Static, 1

“Exit’s coming up. Turn off here.”

“Where?”

“Here!”

Evan cut the wheel hard to make the ramp that came out of nowhere. It was a tight turn for a highway off-ramp, and for a few seconds Evan, Luis, and Alex could only grip the oh-shit handles and fight the turn’s urging to be flung to the side of the car.

Then they were on a skinny, two-lane road heading north, the lights and hum of the highway fading behind them. Evan looked to his left to see the last rays of blood-orange sunlight crowning the mountains to the west. The lights of the highway could mask what time of day it was, but out here the desert was in full dusk.

Alex turned around in her seat to gaze wistfully at the retreating interstate.

“Someone tell me again why we’re not stopping at a hotel on the highway?” she asked.

Evan knew how she was feeling. He’d heard some…not great things about northern Nevada before, and hadn’t been too crazy about taking I-80 to San Francisco in the first place. Going south and cutting across the middle on the state roads had been shot down by both Alex and Luis because it would have added another two hours to a car trip none of them wanted. The three of them would have flown to San Francisco if Luis’ older cousin Marty wasn’t paying them a very generous amount to get his Buick from Cheyenne to his new place in Richmond. So, if it had been up to Evan, they would have powered through I-80 and never strayed far enough to lose sight of it until they were past Reno.

Of course, it wasn’t up to Evan.

“Because,” Luis said without looking up from his phone, “This motel is supposed to be the fucking shit. It’s all over TikTok and the ‘gram right now.”

Evan and Alex exchanged knowing glances through the rearview.

“Ah,” Alex said.

“We get it now.”

“Get what?” Luis was flipping through his phone.

“You need more photo ops for your social media presence,” Alex said, pushing brown hair out of her face.

Luis shrugged and glared at them both. “Yeah. Exactly. I wasn’t hiding that.”

Somewhere out here in the desert – not far, he hoped – was the High Desert Motel. Luis had shown them pictures, and it did look pretty neat. It looked like it had been built in the 1960s and then frozen in time, all mid-century modern and neon. There was even supposed to be a swim-up tiki bar in the back. Very stylish. Evan just wasn’t sure if it was worth it.

“How far off the highway did you say it was?” Evan asked. He glanced in the rearview to see the lights of a few trucks on the far horizon.

“Google says a mile,” Luis says.

In the back, Alex sat up and looked around. “Then Google is full of shit.”

“How can Google be wrong?”

“Look around, Luis. Do you see anything?”

Luis finally pulled his eyes off his phone long enough to look out the windows.

The road they were going down was an unwavering march north. Desert lined either side with only mountains and hills to break up the view. In front of them was just the headlights and the roads. Behind them the highway was officially gone. The only other light now was the setting sun’s rays topping the west.

“It’s got to be around here somewhere,” Luis said with a shrug. “Around the next curve, maybe.”

Evan snorted. “What curve?”

“Maybe it was the next exit,” Alex said. Her voice seemed to be getting smaller and smaller the further away from the highway they got.

Luis shook his head. “Everyone is very clear online. That was the right exit.”

“I mean, was it, though?”

Something about Alex’s tone, nervous and dreamy, made Luis turn to look at her and Evan to cut his eyes to the rearview.

“It was a really weird exit for an interstate, wasn’t it? There was the big ‘exit in a quarter mile sign,’ and then there the exit was. No way that was a quarter of a mile. And then there was no other ‘exit’ sign. No blue signs for food or gas or anything. And it was a really sharp turn.”

“It was just a weird exit.”

“I’d expect that shit from a state road,” Evan said. “Not an interstate.”

Evan and Alex shared another look through the rearview.

“I’m turning around.”

“Guys, come on!”

“You said it was only a mile off the highway, Luis. We’ve gone farther than that already. Obviously, we turned off too early. Probably a service entrance or something. We’ll get back to the highway and find the right road and get you to your photogenic motel.”

Luis grumbled a little bit but otherwise didn’t fight too much. It was obvious, as Evan slowed and made the K-turn, that there was nothing around them, and going further on this road wouldn’t make the motel rise up out of the sand.

Alex shot him a grateful look, but he’d done it for himself, too. He didn’t want to be in northern Nevada in the first place, let alone driving away from the only thread of civilization for miles around.

They’d all met as freshman in college, almost ten years ago. Jesus, ten fricking years, Evan thought to himself. I am in my upper twenties. It was a thought he had a lot, ever since his mom had mentioned it as a joke around the time he turned twenty-seven.

I am in my upper twenties, and in less than two years I will be thirty. He was still young by any metric. Just not as young as he had been. And he was already feeling it. In college the three of them had partied hard. Frat parties. Tailgating. Driving down to Denver to go clubbing and then driving back to Laramie at three in the morning, stopping at every Del Taco they came across. Sliding into his eight o’clock anthro class with a muffin and a barely-there headache, already waiting for someone to text him the plan for that night.

Last week, he stayed up half an hour past his usual ten pm bedtime to work on some reports for work and woke up the next morning feeling hungover. His parents were always teasing him, saying he was wasting ‘the best years.’ What best years? He had to work two jobs to cover the rental house he was sharing with three other people. When was he supposed to have time for his ‘best’ years?”

The three of them had been saving for this trip for three years. They planned to get fucked up and stay out until sunrise every night, even the days they planned to go out to wine country.

Evan glanced at the setting sun and yawned.

Sure, going to stay up and party when you can’t even–

Evan’s eyes cut back to the setting sun. Then the clock in the dash. Then back to the west.

It wasn’t outright fear that crept through him. No, no, not that. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he didn’t know how long a sunset could take when the Rocky Mountains weren’t towering above you. No, what dripped into his veins and slowly filled them up was something akin to the existential dread about climate change he had every other week. A nervy feeling in his chest and vague cramping in the abdomen and joints. He took a long breath and hoped the others didn’t notice how it wavered.

Shouldn’t the sun have set by now?

He phrased it as a question to protect himself. He knew the answer. They’d driven for ten minutes in one direction, and now five in the other. The west should have gotten darker. If there was still light coming over the mountains, it should have been faded and purple. The sun should have been just about gone.

But it wasn’t. It was the same. The exact same shades of orange-red were coming up over the mountains, just as bright as they had when they had gotten off the exit. The dusk around them had not settled one bit, everything still painted in pale purples and blues.

Next to him, Luis was still on his phone, typing away. Some message to his followers. Wrong exit, but soon it’ll be Mai Tais in the middle of the Nevada desert! #swaglife or whatever the fuck.

Alex, though. Alex was looking west. Evan watched as she looked down at her watch, and then glanced back up at the setting sun. He could see it in her face. He knew what that feeling looked like.

“Shouldn’t we have reached the highway by now?” Alex asked.

Ten minutes out, seven…no, now eight minutes back. So, not quite.

But they should have been able to see it.

This was the desert. Flat flat flat. Going the other direction, the highway had only dropped out of the rearview seconds before he decided to turn around.

He should have seen it this whole time.

Evan gripped the steering wheel.

“Relax,” Luis said, barely looking up his phone. “It’s got to be around here somewhere.”

Something inside him snapped. He practically stood on the brakes, jerking Alex and Luis forward. He put the Buick in park and turned, slapping the phone out of Luis’ hand.

“Hey, what the fuck?” Luis shouted. He reached down to find it but Evan pushed him back.

“Luis, use your fucking eyes for three seconds.” High emotion had sprung on him so fast he hadn’t seen them coming. At least he was managing not to shout. Barely. “Something is wrong here. There is no highway. We’d fucking see if there was a highway by now and there isn’t.”

Luis didn’t look overly impressed with Evan’s snapped grip on reality, but he did deign to look out the windshield. Toward where the highway used to be. Luis squinted his eyes. Hands in his lap, his thumbs twitched like they were desperate to post something about it.

“Well,” he said. “It has to be there. We got off of it. We never left his road, right? It didn’t just, I don’t know, slip through a crack in the universe or something.”

“The sunset,” Alex said from the backseat.

“What about it?” Luis asked.

“Fucking look at it, dude. It hasn’t moved. The sun isn’t setting anymore. It’s…sitting.”

Luis looked west, but the same emotions did not seem to be moving them as they had moved Alex and Evan. He only shook his head and looked between them.

“The two of you are riling yourselves up over nothing. Nothing! Does anything you’re saying make a lick of sense? ‘The highway disappeared and the sun stopped.’ What? What does that even mean? The two of you. Fuck out of here. Evan, put the car in gear and drive. We’re going to see the highway on the horizon in a couple of minutes and the two of you are going to feel like the fucking morons you are.”

Maybe not a great pep-talk if you didn’t know Luis. But Alex shared an embarrassed laugh with Evan, and put the car in gear he did.

Luis was right. He had to be. Whatever was going on, wasn’t. It didn’t make sense, so it couldn’t. They would drive, and they would find the highway.

Any minute now.

Next

The Horizon Zero Dawn Blanket: Banuk Sickness Eater, Werak Runner, and Song’s Edge

The HZD Blanket

Super fun update before we start – the twenty-dollar yarn winder I bought broke after about eight months of consistent use. Instead of getting neat little yarn cakes I’m getting crooked fat yarn blobs.

I found good advice on what went wrong and how to fix it but I couldn’t make it work. I’ve always heard when starting a new hobby you should buy the cheap version of a tool and if you use it until it breaks it means you’re actually using it and it’s time to buy the expensive version. So, done and done, but it’s going to take a few weeks for the new winder to get here so for the rest of August I’m going to have to work with a bunch of fluffy fuckheads barely holding it together. But, hey, I’m a fluffy fuckhead barely holding it together, so I’ve got some practice. Anyway, let’s talk about some…

Bodacious Banuk

Brin

Me, too, Aloy. Me, too.

While most of the Banuk live north of Nora territory on the east side of the map, you find Brin living all on his lonesome in the middle of the desert in Carja territory. And that’s because the rest of the Banuk don’t really agree with the way he expresses his spirituality: he fucking drinks motor oil.

Brin once heard that there was some tribe out west drinking machine oil for visions, and instead of getting so close to puking his mouth started watering and wondering what the fuck is wrong with some people, Brin decided that was a really neat thing to try and went for it. Which makes me think a lot of Brin’s quirks were there before he started chugging antifreeze or whatever. Brin has his own quest line where he requests oil from different machines so he can drink it and have new visions. Sort of like peyote, I guess, except I super doubt peyote can corrode your esophagus and stomach from the inside.

The weirdest part, of course, is that Brin does actually seem to be having real visions from the machine oil. The last one is so disturbing he doesn’t even want to talk about it, except to mention that he saw a ‘future storm’ and he’s leaving to go to the Forbidden West and, hey! That’s the title of the sequel! Hopefully that means we get to see this delightfully brain-rotted character again.

Ourea and Aratak

Met as main characters of The Frozen Wilds DLC, this duo acts as shaman and chieftan to the main werak living in The Cut, the southernmost part of the Banuk territory that spans Wyoming and Montana. Getting into their details means potentially getting into main plot spoilers territory, which I’ve tried to avoid throughout this series, so just know that on the Banuk spectrum previously discussed, Ourea is on the ‘What if God Was One of Us’ end and Aratak is on the ‘Stab it in the FACE’ end and thus they never really see eye to eye on how to lead their people.

Ikrie

Also found in the DLC, you meet Ikrie as she and her friend Mailen are auditioning to join a werak. Instead of interviews and skills demonstrations, auditioning for a werak involves trekking out into the deepest, coldest part of the Cut and trying not to die for a few days. Shockingly, things have gone horribly wrong and Mailen needs help but she doesn’t want it because if she accepts help she’ll fail the audition and get rejected by the werak, the only thing in life she’s ever wanted. The problem is that Ikrie doesn’t give a shit about the werak, the only thing in life she’s ever wanted is Mailen. This is, story-wise, one of my favorite side quests in the entire game. It’s short compared to others, but it is hugely emotional.

The Outfits and The Squares

Sickness Eater

As I mentioned before at some point, I’m sure of it (am I?), about twenty years before the game begins, the Derangement started, where normally docile machines started to go completely aggro. Beyond that, you will find machines that have been ‘corrupted,’ or taken over by the ultimate baddy of the game. These machines glow red, are hyper-aggressive, have greater health, do more damage, and are just generally an absolute pain in the ass to deal with. They also ooze corruption, an acidic substance that essentially does poison damage if you get too close.

The glowing red bits are the trails of ‘corruption.’

Of course you can’t just avoid them. One of the side quests consists of defeating machines in eleven different Corrupted Zones, including one with two corrupted Rockbreakers, fucking mechanical graboids that burrow under the ground and pop up underneath you to send you flying and break a rib and I don’t even like dealing with these assholes when they’re not evil and glowing red so for all the times I’ve replayed this game I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to clear that space out after the first time took me twenty-five Got-danged minutes.

sounds of muffled screaming

As you can see, the outfit involves a lot of long scraps or furs, so I decided to try and represent those with a series of spike stitches. This is in The Big Book of Granny Squares in a pattern called ‘Icicles,’ so I thought that also fit the Banuk’s whole ‘Gotta Die of Something, Might as Well be Hypothermia’ vibe. I really like this square. Because it’s a series of descending spike stitches, it’s super easy to work up but makes for a striking pattern, and the way the yarn loops around itself in the spike stitches makes for a super soft, super squishy feel. For colors I used Tranquil (the light blue), Sapphire Heather, Dove Heather, and Cranberry.

Werak Runner

This outfit is found in The Frozen Wilds DLC and I was going to write that it offers no real bonuses or protections until you get the Werak Chieftain version of it, but I looked it up I’m wrong: it offers a very slow health regeneration. So slow I didn’t even fucking notice.

Some games have a player’s health automatically refill at various rates as you play. This game is not one of them. Aloy typically needs to use a variety of healing plants to get back up to max health.

So having an outfit that will refill your health can be a huge boon. The Werak Chieftain (which you only get after you finish the main quests in TFW) refills your health fast, and can make some maneuvers in fights less chancy. Apparently the Werak Runner will also refill your health, but it’s so slow I never noticed before I had Aloy house a bunch of healing.

For this square I went a little more abstract than some others. I tried to represent the colors of the outfit and the Banuk’s love for off-kilter angles. This square is worked up from the bottom right, starting with a very small square and then going outward on the top and left sides. The stripes in the middle are supposed to represent the stripes in the belt of the outfit:

I am also in love with this square, mostly because I live in Colorado and this seems like a very ski-bunny pattern to me. I can 100% see these colors in this pattern on a ski suit, or skis, or sunglasses, or hats, or anything that a local would strap on before barreling down a steep mountain and the speed of sound. REI could slap this pattern on just about anything and it would be sold out by Sunday.

Colors used are Brass Heather, Dove Heather, Tranquil, Sapphire Heather, Red, and Green Tea Heather.

Song’s Edge

Song’s Edge is the southernmost Banuk settlement, just north of where Nora lands end and the Cut begins. Of course as soon as you walk in there’s Some Drama going down, drawing you into Song’s Edge and the lands north of it. Otherwise, why even bother visiting? If I go to a new city and am not enmeshed in some local drama involving the mayor and a secretive clan living just outside of town by nightfall, I check out of that shitty little ass-itch and hop the first flight to Branson. I have literally never been to Branson and not been involved in some sort of black-tie affair espionage, or a high-stakes, multi-opponent fist-fight, or a mad scientist’s half-baked cloning scheme by the end of the third day.

It also features what is potentially a representation of the real Morning Glory Pool in Yellowstone National Park, a rainbow bacteria pool that the Banuk use to dye those bright colors into their clothes:

Because of this pool I wanted to make sure I put bright yellow into the square. This type of yellow shows up a lot in Banuk art, but not so much in their outfits, so I was glad I could put it in this square.

This is a center-out type squares where you start with a magic circle, which also sounds like something from a video game. Basically, you wrap the yarn around your fingers just so, say a few words in ancient Sumerian, complete chapter 7 of your sophomore geometry text book, break a couple of laws of physics, break a single federal law, and boom! Magic circle!

In all seriousness, I have successfully made magic circles but I have to find instructions on the internet every single time. I thought they were called magic circles because you can change the size of it as you go, but maybe they’re called that because no one understands what the fuck is going on.

I went with this pattern because despite being made in rounds it still manages to have a geometric look, and as you may have noticed by now, the Banuk area all about sharp edges. The yellow is Caution, light blue Tranquil, dark blue Sapphire, red Cranberry, and gray is Dove Heather.

The next update is probably going to take a little bit longer than these last few. We are done with the Banuk squares and are moving on to the Carja. They have the biggest area of the map, closely edging out the Nora, and that’s not even counting Shadow Carja territory. Honestly, when we got confirmation that we weren’t getting Horizon Forbidden West until 2022, my first reaction was ‘more time for blanket.’ I plan on taking a full week off for that game, wrapping myself in my blanket and surrounding myself with snacks, and only getting off the couch for emergencies.

Previous Next

Which Witch

Deep in the Mortimor Woods and far off the Woody Path, but not too far, was a handsome, ugly cottage. Handsome because it was sturdily built, wood and nails and a low roof of shingles all coming together to create a small but cozy home. Ugly because the wood was the black of mildew stains, the roof overgrown and reaching, the windows and doors and corners all meeting at sweaty, nonsensical angles. Looking at the cottage could bring a king to his knees and make a hungry man retch.

And yet the people walking in the Woody Path would often stop to find this cottage. Sometimes, they were in the Mortimor Woods specifically to find it. For, as the stories went, living in the handsome, ugly cottage was a powerful witch. And that powerful witch was not shy about trading spells for payment. All sorts of payment, the stories went. Money, surely. Fruits from faraway lands, of course. But stranger things still. Your second happiest memory. All the vowels in your name. The wart growing on your thumb.

Jessalyn had heard all of the stories, and so many times she’d memorized a fair lot of them. And when her husband took ill, and the village’s wise woman called for the doctor, and the doctor called for a priest, and the priest only took his hand and began to pray, Jessalyn knew she had to do something else. So she put on her heaviest boots and found the stoutest stick she could. She kissed her husband on the head and told him she was going to get his favorite sweet from the market. And then Jessalyn set off.

The village she lived in was only a day’s walk from the Mortimor Woods. She made a little camp of nothing more than a woven blanket in the crook of a tree. She was brave, or perhaps just foolhardy, but not enough to walk into the Mortimor Woods at night. At first dawn she packed up her blanket, ate a bit of bread and cheese, and ventured into the trees.

It was an old forest, the oldest forest in the land some would say. The branches were twisted and gnarled, and sometimes seemed to reach for her even when there was no wind to move them. Sounds of animals in the underbrush reached her, but she never saw rabbit nor squirrel nor pheasant. And though she was sure it was still daylight, in fact could only still be morning, not nearly enough sunlight reached her shoulders as she walked. Once, she heard a coach pulled by horses coming toward her from the other direction and she hid. Probably just a noble or a merchant, going from kingdom to kingdom, but the thought of meeting anyone in the Mortimor Woods made her shiver.

Finally, she reached the spot the stories told her about: the smallest little bridge, too small to be necessary, crossing over the tiniest little stream. Once a traveler had found the bridge, they needed only to follow the flow of the stream. After a certain amount of time – the stories never said what amount, and some insisted that it changed depending on the witch’s mood – the tiny stream would pool into a tiny lake no more than a puddle, and from there the traveler only had to follow the ivy somehow blossoming purple even in the deepness of the woods to-

Jessalyn swallowed hard, and gripped the bag around her shoulder for strength. She had found the handsome, ugly cottage. It stood in front of her and made her feel as though the whole world was shimmering in the heat. Her brain began yelling run, woman, run, fool, run as though your life depends on it for surely it does!

But her heart thought only of her ailing husband, surely with not much time left. Jessalyn knew she could not leave without trying. With every ounce of strength she had, the strength she used to help plow her fields and build their barn and bear her children, Jessalyn stepped forward to the crooked front door of the handsome, ugly house and knocked three times.

It felt like hours, and it felt like a second, before the door swung open on silent hinges. Standing in front of Jessalyn, holding the crooked door open, was a woman as handsome, and as ugly, as her home. Black hair hung from her head with nary a wave or ripple. Her face was pale as ice, her lips and eyelids as black as smudge. She was wearing a dress all in black, layers upon layers of black, and her nails were painted the same. The two women studied each other for several seconds. Jessalyn, having already done the most terrifying part, felt emboldened that she hadn’t already been turned into a toad.

“I seek the witch of Mortimor Woods,” Jessalyn said. “My husband-”

The woman held up a white, boney hand. “I’m shall stop you there, for I am not the witch, and I should hate that you have to repeat your story.”

Jessalyn blinked. “You’re…you’re not the witch? But I was told there was a witch, living in a cottage at the end of the purple ivy, at the end of the tiniest river, which leads from the tiniest bridge over the Woody Path.”

“You have been told the truth. But it is not I you seek.” And she pointed one bony finger over Jessalyn’s shoulder.

Jessalyn turned slowly, fear filling her again. If this woman was not the witch, who was? How much worse would the real witch be?

“I…um…what?”

Across a small field, shielded by bright green trees heavy with fruit, was a beautiful cottage, as dainty and pretty as this one was handsome and ugly. It was painted pink with blue trim and Jessalyn was quite certain soap bubbles were floating out of the chimney.

Standing on the stoop of the cottage was a beautiful young man wearing the brightest suit of gold and silver. His smile was bright enough to be seen across the field, and he was waving.

“Hello! Are you looking for the witch? That’s me! I’m the witch! Everyone goes to poor Poppy there but she’s just a friend! Come, come! Let’s see what the witch of Mortimor Woods can do for you!”

Jessalyn turned back to the woman in the black, but she had already shut the door.

“Don’t worry about her, she’s just shy! Come on, then! I’ve made kettle corn!”

Inspired by this.

Magnates and Mirrors

Sir Lord Reginald Thwarpington Ramsbottom the third, lately of Hillshropshireforthdanwidthtonvillebourguponavon, was enjoying his morning rather leisurely. He had awoken in his giant bed and rolled over thrice to get to the edge and then gotten caught in the curtains, made of the very finest damask. Once he was able to cut himself down he put on his best dressing gown, also made of the very finest damask, and walked the three quarters of a mile across his humble and rather quaint manor to find his breakfast had already been placed on the table for him. He filled himself with half a dozen eggs, eighteen pieces of bacon, an entire loaf of bread toasted and buttered, and a bucket of beans. Following, because he deserved it, he poured himself a scotch.

After the little bite to get him through the day, Sir Lord Reginald left his plates and glass on the table for the little people to clean and walked back across his modest manor, stopping halfway across for a water and orange slices break. It was time to dress. Today was to be a day of business. Of industry. Of red-faced, iron-willed, huge-balled capitalism! Just the thought of it made him so invigorated he called for his most faithful butler, Timbly, to come into the room so he could punch him in the face.

“Very good, sir,” Timbly said, staggering back into the dresser.

Sir Lord Reginald dressed in his very finest attire and stepped to the mirror to complete putting on his bowtie, something Timbly had told him he had to learn for himself at knifepoint.

“I say, that’s somewhat unusual,” Sir Lord Reginald said.

“Sir?”

Without taking his eyes off the mirror, Sir Lord Reginald leaned toward the door. “Timbly!” he called for his faithful butler.

“I’m right here, sir,” Timbly said, tying a white kerchief around his left eye.

“Ah, good man,” Sir Lord Reginald said. He only employed the fastest servants here at Dale-on-the-Hill-on-the-Avon-on-the-Green Manor. “Come look at this, Timbly.”

Timbly, back straight and nose turning purple, stepped up next to Sir Lord Reginald.

“Sir?”

“Why, look, good man!”

Looking back at the two of them was Timbly. Once this entire mirror thing had been sorted, he would have to have a discussion about proper attire with Timbly. That kerchief around his eye looked disgraceful! He would be forced to dock his pay this week.

But that was a matter for an entirely other moment. For now, the matter at hand: Timbly was in the mirror. Sir Lord Reginald was not.

“Most intriguing, sir,” Timbly said. “I wonder if it has anything to do-”

“Nonsense!” Sir Lord Reginald said, not listening. “It’s obvious this mirror is broken.”

“Broken, sir?”

“Yes, Timbly, broken! The mirror has one job to do, and that’s to reflect whatever is standing in front of it! I am standing in front of it, yet I do not reflect. Therefore, this mirror is broken. I must talk to my business partners. Surely this most glorious Industrial Revolution can also revolutionize the mirror!”

Timbly took in a long breath with his eye closed, perhaps reflecting on the infallible logic of his master, or perhaps taking in the majesty of the industry that had so quickly changed London from a beautiful city to a beautiful city covered in soot.

“Perhaps we should try another mirror, sir?”

“Yes, Timbly, of course. I have to tie my tie somehow. Unless, you…?”

“This way, sir.”

Timbly led him down the hall to one of his many guest rooms.

“This mirror is broken, too! Timbly! Another!”

All in all, Sir Lord Reginald had Timbly take him to one hundred and nineteen mirrors, all scattered throughout the small manor, a cottage really. Every room, it seemed, had a mirror. A broken mirror.

“How can all of my mirrors fail me on the same day! This is certainly outrageous! Who manufactured all these faulty mirrors? They come from…uh…foreign lands, no doubt,” Sir Lord Reginald said, hoping Timbly didn’t notice he couldn’t think of a single foreign land.

“Sir, if I might be so bold as to offer another suggestion?”

“Well? Out with it Timbly! I don’t have all day to dally around waiting for suggestions, there’s industry to be done! Stocks! Numbers! Child workers!”

Timbly took a second to sigh again, surely a sigh of appreciation that all those children are given the chance to support their families at as young an age as four.

“Perhaps this has something to do with your new neighbor, sir?”

“Who? The Lady Petunia Smith-Kent-Bushel-ton?”

“No.”

“Duke Christopher Archibald Weasel Fox Hound Staggly?”

“No.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Bobert Theomas Tedrick Austintonly?”

“No, sir.”

Sir Lord Reginald scoffed. “Surely, you cannot be talking about Count Meurduerson?”

“Yes, sir, precisely. I believe he may have something to do with this.”

“You take this slander back right this instant!” Sir Lord Reginald screamed with the utmost dignity. “Count Meurduerson is a friend! A fantastic new friend! We are to be friends forever and forever! He told me so!” The tears on his face reflected the chandelier light and made for a stunningly manly picture.

“And when did Count Meurduerson tell you this?”

“Why, just the other night! He invited me out for the most peculiar activity – a night hunt! Oh, we did have so much fun.”

“Did you catch anything?”

“Actually, we did not. Except maybe friendship.”

“Forgive me for being so forward-”

“I don’t, but continue.”

Timbly sniffed. “Did the Count Meurduerson, by any chance, grow fangs and bite your neck with them, thereby drinking your blood?”

“Timbly!” Sir Lord Reginald held a manly hand up to his manly chest. “Did you follow us? Are you spying?”

“Far from it, sir. It is merely an educated guess. I had supposed Count Meurduerson was a vampire after his initial call to the house, where he only came at night and hissed like a cat when passing the chapel. It seems he has made you one, as well.”

“Vampires, Timbly! Are we believing in childish monsters, now?”

“Have you had your breakfast, sir?”

“Of course I have!”

“And has it filled you?”

“No, actually, I’m ravenous! I just supposed that was my vigor for industry!”

“And when have you last seen the sun?”

“It’s England, Timbly. The sun is a myth.”

“Quite. And what of the fangs in your mouth, sir?”

“Fangs! I don’t have any…”

Sir. Lord Reginald reached up to his face and immediately cut himself on one of his teeth. It seemed that four of his upper teeth had become quite long and sharp.

“Timbly.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I do believe you are onto something. Perhaps I won’t dock your pay this week after all.”

“Sir?”

A vampire. A creature of the night. Never to go into the sun again. Forced to drink blood to survive. Doomed to an eternal, lonely life.

“Timbly! Do you know what this means!”

“I supposed I had better order heavier drapes for the manor, sir.”

“I mean, yes, do that. But also…now I can do industry forever! I shall be the greatest magnate the world has ever seen, and I have all the time to do it! Timbly! Fetch the coach! Let us go thank Count Meurduerson on the way to kill poor people in London!”

Timbly sighed again. “Very good, sir.”

Inspired by this.

Lessons from Wheel of Time: Things I Liked

I don’t remember precisely when I started reading these books, but it’s been, like, five years. I wanted a super-long, super-involved fantasy series, and I was initially hesitant to read them for absolutely no good reason. None. I can’t be the only one who just hears about something and immediately shuts down, right? Like, I’m in some mood when I first hear about it, or I’m hungry maybe, I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m just like, “Fleabag? Well, there’s no way I’m going to like that.”

(Spoiler alert: I did like that.)

And it gets worse when it’s something super popular. I don’t even have to mention I don’t want to watch/read it, I only mention that I haven’t, and whoever this other person is in this story goes off. “You haven’t watched Sisters of Solitude: Space Warriors? Oh. My. God. You’d love it! It’s won so many awards! It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d like! How have you not watched this yet?”

And even if it is exactly the sort of thing I’d like, when someone comes at me with that kind of attitude my POS brain just shuts down even further.

So, I already had this bullshit ‘I already know I don’t like that’ attitude, and then I had my friend and my then-boyfriend on either side of me insisting I would love them and it was ridiculous that I didn’t want to and I’m being stubborn and stupid and for the love of Aisha read the fucking things already!

I did eventually give in and read them, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And everybody else who reads them gets to write or make a video with all their hot takes, so I want to do one, too. I feel like I’ve spent the 10,000 hours it takes to become an expert on something reading these things, so let me have this.

The Word Building

Look, if you’re going to write a multi-book fantasy epic, you better be prepared to do some serious development on whatever magical land you plan on moving your characters around in for…hold on, a second…over four million words (people who have not read the books are allowed to be shocked and surprised. Anyone who has read the books, go ahead and crack a beer. You deserve it). Good thing world building might be Robert Jordan’s biggest strength as a writer. Because he went hard.

Every single one of the kingdoms and countries he created comes with its own government, history, customs, fashion, physical traits, and even stereotypes from the other countries. The Carheinin nobility are constantly playing ‘The Game of Houses,’ sort of a like a supercharged Survivor situation where the stakes are actual human lives instead of a cash prize and your dignity, so everybody else in the world think of Carheinins as slippery fucks. One country has a weird way of talking, another likes braiding their hair and putting bells at the end of them (I cannot emphasize enough how much being in one of those cities surrounded by ting jingling bells would stress me the fuck out). The Sheinarans live directly next to The Dark One’s asshole and constantly have to deal with evil bullshit and thus think everyone south of them is a mega-pussy for not knowing how to rip a horn off a trolloc (for all intents and purposes this universe’s version of orcs) and stab it in its own eye.

These feel like real cultures having real interactions with each other. There is great depth to this world. I don’t know Robert Jordan’s methods, but it seems like he worked out a lot of the details before every writing a single word of the narrative.

Different Peoples, Different Understandings of their World

This is my favorite part of Jordan’s world building for these books, specifically because the opposite of it is a cheap, easy cop-out that many writers take.

The cheap way, when building your magical world, is giving everyone across the world the same understanding and knowledge of magic and its history. Wizards and kings and farmers and serving girls alike all know the full history of when Sir Charles Magicman stole magic from the Wizened Old Dirty God and gave it to the people on a sunny, beautiful day that suddenly turned to storms in the afternoon and there was a car crash on I-95 that slowed traffic down all the way through DC down to Fredericksburg and Sir Charles Magicman had to get out and walk so he was late getting to the Council of Ruling Fuckheads and they were all like, ‘we’re out of here!’ and left to get dinner so the only one left to receive the magical bounty from Sir Charles Magicman was the cleaning crew and thus a future of great magical nobility was born!

And so on.

This sucks because it’s not real. There isn’t a single thing in any reality that everybody on the entire planet a) knows every single detail about and b) has the same opinion on. Maybe a wizard or a king would have such detailed knowledge about that day, but why would a farmer? How does knowing that Sir Charles Magicman drove a 2010 Kia Sorento help with the crops? Who took their time to teach this farmer any of it, and what were their motives? It doesn’t make sense.

Robert Jordan is here to show these lazy assholes how it’s done. Nobody – and I mean nobody – in the Wheel of Time series has the same understanding and opinion on the world or its magic as anybody else. The Aes Sedai, the primary magic users in the books, probably have the best picture of the world’s history through their collection of books and journals, but it’s not complete. The main characters are constantly unearthing shit that the Aes Sedai either thought were legends or straight up didn’t know.

At the same time, there are people in this same world who don’t even believe the Aes Sedai are real. It’s a pre-industrial age society where you can be born, live, and die in the same five square miles of land and only meet a few people from outside that square, so of course there are going to be people who only ever hear rumors of women wielding magic and think it’s a big stinky pile of horse plops.

Remember the Sheinarans? Constantly fighting back the trollocs? The rest of the world doesn’t even believe they exist, because they’ve never seen them and Twitter isn’t a thing. Ninety percent of the world thinks trollocs are a myth. For Sheinarans, they’re a Tuesday.

It adds such depth to the world. Such realism. Writers, there’s your hot tip: once you have established the history and rules of your world, make sure nobody knows any more than 75% of it at any time.

The Magic System

First, really briefly, let’s go into the difference between a hard magic system and a soft magic system:

A hard magic system has a strict set of established rules on how magic is created and used in the universe. Brandon Sanderson (who incidentally finished the WoT books after Robert Jordan passed) seems to do this effortlessly in his Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series.

A soft magic system does not have any strict rules on magic use, just vibes. Think Lord of the Rings or even Star Wars, where magic is present but no one is giving a lecture on the specs.

Also, before anyone asks: the Harry Potter series would be a mixture of the two. There’s no explanation for where the magic comes from or why people can use it, but there are rules on how it’s used.

The magic system in WoT is a hard system, and, far more important for readability, not a complicated one. The reader learns where the magic comes from, who can use it, and how it’s used. Once the rules are set in place, they are not broken. They are expanded upon, but it’s a major part of the plot and makes sense in the context of the already set rules. The only thing that is not given a definite answer is why some people can use magic when most others can’t, but it’s addressed in the plot as ‘no one fucking knows’ and that’s good enough for me!

There are some things about the magic system I don’t like, but we’ll get into that in future articles.

Feminism? In My High Fantasy?

Robert Jordan didn’t create female characters. He created characters who were also women. And he created a lot of them. Not only did he create literally hundreds of characters to fill this entire continent he created, he also created a magic system only women can tap into. Thus all of the Aes Sedai are women. And we meet dozens of them.

Sad as it is, we’re only just now (and only sort of) leaving an era where simply having more than one or two female characters is progress (some (most?) of my favorite books and movies from the 20th century do not pass the Bechdel Test).

I think worse than writing something with no female characters (and I do recognize that there will be some plots that naturally consist of all men) is writing something with only one female character. Then you run into the problem of tokenism and its dangerous side effect: This is How All (blank) Are. Even if you don’t mean to, if you write something that has an all-male cast with one female character, every bit of characterization you give to that female character could be read as how you see all women.

How do you counteract this? You could go the Robert Jordan way, and write in hundreds of female characters, all of them vastly different. Some of the women he writes are kind. Some are evil. Some are not evil, but they do objectively suck as human beings. Some women are smart, some are dumb. Some are conniving, some are honest to a fault. It’s almost like all these female characters are all their own person and not part of some hivemind that still won’t go out with you.

Is Wheel of Time Worth Your Time?

Do you have literal years to spend on a book series?

Also, if you’re a writer looking to write anything similar to WoT. A long series. A unique world. A large cast of characters. A fresh magic system. There is something to learn about each of these from Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s fourteen book epic.

Other The Wheel of Time Posts

Two Oranges

Jeff didn’t want to look up at the flat-screen hanging over the Slushee machine, but he’d always had a hard time not looking when a television was on. Didn’t seem to matter what was on it. It was one of the many, many reasons his first wife Barb had screamed at him before she’d jumped in her hatchback and scurried off to live with her new boyfriend in Clearwater.

Title fanfare gave way to a woman who was attractive in that TV way, which is to say so perfectly polished and manicured anything even approaching a personality had been weeded out and burned. She was standing in the middle of a neutral set with some kind of screen behind her.

“Welcome to Profiles in Super, where we highlight a different superhero across the country every week with exclusive interviews, ride-alongs, and surprises. I’m your host, Kimber Tweed. This week we’re traveling all the way out to the sunniest state, and also the most isolated. That’s right, we’re headed to Hawai’i, famous for beautiful hula dancers, tough Iron Men, fast surfers, and this week’s superhero, Honolulu’s own King Iz.”

The video cut away to what Jeff would swear was the same damn montage of Hawai’i shows had been playing since the eighties. Actually, the more he watched, the more he was convinced there were clips from Magnum, PI in there.

Sunniest state. Pfffft, Jeff thought. First they take the southernmost point from us, now they take that? Ain’t they happy enough living in a paradise instead of this swampy, gator infested shitho-

Something cold and wet poured down Jeff’s hand and he bit down to keep from yelling. He’d forgotten about the Slushee he had been filling up and now there was blue sugar-ice all over his hand and wrist.

“Fuck,” he said to himself mildly. He reached for the napkin case with his clean hand and pulled out about thirty of the thin, brown fuckers. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Everything okay over there, Jeff?” Ricky called from behind the front counter.

“Yeah, man, I’m just singing a chorus of ‘fucks’ because I enjoy it.”

“You make work for me, I’ll kick your ass, old man.”

Jeff tossed a handful of the napkins and tried to shove the clean ones back in the stupid little metal box. “Old man,” he muttered to himself.

Just because Ricky was barely out of high school, that didn’t make him an old man. He was middle aged and proud of it, God damn it. When he was Ricky’s age there were days he didn’t think he’d make it past thirty, so every year past that had been a gift. Nine beautiful, exhausting, tedious gifts.

Ricky knew Jeff’s name, and Jeff Ricky’s, a little because Jeff was in this particular Gulp ‘n’ Go practically every day, and mostly because Two Oranges, Florida was the absolute last bit of civilization before everything sank into the Everglades. Everybody in Two Oranges knew everybody else, except for tourists of course, of which there were both too many and not enough.

Tourists were most of Jeff’s problems and also the only way he paid rent on his trailer. He’d spent most of the day boating around what felt like the entire Gulf of Mexico so a couple of English pricks could catch some marlin. Eh, they kept saying they weren’t English. Scottish. Ed-en-bur-ra. Whatever. As far as Jeff was concerned, if your entire country could fit in a National Park arguing about where you lived in it was just farting into the wind to make a fucking point.

Wherever these pricks were from, they were definitely pricks. Rich assholes with more money than they knew what to do with. Money had gotten them those expensive water-proof watches, the Bentley they had driven-up, and the two trophy wives half their age waiting for them at the Salty Mermaid. Money hadn’t gotten them looks, or manners, and it wouldn’t get them marlin. They were already sunburned so bad Jeff could see the skin cancer starting on their fat noses and gin-blossomed cheeks, and they had been getting redder and redder in the face while Jeff and his boss, incidentally named Marlin, tried to explain that as far as the fish went, they were out of season.

“It’s January,” Jeff had said, gripping his thumb in his fist as hard as he could. A trick he’d learned to keep from upchucking, but something that also worked to keep from hitting idiots. “We’re going to search all day and probably find nothing. If you want marlin you should come back at the end of spring.”

But all the tourists had done was let more and more nonsense syllables fall out of their mouths, along with a lot of spit, until finally Marlin had told him to just take them already and get them the fuck out of his boathouse.

Six hours of sun and spray and soccer chants later, no big fish. Just two angry-ass lobster blobs screaming that they wouldn’t pay. Thankfully, Marlin had a sawed-off tucked behind the counter for that exact sort of situation.

These two pricks had probably taken a couple of years off his life. But they’d also sent him home with enough money for a Slushee, a couple of roller dogs, a six pack, a handful of scratchers, and maybe even a Redbox. That sounded like a wash to Jeff.

With another glance at the television (apparently King Iz in Honolulu had superhearing, and could hear calls for help from the other side of the city), Jeff took his Slushee and headed for the hot case.

“You keep eating like that, you’re going to die,” Ricky said, watching him pick a couple of dogs out of the rollers with his fingers.

“Promise? Ah, shit.”

One of the dogs slipped out of his fingers and rolled away, picking up lint as it went.

“Fucking butterfingers today, my guy.”

“Don’t you fucking mop in here?”

“You’re paying for that roller dog.”

“Like hell.”

Jeff bent down to pick up the runaway dog. The very second he decided he didn’t want to pick up the floor meat with his bare hands, the front door to the Gulp ‘n’ Go opened with a jingle and a bang.

“Open the register and give me the money! I’m not messing around here, do it!”

Jeff rose enough to be able to see over the snack cake shelf. Ricky, behind the counter, hands up and eyes wide and frozen to his spot like the AC had blown out. In front of him was someone Jeff had never seen before. Not a resident of Two Oranges. Not a tourist either. Whiter than him. Scragglier hair than him. An all-around worse version of him, to be honest. Jeff had never been a guns guy, so he didn’t know what he had pointed at Ricky. Except that it was a gun. And it was pointed directly at Ricky’s face.

“Are you fucking deaf?” The worse version of Jeff screamed. He pointed the gun at the ceiling and fired, raining plaster down on the two of them and making Ricky scream. “Open the God-damned register!”

It was one thing to rob a convenience store. Hell, some people might think that was the point of these things. Money easier than the bank. But to actually fire a gun? Fuck, to actually load the thing? Jeff had robbed a few in his time and most of the time he just made a finger gun in his pocket.

“What kind-”

He was going to say what kind of turd robs a convenience store with a loaded gun. Talk him down. But talking had never been one of Jeff’s strong suits and he didn’t realize that Worse Jeff didn’t even know he was there.

Worse Jeff spun hard on his heels and fired directly into Jeff’s chest.

Ricky screamed again. Worse Jeff stared at him. Gunsmoke turned the room hazy and made it smell like farts.

Jeff looked down at his chest. At the hole in his t-shirt. He pulled the shirt away from him by the bottom to get a better look at it.

“Fuck. This was one of my favorite shirts.”

Underneath the shirt, Jeff’s chest did not have a hole in it. It was fine. Well, as fine as it ever got.

“God shitting damn it.”

“You’re…you’re a…”

“Don’t say it.”

“You’re a su-”

Jeff punched him in the jaw. Worse Jeff had become so entranced by the hole in Jeff’s shirt and the lack of hole in Jeff’s chest that he never saw it coming. He only wanted the moron to shut up. Well, he did shut up. As he collapsed onto the ground.

“Ah, shit,” Jeff muttered.

Behind the counter, Ricky was still standing with his arms up. Frozen. Not because of Worse Jeff, though. Because of Jeff. Because of what Jeff had done. Because of the hole in his shirt, and not in his chest.

Fuck me.

“Ricky. Ricky? You in there, Ricky?”

“You’re-”

“No. No, I’m not. Do you see a leotard? A suit with spangles? You ever seen my face on a t-shirt?”

Ricky shook his head, his hands finally coming down. “No. No, but-”

“I’m not, and I’m not going to be, neither. We’re going to be keeping this between ourselves, okay? Ricky, I need you to nod your head.”

Ricky did as he was told.

“You’re going to be cool about this?”

Ricky nodded again.

“Okay. Good.”

Jeff gathered his Slushee and some fresh rollers, forgoing the six pack and scratchers and movie. He had to force Ricky to take the cash, stepping over the turd still knocked out on the ground.

“Call Muncie,” Jeff said. “Tell him…tell him he slipped in Slushee. But you don’t tell him I was here, you got it? Be cool.”

Ricky nodded wordlessly again, and Jeff left out the front with the distinct feeling that Ricky was not going to be cool.

Hiding: A Body of Thieves

A Body of Thieves

Joey pulled Vinnie into his sleeper car and slammed the door.

“Come on, kid, we’ve got seconds to make this work.”

Over the crushing sound of the wind rushing past the open window, Vinnie heard the guard bang on the door. For such a little man, he was capable of making an awful lot of noise. He had been banging for roughly forty seconds, starting about fifteen seconds after Vinnie had been pulled into the sleeper room by Joey.

With a final glance to make sure everything was right, Joey turned to the door.

“I got my ticket right here, what’s with all this racket?” Joey asked, turning up his eastern accent until he was almost unintelligible.

“Security,” the guard said. “Why did it take you so long to answer?”

In the pause, Vinnie imagined Joey turning to gesture at the unmade bed.

“I like sleeping on trains. The motion is very soothing. You know what’s not soothing? Getting woken up by some railway rent-a-cop at whatever hour it is. You got a name?”

The guard ignored all this. “I’m following a person of interest, and I thought I saw him come into this room.”

There was another pause, and Vinnie was sure Joey was looking around the tiny space. He could imagine the over-exaggerated movements and the way he’d shrug his shoulders.

“Well? Are you done looking? Or do you need another pass by? Where the fuck would I be hiding someone in this closet?”

“I need to look in your bathroom.”

“I don’t got a bathroom, you think a dinky room like this comes with its own bathroom? I don’t got the money for that, I use the car bathroom at the other end like everybody else.”

“Whatever that door is, then, sir. I need to look in it.”

Vinnie tensed and held his breath. The train was going around a bend, taking a turn, and the force of it was making his stomach try to leave his body through his rib cage.

“It’s a closet. And not a big one. Barely big enough for my carry-on, let alone a frigging ‘person of interest,” Joey said with a mocking tone.

“Still, sir, I need to see-”

“You never told me your name. I’m making a complaint about this. You can’t just-”

“I can and I will.”

Vinnie heard some scuffling as the guard pushed himself past Joey into the little room. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited.

The closet door flew open so hard it banged against the wall behind it.

The security guard harrumphed.

“See? Nothing in there but my small bag, because nothing else is fitting,” he said. “Now, I never got your name.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“Aww, no. You don’t leave until you tell me your name. Get back here! You know what, it’s fine! I’ll just tell them I’m looking for the shortest security guard they got!”

Joey slammed the door hard enough that the little room shook. A second later the window was pulled all the way open. Joey stuck his head out.

“Ready to come back in?”

The nod Vinnie gave was stiff and small.

He hadn’t had any time to protest before Joey had opened the window and Maggie had crawled through. The waitress outfit and wig were gone, although her long black hair was still wrapped up and pressed against her skull by a wig cap. She was back in black, wearing a harness with a bungee rope that went out the window and up to the top of the train. Before Vinnie could even get a word out she had strapped him to her with another bit of bungee rope and then they were outside. Hugging the outside of the train, trying to find anything for his fingers to grip on to, while Maggie wrapped herself around him. Eventually he had just pressed his hands flat to the train, as though his leather gloves could grip him to the metal. Behind them the desert night had whipped past, making his ears and nose freeze. He’d looked down only once. Even in the dark he could see how fast they were moving. After that he kept his eyes on the metal in front of him, swallowing over and over to keep from throwing up.

Maggie did all the work getting them back inside. She walked them over the side of the train, the rope dragging over the roof of the train. When they were over the window Vinnie had to relearn how to move his legs before getting them back inside. She released the rope holding them and he crashed inward.

“You okay?” Joey asked.

“Yeah,” Vinnie said into the floor.

“You want to get up?”

“Not yet.”

His forehead was on the floor. It was dirty and sticky but it was under him so he loved it. Behind him Maggie dropped neatly in, and as he managed to look up he found her rolling the rope around her forearm. She didn’t look like she’d just been clinging to the side of a speeding train. She had the look of someone who had been interrupted from a very important nap.

“What now?” Maggie asked.

Joey sat on the bed. He’d gotten a glass of something brown from somewhere and he was holding it to his head. Carefully, Vinnie sat back on the floor and pushed himself up against the wall.

“What I’m thinking,” Joey started, “is that guard is suspicious of you, but still hasn’t really gotten a good look at your face. I don’t think you’re burned.”

Relief, as cold as the air rushing past the window, slid down his back.

“Yet.”

Gone as fast as it came.

“He’ll be looking for you. Monitoring the train, and everyone getting off. He’ll recognize you if he sees you. Eyes?”

“Yeah, boss?”

Vince had forgotten all about the tin ears.

“When you’re done back there I need you to erase the security tapes, anything with Face on it.”

“Easy-peasy.”

“As for you…” Joey said. He took a sip from his glass and put it back to the side of his head. After a while, he looked to Maggie.

“You brought the extra harness?”

“Always.”

“And it can hold him?”

“It can hold Fist.”

Joey nodded. “Hate to do it to you, kid, but you’ll be getting off the train with Spirit.”

Vinnie nodded like he understood. After a few seconds he realized he didn’t, and looked up at Maggie.

“You get the…the goods off the train,” he said. “But I was never told how.”

She tried to hide a grin from him. Poorly. “You ever heard of the Rio Montana?”

Of course he had. Biggest river in the desert, coming down from the mountains before cutting east toward the Gulf. Everybody had heard of the Rio Montana. In fact, if he remembered right, the Southern Line went right over the Montana, right across…

He looked between them, his eyes bouncing faster and faster, as his mouth went dry and he somehow developed instantaneous hiccups.

“No,” was all he said.

They didn’t have to say anything to tell him he was wrong.

The Rio Montana came down from the mountains and cut through the desert. Cut into it deep, creating the Nava Cliffs. A five hundred foot deep gorge with the river below. The Southern Line went right over it, across their Nava Bridge.

Neither Joey nor Maggie had to say anything. Spirit’s way off the train was jumping into the gorge.

Previous Next

Haunting 101

Tucker Winslow – alive for twenty-six years, dead for three, employed by Here and Beyond Solutions for two and a half – was sitting on a crappy plastic chair in the breakroom, staring at the soda machine without really seeing it. The Sector 1248 break room shared a physical space with the break room for a Gulp ‘n’ Go, so in a technical sense he was sitting next to Tammy while she Face-Timed her step-daughter on her own fifteen. He could tune in and listen, if he wanted. Satan in stretch pants, he did not want to.

Prior to haunting the Cho residence in the middle of whatever bland California suburb he was sitting in – mortal plane locations really stopped mattering after a while – he’d been working the Walkers out in Georgia somewhere. Atlanta, maybe? They did live on Peach Tree. That job had been a cake walk. He’d done a good job. Too good, in fact, and after the fifteenth night of little Luke and Emmy Walker running to their parents’ room the whole family had up and quit. He thought that was the point. He thought he’d done something good. When his supervisor, Mitch, had called him into his office he had honestly thought he was going to get a promotion.

“We don’t want to make them move. Didn’t you learn that in the training?” Mitch asked, barely looking up from his computer, his fingers flying over the keyboard too fast to see. He was a man of average build who had died in a freak rider mower accident, and the stresses of his job kept him so distracted he usually forgot to switch from his death state to a more neutral appearance. Tucker tried to keep his eyes on his face, and not on the ten-inch mower blade embedded into his left temple.

“No…I mean, yes…I mean…I must have misunderstood the material?”

Mitch sighed long enough for Tucker to smell burnt coffee and gasoline, tapped a few more keys before hitting the ‘enter’ key with a bit of mustard, and then finally looked at Tucker.

“One family, one house. We don’t follow the family if they move, and we don’t stay with the house, either. Then things get too obvious. Got to keep the living on their toes.”

“Right.” Don’t look don’t look don’t look don’t look.

“We’ll have to reassign you. It’s your first job and you were doing good work, so there won’t be any marks on your permanent record. Another slip-up like this, Taylor-”

“Tucker.”

“-and we’ll have to discuss some re-education.”

While alive, Tucker had worked for enough major corporations and seen enough science fiction to know that any interpretation of ‘re-education’ was going to be soul crushing, the only question was in what way. So he had been determined to get it right this time. He’d requested a new handbook and had read it so many times he could now recite all thirty-four pages from memory alone. He’d been attending all the Tools of the Trade Zoom meetings and had even agreed to join the Baby Haunters-Big Haunters to get more tips. He was going to get this right, and he would be haunting Harry and Rose Cho for decades. Maybe even their kids.

Tucker hadn’t counted on one thing.

The door to the break room swung open – the one on Tucker’s plane, Tammy didn’t stop yelling into her rose-gold iPhone – and in walked Marty carrying his packed lunch.

“Cripes, Tucker, what’s the matter with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

Marty laughed at his own joke as he sat down, his huge belly jiggling. You could never tell what state Marty was in. He’d croaked of a heart attack and the differences were minor.

“I’m stuck, Marty,” Tucker said, running his hands through his hair. “I botched my first job and I really don’t want to mess up this one, but I don’t know what to do.”

“Uh huh,” Marty said, digging through his huge Igloo lunchbox, really more the size of a small camping cooler. “Aren’t you down at the, uh, the Cho residence, right?”

“Right.”

Marty shrugged. “Young couple, just starting out, first house. I mean, very basic situation. I’m not seeing what the problem is.

Tucker took a deep breath and tried not to let his fingers fidget on the table.

“They have cats.”

“Oh,” Marty said. He sat back in his chair, his pepperoni and provolone sandwich forgotten. “Shitfire, man.”

“Yeah.”

The break room door swung in and Sweaty – a nickname he had chosen, would not explain, and would not respond to anything but – zoomed in laughing that ridiculous, high pitched cackle of his. From what Tucker heard it scared the shit out of the Jones-Simpsons. Only made Tucker feel like he was wiping his ass with steel wool.

“’Sup, idiots?” He punched the soda machine in just the right place and waited for it to spit out a root beer. It didn’t spit out a root beer on the mortal plane, but the soda machine still jumped a little and actually made Tammy look up from her conversation about her infected ingrown toe nail long enough to glare at it.

Sweaty leaned in until what little mustache hair he was able to grow was tickling the back of Tammy’s ear.

“Good evening, Tammy,” he whispered in a sensuous way that made Tucker feel like he needed a shower.

Tammy screamed, and Marty pulled a face.

“Not supposed to scare folks who aren’t your family,” he said in a sing-song around a bite of a Ho-Ho, watching Tammy hustle out with her hand clutched around her phone.

“The only way they find out is if you snitch, and you don’t have the balls or the energy for that.” Sweaty plopped down in the seat Tammy had been using and put his feet up on the table. He looked at Tucker and sniffed. “The fuck’s the matter with you?”

“The family he’s been assigned to has cats.”

Sweaty shrugged. “And?”

Sweaty had been nineteen when the skateboard his friends had duct-taped his feet to had missed the jump ramp they’d built and sent him careening into a local quarry, and he was only six weeks into his first assignment: one of those Christian families bordering on extremism. All Sweaty had to do was blow his nose in the vicinity of their baby before the family was hauling some sort of priest out. He didn’t know how good he had it.

“They’re not afraid of anything I do,” Tucker said. “Anything I do, they just say, ‘oh, it’s probably one of the cats.’”

“How many they got?” Marty asked.

“Three.”

“Fucking why?” Sweaty asked.

Tucker shrugged. He’d always been a dog person. “They’re in the bedroom, so I start slamming cabinets in the kitchen. They don’t even get out of bed. Or they’re watching television, so I start switching stations and changing the volume. Must be the cats, sitting on the remote! Even though the cats are in the other room and the remote is right in front of them! Everything I’ve done, for the past three months, has been pinned on those stupid fluffy pieces of shit.”

“I knew a fellow once,” Marty said, “got assigned to a house with six of the little turds. Couldn’t do a fucking thing without the family hollering at the cats. Eventually he got so frustrated he burnt the house down. And do you know what the bitch of it is?”

“They still blamed the cats?”

“They still blamed the cats! Couldn’t even get credit for good old arson. I don’t think a single cat died in that fire, either.”

“I don’t want to start any fires,” Tucker said. “But I need to figure this out. I don’t want to be reassigned so soon. Not again.”

Sweaty shook his head. “You’re looking at it all wrong, man.”

“Sweaty, no offense, but you’re an idiot and you’ve only been doing this for a month and a half. What do you know about it?”

“First off – fuck you. Second off, my mom had cats my whole life. And those fuckers scared the shit out of me.”

“Really? How?”

“Stupid shit. I’d catch one staring into a dark room. Like, really staring and getting all fucked up about it. Or one of them would be sleeping next to me while I’m playing Call of Duty, and out of nowhere it would freak out, bite the shit out of my elbow, and run screaming down the hall.”

Marty looked from Sweaty to Tucker. “Do the cats even see you?”

“Oh, they see me,” Tucker said with a nod. “They don’t seem to care, but they see me.”

“So you’ve got to make them!” Sweaty said, finally cracking open his root beer. “Use them to scare the Cho’s. Then, when they’re on edge, start pulling your others tricks. They’ll stop thinking its just the cats real fucking fast.”

“Wow. That’s…actually a good idea. Thanks, Sweaty.”

Sweaty shot finger guns at him, spilling root beer all over his shirt in the process.

Fun Fun Fun: Pacific City

Pacific City

Naomi Wallace wasn’t home. Aster called Maria on the payphone at the corner, and after a few super fun minutes where Mario would write something down and then Maria would read it over the phone only for Aster to come back with a brand new question, they eventually figured out that as long as Naomi’s schedule hadn’t changed drastically since the breakup she’d be home in an hour. Thankfully, Yellow SUBmarine was across the street.

They took a table out on the sidewalk. Aster sat down with their veggie sandwich wrapped in paper, glaring at the double Italian monstrosity sitting in front of Peggy.

“You know, up until now we haven’t really known each other well enough for me to ask,” Aster began, watching Peggy take a huge bite of the sandwich before picking up the meatball that had escaped and eating that, too. “But…I don’t know how to phrase this…are you planning on honking up your cookies later?”

Peggy swallowed. “There are cookies?”

She looked back through the door at the cash register, hoping to catch sight of double chocolate chip or maybe even peanut butter wrapped in plastic. Alas, the only things she saw were the packets of chips and she already had the family sized ketchup chips next to her sandwich. Slowly, staring at Aster, she began to understand what they were really asking.

“I don’t have an eating disorder.”

“Then how the fuck are you constantly eating like that? Do you know how many plates of nachos I’ve seen you pack away by yourself at Dinah’s? Because I don’t. I’ve lost count. And you’re still skinny as a rail.”

Peggy put her sandwich down and counted to five. Aster, perhaps realizing they had crossed a line, worked on opening the paper of their sandwich, folding it back just so. Finally, Peggy swallowed.

“Being a quarter-god isn’t all high jumps and parkour. My metabolism is fast. I mean, so fast I can barely keep up. One time, when I was a kid, I got the flu and lost my appetite. I lost thirty pounds in a week. I had to be hospitalized and the doctors thought my mom had been starving me, because ‘no one as healthy as me should lose weight that fast.’ I’m constantly sprinting just to stay in place.”

Aster fidgeted with their suspenders. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Lots of people think they can say rude stuff about my weight because ‘everyone wants to be as skinny as you!’ Pah. I’ve always wanted curves. I’ve got A cups and a pancake ass and you would not believe how many shady people have hit me up for heroin. Okay, so you asked me an intrusive question, I get to ask you one.”

Looking to balance the scales, Aster nodded with a mouth full of veggie sandwich. “Anything, ask away.”

“Why are you so eager to throw yourself into all this?”

They looked at her like she was crazy. “Why are you not?”

“Ah-ah, no. You already asked your question.”

Aster rolled their eyes. It was almost one o’clock, and every table on the sidewalk was full. Even the people closest to them were deep into their own conversations, or reading, or just staring out into the street fretting about their own bullshit. Still, Aster pulled their chair into the table a little bit and leaned over their food.

“There wasn’t a single moment or anything, I guess,” they said. “I grew up reading comics and watching movies. I really liked the X-Men, and I used to imagine I was one of them. Not just a mutant, you know, but an X-Man. A mutant to help other mutants. And everybody, I guess. I never did get any super powers, but I still wondered what I would do, if I ever found out something like this was real. And then I did find out it was real, or something like it.  I was scared, at first. I thought maybe you were right and I should just ignore it. But I kept imagining thirteen year old me, and how pissed I would have been. So, I knew. I had to do something.”

Peggy sipped at her drink through her straw before answering. “You’re a nerd. I get it. You could have just said that.”

“Fuck you. And it’s your turn, why don’t-”

“What did Maria say Naomi looked like?”

Aster looked to where Peggy was pointing. Across the street, a woman with blonde, bouncy soft curls was parking her brand new light blue scooter in front of the apartment building.

“That looks like her,” Aster said. “How the fuck does her hair look like that after getting off a scooter?”

Peggy ate the last bit of her sandwich. “Maybe she’s born with it.”

“Maybe it’s redwave magic,” Aster finished.

Her apartment was a sixth floor walk-up in a converted canning factory, and as they walked up the stairs Peggy could swear she could still smell something brining.

“What’s the plan?” Aster asked, panting heavily.

Peggy looked at her, confused. “Plan? What plan? We knock, she answers, we ask her why she cursed her ex-boyfriend.”

Aster paused at the top of the stairs, shaking their head as they got their breath back. “Shit, I need to work out. You can’t just ask that. What if she shuts down? What if she closes the door in our faces? We need a little subterfuge. You know what, you’re no longer in charge of plans. Just follow my lead.”

Aster wiped sweat from the back of their neck before going down the hall. Peggy shrugged to herself. She’d never been the brains of any operation, so if someone else wanted to call the shots she was fine with that. And the more this was Aster’s project, the better her chances of being able to extricate herself from it entirely.

Standing in front of 6B, Aster adjusted their clothes, ran a hand through their hair to straighten it out, and then knocked on the door.

“Coming!” came brightly from the other side, and before either of them could react the door flung open.

The woman with the blonde hair was standing in front of them. Her hair was now up in a knot above her head, and she had changed into form-fitting workout clothes, including purple leopard print tights that were practically see-through at the hips. Her face was clean of makeup, but her eyelashes were so long they had to be fake. Speaking of that, her lips were a little too plump, her cheekbones a little too high. She looked like she’d been fixed up in a magazine, and yet somehow she was standing right in front of them.

Naomi frowned at Aster, but her eyes lit up when she saw Peggy.

“You must be Ginger! I’ve heard such great things. I wanted the best instructor, and I’m sure I got it. And this is…”

“Billie,” Aster said without missing a beat. “I’m here for safety. We don’t send our instructors to new apartments by themselves. Not to say anything against you, but you just can’t be too careful.”

Naomi nodded with a sympathetic frown. “Too true, you never know who you’re going to meet these days. Well, come in, come in!”

It was not a small apartment, only made to feel small by all the stuff crammed into it. Looking around, it was easy to find the things that had always been there – a ratty couch, a small black coffee table, a couple of old paintings on the wall clearly found at a thrift shop – among the sea of new things Bags of clothes from boutiques sitting on a brand new dining table. A white leather couch sitting next to the old one, along with a matching leather recliner by the window. From where they were in the living room they could see the kitchen, and the line-up of new appliances. Shiny fridge. Modern oven. And sitting on the counter, all in a line, was an espresso machine, a microwave, and a waffle iron, still in the box.

“My personal dojo is over here,” Naomi said, leading them down a hall.

“Mind if I use your bathroom?” Aster asked.

Naomi waved down to a room farther down the hall. After a brief thumbs up, Aster motioned for Peggy to go into the ‘dojo’ and hurried off. Wishing she hadn’t gotten onions on the sandwich, Peggy followed after Naomi.

Probably once a bedroom, it was now mostly empty. A mirror and a bar had been affixed to one wall. The wood floor was near-completely covered with some kind of mat. Weights and medicine balls were neatly placed near the wall.

“Do you usually do yoga in jeans and a t-shirt?” Naomi asked.

“Yoga? I thought you called this a dojo?”

“Right. Dojo. My personal gym.”

“That’s…” Peggy trailed off. There didn’t really seem a point getting into semantics at this point. Yoga. She didn’t know anything about yoga. She was bendy enough without having to work at it. When Naomi had said ‘dojo’ she had been hopeful it had been some kind of fighting. She knew enough basics to fake her way through a beginner’s lesson.

“Um…right…let’s start…tree pose?”

Naomi frowned. “Shouldn’t we start with some sitting meditation first? That’s what I usually start with.”

“Oh, yes! Meditation. Of course. I…I thought you had already done that part. In preparation for me coming. Yes, let’s sit.”

Naomi half sat/half fell gracefully onto the floor, trying to put her legs into a crossed shape in front of her and almost getting there. Peggy sat, mimicking Naomi with her legs and the way she put her hands on her knees, pinching the air above them.

After a few seconds, Naomi opened her eyes. “Don’t you do guided meditations?”

Where the fuck is Aster?

“Guided meditations. Yes. Of course. Who can meditate without someone telling them what to meditate on? Uh, okay…you’re in the middle of a forest. Forest, on top of a mountain. And it’s windy. But not, like, in your face windy. More like, soothing windy. Your hair is blowing gently, but not hard enough to whip around and get stuck in your lip gloss. Uhhh…there are birds? Yes, birds. And they are singing very gently. They’re singing your favorite song, actually. They’re very good. You are walking through this forest on a mountain, and you’re not wondering how you got here. You know how you got here. And you know where you’re going. Because there’s a path. And this path is covered in leaves. The soft kind, not the crunchy kind. The leaves are whispering. What are they whispering? Only the trees know, and they’re not telling. Secretive bastards. Um…there’s a squirrel?”

“Found it!”

“Oh, thank God,” Peggy said, bouncing up. Naomi looked up at her, opening her eyes to total confusion. Holy shit, was that actually working?

Aster came bounding into the room, holding a book out in front of her.

“Hey, that’s mine!” Naomi said, working to stand up.

The book was what Peggy had been afraid of. In fact, it was almost too perfect. With its leather bound exterior and pentagram complete with goat head carved into the middle, it practically looked like a movie prop. Naomi tried to take it from Aster but Aster held it over her head. They were already taller than Naomi, and even as Naomi jumped she couldn’t reach the book.

“You’re not Ginger, are you!” Naomi said, crossing her arms. “You’re strangers…burglars…I’m calling the police!”

“And what?” Aster called after her. “Tell her you let two people into your apartment and then they found your book of magic spells.”

Naomi froze in the doorway. She turned slowly, her face carefully neutral. Finally, she crossed her arms.

“That’s not what that is.”

“Uh huh,” Aster said. They were flipping through the pages. “Yeah, looks like all cake and pie recipes to me. Tell me, which one of these did you use on Mario?”

Naomi sneered.

Peggy gestured for the book. “How about, which one got you all the new appliances in the kitchen? Or fixed up your face and hair? Or, the million dollar question, who are you working with to make all this magic work?”

Now Naomi rolled her eyes, her indignation swelling into anger.

“What, you think I’m in, like, a coven or something? That we light fires and chant in Latin or something? I’m not working with anyone. I don’t need to. I can do all of this on my own.”

“I’m not talking about other witches, Naomi. I’m talking about the demon.”

“Demon?”

Aster and Peggy exchanged looks. Naomi wasn’t feigning ignorance anymore. It was extremely real.

“Ah, shit,” Peggy said.

“What? What demon? What are you talking about?”

“You know what?” Aster asked, their voice gentle. They took Naomi by the arm and waist and led her out to the living room. “Let’s just sit down, okay? This is a nice couch, is it real leather? Okay, good, just sit there. Do you want something to drink? Water? Tequila?”

“Just tell me what’s going on.”

Aster sat on the coffee table in front of her. “So, I’ve only started reading up on this myself, but there’s one thing that’s been obvious from the beginning, and that’s that humans can’t do magic on their own. They need to borrow it.”

“Okay, so, I’m borrowing it. So what?”

“The problem is you’re borrowing redwave magic. The kind that comes from…well, hell. Demons. And the thing about getting redwave magic from demons is that their price is…well, it’s…”

“It’s your soul,” Peggy said, leaning against the wall. Aster shot her a look, and Peggy shot one back. “What? Might as well rip that band-aid off quick.”

“I was thinking we could ease her, more like walking into cold water.”

“Do you not just jump in? Weird.”

Naomi held up her hands. She wasn’t quite crying, but her eyes were shining. “My soul? I don’t understand.”

Peggy opened the book to the first page and handed it to Aster. Aster’s eyes skipped over the page, the corner of their lips turning down with understanding. They held the book up so Naomi could read the page.

“Did you do this spell?”

Naomi nodded. “Nothing worked until I did that one.”

Aster stared at Naomi. “So, you said the words, ‘my soul for the power?’ You said those words out loud, after you’d done all these other steps?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean anything! It’s just, like, metaphorical, or symbolic.” Naomi looked between Aster and Peggy, tears beginning to fall down her cheeks. “Right?”

Peggy stood up from the wall. Sighed. Tried to find something – anything – to say.

“I’m going to get you that tequila.”

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Laundry Day: A Biddies and Broken Hearts Story

The Biddies and Broken Hearts

It wasn’t supposed to get this hot, this high up in the mountains. Birdie could remember her childhood, all the way back in the last millennium, and she couldn’t ever remember temperatures above ninety degrees. Oh, sure, odd heat waves here and there. A couple of days, three tops. And then the winds would change and the temperatures would fall back into the upper seventies. Hot enough when you’re used to Easters and Halloweens buried in snow.

“Humans are gone,” Susie Jean said. She stood straight over the wash basin, braced her hands at her lower back, and stretched like she was trying to snap herself in half. Only after a few things in her back did snap did she release and sigh. “The damage we did ain’t. And I use ‘we’ in the royal sense. I, personally, didn’t do shit.”

Birdie looked up from the jeans she was scrubbing in time to catch Susie Jean’s wink. She was, by her own words, ‘older than dirt and half as tasty.’

“If’n a bear caught me, it wouldn’t know what to do,” she’d said the day she’d walked into town. “It’d think I was jerky.”

Susie Jean didn’t like talking about her past except to mention, often, that prior to coming up the mountain she’d been living in a nudist colony and wasn’t particularly pleased with having to don pants and a shirt again. She never wore a bra, obvious on days like this when the sun was a burning eldritch god in the sky attempting to kill them through sheer fury alone, but what with Susie Jean being five and a half feet tall and all of one hundred and ten pounds, she didn’t really have boobs to begin with and no one really minded. Except Mike, of course, but everyone figured that was just him being a dick.

Birdie put the jeans down to soak some more and reached for one of Paula’s Mickey Mouse t-shirts. Laundry was done every four weeks on a rotating shift. They were rationing the old containers of detergent they had scooped up from the grocery stores, hoping someone would come along who knew how to make soap or else they were going to have to learn. They had enough for another two years, the rate they were going, but it meant laundry was done communally and on schedule, no using soap for grass stains of your favorite dress.

This time around was Susie Jean, Birdie, and June. The three of them sat on gardener’s stools by Marrow’s Creek in the shade of a few aspens. Two kiddie pools, the bright blue plastic kind, sat between them. One sudsy and one clear, until the sudsy one got too dirty and the clear one got too sudsy, at which point Susie Jean would tip them over and Birdie and June would get the pails to fill it up again. A little bit away, what was left of hole nine of the Mountain Valley Golf Course sat looking ugly. Pointless grass that sat taking up energy until Doc Wendy suggested stringing lines across the green to dry laundry. Once one of the white baskets nearby was filled with rung out clothes one of them would take it over and hang it all up.

“I guess I could have gotten an electric car,” Birdie said, wrinkling her nose at the blood stains across Mickey’s face. Hopefully that belonged to a deer. “Been better about recycling.”

But Susie Jean was already shaking her head. “That’s what they wanted you to believe. Make it seem like it was the little guy’s fault. Even if you had gotten an electric car…hell, even if you rode a damn bicycle everywhere. Even if you reduced, reused, re-God-damned-cycled everything you ever owned…ah! Even if you lived just like Marietta, out in the woods with her poor husband, God rest his soul, even if you did all that, do you think anything would have been better?”

Birdie blinked. “No. Huh. I guess not.”

“Huh is right, girlfriend. They lied. They lied all the time! Lied about how much damage they were doing, and then lied and said it was our fault! You’re a scientist, weren’t you, June? You know.”

Susie Jean looked across at June. He was taking the sudsy clothes from Birdie and Susie Jean and rinsing them in the clean water. He rung a pair of boxers out – communal laundry meant everyone knew each other’s dirtiest, haha – and looked up at Susie Jean. Opened his mouth and closed it with a nod.

He was mostly aware of what was going on now, following conversations with his eyes and helping where Birdie told him to. He’d been getting a lot of motion back. He didn’t shamble around like a zombie anymore, and could actually get his arms up over his head. Birdie had been working with him every night these past couple of months, going through what little she remembered of yoga. Even his hands, what Doc Wendy called his fine motor skills, were getting ever-so-slowly better. Just yesterday he’d managed to button half his shirt up before his fingers had cramped. The only thing not getting better was his voice.

Well, he had one. Birdie had heard it plenty during his nightmares, calling out strings of nonsense. Sometimes you could see him struggling to say something, anything. And nothing would come. That single word back at the mall had been the only thing he’d uttered. Birdie didn’t know anything about the brain, but she’d bet just about anything she had that the part under that dent was where English was supposed to come from.

Susie Jean shoved a handful of socks under the water like they’d killed her brother and held them there, smiling. “See? Liars, the bunch of them.”

The old woman was why she’d taken laundry duty from Henry. Everyone was getting better being around June but a lot of them still walked on eggshells. Like if they said the wrong thing or looked at him funny he’d break again. Susie Jean didn’t seem to give a shit, and talked to June like he was anyone else.

“Susie-Birdie-Juney,” Nico sang, coming around the hanging laundry. “I come bearing gifts.”

“Thank the bountiful Lord,” Susie said, standing up. “My stomach’s growling fit to scare a cat.”

“You can thank me, old woman, for walking all the way up here,” Nico said.

“Blasphemer.” Susie Jean winked. She winked a lot. They all seemed to mean something different and nothing at all at the same time.

While the three of them dried off Nico began unpacking the backpack he’d carried with him. First a blanket, then corked wine bottles full of water. Then bread, turkey, and a little basket filled to the brim with berries. He set it all under the aspens. The sun was merciless but even the shade of a few trees made things bearable. Nice, almost, especially with the little cool breeze coming off the creek.

“You guys got it good over here. I’m over at the ovens, baking the bread. Got this headache from the heat that won’t quit.”

Susie Jean said a prayer over the food, something the other three didn’t join but they didn’t mind neither. Whatever Susie Jean’s relationship was with God, it was short and to the point and never pushed on the others, so when Susie Jean wanted to spend five seconds thanking God for dry turkey everybody let her.

“All right, let’s hear it,” Nico said.

Birdie groaned. “I don’t know how you still want to do this.”

“It’s for perspective!”

“It’s torture.”

“What are you kids talking about?” Susie Jean asked, popping a hunk of bread in her mouth.

“It’s this thing Nico likes to do,” Birdie said. “A game, I guess. A stupid game.”

“You’re not telling it right, woman,” Nico said. He leaned forward on the blanket, close to knocking his wine bottle over. “It’s a game, sure. To remember the past, and also how much it sucked. Someone says something they miss from the old days, and everyone else has to remind them what was terrible about it.”

Birdie snorted. “Except sometimes there aren’t enough terrible things about, and I’m left daydreaming about hot showers again.”

Susie Jean leaned back and spat into the river. “How do you win?”

“You don’t win, there’s no winning.”

“Then it’s not a game, is it?”

“A conversation starter, then.”

She gnawed on a piece of turkey, staring at him. Nico stared back. Birdie and June waited, making themselves busy with lunch. The creek babbled and a couple of bees buzzed around the berries and a single large cloud floated by, casting them in shade for a few seconds before marching on.

“Weather reports,” Susie Jean said.

“Weather reports?”

“Weather reports! I miss knowing what the weather is supposed to be.”

“Yeah, but, did you know?” Birdie asked. “They were wrong more often than they were right. Especially about snow.”

Susie Jean barked a laugh. “I guess that’s right. They’d predict a foot and we’d get an inch. They’d predict an inch and we’d get buried.”

“Man, I didn’t know anything about snow before all this, but it’s the same with hurricanes. Any time they’d be telling you the end was near, that shit would die out at sea,” Nico said. “It’s your turn, Birdie.”

“Fuck, I don’t know. Let Susie Jean go again, it’s her first time.”

“My dear, I am eighty or ninety years old, it ain’t my first time for anything.”

They were laughing when he first made the noise. Birdie thought he was choking at first and she sobered up quick. But June’s food was already gone, just a bit of crust on the blanket in front of him. He was struggling, anyway. Face red. Eyes staring at her like he could broadcast the words into her brain if he just thought hard enough. Maybe that’s exactly what he was trying.

“He’s going to pop,” Susie Jean said around a mouthful of berries.

“He’s trying to talk,” Nico said. He made slow, patting motions with his hands. “Easy, man. Breathe through it.”

June actually nodded, and starting taking long, almost whooping breaths.

“I don’t know how to help him,” Birdie said, pushing down the guilt Nico had assured her was bullshit. “He can make the words, when he finds them…but he has to find them first.”

“Stuck in the end times with brain damage.” Susie Jean took a long sip of her water. “Ain’t that a bitch.”

“CON.”

June was panting like he’d run up and down the golf course, his face flushed and his eyes wide. But he was smiling. He’d gotten out what he’d wanted to say. Too bad Birdie had no idea what he meant.

“Con?” she asked. “Like…pros and cons? Convicts?”

The smile was falling from his face, and those wrinkles above his nose, the ones he got when he was frustrated, were coming back. Before things could get worse, though, Nico slapped his thigh.

“No! I know what you’re talking about, man. Your book…the book flap…it said you liked to dress up like Link! You miss conventions, right? Like Comic Con?”

June leaned back on the aspen behind him, the relief washing off of him cooler than the creek.

“I never been to San Diego, but I went to Dragon Con plenty. You know what you’re forgetting? The stank. All those nerds knew everything there was to know about Naruto, and nothing about how to work a shower.”

“Hey, I think I know what you’re talking about. Is that like the old Star Trek conventions? I went to a few of those in the seventies.”

The three of them traded stories – well, the two of them did and June followed along with a broad smile that never faltered – while Birdie sat and listened. She’d never been to a convention. They’d ask her sooner or later. Hopefully after she’d gotten herself together, because as it was if she opened her mouth she would burst into tears and she never liked crying in front of people, especially when she couldn’t really explain herself. She didn’t even know if she was happy or sad.

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