, and writing down a pattern, they generally want to get paid for it.

But sometimes you’re not looking to make a stuffed animal or even a complicated blanket. You just want to make a shawl. Simple shawl, nothing fancy, surely there’s a free pattern out there so you can get your feet wet, yeah? Time to ask Google for ‘crochet free shawl pattern.’

The first thing you’re going to notice is the results are not simply free shawl patterns. Oh, no. That would be way too easy. Instead, the first page of results are all lists of free shawl patterns. Ten here, twenty there, fucking seventy-six on this page! Boy howdy, there sure are a lot free shawl patterns out there! I tell ya, you can’t even open your car door without hitting a pile of shawl patterns all aggregated together.

So you open up the webpage with seventy-fucking-six different shawls you can make. You find one you like and you search around in the accompanying text trying to figure out which of the three phrases made into links is the one you want. Apparently, the answer is ‘get fucked’ because none of them bring you to the shawl.

Okay, fine. You go back to the list and pick another. This one is obvious, because there’s only one blue link in the text.

And it’s broken.

Or, not exactly broken, but it’s not bringing you to a shawl pattern, either. It’s bringing you to fun Halloween crafts. Okay? But you wanted a shawl?

You go back to the list and pick another and success! You have found the actual page for the shawl! And the instructions…

Are in a downloadable PDF.

FUCK.

Repeat After Me, Ladies: ‘I Ain’t Downloading Shit’

In 2011, anti-virus vendor Symantec released an Internet Security Threat Report that rated which sort of websites were most likely to be hosting viruses (full disclosure, I found tons of articles from 2012 about this report but could not locate the report itself). The news went buckwild because, among other things, the report stated that people were more likely to get viruses from religious websites than from porn sites.

It had become a joke, back in the Wild West days of the internet, that if you ended up with a virus on your computer you were obviously doing something shady. Only those freaks going to the foot fetish websites would end up with something as dirty as a computer virus, amirite?

Well, no. The truth is, the internet was fucking riddled with viruses. It had more viruses than a Trump rally. It was mostly viruses, with some content thrown in the mix to keep you guessing. And honestly, they weren’t even being subtle. The people creating these viruses knew that at that point, 85% of internet users didn’t know shit about fuck and they could say anything to get you to click and download.

You’ve just won a free laptop/cruise/motorcycle! Just click here to get your prize!!!

YOUR COMPUTER HAS A DEADLY VIRUS. CLICK HERE TO FIX IT.

What if Internet Criminals already have your credit card number? Better click here to check!

Hey kids! How would you like to have a cursor shaped like a hot dog? No? How about this Xena: Warrior Princess screen saver? Not your thing? How about making the scroll bars orange? Or, ooh, I know what you want. How would you like a purple gorilla to hang out at the bottom of your screen all day and DEFINITELY NOT LOG YOUR KEYSTROKES LOL WHAT EVEN IS THAT??

Full disclosure: I definitely downloaded Bonzi Buddy and a shit ton of screen savers at the end of the nineties. How my computer didn’t just implode in on itself like the house at the end of Poltergeist I’ll never know.

Everybody was getting viruses, it was just the porn sites that had the really embarrassing viruses where all the pop-ups for even more naked ladies kept appearing until your screen was covered in boobs which, to this day, is an extreme problem in the workplace.

Eventually, though, people got wise, and unsurprisingly it was a direct correlation: the more time you spent on the internet, the better you got at picking out viruses. The people making these things didn’t give up, oh no, there’s money and embarrassment to be had. They got a little better at hiding them, but they also got a lot better at knowing who to target.

Which is why by 2010 more people were getting viruses off religious websites than porn websites. I have exactly zero evidence to sum this up, but I’m guessing the average internet porn viewer clocks far more online hours than the average Christian going in the chatroom to talk about the best bars to bring to church next Sunday (it’s the seven layer bars, Janet, and you fucking know it). The virus makers aren’t going after the religious types because they’re all Satan-worshipping atheists or whatever, they’re going after religious types because when it comes to the internet, they’re far more likely to still not know shit about fuck.

The same can be said for crafting websites. Most crafts don’t really need a lot of internet support, and traditionally (gag) crafts are done by housewives and grandmothers (retch) who stereotypically can’t turn on a car stereo without it bursting into flames (barf). Sure, there are plenty of tech-savvy people who also do crafts, but the virus-makers aren’t after them. They’re after your Nana who only ever uses the internet for e-mail, Facebook, and finding new knitting patterns. Nana is going to see a cardigan she just has to make for you, seriously, you will look so cute, and it’s free, yay! She just has to download the PDF and then the pattern will be on her computer! SO EASY!

Bam, virus.

Most of the time, it isn’t even the website creator’s fault. These websites are notoriously easy to break into. All a virus maker has to do is sneak in and change what that download button actually puts on your computer. To most people, it’s going to look totally legit. The only thing possibly saving you is the sixth sense about shady links that you develop after being chronically on the internet for years and years. I don’t even know how to describe it. Some websites are the digital equivalent of Gary, Indiana: you take one look, throw the car into reverse, and shoot back onto the freeway.

The takeaway here is STOP DOWNLOADING FREE PDFS OF PATTERNS. Even if the website it’s on is legit, it might have been hacked and you could still be downloading a keylogger or some shit. Find a different pattern that’s simply on the webpage or just bite the bullet and buy a pattern on a reputable site like Etsy or eBay. And if I’m telling you stuff you already know, check in on your friends and family who don’t. The last thing you want to do is show up at Nana’s to pick up the cardigan she made you and find out she’s in the middle of wiring her pension to some dicks in Pasadena so they’ll unlock her family photos.

In Conclusion, This is Why I Buy Books

Look, I already have too much anxiety for all this shit. We’re on the verge of losing our democracy and killing the planet and everyone who can do something about it is like, ‘nah, profits’ and makes everything ten times worse over a weekend, and also I identify some new symptom that’s definitely the things that’s going to kill me first, like, every other week, and it is exhausting. Crochet and cooking are supposed to be the things that calm me down. I do not have the mental space for all this bullshit. Do you hear me, Deborah? Caryn? Aimeigh-Leigh? Ladies? Can we just make this easier on ourselves? No?

Fuck it.

Go to abebooks.com or thriftbooks.com and get everything you need from some Goodwill in Dallas for three dollars and free shipping. Not to sound all forwardsfromyourgrandma, but books don’t try to sell you shit, try to get you to repost their content, and they definitely won’t give your computer a virus. Unless it’s a book about making viruses, and then you make one and accidentally unleash it on your own computer, but I feel like in this scenario that’s on you.

Running with the Devil: Pacific City

Pacific City

This is how the phone call went:

Aster: Hi, can you put Steve on the phone?

Gulp ‘n’ Go Employee: Steve? We don’t have a Steve.

Aster: Yes, you do. He’s out in the parking lot right now. He’s always out in the parking lot.

Gulp ‘n’ Go Employee: Those guys? Why the hell do you want to talk to those guys? I don’t think my manager would like it.

Aster: I don’t give a fuck about your manager, and I’m betting you don’t either. Just go get Steve. Tell him Aster’s on the phone.

Gulp ‘n’ Go Employee: *annoyed grumble* Hold on.

Forty-seconds of silence.

Steve: Well, hello, my delicious crumpet. I knew you couldn’t stay away.

Aster: Not now with that, Steve. Our investigation has taken a turn and we need help. Do you know who Andromeda is?

Steve: Of course I know who Andromeda is. Everyone knows who Andromeda is.

Aster:…I don’t.

Steve: Don’t worry, love bug, I’ll fill you in. When it comes to redwave magic in Pacific City, she is the witch in charge. No one does anything around here without her say so. Even Stevie and me.

Aster: Yeah, well, that redwave magic you guys were feeling? Turns out it’s rogue.

Steve: Oh, shi-hih-hit. Oh, she is going to go ballistic, she is going to lose it, oh my God, this is going to be hilarious, you have to tell me what she says when you tell her.

Aster: Focus, Steve. Where do I find her?

Steve: Hotel Idaho, as always. And you know how to find me, right, baby? Just purse your lips and-

Aster slammed the payphone down while making a face and turned to Peggy.

“Hotel Idaho.”

“Oh, good. That’s not far. We could walk, be there in…twenty minutes, you think?”

Aster gave her a look, stepping away from the payphone. After a couple of seconds the lines across their forehead smoothed out, and they gave Peggy a slow nod.

“Okay. It seems a little early, I’m not going to lie, but if you think we can go after her, I’m ready.”

Peggy snorted in laughter, and started to walk north up the street when she realized Aster wasn’t following her.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your joke. That was a joke, right?” Peggy turned to face Aster and froze. “It wasn’t a joke? It wasn’t a joke. Jesus Christ, Aster.”

Aster held out their hands, almost hitting someone walking by. Suddenly aware of the people on the sidewalk around them, Aster closed the distance between them and Peggy, meeting her between a trash can and a bus stop bench.

“This Andromeda person is a witch. Witches are redwave magic. And as far as I can tell, redwave magic is always evil. Are you telling me you don’t want to bring someone like this down? We could save the whole city!”

Peggy looked around. It was early evening and the sky to the west was just starting to be splashed with beautiful pinks and oranges. People went about their business around them. Friends idling by. Lovers holding hands. Shops were just putting their front lights on. Restaurants were welcoming in the hungry. A few scooters went by, honking. She turned back to Aster and shrugged.

“Everything seems good to me.”

Aster threw up their hands. “You know you can’t see this stuff on the surface.”

Sudden emotion bubbled up in Peggy. She was pretty sure it was anger. “You know what? I don’t know. I’ve told you repeatedly I’m not cut out for this. I don’t know how to be a hero, and I can’t help people. You’ve just dragged me along to one place after another even as I tell you I don’t know what I’m doing. You want to go bring down an evil witch? Do it by yourself.”

She stalked off down the sidewalk, surprised at how the world had gotten blurry.

“You know what, Peg? You kept telling me you weren’t cut out for this, and I didn’t believe it. Not until right now.”

Peggy snorted, turning to make sure it carried over her shoulder. “Oh, yeah? What finally clued you in?”

“This! We have one – one – disagreement about what to do next and you shut down and try to leave instead of talking to me!”

Stopping short, she whipped around. She’d made it to the corner, anyway, and the Do Not Walk sign was on. Aster had been following her, and it only took a couple of seconds for them to catch up.

“I have no idea why your self-esteem seems to be huddled at the bottom of the barrel. I never would have made it this far without you. Okay, maybe I would have, but not so fast. You know about some of this stuff, way more than I do. And you can kick over your head.”

Despite herself, Peggy laughed. She wiped at her eye, trying to make it seem like she was getting rid of an eyelash. The emotion Peggy had decided was anger was fading, and it was only as it was going that Peggy realized it was shame.

“How about, instead of walking away, you talk to me? Pretend like I only discovered any of this was real a month ago, and tell me why we shouldn’t target Andromeda?”

Peggy took a breath that was far shakier than she would have liked it. “You mean besides the fact that you’re talking about pitting a quarter-god and a human against a witch running a whole city?”

“Call that reason number one.”

“Well…I may not have heard of Andromeda before, but I’ve seen the same thing in other cities. If she’s really in charge of all the redwave magic, then she’s built into this city. Baked into it. I wouldn’t even know how to go about getting her out, and if we did the power vacuum would create a black hole that would mush the city into spaghetti before we could even celebrate. Call that reason two.”

“And reason three?”

“If we want to help Mario, and Naomi, and Gary, then what we want is Andromeda’s help. I heard Steve over the phone. If she’s going to be that mad, she’s probably the only one who can do anything about this rogue demon and free the others from their contracts.”

Aster mulled all of this over, hand to their chin and foot tapping. Peggy didn’t realize she had begun holding her breath until her vision started tunneling. Finally, Aster nodded.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. I didn’t think of any of that. And it kind of sucks, but you’re right.” Aster patted Peggy on the arm. “See? We balance each other out. Without you I’d be running blindly into danger until I died really fast, and without me you’d still be pretending you can’t do anything to help. But together, we’re Aster and Peggy: Pacific City Defenders.”

Peggy wrinkled her nose. “Maybe we can workshop the name.”

It took closer to forty minutes to walk to Hotel Idaho. If a witch queen was going to be anywhere in the city, neither of them were exactly surprised it was here. Hotel Idaho was the classiest place in all of Pacific City. Expensive, glamorous, full of that last century architecture and oozing with gold and crystal. Also peppered with paparazzi. Every celebrity wanted to be seen at the Idaho. As they walked through the gates to the front a dozen cameras swung toward them, a few taking pictures as a precaution. Once they all realized Peggy and Aster were nobodies they went back to watching the front loop, waiting for their prey to exit.

“Maybe we should go around the back,” Aster said, eyeing the vultures.

“I figured you’d want to go in the front. You’re always reading the gossip magazines these pictures end up in.”

Aster shook their head. “Not now. We’ve got a mission, right? There’s no way you-know-who would be around this mess. She must be holed up in one of the private bungalows.”

They took the lead, following a small, unlit path that led them away from the front of the hotel and looped around the back. Peggy frowned as she followed. Every time she thought she understood Aster, she was proven wrong. And she was starting to feel bad about it.

Even the back of the hotel was well kept and gorgeous, standing above them with a certain charming menace. And even back here, among the fountains shaped like children and rose bushes, photographers milled about smoking cigarettes and scanning the faces inside and on the patios. None of them took pictures of Peggy and Aster as they passed, or even glanced at them. Stalking specific celebrities, then, celebrities they already knew were inside. Peggy stopped next to a couple passing a joint back and forth.

“Who you watching?” she asked.

“Celeste Carmichael,” one of them said, not looking away from the big windows that looked into the lobby.

“Supposedly here with Bradley Brown,” the other said, passing the joint back.

Peggy’s eyebrows raised. “Oh, no shit? I liked that movie they were in.”

“Peggy,” Aster hissed. They were already across the stone patio, moving into the darkness. Without waiting for her they turned and went down another dark path.

“Shit,” Peggy muttered to herself. She almost thought to call back and tell them who the photographers were waiting for. She was sure Aster liked both of them, too, and would kill for a look. But Aster was, once again, more invested than Peggy thought. It was turning out to be harder to get a read on Aster than Peggy had once thought, but she found herself more committed than ever to-

All the thoughts in her brain scattered across the grass like leaves as something heavy and rough caught her across the face, from eye to mouth. Peggy stumbled back, working to regain her balance and stay up. Blood was running down her face and she could taste it between her teeth. Aster, is Aster okay, where’s Aster, what-

Peggy felt something rushing at her and she sidestepped fast, putting a foot out. Whoever it was went down with an oof. But they were back up in a heartbeat, moving as fast as Peggy could. Peggy pushed the hair that had come loose from her braid out of her face and-

And found herself face to face with Aster.

Sort of.

They weren’t holding themselves right, all of the casualness and ease of motion gone and replaced with an awkward stiffness. Oh, and their eyes were glowing red.

“You’re not Aster,” Peggy said.

“You’re not human,” Not-Aster said. Their voice was gravel.

“Pot and fucking kettle. You must be that demon we’re chasing.”

Not-Aster stood up straight and bowed at the waist. “In the flesh, so to speak. I’ve had this stew cooking for months, now, and I’m not going to let a couple of wannabe detectives knock over the pot.”

“You only came up with that metaphor because I just said ‘pot,’” Peggy said.

“What? No, I didn’t. I always use that metaphor.”

“Always?”

“Who fucking cares? You listen to me. You’re going to walk away from this. Go back to the cheap side of town and pretend you don’t know a thing about it. You seem to be good at that.”

Peggy raised an eyebrow. “And my friend?”

“I’ll dump the meat-suit. No harm, no foul. Just as long as you back off.”

Peggy considered it. And then, this time, she really did feel anger. Angry that this low-life demon had been able to make her think of leaving her friend with no guarantee they’d be okay. Angry, because she knew Aster would want her to stay. Angry that she was being pushed to trying something she had told herself she would never try again.

With a sigh, Peggy pulled herself up to full height and squared up. “You haven’t really taken a look around in there, have you? If I just walked away, even if you actually left, Aster would just kill me themselves.”

Not-Aster tutted. “You really want to hurt this body?”

“No. And I’m not going to have to.”

Not-Aster threw themselves at Peggy. No fists up. Not ready to strike. Ready to be struck. To make Peggy hurt her friend. If the demon had bothered to figure out what Peggy was beyond ‘not human’ he might not have tried it.

Peggy put her hands out. Not to strike Aster. As the demon pushed Aster’s body toward her, Peggy put out her hands and placed them on their shoulders.

I hope this works.

She was only a quarter god, so there wasn’t much bluewave magic in her. In fact, exactly a quarter of what a full god would have. It made her a little faster, a little stronger, a little more balanced. It heightened her senses. It potentially made her less afraid than she should have been, although that may have been upbringing. It made her hungry all the time. And sometimes, if she concentrated very hard, she could gather all of the magic that was inside her, and push.

Blue light rolled out of her hands and into Aster. Not-Aster began screaming, trying to pull away, but the bluewave magic wasn’t having it. Aster had become affixed to Peggy, and all Not-Aster could do was howl and flail as the bluewave magic filled Aster, filled them until finally the demon was pushed out in a backward explosion of red light.

Aster collapsed to the ground. Peggy collapsed right next to them.

After a few seconds, Aster coughed. “What the fuck.”

“Fucking demons.”

“How did it…how did you…when…I…” Aster cleared their throat as they sat up. “Why does my throat hurt?”

Peggy got up on her elbows and spoke in a low growl, “Because it kept talking like this.”

Aster laughed, and then groaned. “Oh, even that hurts.”

“Good evening.”

The two of them whipped around, Peggy almost falling over. Standing at the line where the stone-paved path met the grass Peggy and Aster were currently lying in was a man in a suit and a cloak with a high collar. His white blonde hair was slicked back and he was standing like a butler in a movie, hands behind his very straight back.

“Andromeda will see you now.”

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An Attic in the Middle of the Night

Children, especially very young children, don’t know anything.

More, they don’t know what they don’t know. Their brains are black holes, taking in everything, spaghettifying the concepts, and coming away with the wrong idea. They must be taught everything, especially the things adults take for granted. How physics works. How people work. Don’t touch that. Dropping something will make it fall. Whining and crying won’t get you anything. What is that? Don’t put that in your mouth! There’s germs. Don’t say ain’t, you sound uneducated. If you’re sleepy go to sleep. If you’re hungry here’s what to eat. Go outside. Be quiet.

Be afraid.

Miss Lavender Black, five years old and tallest in her kindergarten, didn’t know the history of the old house they moved into. She didn’t know the house was a Victorian and older than her grandparents. She didn’t know her parents had gotten it for a steal. She most certainly didn’t know about the murders.

What she did know was that she couldn’t sleep, and it was because someone was singing. Lavender could read her numbers, and the clock on the little table next to her bed said it was twelve thirty-four, which meant it was Late. No one should have been awake in the house. She lay in her little wooden bed, under the Disney princess blankets and staring at the glow in the dark stars affixed to the ceiling. The nightlight by the door, a plain bulb trapped in a foggy square, cast odd shadows in the room. Long, twisting things that reached toward her bed. The days were getting cold, and the nights colder, and the window above her bed was open a little bit because they lived in a good neighborhood now. Lavender didn’t know what that had to do with leaving a window open, only that she wasn’t supposed to have heard it.

The singing was not coming from outside. It was coming from the hall, and as Lavender sat up to stare into the darkness beyond her bedroom door, she wasn’t afraid. She was only curious. And something else, some emotion she had seen on adults, some emotion she had felt before, but didn’t quite know enough to call it what it was. Annoyed. Lavender was annoyed. It was a school night. The bus would come to pick her up for kindergarten when the sun was still low and her breath came out in white puffs. This singing was keeping her up, and it needed to stop.

Lavender threw off the blankets and climbed out of her bed. The cold air from the window pooled around her, making her shiver. She had little slippers somewhere, as pleasantly pink as her blanket, but there was no time for that. All she had to do was find the singer and ask them nicely to stop. Then she could be asleep again. They were going to be making turkeys with colored paper tomorrow and Lavender wanted to be well-rested.

The house creaked under feet as she followed the singing down the hall. Their last home hadn’t creaked. Lavender’s mother had said it was because this house was so much older, so its bones creaked like nana’s. Lavender had pulled up the loose floorboards in the dining room but she hadn’t found any bones. Only a lot of dust and some pipes and a dead mouse.

The singing was not coming from her parents’ room. She stood outside their door, listening to their slow breathing. How the creaking house did not wake them up was a mystery. How they didn’t hear the singing was another mystery altogether. It may not be coming from their room, but it was louder, now. It was a woman’s voice, switching between humming and singing so softly Lavender couldn’t quite hear the words.

It was coming from the door to the attic.

Dust and boxes and more boxes were all that were in the attic. Lavender had to unlock the door to get in. There were windows the singer could have come through. Maybe that could be a normal thing. Lavender was pretty sure people didn’t just come in through the windows, but as she considered it in her slow, sleepy way, taking the stairs with light steps so they didn’t creak even louder, she supposed there might have been a way climbing through windows was normal that she had never been told about.

It was hard to see her in the dark, so Lavender reached for the light switch. The single bulb hanging from a hire flickered to an orange glow.

There was a lady.

She was sitting in front of a round little table with a mirror, something Lavender was sure had been in the corner covered up with a sheet. Waves of blonde hair fell over her back and plain nightgown, and as she hummed and sang a song Lavender didn’t know, the lady ran a brush through the hair over and over. Slowly, as though she were dreaming about something.

For the first time, Lavender wondered if she was dreaming. No one had ever told her how to check, so she decided to pretend like she wasn’t and if she was, well, at least she was sleeping.

Lavender suddenly felt shy. This lady was a grown up, minding her business, and she wasn’t supposed to interrupt grown ups minding their business. But this did feel like a special case. The lady wasn’t supposed to be in their house, not even their attic, and the singing in the middle of the night was very rude!

“Excuse me.”

The lady did not stop singing. Maybe she hadn’t been loud enough.

“Excuse me!”

The lady froze, the song dying on her tongue. Putting the brush down first, careful to not make a noise, the lady finally turned to face Lavender.

There was something wrong with her face. She was white, but even the white kids Lavender went to school with were never this pale. And her eyes were all white and chalky. Then there was her neck, bulging and black. Not the good kind of black like Lavender. A bad black. Black like rubber tires, rolling and squishy.

Lavender stared at the lady’s neck, black and round and swollen, her eyes perfectly round. The lady was smiling at her.

Smiling?

The voice of Lavender’s mother suddenly shot through her mind. Don’t stare at people, it’s rude.

They had been at the grocery store and seen a person in a wheelchair. The person didn’t look like any other person Lavender had ever seen. Very small, oddly shaped. She was just curious. But then her mother had snapped like that and pulled her away, and finally explained in the car that some people are different but they don’t want to be stared at. They just want to be treated like everyone else.

“If that person had been walking around, would you have stared?”

“No.”

“Then don’t stare if they’re in a wheelchair, either.”

This must be the same situation. The lady was different, but she should be treated normal. So, Lavender swallowed and forced herself to look the lady in her eyes.

“I’m trying to sleep but I can’t because of your singing. Can you sing in the morning, please?”

Even with her eyes all weird and white Lavender could see the lady was surprised. Maybe she shouldn’t be staring at her weird eyes, either? But if the lady was normal, that’s where Lavender would be looking, so she held firm.

“You…don’t…like…my…singing?” Her voice was crunchy, now, almost too hard to understand.

Lavender shrugged. “It’s pretty. But it woke me up and I can’t go back to sleep.”

The woman leaned in, closer, closer, until her blonde hair surrounded Lavender like curtains and those weird, painted eyes were only an inch from hers.

“You…don’t…like…my…singing?” she asked again, her crunchy voice now rising to match her mother’s that time she cut all her doll’s hair off.

“No, ma’am. I mean, not right now, ma’am.”

The lady jerked back like she’d been burned. Maybe she should have called the lady miss. It was hard to tell how old she was what with the white eyes and black neck. She stared at Lavender for a long time, bony fingers completely still on the lap of her yellowed nightgown.

Finally, the woman relaxed, just a bit.

“You’re…not…afraid.”

Lavender shook her head, and was overtaken with a yawn. “I just don’t want to be sleepy at school tomorrow. We’re making turkeys with construction paper and I want mine to go on the fridge.”

The nightgown sounded like dried leaves as the woman shifted on her seat, becoming smaller.

“Can…I…see?”

“They probably won’t let me take it home tomorrow. They like to put stuff in the hallway. But I can come up after school and tell you about it. And you can sing. Just not now. Deal?”

Lavender stuck her hand out the way her father had taught her. Sort of. Elbow straight, hand in the lady’s face. She was sure there was a little smile when the woman took it, her dry skin rasping against Lavender’s fingers.

Miss Rawlins watched as the little girl with her hair pulled back in puffs went down the stairs. She gave a wave before turning off the light, and before Miss Rawlins could stop herself she was waving back. Then the lights were off, the door was shut, the little girl was walking down the hallway, and Miss Rawlins was alone. Again.

This time, though, it would not be for long.

She’d been about to kill the little girl, like she’d killed the others. But the others had screamed and cried. The others had tried to run. The others had not asked her politely to stopped singing and promised to come back to keep her company.

Perhaps, Miss Rawlins could let this one live.

Discover Yourself Through Writing Short Stories

Way back in the bad old days of the late 2000s, I was an idiot college student trying to get an English degree with no idea that the economy was going to collapse a few months before I graduated. I mean, I also had no idea what I wanted to do with an English degree besides write, and guess what? That’s not a good enough career trajectory to keep food on the table.

Pro-Tip: If you’re getting an English degree, fucking figure out what job you want after you graduate before you graduate.

Everyone always asks if you plan on teaching when you’re getting an English degree, and my answer was always the same: Gross. I’m not good with kids, I hated high school and barely tolerated college, why the fuck would I want to spend the rest of my life with smaller humans getting through the worst years of their life? Tweens are objectively the shittiest human beings we have on the planet, I didn’t like being near them when I was a tween and I’m sure as shit not doing it now.

It’s sort of the same with nursing, actually. Everybody always assumes you really want to go into pediatrics. Like…no. Fuck no. Now, instead of hanging out with a bunch of kids I don’t like, you expect me to hang out with a bunch of sick kids I don’t like, and their hovering, angry parents, and they might die? Yeah, no. Hard no. Like, 80% of my nursing cohort were all fighting over those pediatric placements and the other six of us were like, we’d rather hang out with the geezers. They have better stories and when they cry when you stick them with a needle you can tell them to harden the fuck up.

Wow, it’s almost like when you’re a woman, there’s this societal idea that you want to spend your life with kids. Weird.

What was I here for again?

Oh, yeah. So, I got this English degree. Specifically with a creative writing track. If you haven’t gotten an English degree from a major college or university, don’t worry about it too much. All the stuff they teach you is stuff you can figure out on your own, you’re basically paying just to get there faster. Mostly the classes are writing workshops. Twenty to thirty students all take turns writing short stories. You write your story and print off a bunch of copies down at the college print center where, even though you’re already giving them thousands of dollars a semester it still costs ten cents to print a page, and then you hand them out to your classmates, and they all go home and read them and write all over them in red pen, and then the next time you go everybody just sits there and slaps you around for a bit. Verbally, of course.

The difference between a 101 course and a senior level class is fucking hilarious, by the way.

101 Fiction Writing Student: Well, see, this part here was a little…unclear? I guess? I don’t want to tell you what to do you, but I wasn’t sure what was happening until I read a little further, so maybe…I mean, if I was writing it, I would take this bit and put it earlier. But that’s just me! Maybe it’s a me problem, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you, please just kill me now.

302 Advanced Fiction Writing Student: I almost set this page on fire it was so bad. What the hell were you doing with all these adverbs? And these characters are flatter than your ass. You need to work on this story down at the gym.

I fell off writing short stories after college, but I got back into it for this website and I’m angry at myself for stopping in the first place. Just in case you, also, have come up with a variety of reasons and excuses why you’re not writing short stories, here’s some reasons why you should (if you’re not a writer, check out my reasons why you should be reading short stories here).

Build a Portfolio and Find Out What You Really Want to Write

I mentioned this in another article a few months back. Writing lots of short stories for this website has

  1. Given me lots of content to show off and grow from, and
  2. Shown me what I want to write better than any sort of writing exercise could

If you have been reading my website for a while, first off, thanks! Secondly, you may have noticed patterns in my writing. Things I like to write about. Fantasy, obviously. I knew that going in. But some stuff that, looking back, honestly surprised me. Strong female protagonists are usually a must, I’m way more political in my writing than I thought I’d be, and I fucking love writing about the end of the world. All things that I possibly knew before, in my subconscious, but looking back on a year’s worth of writing it all becomes super obvious.

This can happen for you, too. You don’t even have to spend an entire year writing short stories before you begin to get a better sense of the kinds of things you want to write. And while you’re on your journey of self-discovery, you’re also building up a portfolio of work. Pieces that you can show off to potential employers or get published, or pieces that might give you ideas for bigger works in the future.

Test Runs

This is something a lot of authors do, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident.

How Long ‘til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin features what she calls ‘proof of concept’ stories for both her Broken Earth Trilogy and Dreamblood Duology. By this, I take it to mean that she was interested in writing something longer in these worlds but wanted to make sure they would hold up. Short stories can be a great way to test out some of the concepts you have kicking around in your head. You can play around with the world, the tone, and the characters until you get them working and feel ready to expand. Or, realize that the idea would never hold up for an entire novel. That’s okay, too, because now you know and hey, you got a story out of it.

Other times, you might write something and realize after that you’ve discovered a world you want to spend more time in. Long before The Stand was published in 1978, Stephen King wrote a short little story called “Night Surf.” About teens going to the beach after the world is wiped out by a flu called Captain Trips, the details are different enough that it doesn’t work as a prequel. Because it wasn’t. It was just a short story King wrote, and a few years later went back to it to create a huge, sprawling world.

And that’s totally allowed! There’s no rule anywhere that says once you’ve spent an idea on a short story you can’t go back to it. Expand on it, play with it, twist it around until you like it more. Even if that short story gets published somewhere, I’ve got proof here for you that it doesn’t really matter.

Freedom to be Experimental

I don’t know about you guys, but I have found some absolutely buck-wild short stories out there, and I mean it in every sense. Concepts that even the fringiest tin-foil-hat-wearing, AM-radio-listening, ancient-aliens-believing motherfucker would raise an eyebrow at. Structures that are so unhinged I have to keep rereading sections to understand where the fuck we’re going. Wild tonal shifts. Mixing languages. Shifting timelines without a safety net. Shit I would never sit still for if it lasted an entire novel. But 5,000 words? 10,000 words? Sign me the fuck up.

Any bizarre idea you’ve ever had can be put into a short story, because it’s not just me. I think most people are willing to put up with some crazy-ass shit if they know it’s going to be over in fifteen minutes. If you’ve ever had an idea that really intrigued you, but you were afraid it would never fit inside a full-length novel, try it with a short story. And then edit it to be even more fucked up, because why not?

Fun With Restrictions

Sometimes a good idea just fucking runs up on you and suplexes you into the ground and even as there is metaphorical blood running out of your ears and eyes you stumble over to a computer or a notebook and the whole story just pours out of you like you’re less a writer and more an interdimensional portal to some fucked up world where a werewolf is president and the inauguration is occurring on a full moon.

Other times you stare at a blinking cursor for hours, cursing the gods and wishing for death.

It’s all in a day.

In those times when you’re struggling to get something started, it might help to start narrowing what you can do with the story. There might be too many options, too many directions the story could go, too many characters. Giving yourself restrictions can help you choose where to start and even create a more interesting story than if you let yourself do whatever you want. Here’s some restrictions you can impose on your story to see what you get:

  • Use a story prompt or a beginning sentence
  • Pick a specific genre, a time period, or a specific location
  • Pick an overarching theme, like ‘love,’ or ‘revenge’ or ‘Florida Man’
  • Pick something that will be a recurring motif, like focusing on a color, a mood, or phrase
  • Constrict your word count
  • Try to start and end the story with the same sentence

There’s plenty more of these you can find in books and online. Sometimes telling yourself you can only write about clowns living on a pig farm in Alberta really brings the creativity out of a person.

Backstories

Short stories like these might be written for your eyes only, but who knows? Maybe you’ll find a place for them either published separately or woven into your larger work.

Basically, you’ve got this kickass concept, a fully realized world, and a plot that’s sending your characters on all sorts of interesting adventures. The problem is your characters. They feel flat. Shallow. Uninteresting. Maybe they’re not working together, or their actions feel forced. Somehow, your characters feel like they’re fighting you tooth and nail to ruin the story and you don’t know how to force them to behave the way they’re supposed to.

Before giving up on the characters – or the project – entirely, why not try a deep dive into your characters backgrounds? Obviously not a novel’s worth of information, because if there’s enough interesting stuff going on in your character’s background for an entire novel, and the current story you’re working on isn’t, you know, working, then maybe the background is the novel.

No, just pick a few defining moments of your character’s life and flesh them out. What happened? Who was there? How do they feel about it? Write it with as much detail and mental insight as you can. Do a few of these for every character that feels janky for whatever reason and see if you can get them to live more comfortably in their skin. If not, it might be time for a major rework or even the cutting floor.

A lot of people have this idea that taking the time to write short stories is not only pointless, but detrimental. After all, isn’t the time spent writing these short stories taking away from the time you could be spending on the multi-book passion project you’ve been dreaming about since high school? And I get it, because I also have a multi-book passion project I’ve been dreaming about since high school. And, yes, writing for this website is slowing me down on finishing the first book.

But writing for this website, I feel, has also improved my writing. The chapters I’ve written for my first book before I began this website were very long and sometimes meandering. I’ve completely rewritten some for editing purposes, and they are shorter, tighter, and stronger, and in part it’s because I’ve been writing these flash fiction pieces where I have to get to the point in one thousand words.

To make a long story short (too late), writing short stories will improve your writing, and any time spent improving your writing is not wasted.

Subtle Pressure to Get You to Read Short Stories

I’m always consistently shocked when someone tells me they don’t like short stories. I know that doesn’t sound like a conversation that can come up a lot. I sound like some NASA douche at a party half-drunk on wine coolers and slurring at a friend of a friend’s neighbor I’ve managed to pin to the corner, ‘You don’t have a favorite red supergiant? What are you even doing with your life?’

(Betelgeuse. Obviously.)

But I’ve been that girl who likes reading and writing since I was a kid. And sometimes people ask me for book recommendations. And sometimes I recommend short story collections. And then mostly people look at me like I told them to grab some Chaucer in its original Middle English.

College writing classes are pretty much all short stories for obvious reasons. No one has time to read and critique a NaNoWriMo project every week unless they’re getting paid for it. Every single one of those classes seemed to start with a majority of the students – again, English creative writing students – saying they weren’t a fan of reading short stories and thought that writing them meant taking time away from their ‘real work.’

We’ll talk about why writers should be writing short stories next time, but for now let’s focus on reading short stories and why it’s great.

‘Short Story’ Isn’t a Genre

The aforementioned shock I get when people flatly tell me they don’t read short stories stems from this idea. The way people say it is the same way people say, ‘I don’t listen to country music,’ or ‘I can’t watch horror movies.’ Like all short stories have the same types of characters, plots, and tones. Once you’ve read one, you know what all the others are going to do.

Obviously untrue, or I wouldn’t be so shocked all the time. Short story isn’t a genre, it’s a format. They’re the 45s of literature. The anthology TV show of literature. The Vines of literature. Do the kids remember Vines, or is it all about the TikToks now? Okay, book stans, they’re the TikToks of literature, and that’s the tea I’ve spilled.

Man, I’d be a great middle school teacher.

Short stories can be about anything, and in any genre. They can be simple or they can be experimental. One short story might be a scene of people talking at a diner, and another might span generations on a space adventure. Short stories are as varied as the rest of literature because they’re little snapshots of different genres, not their own thing.

Great for Beach Reads

This specific conversation is the one I’ve had probably half a dozen times:

Them: I’m going on a vacation and I want something to read on the plane or when we’re sitting around. You know, something short and light that I can finish by the end of the week.
Me: Oh, you should find a short story collection!
Them: A what now.
Me: Yeah, they’re exactly what you’re looking for! They’re all short, and because they’re not connected you can read one or two when you have time and not have to worry about remembering what happened when you come back to it.
Them: I have never heard of this concept before in my entire life and will be leaving this conversation now to go stand in a corner by myself, which is something I’d rather do than talk to you at this point.
Me (calling after them): Have you heard Betelgeuse might go supernova in our lifetime?

Sometimes people don’t want to read short stories because they’re looking for something longer and more involved Something they can really get absorbed in. And that’s totally valid. But when people come up to me asking for a book recommendation, and the guidelines they give me are literally descriptors of short story collections, and they still turn up their nose, I begin to get the feeling that they’re just rejecting short stories as a concept.

So the next time you feel comfortable traveling, which at this rate might not be until the sun explodes, look into a short story collection. Specifically one with soft pages so you’ll be comfortable when you fall asleep with it on your face.

Great for Busy Schedules

For pretty much the same reason they’re great for vacations, short stories are great for people who want to get into reading but are currently stuck in that late-capitalism grind where you are expected to somehow monetize every little piece of you and even when you do it’s still not enough to afford rent without roommates or take the kids on a vacation that isn’t just camping out in the backyard. Finally find yourself with half an hour? Read a short story! The next time you find half an hour to read isn’t for over a month? Who cares! It’s not like you were reading a full novel and have to remember what the hell was going on the last time you were able to crack the casing. They’re entirely separate stories!

I mean, it does fully suck that it takes you literal weeks to find time to sit down and read something, and I really hope that’s because your schedule is full of other fun stuff that you do with friends and family or by yourself and not because you have to work all the time.

Great for Trying Something New

Let’s say there’s an author you’ve been wanting to try, but all of their books are around a thousand pages long and you’ve been burned before.

Maybe you want to get into a new genre, but you’re not sure where to start and you’re not even confident you’re going to like it.

Maybe you want to see what new authors are out there, and get a little bit from every one.

Short story collections! Every time, short story collections!

Like I said, short stories aren’t their own genre. They come in every single one, even down to some niche stuff like solarpunk. Any genre you feel like getting into I guarantee a good collection of stories is only an internet search away.

Many famous authors write short stories, especially early in their career as a way to break out. If you want to find out if you’ll like an author’s style before taking the plunge into a full length novel, you’ll most likely find either a collection or at least one or two stories that had been previously published in magazines, journals, or genre collections. Sometimes these authors try out concepts in short stories that will eventually become one of their longer works, and it’s like having insider knowledge.

Great for Horror

Writing full length horror novels or movies can be a tricky thing. I think the reason horror movies and literature are so often associated with schlock is because it’s so hard to get it right. If you get even a little thing wrong – the tone, the pacing, the scares – you can quickly veer off that tightrope and end up with something that doesn’t work. More often than not, when horror doesn’t work it comes off as goofy and can quickly break any tension that’s been built.

Here’s what happens a lot: the movie or book or whatever starts off with a scary thing, and that thing is scary because we know next to nothing about it. But it’s supposed to be a complete story, and we’ve been conditioned to expect things from complete stories. Like answers. So, the movie or book starts filling in backstory or explanations for the scary thing as it works toward a resolution. By the end you know everything about the scary thing, and it’s just not scary anymore. Or, the writer held back details to keep it scary but now you’re pissed because you don’t have all the answers (paging Cloverfield, Cloverfield please pick up the red courtesy phone).

The great thing about short stories is that they aren’t expected to be a full fledged story. Sure, some are, there’s great variety. But short stories can get away with being incomplete. They can thrust the reader into a situation with absolutely no set-up and then end whenever they want, without having to explain everything that just happened.

For this reason, horror short stories are some of the best examples of the genre out there.

The author doesn’t have to ruin the scary thing by explaining where the scary thing came from and how to stop it. Hell, the protagonists of the book don’t even have to stop it! This isn’t a traditional story with a hero’s journey and a climax and a dénouement. This is a short story, and anything goes. It’s sort of like some of those episodes of The Twilight Zone where some fucked up shit would happen and there was no relatable lesson and then the credits rolled. Like the one where there’s a bunch of strangers trapped in a room with no escape except it turns out that they’re all donated dolls in a bin at Christmas? Who the fuck wrote that one?

Stephen King is absolutely great at this, and it’s probably related to his most famous criticism about not being able to write an ending. Well, fucking guess what? With short stories, he doesn’t have to end that shit! He can just scare the bejeepers out of you and then move on with his day. Here’s a short list of Stephen King short story concepts, none of which I’m making up:

  • There’s a finger coming out of the bathroom sink.
  • An oil slick is slowly killing teenagers stuck on a raft.
  • Frogs!
  • An astronaut comes down with a bad case of Eyes.
  • Evil sand planet.
  • Evil shortcuts.
  • Rats!

None of these things are ever explained. Shit is fucked up for about 10,000 words and then he walks away with no answers to leave you pissing yourself.

I generally don’t get scared by books, not the way I do from movies. I think having to read and imagine it myself pulls me away enough that I find horror literature entertaining and interesting but not actually scary. Except after I read “The Jaunt” from King’s collection The Skeleton Crew I had to put the book away and go outside for a while. I didn’t pick the book back up for three days. It’s all build build build unsettling creepy horror terror face-punch reveal over.

It’s fucking great.

And Now, Some Recommendations

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl. Probably the first short story collection I ever read, besides collected fairy tails and myths and such, and I still have my childhood copy.

Skeleton Crew by Stephen King. You can’t go wrong with any of his collections, honestly, but this one has the most stories that have stuck with me.

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor. Ms. O’Connor was a white Southern woman living in the middle of the twentieth century who knew how fucked up everything was and refused to ignore it. The topics she touches on in her short stories would have made her neighbors clutch each other’s pearls.

American Gothic Tales collected by Joyce Carol Oates. Gothic as a genre is about as American as dunking on Tampa, and this collection has stories spanning two hundred years.

How Long ‘til Black Future Month by N.K. Jemisin. Author of the Broken Earth Trilogy, these stories are all speculative, solarpunk, and afrofuturism, and include some of those ‘working out the concept’ stories that would eventually lead to her major novels.

The Day the World Came to Town

Sunshine, warm and soft, fell through the open window onto Dagny’s face. It was early, and the sun had not discovered what it would be angry about today. It would. It was nearly the end of April. The sun had been angry since the last week of March.

But now the sun was still half asleep and only cast easy rays on the world. Dagny’s world, anyway. They’d learned in school about how the sun shone on the planet. If the sun was just finished rising here, that meant if you went exactly halfway around you’d find the sun had just finished setting.

Were there people there?

Dagny’s world consisted of this house at the northern edge of Verdevilla. Of all of Verdevilla, she supposed. It was her mother and her father and her two brothers and one baby sister and papa. It was her friends at school.

Dagny’s world was Zadie.

“How wonderful! You’ve discovered a way to roll dough by looking dreamily out the window.”

Her mother came into the kitchen through the back door, hair tied up and Jerrah snug at her back. Dagny got up from the table to help her with the jars from the cellar crowded in her arms before something dropped.

“So funny I forgot to laugh,” Dagny said, taking the preserves.

“Huh-huh-huh,” her mother fake-laughed. Then she stopped and cocked her head to the side. Dagny had gotten her brown curls, slender fingers, and glorious lack of period cramps from her mother, but she hadn’t gotten the woman’s superhuman hearing. Dagny couldn’t hear a thing.

“I think I hear your friend coming.”

Dagny knew not to ask. She put the jars down and waited. Almost a minute later, she heard it, too.

Not just footsteps. Not even just running footsteps. High on the wind, sounding like some peculiar bird, came Zadie’s voice, louder and louder with every passing second.

“Dagny! Dagny! Dagny! Daaaaaagnnnnnyyyyyy! Dagny! Dagnydagnydagny! DAGNY!”

And then she was at the window, clutching the sill and panting. She must have run all the way from home. No, the Grants barely lived a quarter-mile away. She must have run all the way from town. The exertion had brought sweat to the edges of her red-blonde hair and a high color to her cheeks that made her look one of the models in the magazines down at the library. Zadie saw mother at the back of the kitchen and relaxed her posture, leaning on the sill and breathing through her nose.

“Oh. Hey, Mrs. P.”

“Good morning, Zadie. Did the mayor hire you to wake everybody up?”

Zadie snorted. “No, but today she should have.” She looked at Dagny again, and the way Zadie’s eyes flashed and her cheeks twitched Dagny knew what she would say before she said it.

“The train is coming. Today.”

It took a little begging and bargaining but finally mother relented. While mother went out back to find father and the boys, Dagny could go to town with Zadie.

And Papa.

“The train!” His voice was as spindly as the rest of him, crackling like static. He shuffled after them, talking a mile a minute. Mother had always said he could talk faster than he could do anything else. “Didn’t think it was supposed to show up for months.”

“I only just heard this morning,” Zadie said. The eagerness to get to town, the fear of missing it, made her shuffle her feet a little as she walked, but she did not leave the old man behind. Zadie had always been better with Dagny’s papa than Dagny was. Color rose in Dagny’s cheeks as she paused to let the two of them catch up.

Zadie said, “The tracks through the Gallon Fields, the ones they thought were missing? They weren’t, they were just buried. They dug them out and fixed them up. A couple of mailmen sprinted their horses all night to get here and let us know.”

“They should have said something!” Papa said. “Surely they didn’t get a mile of track dug up in a day.”

“I think they didn’t want to get people’s hopes up,” Zadie said.

They were walking through the Empties. Some of the houses weren’t, of course, like Dagny’s and Zadie’s. The Garcias and the Winstons and the Joelsons, they were scattered around. Mostly people lived closer to town. The rest of the homes, the empty ones with their broken windows and useless plots of dead grass, they freaked most people out. The other kids at school told each other horror stories of dead bodies and monsters living in basements. The adults told stories of vagrants and nails sticking out of boards just dripping with tetanus.

Zadie and Dagny had been in every single house at least once. They hadn’t found a single monster. A few families of raccoons and opossums. One time a vagrant, but he hadn’t done anything to hurt them and now Mr. Reynolds was running the music shop. Neither of them had ever gotten tetanus.

They liked the empty houses. When they had been younger it had been like having street after street of playhouses. Zadie would be the old world father coming home from work and drinking heavily and yelling at the black screen Papa said was called a television and Dagny would be the ‘little woman’ at home, making dinner and screaming at the kids.

“Look at it all,” Papa said, like he always did. “Look how useless everything was. Grass everywhere. Trees that didn’t fruit right. Cars, cars everywhere! Why walk half a mile to the convenience store when you can drive and be there in thirty seconds? Pah. No wonder my grandfather could barely move when he was my age. We were idiots. Now it’s hot as balls all the time and the only things I miss are the music and the food.”

Dagny covered her eyes as she looked up, as close to the angry sun as she dared.

“What’s the sun angry about today, Papa?” she asked.

Papa thought about it, scratching at the back of his head. “Today I bet it’s the trees. Or the holes where the trees should be. The sun never stops being angry about that one.”

He looked around, back toward the house. The old street they were following curved slightly, and they couldn’t see it anymore.

“Well, go on,” he said.

“Papa?”

“You don’t need an old man like me slowing you down, and I don’t know what your mother is afraid of. Anything comes at us out here it’d be the two teenage girls protecting the eighty-year-old man and not the other way around.”

Zadie grinned. “What if we’re supposed to be protecting you?”

“I’m old, not stupid,” he said, casually lifting his shirt to show off the old gun tucked in his belt. “Ain’t nothing out here, anyway. Go ahead, don’t miss the train on my account. If I miss it, you girls will have to tell me about it. Go, go!”

Dagny and Zadie each hugged the old man before skipping off ahead.

Zadie was almost a year older than Dagny. She hoped, when they were older, it wouldn’t matter so much. It seemed to matter a lot now. Zadie was a woman. Dagny still felt like a kid.

It didn’t help that Zadie was half a foot taller than her. They ran through the streets, cutting across dead yards and under broken fences, and Dagny felt like her lungs would collapse just trying to keep up.

“Slow down,” she finally pushed out.

“We’re going to miss it!” Zadie called back to her.

“We’ll hear it coming, won’t we? Zadie…Zadie, I can’t…”

Dagny pulled up short, bent over with her hands on her knees. She expected Zadie to keep running, so when Zadie’s upside-down face appeared in front of her, hair trailing to the ground, Dagny almost screamed.

“Are you dying?”

“Yes.”

“Nope,” Zadie said. She took Dagny’s hand and pulled her forward. She was walking fast, but at least she was walking. “There will be no dying today. Not when the world is finally coming to town.”

Verdevilla, built on the ruins of some other town, was thirty miles away from the next town, on the other side of the Gallon Fields. The mailmen on their horses came. Sometimes a few traveling salesmen. But otherwise they were left to themselves. It was too much hassle to come all this way for the same things the people in the city could get from right outside the walls.

It was a shock to the town when people from the city showed up at all, nearly five years ago now. Dagny had been eleven, barely able to understand it all, but Papa had patiently explained everything as they had walked home from the big meeting in the old school cafeteria.

“They were scientists, mostly. Engineers, too. People that design things, build things. In this case, though, they designed a way to break things. They want to come here – they want to go everywhere, I guess – and break down all the things we don’t use. All the Old World things that were pointless back then, anyway.”

“If they’re pointless, who cares if they’re still there?”

“Because they’re still hurting the world and making the sun angry. They get too hot. They get in the way of animals and plants trying to come back. The scientists say they have a way to break it all down. A team of people who will go through everything. They’ll see what they can use, and use it. And if they can’t use, they’ll break it down until they can, or until it doesn’t matter anymore.”

It had all sounded like a fairy tale to Dagny, but Papa had said it was just technology. He’d been out to the city, once, a little before Dagny had been born. Zadie and Dagny, when they were alone and bored, still breathlessly recited the stories he had told them. Towers that touched the sky, covered in trees and ivy and moss. Cars and trams that ran on electricity. Radios that worked. And over the whole city, a dome protecting it all from the sun’s anger.

The train would come, and bring the scientists and the engineers back. And they’d all work together to fix Verdevilla until it could live up to its name.

Even after Dagny had her breath back, she still held onto Zadie’s hand. Zadie, thankfully, didn’t try to take it back. She even smiled at Dagny, that special smile that only seemed to exist for her. With Zadie next to her, the sun didn’t seem angry. Just…a little too happy, maybe.

The swung their hands as they walked, their excitement making them skip here and there, and Dagny let her mind wander.

The engineers would come, but maybe Dagny could convince them to leave one of the Empties. Near her parents, but far away from Zadie’s. They could move in together. Play house the way they used to, but without the ‘play’ part.

“Do you think they’ll bring enough people to tear down the old stuff?” Dagny asked. “Or will they need our help?”

“They must need our help. They can’t have enough people in the city to do all the work for every little town they find,” Zadie said. “Can they?”

“Oh, I bet they do. The stories Papa told us, remember? More people on a single street than he’d seen since the end of the old world.”

Zadie went quiet again, thinking. She seemed to live in the extremes that Dagny hardly ever reached. Dagny sometimes felt a little sad, sometimes a little excited, but mostly seemed to exist in the middle. Zadie, on the other hand, could be bawling her eyes out in the morning and then angry as the sun in the afternoon. She didn’t seem to feel emotions so much as she became them. It was one of the things Dagny…

“What else do you think the train will bring?” Dagny asked quickly.

“Mayor Wellington said she hopes for electricity eventually,” Zadie said. “First she wants a quick way to communicate with the city. We probably won’t get back the stuff they had at the end right away, but there used to be this thing called telegraph?”

“Dots and dashes,” Dagny said, nodding. “Maybe new foods, you think? I had an orange, once, when I was a kid, and I’ve been dreaming about them ever since.”

Zadie giggled. “You dream about fruit?”

“It’s an expression.” Dagny huffed as she rolled her eyes. “You don’t dream about anything?”

The laughing expression was gone in an instant, emotions moving in Zadie as fast as ever. They had left the Empties behind and were in the town proper. Everyone was going in the same direction as they were, toward the tracks and the little station that had stood in loneliness for as long as anyone could remember. They could see it now, a white building surrounded by people and under the cover of bright balloons. It was really happening. The train was really coming.

Zadie wasn’t looking at the station. She was looking away. Away from the station. Away from Dagny.

“I don’t dream about things coming to town,” she muttered, so low Dagny almost missed it. Before Dagny could ask, Zadie had turned to her, eyes wide with mischief. “Come on.”

She pulled on Dagny’s hand before she could protest, dragging her down the alley. Just one block over and already the crowd heading for the train station had thinned, but Zadie kept pulling her away, only laughing when Dagny asked where they were going.

And then they were there. Between the streets of downtown and the endless, pointless river of pavement that made up the old highway, were the train tracks. They were inches away, the toe of Zadie’s shoes almost touching the edge of the wooden planks. There had been a fence here, once, but it had blown down in a storm when Dagny was eight and no one had thought it needed to go back up.

“It’ll come right through here,” Zadie said. “We’ll see it first.”

Dagny tried to smile back at her. There was a sour feeling in her stomach, now. She tried to tell herself her eyes were watering from the breezes coming off the highway.

“What?” Zadie asked.

“You’re not thinking about what the train can bring to town,” Dagny said, taking her hand back. “You’re thinking about what the train can take away.”

Zadie stared at her, eyes darting back and forth. “Haven’t you?”

“No!”

The truth fell out of her before she could consider any of it. She knew Zadie never wanted to go home. Had seen the bruises when she thought Dagny wasn’t looking. Remembered the times they played house and Zadie wanted to stay there all night. When they’d finally go home and split in the middle of the Empties, and Dagny would watch Zadie take off in a direction that did not lead to her home. Dagny knew Zadie would leave that house if she could.

She just didn’t think Zadie would leave town altogether.

Zadie took her hand again, the pressure of her fingers on the cusp of hurting. Even if it had, Dagny might not have pulled away again.

“Come with me,” Zadie whispered.

“Where? Where would we go?”

“I don’t know. Don’t you see? That’s the best part. We can take the train back to the city, and from there…I don’t know!”

“But…”

A whistle, high and loud and long, interrupted the stammering. Coming toward them, bigger and faster than Dagny could ever have imagined. The two of them stepped back from the tracks seemingly just in time, the wind making their hair and shirts fly. People were in the front car, waving and yelling and tossing pretty pieces of paper out the windows. Zadie was next to her, hopping and yelling and waving back. Dagny could only stare.

The train was supposed to bring the world to her. Not take her world away.

The Horizon Zero Dawn Blanket: The Carja Blazon

The HZD Blanket

First, a few updates:

Horizon Forbidden West

We finally have a release date for Horizon Forbidden West: February 18th, 2022. Guerilla is acting like it’s set in stone, but anyone who pays attention to video games knows anything can happen. It certainly won’t be coming out any earlier than that, so I’m treating this date as my deadline for the blanket.

I generally do not pre-order video games as we’ve all seen how that can turn out, but there is absolutely no way I’m not playing this the day it comes out. I plan on taking that entire week as a staycation. Still, I told myself I would only pre-order if it came with an exclusive outfit.

So, when pre-orders released and I found the Digital Deluxe Edition came with three outfits, and a face paint, and a photo mode pose, I repeatedly threw my credit card at the computer screen until I remembered how online purchases work. Also, I’m pretty relieved I’m beyond the part of my life where I’m collecting tchotchkes, because the Collector’s Edition and the Regalla Edition both were wicked expensive and sold out wicked fast. I’m happy for the people who bought it, and I’m also happy the extras I crave are only ten bucks more than standard price.

I Got My New Yarn Ball Winder, And It Is Glorious

Man, I’m just an advertising machine today, huh? Too bad none of these people are paying me for it.

Look at this thing:

I love it so much I want to cry.

I specifically didn’t want something made of plastic again, and looked for something I could conceivably repair instead of having to replace outright. This thing is heavy, quiet, and smooth like butter. The most important question: does the yarn wind?

You bet your ass it does.

I got mine from the theknitstore on Etsy, and it came with easy-to-follow instructions on how to put it together.

Okay, now that we’re done with the housekeeping, let’s talk about

The Carja

If you’ve been reading through my posts on making this blanket, you may have started to pick up on a theme: none of the other tribes really like the Carja. What hasn’t come up is the corollary fact: the feeling is sort of mutual. What happened to create this resentment?

First of all, the Carja are pretty different compared to the other tribes we’ve talked about. They are far more technologically advanced and have a long-established writing system. Their capital city, Meridian, is built of stones on top of a giant mesa in the middle of the Utah desert and it has two working elevators. They are a patriarchal kingdom with separated classes of people that used to use slave labor. They value art and artisans and their clothes are very detailed and colorful (at least the nobles and the artisans are). You can already tell where this is going: the Carja think of the other tribes as squatting in ditches poking berries up their noses and the other tribes think the Carja stand around all day smelling their own farts and pulling a muscle just going to the toilet.

Second of all, and way more important, are the Red Raids. Twenty years prior to the beginning of the game the Derangement started. Normally docile machines started to go aggro and new machines whose sole purpose appeared to be Tearing Shit Up began to show up. The Carja king at the time, Jiran the 13th Sun King, was already a little fucked in the head and decided that the only way to stop the Derangement was some good, old fashioned blood sacrifice. Can’t sacrifice your own people, that’s how revolution starts, so Jiran ordered that the other tribes be raided both for blood sacrifices and slavery (those elevators were actually built by Oseram). This went on for over a decade before his son did start a revolution.

So, yeah. Everybody still’s a little pissed about that.

Carja Fashion

While the rest of the tribes dress primarily for survival – the Nora for hunting in forests, the Banuk for hunting in snow, and the Oseram for smelting and smithing – the Carja mostly seem to dress specifically to look fly as hell. They wear a variety of bright colors with intricate designs and machine pieces woven in not as armor, but as decoration. The higher standing you have, the more color you wear. Even the guards and their holy men dress like ‘ostentatious’ is less an adjective and more a competition.

Something I haven’t talked about because its only outfit-adjacent are the face paints the tribes sometimes wear. The Oseram don’t have any while both the Nora and the Banuk have face paints that indicate role in the tribes or wreaks. Meanwhile, the Carja have several face paints that straight up look like make-up.

The Banuk Shaman, the Nora Seeker, and the Carja Night On Meridian by Maybelline

Most of the disparaging things other tribes say about the Carja – when they’re not, you know, talking about the time the Carja kept showing up to drag them away and kill them – is talking shit about how fucking fancy they dress. When you’re wandering around Meridian dressed in Nora outfits the Carja NPCs will shit-talk your outfit to your face, and if you’re wearing a Carja outfit they’ll compliment you. It’s a backhanded compliment, but still.

The Outfit

This is one of my favorite outfits, so I have a LOT of pictures of it.

You may be able to figure out what the Carja Blazon outfit is going to protect you from. Hint: It’s fire. It’s protecting you from fire. Now, how is this outfit, which reveals a completely bare stomach area, protecting you against fire? Who knows, but it a great example of what I’ve been saying: the Carja are willing to sacrifice a lot of function to look a little bit better. Who gives a shit if you suffer third degree burns to your abdomen if you look like hot shit when it’s happening?

The Square

I have been explicitly avoiding doing center-out granny squares for the other tribes (except in the case of certain cities) because I wanted them for the Carja for two reasons:

  1. They worship the sun.
  2. A lot of center-out granny squares are really intricate and use a lot of colors, which matches their style.

This pattern is called Geisha in The Big Book of Granny Squares, and I chose it because I thought the large ‘petals’ looked like the vest piece of the Blazon outfit. I modified the stitches in the petals, making them fuller and more solid, and obviously changed the colors to match the outfits style. The colors (from center) are currant, whirlpool, hyacinth, and brass heather.

My favorite part of this pattern are the stitches done in brass, where you loop down and catch all the chains connecting the petals to give each section a more separated look:

It looks downright messy beforehand, and afterward it really gives each section the illusion of being a part from the others. As I’ve said (a lot) before, The Big Book of Granny Squares has a lot of great patterns once you get past the crazy amount of mistakes (to be fair, I didn’t catch any mistakes in this particular pattern).

The other part I enjoyed doing in this square are the outside blue and maroon pieces, which include double, triple, double treble, and triple treble stitches. These are longer-than-average crochet stitches, and when done as loosely as I did (not by choice, btw, I’m just still learning) they come out nice and soft and squishy.

Overall, A+ square, very fun.

That’ll do it for now! I counted it up, and I’ve got roughly eighty more squares to crochet, plus stitching them all together (thank fuzzy God I weave in the ends as I go), and about one hundred and fifty days to get them done. That sounds like enough time, but with me, who the hell knows. Let’s find out together.

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