Something is Wrong: A Biddies and Broken Hearts Story

The Biddies and Broken Hearts

Something is wrong.

What?

What’s wrong?

Dunno. Something.

He was lying in his bed. Twin bed. Pulled into the room. Pushed against the wall. Under the window. Beyond trees, he could see the stars. Bright and heavy.

Light travels at a constant speed of two hundred ninety-nine million, seven hundred and ninety-two thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight meters per second in a vacuum. The stars you see in the night sky are time travelers from thousands of years in the past.

Thoughts like these came to him occasionally. Sometimes he’d know what they’d mean. Most times he wouldn’t. It was easier when he couldn’t remember any of it. There was still a section of time he couldn’t remember at all. After the Blues but before Eric and Dean. That must have been when whatever it was hit him, hit him. Don’t want that memory, brain says no.

For a while, he couldn’t remember anything. Pieces were coming back. Broken, jagged pieces.

They didn’t use to call him June, beforehand. They called him Benji. Why did Eric and Dean call him June? Had they known him? Knew he carried his father’s name? Maybe it was something completely different. He couldn’t remember the two of them before they showed up that day in Austin. Maybe he wasn’t still in Austin but he was around there. The edges of the world had been fuzzy, sounds hollow and muffled like his whole head was caught in a pickle jar. He’d been starving. They’d had food. And then the pills. The pills made his head stop hurting. Or stopped him caring about the hurt. Or stopped him caring about anything.

Something is wrong.

This again. Something was wrong. The signals were coming. Getting all jammed up. Twisted. Something inside him was wrong? That was true, anyway. Something new? His stomach didn’t hurt. He didn’t need the bathroom. His toe sort of ached but that was because he’d tripped on a root the day before. That wasn’t it. The wrong thing.

Benji, we’re hosed. The entire planet.

That was Mig. They had been friends. They went to conventions together, sometimes wore matching costumes. Once, Mig had been Mando and Benji had been The Child. Mig’s Mando costume had taken him months. Benji’s costume relied heavily on green face paint. Mig never stopped being mad about how much more attention Benji had gotten.

June didn’t know if Mig was dead. Maybe he was only dead like Benji was dead, replaced with someone else. Probably he was dead for real.

It was the early days of the Blues. No one was even calling it that yet. It was just another flu strain, only getting news for popping up in the summer. Doctors had been making the rounds on cable news telling people the usual – wash your hands, stay home or wear a mask if you feel sick, only the very old or very young or immunocompromised are in any danger so check your temp before you go visit nana.

His nana was definitely dead. Stroke, years before the Blues. She smoked to the end and cussed like a sailor. Mom hated her. Her mom had still been alive, living that oil baron wet dream out west somewhere he couldn’t remember where but it probably ended in a vowel. All cowboy hats and boots and floral blouses and pearls always pearls you live the desert grandmother where are you getting pearls-

Something is wrong.

“They sent us a sample,” Mig is saying. He’s smoking. He quit smoking six years ago and hasn’t touched them since but he’s smoking now, and the smell is in his hair and clothes and Benji knows he’s been smoking for hours. “They’re sending samples to everyone they can.”

Mig works in molecular biosciences. Infectious disease. How lucky he has a friend working in a such a relevant area. Surely they are all saved.

“We’re hosed. The entire planet,” Mig says. He drags on his cigarette and flicks the butt. Pulls out the pack from his front pocket. “I’ve never seen mutations like this. No one has. It just…it persists. You think its over, think you’re clear…”

Mig shakes his head, as though he can see what’s coming. Maybe he can.

“What are you telling me?” Benji asks. Mostly he understands. But he doesn’t want to and he’s hoping he’s wrong.

“Can you get out of the city? Do you have a place to go?”

“No.” Maybe if he was still speaking to his parents.

“Then go home. No, go to the grocery store. Stock up on…fuck, everything. Water. Toilet paper. Those disgusting snack cakes you like. Take it all home. Lock the doors. Don’t open them for anyone.”

“I’ve got summer courses.”

Mig holds the cigarette away so there is no smoke between them and looks Benji in the eyes for the first time. Benji swears there are already new wrinkles around his eyes, white hairs mixed in with the black, and something else he has never seen on Mig before. Terror.

“Benji, I am telling you that you don’t. Courses are cancelled. Maybe forever.”

He’d been right about that. Mig had always been right. Benji had followed his advice to the letter. He was pretty sure he got the Blues at the grocery store.

Something is wrong.

His brain didn’t work right anymore and it frustrated Benji, so much he wanted to scream. He could remember these specific little things. Moments. Remember the look on Mig’s face. The summer heat pooling around them, testing them even as they sat in the shade. He could remember his research. He remembered the words and the concepts and what they meant.

Sometimes. Then it would all go away, and the words were just strings of syllables, if he remembered them at all. That wasn’t so bad. It was the other stuff.

Even when he could remember it all, he couldn’t speak it. He could barely speak little words. They were there, in his mind. He could think them, chant them, sing them all in his head. But when he tried to send the words to his mouth and tongue and lips nothing would happen. The signal was jammed somewhere, traffic jammed in a tunnel between his brain and his face and nothing would move, the letters would get made and strung together like the stupid pearls his grandmother always wore, always, so stupid

Something is wrong.

June threw the covers off and sat up in bed. This part sucked, too. Part of his brain knew something, but it couldn’t tell the rest of the brain what it is. It could only scream ominously, giving no details, and Benji was tired of it. He was tired. He wanted to sleep. But something is wrong so he couldn’t but he didn’t…know…what.

It wasn’t inside him. Whatever was wrong. The things wrong with him weren’t new. It was outside him then. Benji looked across the room. Birdie was asleep in her bed. There was enough starlight to see her face, her hand gripped around the blankets puddled at her chest. He watched for a few seconds, until he could see the rise and fall of her back. Breathing. That wasn’t it.

It was dark. As it should be.

Sounds. Were there sounds? No, no sounds. No one else was awake in the house. Outside the crickets chirped. Something moved in the brush, but now that the humans had been beaten back something always moved out there. Whatever it was sounded small. Rabbit. Squirrel. Nothing else. No sounds.

Temperature was normal.

June breathed deep.

Something is wrong!

The traffic jam in his brain broke. Signals went where they were supposed to. And June understood.

He crossed the room and began shaking Birdie awake.

“Huh? What…June? What time is it?”

Speak it. Say the words. Small words. One word.

“Sssss…”

First sound. Make the second. Come on, come on, make the sounds. I can think, mostly, and I can remember and I’m here but I can’t tell anyone because I can’t make the sounds!

June gave up. He slowly reached out and, after some effort, managed to touch Birdie on her nose. His fingers were almost as stubborn as his mouth sometimes. Almost.

“Did you wake me up to…to boop me?”

June shook his head. Tried to make the sounds.

“Sssssss…”

He took a big breath through his nose, as loud as he could. She was still half asleep, not understanding. He tried to touch her nose again. Got her cheek. Tried again and hit her nose. Took another big breath.

Finally, understanding.

Birdie breathed deep.

She was out of bed in a second.

“Smoke. Shit, June, that’s smoke!”

Birdie was in the window, leaning over his bed and out into the darkness.

“Lots of it. That might be close. Come on, we need to get John.”

Not bothering to change clothes, Birdie grabbed the floral robe hanging on the wall before flinging the door open. She was hustling down the hall, not bothering to check if he was following.

That was good. She’d been treating him like a baby, he knew. Hell, he also knew he needed it, at the beginning.

Hey, mister. Mister, I’m talking to you. Are you okay with these two?

You can stay here with us. We’ll fix you up and get you warm.

June had been so fogged and broken by the cold and the beatings and the drugs he’d barely heard it. But enough had come through. Maybe not the meaning of the words, not then even if he could remember them now. But the tones. The softness. The way John and Birdie had looked at him, equal parts alarmed and worried. The most compassion he’d seen in however long it had been since some great terrible thing had fallen out of the sky and hit the back of his head square.

June didn’t need that pity now.

He needed to find a way to break free.

Previous Next

Preparation: A Body of Thieves

A Body of Thieves

They were halfway down the next sleeper car but his brain was still in Joey’s room, turning the thought over and over.

Jump off the train.

Jump off the train.

Jump OFF the TRAIN.

Into a RIVER.

We are about to jump off a train through a gorge into a river.

Jump.

Jump.

Critical failure.

Wait.

Resetting.

Vinnie’s brain woke up and raced to catch up with them, speeding through the halls and crashing back into his head. His body was following Maggie down the hall like a sleepwalker, and when he finally caught up to what was happening he stopped, clutching the wall.

Maggie glanced at a small wrist watch tucked under her black sleeve before coming back for him. She took him by the upper arm and pulled him toward the back.

“Look. I get it. You’re freaking out,” she hissed at him. “But the Montana is coming. We’ve got less than fifteen minutes to get the package, get to the back of the train, get set up, get on top of the train, and be ready to go. So you can freak out all you want, but I need you to freak out in motion.”

Still dazed, Vinnie allowed himself to get pulled along for a few feet before wrestling his arm out of her grip.

“This is crazy. Listen to yourself. You’re talking about jumping off a train into a river.”

“Keep your voice down,” she said. Her eyes darted to the rooms closest and she closed the gap between them. This close he could still see the fat lip and black eye she had, buried under layers of smooth make up. “This is what I do. I’m the spirit. In, out, never seen or noticed.”

“Well, it’s not what I do,” he shot back, trying to keep his voice to a stage whisper. “I’ve never done anything like this before! I…I…I don’t even like roller coasters!”

Maggie narrowed her eyes. “This is your best way off the train. You get off with the passengers, you’ll be spotted and burned. We miss the river, there is another way off, but if you don’t like the jump you’re going to hate that. You wanted to be a famous con? This is the way you keep doing it.”

With that she walked off down the train, leaving him. Slowly, he realized she was giving him a choice.

Jump, or burn.

He jogged to catch up with her and nearly had to stay jogging, she was walking so fast. By the time they had gotten to the safe car, Hannah and Duane were waiting. Vinnie had never seen such a place, although he had figured out there must have been a car like this on nearly every train. It was like someone had moved the deposit box room from a bank onto a train. Dozens of little boxes glittered around the walls, all untouched. Bigger boxes lined the bottom. Given the size of the bag sitting on the table in the middle, the rhodium must have come from at least one of those boxes, but none of them looked disturbed.

Maggie examined the black bag and then looked up at Duane. “Good?”

Duane nodded. “Frosty.”

Hannah ignored Maggie like she really was a spirit. She reached out to Vinnie and gave his gloved hand a squeeze.

“You can do this.”

“Time to fly,” Maggie said, heading for the back of the car with the bag.

Vinnie gave Hannah and Duane one last look. A look that he hoped they were able to read. A look that said please don’t let this crazy woman take me off this train.

They must have known, because their faces were easy to read, too.

If there was another way…

There was only one more car behind the safe car. The caboose. A mostly empty car with only a few boxes and a couple of rats scurrying away from the light.

“Shouldn’t there be security back here or something?” Vinnie asked, pretending his voice wasn’t water.

“Maybe back in the old-timey western days when trains were barely faster than a horse,” Maggie said. She was down toward the back of the car, examining a couple of the boxes. After a second she darted forward, moving a box away and revealing a large black canvas backpack. She pulled something from the front of the bag and tried to hand it to Vinnie.

Panic had turned to fear. And fear had turned to skin-crawling, dry mouthed terror. Vinnie realized he was beyond functioning. His limbs wouldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He could barely think. Except about what they were about to do.

Maggie stared at him for a few seconds, holding whatever it was she had in her hand out to him. She lowered her arm, and Vinnie braced himself, waiting for more spunky logic and straight threats to get him to move.

Instead, she took out her tin ear. It took a few seconds to build up to the motion, but Vinnie managed to take his out, too. He handed it to her, and she slid both into a pocket at the side of the backpack. When she looked at him again, her face was different. Softer.

“Let’s start with your breath, okay? You’ve been holding it. You’re holding it right now. Breathe. Force yourself to breathe. Not too fast…good, just like that, just keep doing that. Unclench your fists. Just let the hands hang loose. Now, find a place where you were happy. You don’t have to tell me that place. Just find it. Picture it. Be in that place.”

If he had time, he might have been able to think of something happier. More appropriate. But he went with the first thing that came to his mind: Taking the train away from home. Dad wouldn’t know for another half a day and wouldn’t have a way to contact him for weeks. The train was taking him west, to his new life, an acceptance letter and a dorm. The train was taking him to his new life. That life wouldn’t actually pan out, but in that moment he hadn’t known it. At that moment, every door had been thrown wide open.

He looked at her, and she smiled at him. The first time he had seen her smile.

“Functioning again?”

“Around eighty percent.”

“Hold onto that moment. It’s going to be hard, but that’s good. If you work on holding onto that moment, you won’t notice the other stuff.”

The thing she had been trying to hand to him was a harness. She helped him get into it, strapping it across his body this way and that until he felt like he’d been caught up in a net.

“We’re going to jump tandem. We’ll hook together once we’re up top. The wind is going to try to push you, so stay low. It’s going to be loud up there, like when we were on the side of the train. We won’t be able to hear each other, but we shouldn’t have to do much talking anyway. I’ll get us hooked together. The only thing you need to do is jump with me. I’ll squeeze your hand when it’s time. That’s it. I’ll take care of everything else, got it?”

Vinnie only nodded, trying to hold on to his happy moment.

Maggie moved quickly after that. Not in a rushed way, there was no panic. Instead, she moved the way people do when they’ve done a thing so many times it has become muscle memory, and they are only living in the flow. She strapped the bag of precious metals to her front, and then strapped her own harness around her. The backpack clipped into the harness, and she pulled and tugged at everything to make sure nothing was loose. Each moment was so fluid. Almost too fast. Just practice, Vinnie supposed. With a final glance at her wristwatch, she nodded.

“Right on time. Ready?”

They went to the very back of the car. She gave him a last look before throwing open the door.

Without the sound dampening walls the roar of the train was monstrous, attacking through his feet and ears. The wind rushed past them as they stepped out to the rear of the train. She had been right, he couldn’t hear a thing besides the desert howling as it fell away from them. There was a half-moon in the sky above them, providing enough light for Vinnie to find the ladder next to the door. He waited for Maggie to go up, but she shook her head and pointed. Him first. He didn’t like it, but he understood: if she went up, there was a strong possibility he would just stay down here, waiting at the back of the train until it pulled into the Jewel.

Picturing the other train ride, the one where there were many possibilities instead of just one involving jumping, he began to climb. He was grateful for the gloves, wondering how cold the metal rungs must have been out here. And then his head got over the side of the train and he was almost blown off, barely holding onto the rung by his fingers.

Sunny train, calm train, going to college train, leaving home train

He crawled on top and stayed low, just as she said. There didn’t seem to be another way, anyway, unless he wanted to get off the train by just blowing away into the desert. It was hard to look forward, into the rushing air, but he managed a quick glance ahead. The train moving into the darkness. Somewhere up there, somewhere close, was the gorge.

Leaving home train, new life train, on top of a train, no, IN a train, warm, ready for a new life, NOT ready to jump, no, no, no

Maggie was next to him. He missed her climbing up and over. One second she wasn’t there, then she was. She had put on a pair of something that looked like glasses and goggles crossed, and was looking ahead. He could see her eyes scanning, following the train. Then she nodded, and gestured for him to come be in front of her.

Again, she moved with such efficiency getting him hooked up to her it almost felt unreal. Of course everything would feel unreal, though. He was on top of a train getting ready-

In a train, I’m in a train, I’m watching the plains go by, tall grasses and corn and no river, definitely not a river, this train doesn’t go over a river at all, ever, nope, nope, nope

He could see the bridge now. The front of the train was on it, pulling them forward, and it wouldn’t be long now. Seconds.

Behind him, he felt Maggie tense up like a spring.

The vision of the day he left home vanished.

His lower back tightened.

His breath left him.

His skeleton felt ready to abandon ship.

Below, the rushing earth disappeared, revealing inky, sinky darkness. Then he saw the half-moon, reflected on a sheet of water.

Maggie squeezed his hand.

He would never know if he actually jumped or not. It didn’t matter. They were on the train.

And then they weren’t.

Previous Next

Live from Wheel of Time: Sexism? In My High Fantasy?

Spoilers for the series ahead.

Let’s start this off with a simple message:

I Am Not Saying Robert Jordan Was Sexist

In fact, as I pointed out in another article, there are a lot of feminist aspects about the book that I really enjoyed. Hell, here’s one I missed: an Aes Sedai named Leane Sharif who, after she is deposed and ‘stilled’ (stripped of magic) decides that the way she’s going to find inner strength is to become a sexy femme fatale who crushes men under her heeled boot. On the surface, this doesn’t sound particularly feminist, but I think it works for three reasons:

  1. She is from Arad Doman, a kingdom where the woman dress in form fitting clothes with plunging necklines and use seduction as a weapon on the reg. The rest of the kingdoms all consider this terribly scandalous, but in Arad Doman this is just how the women roll and the men are mostly immune to it. With Leane, it means that she’s not becoming some sort of sexpot out of nowhere, she’s reaching back to find strength in her roots.
  2. Leane pointedly did not spend her time in the White Tower practicing Domani seduction techniques, so when she begins she doesn’t just become this bikini-wearing blonde who can flirt her way out of every situation. In fact, she sort of sucks at it for a while.
  3. Most of all, it works because Leane isn’t the only woman in the books. Far from it. And the women who observe Leane trying to use seduction to get what she needs all have varying opinions on it.

Robert Jordan isn’t calling all women conniving seductresses with Leane. Instead, he’s created a single character coping with a great loss of power by finding the power in her own sexuality. Suian, another Aes Sedia who goes through the same deposition and stilling, copes in an entirely different way relevant to her own experiences. Jordan isn’t making statements on women, he’s just writing women as fully realized characters. He’s not sexist.

That Being Said…

Robert Jordan was a white man who was raised in the South of the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. Actually, I can take a lot of that away.

Robert Jordan was raised in the United States. A sometimes violently patriarchal society that is only recently starting to confront itself on its toxic masculinity and its fear of both feminism and ‘non-conforming’ genders. And it’s not going well. All of us born and raised in such a society have a certain amount of sexism baked into us from birth, and it takes constant self-awareness to recognize it and root it out. I, obviously, did not know the man personally, and there isn’t much about his personal life on the internet, so I’m not going to guess on how these themes and situations ended up in the books, only point out that way or another, they did.

Saidar vs Saidin

This is the number one thing people writing about the sexist tropes in Wheel of Time write about so I’m not going to linger, but basically:

Saidar: the female half of the One Power, which is described as a river of power one must surrender to.

Saidin: The male half of the One Power, which is described as a raging torrent of power that one must dominate.

Excuse me, I’m going to find a small room and make the jerk off motion until I pass out from exhaustion.

No One Seems to Like Each Other

I already brought this up in another article, but I’m bringing it up again because in these situations where people are thrown together and get stuck in a never-ending time loop of disgust and distrust, it’s always between the women and the men. Men are constantly thinking and talking to each other about how they can’t understand women. Women are constantly calling men idiots and dismissing them out of hand, or telling them what to do and expecting the men to do it without any actual discussion. This happened so much I wanted to scream. It enforces the idea that all men are like this and women are like this.

Come to think of it, of the few relationships that actually make it to the pages of these books, I don’t buy a single one of them. Mat and Tuon are a literal self-fulfilling prophecy and she’s probably going to kill Mat eventually. Perrin and Faile are complete opposites that love each but don’t seem to like each other. Lan is fully twenty years older than Nynaeve and they meet when she’s twenty-four. I have read this exact situation on r/amitheasshole over and over and over and it never ends well.

And then you have Rand, and his three insanely hot wives. One is a tomboy who clings to his boots like a child getting dragged around the living room, another is an Aiel warrior who could crush him with her thighs, and the last is the damned Queen of Andor. But they’re all just so hopelessly in love with him they don’t mind sharing!

Excuse me, I’m going to that small room again to scream into a pillow until I my vocal cords rupture.

Everyone is Obsessed with Not Killing Women

Specifically Rand, who builds an entire mantra of listing the names of all the women he’s either directly killed or gotten killed even as that list reaches into the triple digits.

And to be clear, a lot of these women are Aiel, a society where woman are warriors. Like, it’s their whole thing. They knew what they were signing up for and they believed that dying in battle was an honor. These aren’t untrained village women who got caught in the crossfire, they’re fighters who died swinging. But Rand treats their deaths like they were baby ducklings caught under the treads of a tank. Because they’re women and delicate flowers and not capable of making their own decisions uwu pwecious babbies.

To be clear, if Rand killed hundreds of women, he killed thousands of men. And he doesn’t appear to give a shit about any of them.

This all reaches its ridiculous crescendo when Rand has a mini shitfit and then refuses to kill Semirhage. Semirhage is one of the Forsaken, the Middle Manager Baddies that roam around the books and cause general pain and suffering for everyone who crosses their paths. She’s also described as particularly psychotic, capable of great acts of torture and was apparently a sadist even before the Dark Lord turned her into something worse. She pretends to be the Seanchan’s Empress to get a meeting with Rand, gets founds out at the last minute, but still manages to kill some of his people and cast a fireball that entirely blows off his right hand.

And still Rand refuses to kill her. Because she’s a woman.

Excuse me, going back to my Sadness Room to just sigh uncontrollably until I’m dead.

Semirhage is also a mass murderer. But because she’s a female mass murderer, not only is Rand going to let it slide, he’s going to make this the hill he dies on. Or at least the hill he loses a hand on.

Mat also has weird hang-ups about killing women who are in the process of trying to get him killed. The only one who doesn’t is Perrin, who snaps another Forsaken Lanfear’s neck like it’s a walnut and doesn’t cry about it for half a dozen books.

To spell it out: women are capable of making their own decisions and living (or not) with the consequences of those decisions. By having Rand refuse to kill even the evilest of women he, and by extension Jordan, are simultaneously putting women up on a pedestal and saying that they aren’t culpable for their actions. If a woman fucking mind controls you to make you strangle your girlfriend to death, and that’s just the cherry on top of the sludgy-shit sundae that is her life, and you still don’t want to kill her solely because she’s a woman, that isn’t chivalry, that’s just a bizarre and frankly gross obsession with gender and gender roles.

The Series’ Bizarre and Frankly Gross Obsession with Gender and Gender Roles

I wouldn’t consider this obsession super-obvious, especially compared to other works. After finishing this series I began The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson and it seems like fucking everything is gendered in the most prominent society. Men can’t eat jam because that’s a ‘feminine’ food? What the what?

But there are so many little pieces that ultimately add up to a weird fucking picture. The fact that the primary magic source is gendered in the first place is sort of fucked up, and the way it’s gendered is definitely fucked up. I have deliberately not gotten into how the way the magic is split between genders makes the idea of people who are trans a muddy mess and completely ignores people who are nonbinary because a) again, he was a southern white dude writing in the eighties and the nineties and we can only expect so much, and b) I’m cis and thus can’t actually speak to how reading this stuff would effect people who are trans. But none of that changes the fact that gendering the magic system that way excludes a lot people.

Add to that stuff like:

  • Every man thinks they can’t understand women. Every man thinks women are stubborn and secretive and do things just to piss men off.
  • Every woman thinks men are stubborn and generally too stupid to function. Fun and Deadly Drinking Game: every time a woman calls a man ‘woolheaded.’ You’ll die.
  • Grown ass women get spanked. A lot. To the point where I’m thinking, are you revealing something about yourself, Robert?
  • Berelain is out here living her best life and every other woman in a five miles radius is just chanting slut slut slut under their breath as she passes by.
  • The Aes Sedai have to be naked for every important milestone. Come to think of it, so do the Aiel Wise Women. Of course the men don’t. Slanging some dong while you’re proving how manly you are in the manly art of grasping Saidin by the manly horns and showing it who’s boss is totes gay, or something.
  • With magic the men are naturally better at dealing with earth and fire elements (you know, the manly elements) and the women are better are dealing with water and air (the delicately feminine elements). So, in this already needlessly gendered magic system, there is further gendering.

All of these things add up to this beautiful intricate fantasy world on an entirely other continent that ends up sounding like The South. Wonder why.

TW: rape for the next section. It’s the last part of the article so if you need to you can take off. Otherwise, proceed past the Protection Prompto.

Not the right time for a selfie, bro

The Rape of Mat Cauthon

Mat Cauthon is one of the earliest main characters we meet, coming from the same small village as Rand. He’s characterized as a bit of a fuck-up, who likes to gamble and chase women. His women chasing is always light and never played as anything but consensual. In fact, he seems to get rejected more than he actually gets lucky (although this might be a side effect of the incredibly sterile nature of the books. There’s only a handful of sex scenes and mostly it’s just hinted at). He’s that lovable cad trope, like Han Solo. The lovable bad boy type.

In the seventh book of the series, A Crown of Swords, Mat ends up in Ebou Dar and catches the eye of Queen Tylin. At first, it’s a cat and mouse game where Mat is the mouse for once, and it’s sort of cute to watch the tables turn. Until:

“It was too much. The woman hounded him, tried to starve him; now she locked them in together like…like he did not know what…He reached her in two long strides, seized her arm, and began fumbling in her belt for the keys. “I don’t have bloody time for-” His breath froze as the sharp point of her dagger beneath his chin shut his mouth and drove him right up onto his toes.

“Remove your hand,” she said coldly. He managed to look down his nose at her face. She was not smiling now…

“What are you going to do?” he mumbled through his teeth… “Will you answer me!” That was not panic in his voice. He was not in a panic…

Tylin did not answer, only kept him tiptoeing backward, until suddenly his shoulders bumped against something that stopped him. With that flaming dagger never easing a hair, he could not move his head, but eyes that had been focused on her face darted. They were in the bedchamber, a flower-carved red bedpost hard between his shoulder blades. Why would she bring him…? His face was suddenly crimson as the bedpost. No. She could not mean to…It was not decent! It was not possible!

“You can’t do this to me,” he mumbled at her, and if his voice was a touch breathy and shrill, he surely had cause.

“Watch and learn, my kitten,” Tylin said.

A Crown of Swords, pages 595-596

This isn’t only ‘not decent.’ It’s rape. Full stop. Tylin locks him into her rooms, pulls a knife on him, and then pushes him to the bed. Imagine if the roles were reversed, and this was a fifty-ish year old king locking a twenty-year-old woman in.

Soon after this, in an unrelated event, Mat ends up breaking a leg. Tylin pounces on this weakness, having all of his things moved to her rooms, burning his clothes and replacing them with the sort of outfits she wants him to wear, and continues to have sex with him whenever she wants, never asking what Mat wants. As the fandom wiki puts it:

We have a term for ‘non-consensual activities,’ my dude.

This goes on for months in the books until Mat finally escapes Ebou Dar entirely.

I think, given the other things we’ve gone over, you won’t be surprised to find out that Robert Jordan handles this situation without any sort of emotional intelligence or tact. This was not placed in the books as a way to explore how the rape of men can happen, is reacted to, and should be reacted to. Instead, Jordan follows the playbook set up by Hollywood and popular culture:

  1. Mat was a womanizing cad, so he deserved this. Hell, he probably secretly wants it.
  2. No one has any sympathy for Mat. The women who are supposed to be his friends don’t understand what the big deal is and think it’s kind of funny. Most of the servants in Tylin’s estate think it’s funny and actively aid and abet Tylin, taking his things away and reporting to Tylin where Mat is at all times.
  3. After Mat escapes Ebou Dar, there are no lingering consequences to his repeated rapes. In fact, after Tylin is found dead shortly after he leaves, he mourns Tylin and then promptly forgets anything ever happened. It’s never brought up again.

As Jonathan McIntosh puts it in this brilliant Pop Culture Detective video:

“What makes these jokes [about the sexual assault of men] insidious, is that they present the sexual assault of men as something that is, ultimately, harmless.”

Feminism doesn’t only benefit women. Our patriarchal system and toxic masculinity can do damage to men as well, including instilling the belief that men want sex all the time so there’s no way a woman can rape a man. Robert Jordan didn’t use the rape of Mat Cauthon as a way to confront the patriarchy or the sexism lurking inside him. He used it mostly as a joke, the way popular culture has been doing for hundreds of years. Given how little other sexual encounters there are in fourteen books, it’s honestly shocking that one of the longest sexual relationships consists of repeated rape.

Again, I ultimately do not think Robert Jordan was sexist, or misogynist. I fully believe he was trying his best. For something written mostly in the eighties and nineties these books are pretty progressive. But as we march forward and (hopefully) progress further in the right direction we find that the things that were good stepping stones have ultimately not survived the test of time. This doesn’t mean that we stop reading these things, but it does mean that we have to have a critical eye on where they went wrong, so that in the future we can do it better.

Other Wheel of Time Posts:

A Good Idea at the Time: Pacific City

Pacific City

They had left Naomi sitting on her new leather couch, bitterly weeping, with a promise to get things sorted.

A promise to try to get things sorted.

The store she had bought the book from – Crow’s Blessing, gag – was of course in Wisteria, the expensive, trendy neighborhood clear across the fucking city. The few times Peggy had been to this side of town was for work, so she doubted anyone would recognize her. They debated taking a cab, decided that was too much money to pay, and instead headed for the train. It was the middle afternoon, the sun only starting to climb down from its peak and the commuters still stuck in their office buildings, so they managed to get in a car with only a couple others.

“Are we going to be able to help her?” Aster asked. They had sat down, putting one leg up down the empty row of seats. Peggy was standing, casually holding on to one of the support poles and biting her finger nail. “I mean, I really haven’t read much of this. But what I can tell from redwave magic…”

“Yeah,” Peggy said, staring out the window. “She’s probably fucked.”

She was staring out the window at the city passing by below and not really seeing any of it. Something about this wasn’t sitting right with her. The air conditioning suddenly turned on, hitting her at her neck and back. It was nice for a few seconds, but she was quickly shivering.

“You sign the contract, that’s it,” Peggy said. “There’s no breaking it, as far as I know.”

Aster looked up at her, hearing the way her tone lilted and hesitated.

“But?” they finally asked.

Peggy looked at Aster like she had forgotten they were there.

“But…I’ve known a few demons in my time, and I don’t think they usually operate like this.”

“Okay, ignoring the ‘known a few demons’ bomb, what’s different with this?”

“She didn’t know what she was agreeing to. Demons don’t like to trick people like that. History makes it seem like witches just serve the demons they get tied to, but that’s not really it. It’s a partnership. And who wants to partner with someone who doesn’t even really understand what they’ve done?”

Aster nodded slowly as they processed what Peggy was saying. “Right. Look at what she’s done since she gotten the book. Gotten herself a face lift, some new shiny toys for the apartment…”

“And a single curse. A weak one. That’s not a lot of gains on the investment,” she said. She shivered again, and stepped away from the cold air. “This whole thing is starting to feel weird.”

“She says, after seeing a curse, talking with imps, and meeting an accidental witch,” Aster said.

Crow’s Blessing was in the middle of a brick-paved street, wedged between an expensive boutique where everything sold was some shade of purple, and a frozen yogurt place that seemed to rely on bright greens and pinks to make themselves look fun. The front window of the store was papered with fliers, mostly for local yoga and Pilates classes, meditation workshops, and somebody down in Ferndate selling ‘homemade crystals,’ whatever the fuck that meant. As Aster and Peggy stood on the sidewalk, staring, a woman in green dress and oversized sunglasses came out with a man in skinny jeans, hotly discussing one or the other’s tarot reading and what it meant for getting laid that weekend.

“This is…not what I expected? But also exactly what I expected?” Aster said. “My brain is hurting.”

“It’s a tourist trap,” Peggy said. “Snake oil and crystal placebos. So, what the hell are they doing selling actual magic?”

“Maybe it looks better on the inside?”

It did not look better on the inside. The colorful signs directing shoppers to the prayer mats and the dreamcatchers and the wishing stones were all printed. There were little wooden boxes on a nearby shelf, all apparently hand carved and painted, each with a small, gold ‘Made in Taiwan’ sticker on the bottom. Despite the incense being sold the store didn’t smell like incense. It smelled heavily of lemon floor cleaner. The music when they walked in had been a tribal sounding piece made entirely of wood flutes, but as soon as that ended a soft Michael Bolton song came on.

“Is it just me,” Aster asked. “Or is this part of a chain?”

Peggy, still looking around, saw a sign on the front counter and pointed.

Visit our other locations! the sign said, and then listed off twelve other towns in the south half of Golden.

A man walking by carrying an opened box stopped a couple feet away from them. He was college-aged with a strong jaw and a name tag pinned to his T-shirt that said GARY.

“Can I help you find something?” he asked, giving them that classic, empty customer service smile.

“Uh, maybe,” Aster said. They held up the book so Gary could see it. “Our friend bought this book here, and-”

Gary dropped the box and was running for the back before Aster could even register what was happening. Whatever the box was filled with shattered, but that didn’t stop Gary.

“God damn it,” Peggy muttered, and then she was running after him.

Everyone in the store was staring. Gary cut through two guys, pushing each one to either side and ignoring their yells. Peggy was able to slip through the gap he had made, apologizing as she did. He ran for the door to the back and slammed it behind him, apparently thinking that would slow her down. It wasn’t locked, so it didn’t, and he was still only a few feet in front of her as she made it into the back room.

“No, no, no!” he yelled as he backed up through the room, tripping over a box and another box and then finally a chair. Peggy slowed, thinking she’d finally caught him. Gary popped back up and, finally looking in front of him, sprinted for the door to the back alley.

He was halfway down to the street by the time she got to the door. He was fast. Peggy was faster. She had to catch him before he got to the street, though. If he got out in front of people it was going to be hard to explain why she was marching him back into the alley in a headlock.

She still wasn’t going to make it. As he closed in on the alley he took one last look behind her. No triumph. No smirk. Just fear.

Gary turned back to look in front of him just as Aster stepped out from the alley corner and hit him in the middle with a metal garbage lid. Clutching his stomach he stumbled back and fell on his ass. Peggy finally caught up, and with Aster they got him to his feet and walked him back down the alley. Peggy spared a few glances for the street but if anyone had noticed, they were pretending that they hadn’t.

“Please, please, please, no, no, no,” Gary said, over and over. He didn’t try to pull away, though, only walked with them like a man going to the guillotine. “It’s not my fault, please, don’t. Tell Andromeda it’s not my fault, I didn’t mean to.”

Back behind Crow’s Blessing, Peggy pushed Gary up against the wall. Snot was bubbling out of his nose and he was whimpering.

Aster shook their head in wonder. “When he ran, I thought he’d be all tough and scary. Not…this.”

“I’m not tough! Or scary! Please, don’t hurt me. I’m sorry. It’s not my fault. Tell Andromeda-”

Peggy waved a hand. “Stop, stop, stop blubbering. Who the fuck is Andromeda?”

Gary’s eyes grew wide. “You…you’re not with her?”

“No,” Aster said. They held up the book again. “Your store sold this a couple of weeks ago. Except it’s actual magic, and now we got a guy who can’t open his mouth without light bulbs exploding.”

“If you’re not with Andromeda, who are you?”

Peggy reached up and put a hand on his ear, twisting. “We’re not with her but we’re still plenty mad. Spill it.”

“Okay, okay. Fucking hell, lady.” He shook his head, trying to get his ear to stop stinging. “He came to me a few weeks ago. Said he was a book salesman and he had something for the store. Usually things have to go through corporate, but…I don’t know…he was just so convincing. He gave me one, to try out-”

Aster sighed. “And you did the first spell in the book?”

“I didn’t know it was real,” Gary said, holding up his hands. “We sell spiritual stuff, not actual magic. He showed up after I read it. Just – pop! – standing in the middle of my apartment. He said the books were at the store, and I was to sell as many as I could to anyone I could. And to keep that they were real magic to myself.”

Peggy raised an eyebrow. “And Andromeda?”

“He said to watch out for her or her goons. That she’s ‘the big cheese in this patisserie,’ his words, and that if they caught wind of what we’re doing they’d kill us both. Would she? Kill me? This wasn’t my fault…I didn’t know…the things he said he’d do if I didn’t…”

Gary broke down crying, bending at the knees and falling to the ground. Aster patted his back while mouthing, what the fuck? to Peggy.

Previous Next

First Day at a New School

I’m starting to think I should make a series of these called Things I Wish the Main Character Teenage Girl Would Say Instead of Whatever Insecure Thing Actually Comes Out of Her Mouth

So far, Kate’s first day at her new high school had been going…well enough. Math was a bummer, as always, and worse they had her repeating trigonometry even though she’d already done it back in Meadowville because ‘all juniors take trigonometry here.’ At least it was a guaranteed A. Okay, a guaranteed B. They were letting her take an art class and the band class at the same time, at least, which was a big step-up from Meadowville’s policy.

The girl they’d assigned to show her around, Nadia, was nice, too. Really nice. Actually, she might have made a friend. After leaving her whole life back in Meadowville, it would be nice to have someone to hang out with this weekend instead of sadly trolling her friends Instagrams and Tiktoks to see what they were up to. Like she had been. For the past three weeks.

“I usually sit over there, by the window,” Nadia said, pointing. The cafeteria, like the rest of East Carver High, was huge compared to what she was used. A cavern, rising to steel rafters that took every shout and laughter from the students below and amplified it so the students would have to shout even more, painted in bright school colors sometime late in the last millennium, the only light of any substance the sun coming in through the dirty windows on the west wall. Also, whatever was being served for lunch today smelled like farts. Thank God for her Thor lunchbox.

“Oh, hi, Nadia.”

Kate turned around to find a girl who completely did not fit with everything she had seen today or was currently surrounded by. Everyone else was a normal high school kid having a normal high school kid day. Lots of sweat pants. Lots of home-made t-shirts for whatever after school thing they did. Track and field. Marching band. Robotics club. Meanwhile, this girl who had come up behind them and the other girls behind her were dressed like they were late for a music video audition. The girl who had spoken was wearing what looked like designer clothes, a skirt and a blouse with such a deep cut between the breasts Kate was immediately embarrassed and worried for her, and carrying either an actual Louis Vuitton bag or a fake so good it really didn’t matter. Given the Gucci branded hair clip holding back her waves of blonde hair, Kate guessed it was the former.

The new girl didn’t give Nadia time to speak before looking Kate up and down.

“And who is this?”

Please, just give them a chance, her mother had said before she had left. Since the reason they had moved two towns over was because her mom had found out her dad had been screwing his coffee boy for the past eight years, Kate was willing to whatever made her mother happy.

Kate smiled. “I’m Kate, I just moved here from Meadowville.”

The smile on the girl’s face broadened. “What a shock, I’d never have guessed!” she said brightly. Too brightly. “Well, welcome to East Carver. I guess. I’m sure it’s all a bit of a shock for you, huh?”

“Not too bad,” Kate said with a shrug. “And you are?”

The two girls behind her giggled as the girl swung her purse so it was in full view. “Emily Reinstadt.”

Kate got the feeling she was supposed to recognize the name. Maybe at least the last name? But how was Kate supposed to know anyone here?

“Okay, nice to meet you,” Kate lied.

Emily shuffled her feet, trying to hide how upset she was that Kate hadn’t recognized her. Local politician’s daughter, maybe. Or a businessman.

Nadia tugged at her elbow. “Come on, Kate. We should eat.”

“Yes, don’t want to miss a meal,” Emily said. “I’m sure you’ll fun have on…that side of the cafeteria. Looks like you’ll fit right in.”

Kate glanced over her shoulder, and then at Nadia. She had been all smiles and jokes all day. Now she was staring at her feet, looking like she was waiting to be dismissed by the principal.

Instantly, Kate was exhausted.

“Oh, I get it,” she said, stopping Emily mid-hair toss. “You’re the class bitch.”

Emily’s mouth dropped open in surprise and hung there for at least two seconds. The other girls gasped and took a step back, like bad language might be catching. Finally, Emily’s brain caught up and her mouth snapped close.

“Excuse me?”

“Or maybe not the class bitch. One of many, perhaps. I haven’t seen the whole school?” She turned it into a question, looking at Nadia. She was staring at her with eyes so wide they could have fallen out.

“I don’t know where you get off calling me that,” Emily said. “I have been nothing but nice to you.”

“No, no you haven’t. You’ve been pretending to be nice while insulting me. And Nadia. And that half of the cafeteria, come to think of it.”

“If you read into it, you-”

“There’s no reading into anything,” Kate said. “You’re negging me.”

“I…what?”

“Wow. I’ve never been negged in daylight before. Usually it’s at some shitty club in the city. And it’s being done by some skinny guy named Skeeter with a lot of stupid tattoos and an ugly hat.”

Emily narrowed her eyes. “There’s no way in hell someone like you has been to clubs in the city.”

“Oh, why? Because I’m from Meadowville, and we’re all farm-fresh hicks out there? We’re just as far from downtown there as we are here in East Carver.”

Emily shuffled her bag again, but this time it was to hide it behind her back. Maybe it was a fake.

“You can’t be mean to me. My father-”

“Don’t care. Nadia, how much time do we have left before the bell rings?”

“Uh…twenty minutes. Give or take.”

“Let’s go eat then. I’m bored with this conversation.”

Kate walked off, bring Nadia with her, aware of the eyes on the back of her head.

“You let her talk to you that way?”

“I mean, she’s always like that. She’s always been like that. Even when we were friends-”

Kate reared back in horror. “You were friends with that thing?”

Behind her, she heard Emily scream.

Live from Wheel of Time: The Seanchan Are the Absolute Worst

Spoilers throughout for the entire series, including the ending.

As I discussed in a previous article, Robert Jordan’s worldbuilding in The Wheel of Time series is a masterclass on creating an entire continent filled with different, cohesive peoples and having them interact. The number one reason anyone who wants to write fantasy, especially a sprawling fantasy series, should read these books is to see how Jordan does it and steal ideas like the filthy thieving vagrants all good writers are. These feel like real kingdoms and societies with rich histories and, even better, they’re constantly talking shit about each other. Neighboring kingdoms either have rivalries or straight up invade each other every once in a while. Farmers living in the middle of nowhere don’t even know which kingdom they belong to and don’t really care all that much. There’s an entire separate faction of people living in the desert that, to most people, are just rumor and conjecture until they begin to get pulled into the world at large by Rand and his bulging ta’veren. It’s a living, evolving world all reacting in different ways to the impending end of the world but learning to come together to defeat it.

And then the fucking Seanchan show up.

These Fucking Guys

A thousand years before the books begin – which sounds like a long time but this period actually comes up a lot – Artur Hawkwing, king of everything, decided to send one of his sons with a huge, ass-kicking army across the western ocean for reasons mostly unclear, but I have to believe it was because his son was seventy pounds of crap in a five pound toilet bowl and Artur was done dealing with his shit. Anyway, Prince Crapper and his people find a continent, name it after themselves, colonize the shit out of it, and become the Seanchan.

These people objectively suck.

They have a strict class structure with bullshit rules like you can’t look someone of a higher class directly in the eye and the Empress won’t even speak to people of lower classes, instead using sign language to a slave and having them say it.

Yes. They have slaves. Like, a lot of them. High blood, low blood, doesn’t matter, it is hilariously easy to end up owned in Seanchan. What do you expect from a people who crossed the ocean, found a continent filled with people, and systematically went through and took over?

In related news, I love the fan page for the Seanchan where they compare them to real life societies and it seems like they might be avoiding something…

Can you see what’s missing?

Further, there are sul’dam and damane. Women in this world, for the most part, are the only ones who can use magic, referred to as ‘channeling.’ On the continent we get to know, women who can channel go to the White Tower and test to become an Aes Sedai. It’s brutal training but ultimately these women become, essentially, free agents who can spend their lives as they like, whether that’s through research, advising royalty, or finding and crushing men who can channel (to be fair, up to a certain point any man who can channel is guaranteed to go crazy and take a lot of people with them when they die). Meanwhile, over in Seanchan, once it’s discovered you can channel, you are literally leashed like an animal and controlled by someone else for the rest of your life. Most of these women who get leashed are so broken and brainwashed if someone even suggests taking off the leash they have a DEFCON 1 Meltdown. Damane translates to ‘leashed one.’ Aes Sedai are referred to as marath’damane – ‘those who must be leashed.’

To be clear, we never actually go to Seanchan. We only meet them when they show up in the second book with the sole intent of taking over the entire fucking continent because that’s what their prophecies said they get to do now. They are a society with the strong belief that everything they do is right, everything everyone else does is wrong, and there’s absolutely no discussion on the matter.

They are the worst.

What the Fuck is the Point of The Seanchan?

I read the books and I still don’t fucking know.

They Should Have Been Villains

When they first show up in the second book The Great Hunt they are painted as villains. Three of our main characters – Nynaeve, Elayne, and Egwene – are all on the road to becoming Aes Sedai and thus lose their absolute shit when they realize what’s going on with damane. Egwene gets captured and leashed, and although its not long before she manages to escape this event fucks her up for the rest of the books, becoming a trauma she revisits right through to the end. The Seanchan, with the help of their damane and fucking dragons, easily take over a handful of kingdoms as the books progress, killing monarchs, enslaving people, and leashing any woman they find who can channel, Aes Sedai or not.

All of this, to me, reads as a secondary villain. You know, like, it’s bad enough that our heroes have to defeat the physical manifestation of the concept of evil itself, but on top of that they also have to deal with these invaders who think only they can defeat the physical manifestation of evil and for that to happen literally an entire continent has to submit to their rule and there’s no logic or reason behind this line of thinking so you can’t rationalize with them because the omens told them so and how the fuck do you argue against an entire people who built their society on fully believing, like, seeing three ravens before breakfast means your oil light is going to come on soon or whatever?

So, yeah. They show up in the second book, wreak havoc on a city called Falme and leash one of our main characters and I’m immediately looking forward to whenever these backwards chucklefucks get their assholes ripped inside out by Rand and handed back to them on a platter that I’m sure Robert Jordan would have described in loving detail.

Obviously, That Doesn’t Happen

Or I wouldn’t be here bitching about it.

Sometime early in the back half of the books Rand begins to realize that he can’t fight a two-pronged war against the Seanchan and the forces of evil. Okay, obviously, makes total sense, so let’s defeat the Seanchan first and then direct our energies toward evil, right?

Right?

Instead, Rand decides that they have to work with the Seanchan. They are incredibly powerful, after all. You know, powerful enough to have already fully invaded and taken control of, like, three previously independent kingdoms. The clear lesson to take from that is that they need their help.

This could still work! The enemy of your enemy, and all that, but once the forces of evil have been defeated, then it’s time to confront the Seanchan and tell them to take their bullshit back across the western ocean!

Or you could, I don’t know, sign a treaty with them that says they get to keep the lands they’ve already conquered and the women they’ve already leashed. But no more or, oh boy, there will be hell to pay!

They show absolutely no sign that they are seeing the error of their ways and plan on making changes to their civilization.

And then, as previously mentioned, immediately after evil is defeated the series ends with absolutely no follow up. As far as the reader knows, the colonizing, slave-taking, smelling-their-own-farts Seanchan are left the way they are with a treaty that they are definitely not going to break in the near-future, no sir.

The Seanchan as Written Could Work in Another Story

I am not saying that the Seanchan, written as an invading, colonizing force that is too powerful for full reprisal and everyone has to get use to their presence, would never work. There are plenty of series that use a fantasy setting to house hyper-realistic-bordering-on-grimdark sociopolitics that would have an absolute field day with the Seanchan. Think A Song of Ice and Fire or The First Law trilogy. Series like that could spend chapters, whole books even, exploring the ramifications of the appearance of the Seanchan, the ethics of dealing with these people, and the ultimate moral sacrifice of wanting to do something about them but being unable to.

The Wheel of Time is not that kind of story. Its tone is far more traditional. A teenager wakes up one day to find out he’s the reincarnation of the last dude who tried to fight back evil, and there’s a prophecy that says he’s also going to try to fight back evil and probably win. From the beginning, it sets itself up as a world where evil can be defeated. While it does delve into some sociopolitical issues, its tone is far more fantastical and classical than A Song of Ice and Fire and doesn’t contain the sort of cynicism and darkness required to pull off the Seanchan as a set of invaders everyone has to live with.

The Things Not Said

The tone of the Wheel of Time series should mean that the Seanchan are an evil society that have to be beaten back, broken, or shown how fucked up they are so that they begin the process of changing. This doesn’t happen.

They instead read as the invading force that the rest of the continent has to deal with, but this isn’t done well, either.

Robert Jordan never has his characters confront the ethical implications of rolling over for the Seanchan. There are token pockets of resistance, a few arguments here and there. Egwene, obviously, has objections to making a treaty with the Seanchan, but by the time it’s brought to her attention they are on the cusp of the final battle with evil and there isn’t any time to argue about it.

It’s not enough. Seanchan society is so radically different from every other society on the continent, and in such an evil way, that Robert Jordan should have devoted pages and pages, even entire chapters, to the characters wrestling with the reason and morals inherent in dealing with them. Again, this is a society who keep people as slaves and chain women who can channel like dogs. There is no other society that even comes close to behaving like this in the main continent. If, ultimately, there was no way to get through the battle against evil without finding a way to work with the Seanchan, then there should have been a lot of emotions about it. But there isn’t.

The treaty is signed. The Seanchan now have some land. Some people don’t like it, but that’s life, I guess?

The Secret Behind Sul’dam: Eh, Who Needs It?

Sul’dam translates to ‘leash holder’ and is the name for the class of women in Seanchan who can control the damane. In Seanchan, you can test to be a sul’dam, and if you can control these women you become a highly celebrated member of society.

The Seanchan have invaded the new continent for less than a year when some of our heroes discover the truth: the sul’dam are also women who can channel, they just never showed the spark and got caught. It’s established that this revelation would tear the fabric of Seanchan society apart, forcing them to question the nature of channeling and the status they’ve taken away from some women and the status they’ve given to others.

And then nothing happens with it.

That just keeps being the story of the Seanchan, huh?

Again, I was so excited to see this revelation as clearly this was going to be the way to sow havoc into this brick shithouse of a society. Alas, nothing. The knowledge is never weaponized. Even the Empress of the Seanchan, a woman who can be a sul’dam, and therefore can channel herself, is told the truth to her face. And nothing happens! Because she was told in the last book, during the Last Battle, and there wasn’t enough time for that and then after the battle the book ends. I mean, she’s upset by it. But more like your nana getting upset because you accidentally dropped an F-bomb in front of her and her bridge club and less like a homicidal piece of shit Empress who has had people killed for way less and totally should have had all her people present for that little fact murdered out back so they couldn’t tell anyone. Speaking of the Empress…

I Hate This Woman

Not in a ‘love to hate’ way. Not in a ‘good villain’ way. I hate her as a person, I hate whatever her function in the story is supposed to be, and I hate her entanglement with another character, Mat Cauthon.

Let’s start at the beginning.

She’s a Dumpster Fire of a Human Being

And I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to think that. I think.

Tuon is the Empress of the Seanchan, which means she’s spent her entire life having an entire fucking country bow and grovel at her feet. All of the Seanchan’s shitty beliefs are distilled in her until the evil is oozing out of her pores. She treats everybody like garbage, has people killed and doesn’t care when people kill in her name, and is 1000% percent in favor of leashing all women who can channel and enjoys breaking these women like horses. Tuon believes she came to rule through divine right, and also has the right to invade and conquer the continent and that everyone will be happier under her rule because of course they would because she’s right and everyone else is wrong.

At face value, she is written as a villain, and an objectively terrible human being.

She’s Not Treated as a Villain

It’s the same problem with the Seanchan. Tuon is wandering around, wasting oxygen and kicking puppies and shit, but at the same time having favorable interactions with people we’re supposed to like. She’s not dead by the end, in fact, she’s agreed to Rand’s treaty and is still ruling. Egwene shoves the fact that she could probably channel if she started practicing in her face and while it rattles her, it otherwise does nothing to slow her down. Much like the rest of her people, I have no idea what function she’s performing for the story or what Robert Jordan was trying to say with her. If anything.

Loveless Marriage, Table for Two

In the fourth book, one of our main characters Mat receives three prophecies about himself, the most relevant here being that he would marry the ‘daughter of the nine moons.’

Meanwhile, back in Seanchan, Tuon had received a foretelling of her own that boiled down to: she would marry Mat.

And then their marriage is literally a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mat figures out Tuon is the daughter of the nine moons and jokingly says aloud that they’re married, unknowingly initiating the Seanchan marriage ceremony.

When all this started I was once again excited, thinking I was going to get that sweet, sweet ‘enemies to lovers’ trope I so desperately crave. Mat is, objectively and without argument, the best character in the entire fucking series, and I figured Mat would be able to mellow Tuon out and give her some humility and, like, teach her how humans work. Instead what we got was ‘enemies to bitter old married couple trying to kill each other.’ The narrative keeps telling me that Mat is falling in love with Tuon, but it ain’t showing me shit. And Tuon seems to actively dislike Mat even at the end. At one point she is aware of at least one dude trying to kill Mat to advance politically and does nothing about it, and once she finds out she’s pregnant and has an heir she sounds like she might kill Mat herself because she doesn’t need him anymore.

By the end of the book she sucks just as much as she did when we met her, and all she’s doing is dragging Mat down to her level.

Tacit Complicity

I don’t know what Robert Jordan intended for the Seanchan. I don’t know if his early passing changed their trajectory, although I doubt it due to how big of a presence the Seanchan were. Jordan must have written many notes on them, so either this was how he envisioned them to go or Sanderson jerked the reins. Given that Sanderson wasn’t piecing the last three books together alone, I don’t think he would have gotten away with making such a big change.

I think it comes down to Jordan having too many irons in the fire. Sanderson spent a lot of the twelfth book ending a bunch of side plots that weren’t fulfilling the story anymore. Jordan created a huge, sprawling world and perhaps got a little bit lost in it. There were too many groups demanding too much time and ultimately the Seanchan ended up being stuck in the middle.

At least, I hope that’s what happened. I hope the Seanchan were originally supposed to be defeated, or redeemed, because having them get to continue their society with so many of the characters shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘What are you going to do?’ feels like tacit complicity to everything they stand for.

The worst example I can think of is the ultimate fate of Moghedien. One of the Forsaken, aka the really really bad guys, Moghedien is still alive at the end of the last battle, thinks she’s the last of the Forsaken still alive and is super stoked for all the evil she gets to do now. Except, while she’s wandering around the battlefield, she gets mistaken for a regular woman who can channel and gets a collar snapped around her by some Seanchan specifically looking for any women remaining who can channel.

The book treats this like a good thing. Which it is, in a way. Moghedien is capable of her own fucked up shit and would have definitely gone on to make life hell for whoever ended up in her way. But ultimately the message is ‘she’s no longer a problem because she’s a slave with no free will now, yay!’ It’s making the reader happy the damane exist because it’s being used against Moghedien. But that doesn’t erase that’s it being done to dozens if not thousands of innocent women, and from the looks of it the Seanchan are already wiping their ass with the treaty they only signed a few days ago and will definitely be kidnapping any women they can get their hands on.

This also leads back to one of my previous complaints about the series ending so abruptly. If there had been any sort of narrative about what happens after the Last Battle, maybe something could have been thrown in about the other kingdoms fighting back against the Seanchan. In fact, all we have are visions of the future that indicate that the Seanchan don’t go anywhere.

So. Yeah. This terrible society with a long history of human rights violations just gets to chill in the middle of the lands they conquered with their slaves forever. Great message.

Other The Wheel of Time Posts

Live from Wheel of Time: Things I Didn’t Like

I already wrote about some of the things I liked about Wheel of Time. Definitely not all the things I like about the series, but I was bumping up to two thousand words and not everyone gets ten thousand words to make a point. Now that I’ve mentioned it…

Today I Was Wearing a Black Corset with Matching Lace Around It and a Black Leather Miniskirt, Pink Fishnets and Black Combat Boots

When I first heard Amazon was planning to make a show out of the series, my initial reaction was ‘how are they possibly going to turn such a long series into a viable show?’ When you look at it, it’s an insane prospect. Fourteen books, each around a thousand pages long. So many characters! So many locations! So many twisting plot lines! So many…descriptions!

Yeah, my second reaction was, ‘oh, they won’t need half a page to describe what everyone is wearing or what this tavern looks like even though it mostly looks like all the other taverns our heroes have been to. This will be fine.’

(Fine as in, they have a decent chance at converting the material into a workable script. I have no idea whether it will be good or not.)

If you’ve never read the books, only seen them on the shelves at Barnes and Noble and wondered if perhaps they’re actually weapons in disguise, a lot of the bulk of them come from description. Robert Jordan was the sort of writer who wanted to paint you a picture of every scene, make sure you knew how green the grass is, how the smells from the bakery wafted over the characters, how someone felt during battle. For the most part his descriptions enhance the world and bring it to life.

But sometimes a scene slams to a halt as Jordan takes two entire pages to describe some shit that fully doesn’t matter.

Every time you meet new characters, you are going to know their hair, skin, and eye color, another defining physical characteristic, where they hail from (either from looks or accent), and what they’re wearing. Every. Single. Time. Sometimes, you’re meeting a bunch of Aes Sedai at the same time, and you’re staring down an entire page of long-ass paragraphs as Jordan describes each woman one after the other. And they’re all just…women! Wearing dresses! Talking for a scene and then that’s it. They’re gone, not to be seen again for a dozen chapters if at all. But Jordan needs you to know that this one is blonde with a round face and she’s wearing a gray woolen dress with green embroidery and this one is a brunette with her hair in braids and she’s wearing blue silks with skirts split for riding and this one is another brunette but her hair is loose down her back and she’s wearing (you’ll never guess) a green woolen dress.

Writing tip: I don’t need to know all this.

You almost never need to describe in great detail what your main characters are wearing, let alone what every single tertiary and background character is wearing as they waltz through your scene and then exit stage left, never to be heard from again. When I describe what a character is wearing, it always has a purpose greater than solely describing the character. Clothes can be a great way to establish a part of a character, like personality, social class, profession, etc. If you describe them from the point of view of another character you can give insight on both characters, as in: Sandy meets Lori and the first thing Sandy notices is that Lori is wearing last year’s outfit and cheap shoes. Now we know Lori might be poor or tight with money and Sandy might be a snob.

I also use clothes in describing how characters are moving while they are having a conversation. Maybe too much. Sometimes I go back to edit a scene and I’ve got a character taking off their flannel shirt three times in a row.

Of course, Robert Jordan wasn’t describing what everyone was wearing because he was an amateurish writer. This was a stylistic choice, and not even a new one. Oscar Wilde sometimes went off for literal pages describing a single room in such radiant words that I suspect he only got back to the plot after he’d had a cigarette and a glass of brandy. If you enjoy making sure your reader knows what every person in the scene is wearing down to the button-holes, have at it. Just keep in mind that I’m skimming the fuck out of those paragraphs and I doubt I’m the only one.

Do Any of These People Actually Like Each Other?

An actual question I asked myself multiple times each book.

Admittedly, this might be more of a ‘me’ thing than an actual criticism of Robert Jordan. We saw Uncut Gems back when it came out and I hated every minute of it, because it felt like the whole movie consisted of unlikable assholes screaming at each other for two hours. I prefer characters who like each other to the point where I actually struggle writing characters who don’t get along. I need everybody to not be mad at each other.

Robert Jordan did not have this problem. A lot of these characters are in situations where they’ve been forced together, and they just…hate each other. All the time. Specifically, I’m thinking of one of the main characters, Mat Cauthon, and the Aes Sedai he gets stuck with for two or three books. They hate each other. They never grow beyond hating each other. They’re all stuck in a constant cycle of getting under each other’s skin and giggling about it until the other gets under their skin.

I would have been okay with an ‘enemies to lovers’ situations. Hell, even an ‘enemies to friends’ situation. That sort of shit is my jam. I will read literally hundreds of books that feature a group of distinctly different people from disparate backgrounds coming together and overcoming their own fears and prejudices to form a new found family. It never gets old for me.

In WoT, we start out great with a bunch of different people getting thrown together and then they keep disliking each other until the book ends. It’s frankly exhausting. Everybody seems constantly pissed at each other, unless they’re fucking. And even then, half the time it’s hate-fucking.

Let’s throw up the spoiler chocobo, because now I’m going to talk about the ending.

kweh

I’m Going to Get Hate Mail

To start off with, I know the story behind the ending.

If you don’t, let me explain: Robert Jordan sadly passed from cardiac amyloidosis two years after the eleventh book in the series, Knife of Dreams, was published. Before he passed, he had planned for his next book to the final one of the series, to come out in 2009. Even after he was diagnosed he very much wanted to finish the series on his own, but as the disease progressed he began making notes of what he wanted to happen just in case.

Of course, life isn’t a movie and Robert Jordan never got to finish his final book. Tor Publishing, along with Jordan’s wife, decided that the series should be finished posthumously and chose Brandon Sanderson to do it. With the help of Jordan’s notes, his assistant, and the series continuity manager he was able to finish the series. While Jordan had been hellbent on only writing one more book, Sanderson concluded there was too much material to jam into a single paperback and it was split into three more books.

With all of that, I completely understand that the ending was not the way it was supposed to be. Sanderson is another good writer, but he has his own style that is different enough from Jordan’s to be hard to ignore. He was working off nothing more than notes and trying to finish up a series of books that had already run for over a decade and had a dedicated fanbase, of which he was a part of. The pressure this man was under to get it right was at blobfish-levels. I get that.

That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I’m not talking about all of Sanderson’s contributions here. There were some things he did that I very much enjoyed. Sanderson does not go to the same descriptive lengths as Jordan did. Overall, I think he does a better job with pacing. And he spent most of the twelfth book The Gathering Storm ending a lot of side stories that had been lingering on the edges of the plot without contributing anything meaningful. Getting into the pros and cons of Sanderson’s three books is its own article, and I’ve already got two other WoT articles I want to write and it has to end somewhere.

I’m strictly talking about the ending, which…I mean, it just ends. Almost all of the last book is the actual confrontation with all the various evils they’ve been fighting against for the previous thirteen books, including a 248-page chapter called “The Last Battle.” Most of them are actually fighting trollocks and those Slenderman motherfuckers and shit in a huge field, Perrin is off being boring in the Dream World, and Rand is going toe-to-toe with the manifestation of evil itself. Everybody is fighting.

And then the good guys win.

And then the book is over.

This entire fourteen book, millions-of-words series ends with a single chapter of denouement.

It’s so abrupt I thought maybe I had a defective copy. I looked for pages ripped out. They finally put evil back in its place, and all we get is a single scene after the fact?

I’m not saying I want some Harry Potter style ending where we flash forward twenty years and find out Rand named all his kids Moridin Moridin or some shit (I could write so many words about how much I ultimately hate Snape but forget hate mail, that might get me strangled to death with an official Universal Studios The Wizarding World of Harry Potter Slytherin scarf, $29.99 retail). But…like…something??? Perrin’s gone off with his bitch of a wife to be king of Saldea, and he fucking hates people calling him Lord so how’s that going to go? Matt’s wife is pregnant, and she might legitimately kill him now. Seems like Lan could revive his dead kingdom, what about that?

No. Nothing. We saved the day. Rand’s dead, but oops, he’s not, actually, he’s fine. The end.

It’s all so abrupt. So much story should have gotten a little bit more wrap up, and, again, I understand why this happened. I still hate it.

Anyway, these books took up five years of my life so if you think I’m done ranting about them get ready to be wrong.

Other The Wheel of Time Posts

The Forecast is Storms

Maybe it wasn’t fair, but there were only hours left so what did fair mean anymore, anyway?

It was outside a CVS, of all places. Why would they keep it? Was it even theirs? Who else could have owned it? He didn’t know a thing about that sort of thing. As the clock wound down, he was confronting the fact that he didn’t know a thing about anything.

The CVS was a six block walk away from his garden-level apartment. He whistled tunelessly, hands in pockets, head down. Normally he wouldn’t walk like this in his neighborhood. In his own head. Unaware. Hours left, now. Nobody had the energy to try anything. If they did, maybe they’d be doing him a favor.

They had met in the rain. That could have meaning. It could be a sign. A good sign? Probably not.

It had been June, he no longer remembered the year and it didn’t matter anyway, and they had been waiting for the bus. She’d been going to a job interview and been wearing a bright blue blouse. He’d been to see his grandfather at that shitty nursing home that he swore he liked but only because they couldn’t afford better. He would die there, stroked out and not found until shift change six hours later.

Lucky bastard.

It had been June, and it had been hot. It had been the afternoon, and the blue sky had turned cloudy in an instant, dark in a heartbeat, and then as they sat on opposite ends of the bench under the bus shelter the rain had come. Heavy, fast, no, this is heavy, this is fast. A true downpour.

And then a storm. The winds whipped the rain into the bus shelter, into their faces, and just as he had been thinking I should make a run for it the air had begun crackling blue and purple and electricity had started to stab at the buildings, the trees, the ground. The two of them had been as far apart in the shelter as they could and within seconds they were huddle together in the back corner, trying to get farther away. It was over in minutes. He didn’t remember giving it to her but she was wearing his jacket. They were still soaked through, clammy in the returning sun.

“Thanks.”

“Didn’t help much.”

“It was the end of the world. It’s the thought that counts.”

“Make it up to me?”

She never made that interview.

He didn’t know when she blocked his number. Sometime since the break-up eight months ago and before three weeks ago, when he’d started calling. Trying to call. The day after the announcement. Well, the last announcement. There had been a lot of back and forth for a while there. Weird news. Weirder news. Bad news. Good news. Bad news. Good news. Bad news. And then worse news. And then the news had stopped coming. Replaced only with adjustments to a timer that nevertheless kept counting down.

The lights in the CVS were on, but he doubted anyone was home. The past few weeks it had been the place to be. All the pharmacies had. Pharmacies, grocery stores, eventually post offices and banks. Lines out the front door and around the block. At first there had been stories of scalpers, standing in line over and over to get as many as they could. Why not, why not. Get as many as they could to sell to the desperate. Except that hadn’t panned out. It turned out the pills were easy to make, and with nothing else to do all the manufacturers had hopped to. The real chumps had been everyone waiting in line. By the last week there had been bins of them everywhere.

He had been a chump in line when he’d called and discovered he was blocked. It was a long line, so he called over and over. Like that would change anything. What else was he going to do? All sports were cancelled and everything else was just footage of people crying. Call her. Message. Call her. Message. Call her. Message. Flip off woman in front of him in line, staring at him. Call her. Message. Call her.

Oh. He’s been blocked. That’s fair.

Now there was no line. There was nobody left at all, really. Not at the CVS, anyway. He’d heard of people who thought they could survive. People in old fallout shelters. Billionaires burrowing into mountains like bizarre little moles with too much money. When the military collapsed he’d heard submarines had been auctioning off space for whoever had skills.

He wasn’t a scientist, but he did wonder how the fuck they planned on feeding themselves a mile under the ocean.

He glanced up, mostly out of habit. You couldn’t really see it during the day, but at night it was there. This growing area directly above, toward Sirius, where the stars went out of focus and then disappeared entirely. The first time you could see it with naked eyes it had been a spot barely bigger than the moon. Now it was the entire sky.

Water in space. Who knew?

It was next to a Redbox. He picked up the receiver and was shocked to hear a ringtone. Who was keeping this stuff on? Quarters were fed into the little slot and then he was dialing her number. When they were dating, he didn’t know it. Now it was etched into his heart. It rang for a while. Long enough he thought she might already be dead.

“Hello?”

“Hi.”

A long moment of silence, so long he reached to hit the thing, he couldn’t remember the name, it had been so long since he’d been on a real phone, but the thing to hang up and call again.

“Why the fuck are you calling me?” she asked. Finally. Her voice was tight and scared. And weak. She’d taken the pill, he guessed. His own was still in his pocket.

“It’s the end of the world,” he said.

“You still can’t be calling me. Not now. Not ever.”

He smiled at the brick wall. Smiled at the panic in her voice. Smiled because he knew what she looked like.

“The restraining order-”

“I’m not even in your city,” he said with a sniff. “Bitch.”

“Then why-”

“I wanted my voice to be the last one you hear,” he said. “It will be, right? Your parents are already dead. Your brother is too concerned with his family for you and your sister is off in Borneo or something and probably doesn’t even know what’s about to happen. I can’t see you online, but I can see you friends. Most of them popped off already. So it’s just you, and me. Am I right?”

Choked, angry sobs came through on the phone.

“See you in hell, Jay.”

Then the dead line was sounding in his ear and the booth spat change at him. He left it.

He walked to the middle of the parking lot and sat on one of those things to stop cars. Lit up a cigarette, and smoked it in long drags. The pill he took out of his pocket, and rolled it between his fingers. If he wanted to take it, he was probably too late.

It didn’t matter. Hours left, and he’d won.

Drops began hitting the pavement around him. He breathed in the smell.

Static, 3

Previous

“The radio!” Luis screamed. Everything about him since they had gotten back in the car was tight and intense. His voice was constantly on the edge of ragged, and as he reached for the power button Evan could see the muscles in his arm tight and practically twitching.

Evan had forgotten about the radio. Whenever they wanted music they always hooked the aux cord up to someone’s phone. Even as part of him knew getting something on the radio meant nothing, would not save them, another part of him wanted desperately to hear something. To know someone else was out there.

With the power button pressed the radio burst into static. Undeterred, began scanning. The Buick was old, older than any of them, and he had to scan manually, spinning the little dial with the sort of slow control Evan didn’t think Luis would be capable of right then.

“Come on…Come on…give me something…”

Even Alex was leaning forward on the back of the front bench seat, eyes shining from the lights on the dash. With every twitch of the dial, every new static sound, Evan gripped the steering wheel harder and harder.

“Stop!” Evan and Alex said at the same time. They didn’t need to. Luis had heard it, too. Evan’s heart was beating hard enough to make the blood in his ears pulse as Luis fine-tuned the radio. It only took a little tweaking for whatever station they found to come in clear as the night sky above.

“Is that…” Evan’s mouth had gone dry. “Is that polka music?”

“No.” Luis was staring at the radio, breathing through his mouth. “I mean, sort of. It’s norteño. My grandmother listens to this.”

Sure enough, when voices began to join the accordion and the oompa oompa they crooned out in smooth Spanish syllables.

Evan cocked his head and strained the high school Spanish twelve years behind him. “What are they saying? Is there a message or something?”

Luis listened for a few seconds, then his shoulders slumped. “No, just the normal stuff.”

He scanned the rest of the band but came up with nothing but static, static, static. Eventually he made it all the way around and came back to the norteño music. The three of them sat in silence, Alex still leaning on the seat between them, listening to the Spanish and staring out at an unchanging world.

The car chimed.

“The fuck was that?”

Evan swallowed. “Low gas.”

“No.”

Alex sat back and whimpered.

“Nothing changes,” Luis said. “Nothing changes in the God-forsaken place but the God. Damned. Car.”

He punched the dash in front of him with the last three words, as though he could show it who was boss.

After a pause, Alex spoke. “I’m hungry.”

“Yeah,” Luis said, miserably. “Me, too.”

Evan was going to make another stupid joke. Maybe something about hunting. Finding jackalopes. His stupid jokes didn’t ever work but it was all his panicking brain could come up with and-

“There’s a light,” he said instead.

The others didn’t ask what he meant. They both leaned forward, straining to look.

It was dead ahead. It was bright.

It was new.

“Did we…” Luis swallowed. “Did we escape?”

“We don’t know what it is,” Alex said cautiously.

“We will soon.”

Despite the new light on the dash, the one in the shape of the gas pump, Evan pushed the accelerator toward the floor. What if the light escaped them? What if it was a mirage? What if it disappeared before they could reach it?

70 miles an hour. 80. 90.

The old Buick started shaking or he would have pushed it further. The sound from the tires on the road was unbearable, roaring in their ears, drowning out those old Mexican crooners. It was a straight shot, no curves, the setting sun always to his right.

“It’s a gas station,” Luis muttered. Then he whooped, cutting through the road noise. “It’s a gas station!”

Alex made a choked sound. Through the rearview mirror Evan could see the way relief cut the strings pulling her face taught, making her looking round and puffy. He could feel the grin on his own face, pulling the corners of his mouth to his ears with such intensity he thought his cheeks would split.

It was a little brick building on the side of the road with a couple of old-fashioned pumps out front. Flood lamps lit the pumps, and lights were pouring out of the windows of the little, nameless convenience store. Evan had never seen anything so beautiful. He kept the car going at close to ninety until it felt like they’d fly past it. Then he stood on the brakes and whipped the car into the little lot. The car stopped on a dime in front of the pumps and then all three of them were climbing out, running across the still baking blacktop, trying to be the first one in the little store. The first one to see someone new.

Despite the faded look of the outside, the inside seemed fairly modern. The three aisles were stacked with chips and sweets and snacks in packages they all recognized. The coolers along the back had Cokes and Pepsi and Dr Peppers in bottles they knew well. A counter on the other side had a Slushee station and one of those rolling machines. Fresh looking hot dogs rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled.

“I’m so hungry, I’ll eat one of those,” Alex said, making a beeline. “Two, even.”

“Where’s the can?” Luis asked, running for the back.

Evan went to the counter, hoping to see the owner. A smiling, maybe confused face who would welcome them in and tell them not to steal anything. Even when he didn’t see anyone at first, he thought maybe they were sitting down. Reading, or doing a crossword, and as he got close they would look up and smile and say-

There was no one behind the counter.

Ignoring the acid climbing his throat, Evan followed Luis to the back. A short hallway had three doors. Men’s. Women’s. Break room? Whoever owned this place would be in there.

The door opened easily and swung open. It was a break room.

An empty break room.

There were no other spaces back here.

There were no other doors in the store.

Evan went out the front. Walking at first, running by the time he came back around the building.

Nothing.

No one.

Alex was halfway through a hot dog and Luis was putting new snacks on the stack he already had in his hands.

Norteño music was playing softly over the speakers.

Without a word he walked out the door and into the evening, moving slow so the bells above the door didn’t make much noise.

Did he expect anything different out there? Some change in temperature, maybe? A shift in the stars, or the sands? The little brick gas station faced east. The sunset was behind him. A little part of him still thought that if he walked around the back, he would see that the oranges had turned to reds and the reds had turned to purples.

A little part. No more. Maybe a part of him that would never go away.

The pump was old and partially sand-blasted from high winds in the desert, but it still worked as it should. It took his credit card, although he doubted the machine had talked to a bank in the real world. He put the pump into the gas tank and clicked the holding lever. Leaning against the car he studied the gas station. The flood lamps above him. Not a single moth.

They had gotten hungry. Needed to use the bathroom. But the wind still blowed, too. Were they changing? Evan turned from the empty light to his own hands, trying to determine if he was still aging.

Cries from inside the shop turned to panic-streaked screams as Evan calmly stared at his palm and tried to decide if he would ride this road until he died, or if death was as far out of reach as life seemed to be.

Static, 2

Previous

There was no highway.

It took Luis the longest to believe it. He sat in the passenger side of the car, clutching his phone in the grip of both hands like some kind of talisman. Eyes straight ahead, Evan couldn’t tell if he was blinking or not.

Alex was sitting in the middle of the backseat, as though afraid of the windows. Legs up, arms wrapped around her knees. She was rocking ever so slightly, but at least she wasn’t crying. Or maybe, he wished she was crying. Evan couldn’t decide which was better, which was worse.

And he in the driver’s seat. Cruising down whatever sort of road this was, headlights on despite the last remainders of sunset to stop remaining. There was this feeling, not quite in his stomach. More, below it and to the left. It was a soft burning feeling, the same feeling he’d had all through senior year of college. Maybe an ulcer. Maybe just the inescapable knowledge that every single bit of his life was fucked.

“Where is it?” Luis asked to no one in particular. “Where is it, where is it, where is it?”

“Luis.”

“This can’t be happening,” Luis steamrolled over whatever Evan was going to say. Which was good, because wasn’t really sure. “This can’t be…where’s the highway? Why won’t the sun set? Why can’t I reach anyone?”

He flung his face into his phone again and Evan resisted the urge to roll down the window and chuck it out. It was no help. None of their phones were. They had a signal. Somehow, out here in the…wherever they were, they were receiving. Emails. Messages. Luis could refresh his Instagram and see what all of his other worldwide influencers were doing. But he couldn’t post. They couldn’t message. Alex had tried to call and gotten a message none of them had ever heard before.

Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please hang up and try again.

“Shouldn’t it just not work?” Alex had asked, holding the phone up on speaker so they could hear it repeat and repeat. “If you don’t have a signal, it just doesn’t make a call.”

That was back when Alex was capable of making words. Now there was just the rocking, and the dry eyes watching the road ahead.

“How long have we been driving?” Luis asked.

Evan glanced down at the dash. “An hour. About.”

“Pull over. I’m going to be sick.”

“No,” Alex whispered from the back, practically making Evan jumped. “No, we can’t get out.”

“I’m going to hurl.” He looked it. His face was turning an ugly shade of green and he was clutching his stomach like he’d been shot. “I’m not…oh, God…I’m not puking in my cousins’ car, pull over.”

Evan didn’t see much point to pulling over. He just stopped, putting the cark in park in the middle of the street.

“No, don’t!”

But Luis was already out, stumbling his way the few feet across the blacktop. He came to stop at the edge, puking into the dirt like it was miles below him. Evan turned away before his stomach could decide it was a good idea.

Alex’s eyes had gone wide. She was gripping her knees now, tight enough she was dimpling her jeans. In the glow of the dome light overhead she was starting to look sick, too, and Evan was afraid she would be the next out there. But it wasn’t carsickness, or whatever sickness had taken over Luis. The tight lights and pale color of her face was terror, pure and simple.

“He shouldn’t be out there,” she muttered.

“I don’t want him puking in the car, either,” Evan said. It sounded like a stupid thing to say. He couldn’t think of another.

“We don’t know what’s out there.” She wasn’t whispering, but her voice was very low. Her eyes darted back forth out the windows, as though simply speaking about it would bring something to them. Evan gripped the steering wheel and stared forward.

“There’s nothing out there,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

He got out of the car, ignoring Alex’s tiny pleas to stay inside. She was so scared, she seemed so sure that something would come for them, he expected something to feel wrong. Anything to feel wrong.

Nothing did. It was cool bordering on cold, like a desert at the switchover between evening and night would be. The pavement under his feet was normal asphalt, cracked here and there but otherwise intact. Two broken yellow lines painted in the middle. Stars twinkled above. A breeze made his ears and nose cold. He stood next to Luis, still kneeling on the ground, and searched for a clue.

Luis spit a couple more times and then rose to stand next to him. After another minute, he heard the car door open. Alex came to stand with them, the three of them back to back to back, looking in every direction.

“Nothing,” Evan said after a while.

The others didn’t ask what he meant. Luis even nodded.

Nothing was wrong.

Besides everything.

The three of them got back in the car, because there was nothing else to do.

“There has to be some kind of explanation,” Luis said.

“Of course there is,” Alex said. She had relaxed – a little. At least she wasn’t clutching her knees to her chest anymore. “I don’t think we’re going to like it, though.”

Luis ignored her. “We got turned around somehow. We think we’re going straight but actually we’re going in circles. We all had some kind of seizure at the same time and we’re confused.”

“Aliens.”

Evan meant it as a joke but regretted it immediately. Said out loud, it didn’t feel like a joke. It felt like a possibility.

“Pocket universe,” Alex said.

Luis whipped around to face her, nearly backhanding Evan in the process as he swung his arm around to rest on the seat. “What?”

“Pocket universe. Learned about it in college. Something to do with string theory, I think. The universe isn’t really a universe at all, it’s a bunch of universes all bunched together like a piece of string. Sometimes there’s little universes, growing off a big one. Sort of the same, but not really.”

“So, what? We’re trapped in a wart universe off our real universe?” Luis asked. “How do we get back?”

Alex shrugged. “I spent a single class eight years ago on it. And it was all theoretical.”

“What you’re saying is, if we get back we could win the Nobel.”

Another joke he regretted as soon as he said it.

If.

Outside, everything was the same. Nothing to report, sir! Sun was setting, desert in every direction except forward and behind, which was road. Pocket universe. A universe consisting of the same moment in northern Nevada. Nothing changed. Well, the car did. The clock on the dash kept ticking forward. Meaningless.

We do, too, Evan thought as he felt his stomach cramp. There were snacks in the back with Alex. A box of trail mix, a handful of candy bars, and a box of Capri Suns. Road trip food. Supposed to last a couple of days max. Had he seen any animals on the side of the road? Any glowing eyes retreating from the headlights?

Were they the only things alive? For how long?

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