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gumnut-logic · 4 years

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We’ll Be Home For Christmas 4.6

Title: We’ll be home for Christmas

Day Four – Five Billionaires and No Wives – Part 6 Prologue | 1.1 | 1.2 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4 | 3.5 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.6

Author: Gumnut

24 May 2020

Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go 2015/ Thunderbirds TOS

Rating: Teen

Summary: The boys can’t fly home for Christmas, so they have to find another way.

Word count: 3495

Spoilers & warnings: language and so, so much fluff. Science!Gordon. Artist!Virgil, Minor various ships, mostly background. A little angst in this one along with a little minor sexual reference.

Timeline: Christmas Season 3, I have also kinda ignored the main storyline of Season 3. The boys needed a break, so I gave them one. Post season 3B, before Season 3C cos I started this fic before we saw it.

Author’s note: For @scattergraph. This is my 2019 TAG Secret Santa fic :D

Wow, written all in one day. I’ve been rereading the fic and running out of it and wanting more. Unfortunately, for there to be more I had to write more. I checked my archive and the last bit went up on May 11 right before everything at work went to hell, so I’m guessing that was the cause of the delay of this bit. I hope it was worth waiting for. This fic is nearly finished. A few threads to tie up in the next chapter, which, depending on what the characters do (cos they’ve thrown me two curve balls in this ::glares at both Grandma and Virgil:: so who knows what else they will do). i hope you enjoy it.

Many thanks to @i-am-chidorixblossom @scribbles97 and @onereyofstarlight for reading through various bits, fielding my many wibblies, and for all their wonderful support.

Disclaimer: Mine? You’ve got to be kidding. Money? Don’t have any, don’t bother.

-o-o-o-

Scott stared as his home crawled over the horizon. Lit from the west, the peaks of Tracy Island were sculpted in gold, the water surrounding her sparkling in the dying sun.

It was a beautiful sight.

Virgil shifted against him, snorting softly in sleep.

Scott had been out on the bow of the boat for hours. First talking to Virgil, working through some of the events of the day until his exhausted brother slowly tipped sideways, falling asleep despite the breeze and the soft toss of the boat.

Scott just wrapped an arm around him and held him while his brother slept.

His butt was numb from lack of circulation, but he didn’t care.

John had approached at one point and quietly handed him a tablet full of information about whales. It was full of data he didn’t understand and he desperately needed to talk to his genius brother about what it all meant.

But for the moment, he was content to listen to Virgil’s breathing, the wind and watch their home inch closer and closer.

He was aware of Gordon keeping an eye on both of them, the pilot adding more speed to the journey today than he had any other day. There had been relaxation, but all of that had disappeared with recent events.

Hell, it had disappeared the moment they had discovered the trapped calf.

Fire ignited in his belly at the thought. He needed to speak with Penelope and follow up on what had happened to those responsible.

His father’s desk lay waiting on the Island.

Relief and dread waited with it.

He closed his eyes and evened out his breathing. It had been such a relief to let go last night. Mel had met his energy with her own, her hands in his hair, a pardon on her lips. No ties, no obligation, just a moment to be himself, find comfort in her arms and let go.

He was ever so grateful. His brothers may laugh, but it was the only way he could truly release everything that built up day after day. Life was a challenge and he was willing to take it on, but everyone needed a moment.

Mel had given him that moment...and a little more.

Virgil shifted against him as Gordon turned the boat slightly and began to slow on approach.

Scott opened his eyes to watch Mateo shift to starboard. The bow dropped a little as their speed lessened, the background noise of the engine changing pitch.

Virgil muttered something and shifted again.

Scott held him that little bit tighter.

A Little Lightning arced around the smaller island that protected their caldera from the open ocean and the yacht entered the sheltered lagoon smoothly.

The petrel colony raised a ruckus and squawked like crazy as they motored past, Gordon cutting their speed to almost nothing as the yacht coasted over coral.

There were two docks on Tracy Island. One on either side of the villa. Gordon chose the one adjacent to Two’s runway for obvious reasons. It was harder to dock such a large vessel, but it would be easier to get Virgil onto land, and, via the hangars, up to the villa. The other dock, near the beach huts, required a hike up to the house that Virgil was in no shape to make. Scott had checked his brother’s incisions earlier in the day and they were well into healing, but...it had been a weird day and Virgil was still asleep.

Gordon nudged the yacht ever so slowly up to the little used dock. It had been designed for supply delivery early on in the venture, but once the runway had been built, it had been used for little other than the occasional Thunderbird Four testing regime and a little recreational boating.

Nothing as big as A Little Lightning.

Gordon had mentioned early on that they would likely use the inflatable when they reached home, but the aquanaut had obviously changed his mind.

Virgil was definitely the reason.

John darted past Scott and Virgil, docking pole in hand, turquoise eyes targeting both of them. He didn’t say anything, but the concerned frown shot at Scott said everything.

Ropes were launched at the wharf bollards and the engine dropped down to a bare rumble. Alan yelled an acknowledgement at the back of the boat and John held up a hand to signal to Gordon. A slight shift sideways and A Little Lightning nudged up against Tracy Island and was secured.

Gordon cut the engine and its absence was profound.

John turned and smiled at him.

They were home.

-o-o-o-

Soft fingers touched his cheek.

“Honey, it’s time to wake up.”

He screwed up his face. He was in that pleasant warm place just below consciousness and he didn’t want to leave it.

But his pillow rumbled just a little with quiet laughter. Cotton moved against his temple and an arm tightened gently around him.

“You’re going to have to be more direct than that, Grandma.”

Those words, said in his brother’s voice, and enough neurons came online to recognise that he was curled up on something hard, leaning against...the warm cotton shifted and a breath was drawn in. A heartbeat pulsed against his ear, slow and sure.

The whirr of a scanner made him frown.

Light flickered under his eyelids and he clenched his eyes shut.

“C’mon, Virgil, we’re home. You can’t sleep out here all night and my butt is going to drop off if it doesn’t get circulation soon.”

Another voice piped up. “And then you’ll have to face Mel for the loss of that perfect butt.”

“What do you know about Scott’s butt?” Higher pitched. Alan?

“Remember number twenty-nine? Or was it twenty-eight? The one that worked in that circus we saved from the flood? She wrote letters about it.”

His pillow shifted sharply. “What the hell, Gordon?”

“Hey, you’re the one who left your email open for all to see.”

“It is encrypted!”

“Only to those who don’t know the encryption code, Scotty.”

“Boys, keep it down. Give Virgil a chance to wake up properly.”

He found his mouth. “Too late.” A groan and he was pushing himself upright. Everything complained.

Everything. His gut, his back, the numb leg that had somehow been denied blood when he leant on it.

Several hands helped him sit up and he found himself blinking against the golden light of sunset.

Sunset?

What the hell?

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Long enough.” His eldest brother was standing up, stretching his limbs and obviously rubbing blood back into his extremities. “You’re heavy.” But the smile Scott sent him was fond and happy. “We’re home, Virg.”

John, Alan and Gordon were arrayed beyond Scott, but as he turned his head, two other presences made themselves known. Grandma was in front of him, scanner in hand, blue eyes frowning at him in concern.

And on the dock, beyond the railing, stood Kayo.

Her frown vanished the moment she realised he was looking at her and was replaced with a small smile. “Welcome home.”

It was addressed to all of them, but she was looking at him when she said it.

“Let’s get you off this boat, young man.”

Yes! He was home. His ‘bird’s runway stretched along the cliff above them and the whole purpose of the boat trip came home to rest in his heart. As he stood, Scott helping him to his feet, he turned to his brothers. “Thank you.” He could claim that his voice was rough from his half drowning a few hours ago. “Thank you for taking me home. You didn’t have to, but you did anyway.” Okay, now he was getting emotional. “Thank you.”

An arm slung about his shoulders. “Anytime, Virgil, anytime.” Scott’s eyes flashed almost green in the evening light.

Alan muttered something and darted past Gordon to wrap his arms around Virgil. “Don’t do that again.”

Virgil blinked. “Not planning on it.” He wasn’t sure whether Alan was referring to his appendix or the whale thing, but whatever. His arm came around his brother and held him tight.

John’s smile was soft, but full of enough to swell Virgil’s heart.

Gordon...

A moment and Virgil untangled himself from Scott and Alan, took those few steps to his fish brother and smothered him in a massive hug. As expected, Gordon squawked and struggled just enough to make his protest shown, but Virgil hung on.

“Thank you, Gordon. Best idea ever.”

Arms encircled his waist, but his brother didn’t answer.

The moment was broken by Grandma placing a gentle hand on his arm. “Virgil, I would like to do a full medscan. John reported that you’ve been rather active today.” Virgil shot a look at his younger brother. John just smiled a little more and shrugged.

It was to be expected. Virgil would have done the same thing under the circumstances.

He sighed and let Gordon go.

Russet brown stared up at him a moment before Gordon stepped aside and gestured Virgil towards the gangplank that connected A Little Lightning to the dock.

Scott materialised on one side and John on the other and he had to force himself not to roll his eyes in exasperation.

Between the two of them, they made sure he stepped securely onto solid ground, ghosted him up the hill to the runway and to one of the little runabouts they used to transport cargo about the Island. It was clear that he was the cargo.

Well, at least it wasn’t a hoverstretcher.

He let out a sigh as Scott drove him into Two’s hangar and his ‘bird loomed over him.

Home.

It was a matter of elevators and examinations after that. Grandma was very thorough. The word ‘pneumonia’ was bandied about as a possibility if he didn’t look after himself properly. Apparently, he had breathed in a little too much seawater.

Fortunately, his incisions were quite happy and well on the mend despite the two dunkings for the day. Grandma didn’t frown at him, but the firm line of her lips was enough to keep him quiet.

You did not mess around with Grandma regarding medical matters.

Hell, when cornering his brothers as a medic himself, often the only threat that kept them corralled was that he would bring in Grandma if they didn’t behave.

When Virgil was ill, there was no-one else. Grandma was always the one who looked after him. She always had.

And, in turn, he now looked after her.

“What happened out there, Virgil?” Her voice was soft. They were alone and his grandmother was putting away her instruments. She had run him through everything, even a brain scan. She was obviously concerned.

“I don’t know, Grandma.”

“John says you spoke to whales.”

He shook his head and let it drop. “I don’t know.”

A finger caught his chin and drew his head up to look into her eyes. “You keep yourself safe, Virgil. You hear me? You have family who need you. Family who love you.”

“I’m okay, Grandma.”

She stared at him a moment longer before letting out a breath and turning back to her instruments. “You’re off rescues for another week, but I suspect you knew that.”

He did, but part of him had hoped he could shorten it. One glance at Grandma and he knew he didn’t have a hope. “Yes, standard recovery period for an operation of this type.”

Blue eyes shot a suspicious glare at him, but he didn’t respond.

“Lots of bed rest. None of your heavy lifting. No gym until next week.”

Damn. “Yes, Grandma.”

She turned back and he was in her arms. “Welcome home, Virgil.”

He blinked and returned the hug. “I’m fine, Grandma.”

Those arms tightened just a fraction.

He frowned. “Grandma?”

She let him go and turned away. “You better go downstairs. Kayo has dinner ready for all of us. It’s Christmas Eve.” She straightened up and looked at him, her eyes saying something he couldn’t quite decipher. “We should celebrate as a family.”

“Okay.”

Her hand landed on his arm and squeezed gently before letting go. He took that as a dismissal, slid off the bed and grabbed his shirt. “Thank you, Grandma.”

She didn’t turn. “I’ll see you down there shortly.”

He frowned, but did as she asked and headed off to the comms room.

-o-o-o-

Scott stared at John and Gordon. “You think he is actually communicating with the whales.”

A pair of copper eyebrows rose. “We think so.”

“But Virgil told me himself that he doesn’t understand it.”

Eos’ voice was deceptively wise. “Commander, he may not understand consciously, but subconsciously.”

“Explain.” Scott glared at the simulacrum of spinning lights on the holoprojector.

“His brain is at least partly processing the information, enough to receive an impression of the content, but not enough to clarify it. He has processed enough to produce a vocalisation that connects with the whales despite the lack of range in his vocal cords. Humans cannot produce the sound required to emulate whale song without electronic enhancement. Virgil’s physical contact appears to have amplified his emissions enough for the whale to recognise his voice as a form of communication.” A graphic appeared on the ‘projector. A small portion was set aside and fit into the larger like a puzzle piece. “The whale was able to clarify his vocalisation into something that could be understood.”

“What did Virgil say?”

John answered him. “We don’t know.”

“We should ask him.” Gordon stood up. “And I think he should be part of this conversation.”

Scott bit back a retort. Every bone in his body wanted to protect Virgil from this.

But he knew he couldn’t.

Sagging, he sat down on the couch behind him and nodded.

Gordon stepped around the ‘projector and perched beside him. “Sam and I will find out more. I promise, Scott. This is a major breakthrough, you know that.”

Scott turned slowly to look at his little brother. “You saw what it did to him.”

“Do you trust me, Scott?” Russet brown bared his little brother’s soul.

He stared into those eyes. Little rapscallion Gordy, the prankster of the family. The ray of sunshine on moments so dark Scott feared his own survival. Did he trust Gordon? Trust him with Virgil’s life?

All the time.

“Yes, I do.”

Gordon swallowed. “Then trust me with this. I’ll keep him safe. I promise. We’ll work this out. Discover what it means. What exactly is going on.”

John cleared his throat. “Perhaps you should both speak to Virgil first?”

Scott turned to find his engineer brother standing by the kitchen stairs, staring at them.

-o-o-o-

“Virgil-“

“No!” His older brother threw his hands up and Gordon took a step back. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

So, of course, Scott took a step forward. “Vir-“

“No, Scott! Not now. Just leave it. I need to work this out for myself. I...I thank you for the information, John, Eos.” He nodded to the ‘projector. “Gordon, I understand the interest and I...empathise.” He sighed. “I just need time, guys, okay?”

“Okay.” It was parched and apparently his voice. The frown creasing Gordon’s forehead was deep enough to hurt. Why wasn’t Virgil letting him help?

His brother reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Just some time, Gords, please.”

“Okay.”

“Then I’ll come to you.” Eyes a deeper brown than his own were pleading for understanding. “I promise.”

“Okay.” Gordon swallowed and cleared his throat. “Well, in that case, I vote we go eat before Alan inhales everything.” It was a simple distraction, but it worked.

Virgil squeezed his shoulder, his expression flashing thanks before turning away. The tension in the man’s back was pulling his shirt tight.

Maybe he was right. Maybe they should wait.

A blink and another swallow and Gordon followed Virgil from the room, Scott and John behind him.

-o-o-o-

The evening was a quiet one. All five brothers were tired after the day’s events, even Virgil who, despite having slept a few hours in the morning and afternoon, still looked like he was going to fall on his face at any moment.

Even Grandma was more reserved than usual, her gaze landing on Virgil repeatedly, her eyes distant as if in thought.

It was unnerving.

Kayo served dinner. A buffet of Asian dishes accompanied by rice and noodles. Most were purchased, but she had also made her own stir fry, a family favourite with just the right amount of chilli and cilantro. An appropriate welcome back feast, but none of them had the energy to truly appreciate it as much as it deserved.

After dinner saw them stocking presents under the massive Christmas tree in the comms room. Alan made various comments, especially when Virgil lugged out what was likely a painting wrapped in several layers of wrapping paper.

The fact he lugged it by himself led to words from Scott and the present being confiscated. Virgil’s protest that it wasn’t heavy was followed up by John stepping between the two of them and declaring he was going to help Virgil with his load. The two of them disappeared upstairs and Gordon was left with a grumpy Scott.

The whole lack of spirit finally cracked the aquanaut and he grabbed some tinsel off the tree, wrapped it into a ball and threw it at Scott’s head.

The astonishment on his big brother’s face was worth it.

Scott carefully placed the painting-shaped present down beside the tree and turned to verbally retaliate only to have his face muffled by a lounge cushion thrown by Alan.

“Bullseye!”

Gordon idly noted Brains taking one look at the resultant expression on Scott’s face and, grabbing Max, making a beeline for the elevator.

“Alan!”

“Yes, Scott?”

Gordon threw another ball of tinsel, silvery strands fluttering in the air as it flew.

“Gordon!”

Another couch cushion whacked Scott in the face.”

“Ala-“

More tinsel to the head.

Hmm, this tree really did have a lot of tinsel on it, but just in case, Gordon darted in and grabbed two of the balls he had already thrown.

He was not surprised when the remaining tinsel ball retaliated and hit him between the eyes.

Alan was landed by a return cushion volley. Scott really was a good shot.

“Oh, you are going down, bro.” Alan was positively gleeful and before they knew it, cushions, tinsel, several Christmas baubles and a pile of tribbles were hurtling back and forth across the room.

Kayo stood to one side and just rolled her eyes. Grandma joined in and was the likely source of the tribbles.

When John and Virgil returned, it was to utter chaos and not a small amount of laughter. Both got tribbles stuffed down their shirts and tinsel bounced off their heads.

John protested loudly at the use of his tribble stash, but Grandma told him to lighten up...right before she bounced one off his nose.

What followed that was a free for all.

The night got better, much to Gordon’s relief. His brothers loosened up, a little alcohol was dragged out and moods mellowed.

Of course, Alan was the first to nod off, curled up beside Gordon. He was fast followed by Virgil who yet again fell asleep on Scott. The worry that appeared on Scott’s face only made Gordon’s heart sink.

Grandma called it then, sending them all off to bed.

Virgil was nudged awake enough for Scott and John to get him on his feet and guide him to his bed. Gordon shouldered Alan and dragged him to the elevator.

“Thans, Gords.”

“Not a problem, bro.” The elevator was taking forever to return.

Alan turned into Gordon’s shoulder and slumped against it, half snoring.

“C’mon, Allie.” The elevator arrived and he helped his little brother aboard. If there was one thing Alan had in common with Virgil it was his ability to sleep.

Some complaints about the boat still rocking and Gordon tumbled his little brother into his bed. Shoes off, covers on. Gordon sat down beside his sleeping brother.

It had been one hell of a trip and now it was over. It was less than a week since Virgil folded in his pilot’s seat, yet it seemed years ago. One boat, four days and five brothers.

Alan rolled over and snorted in his sleep.

Gordon reached out and placed his hand on his arm.

“I’m gonna getcha, John.” It was quiet and mumbled into Alan’s pillow, but it was enough to push Gordon to his feet.

Blimey.

A blink that lasted longer than it should have and Gordon realised he was exhausted. One more glance at his little brother who was now muttering something about space resources and was no doubt plotting his brother’s video game demise, and Gordon made his way to the door.

One boat, four days, five brothers...and tomorrow.

Gordon went to bed.

-o-o-o-

End Day Four.

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #Virgil Tracy #Scott Tracy #John Tracy #Gordon Tracy #Alan Tracy #kermadec fic

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slipsthrufingers · 4 years

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Fic Tag Meme

Tagged by: @nire-the-mithridatist and @luthienebonyx

AO3 name: slipsthrufingers

Fandoms: presently Game of Thrones, but I dip in and out of a bunch of things

historically: Harry Potter, X-Men in every incarnation (Movies, evolution, original comics and animated series), the MCU, Fables, Glee, Nikita, a bunch of other, smaller things.

Tropes: to write... apparently canon divergence and alternate universes, anything vaguely angsty but with a hopeful end, arranged/forced marriage, alternate POV scenes, any kind of “what if” situation I’m down for.

Number of fics: 30 on AO3, though one is co-authored with @nire-the-mithridatist

Fic I spent the most time on: She’s Beauty, She’s Grace at this point. A Good Match took up a lot of time but it got written in half the time it would’ve taken me by myself because nire is a machine when she wants to be!!!

Fic I spent the least time on: I wrote my Christmas fic you’d better not pout in, idk... 12 hours? Considering it’s 9k, that’s pretty quick for me.

Longest Fic: A Good Match, but that will be overtaken by She’s Beauty either this coming chapter or the next.

Shortest Fic: a bunch of tumblr prompt fics and stuff, or The Home Front, which is a Fables fic I wrote as a Yuletide stocking stuffer ages ago.

Most kudos: The Tides, by a long way

Most comment threads: She’s Beauty, by a long way.

Most bookmarks: The Tides, though AGM is getting closer and closer by the day.

Total word count: 290 088, 61,680 of them with nire.

Favourite fic I wrote: A Good Match has definitely been the most fun I’ve had in ages. I got to do things I don’t usually do (write smut; nire only mocked me mercilessly throughout while still handling me with abject kindness) and I feel like it’s a more nuanced and complex fic than it ever would’ve been with just the one of us writing it. Having two meant we could share the mental load of character motivations and be fair to all of them, I think. Also it reminded me of my role-playing days, which is where I really got off the ground in my writing.

I’m also very fond of The Tides too, for various reasons. Mostly that it makes so many people cry.

Fic you want to rewrite/expand on: Um, my most popular fic not in the GOT/ASOIAF fandom is fairly big in The Mummy fandom. Problem is I wrote it in a frenzy for Yuletide and barely edited it, so every time I reread it all I see is flaws, but also I don’t wanna go there, yanno?! I feel like it would be bad for my mental health as a writer. So. It shall remain flawed.

Share a bit of a WIP or a story idea you’re planning on: I am almost finished Chapter 14 of She’s Beauty, so here you go with a little snippy snip:

“Do you want me to be the first woman to walk on the moon, too?” she asked, holding the stiletto heels hooked between her fingers. “I’ll knock my head on the lighting rig in these.”

Satin pointedly looked at his own feet, encased in six-inch tall platform boots, then rolled his eyes with such deliberate enthusiasm that Brienne worried he’d hurt his optic nerve.

Then he handed her a small garment bag and shooed her into the curtained change room. At least in there there was no one watching her. So she was free to feel the full extent of her dread when she pulled the very small swimsuit from the bag. To call it a swimsuit was generous. She'd been on her school's swim team all the way through high school and knew for a fact that if she were to dive into the pool and swim a lap wearing it, she'd emerge from the pool 40 seconds later in her birthday suit instead. Flimsy didn't even begin to describe it.

Not gonna tag nobody unless you want tagging!!

#fandom ask meme

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justalittlelitnerd · 4 years

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By A Thread by Lucy Score

We weren’t touching. But it felt like the space between us was charged with something. It was acting like a defibrillator on my heart.

This book had everything I want in a romance: a sassy, non-damsel heroine and a hero with soft boi vibes (I am a complete sucker for assholes covering up soft, warm centers).

Don’t let the office romance aspect dissuade you (it’s obviously a common, but controversial trope in romance b/c power dynamics and whatnot), this is not ~in my experience~ a conventional office romance.

First, Ally only ends up working at Dominic’s company after he gets her fired and his mom (who’s also his boss at the magazine she also owns) makes the job offer in reparation.

Second, in addition to the two characters being completely at odds from the first meeting (he got her fired after all), Dominic is staunchly against an office romance not only because of his own values and awareness of power dynamics but because of his father’s history of sexual harrassment and assault. When they eventually fall into bed together (because duh this is a romance) he immediately offers to quit his job so the power dynamics of the office wouldn’t be an issue.

That being said Dominic is an overbearing, and at times straight up controlling, son of a bitch (sorry as Ally would say his mother is lovely) and it made me want to throat punch him sometimes, but at the same time so did Ally’s stubbornness and pride.

Score has a talent though for balance because any time Dominic started to get out of control, Ally wouldn’t hesitate to go head to head with him and speak her mind and the honesty and directness was refreshing.

The ending felt a little bit rushed because clearly Dominic was trying (although in ways that were grossly overbearing and were exactly what Ally didn’t want him to do) and she made it clear that she couldn’t forgive him and I wanted more of a conversation or thought process to why she finally did aside from “that’s what love is.”

This book was fun and funny and sarcastic and their banter made the story flow and is definitely the main reason I would consider rereading this romance.

Keep reading for some top notch quotes!

It wasn’t out of the kindness of my heart. I had neither kindness nor a heart. I considered it atonement for being an asshole.

Clearly, she wasn’t intimidated by an asshole in Hugo Boss with a haircut that cost more than her entire outfit. I basked in her disdain. It was miles more comfortable for me than the terrified glances and “Right away, Mr. Russo”s I got in the hallways at work.

It had been too long since I’d squashed a disrespectful underling. I itched to do it now. She looked not only like she could take it but that she might even enjoy it.

“Fine. But if she poisons me, I’ll sue her and her entire family. Her great-grandchildren will feel my wrath.” My mother sighed theatrically. “Who hurt you, darling?” It was a joke. But we both knew the answer wasn’t funny.

I knew he felt it, too. That unexpected jolt. Like taking a shot of whiskey or sticking a finger in a light socket. Maybe both at the same time. For one moment of pure insanity, I wondered if he intended to take me over his knee and if I’d let him.

I’d assumed they’d all get used to me. Apparently I’d assumed incorrectly. I was the beast to my mother’s beauty. The monster to the heroine. When they looked at me, they saw my father.

Her tone was steely and anger all but crackled off her. I hoped she got the guy’s balls in the divorce.

“You know, you’d be a lot prettier if you smiled once in a while,” she mused, fluttering her lashes. No wonder women hated it when men said that.

It was fucking cold. February was right around the corner, and if there was anything colder and damper than January in New York, it was fucking February. Of course, fashion didn’t heed below-freezing temperatures. No. Fashion made its own rules outside of time and space and temperature.

I, on the other hand, didn’t trust myself to survive even basic contact. Ally was only safe, my soul was only safe, as long as I didn’t touch her.

He was looming over me, but rather than threatening, it felt intimate, careful, almost safe. Like I wanted to be exactly here with exactly him.

Tell me the top five things you hate STAT. (This is the secret to finding out just how bad a person is in case you need it for interviewing future wives or human sacrifices.)

Somewhere along the line, she’d started talking to me like we were friends. As if that moment of honesty in the bar, those emails exchanged, had somehow made us friendly. And while I craved her next confession, I also couldn’t handle the intimacy. I was ripped down the middle. Torn between wanting to know everything there was to know about this woman and wanting to forget she existed.

I hated it when she walked away from me. It always felt like she took the light and heat with her. I added that to my Hate List.

Those blue eyes weren’t cold now. There was a victorious fire burning in them. And I was acutely aware that I was in immediate danger.

My heart was trying to blast its way out of my chest. I didn’t know where the organ had gotten actual sticks of dynamite, but that’s what was happening. My insides had turned to lava… or magma, whichever metaphor was most appropriate.

“Lots of people dance for money. Prima ballerinas, Jane Fonda, Laker Girls, back-up dancers, Rockettes. All women who make money by moving their bodies. There’s nothing remotely shameful about it,” Faith insisted. “You aren’t doing anything wrong. And anyone who tells you that you are is—” “Part of the patriarchy.”

I hoped to God security was up to the challenge tonight. Because if anyone laid a hand on her, one single finger on her, I was going to lose my shit.

I wondered if I was leaving a trail of body glitter behind me like I was a Questionable Life Choices Tinkerbell.

If mystery bothered him so much, this son of a bitch—wait, no. His mother was a lovely human being. This alphahole was going to suffer. I’d make sure of it.

I wanted to believe in my bones that he was doing this as some stupid mind game, that he got off on playing puppet master with my life. But deep down, I was worried that it was something much, much worse. Dominic Russo was trying to take care of me.

I was so pathetically happy that she was speaking to me in multisyllabic words I would have let her slap me across the face with the folder.

I walked back into the room feeling like Cinder-freaking-rella. If Cinderella’s fairy godmother had given her a sexy, skin-hugging gown the color of crimson or, as I liked to think of it, Dominic Russo’s crushed heart.

Everyone was hitting the open bar like it was last call, and those little appetizers were doing nothing to soak up the liquor. It was entertaining, but I had a feeling this is how bad things happened at office Christmas parties. Inhibitions lowered, tongues loosened, and shit went down.

Oh, boy. I’d heard rumors of Drunk Dominic. But they hadn’t prepared me for the reality of him. He was adorable… and in no way capable of functioning as creative director right now. I needed to get him home.

Damn it. My shattered broken heart was trying to knit itself back together just so it could fall for him all over again.

I hooked my pinky around his and tried not to fall in love with the idiot when he pressed his lips to our joined fingers.

Nights like these changed lives and were retold as stories for years to come. But I didn’t know what my story would be. Would it be the time the up-and-coming designer made me temporarily semi-famous? Or would it be the night I finally realized my heart belonged to a man I was never going to be with?

Tacos and home renovation supplies with an entrepreneur, a male exotic dancer, and a drag queen on her day off. Just another glamorous day in the life.

I spent the rest of the day on the couch, which delighted Brownie. We watched the entire first season of The Great British Baking Show and then three episodes of Queer Eye. I was inspired to order and to eat an entire sponge cake from the bakery three blocks over and pondered growing a beard. Then I pondered what Ally thought about beards. And the shame spiral began again.

“I’m not hiding this,” Dom said quietly. “I don’t think I could even if you asked me.” Okay, coming from Dominic Russo, maybe that was kind of a swoony thing to say. It wasn’t a declaration of love, but it was real. These feelings felt real.

“I don’t need to be saved.” Dalessandra and I blinked at each other as the words came out of both our mouths in unison.

I wanted to take care of her. I wanted to take her worries and concerns and problems and solve every last one of them so she could focus all of her attention on me. And Brownie of course. I wasn’t a completely selfish monster.

I didn’t want her drawing lines when I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to redraw them properly. She would live here. She would have anything and everything she needed. No one would ever take advantage of her or lay a hand on her ever again. End of fucking story. I was her Prince Fucking Charming.

“Dom, of course people are going to talk. Trying to avoid being a topic of conversation is a pretty lame way to live life. Sometimes, accepting the discomfort is how good things are earned.”

It was disconcerting to wake up one day and find myself… well. Here. Making plans for two instead of one. Looking forward to sharing things like beds and weekends and closet space. I’d dated before. But I’d never gotten this deep, this fast. I’d never made space in my home for a woman before. Change was happening, and I didn’t know how I felt about it.

Ally didn’t bitch-slap, but Faith did it like it was an Olympic sport and she was a gold medalist.

“Everyone has baggage, Russo. Most of us are just smart enough not to hurl full-sized suitcases at the people we love.”

But sometimes an inch might as well be a mile. And I didn’t know how to cross it. I didn’t know how to ask him for what I needed. Because I didn’t know what I needed.

#by a thread #lucy score #romance #adult romance #romance books #love #office romance #grumpy boss #enemies to lovers #books #book quotes #quotes #book blog #booklr #book post

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cal3ris · 5 years

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@bisexualcyborg (reposting bc i think tumblr ate my first attempt)

bisexualcyborg replied to your photo “I saw The Fellowship again last weekend and promptly reached for the…”

CARO ILU

SARAH ILU2 <333

Lilou and I marathoned the movies right before christmas

U wanna know how much i FUCKING CRIED about the parallels of Frodo’s journey with illness, and about Sam’s UNERRING loyalty and how obvious it is that he’s staying for himself as much as for Frodo

Bc it was A LOT

Also the ending “how do you pick up the threads of a life” (badly quoted but yknow the bit. cue me CRYING MY EYES OUT.)

Didn’t help that the last time I read the full tolkienverse series (lotr+hobbit+silmarillion+etc) was the summer when i was sick

I can only imagine the amount of crying that occurred bc my eyes already get watery when I think about Frodo & Sam and especially when I remember the Grey Havens but it doesn’t hit nearly as close to home for me as I’m guessing it does for you *hugs*

it’s not my first rewatch (tho haven’t reread in a looong time) but this time I am ready to give it the attention it deserves, and also to drag up all the memories bc I am def not the same person I was nearly two-thirds of my lifetime ago (saw the first movie when it came out in 2001) but also in a way I am and that is…interesting.

like, I had no idea what fandom was. I barely knew what the internet was or enough english to get by. at first it was just me and a friend reading the books and geeking out and working it into school assignments at every possibility (I remember so much singing. plays. a fashion show. poetry. an ad for wizard fuzzy slippers named Gandies) we wrote fix-it fic before we knew what fanfic was. and then the internet started to become more commonplace and there were forums and fansites and Elfwood to discover (ohnooo I just found out it shut down in 2016?? i am cry) I don’t actually remember if we had much access to fic back then, the only things I remember were a LotR version of Big Brother the Dutch tv show (an AU if you will) and a verrrry long fic in which Frodo gets a girlfriend (Sam got one, it seemed only fair at the time) I’m sure that if someone had told me about Frodo and Sam living together forever I would have been 100% into it but I was so clueless. so incredibly clueless (didn’t know about shipping, didn’t know queerness as anything more than a vague concept)

On a more fun note: I STILL HAVE ALL THE FUCKING FEELS ABOUT GIMLI AND LEGOLAS OKAY. THEY ARE SO GAY AND SO FANTASTIC. SUCH A SIMULTANEOUSLY FUN AND BEAUTIFUL AND HEARTWRENCHING ROMANCE. I’M SORRY FOR THE SAP BUT G O D

(Have you read sansukh. if you care about the lotr dwarves at all you NEED to read sansukh. even if not tbh. it is a GREAT fic and follows the whole journey of all the members of the fellowship)

SO now that I’m the me I am now I can explore all this again, differently, and am for sure planning on reading fic, so thanks for the rec, I will check it out!!

Also going walking in the woods with a backpack, some rope and fake elvish brad was The Childhood Experience. My backpack was leather and my rope was Way Too Heavy to be elven rope but i loved it anyway

I am so glad you had a similar Childhood Experience bc personally I don’t know anybody else who used to drag rope around for no reason other than “elves!!” I also tried for a while to walk toes first (instead of heel first) bc I had somehow got it into my head that’s how elves walk (don’t ask how that went) (it didn’t :P)

#bisexualcyborg #replies #lotr #nostalgia #i wish i could drag up my old notes and stuff but it's stored away in my dad's attic #maybe i will at some point #i wanna remember who i used to be and also have a good laugh

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spamzineglasgow · 5 years

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(REVIEW) Not your minute turns from the blueprint: Body Work, by Tom Betteridge (SAD Press, 2018)

Denise Bonetti <[email protected]> Mon, 10 Dec 2018, 20:21 to maria.spamzine Hey Maria, Hope life’s good :) I’m just writing to see you if you’ve read Tom B’s new Body Work? There’s a paper I should be writing, but have been reading and rereading that pamphlet instead, or more like dipping in and out really, cause it's so beautifully layered and expanding that you can only take so much at a time. Don’t you think Tom’s poetry has this strange earworm quality to it? (I think he’d like the annelid comparison.) The way he choreographs words (I don’t want to use the word 'images’) makes its way into my brain and never wants to leave. He draws these, like, lateral paths of meaning so clearly that the weeds never grow back.Tom Raworth has this bit in 'Writers / Riders / Rioters' that goes:

the present is surrounded with the ringing of ings which words have moss on the northside

like, words naturally arrange themselves into a system of semantic habit, which is so stable and stale that makes them grow moss, but also so rich and vibrant when it's exploited productively. Obviously this is Raworth so it probably also means the opposite of this and so much more, but it kinda makes me want to say that the present (poem) makes the ringing of ings deviate so well that the moss can never grow again. I’d say that his poems behave like sophisticated lines in the sand, but they're more like brutal carvings on a rock. He had a couple poems in Blackbox Manifold ages ago (I think) and there was this one bit

‘nerve truffled plume lead pickled breast’

I think about all the time (especially when I cook). It’s so smooth. Why can I not stop thinking about it. It’s cause it’s so shameless, it wants it all - the feather-light and the corpse-heavy, never perturbed, so lucid. It plays at tasting good, but it tastes of an unrealistically blank texture. A-ha! Anyway the new pamphlet is gr8, if you haven’t read it yet look at the first poem pls - ‘OCCAM OCEAN’ (sounds like an anagram or palindrome)

It all dwells in systematic abstraction but flies so close to materiality, like a mosquito buzzing around the ear ('Not your minute turns from the blueprint'). I love that ‘plate’ in the first phrase, too: it behaves like an adjective but feels nothing like it. I can't help but think it's the subject of the sentence in a parallel universe that's created by scrambling syntax. It makes me think this is the way language should always work, and that we're the fkn idiots living in the parallel universe in which syntax is scrambled in ordered to be as boring as possible. Idk - it's late and I need to go back to writing boring essay syntax 'bound to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Lemme know ur thoughts you smart queen D xxx

Maria Sledmere <[email protected]> Wed, 12 Dec 2018, 17:30 to denise.spamzine

Dearest Denise,

Life is good thanks. I'm sitting in the attic of the law building and I can hear the construction work going on and every time I leave I look out at the skyline and slivers of infrastructural alteration. I was walking along the road earlier because the pavement was closed off for construction and cba crossing and the high-vis guy was like, 'you'll not see Christmas walking on the road like that', but I guess I misheard him saying something else because I was really engrossed in this old Slowdive album, so I just smiled sweetly. Anyway, that got me thinking back to the question of erasure, which I think is pretty vital to Body Work.Have been carrying this pamphlet in my bag for so long that the cover has started to peel and revealing speckles of white underneath, like the text itself is ready to reveal itself, and yes I was thinking Barthes and strip-tease and paratextual enticement.

So I had to google the word annelid and now can't get the phrase 'segmented worm' out of my ear/head/throat (gross!). I was thinking about what sort of stains are on the cover of this book, you know, with Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir's gouache/pencil work. A stain is one thing stuck to another. Gouache is a funny kinda substance that is half watery gauze, half binding, thick, gummy akin to acrylic. Wet, it will easily smudge. My thumb keeps bleeding where the skin thins, hardens, peels and sloughs off. Tom's poems are kinda mucilaginous in parts (v. insecty, molluscky, sap emission; but also they have a crispness and precision, like cuts of leaf). Things that smudge or fall in flakes. Bodies are maybe whatever we leave behind. I didn't want to mention Hookworms the band because of the singer's sexual abuse scandal BUT it seems significant that a group named after an earworm/type of parasitic larvae would have a song called 'Negative Space'. Like what we eat into in the process of making, existing, remixing. Is language a rash, the result of these parasitic inf(l)ections?

I've been to a couple of reading groups on microbiomes lately, and we were thinking through this idea of how acknowledging your bodily composition in terms of myriad genes and organisms challenges conventional, bounded notions of 'self'. What kinds of affects does this produce? There's a weirdness to that, in Mark Fisher's sense of the weird as 'that which does not belong', that which 'brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the "homely" (even as its negation)'. Fisher suggests that the form most conducive to rendering the weird might be montage. So I was thinking about how montage involves splicings, gaps, juxtapositions, cuts and suddenness. I mean you open the very first poem of Body Work, 'Occam Ocean', and see that its prose-poetic paragraph compacting is split in the middle by the juncture of line break and indent. And ofc the title recalling Occam's razor, the philosophic principle by which in the case of two explanations for an occurrence, it's best to go with the one that requires least speculation. Razor things down and erase speculation? What are we left with, more of the Rreal? Lately I've been hankering for cleaner prose, crisp lines, simpler solutions. The Anthropocene is all of a goddamn tangle. Do I want to follow the myriad threads or just cut cut cut -- who gets to do that?

Did you ever cut a worm in two as a kid?

Okay so I love how 'Occam Ocean' might promise, title-wise, this clean prosaic expanse (like the oxymoron of expanding ocean and occam's, which requires surely a condensing), but what we get is clustering, motion, shiver, containment. The sensual trash magickk of P. Manson! The little syncope of this thing or that, the 'maple neck', vibrating canes, 'chambered breath bowed into the driest soundboard'. These aren't like 'Latour litanies' because they are not like concrete OOO segments of things; idk, they are more about processes and mutable assemblages, emphasis on action and change, sometimes transmission, things inside things. Lynn Margulis and symbiogenesis. How things interact, communicate up close; all of a mutable, prose-poetic swallow. It's actually an incredible intimate pamphlet, don't you think? I feel inside a thing inside a thing inside a thing. I feel a vague ecological sorrow, which gnaws at introspective tendency. The clue to that, you might see, is the cutaway phrase, 'emo Chord' in 'String Growth'.

'Collapse all tears allowing echo retreat'; these lyric lines of 'Glissando' expression, smoothing and shimmering over cuts and junctures: a slide between notes. I used to play trombone and I wish I cld articulate linguistically what kinds of lip vibration occur when you attempt a glissando and feel it slide down your arm muscle but then also through your chest as you try to sustain a sound. It's maybe the way you glide through a scattered poem, with your eye, which is different ofc to the spikier way you'd have to read it aloud, stuck on the vowels. Stuttering. I would love to hear Nat Raha perform these poems, because she does such wonderful things with punctuation and bodily performance, a kind of grammar of breath and cough and click. Reading over the more field erasure poems like 'O--NE' and 'String Growth', it's easy to say something like ~vibrant materialism~ here, but as usual I reach for Steven Connor on noise. Return to the ear, which is 'vulnerable' and 'resembles the skin in being the organ of exposure and reception'. I love what Connor says about Levinas' perspective on 'the awareness of the vacant anonymity of being, of an abstract, encompassing sense that "there is"' being 'an experience of noise'. <3 Acknowledging that breath in the void, that is not nothing but a sparkling something, entails a sense of noise. I am here in the attic of the law building, listening to construction, the type of my fingers on the keys. Someone is murmuring of their distress. What is the difference between living and existing, and being and nothing?

Karen Barad:

'Suppose we had a finely tuned, ultrasensitive instrument that we could use to zoom in on and tune in to the nuances and subtleties of nothingness. But what would it mean to zoom in on nothingness, to look and listen with ever-increasing sensitivity and acuity, to move to finer and finer scales of detail of...?'

When she asks, 'What is the measure of nothingness?' I think surely it is a bodily measure, as everything is: 'bound', as Tom puts it, 'to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Of course 'what follows' recalls Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', where he's just out the shower and watching his cat watching his phallus, etc. What kinds of dislocation occur. But I mean in all that grandeur of encounter, there's still anthropocentricism. Tom gives you this cinematic CUT, like the instructive 'keen SNAP' that occurs in 'Occam Ocean' to dramatise 'Still, pondsnails whir and blindly source [...] a working leaf shutter'. Soever the language enacts the slurs of the snails up close. We look for the answer to the question of ellipsis, the more to follow [what follows]: inevitable, a question. Sometimes Tom is writing about silence ('then silence confronts an earful underhand') but the music of his language does all the noise, so we just can't have nothingness: there is always a vibrational residue that speaks of something in miniature, atomic, happening.

Ofc with the ear again I am thinking of the ear at the start of Lynch's Blue Velvet and how it's covered in rasping wee insects whose hum is a sort of white noise of trauma that runs through Lumberton's suburban idyllicism.

And so what happens next is I flip open to the following page of Body Work and there is 'String Growth', one of Tom's sprawling erasure poems, which for more than a split-second resembles hundreds of crawling, shimmering ants. I actually think my earliest childhood memory is of looking down at my bare feet on the patio of our old house in Hertfordshire and seeing red ants run over my toes. Then looking up to a greying, English sky. Constantly struck by the cinematic image of that, its splicing out of time: the vividness of insects on human flesh, then milky smog of skyward nothingness. 'String Growth', the accompanying notes to Body Work tell me, is an erasure poem of the Chordoma Foundation's 'Understanding Chordoma' information page.

Erasure can expose sequences of nightmare at work in the lexis and syntax of the text on which it parasitically feeds. I am scared to go on the Chordoma Foundation's website, for fear that just reading or saying the word 'tumour' will activate some kind of malignant growth in my body. And so something of the word chord as a sonorous relation between materials (bodily, textual; textural, cellular). Chordomas are tumours often located in the spine and so I find myself looking for the undulating shape of a spine in the scatter-text of Tom's poem. My eyes cascade down textual spines. Why is it sometimes I otherwise latch upon a 'keystone' word which then extends with adjacent resonance? Musical abnormalities accumulate. Thought swells.

And yea I wonder how this fits into what you say about the poems being 'so smooth'. Like Lynch's waxen silicone ear. Because even though fragmentation makes me think of bits and jaggedness etc, there's this sheen of aestheticism to Tom's work that makes me think of gloopiness, fullness, thereness but also the glaze of potential nothingness. Like in Barad's sense, or miniaturised ecological window shopping - a la Morton's Romantic consumerism? Or do we get into the things themselves? What are your thoughts on the question of recalcitrance? Maybe cos he named a previous pamphlet Pedicure I've just got varnish on my mind. Things an insect might stick to, and be amberized in. Mm.

'[...] Phosphorus crystals may be white, red, burgundyor alight as urine passes'

I keep a stone of citrine under my pillow sometimes. It is supposed to alleviate nightmares and 'manifest abundance'. It is the colour of a rich, dehydrated piss and sometimes when I come back to bed after peeing in the night I think it's some kind of organ lain on my bedsheets, hopped out of my body, and I have to stop my heart and breathe. Is that syncope?

On the <topic of piss>, isn't there a sort of caustic quality, even to the smoothness? Like it is working at making a brittleness of its sheen? And that is what poetry is, cracking the veneer of language or something? Punctuational insects dwelling in splits and fissures? It is nice and cool in Tom's poetry, a place for thinning the self and dwelling. Even though the lexis is so rich and dense, it still seems slender somehow; there's a suppleness. Tease threads of your silk(worm).

Was thinking about what Lisa Robertson says about 'commodiousness' in poetry and what kinds of space there are for the reader here, because I don't think there is much space at all, in the conventional humanly readerly sense. Maybe what I mean by (straw man: Romantic) lyric, which requires something of declarative expansiveness? The density and clutter of specialist language in Body Work makes me feel like a worm, trying to hook my way lusciously into a line: 'espalier's / strains unfinished by the scarp trellis' ('Body Work'), 'rooted to a middle-ground / no more than motion defibrillates'. And I become a parasite on the body of the text, which is a parasite on the body, which is made up of millions of (para)sites. Para ofc meaning side by side, which made me think of Haraway's sympoeisis (making-with) but also, admittedly, Limmy's madeup psychic show, Paraside (lalalol what you were saying about the scrambling parallel universe maybe, is that a lalaLacian Real which necessitates ululation, stammering? Complex remixing musicality of language throughout Body Work as summoning?). Going back to my incidental Slowdive reference earlier, maybe there's a shoegaze thing here, like setting up these 'noise-worlds' which shimmer indiscriminately behind/inside/through the semiotic oscillations of lyric? Is shoegaze a form of sonic gouache? Well it is certainly an ontic form of seduction, where I can't pick out the instruments of expression but I look for them hungrily in the haze. And the idea that transmission between worlds (the living/dead, human/nonhuman) might require a strain of humour (like haha but also meant in the sense of bodily humours?). For instance, shoegaze is decidedly not a humorous genre, but it sort of works on bodily humours, sometimes giving me the bends, or the blurry spaced-out feeling of having one's pleasure receptor's caressed by sound. Was wondering how YOU experienced the space and physicality of the poems -- was there anything u found FUNNY or sufficiently sultry as to produce a long and gorgeous sigh?

Mm and aren't there these tasty, cute moments of wow like 'tropic glut' ('O--NE') and 'prism arousal' ('Body Work') and 'clamour to emboss' ('Sapling').

Come to think of it, there are quite a lot of trees in Body Work, at the very least between 'Sapling' and 'Copsing', but also resonance in 'Awning', 'Annual' (which mentions 'yield', 'Thicket', 'sky-light muddle' etc) and 'Georgel' (georgics, idk?). Something about sprawl and thread: like the action of branches as arboreal mirror for threads of viruses, threads of code?

Side note: Can a person in a crowd of people experience canopy-shyness? Emily Berry has this lovely poem about crying and canopies and language.

Ways to dwell in inertia, violence, suspense ('Poem for July') as a 'clearing' within the pamphlet? Body Work as a title seems to combine two distinct fields: car repair and alternative medicine (hence mention of plants, cancers and crystals). The question of holistic approach, therapeutics, restoration. The sheen of metal, the sheen of health. O wise one of la letteratura del contemporaneo, pray tell your thoughts on possible Ballardian comparisons? Like obv v. different but I was struck by something to do with the cut-up structures of The Atrocity Exhibition and the way erasure works in Tom's work (probably in a more precise, attentive way, like the specialist's collage of tiny skins and digits, as opposed to grander themes of mediation that explode all over Ballard's work? -- generalising for the sake of interest obv).

Longing for a 'carvery [of] / uncommoning / rave'. Some kind of party you'd give up your skin for (is skin mere synecdoche of identity here?). Maybe the rave is what you were saying about scrambling.

Anyway, I hope your essay is going well. I must go read Hillis Miller's thoughts on Ariadne's thread, maybe make a tea. I've been getting these headaches lately, dawn to dusk & beyond, like the kind you get after being swimming (chlorine headache) or after crying (hormone headache). Pressurisation. I wonder if I have a parasite in my brain? So tonite I will probs lie awake, sleepless, listening for tinnitus :(

With warmth, Maria xxxxxxx

p.s.

Of course, by the time I get to the end of rereading I realise that it's only white marks being revealed underneath because literal holes have appeared in the Body Work cover, like some kind of fungus has been eating away at the book, performing another erasure.

Denise Bonetti <[email protected]> Fri, 1 Feb, 12:15 to maria.spamzine Dear Maria, Once again my legendary inability to reply to personal emails within a reasonable 1-month window manifests itself. Invoke my Scorpio moon (?) etc. I love it when people are like 'RIGHT - enough Facebook for me, email me if you want to talk etc', because that sounds like a nightmare to me. Long live IM! Long live the short form! (quite rich coming from someone whose job at the moment, I guess, is to churn out a dissertation?)

But then you know what I was thinking - someone like Clark Coolidge, for example, can get away with long form, intense long form. Not only get away, but own that long form. That long form I'm into. Clark Coolidge drown me in words and I'm fine with it, because he never dilutes, there's never any stagnation, you know what I mean, he just goes and goes and goes and you're like !!? YES!! HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS!? He just never runs out of steam. And I'm thinking of Coolidge because you mentioned crystals as agents in Tom B. (cf. The Crystal Text, how would the crystal speak etc), and of course because both Tom B. and Clark C. are just doing mad things with language, bold things and exciting things... They are like scientists you're friends with but who (maybe) don't like to talk about their work, then one day they decide to let into their basement lab where they've been secretly working on the most complex, organic, project for years, and they're like, don't freak out, here it is:

(Sorry for terrible quality [#postinternet] First is Tom B., second is Clark C.) Body Work looks quite controlled in form, visually speaking, with its vaguely justified lines, BIG symmetrical margins.. even the scattered pages look orderly! Like the bit of 'STRING WORTH' you sent. Which going back to your erasure thing, it makes me feel like Tom B. is giving us an OXO cube of his writing, all concentrated and delicious. But then my response is - show us more!!! Which rarely happens because I am scared of long form. And email. And dissertations. I also LOVE what you said about how Body Work combines car repair and alternative medicine!! That is absolutely spot on. Like the material, pragmatic tinkering motions of his writing, the referral to structures and the intention of like, see how far we can bend them and push them, but then it is never as dry as that! Very sweet motor oil. It's very kind poetry... generous! (A word that my friend Phoebe used to describe a certain type of poetry at a party last week and I thought, very interesting). Linguistically generous because it offers so many networks of reading, but then also.. approachable? As approachable as experimental poetry of this kind can be. I'm sure like, DANIEL would not think this is approachable lol (#COYBIG #romance). Which, fair enough. But if you're a nerd for this kind of poetry, then yeah. Like this bit from 'ANNUAL'??

*Cries!!! This is like you said, healing!! I feel looked after! 'Stomach prefers sound to day-to-day camphor'!!! Honestly what is this! So touching, so simple!

(Btw, I started experimenting with aromatherapy in my tiny room lol, do you know how to stop the water from boiling in the oil burner??)

Thanks for sending such interesting ideas over, I have to shoot to a seminar ! PPS: I saw Steven Connor in the English library yesterday (Oliver pointed at him silently like !!!!!!!!!!) so I kind of followed him to see what his approach to book browsing is.. very natural-looking and orderly? Surprised. Love the guy. *bubble sounds*

Lots of love Maria ‘let’s see where the spirits take us’ ur the best

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Maria Sledmere <[email protected]> 6 Feb 2019, 23:19 to denise.spamzine Dear Denise,

Makes so much sense to map your message sensibilities onto your taste in poetry! I am so torn between the percolated richness of the email, its classic deferral (omg hun I owe you a million emails!) through a sort of quantum dimension of procrastination, and in opposition the sugar rush nowness of IM. I am such a frantic typist that often I send the wrong messages or cross my wires or just gush too much, so email is probably a safe option for me. There is all too much blue in my Messenger windows...Temptation of x's and endless emojis. But such a beauty to IM and texts out of context, like I wonder how many people read your probs too late 4 a snog now :'((( as micro-fictions, versus poems. I have a whole folder of screenshots on my computer from things that happened on Facebook that I have no memory of. Something about the Romantic fragment, accumulating ruin.

(btw) I feel like these extracts also shed light upon Body Work somehow. Biodegradables versus hard minerals and synthetic matter. Inner/outer. Flush. Tbh I think the middle one was from you?

Yes the dissertation, the dissertation as labour; it's like you have to find your scaffold first. Sometimes I feel like the scaffold in that wonderful Sophie Collins poem, 'Healers', and I write and don't notice myself and suddenly I'm so there, but the scaffold is secretly taking her bolt pins out the more I write around her. You can only be so respectful to your scaffold when she's so in the way. Gemini problems?Duality; structure/content. What is it Tom McCarthy says: 'structure is content, geometry is everything'. I want to be a wee fractal in a sequence of massive refraction. Is that how it works? Back to scaffolds, maybe we need to find the kindest mode of dismantling, and that's when you work into a form or something. And then also the more organic structures! So for CC it's the whole crystal thing, and working out of crystal logic. And then you just go and go and it's wonderful, much extravagant fractality, almost like poetry as virus, replicate replicate, grow, change. Mm, it's so good. My friend Kirsty did this mad poem about a tree, I couldn't tell if it was a story or poem, it was just branching out in a way that seemed hungry, necessary, spreading its roots. She said she wrote it in a rush! As if trees could rush! I like to think she inhabited a concentrated moment of becoming-tree, like she was a myriad in the roots or leaves. I don't think it could have happened without the tree, you know? But also the tree was almost entirely absent, it was like a ghost of form. Maybe I forgot how it goes. The lines looked like branches or something. Can you have long-form concrete? Concrete I guess by necessity is long-form. It takes a lot of energy to make. People are building houses out of mycelium instead, which is rad. Talking of roots and that, I just wrote 26k words on ecopoetics & t h r e a d s over the past fortnight and it was kind of that process, like letting a sort of tapestry take hold and I was maybe just one more thread, I was hardly doing the weaving, everything was moving around me and I wanted to wriggle into more and more gaps. Becoming-thread, perhaps. The next step is to slack and cut, which is exciting. Where to even start?

Your description of the complex, organic project is so gorgeous. Poems slow-cooked in a lab with tender organic care. My two scientist PhD pals are always gramming these beautiful pictures of crystals they're growing or mad wave patterns on screens. And we go for lunch and I'm like what you doing this afternoon and they're like, Oh just shooting photons. And is that much different from spending your afternoon writing poems? (Yes, they'd groan). I'm just chasing bits of light. Reading Tom B's work it's this whole precision thing, the actual inhabitation of process as such, so you see the energy buzz between things. I don't mean to say simply this is atomic poetry or poetry as tool analysis. It's more a betweening.

Isn't it super difficult to write non-anthropocentrically and really inhabit micro-relationality and also sound interesting and sexy in the way Claire Colebrook (she has that great essay in Tom Cohen's Telemorphosis) describes as 'sexual indifference', i.e. that threat to heteronormative reproduction that 'has always been warded off precisely because it opens the human organism to mutation, production, lines of descent and annihilation beyond that of its own intentionality'? Well anyway Body Work really works this way for me, it's like a poetics of sexual indifference that is nevertheless charged with desire you can't really predict, it's something in the frisson between objects and lines and coils of form. I think of crystal charge, iPhone battery (mine's always dying, Gemini trait 100%), engines. Neat miniaturisations of entropy, surge, spike and flux. When the 'I' comes in I'm like hey, what flow are you? It's actually so satisfying to quote these poems as fragments btw, they can do so much on their own as much as in poems and pamphlets, I wonder if that goes back to the accessibility thing. Like the absolute charm of a line as auto-affection:

This bit is from 'Temper' and I go back to my point about the flush/fluster! Globe of air/your *bubble sounds*. Isn't everything held so neatly, and yet it never feels neat, it just feels sharp and sparking, this 'technical glossy finish' like a really nice car, the body paint of a poem, its prosody so tightly held it feels more surface, a selection of hues and textures. And the erotics of the text or at the very least its pleasure is the shift between bodies, synecdoche, yes you could say bodies without organs but things in themselves are also important. Maybe another poet who does this is Sylvia Legris, she writes these apparently impersonal poems filled to the seams with specialist lexis (you have to have like twelve tabs open per poem to get it), but there's an affirmative humour and energy that feels v much a personal sensibility, a deliberated skewing of world that splices the poet's agency among items, artefacts, language. I mean how nice are these poemsshe published in Granta. I feel like I want cutlery to read them with, if that makes sense. Maybe a scalpel, for the succulence. The appearance of an ear again!

And then the beautiful metallurgy of this line from Tom, like somebody pierced my ears with perfect silver and it let all the demons out:

I am worried about what a certain seizure would look like. When we talk about vitality is it a willing naivety towards matter qua matter, as if we could just step out of correlationism? Such thoughts for 11pm of a Wednesday night. I can't help but think of the body image that Elizabeth Grosz describes in Volatile Bodies, kind of riffing off Paul Schilder: 'What psychoanalytic theory makes clear is that the body is literally written on, inscribed, by desire and signification, at the anatomical, physiological, and neurological levels'. And yeah, cool, what about the nonhuman body also? Has anyone done a really good psychoanalysis of the object. Parsed its psychic striations (traumatic or pleasurable residues of every microbial, huh?). In fact, what about the psychodynamic model of actual icebergs? Time we started literalising the matter of metaphors, absenting 'real cultural / medium' and filling with meltwater, fire and flow. Maybe it comes down to a bead of ink, the 'intimate concentrate' which is Lucozade, hangover piss, sick pH levels. So yeah, Body Work for me is this totally seductiveintersubjective space which actually works out pretty visceral states, sometimes disembodying me into a more fractal, mineral or bacterial being. I could start talking Kathryn Yusoff and geomorphism too, but maybe enough strata for one email? Plus I'm mixing my metaphors, I'm sure, mostly because I'm still morphing, dissolving inside those lines. I think I ate too many OXO cubes.

As for your oil burner boiling, sounds like you have an overactive candle? Maybe try a cooler tealight, nestle it to the back a little to redirect the strength of the flame? I like rosemary oil for remembrance, cranberry for comfort, ginger for energy. That line about resin is so nice. I was in Crianlarich at the weekend and my friend Patrick found this massive log and he carried it for so long that you could smell the resin on his skin, it was amazing. I keep thinking about the word 'pitch' and lush tree-ness, and the Log Lady in Twin Peaks and poetry you can chew like new molasses, prior to melt. Is that how it works?

Somebody is smashing glass into a bin in my garden and probably I should just close the pamphlet...

...but it's like a delicious pdf that gives infinities...

Yours in multiples & cherryish flusters,

Maria xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxox

#review #tom betteridge #body work #Sad Press #reviews

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initiare · 6 years

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@leuthros So, you got your actual birthday present two days early— and now you get an extra little something almost two days later, because, well, I’m a real rebel like that. And I guess also, possibly, because I adore you. Only a little, though. Anyway, I hope that you can deal with some (I promise it’s just ‘some’, it’s nothing too long) mush, because if not, I wouldn't recommend clicking read more. I’m French, okay, being mushy is in my blood; get off my case.

“excuse me i got home and sat down and was about to reblog that and i very distinctly remember there being super sweet tags on there and now they're gone what gives insert hands-on-hips-emoji that doesn't exist here”

‘you’ve done nothing but enrich my life since you first entered it’

I know that’s how I started the tags; because it’s always how I’d start when it comes to you. There’s no simpler truth. Cris, I’ve mentioned all of this to you on numerous occasions before, but you stuck with me when you had absolutely zero need to and I cannot get over that. I want you to know how much that meant and still means to me. Honestly, our interaction started over me liking a post of yours regarding interaction while I was in the midst of a hiatus still, I fell quiet in our IMs immediately and despite it, you messaged me a second time (regarding Reign), to which I went quiet, again. I was busy and anything but talkative until I was done with coding; I was so adamant about it. But you were relentless in your typing about Clary, about Jace, about Clace. You stuck with me despite it all, heck, you kept going. You even had this plan where you insisted that your first in-character post on your Clary blog would be a starter to me— what a starter it was. And the fact that the idea that you had for a first thread with me was that scene, meant even more. It’s such a very hefty one, so it showed a sort of faith, which really warmed my heart and served as an insane surge of rejuvenation.

But what was even more thrilling to me, was the ease with which I replied to you, how much our writing meshed and flowed. But primarily, it was how quick Jace woke up and how present he was from thereon out— how whenever you typed anything to me from that moment forward, he was right there. And I think that speaks volumes as to what you've done and still do— it speaks volumes to your talent and to your dedication. Honestly, when a muse awakens the way my Jace does when you bring up anything in-character— that tells me everything that I need to know; it tells me something is pretty darn right.

But honestly, Cris, your passion when it comes to Clary Fray is unrivaled. I really mean that. It’s truly one of the most beautiful things about you. The way that you've spoken to me continuously about this fiery little redhead for hours on end— nothing spells out ‘I love my muse’ more than that. I’ve had partners that I’ve adored and thought I meshed with immensely, but then you came along and you made me realize what I was missing, while I didn't even know I was missing it— and now I can’t fathom going back. I missed having a partner that has a mind in regards to these muses which rivals my own, I missed having a partner that talks to me at random for hours about their muse, mine and ours combined; I missed having a partner who’s as detailed and nit picky regarding everything as I am. I missed having a writing partner like you. Because you've been nothing short of utterly magnificent. You’ve been nothing but an enrichment, and I know that you've rejuvenated not only my muse, but the ones of others, as well.

Thank you, seriously, for having decided to reread this incredible franchise one day and to have added Clary Fray to your list of muses. There are many of us who’re grateful, but none more than me. Because I’ve found an amazing friend and writing partner in you that I didn't know I was looking for, but got anyway. And on top of it all, that together, we write this ridiculous and astounding ship known as Clace— I mean, that’s the best bonus anyone could ask for, right? Anyway, I thought the end of 2017 was pretty darn good, but 2018 is better because, well, that’s when our paths crossed. You’re like a Christmas, New Year’s and birthday present x 50, all in one.

Thank you for being a wonder, thank you for doing such justice to that fiery bundle of red that numerous of us love so dearly (though none more than Jace, obviously), thank you for being so passionate in regards to her character; I’m sure even Cassandra would be flattered and honored. And thank you for dealing with my salt, judgment and lack of calls— on which note, when are we going to watch City of Bones together, hmm? We're engaged and we haven’t even had a movie night yet— geez.

Oh, and thank you for having exemplary taste, by the way. I mean, an autumn wedding? I’m beyond game for that. So hey, summer, I know you haven’t started yet but uh, can we skip you? Because I’m getting really impatient. Gotta put an actual ring on that finger.

Hope your weekend was a blast, my dear; here’s to many threads and talks to come! <3

#leuthros #⌈✧⌋ if i could play any character from the book. it'd be church. who wouln't want to be a cat? [ ooc. ]#[ i need to come up with a tag for you. ]#[ also you knew this was coming. surely. i'm pretty predictable. ]#[ no but seriously. you're <3 <3 magnificent. ]

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eddiespagheti · 6 years

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What Amy Forgot Chapter 4

When Amy wakes up in a hospital, she thinks she’s 27, about to start working in a new precinct. She’s actually 37 and married. Now, with a life she has no recollection of and a husband she no longer knows, she must uncover the pieces and find herself once again.

The Rest

She surprised to see him outside her parents’ apartment the next morning. He’s sitting atop his car and he straightens up when he spots her. His eyes gleam and his foot taps, he’s excited and he’s trying to squeeze into himself, about to burst. It’s fifteen minutes till eleven but he’s already here, abound with eagerness, it shows on his face.

“Hey.” she says, bouncing down the rest of the steps. The binder is in her arms and she hugs it closer.

“Hi.” he replies. I want to press play, repeats in her brain and her cheeks warm dangerously.

“What are you doing here so early?”

“I…” he pauses, eyes going behind her and he straightens sloightly.. “Mr. Santiago.” Amy turns and there’s her father atop the stairs, almost glaring down at him.

“Nice to see you again, Jake.” his tone is sarcastic and Amy raises an eyebrow at him. Settle down, she tells him with her eyes and her father calms his glare. Slightly.

“Nice to see you, too.”

Her father grunts in displeasure but Amy can tell he’s relieved Jake is back. When she told him that he had returned he had only said, “Good” but the slight relief in his eyes said more than enough.

“What are you two up to?”

“We’re going to the planetarium.” she says. Her dad nods.

“The Jupiter exhibit is back.” her dad says.

“Yup. That’s why I’m taking her.” Jake says.

Her dad ‘hmm’s and goes back into the house.

At the exhibit, Jake asks her about her memory, if she’s had any more.

“I haven’t really.” she says, turning away from him and trying to seem interested in the Jupiter exhibit. Truth is, she she’s seen this exhibit already. This exhibit makes its way back at least once a year. She’s seen it countless of times.

“What do you mean?” he asks. Amy sighs and peeks over at him. His eyebrows are furrowed in interest.

“I haven’t remembered in anything in awhile.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Yes. Obviously.” her voice has a slight edge and she cringes but Jake isn’t listening, his eyes are lost. They are beyond Jupiter, beyond this room; he’s gone. As are his thoughts, only the thin shell of him remaining. She touches his arm in worry and he blinks back, but Amy sees the fleck of disappointment in his eyes.

It makes her hand drop. She’s let him down again.

“Since when?” he asks, his throat dry.

“A while now.” she shrugs, tries to pass it off as nothing important but Jake is still watching her, something in his eyes hidden behind the shrubbery of brown. That little ball of dark is back, like guilt. Laden and heavy.

“I just..” he stops and it looks like he’s falling apart inside. Like none of this makes sense. She regrets saying anything about it; she should’ve lied to him and told him that she remembered it all. Lying to him would be better than seeing the look on his face right now.

He’s quiet through the rest of the Jupiter exhibit and that black ball in her stomach grows into an enormous black hole of worry. He drives her home with the quiet hum of the car as a soundtrack. When she gets home, she rereads the sections they’d gone over already, trying desperately to remember it all.

It doesn’t come back and she throws it against the wall in anger.

She doesn’t expect him to be there the next day but he knocks at her door as she’s reading.

He’s not the dark-eyed person he was the day before. He’s chipper. Not exactly excited like yesterday but like a man with a plan.

“It seems like the binder isn’t working.” he says and Amy awaits at the door, a little eagerly. His eyes sparkle in that mischievous way and something ignites within her. It makes her happy that he’s not mad or even sad anymore. That look in his eyes still haunts her. “So…” he trails off and Amy raises her eyebrows in excitement. He grins, knowing what he’s doing to her. “So, I thought it best that I bring the memories to you.”

“What?” she steps closer to him. “How?”

“Well, why don’t you come and see, my lady.” He holds his arm out and Amy grabs onto it, closes the door to her parents house with one hand. She lets him open the passenger door and help her in. Before he closes the door, he pauses and Amy can see the reflection of her smile in the shine of his eyes. “We’re gonna get those memories out even if we have to drag them out.”

It excites her.

Jake drives to his apartment and then makes her close her eyes as he leads her up the stairs. Amy blushes as she remembers sneaking in when he was down in Boston. He opens the door and tells her to open her eyes. The lights are off but there are two candles lightened on the table top, illuminating it slightly. they cast a dark glow in the room, making it look ominous but romantic.

Amy slowly walks in and Jake watches her with nervous eyes. He turns on the light and Amy’s stunned with the display on the table. It’s almost a banquet of food complete with Christmas decorations. She’s sure that he didn’t cook most of it, the takeout boxes in the kitchen trash make sure of that.

“Our first Thanksgiving.” he begins. “That’s where we left off, didn’t we?”

Amy’s stunned to silence and nods slowly. “Yes.” she whispers. She still can’t believe it.

“Well, our first real Thanksgiving was when we were dating but we did celebrate it as a squad once.”

“How?” she asks, walking up to the table and touching the fake snow in wonder.

“Long story.” he shrugs and walks closer to her. “I also put Hanukkah and New Years here.” He points towards the other parts on the table.

“I-” she shakes her head, unable to speak. She looks at him and he’s gouging her reaction. something melts in him when she meets his eyes. “Thank you.”

“Anything.” he says and Amy can hear the unspoken for you.

She asks him of the boyfriend Kylie had mentioned before.

“You weren’t dating him yet.” he says.

“Did you like him?” Jake shrugs but he isn’t looking at her. “Okay, so you didn’t.”

“That obvious?” he cringes. “He was boring and fine, I was a little or a lot jealous.”

She tuts and smiles. “I think I would be jealous, too.”

“You? No way.” he shakes his head. “I had a girlfriend after returning undercover and you got along with her fine. You invited her to our wedding.” He continues, “But Teddy proposed to you in front of me and his girlfriend when we dating. He was officially the worst.”

“What?”

“That’s a story for when we go over 2016.” he says with a shrug and smiles over at her. “You’re gonna love jazz brunch, by the way.”

Amy scrunches her nose and he grins over the Thanksgiving ham.

He’s there the next day and the next. One day he even waits for her after work. The girls crowd around him asking him questions.

“Oh Amy, what did you tell them about me?” Amy rolls her eyes and he grins a juvenile smile at her.

He takes her to the roof two weeks in.

“We’ve been here before.” she says. He nods shyly in the dark night.

“Remember I told you this was the place we had our first date?” she nods. “Ready for me to tell you that whole story?” he points towards two chairs by the edge of the roof, a huge bag of peanuts by the floor.

He tells it quietly, painting a beautiful picture with his words. She’s transported into that place but doesn’t remember, not really. The slightly leaky faucet of memories has been closed.

When, he’s munching on peanuts and staring at the rooftops she finally asks him a question that had been weighing heavy in her mind. “What if i never get them back? What if I stay the way i am?”

“Even if you don’t remember I still want to be around you.” he says quietly, the wind blowing his words away. Amy finds his hand in the dark and squeezes it three times. I want to be around you too, she says without words.

His hand tightens around hers as he threads their fingers together. It’s the first time they’ve sat so close she could see the flecks in his eyes and the first time she’s felt her heart beat in her ears like this. It’s intoxicating. Maybe it’s the peanuts and she’s got an allergy she can’t remember or maybe it just that his eyes are so brown she could get lost in them.

And she almost does.

“I want to be her again.” she confesses just as quietly as him. She hands him her words shyly, a little ashamed. He shakes his head, eyebrows furrowed.

“Don’t you understand?” he argues quietly. “You already are her. You’ve always been.”

“But you said I didn’t owe her anything.” she says, replaying the hurtful words he said on the stoop.

“Yes.” he confesses. “Because you are her. There is no pre-you and post-you. It’s always just you. Always you.“ A warm feeling spreads in her chest, a feeling that makes her heart dance in her chest.

She doesn’t think about it as she kisses his cheek, it just happens. His cheek warms where her lips presses against it and he says, “I could meet you a hundred times and I’d still fall in love with you.” She kisses him again, a little closer to his mouth but doesn’t kiss him. Not yet, not now. But, there’s an intense feeling in her heart, something pulling her closer and tugging her towards him.

So, no she doesn’t kiss him.

Instead, they sit close together and watch the stars shine up above them.

“We could stop these these if you want.” he says quietly whe he drives her home and Amy shakes her head.

“No, I want to remember. Not just for you but for me.”

She isn’t lying.

(truth be told, she doesn’t believe him, doesn’t once believe that she and old-Amy are the same. truth the told, there’s nothing she craves more than to live in that bubble of happy again to be surrounded by his love and to be able to relay it back.)

“Oscar night.” he tells her one night as he leads her into his apartment once again. Red carpet on the floor and TV paused in the beginning credits. “We both bet against one another. I said Gravity would win Best Picture and you said Her would.” A shrug. “We both lost.”

“St. Patrick’s Day.” he says another. “We got so drunk that we fell asleep on the stoop outside Shaw’s.” There’s a table of green beer in his living room. “You can’t drink so that’s just bubbly water.”

Amy takes a sip and scrunches her face in disgust. “Did you blend it with broccoli?”

He shrugs. “How else was I supposed to turn it green?”

It takes them a few weeks to get through 2014 and then, they’re there. At her first memory. Romantic stylez, a whispered confession and the thunderous beating of her heart. This time, there’s no big fanfare. No red carpet or nasty almost-beer. This time, it’s just him and her in the apartment. His eyes are turned towards the carpet as he speaks and as he recalls it. It’s one of only times that she’s seen him this vulnerable and she’s glad there’s no big dramatic thing because this is how she imagined that confession to fully be.

It’s organic.

“Can I be honest with you?” he nods, looks a little scared and Amy looks down at her shoes as she says, “That was actually the first memory I remembered.”

“Is that why you left? It scared you?”

“No.” she shakes her head. “It had nothing to do with that.” she continues, “I..” she pauses and takes a deep breath. “I actually go back to that memory a lot. It makes me me feel…warm.” she shrugs.

His eyes dazzle. “Warm?”

“You know, like old-me really liked it.” she says. “It meant alot to her.” What she doesn’t say is, and to me, too.

Karen Peralta is just as Amy’s imagined her. She’s always surprised at the rearrangement of genes on mothers and children; a God-given cocktail. She sees his nose, kind eyes, warm brown hair. She also sees young Jake sitting in these same kitchen chairs that she sits in now. She sees grown up Jake hunched over these same chairs a few months ago, his face betraying every single emotion and the tightness of his throat as he tells her about Amy, the car and the lost ten years.

Amy folds her hands over one another, watching as Karen makes coffee, taking mugs out of hazardly wrapped boxes that clutter the kitchen. The living room is bare, everything packed into boxes that open like gaping mouths. Amy itches to close them tightly with tape.

“Aw, Jake bought me this for my fourtieth birthday.” Karen coos holding up a blue mug. She throws it back into the box, most likely shattering it as she searches for a mug she swears Amy needs to see. “It’s around here somewhere.” she mutters, rummaging through boxes.

“It’s okay, I can drink out of whatever mug.” God, if Karen doesn’t close the boxes soon Amy is just going to do it for her.

“Nope, you need to drink out of this one. It’s tradition.” she says over her shoulder. “Ah-ha!” she turns, a huge smile on her face. “Now, my son, bless his heart, made this mug during his short lived artisan phase. It’s wonky, doesn’t really stand on it’s own but he was so, so proud of it that I couldn’t bear to throw it away.”

Amy glances at her hands but the mug is small and she can only see slivers of green as Karen holds it.

“Every Sunday morning,” she continues. “You would come over and we’d drink coffee. You thought it was ugly as sin, which, honestly it really is. Regardless, everytime you came over, you used this mug.” she smiles at it, opening her hands and showing Amy the sad, lopsided mug. Karen is right, it’s ugly as sin. The handle is too small to fit more than one finger to hold and the top is diagonal. She isn’t sure how she drank from it or even how it holds any liquid.

“I love it.” she says honestly and Karen’s smile shines just as brightly as Jake’s.

She manages to take things out of every single box, holding up things and showing them to Amy. Amy lets her tell her the stories as she boxes the rest of the things up for her. It takes them three hours before they’re done with kitchen. Afterwards, Karen orders pizza and they sit on the empty kitchen floor.

“You must be excited to be moving down to see Roger.”

“I am. Long distance is fun and all but you really know how much you miss someone when they’re far away.”

Amy takes a bite of her pizza.

“Did I like him?” she asks.

Karen shrugs. “Sort of.” she laughs. “Okay, you didn’t but Jake adores him so you tolerated him.”

Before she goes, she hands Amy the lopsided mug. “Keep it.” she says and then continues, “And I hope you and Jake come to visit us down in Boston.”

Amy nods, holds the mug close, feeling sentimental.

“So, your friend Rosa.” Lauren asks, not even trying to mask her interest. “How is she?”

“What do you mean?” Amy struggles with the books in her arms and sets them down next to register. Lauren shrugs.

“I guess what I’m asking is if she’s, you know, gay.” Lauren says. “I’m usually very good at these kind of things but I really can’t get a vibe out her at all.”

“Rosa’s..” Amy searches for the word. “private.” she shrugs.

“Yeah, well, she’s beautiful and,” she leans in conspiratorially. “I love the privacy. It’s mysterious. Sexy.”

Amy almost snorts. In the weeks that had passed her friendship with Rosa had blossomed. Rosa came every Friday night, bottle of wine in hand. She slowly learned that Rosa loved bubbly pink wine no matter how many times she tried to hide it.

She also knew that Rosa was interested in Lauren. She had shown up way too many times to ‘pick Amy up’ to not be considered suspicious.

“I’ll tell her you’re interested.” Amy picks the books up. “Or better yet, I’m eighty percent sure she’s going to pick me up today, you can ask her yourself.”

Turns out that Rosa beats them both to it.

“So, you want a coffee?” she tells Lauren when she comes that night. Lauren almost drops the books in her hands.

“I, um, yes.” she stops and shakes her head, letting out a slight laugh. “Wait, it’s midnight. How about a drink?”

“Okay.” She nods and Lauren smiles brightly.

They both leave, leaving Amy to close the store all by herself. Lauren is so dumbstruck that she leaves with the books still in her hands.

Jake is late. She glances at the clock again but he’s thirty minutes late and the storm in her stomach continues on. Her mother watches as Amy anxiously turns towards the clock on the wall again.

“He’s late, huh?”

“Yep.” she drums her fingers on her thighs. Should she call him? Or would that look too needy? Oh, god. The knock on her the door startles her and she nearly leaps toward it.

“Hi.” It’s him. She looks him up and down and is relieved to see him safe and sound.

“You’re late.”

“I know.” he cringes. “I was trying to get something together with you and it took longer than necessary.” he shakes his head. “Anyway, it’s all settled down so what do you say we get to going?”

She grins and Jake smiles back, holds his hand out. Amy threads their fingers together. She’ll never get used to the electrifying feeling of his hand wrapped in hers.

“Bye, Mrs.Santiago.” Jake calls into the still-open door as Amy closes it.

Her mother says, “Goodbye, Jake.”

As they walk, he tells her of his plan.

“We’re going to Shaw’s. We used to spend eternities there. Well, us and the squad.” he says.

Amy stops, drops his hand. “Wait, are they going to be there? Is this the big plan?”

“I thought you’d like to see them.” he says but backtracks at the look on her face. “But…it’s totally okay if you don’t want to.”

“No!” she argues. “I do. I do.” She’s so excited to meet them for the second time in her life. She wonders what they’re going to be like and whether they’ll like her.

“Good.” he lets out a sigh. “Because they miss you like crazy. I’m tired of Boyle calling me at two in the morning crying because he hasn’t seen his favorite couple. Also, Holt always looks sad because there’s no one there to stalk him around the precinct.” Amy cracks a smile. “That big softie.”

“Describe them to me.” she asks and Jake nods, wraps his hand tightly around hers again.

When they walk into the bar, they’re assaulted by a short man with bright eyes. He grabs onto her arms and Amy yelps, lets go of Jake.

“Boyle!” Jake chastises and pulls Amy away from him, hiding her behind him.

“You know I can’t help but be excited Jake!” he retorts. Slowly, people begin to form around them, circling them. Amy shrinks and looks at the floor in shyness, not used to so many eyes on her but slowly looks up from her eyelashes. They’re the same people from the pictures in Jake’s box. She tries to pinpoint faces to names that Jake told her but can’t.

“You’re scaring her.” Rosa says from the back. Boyle is still smiling, eyes wide and almost tearful. “Boyle.” Rosa says with a scowl and pulls him towards her.

“Well, well, well if it isn’t little lame-y Amy.”

“Gina.” Jake says into her ear.

“So now that you’re back, you must have amazing credit score.” Gina begins.

“Huh?” Amy furrows her eyebrows and Jake sighs.

“-how would you like to invest in an emerging market?”

“I dont’-” she starts. Jake looks over his shoulder at her and shakes his head, rolling his eyes. Ignore her, he whispers.

“Think about it: have you ever been to a casino and thought hm, wouldn’t this be better with dolphins and beautiful sea creatures around me? Well, now you-”

“Stop trying to get people to invest, Gina.” A tall muscled man says from the back. Terry. “That’s what you get for wasting money on Hitchcock and Scully’s scam.”

“It’s not a scam!” Calls a balding man.

“Yeah, it’s a business opportunity!” calls the one next to him. Hitchcock and Scully.

“Ugh, you guys ruin everything.” Gina rolls her eyes and walks away. Hitchcock and Scully drift off. Terry smiles shyly at her and Amy smiles back. Rosa leaves until the only ones left are Jake, an emotional Boyle and Captain Holt.

He’s a tall man with dark, unwavering eyes and Amy straightens up. She’s nervous but then he leans in and hugs her. She’s frozen in place and over his shoulder Jake looks joyfully shocked. He smiles widely at her. Holt is stiff and hugs her only for a second before he lets go. She nearly gets whiplash.

He clears his throat and says, “Good to see you again, Detective.”

“Thank you, sir.” she replies, throat closed up.

Somehow, he’s just like Jake described him. A sentimental robot.

“Now, don’t get jealous but during this time is when I met Sophia.” he begins two weeks later when they’re sitting at Carrie’s. Amy rolls her eyes and takes a bite of her apple pie.

“I won’t, Jake.”

He’s waiting two days later outside her parent’s home, car packed up.

“Road trip!” he sings out. “Ready to recreate the disaster that was a couple’s retreat slash prisoner transfer?”

She’s never been more ready to say, “Yes.”

They sleep on separate beds but in the same room. She waits in her bed, going over the room service menu, surprised at how many things can be made with syrup.

“After the dinner what did I do?” she asks when he’s out of the shower.

“What do you mean?”

“Did I ever tell you? Like did I cry myself to sleep or what happened?”

He sits on his bed, it creaking under his weight. “You ran into Sophia later. She told me that you were both getting ice.” he recalls. “She said that you were so quiet and awkward. She also said you nearly ran to your room after.”

She nods. “Sounds like me.”

“I, on the other hand, stayed up all night. I was pretty shaken up because I was basically obsessed with you for months. But, I had a girlfriend and you had a ex-boyfriend that you owed a brewing kit to, so.” he shrugs. “I stayed with Sophia and fine, okay, I did like her alot-”

“Okay, now I’m jealous.” she jokes with a smile. He grins back.

“But, in the end, she wasn’t you and I wasn’t her you. You get it?”

“Yes.” she replies, understanding his tangling ramble. “I understand.”

And Teddy wasn’t yours, he doesn’t add but her mind adds it anyway.

He smiles and wishes her goodnight. He falls asleep rather quickly, his chest rising and falling quickly.

It’s the first time since her accident that they’ve slept in the same room. Even when she returned from the hospital, he slept in the spare room. But now, he’s only several feet away and she stares as the moonlight shines over his face. It would be easy to walk those five feet and slip into his bed; to curl into the warmthness of his body and to let sleep befall her in his arms.

It would be extremely easy but it would not be prudent.

So, she turns over and instead stares at the open closet. it takes her a long time to fall asleep but then-

…”Oh, god.” her laugh bubbling and his sunshine smile. His hands wrapped on her arms as she laughs.

“Stop it, Ames. I’m going to die from mortification.”

“It’s what you deserve.” she laughs louder and his smile grows. “Why did you tell him that you were related to Barack Obama?”

“I thought it’d get us better rooms.” he says and she wraps her arms around him. She smiles sweetly, can feel the sugary taste in her gums.

“You’re such a dork-”

A gasp. Back in the bed and breakfast. She glances to her right and Jake’s still there, sleeping soundly in his own bed. She closes her eyes tightly and tries to bring it back, the memory, the feel of his smile, warm like a midsummer day. It comes back in ebbing waves. A weekend away to upstate New York after the first time they were separated. His skin was tan and his leg limping but everything was the same. The same warming sensation in her chest and the same hard beating of her heart.

When Jake wakes up, she remembers all that day fully.

She doesn’t tell him.

Do you think that there’s someone out there pushing people together? Someone who would poke people until they got together? Until their lives entwined and bolted together? Or maybe the Zeus story that your mom tells her students is true.

I didn’t think that it was. Because of my parents and because of Gina’s parents. But, look at Holt; at Terry and Sharon; at you and me.

Excerpt from Amy Santiago: A Life in a Binder By: Jake Peralta

“After months and months of us liking each other at the wrong times; of us having partners and of us going on undercover missions. Of us being asked out by total hunks-” She throws a look his way and he grins. “and deciding that dating cops is out of the question. We finally, finally, go on a date.”

“I thought we had already gone on one.” He had picked her up at eight that night, calling at five and telling her to put on her best clothes because they were going out. She spent an hour on her hair and another hour reading over the sections of the binder they had already gone over. She liked to re-read them often but never read ahead. She liked it better when he told it in person. But, she did spend another thirty minutes re-reading the part where he described the first time they kissed.

“Well, yeah but…” he trails off. She smiles at the defeated look on his face.

“Our first real date, then.”

He brightens. “Yeah, but before that, remember we had that fake one.”

“We sure did a lot of fake dating.”

“Just two people trying to hide their real feelings.” he says with a fake deep sigh and she hides her smile, remembers the binder section. -I really liked kissing you, though it was a fake kiss, it was like- “Anyway, the place we’re going is to the place where we had our first real official date.”

When they arrive, he turns to her and says, “And let the story of Jake and Amy begin.”

He almost tears the doors off it’s hinges before he realizes that it’s not budging, the yellowing paper on the door announcing it’s official closure.

“Oh.” he blinks and looks over at her. “It’s..closed.”

“Been closed for a while now.” she points towards the yellow sheet. Jake sighs, tucks his hands into his pant pockets.

“Well, this royally sucks.” he looks downright distraught and she tries to find that feeling in her but comes up empty handed. He reads the paper again and his excitement deflates. “I can’t believe it’s closed.” he says quietly, mourning the death of the place of their first date.

Through the clear glass doors she can see where the tables went and the now-empty bar area but she needs something else to open that faucet in her brain.

“Describe it to me.”

“What?” Jake asks, still in his haze.

“Describe it to me.” she looks at him but his face looks doubtful. “We can’t go in but tell me about it, about that night.”

Jake nods, the doubt in his face draining. “We sat there.” he points to the empty place but despite it, Amy can see them, can imagine them sitting there. “I got there first, a first for me. You were wearing red and your hair was down.”

She envisions it. Her in red, pausing by the door as she spots him. Just watching him as he straightens his collar for the fifteenth time, his shirt the most ironed she’s ever seen it. His eyes meeting hers over the other patrons and all of it becoming real before her eyes. How much they’d both wanted this and just how it unfolded before them. The slight terror and the butterflies swarming her stomach.

She feels it all, starts to see it. The memory comes to her slightly warped like a piece of plastic left under a sun for a long time.

“Was I nervous?”

“Mhmm. Oh, God. We were both so awkward and nervous.” he laughs. His eyes are distant, remembering their small talk. “We got super drunk.” He grins over at her. “They almost kicked us out.” Suddenly, he looks sadder than before.

He turns away from the door and walks towards the curb, slowly sitting down. Amy sits next to him, waiting for him to speak again.

“Then what happened?” she asks, their hips touching. Her right side throbs with the feel of him. She isn’t sure when this feeling began but she leans into it, walks down it’s road. She wonders if this was how she felt the first time they went on that date or the time they spent on the roof. She wonders if old-her also relished the feeling, held it tight against her chest.

Jake looks at the dirty ground in nervousness and Amy blushes, already knowing.

He meets her eyes over his eyelashes and before she can stop herself, she leans in, kisses him. His eyelashes flutter against her cheek and Amy’s own eyes close. He’s slightly stunned for a second and then his hand is on her cheek and he’s kissing her back. Her dress is getting dirty beyond repair and in the mid-January humidity, her hair poofs around her faze, a frizzy halo but she doesn’t care. Not at all. This is the only thing that’s on her mind, just the taste of his lips and the inescapable feeling that she had to be doing this all along.

“Something like that?” she asks quietly when she pulls away, breathless.

“Uh-huh.” he says, hand still on her cheek.

She’d been wanting to do that for a while. Now that she’s done it, she wants to do it again and again. Wants to do it until her lips fall off her mouth and until the only thing she hears is the dull echo of her heartbeat in her ears.

So, she does it again. He’s not surprised this time. This time he loses himself in her. This time, Amy does hear her heartbeat in her ears and this time, her whole soul vibrates with the feel of him.

“Something like that.” he repeats, with his smile as bright as the stars above. Then, he leans in and kisses her again.

Did you know that 2015 is one of the happiest years in my life? Okay, Holt left and yada yada yada but you were there and that was all I really needed. All I really need. And okay, fine, 2015 is a little sad, too because you dumped me like i don’t how many times in a span of two days. (two times, by the way) But, Holt, like the amazing person he is, saved us. Told the Vulture to back off and with his robot like smile, gave us his blessing.

That night, I went home with you and although Holt wasn’t back, that feeling like I was on top of the world lived on. And one smile from you assured me that I wasn’t going to plummet to my death. We had been dating for six days then but everything lined up with just your smile.

And isn’t that all you ever need?

Excerpt from Amy Santiago: A Life in a Binder by Jake Peralta.

#b99 #what amy forgot #Brooklyn Nine-Nine #brooklyn nine nine fic #jake peralta #peraltiago fic #idlewheelposts

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booksontheshelf · 6 years

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Scallywag Reading 2017

I‘m surprised that a book was opened at all this year. So much of my time is reading online, so it seems a triumph of sorts that I am still managing to read books at all. It is not possible to do justice for all books mentioned here individually. They all add up to the string of pearls that sustains me in some sort of equilibrium and continues to provide threads to places that only a particular book can reveal, at the particular time you are reading.

Some of the books here were chanced on in bookshops. You never regret time spent in bookshops. There didn’t seem enough time this year though to enjoy this gentle past time. Which is probably a good thing for me, as I truly have enough books at home to read already. My daughter tries to stop me adding to my collection all the time. Can you imagine taking off one day, just to visit all the bookshops in the world?

One day this winter, heading down Bourke St after a meeting, I stepped into The Paperback Bookshop. There I chanced on a book of poetry by anthony lawrence called headwaters.

It has the lines

‘Her dreams have night vision, and in her sight Our bodies leave a ghostprint where we’ve laid. My darling turns to poetry at night Between abstract expression and first light.’

I’ve just finished You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me - A MEMOIR by Sherman Alexie. Hard not to proclaim this book loudly enough. Strangely the book’s poetic, diaristic chapters look superficially like the incredible work of American fiction I read this year called Lincoln in the Bardo. Perhaps the Trump-dark atmosphere of 2017 made George Saunder’s romp with the ghost of Lincoln’s past presidential time and place so strangely alluring. (The book was purchased with intelligent guidance from Readings’ Acland St staff.)

The year began with the death of one of my favourite artists/writerJohn Berger. I remember we thought 2016 was bad for the death of larger than life artists. John Berger was such a great humanist. But I love that I can still read him and hear his fabulous voice in my head. I did order his last work of essays Confabulations and made a concerted effort to gather all the books I had by him in one place. They are now housed in my studio. Vale John Berger. I return to you all the time. Thinking of artists, I loved reading the The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead.

You might gather by the next titles we have Alzheimer’s in the family - my Dad has had the disease (as far as we know) the last 10 years. Books that have helped me try to understand what is happening for him and helping me deal with it this year have been: Learning to Speak Alzheimer’s- A Groundbreaking Approach for Everyone Dealing with the Disease by Joanne Koenig Coste. The Forgetting Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic by David Shenk. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. And In Pursuit of Memory- The Fight Against Alzheimers by Joseph Jebelli I am rereading Missing Out by Adam Phillips with newly minted insights from thinking about memory and who we are without it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Geoff Dwyer’s book on Tarkovsky’s film Stalker called Zona. I need to see Stalker again but as Geoff Dwyer says- it has to be cinematic not at home! The ignition of crazy nuclear war thinking by America’s President Trump, who thinks he’s eviscerating ‘Rocket Man’ with a tweet, sets a dé ja vu tone reading about the haunted nuclear-strange Beckettian terrain of the film Stalker.

I love a good graphic novel and I have thoroughly enjoyed two by Riad Sattouf - THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE A Childhood in the Middle East 1) 178-1984 and 2) 1984-1985. I also enjoyed the short graphic novel by Jason Lutes called Jar of fools. One for the young at heart to the very young is by my friend Trace Balla- who wrote the book RiverTime. This year I read her book Rockhopping, taking me all the way to the source of the Glenelg River in Gariwerd (the Grampians).

Feeding into my marine thinking for projects, I am still working my way through The Sounding of the Whale Science and Cetaceans in the 20th Century by D.Graham Burnett. I am also in the midst of The Reef A Passionate history by Iain McCalman. Hoping that Pelican1 will be on her way North to the Reef next year too. As we have worked on the Cape a lot in the last 15 years, I have also been reading the story of the explorer Edmund Kennedy in a book I found second-hand (Daylesford) called Kennedy of Cape York- Edmund Beale. Trying to get some insight into the newly colonial world and the exploration of the Eastern Cape (before the impact of the gold rush). The book tells the story from a very colonial perspective. Larissa Beherendt’s book FINDING ELIZA Power and Colonial Storytelling was a good follow on read.

I then found myself rereading gularabulu - Stories from the West Kimberley by Paddy Roe edited by Stephen Muecke.

'This is all public, You know (it) is for everybody: Children, women, everybody. See, this is the thing they used to tell us: Story, and we know.

Paddy Roe

Back to the science books, I learnt a lot from Where The River Flows, Scientific Reflections on Earth’s Waterways by Sean W.Fleming. Had me looking at graphs of sine waves (there was a reason to learn about them in maths after all!), thinking about ‘Digital Rainbows’ and diving deeper into scientific connections between rivers, land and ocean and understanding that the physics of rivers and the quantum leap in understanding being made about their dynamics is one of the many tools that will be needed to help care for this crowded planet. The Ocean Of Life-The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts was another regular dip in as I gather ideas to try to incorporate plans for sea projects and understand our oceans more deeply (haha). A new writer for me this year was Yi-Fu Tuan with his book ROMANTIC GEOGRAPHY in search of the sublime landscape- A geographer’s meditation on place and human emotions. I found two new wonderful reference books, the first second hand from South Melbourne Market -The Seabirds of AUSTRALIA by Terence R. Lindsey. And SEAHORSES- A Life-Sized Guide to Every Species by Sara Lourie.

Looking at the politics and economics of our times I managed to read The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein- an enlightening exposé of the behind the scenes snake-oil salesmen. The old rule of following the money results in a thorough investigation of oil’s all too human underbelly. I am still reading Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics. 7 Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist. A complete creative overhaul of economics, pulling it out of our old ways of understanding the world to make ideas for a better future world possible. Highly recommend.

It’s been another tough year for journalists and the book of writings by Anna Politikovskaya Is Journalism Worth Dying For? reported from Russian frontline and includes the piece that she was working on at the time of her murder. ‘What am I guilty of? I have merely reported what I witnessed, nothing but the truth.’ It was a journalist who wrote a difficult and intense book about the 2011 tsunami in Japan that I’ve just finished. GHOSTS of the TSUNAMI by Richard Lloyd Parry. I have not stopped thinking about that wave and our visit to Japan’s Irate prefecture 3 years post the event left an indelible memory and deep affection for all the people we met still picking up and recovering after the trauma and destruction from that most unsea-like wave.

Back to Oz I loved reading Sophie Cunningham’s book Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy. I was very fortunate to take part in one of Sophie’s walks, following the footsteps of William Buckley from Sorrento to Dromana. Though footsore, it was a terrific way to connect with the Bay, while thinking of this man’s path and how different, perhaps, Australia could have been if his attitude to the First People of this Country was shared across the country. I reread much of the fictionalised account again by Craig Robertson (Buckley’s Hope -The Real Story of Australia’s Robinson Crusoe) to get me in the frame of mind for the 20k meditative walk. It was on a recommendation that Sophie shared on Facebook that I now have Phillip Pullman’s latest book The Book of Dust by my bed.

The year has been a terrible one for our ongoing torture of refugees who are STILL languishing in our offshore prisons. I heard that New Zealand had offered to take ALL the men on Manus and that offer has been refused by Dutton and MT. I went to the launch of a book that was trying to navigate the extremely polarised political territory around asylum seekers and I highly recommend it. Bridging Troubled Waters Australia and Asylum Seekers by Tony Ward. During the year I went to a wonderful event organised by Behind the Wire (http://behindthewire.org.au) and came away with their incredible book of first-person narratives called They Cannot Take The Sky- Stories from detention. I reckon our pollies should be sat in a room and this is read aloud to them.

A book that has been a good one to read this year was Hope in the Dark Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit which I read with the new foreword and afterword.

From the gifts of Christmas I have a pile that includes John Clarke- A pleasure to be here. A very sad loss to the Australian landscape, he will be missed for a very long time. The Man who Climbs by James Aldred and looking forward to A.S. Patrić’s new book Atlantic Black. Also on the pile is Robert Mafarlane’s The Old Ways- A Journey on Foot.

And looking back out to sea with a beautiful book I have just started. The Seabird’s Cry - The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers by Adam Nicolson.

Might have to do a separate post on the poetry that is always by my bedside but all I can say is as I get older, reading poetry becomes more and more pleasurable.

If you have got this far in my rambling through my ambling reading, I want to wish you a very Happy New Year, illuminated by many, many fine reading adventures….

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