saltburn is making me feral

MINORS DNI

Pairing: Alwyn (Male OC) x female!reader

Summary: Alwyn helps reader overcome her disgust of a very natural part of her.

TW: Female reader, insecure thoughts, chubby!reader, midsized!reader, she's got boobs, reader herself doesn't act insecure but she would be described as insecure yes. discussion of body hair and the outlaw is a bit vulgar (he likes something to grab). Illusion to the times Alwyn hid under the reader's bed while she was getting changed (she does not know this) (EDIT: Turns out I completely forgot to add that in, I was planning on it and then completely forgot). also not very historically accurate cause medieval people would not give a shit about body hair (they were just trying to survive the winter) but for the sake of the plot, they did (socially).

NSFW: swear words, no real smut in this one, implied smut. I have yet to make a proper part two to my first Alwyn fic, but this one is still very early in their relationship.

If I have forgotten anything let me know!

Notes: I literally had a mini emotional breakdown over this very topic today and this is my therapy. Not a lot of people are gonna be able to relate and I'm okay with that. this is purely for me :) Also please please please use your own discretion for this one, I would hate for my writing to reinforce insecurities in anyone or bring up bad thoughts about themselves. So once again please please please use discretion. No one is forcing you to read this.

I haven't written Alwyn for a while so his dialogue might not seem right

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It was still a bit of getting used to Alwyn. The idea that someone truly romantically cared for you, it was a lot to take in. You were often overwhelmed by his kisses or his declarations of love. But you were getting better. You no longer rejected his compliments, no longer held back your own affection in fear he would find it annoying, and no longer questioned his motives when he placed sweet kisses on your cheek. But there were some old habits you struggled to let go of, in fear of Alwyn, sweet, lovely, albeit lustful Alwyn, finding you in some way or another grotesque.

It took so much effort for you to believe him, or at least not refuse the compliments when he called you angelic or radiant, that he saw you as something beautiful and graceful, everything you've longed to be your whole life. So it terrified you that one day he might see you the way you saw yourself, the way you looked through your own eyes, not blinded by Alwyn's lust or foolish love. The only way to do that was to hide the offending parts, hide the pieces of you that refused to be tamed. It was easy to do before him. No one else expected to see your body in its fullness, so while it hurt for your family to make snide remarks about your silhouette, at least you could hide the most offending piece of all.

It was hard to do that with Alwyn. He was not a man to take things in halves or quarters. he wanted it all. He wanted to see and touch you without limitations, and that was something you refused to do. It was easy to do the first time you laid with him, he was too hungry for you to bother battling your objections to him trying to get you out of your dress but become harder as the days rolled by. He was no longer happy to fight against your many layers of fabric and petticoat, yet he allowed you the comfort, the safety of their protection, at least for a few short days after. But he was getting frustrated, impatient even. But you knew if he got his wish, if he really saw all of you, you knew that he would no longer see you as a delicate thing but a monstrous creature.

But Alwyn was not a man to take things in halves.

It began like it always did with Alwyn, his wandering hands inching up your skirts, gripping, grabbing, pinching. He had you on his desk, one foot barely touching the ground, as he pushed his way in between your thighs. His kisses were not sweet, but hungry and desperate, leaving trails of heat up your neck to your cheeks, before diving into your lips. His hands suddenly left your skin and made their way to your skirts, lifting them up higher and higher as your heartbeat increased rapidly.

"wait" you gasped, hands leaving the nape of his neck to his hands, pushing them back down to your knees. It was bad enough that he didn't feel smooth skin when he touched your thighs, that he had to battle rough bristles, but he seemed to be tolerant of it, not shying away from the spikes growing from your legs, but you knew he wouldn't tolerate anything more.

"what is it my love?" he questioned, panting as he nudged your cheek with his nose, lips leaving soft kisses on your cheek. You wanted to fuck him, but on your terms, hiding away all the worst parts of you.

You quickly lifted yourself off the desk and turned around, placing his hands on your plush hips, hidden by the fabric.

"take me from behind, Alwyn, please, I, ah, I want you to be rough"

If your voice wasn't so hesitant and you very clearly hiding something, Alwyn would have jumped at the chance to fuck you rough, to grip your hips tightly as he rutted into your tight cunt. But he could tell something was wrong. He removed his hands from you and took a step back.

"no, no I won't"

"Why?" you questioned still bent over the desk, turning your head over your shoulder, your eyes betraying your fear. Had he finally had enough? Did he finally realise you weren't enough?

"Come on sweetheart, something is tormenting my princess and I'm not gonna ignore that for all the sex in the world" he smiled, hand reaching for yours, softly holding it as he lead you from his planning room into your shared bedroom.

"sit your pretty butt on the bed and tell your man what's goin' on," he said as he plopped himself on the side of the bed and patted the place beside him. You slowly made your way to his side. Alwyn leaned his arms on his legs and turned his head to you.

"you gonna tell me what's goin' on in your pretty head or do I have to get a lady friend so you can talk lady things," he asked seriously. a smile betrayed your torment at his genuine care. You slightly shook your head and began picking at your nails in your lap.

"I would rather not talk to anybody" you whispered, giving him a painful smile.

a moment passed between you two and you hoped he would leave, get bored at trying to understand you like everyone always has and leave you to your misery.

"Why are you trying to hide your body from me sweetheart" he softly asked, still looking at you from his hunched-over position,

It was a very simple question yet enough to tear down something in you, you were no longer able to ignore the wall of doubt and insecurity hiding you from him. He saw straight through it. Tears fell from your eyes like rain and you reached a hand up to try and stem the fall.

"How did you know I was hiding it?" you sobbed, for the first time in your life someone noticed. He took an extra second, an extra thought to see your thinly veiled pain. no one else ever seemed to notice your behaviour, never seemed to notice hiding under the extra fabric, taking less food than usual, or not joining your sisters and cousins in the river. Or maybe they just didn't care enough to say anything.

But he did, he noticed and he cared.

"I pride myself on being a very observant man princess. It wasn't hard to see, you kinda suck at distractions" he sadly laughed, you could tell it was forced for your benefit but it gave you a chance to laugh through your pain.

"sweetheart" he started, hesitating, for once thinking of what to say before he said it, "you know I find you absolutely gorgeous, and I never want you to think that your shape or siz-"

"This isn't about my body, it's about what taints it" you seethed, directing your disgust on yourself, turning your head back to watch as you punished your fingers with your hate. A hand, his hand, reached for yours, stopping your assault.

"scars?" he asked, a thumb soothing the pain you inflicted on your skin.

"no" you whispered, your other hand gripping his tight. Alwyn didn't say anything, just comforted you in his presence. Your tears were slow now.

"I don't know what to say" you gasped, face grimacing, what could you say? No matter what you said, you knew that your days of being seen by Alwyn as beautiful and angelic were passed. "I don't know how to tell you" you whimpered, eyes finding his.

"then show me"

"no" you answered quickly, "no..anything but"

"sweetheart" he began

"I'm scared" you interrupted.

"of what?" he quested, eyes crinkling in confusion.

"that..that you'll see me differently, see me as I truly am, as a disgusting thing" you spat out the last two words, it was easy to call yourself that, you already have for so long.

Alwyn opened his mouth to deny it.

"wait, please just wait, let me say what I need to say." you rushed, pausing to swallow. "you'll say that it won't change anything, you'll promise you'll still love me, still want me. but you won't. I will no longer be beautiful to you, I'll no longer be delicate, or radiant but I'll be monstrous, grotesque, and I, I can't lose you" by the end your tears were once again released, trailing down your cheeks.

"Sweetheart, please just tell me what it is" he urged, kissing your cheek with a slight force, his free hand cupping your other cheek

"it's my hair" you whispered

"Pardon?" he asked, slowly removing his hands to turn his whole body to you. You gave a slight nod.

"princess your hair looks fine to me" he laughed, one hand playing with a curl

"no, thats not, uh" you grunted, pushing his hands away, standing up and turning away from him. "it's not my head hair, it's my um, it's my body hair" you explained turning back towards him. He still looked very confused before erupting in laughter. God, how you hated this man.

"Sweetheart, my goodness, I'm sorry but body hair? that's what's got you all teary and shit?" he laughed, rubbing his face with his hands. You on the other hand stood still. Of course, it was stupid, you were a fool for thinking he would understand. Your mouth falls into a frown and soft tears swelled. Alwyn continued to chuckle until he saw your pained face.

"oh princess, I'm sorry, really, fuck I'm such dickhead, clearly this is something that troubles you and here I am laug- fuck sweetheart don't cry, please? come here" he rushed, standing up to hold you in his arms

"Princess, it's not something to be disgusted in, everyone has it, women too" he comforted, rubbing your back as you dug your face into his chest.

"I know, but I'm different" you whimpered, you were well aware that your body hair was incredibly difficult to tame, growing rapidly and often growing darker and courser if you tried to rid it. You could manage legs, barely, but when you turned 14 and hair began growing on your stomach? or when your mother kept telling you to tame the hair growing dark on the back of your thighs? you tried, really, but it only made it worse, making a small patch of hair growing from your belly button down into dark hairs that seemed eager to spread across your belly and chest if you tried to tame it further. And your thighs? gone one day straight back the next. so it just was easier to leave it, no one would notice, it wasn't like you had suitors desperate to touch you while you were bare. until Alwyn.

"I'm worse" you whispered, looking up from his chest into his eyes. "You'll see it and run. I know it"

"Ah, sweetheart you really thinking something like that would scare me? I think I'm braver than that"

"It scares me" you painfully smiled, tears still rolling down

"Well good thing I'm brave enough for the both of us" he smiled, kissing you softly

"your beauty will never ever scare me" he whispered, leaving you to let out a sob.

"but what if it does?" you whimpered

"never"

• Under The Glaze Lilly's Glow

- A request for @c-a-v-e-town !

A/n: But, no- I feel the same. Zhongli is a big comfort to me and admittedly, he made some rough times easier, so you know I had to do this one first. I thoroughly enjoyed writing this, and thank you for the birthday wishes!. I do hope you enjoy this! :)

Content: fluff, drabble, F/Reader, use of (Y/n), soft Zhongli, established relationship, a little bit suggestive at the end but no NSFW in this one. Zhongli has arms like in his Archon days, not heavily proof read.

Words: 1,260

“Are you most certain you must leave us all so soon?” Iron Tongue Tian asked as the gentleman in the first table at his right rose from his seat. 

“Past certain, my friend” - Zhonglis' polite, yet tempered tone replied as he gathered what few possessions he brought, that being a sweetly tied up box that fit into his palm.  “I have an important person I must meet, and if I am any more late I'm afraid she will worry herself ill” - he excused himself, bidding farewell to the storyteller and any familiar faces that tuned in to listen to the tonight's tale of the mighty Rex Lapis, oblivious to the fact they were in the company of the same. He heard the others bid their goodbyes to him, and he responded to them accordingly before his body was swallowed by the distance and the crowd of the evening markets. 

Having wandered these streets for a millenia too long, watching them be built, he was able to walk with his eyes closed without a worry he would slip or bump into anything. Zhongli walked under the towering iron-and-stone gate, taking note of the glaze lilies at the sides of the public gardens. Their gentle smell was ever present, and unmistakable, carrying the weight of many memories, old and fresh. In the past, he would have seen the horrible views of the Archon War, his mind plagued with grotesque images but now, all he sees is her. 

One of the blue stems found its way between his gloved fingers, firm and bigger than other blooms, still waiting for night to fall to reveal its true beauty, yet none of it could be compared to the one's beloved. Zhongli arrived moments before she did, stripping off his long coat and heavy layers until was left in the simple plain shirt and pants he wore only around the house, relieving himself of modesty that covered his coal colored arms and the golden marks that spanned like veins.

Sooner rather than later, the house came alive once more as the long haired man waltzes about, putting the kettle onto the stove along with another pan for dinner he was planning to prepare. The wafting smell is what greets his beloved when she walks in, a mix between mildly sweet herbs and salt water that was boiling, the meat already half way done.

“Zhongli, I'm home!” - she called out, despite hearing his light footsteps nearing her position in the short hall; already having heard her entrance. 

“Oh, my love-” - Zhongli greeted, taking hold of a grocery bag tucked beneath her arm and helping her up once she removed her shoes so he could gaze upon her face, tucking away the stray hairs the wind had swept from her hairstyle. To say he missed her was a big understatement, and no words he ever has known or possessed in his vocabulary is sufficient enough to say so. His lips greet hers in a fleeting kiss with a promise of more laced into it.  “How was your day? I've already prepared us some tea and a quick meal to lighten our spirits, should you be tired out”

The conversation is swiftly lost amidst the exhaustion and the smells and his warm touches and words. It flew by too swiftly, like a mountain spring until it reached flat ground where it slowed its course. That being the moment when all tea cups have been emptied, the food eaten and her finding her place in his arms on their shared bed. Finding themselves covered by the thick veil of night, the two lovers intertwined, becoming a big mass of shadows while there was no light source in the room, only one, coming from the outside.

Little to no words are exchanged between them, her hands caressing his back while his rubbed soothing circles into her naked hips. “I've missed you..” - she breathed, meanwhile his lips found her hairline and pressed against it. The golden lined comb he had gifted her tonight lay on the nightstand.

“Not as much as I missed you '' - he responded gently, a tone carrying warmth only reserved for her and her alone. The glaze lilly he had placed in a little vase of water had spread its petals wide, bathing them in the silver waterfall cascading from the window.   “You have too much effect on me, I should be ashamed to have fallen so hard. But I am not, and I never will be.." Zhongli added with a curl of his lips, pulling back to find her eyes in the dimmed setting. The color he remembers she possesses is drowned out, but her beauty prevails  nonetheless. With the silver outline of her cheek, hairs and nose as her back was turned to the window, he couldn't help but go speechless.

His love playfully scoffs, rolling onto her back with one arm remaining around his shoulder. “All you do is flatter me, day in and day out.. You have no end.. Why do you never let me show you my affections too?” - (Y/n) teased softly, in no way offended with his non stop praise that effortlessly flew past his lips. 

“Flattery? My words are no mere flattery, they are the truth I hold within my heart, and I intend to keep proving it to you until the time itself comes to an end” Zhongli promised with an airy, quiet laugh, dragging himself up to his elbow to hover above her. The long strands of his freely flowing hair  cascade over his shoulders and tickle her exposed skin that gathered a pearly glow. Her heart has accepted him as he is, in his entirety and he can never repay that kindness enough, no matter how many times she told him there was no need, as this was no favor - this was love. Love they both mutually felt for each other.

“You, my dearest, have become my everything. I love you.. with my body and soul” - his face came near, stealing the air from her lungs with his lips brushing against her own as well as the tips of their noses. A cord is struck, or maybe it has been struck since the moment she stepped into the house, but its effects are showing now. A deep rooted feeling, walking the thin line between overwhelming love and a form of sadness deranged from the same happiness brought by this tenderness.

“I love you” - She whispered, so quietly he almost missed it. Her hand found his face and rested atop of it, thumbing at his soft cheek. That's when he finally gave in to the feeling of yearning, tilting his chin up and meeting her lips into a gentle kiss. The soft plush of her pressed against him is what will be the end of him, and he doesn't regret it, nor stop it. He accepts it with open arms and allows her to deepen the kiss as she pleases, following her pace as she sets it. 

“I know- and I love you even more” - Zhongli told her between the dance of the kiss, their air supplies dwindling significantly, but neither pull away. (Y/n) chuckles lightly at his claim, cradling his face with both hands and pulling him on top of her,  feeling how his warmth radiated off of him in tidal, gentle waves that caress the shore that was her. He was her love, her life, her support, and she would do anything to see him smile every day too - just like he would do everything for her to remain happy, and at his side.

Ⓒ n0tamused 2022. Do not repost, translate, edit, and/or copy any of my works. Likes, comments, and reblogs are appreciated.

i’ve read almost 270 books this year, so i wanted to share my favourites! here are the absolute best books i read in 2022.

animal by lisa taddeo: fun, real, and overall a wild ride. lisa taddeo knows how to describe things we all think, and manages to show us our worst thoughts in beautiful ways.

detransition baby by torrey peters: LOVED this little family. amazing gender politics and explorations. thrilling, sad, funny, all of it.

yolk by mary h. k. choi: a must read for those familiar with sibling rivalries. relatable and heartwrenching.

woman eating by claire kohda: a fresh and smart take on vampirism. it’s rare to find such a cleverly crafted rewrite of creatures that have already been featured for centuries.

beartown series by fredrik backman: not a new author for me but a hard hitting gutpunch either way. so intricate and subtle, so beautiful and real. also the only time i will ever care about hockey.

a certain hunger by chelsea g summers: from the description alone i knew i was gonna love it, so i looked for it for a year, then devoured it in a day. a food critic who eats men in the fanciest ways like a bon appetit hannibal lecter? i have only good things to say.

out by natsuo kirino: the graphic imagery and unsettling atmosphere in this book is INSANE!! it was such an intense read that i could almost feel it in my bones. gorey and violent, yet tender and real.

paul takes the form of a mortal girl by andrea lawlor: i’ve literally been raving about this book since i read it. it touched me very deeply and might be my favourite book of the year. an incredibly funny look at gender expression and sexuality, set in the 90’s club scene. worth a read for every lgbt person who likes fun.

her majesty’s royal coven by juno dawson: wild and thrilling and cozy and heartbreaking, this is a story featuring witches, imperialism, royal fanaticism, gender, grief, and friendship. i want more.

exquisite corpse by poppy z brite: i hadn’t been able to find this book anywhere until my london trip in september and i’m so happy that i did. the inspiration behind this book is obvious and adds several layers to this grotesquely gorgeous novel.

the book eaters by sunyi dean: i’m very picky with my fantasy reads but im so glad i gave this a chance. incredible world building and relationships. plus the overall concept of book eating is genius.

the left handed booksellers of london by garth nix: i can’t even explain what it was about this book i loved so much but GOD did i like it !!!! terry pratchett-esque, yet unique and beautiful. i loved every character and wanted more.

thistlefoot by gennarose nethercott: this beautiful and creative baba yaga retelling kept me company during a long train ride and stuck with me. such vivid imagery and an overall great book.

hell followed with us by andrew joseph white: i wanted to scream during this entire book, honestly. this biblical horror feels like the worlds best fever dream and i loved it SO MUCH!!!! gender and prejudice is explored in a new and beautiful way, while spotted with gore. on a personal note, this book featured one of the only autistic characters i’ve encountered in literature that i, as an autistic person, related to and found compelling.

horrorstor by grady hendrix: y’all know i’ll read anything by this author but this was just so fucking fun. i read it in one night and really felt as though i myself was trapped in a haunted knockoff ikea.

boy parts by eliza clark: very much up my alley in terms of genre. amazing writing and such a good story.

almond by sohn won-pyung: this was surprisingly relatable and ironically emotional. simply stunning. must read.

the seep by chana porter: i went into this blind and i’m so glad i did, because trying to explain why you should read this book is pointless. it’s simply, indescribably great.

inuyasha rambles, brain goes brrrrrrrrr

hahaha love triangles in fandom are sad and hilarious. ppl get so high-strung and territorial over their ships when i feel like often times, if it's a well-done love triangle, the author goes to great lengths to show that either possibility is valid and should be appreciated on its own merits, even if you have a preference. and if it's a good story, there's so much more to the character dynamics than who ends up with who. this is applicable to ff7 as well, where i unfortunately have to see ppl eternally bickering about ships instead of celebrating the quality of drama and character relationships outside of shipping...

and it's not like inuyasha is immediately relevant in pop entertainment anymore, but uhm im back in that headspace so *shrug*

inuyasha and kagome's development was very enjoyable and well-developed. if you don't like inuyasha and kagome, what's the point of watching inuyasha lol that's the whole plot right there.

inuyasha and kikyo is what i think about nowadays because there was so much left unsaid and had the extra layer of tragedy and a yearning entirely on a different level, because they were doomed from the start. i also think kikyo and kagome could have had more meangingful interactions...like they could've just talked more and it would've been really interesting.

i really do believe inuyasha, specifically early inuyasha, is phenomenal. the best shounen i've ever seen. my favorite shounen of all time. it's a dark fairytale, it's splendid and beautiful and it can be grotesque and tragic.

the action is really dynamic and beautiful, the character designs and abilities, as well as the demon designs, are unique and stand out. the music, THE MUSIC, is gorgeous and epic. within the story, there's so much spirit and humor that is seamlessly interwoven with angst and melodrama. i'm genuinely touched by the romance every time i revisit this story (it's a romance first and foremost...i love that...). the story starts off very unique to me - the villains have cool powers and colorful personalities (sesshomaru aside, tho i enjoyed his intro episode a lot and his powers are entertaining), naraku's schemes are interesting at first (tho i get bored of him later). it makes me laugh, it makes me cry, it makes me scream, it's a visual masterpiece, it means so much to me.

it is once again time to be emo abt angry sad lost boys—first, a dark!harry double feature: as bloodlust vigilante and haunted assassin. second, it’s two of my favorite GallaPlacidia dracos: an eccentric, burlesque dancer draco (feelings avoider) and an anxious, charity worker draco (feelings declarer).  this week’s characterization said contrast, intrigue, range!

The Placebo Sequence by Snegurochka - 6k, M  Harry Potter has only ever had two goals in life: to defeat Voldemort and to bring his followers to justice. One, he's done. The other is in progress. It should be simple, except there's one former Death Eater who doesn't meet the right criteria.

harry’s anger has always been the most interesting and cathartic part of his character for me. i love it when fic writers choose to explore the extent of that justified rage. this post-war harry wants a clean slate and he wants to do the violent cleansing. there’s this exchange: "Does that hurt? "No." Malfoy was watching him intently, his jaw tight. "Maybe it should.” "Maybe it's not up to you to decide." but this harry wants to decide. and for two boys who have never had much autonomy, there is an allure in choice even when it’s a horrifying one. this time draco is the rational one, the just one. i think harry is enraged and absolved by that. goD all those layers and tension in 6k words? lazywonderland recc’d this one to me and she said Taste. 

My Hands Are Of Your Colour by @ohdrarry - 8k, M Sometimes spilled blood lingers on guilty hands. Draco sees red and Harry washes it clean.

harry, killer for hire. ministry-employed murderer. he has long moved past the shock of his job. until he sees himself through untainted eyes and all the humanity he thought he’d lost is forced to surface. it’s this part for me: “I’m glad you found it horrifying.” Draco stares. Harry shrugs. “It means you won’t become like me.” “I don’t find being you undesirable,” Draco says after a second. His eyes are brimming with something Harry can name easily. the empathy, the tenderness, the good in the grotesque! another short story banger.

Can I tell you something? by GallaPlacidia - 33k, M It's not a party unless Draco Malfoy is there. He's so fun! So wild! So crazy! So many drugs! So many drugs. Too many drugs? Harry's starting to think it's probably a lot too many drugs. This is not a drug addiction recovery fic, although there is a drug addiction recovery. Feat. character development through wide-eyed MDMA trips and Draco Malfoy finding peace as a burlesque dancer.

u read galla for her dracos—sad, eccentric, sharp, avoidant, hilarious. a little mean, a little lovely. this one is in the mess of post-war kids coping however they can via sex, drugs, euphoria, etc. but then, the inevitable come-down. draco flails. draco copes. harry is always somewhere in the periphery, watching. always earnest and falling in love with unattainable, devastatingly beautiful things. never letting himself become an emotional burden. they text, they banter, they confess by skirting around the confession.  “I like that you always let me change the conversation when I want,” said Draco, à propos nothing. Harry quietly took another bite of his salad. Draco frowned at the table. “It makes it easier to bring things up,” he said, after a moment. there are a few scenes where draco breaks his theatric persona to say the truth plainly and you realize that the reader and draco are both watching harry learn to love from a distance. it’s a relationship of equals, of restraint. when they finally collide and settle, it feels inevitable and earned.

GOODNIGHT FROM YOUR FUTURE HUSBAND by GallaPlacidia - 13k, M Draco accidentally sends Harry a drunken letter proposing marriage. Harry responds.

ok besides the bucket list i rly think this is galla’s funniest. draco’s unhinged epistolary confessional is so so correct in its dramatics, earnestness disguised as humor, etc. draco choosing to be a data analyst for a muggle charity in spite of its colonialist tendencies bc the job is morally complex. harry sort of being obsessed with this rambling, anxious draco. and then galla just Knowing how to write the draco and slytherin friends dynamic. god they are all a Mess. all varying degrees of hot, cutting, maladjusted, secretly lonely, and ridiculous. they make this fic happy-sad in that there are lots of different kinds of love happening here. it’s a story of old friendships and new partners. loyal, contradictory, tainted love. eager, fumbling, honest love. it gives 13k words a whole lotta depth. a complicated addition of joy and trouble to Harry’s life — i love that. this fic is exactly that.

Exhaustive list of Valjean and Vautrin references in the diss so far

below the cut!

Valjean:

An 1866 Jesuit polemic against romanticism entitled Le vandalisme littéraire evokes sunlight in this curious denunciation of Jean Valjean: “C’est le sombre héros de cette sombre histoire, le forçat sur lequel on a appelé votre commisération, l’homme qui a usé le soleil du bagne.” The story and its protagonist are dark not in spite but because of the fact that the latter has “usé” (used, or worn out?) the sun which is not only associated with, but in a sense constitutive of, the bagne. Valjean was, of course, in Toulon—not Brest or Rochefort. Léon Faucher goes so far as to describe the bagne of Toulon as being “sous un ciel vraiment africain.” In Le dernier jour d’un condamné, the protagonist says that he would prefer the bagne to the guillotine, even for life, because at least a forçat “marche encore; cela va et vient; cela voit le soleil.” The sun is not inherently tied to the bagne in this case, since it has been a leitmotif throughout the novella; however, it comes very à propos in a reference to the forçats which the condamné has seen earlier, since they were headed for Toulon, which is intimately linked to the sunlight. It is indeed Toulon that the condamné pines for, even if he does not know it himself; if he were to be sent to Brest, his days would instead be filled with a rain not unlike the one that falls on the day of his execution, or of the cadène’s departure. Similarly, Jean-Isidore Rous would almost certainly not have described Valjean as “l’homme qui a usé le soleil du bagne” if he had not been in Toulon.

Unlike Gustave, Valjean’s inability to appreciate “[le] soleil, ni [les] beaux jours d’été, ni [le] ciel rayonnant, ni [les] fraîches aubes d’avril” is not due to his aesthetics, but it nonetheless shows the limits of natural beauty in a bagne setting. “La nature visible existait à peine pour lui,” the narrator tells us; “Je ne sais quel jour de soupirail éclairait habituellement son âme.”

The bagne occurs as frequently in récits de voyage whose authors pass through Toulon, Brest or Rochefort as it does in exposés and reports that take it as a main subject; almost in spite of themselves, travelers saw the institution and its inmates as a tourist attraction, and were perhaps correct to do so––just as Jean Valjean was correct to fear especial infamy in Toulon because of his having being mayor in Montreuil-sur-Mer.

Another Jesuit, Jean-Isidore Rous, so wished to keep the bagnard at arm’s length that he could not even countenance an ex-convict between the pages of a book. Jean Valjean qua a hero and protagonist, he vituperates in the Les Misérables-focused chapter of the anti-Romantic tract Le vandalisme littéraire, is both an impossibility and an intolerable affront: “L’apothéose de Jean Valjean est la plus grande insulte qui ait jamais été faite à la société. Lavons-nous de cette boue comme nous pourrons, nous n’en aurons pas moins été salis. Type hideux d’une dépravation qui prend sa source dans la plus profonde immoralité, Jean Valjean secoue les plis de son manteau sur nous tous qu’il méprise. Il n’a pour nous, qui l’avons frappé avec les armes de notre justice, que des malédictions et des anathèmes.”

Even Victor Hugo, whose entire thesis hinged on the humanity of the downtrodden and degraded, emphasizes Valjean’s bestial and mechanical nature: hard labor transforms “peu à peu, par une sorte de transfiguration stupide, un homme en une bête fauve, quelquefois en une bête féroce,” and Valjean cannot help but follow the impulse to escape whenever the opportunity presents itself, “comme le loup qui trouve la cage ouverte.” Similarly, more than a beast of burden, Valjean is a human jack––nicknamed “Jean-le-Cric,” and able in a pinch to take the place of load-bearing statuary: “Une fois, comme on réparait le balcon de l’hôtel de ville de Toulon, une des admirables cariatides de Puget* qui soutiennent ce balcon se descella et faillit tomber. Jean Valjean, qui se trouvait là, soutint de l’épaule la cariatide et donna le temps aux ouvriers d’arriver.”** In context, these images serve as an indictment of society and of the penal system rather than of Valjean himself, but they still frame the victim as something less––but also sublimely more––than human. *Footnote: These sculptures––which, being masculine figures who show apparent effort, are technically atlantes rather than caryatids––still exist, although the building to which they were originally attached does not. Much like the stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, they were removed from the Hôtel de Ville in anticipation of bombing during WWII and stored in a less exposed place. After the war, a new mairie (now a “mairie d’honneur,” with the real mairie moved across the street) was built in the same spot on what is now the Quai Cronstadt, and the atlantes/caryatids reattached. They and the original building and balcony are visible in the backgrounds of period paintings such as Joseph Vernet’s 1755 Troisième vue de Toulon, vu du Vieux Port, prise du du côté des magasins aux vivres (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of the relationship between forçats and the naval, urban, and natural landscape). ** Footnote: Émile Bayard furnished an illustration for this scene whose title, “Les deux cariatides,” emphasizes the equivalence between Valjean and this load-bearing sculpture. According to the tour guide and local historian Jean-Pierre Cassely, the two statues are allegorical, named “La Force” and “La Fatigue” but nicknamed “Mal au Dos” and “Mal aux Dents.” In Bayard’s illustration, Valjean is shown to be holding up a slightly larger-than-life-sized version of La Force.

In a sense, it is the healing, and not the trauma, that makes a brand truly permanent—scar tissue is a deeper structural change than an open wound, and thus the convict’s body is complicit in his degradation. The limp was a similar kind of adjustment, an acceptance of the new state of things. Of course, the chain existed for its own sake in a way that a branding iron did not, so the leg-dragging effect blurs the lines between a purposeful marking and an unintentional (but useful) side effect. Either way, the convict begins as a tabula rasa and ends indelibly sullied by his ordeal, having acquired a contaminating knowledge against his will.  That is why it is so poignant that, while confessing his convict past to Marius towards the end of Les Misérables, Jean Valjean declares, “avec un accent inexprimable, ‘Je traîne un peu la jambe. Vous comprenez maintenant pourquoi.’” He is exposing himself completely to his son-in-law’s scorn, showing him a visible proof of his permanent degradation—after Toulon, even the way he walks is impure.

Joseph Méry uses the bonnet vert as sort of secondary synecdoche for hard labor for life, after the more obvious one of the casaque rouge for hard labor in general: “Ne savez-vous pas que l’irritation d’un moment, dans vos villes d’orages,” asks the convict protagonist of Le Bonnet Vert, “peut changer du soir au matin votre feutre noir contre un bonnet vert?” Hugo performs a similar maneuver in Les Misérables, as Jean Valjean is first identified as a convict because of his casaque and then as a convict for life because of his bonnet vert: “Tout à coup, on aperçut un homme qui grimpait dans le gréement avec l’agilité d’un chat-tigre. Cet homme était vêtu de rouge, c’était un forçat; il avait un bonnet vert, c’était un forçat à vie.” He then adds a description of Valjean’s hair––an additional layer which is altogether outside the bagne’s symbolic system and is revealed in the same moment he is freed of the bonnet––and immediately decodes it as well: “Arrivé à la hauteur de la hune, un coup de vent emporta son bonnet et laissa voir une tête toute blanche, ce n'était pas un jeune homme.” Thus a bonnet vert denotes a lifer while a casaque rouge denotes a convict alone, and together with Valjean’s white hair they form the syntagm “old convict for life”*; these declarations set boundaries or expectations (he is unfree and thus impotent, he is old and therefore incapable) which are shortly transcended through grace and Valjean’s own prodigious ability. *Footnote: It should be noted that Valjean’s clothing in the passage is both particular to its historical moment and in line with a partially contradictory gestalt imaginary. Statements like “all convicts wearing green caps are forçats à vie, all forçats à vie wear green caps, the casaque is entirely red, etc.” are incorrect when compared to the entirety of the historical record, but correct on a level that serves the story.

Like everything else, the actual shoes varied over time and from bagne to bagne; they could be wooden sabots, but they could also be souliers ferrés. In Les Misérables, Valjean, in a free indirect discourse, dreads the coming hardship of wearing such shoes (with no socks, a detail that may not be entirely accurate): “Si encore il était jeune! Mais vieux, être tutoyé par le premier venu, être fouillé par le garde-chiourme, recevoir le coup de bâton de l’argousin, avoir les pieds nus dans des souliers ferrés !”

Hugo evokes the cadène in two of its stages in Les Misérables: first the ritual of ferrage in the courtyard of Bicêtre, a solemn and tragic moment for Valjean in 1796; then the carnivalesque spectacle, in 1831, of the journey itself, which is witnessed both by an older Valjean (who has a flashback to 1796) and by Cosette (who is both disturbed and curious). This is the exact opposite of the treatment it is given in Le Dernier jour d’un condamné, where the initial ferrage is carnivalesque and the subsequent departure of the carts is a somber, rainy affair. In both cases, it is sunlight which stirs the convicts to action and provokes the grotesque: “Un rayon de soleil reparut. On eût dit qu'il mettait le feu à tous ces cerveaux. Les forçats se levèrent à la fois, comme par un mouvement convulsif [...] Ils tournaient à fatiguer les yeux. Ils chantaient une chanson du bagne”; “Brusquement, le soleil parut; l'immense rayon de l'orient jaillit, et l'on eût dit qu'il mettait le feu à toutes ces têtes farouches. Les langues se délièrent; un incendie de ricanements, de jurements et de chansons fit explosion.”

In Les Misérables, Valjean reacts with uncharacteristic joy when called “monsieur” by Bishop Myriel because “l’ignominie a soif de consideration”; related to the desire for consideration is a need for individuation.

A footnote: After his release from Toulon, a half-asleep Valjean is obsessed by the image of a fellow-convict’s checkered suspender: “[E]t puis il songeait aussi, sans savoir pourquoi, et avec cette obstination machinale de la rêverie, a un forçat nomme Brevet qu'il avait connu au bagne et dont le pantalon n'était retenu que par une seule bretelle de coton tricote. Le dessin en damier de cette bretelle lui revenait sans cesse à l'esprit.” The memory of this suspender allows Valjean to identify Brevet during Champathieu’s trial and to prove that he had known him in prison (and thus that he, not Champmathieu, is Jean Valjean): “Te rappelles-tu ces bretelles en tricot à damier que tu avais au bagne ?” Such is the importance of the detail which serves to identify and individualize the forçat.

The concept of the matricule number is mise en roman to particularly great effect in Les Misérables. Valjean’s prison number, his identité matriculaire so to speak, is woven into his character and narrative arc, and within the universe of the novel, form a traceable path through the bagne’s paperwork just as his aliases follow him through the twists and turns of the plot. Were he real, his second matricule entry would read “Jean Valjean, dit Madeleine,” and his first entry would forward the reader to his new one, hypertextually: “revenu sous le numéro 9430.” Jean Valjean’s return to Toulon and arrival in Montfermeil are both framed as numerical substitutions or transformations—the first is a simple change of name and state, and the second an act of prestidigitation in which the same number magically takes on new powers. The chapter in which the reader is informed that Valjean is once more a prisoner (“Le 24601 devient le 9430”), and that in which he is revealed to be Cosette’s mysterious benefactor (“Le numéro 9430 reparaît et Cosette le gagne à la loterie”), share a number of structural parallels. Both refer to Valjean’s prison number (and Valjean as number); one is the first chapter of the sub-volume in which it appears (Livre Deuxième, Le Vaisseau l’Orion) while the other is the last chapter of the following sub-volume (Livre Troisième, Accomplissement de la Promesse Faite à la Morte), thus bookending the contents of both; and the chapters themselves consist of short, dialogue-free recapitulations, both opening with a drastic update regarding Valjean’s coordinates vis a vis freedom and captivity (“Jean Valjean avait été repris”) or life and death (“Jean Valjean n'était pas mort”). “Le 24601 devient le 9430” introduces a setback that later turns out to be the setup for remarkable, even miraculous events. The reader sees Valjean apprehended (“repris”) and misapprehended as well (“Il a été établi, par l’habile et éloquent organe du ministère public, que le vol avait été commis de complicité, et que Jean Valjean faisait partie d’une bande de voleurs dans le Midi”), even being sentenced to death before being granted a royal commutation. He is condemned to spend the rest of his life in the bagne and his reintegration into the system seems to both proclaim and ordain this, his new address within the bureaucracy (“Jean Valjean changea de chiffre au bagne. Il s’appela 9430”) implying an existential imprimatur similar to the “pouvoir de faire ou, si l'on veut, de constater des damnés” that, according to Hugo, Javert and other “esprits extrêmes [...] attribuent à la loi humaine.” The inhabitants of Montreuil-sur-Mer, too, are the victims of this (con)damnation, as the sentence immediately following Valjean’s immatriculation shows: “Du reste, disons-le pour n’y plus revenir, avec M. Madeleine la prospérité de Montreuil-sur-Mer disparut ; tout ce qu’il avait prévu dans sa nuit de fièvre et d’hésitation se réalisa ; lui de moins, ce fut en effet l’âme de moins [emphasis in original]” (citation). Cosette would be yet another victim if it were not for Valjean’s determination and near-superhumanity. While coming to the aid of a sailor, he appears to drown, only to be resurrected in “Le numéro 9430 reparaît et Cosette le gagne à la loterie.” The reader can guess, of course, that the stranger in “Cosette côte à côte dans l’ombre avec l’inconnu,” the mysterious “homme à la redingote jaune,” is none other than Jean Valjean, just as they were never really in doubt about the identity of Monsieur Madeleine; nonetheless, it is this chapter that names him, and in so doing closes the file that was opened with “Le numéro 24601 devient le numéro 9430.” Furthermore, the comparison to a winning lottery number underscores the miracle of Valjean’s escape, and ties what is otherwise a dehumanizing anti-name to fate and fortune in a positive sense. It is qua 9430 that Cosette’s rescuer (re)appears, both in contrast to a name, and in contrast to 24601, whose escape attempts were never successful. Madeleine desires to save Cosette; 9430 accomplishes the deed. 

Vautrin:

Balzac and the penal reformer Benjamin Appert share Alhoy’s assessment of Rochefort’s lethality: in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Vautrin tells his accomplice and lover Théodore Calvi, alias Madeleine, “S’ils nous ont déjà ferrés pour Rochefort, c’est qu’ils essaient à se débarrasser de nous”––a sentiment shared by the narrator: “[C]ette superbe évasion avait eu lieu dans le port de Rochefort, où les forçats meurent dru, et où l’on espérait voir finir ces deux dangereux personnages”––and Appert writes, “La mortalité est plus considérable à Rochefort que dans les autres bagnes. Mais on ne doit attribuer ce funeste résultat qu’au climat, et aux changemens fréquens de la température, puisque, pour les hommes libres, la même différence existe entre la mortalité de Rochefort, et celle de Toulon, Brest et Lorient.” 

Accouplement exposed the convict to very real risks of physical and sexual abuse and/or assault, but the specter of homosexuality preoccupied contemporary writers even in the absence of violence. Balzac appears to have been interested in the possibilities of consensual or semi-consensual accouplement (in all senses of the word); in between the events of Le Père Goriot and Illusions Perdues, Vautrin is sent to the bagne of Rochefort where he grows close to Théodore “Madeleine” Calvi, a young and handsome murderer whose companionship he “bought” from the administration, having bribed those in charge to chain them together. In addition to the obvious contact, the chain also engendered closeness between Vautrin and Calvi in indirect ways. In Splendeurs et Misères des courtisanes, Bibi-Lupin cites the quality of the patarasses (see page number) Vautrin made for Calvi as proof of his affection for his friend and lover: “Théodore Calvi, ce Corse, est le camarade de chaîne de Jacques Collin; Jacques Collin lui faisait au pré, m’a-t-on dit, de bien belles patarasses…” (47).

Anthelme Collet is probably the most famous convict memoirist after Vidocq; like the latter, he also served as an inspiration for Vautrin, but unlike him, he wrote his memoirs from the bagne of Rochefort, where he ended his life.

A generic workmen or bourgeois made for a viable disguise––Vidocq had success dressing as a sailor during his escape from Brest––but it could also be useful to impersonate someone more intimately affiliated with the system. Alhoy writes in Les Bagnes: Rochefort of a convict who managed to escape by posing as a pharmacist with the aid of a sheet: “Enchaîné dans un lit à l'hôpital, objet d'une surveillance spéciale, il coupe sa chaîne, s'affuble d'un drap qu'il tourne autour de son corps comme un tablier de pharmacien, cache sa tête sous une profonde casquette, passe au bout de la salle entre les deux lits où les gardes-chiourmes sont assis éveillés [...] franchit le mur, et jouit de la liberté qu'il a acquise par un trait de hardiesse peu commun.” Likewise, in what the narrator of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes describes as a “superbe évasion,” the fictional Vautrin and Madeleine abscond together from Rochefort in 1820 by means of an ingenious ruse in which it is only necessary for one one person, Vautrin, to appear “legitimate”: “il était sorti déguisé en gendarme et conduisant Théodore Calvi marchant à ses côtés en forçat, mené chez le commissaire” (citation). The second escapee can, and indeed must, remain a convict, and that is what makes this particular escape one of Vautrin’s “plus belles combinaisons.”

Born in 1799 in Landreville where he served at one point as a notary clerk, Simon was a law student in Paris at the time of his 1823 arrest for burglary and forgery, and one can easily imagine him driven by the same sort of money troubles that cause Lucien de Rubempré to attempt suicide at the end of Illusions Perdues—but with no Vautrin to save him, as the future criminal mastermind had also done for his first love, the forger Franchessini.

A footnote: This is the juridico-historical context of Balzac’s so-called “Histoire des Treize” (La Fille aux yeux d’or, Ferragus, La Duchesse de Langeais) and “Trilogie de Vautrin” (Le Père Goriot, Illusions Perdues, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes). Vautrin’s brand, TF on the right shoulder, corresponds to the provisions of the 1810 code; as Geoff Woollen notes in “Brand Loyaute in Balzac Criticism,” the phrase “les pauvres diables avec T.F. sur l'épaule” refers specifically to those condemned for forgery (as was Vautrin, wrongly), and not simply forçats in general. It must be noted as well, as Woollen does, that Vautrin’s brand does not mean “travaux forcés”; the T alone represents both words, and the F means “faussaire.” Forgery was apparently another one of the conditions under which a prisoner could find himself branded with a T (as opposed to a TP), as the matricules are replete with TFs. Note as well that a forger sentenced to hard labor for life would be branded TPF and not TFP; contrary to popular belief, including Victor Hugo’s, there is no such thing as a TFP brand.

Both:

To evoke the bagne was to evoke the sea; when the narrator tells us, during Valjean’s first appearance in Les Misérables, that he has come “[d]u midi. Des bords de la mer peut-être”, this is a hint that he is a forçat in much the same way as Vautrin’s disclosure to Rastignac that he has been “dans le Midi” in Le Père Goriot.

While self-fashioning on paper could serve many purposes, the convict’s material mastery of his visual identity had at least one eminently practical end: disguise for the express purpose of escape. The third convict witness against Champmathieu-as-Valjean, Chenildieu, is identified by Valjean-as-Madeleine because of a palimpsest of scars in the same way as Brevet was identified by his suspender(s) and Cochepaille by his tattoo: “Chenildieu, qui te surnommais toi-même Je-nie-Dieu, tu as toute l’épaule droite brûlée profondément, parce que tu t’es couché un jour l’épaule sur un réchaud plein de braise, pour effacer les trois lettres T.F.P., qu’on y voit toujours cependant.” His reasoning for trying to efface his brand is ambiguous; it may have been to aid in an escape attempt (Vautrin similarly disfigures his back as part of his transformation into Carlos Herrera, determined never again to be undone by the brand on his shoulder as he was in Le Père Goriot), or he may simply have resented having to carry around a permanent reminder of his sentence even in prison. These dimensions, of course, are not mutually exclusive; just like the casaque or the irons, the brand had both a symbolic and a practical function, and this duality is reflected in the desire to escape it.

Codename Cupid: Chapter 1

Pairing: OFC X Some members of OT7

Genre: Angst, Secret AgentAU, Government AgentAU

Rating: PG15

Word Count: 1k

Warnings: Swearing 

Summary: Introduction to the leading lady and the broken hearted heiress who wants nothing more than to find the men who broke her heart. But is that all she’s searching for? 

The Broken-Hearted Heiress Present Day

           The light breaks through the stained-glass windows arched above the double paned – somehow always rattling – glass below. The wood, warping slowly, gives way to the rustling of mid-winter, not raging hard enough to knock leaves off the trees, but enough that a cool breeze sweeps through my office. It seemed a universal problem, the lower the rent, the more problems to endure. In my five years in this particular office space, its quirks have done nothing but rage against my nerves. The door that you have to slam shut in order to lock, the bathroom that’s barely big enough to turn around in, and the slight smell of dumplings from the restaurant on the corner. What it lacks in esthetic beauty, it holds in convenience. Close to the business district, near the freeway, an overwhelming amount of natural light and original woodwork, stunning views of what was a park, now a set of townhouses recently built. The rent, barely changing from year to year, has kept me here this long. That, and the landlord was one of my first cases when I get my PI license, and has sent any a client to me, talking about discounted rates while he jacked the prices. A 20% discount, which luckily brought the price down to my original rate, made them feel like I was a steal. I couldn’t thank Mr. Yang enough for the support, or the fact that he got my windows cleaned every year, free of charge.

           I’m the only PI on this side of the city, and the only one in a twenty-mile radius with quick, efficient results. I pride myself on my results, and my 5-star Yelp rating is proof of that. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, I do carry a taser and maize, out of precaution. Being a woman snooping on other people often leads me down back alleys, towards dangerous men and secrets bigger than the universe. But I love the danger, the inability to pin me down, the uncertainty that I am who I say I am, and not the secretary waiting patiently for my boss to come in. In the years I’ve been working, the suspects always remain confused on who exactly I am. Their worst nightmare? Their godsend? Their hope? Their noose?

           I’m both their hurricane and the eye of the storm. They just can’t decipher when I’m which.

          Leaning back in the chair, I sigh, eyes drifting from the too bright computer screen to the refrigerator. The left-over cheesecake calls from its Styrofoam container, eat me, eat me, devour me, it beckons. I want to, more than I care to admit, and there’s no way I can deny the salivation that has been occurring as I try to organize rates for my last client. All I can think about is the creamy texture mixing with the stark contrasting raspberry swirl, the bite of the rum that courses through its silky layers, and the crunch of the graham cracker crust… I waited for weeks to get a slice of it, and finally, finally, the treat is mine. Now it sits, belonging to the mini fridge. I know, it will still be waiting for me after I finish. Waiting to be goggled up with a glass of pinot grigio and maybe, if I have the energy, eaten after a large bowl of pasta that I make instead of you know… DoorDash. I can’t order out again, especially when I am perfectly capable of cooking for myself. Capable and willing are two different things, and truly, I am unwilling.

           I force myself to stop ogling my fridge and lower my eyes to my computer screen. This last client, Lee Euna, heiress and CEO apparent of Lee Enterprises, had left much to be desired. She had minimal, factual intel, which stemmed from a list of names of the men who have wronged her and her family. It wasn’t a short list, by any means. Five names sitting prettily on a piece of paper, her handwriting detailed and immaculate.

          “How stunning are those names?” she had asked. “Kim Seokjin, Min Yoongi, Jung Hoseok, Park Jimin and Kim Taehyung. Pretty names, prettier men.”

          Euna brought photos and as much information as she had, though her eyes were withholding, and she had few answers to my standard questions. What she lacked in factual information, she made up for in her manifesto. It was no shorter than 100 handwritten pages and filled with every wrongdoing the five have committed against the Lee’s. From what I can sus out from our meeting, she was slightly deranged, a multi-billionaire, and seeking some sort of vengeance. The crimes committed ranged from cheating, to what looked to be embezzling and insider trading, though she provided no financial records and no hard proof the men were profiting from Lee Enterprises. How she, and her siblings, ended up in relationships with these men is included in a separate, typed and printed, volume which gives around 50 pages of grotesque details about each man.

          In reading through the documents, I begin to piece together the narrative she’s trying to write: five men, unrelated, had all fallen into bed with her, her siblings, or her company, only to break her heart on or around Valentine’s Day, one almost every year for the better part of a decade. The men, having never crossed paths personally or professionally, to her knowledge, had no university in common, no careers that were similar, no mutual friends. Their only link, the Lee’s. Her manifesto is full of inaccuracies and plot holes bigger than anything Neil Breen has ever written. Through her writing, it’s apparent that she wants blood, but for what I cannot tell. Their unsubstantiated crimes are nothing more than fabricated lies, and for the money she’s willing to pay me, I can tell she wants me to come to a specific conclusion. I’m not sure I’m going to provide her with what she wants, or rather what she assumes I’ll find. Which means one of two things, either Euna is absolutely shattered, or, or, there’s a larger conspiracy at play that I am just a pawn in. Either way, it won’t hurt to go a step further to unearth more about these men and understand why Lee Euna wants them found.

          The first, Kim Seokjin.

Next: Love at First Algorithm

ROCK AND READ 087 – interview with Kyo - part 1/3

A heteromorphic anatomy tract ~the meaning of the meaningless things~

sukekiyo, another project started in 2013 by Kyo from DIR EN GREY. In 2019 they released the new audio compilation INFINTUM, toured, played in Hong Kong, will be holding a countdown live, have already announced a new tour for February next year; even though they do things in their own pace they certainly leave an impression of being very active!

Using this opportunity we will look back at sukekiyo's path.

How did they start, what has changed in those 6 years, we will discover the whole story.

Interview: Yukinobu Hasegawa

Photos: Yosuke Komatsu (ODD JOB LTD.)

Hair: Kyo

Styling and clothes: DRESSEDUNDRESSED

translation: kyotaku (if you notice any mistakes or typos please let me know!😅)

－ I thought I won't be surprised anymore by your looks, but when I came to the studio during the photoshoot I was. Incredibly.

京 Really? The truth is I wanted to do it earlier, but the timing now ended up being perfect. It's a worldview not possible for DIR EN GREY, but I thought it's fine with sukekiyo.

－ Saying you wanted to do it from a way before, has this idea kept growing inside of you over time?

京 Earlier this year I had a show as sukekiyo at Nakano SUNPLAZA, we did a collaboration with the clothes brand DRESSEDUNDRESSED, clothes for this shoot come from them as well, we planned everything together, band member clothes, the performance of the 2 masked men who came on stage.

－ What was the origin of this idea?

京 I've been thinking for a long time that it's good love has many forms/shapes. There's not only love between man and woman, but love between two men, love between two women. This is really not relevant, love knows no gender. I've had this idea for a long time. And that's why I wanted to have a photoshoot in such clothes.

－ Is it different from the so called deviant/perverted world? In the past we have talked about your childhood (ROCK AND READ 002, 2003.10). In young age you had an accident that become something like a trauma that came from love, I can really feel the love is greatly present in your feelings.

京 It might be. Thinking globally it becomes more even for the queer folks. Japan is just behind. But comparing to 10 or 20 years ago [gender] is really irrelevant.

－ Even in Japan the term LGBT has become widely known a year or two ago.

京 That's right. I'm not gay, but I have nothing against gay people. Rather [gay relationships] always seem very beautiful. Feel pure. In sukekiyo usually I sing about many types of love. So I have really nothing against it.

－ It's been about 6 years since sukekiyo started in 2013. At that time I was also able to interview you, you've been holding this idea since 3 or 4 years ago, right? Have you also seen love as your theme that time?

京 No, it wasn’t that big yet. But there were also many poems as songs with the theme of love. This feels like going deeper, getting scattered in various directions.

－ I think you were often asked in interviews how do you compartmentalize DIR EN GREY when you started sukekiyo. At that time you've said that with sukekiyo you express the feminine side. Was femininity something you couldn't express with DIR EN GREY?

京 No, it's not like that. That can’t be split so perfectly. It just happens naturally because of the colors of each band or the atmosphere. I don’t mean to split it this way, but if DIR members have a certain aura and the songs have a certain atmosphere, the things I bring in or the things I express will also change certain way. So simply if the members are different my expression will also be different. The atmosphere that sukekiyo members have, the mood of the songs, the worldview, there are quite many things that naturally make me like this. With DIR it's a bit different. But now that's almost gone. Even one single sound like a guitar sound is totally different in DIR and sukekiyo, don’t you think? So it feels like it get split naturally.

－ The main style of DIR EN GREY's songwriting is to proceed by getting an idea from one band member and then do a catch ball exchanging arrangements between all of you. At the beginning of sukekiyo I heard that you had a method that as sukekiyo members Kyo would hit the idea he got inside of his head to Takumi who would then give it a shape. Has your desire to express the worldview that exists only inside of you gotten stronger?

京 No, it's not like that. I think about the worldview in both cases (bands). For example in DIR, I of course think about the lyrics, I thought about the music video for the recently released single The World of Mercy, about the worldview for the concerts, I think about the images that connect it all. It's not different for sukekiyo. Creating this kind of worldview, using this kind of images, I talk to the members about this some, when the music is ready and I sing, when we think about the images for the videos or the light used at performances, the worldview materializes more and more. At that time I explain more to the band members. That's why it's not like sukekiyo is only me. It's not a solo [project]. sukekiyo is a band [same as DIR].

－ There's no way to control everything with your own brain, do you give shape to your ideas and thoughts blending them with the ideas and thoughts from other members?

京 Of course. Talking about music I don’t like it when people refer to it as my solo. I love being in a band. If I did music solo it would be just singing with a guitar or with piano, I get that. But I love the sound of a band.

－ What's the reason for you to be so fixated about being in a band?

京 I simply like [the idea of the] a band. I've entered the world of music as a band member. There are many musicians, including my senpais, who were in bands and then started solo career just singing etc. But it just doesn't resonate with me. But I don't mind the artists who started as solo singers. I'm simply a type who constantly wants to sing in a band. I think people can try both. But I love being a part of a band.

－ We're talking about the permanent band members only, right?

京 Yeah, using support members doesn’t feel right to me.

－ One of the strong points of bands is constant changing because of the involved band members' motivation or the new ideas they bring in. The early stage sukekiyo came out with 'stateless' as a keyword regarding the music.

京 Yeah, we did.

－ Did all band members share this keyword?

京 In the past? Yeah. First, we had the idea to create something that doesn't exist yet, something new. This continues today as well, but we don't explicitly talk about it like 'something that doesn't exist yet!'. I add singing to the forming song, and layering the sound from all members we have a song. We are creating songs now too, and even now such things happen. I won't say more.

－ Do other members also feel different, do they throw themselves into sukekiyo bringing different ways of thinking?

京 I think so. I just happen to throw some ideas like the direction, what I want to do next, the kind of timbre. Everyone thinks about things properly.

－ The first sukekiyo's performance was in December 2013. I think there was considerable excitement about what will happen from the audience. When you stood then on the stage did any feeling inside started to spark or did something feel different than before?

京 I think the switch there is not different to DIR, I don't think about it. I usually hang out backstage until the last minute before the start of the show. I don't turn a switch in my mind or anything like that. It's like, when I notice [it already happened].

－ The live performance on stage is overflowing with sadness and melancholy instead of grotesque.

京 Ah, I'm not really aware of that. It's the power held by songs and lyrics. When I sing the melody and lyrics born from that music come out like that naturally. I really don’t have a switch inside my head nor I do something different [in both bands].

－ Is it because you go deep into the song? Are you not curious what did the men and women in the audience feel, what got conveyed to the audience when you perform like this?

京 Not at all, not even a bit. If I started to think about it, wouldn’t it become commercialized? Like it wouldn’t even have to be me? There are spectators, fans, in front of us (when we are on the stage), but I don't think they are people who want us to do what they want. Especially DIR and sukekiyo fans. I feel there are many people who like to see us doing what we like. Even if it wasn't like that I wouldn't care. I'm like that since way before (laughing). If there people were suddenly being 'do what makes fans happy', I'd be shocked as in '[after so many years] you want that NOW?' That's why I don't think about it.

－ And then you have another chance to express yourself. How does it feel when it (your idea) becomes the reality? For example, when someone is able to spit out the things that were accumulating inside, it feels almost like a purification.

京 True. But I have so many things I want to do. It's not like it's all used up with things I do with sukekiyo, not really.

－ I thought so. If I can say why, you are vigorously releasing new music and gradually you're becoming more and more borderless, the extend of your creative urge must constantly surprise even sukekiyo members. That's why I feel that as you get more chances to express yourself you get more and more stimulated.

京 If I get even more stimulated it would be bad (laughing). I, myself, am troubled. There's just not enough time. If I could do things without any restrictions I could go on endlessly. But sukekiyo members are really amazing too. Even without having a release date we have about 6 completed songs at the moment. The members are sending new songs in even as we are already working on some songs that don't yet have a proper release plan. Even during DIR tour some time ago when we were playing in Nagoya, our bassist, YUCHI, sent in a song. I was waiting for the arrangement of a different song from other members and I thought [the email] was that, but it was a totally new song. And that's how I was working on the temporary lyrics playing the song on the laptop in my hotel room in Nagoya, I recorded it using my phone and sent it to the rest of (sukekiyo) members. And that way we got another song. We work with this kind of attitude. All members work fast and are insatiable, I think they have many things they'd like to do. I get so much response from them, I respond as well. That way we keep making more and more songs.

－ That's the best possible situation for the band. When sukekiyo just started everyone seen you as a conceptual project.

京 That's true. I've been told that again and again , even when I said that's not the case.

－ Talking to you, it feels like sukekiyo can just do whatever you want really.

京 Yeah, there are no limits (laughing).

－ One of the reasons for being seen as a conceptual project is your performance. You have your fans attend in black clothing if possible. Currently you also play shows at the standing venues, but in the beginning at the seated venues were full of the atmosphere where standing up or making any noise was not permitted. Because of the solemn atmosphere it felt just like a funeral.

京 I think there were many artists until now that didn't allow talking during the concerts. But I haven't heard of anyone who would succeed in that for many years. It was something that I really wanted to do and I did. Feeling like a funeral feels like sukekiyo, personally I really love it. There's no need for any other sound than band members. We also try not to have anyone else on stage besides band members. Even if there's some trouble the members have to deal with it, there's almost no staff. I want to keep this core part important even from now on, but once in a while we step away from that and have shows when everything goes. Earlier, we did a show where it was okay to do anything, but fans were not moving. There were very few people who were singing, but it was mostly quiet. It was like 'ah, I see' (laughing). There are not many bands with so many rules like this, although I think it's fine to do it.

－As you have liked the unconventional drama and performers even before starting sukekiyo, and GENET from AUTO-MOD also came to see sukekiyo's performance, have you been mingling with artists in this field? Especially that you actually had some performances together.

京 Nah, I didn't know anyone from the theatre, I also haven't seen any of their plays. I like Banyuu-inryoku, but I don't watch [plays・other artists performances] as a reference or study. On the contrary I don't want to learn. In the concert there are feelings and atmosphere of that very moment, right? I want to actually express with my body what I feel at that moment; if I had studied and accumulated various knowledge it would remain in my head, ending as a make-believe/pretending. Actually, I don't even like the idea of doing something the same way after seeing something done naturally. I don't want to be tied by that. That's why I don't want to learn/prepare anything. I have things I like, but I don't look that deeply into it. Moving my body and singing freely, as naturally as possible, I always have this [mindset] inside of me. This is the same for DIR and for sukekiyo.

－ I see.

...to be continued😊 (part 2/3) (part 3/3)

Stolen Faces

Cinema is an art of faces, almost a religion of faces: on screen they loom above us, vast as a mother’s face must appear to an infant. We can get lost in them. The deepest thrill the movies offer may be the opportunity to gaze at human faces longer and with more unabashed, lover-like intimacy than real life regularly allows. Most often, of course, we gaze at beautiful faces, though cinema has its share of beloved gargoyles, mugs with “character” rather than symmetry. But the uncanny power of faces onscreen also anchors films about disfigurement and facial transformations, about masks and scars and plastic surgery. These stories summon all the fears and taboos, desires and unresolved questions swirling around the human face. Do faces reveal or conceal a person’s true nature? Can changing someone’s face change their soul?

Deformity is a staple of horror films, of course, from classics such as Phantom of the Opera and The Raven (in which the hideously afflicted man played by Boris Karloff muses, “Maybe if a man looks ugly, he does ugly things”) to surgical shockers such as Eyes Without a Face. But plot twists involving faces that are damaged or corrected, masked or changed, turn up with surprising frequency in film noir as well, where they are related to themes of identity theft, amnesia, desperate attempts to shed the past or recover the past. One of the grim proverbs of noir is that you can’t escape yourself. There are no fresh starts, no second chances. But noir also demonstrates the instability of identity, the way character can be corrupted, and stories about facial transformations harbor a nebulous fear that there is in the end no fixed self. If noir is pessimistic about the possibility of change, it is at the same time haunted by fear of change—fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger.

The Truth of Masks

Two films about men who literally lose their faces take the full measure of the resulting ostracism and crushing isolation—and what men will do to escape it. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (Tanin no Kao, 1966) is based on a Kobo Abe novel about a scientist named Okuyama who has been literally defaced by a chemical accident. We never see what he used to look like; he spends half the film swaddled in bandages like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, ferocious black eyes glinting through slits. Obsessed with people’s reactions to his appearance, he lashes out bitterly, insisting that all his social ties have been severed, including his conjugal ties with his wife. She tries to convince him that it’s all in his head and that her feelings haven’t changed, but her revulsion when he makes an abrupt sexual advance convinces him that she’s lying.

Okuyama believes that a life-like mask will restore his relationship with his wife and his connection to society. He has evidently not seen The Face Behind the Mask (1941), a terrific B noir in which Peter Lorre stars as Johnny Szabo, who is hideously scarred in a fire. This tragedy and the ensuing cruelty of strangers transform him from a sweet, Chaplin-esque immigrant to a bitter criminal mastermind, even after he dons a powder-white mask that gives him a sad, creepy ghost of his former face—more Lorre than Lorre.  The mask is merely a flimsy patch on the horrible visage that spiritually scars Johnny, and though it enables him to marry a sweet and loving (and perhaps near-sighted) woman, it can’t reverse the corrosion of his character.  

The doctor who makes a far more sophisticated mask for Okuyama does so because the project fascinates him as a psychological and philosophical experiment. He speculates about what the world would be like if everyone wore a mask: morality would not exist, he argues, since people would feel no responsibility for the actions of their alternate identities. (His theory seems to be borne out by the consequences of internet anonymity.) Unlike the one Johnny Szabo wears, here the mask bears no resemblance to Okuyama’s original looks, and the doctor believes the new face will change his patient’s personality, turning him into someone else.

When the mask is fitted, it turns out to be the face of Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the most striking and plastic pans in cinema history. With only a little help from a fake mole, dark glasses, and a bizarre fringe of beard, Nakadai succeeds in making his own features look eerily synthetic, as though they don’t belong to him. Sitting in a crowded beer hall on his first masked outing in public, he creates a palpable sense of unease, keeping his features unnaturally still as though unsure of their mobility, touching his skin gingerly to explore its alien surface. As he gradually grows more comfortable and revels in the freedom of his new face, the doctor tells him, “It’s not the beer that’s made you drunk, it’s the mask.”

Abe’s novel contains a scene in which the protagonist goes to an exhibit of Noh masks, highly stylized crystallizations of stock characters and emotions. In Noh, as in other traditional forms of theater that use masks, the actor is present on stage but vanishes into another physical being—men play women, young men play old men, gods, and ghosts. In cinema, actors impersonate other characters using their own faces—usually without even the heavy layer of makeup worn on western stages. Movie actors are pretending to be people they’re not, yet if we judge their performances good it means we believe what we see in their faces. When an actor’s real face plays the part of a mask, like Lorre’s or Nakadai’s, this strange inversion—the real impersonating the artificial—has a uniquely disconcerting effect.

At the heart of this disturbing film lurks a horror that changing the skin can indeed change the soul. Okuyama tries to hold onto his identity, insisting, “I am who I am, I can’t change,” but the doctor insists he is “a new man,” with “no records, no past.” In covering his scar tissue with a smooth, artificial skin he eradicates his own experience, and with it his humanity. The doctor turns out to be right when he predicts that the mask will have a mind of its own. Suddenly endowed with sleek good looks, Okuyama buys flashy suits and sets out to seduce his own wife. When he succeeds easily, he is outraged, only to have her reveal that she knew who he was all along. After she leaves him in disgust he descends into madness and random violence. He has become the opposite of the Invisible Man: a visible shell with nothing inside

Okuyama’s story is interwoven with a subplot about a radiation-scarred girl from Nagasaki, whose social isolation drives her to incest and suicide. Lovely from one side, repellent from the other, she looks very much like the protagonist of A Woman’s  Face. Ingrid Bergman starred in the Swedish original, but Joan Crawford is ideally cast in the 1941 Hollywood remake directed by George Cukor. Half beautiful and half grotesque, half hard-boiled and half vulnerable, Anna Holm spells out what was usually inchoate in Crawford’s paradoxical presence. A childhood fire has left her with a gnarled scar on one side of her face, like a black diseased root growing across her cheek and distorting her eye and mouth. Crawford makes us feel Anna’s agonizing humiliation when people look at her, which spurs her compulsive mannerisms of turning her head aside, lifting her hand to her cheek, or pulling her hair down.

Also perfectly cast is Conrad Veidt as the elegant, sinister Torsten Baring. Veidt went from German Expressionist horror—playing the goth heartthrob Cesar in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the grotesquely disfigured yet weirdly alluring hero of The Man Who Laughs—to an unexpected late-career run as a sexy leading man in cloak-and-dagger films such as The Spy in Black and Contraband. When Anna turns her head defiantly to reveal her scar, Torsten gazes at her with a gleam of excitement, even of perverse attraction. She is confused and touched by his kindness and gallantry, helplessly trying to hide her sensitivity beneath a tough façade. Her broken-up, uncertain expressions when he gives her flowers or kisses her hand count as some of the most delicate acting Crawford ever did. Anna assumes that Torsten, the penniless scion of a rich family, must want her to do some dirty work, and she turns out to be right, but he also genuinely appreciates the proud, bitter, lonely woman who faces down her miserable lot through sheer strength of will.

People are horrible to Anna, nastily mocking her wounded vanity and her attempts to look nice. “The world was against me,” she says, “All right, I’d be against it.” She has found the perfect outlet, blackmailing pretty women who commit adultery. In one of the film’s best scenes, the spoiled and kittenish wife she is threatening retaliates by shining a lamp in Anna’s face and laughing at her. Anna leaps at the woman and starts hitting her over and over, forehand and backhand, in an ecstasy of hatred. This savagely satisfying moment is derailed by the film’s first grossly contrived plot twist, as the encounter is interrupted by the woman’s husband, who happens to be a plastic surgeon specializing in correcting facial scars. He offers to operate on Anna, and once the bandages are removed, in a scene orchestrated for maximum suspense, an absurdly flawless face is revealed.

The doctor (Melvyn Douglas) calls her both his Galatea and his Frankenstein: he views her as his creation, but isn’t sure if she’s an ideal woman or an unholy monster, “a beautiful face with no heart.” Her dilemma is ultimately which man to please, whose approval to seek: the doctor who believes her character should be corrected now that her face is, or Torsten, who wants her to kill the young nephew who stands between him and the family estate. This overwrought turn is never plausible; it is always obvious that Anna is no child murderer. What is believable is her erotic thrall to Torsten, the first man who has ever shown an interest in her. Crawford is at her most unguarded in these moments of trembling desire; Cukor remarked on how “the nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became.” He speculated that the camera was her true lover.

Anna undergoes months of pain and uncertainty for the chance of being beautiful for Torsten, and there is a marvelous shot of her gazing at herself in a mirror as she prepares to surprise him with her new face, brimming with hard proud joy. But he winds up lamenting the surgery that has turned her into “a mere woman, soft and warm and full of love,” he sneers. “I thought you were something different—strong, exciting, not dull, mediocre, safe.” In this same speech, Torsten reveals himself as a cartoonish fascist megalomaniac, which fits in with the film’s slide into silly, flimsily scripted melodrama, but sadly obscures the radical spark of what he’s saying. Anna’s character is shaped by the way she looks, or rather by the way she is looked at by men; the disappointingly conventional ending sides with the man who equates flawless beauty with moral goodness, and against the one man who was able to see something fine—a “hard, shining brightness,” in a woman’s damaged and imperfect face.

A Stolen Face (1952) follows a similar premise, much less effectively, and reaches the opposite conclusion. Paul Henreid plays a plastic surgeon who operates on female criminals with disfiguring scars, convinced that once they look normal they will become contented law-abiding citizens. He gets carried away, however, sculpting one patient into a dead ringer for his lost love (Lizabeth Scott plays both the original and the copy) and marrying her. His attempt to play Pygmalion backfires, since the vulgar, mean-spirited and untrustworthy ex-con is unchanged by her new appearance: she is indeed “a beautiful face without a heart.” That is a succinct definition of the femme fatale, a type Lizabeth Scott often played and one that embodies a fascination with the deceptiveness of feminine beauty. In The Big Heat (1953), it is only when Debbie (Glora Grahame) has her pretty face rearranged by a pot of scalding coffee that she abandons her cynical self-interest to become an avenging angel, fearlessly punishing the corrupt who hide their greed behind a genteel façade. She has nothing left to lose; pulling a gun from her mink coat and plugging the woman she recognizes as her evil “sister,” the disfigured Debbie asserts her freedom: “I never felt better in my life.”

Blessings in Disguise

Sometimes, people are only too happy to lose their faces. Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith), the protagonist of the superb, underappreciated drama Nora Prentiss (1947), sees the bright side when his face is horribly burned in a car crash. He has already faked his own death, sending another man’s corpse over a cliff in a burning car. In a neat bit of poetic irony, by crashing his own car he has completed the process of destroying his identity, and no longer needs to fear he’ll be recognized. Losing his face is a blessing in disguise—or rather, a blessing of disguise. But the disfigurement is also a visual representation of the corruption of his character: his face changes to reflect his downward metamorphosis with almost Dorian Gray-like precision.

Car crashes are a kind of refrain in the film. The doctor’s routine existence veers off course when a taxi knocks down a nightclub singer, Nora Prentiss (Anne Sheridan), across the street from his San Francisco office. Talk about a happy accident: the nice guy trapped in an ice-cold marriage to a rigid, nagging martinet suddenly has a gorgeous, good-humored young woman stretched out on his examining table. Nora may sing for a living, but her real vocation is dishing out wisecracks (her first words on coming to are, “There must be an easier way to get a taxi.”) When the doctor mentions a paper he’s writing on “ailments of the heart,” the canary, her eyelids dropping under the weight of knowingness, quips, “A paper? I could write a book.”

It’s hard to imagine a more sympathetic pair of adulterers, but the doctor is so daunted by the prospect of asking his wife for a divorce that it seems simpler to use the convenient death of a patient in his office to stage his own demise and flee to New York with Nora. It’s soon clear, though, that some part of him did die in San Francisco. Cooped up in a New York hotel room, terrified of going out lest someone spot him, the formerly gentle man becomes an irascible, rude, nervous wreck. When the faithful and incredibly patient Nora goes back to singing for Phil Dinardo (Robert Alda), the handsome nightclub owner who loves her, Talbot becomes hysterically jealous. Unshaven and hollow-eyed, he slaps Nora and almost kills Dinardo before fleeing the police and heading into that fiery crash. He becomes, as the film’s evocative French title has it, L’Amant sans Visage, “the lover without a face.”

When his bandages are removed, he is unrecognizable, wizened and scarred, his face a creased and calloused mask. His own wife doesn’t know him, and when Nora visits him in prison his damaged face, shot through a tight wire mesh, looks like something decaying, dissolving. He’s in prison because, in an even neater bit of irony, he has been charged with his own murder. He decides to take the rap, recognizing the justice of the mistake: he did kill Richard Talbot.

This same ironic plot twist appears in Strange Impersonation (1946), albeit less convincingly. This deliriously far-fetched tale, directed at a breakneck pace by Anthony Mann, stars Brenda Marshall as Nora Goodrich, a pretty scientist whose glasses signal that she is both brainy and emotionally myopic. She is harshly punished for caring more about work than marriage: her female lab assistant, who wants to steal Nora’s fiancé, tampers with an experiment so that it explodes, burning Nora’s face to a crisp. Embittered, she retreats from the world, and when another woman, who is trying to blackmail her over a car accident, falls from the window and is mistakenly identified as Nora, she seizes the opportunity to disappear, have plastic surgery that miraculously eliminates her scars, and return posing as the blackmailer, to seek revenge. She goes to work for her former fiancé, who strangely fails to recognize her voice or her striking resemblance to his lost love.

The plot plays out as, and turns out to be, a fever dream, but this last credibility stretcher is too common to dismiss as merely the flaw of one potboiler. Plots involving impersonation and identity theft rely not only on unrealistic visions of what plastic surgery can achieve, but on the assumption that people are deeply unobservant and tone-deaf in recognizing loved ones. A film that underlines this blindness with droll irony is The Scar (a.k.a. Hollow Triumph and The Man Who Murdered Himself, 1948), a convoluted but hugely entertaining little B noir in which Paul Henreid plays dual roles as a crook on the run and a psychologist who happens to look just like him. John Muller, pursued by hit men sent by a casino owner he robbed, stumbles across his doppelganger and decides to kill him and take his place. All he needs to do is give himself a facial scar to match the doctor’s. Only as he is dumping the body does he notice that he has put the scar on the wrong cheek—the consequence of an accidentally reversed photograph. But the irony quickly doubles back: Muller decides to brazen it out, and in fact no one notices that the doctor’s scar has apparently moved from one side of his face to the other—not even his lover. (Joan Bennett glides through this awkward part in a world-weary trance, giving a dry-martini reading to the script’s most famous lines: “It’s a bitter little world, full of sad surprises.”) The assumption that people pay little attention to the way others look or sound seems directly at odds with the power that faces and voices wield on film, and the intimate specificity with which we experience them. But noir stories often turn on how easily people are deceived, and how poorly they really know one another—or even themselves.

In The Long Wait (1954), perhaps the most extreme case of confused identity, a man with amnesia searches for a woman who has had plastic surgery. Not only does he not know what she looks like now, he can’t even remember what she used to look like. Since the movie is based on a Mickey Spillane story, he proceeds methodically by grabbing every woman he sees, in hopes that something will jog his memory. The film is fun in its pulpy, trashy way, provided you enjoy watching Anthony Quinn kiss women as though his aim were to throttle the life out of them. Quinn plays a man badly injured in a car wreck that erases both his memory and his fingerprints. This is lucky when he wanders into his old town and discovers he is wanted for a bank robbery—without fingerprints, they can’t arrest him. Figuring he must be innocent, he goes in search of the girlfriend who may or may not have grabbed the money and gone under the knife. It’s an intriguing premise, but the ultimate revelation of the right woman feels arbitrary, and the implications of all this confusion of identities are left resolutely unexamined. Nonetheless, there is something in the film’s searing, inarticulate desperation that glints like a shattered mirror.

Under the Knife

The promise of plastic surgery is a new and better self, the erasure of years and the traces of life. Taken to extremes, it is the opportunity to become a different person. Probably the best known plastic surgery noir is Dark Passage (1947), in which Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, who visits a back alley doctor after escaping from San Quentin. Parry was framed for killing his wife, so the face plastered across newspapers with the label of murderer has become a false face that betrays him. A friendly cabby who spots him recommends a surgeon who is he promises is “no quack.” Houseley Stevenson’s gleeful turn as the back-alley doctor is unforgettable, as he sharpens a straight razor while philosophizing about how all human life is rooted in fear of pain and death. He can’t resist scaring Parry, chortling over what he could do to a patient he didn’t like: make him look like a bulldog, or a monkey. But he reassures Parry that he’ll make him look good: “I’ll make you look as if you’ve lived.”

During the operation, Parry’s drugged consciousness becomes a kaleidoscope of faces, all the people who have threatened or helped him swirling around. His face is being re-shaped, as his life has already been shaped by others: the bad woman who framed him and the good woman who rescues and protects him, the small-time crook who menaces him and the kind cabby who helps him. Faceless for much of the movie, mute for part of it (he spends a long time in constraining bandages), Vincent Parry is among the most passive and cipher-like of noir protagonists. When the bandages finally come off after surgery, he looks like Humphrey Bogart, and the idea that this famously beat-up, lived-in face could be the creation of plastic surgery is perhaps the film’s biggest joke. But Vincent Parry remains an oddly blank, undefined character, and he seems unchanged by his new face and name. In a sense the doctor is right: he only looks as though he’s lived.

The fullest cinematic exploration of the problems inherent in trying to make a new life through plastic surgery is Seconds (1966), John Frankenheimer’s flesh-creeping sci-fi drama about a mysterious company that offers clients second lives. For a substantial fee, they will fake your death, make you over completely—including new fingerprints, teeth, and vocal cords—and create an entirely new identity for you. There is never a moment in the movie when this seems like a good idea. The Saul Bass credits, in which human features are stretched and distorted in extreme close-up, instills a horror of plasticity, and disorienting camera-work creates an immediate feeling of unease and dislocation, a physical discomfort at being in the wrong place.

Arthur, a businessman from Scarsdale, is the personification of disappointed middle age, afflicted by profound anomie that goes beyond a dull routine and a tired marriage. When the Company finishes its work—the process is shown in gruesome detail, to the extent that Frankenheimer’s cameraman fainted while shooting a real rhinoplasty—the formerly nondescript and greying Arthur looks like Rock Hudson, and has a new life as a playboy painter in Malibu. He’s told that he is free, “alone in the world, absolved of all responsibility.” He has “what every middle-aged man in America wants: freedom.”

At first, however, his life proves as empty and meaningless in this new setting as it was in the old; even when the Frankenstein scars have healed, he remains nervous and joyless as before. After he meets and falls for a beautiful blonde neighbor, who introduces him to a very 1960s California lifestyle, he begins to revel in youth and sensual freedom. Yet something is still not right; at a cocktail party he gets drunk and starts talking about his former existence—a taboo. He discovers that his lover, indeed almost everyone he knows, is an employee of the company or a fellow “reborn,” hired to create a fake life for him, and to keep him under surveillance. His “freedom” is a construct, tightly controlled.

Arthur rebels, making a forbidden trip to visit his wife, who of course does not recognize him. Talking to her about her supposedly deceased husband, for the first time he begins to understand himself: the depth of his alienation and confusion, the fact that he never really knew what he wanted, and so wanted the things he had been told he should want. Seconds is a scathing attack on the American ideal of a successful life, a portrait of how corporations sell fantasies of youth, beauty, happiness, love; buying into these commercial dreams, no one is really free to know what they want, or even who they are. Will Geer, as the folksy, sinister founder of the Company, talks wistfully about how he simply wanted to make people happy.

There is a deep sadness in the scenes where Arthur revisits his old home and confronts the failure of his attempt at rebirth—beautifully embodied by Rock Hudson in a performance suffused with the melancholy of a man who has spent his life hiding his real identity behind a mask. Yet Arthur still imagines that if he can have another new start, a third face and identity, he will get it right. Instead, he learns the macabre secret of how the Company goes about swapping out people’s identities. Seconds contrasts the surgical precision with which faces, bodies, and the trappings of life can be remade, and the impossibility of determining or predicting how or if the inner self will be changed. For that there are no charts or diagrams, and no knife that can cut deep enough.

by Imogen Sara Smith

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Read time: 8 Days Rating: 5/5

The quote: Who cares about the crowded, broad road? I’ll walk the single-plank bridge all the night. — Wei WuXian

Warnings: The novel has some not minor issues with consent. It can be read as non-con or dub-con. It gets even murkier in the added chapters.

A big thank you to @exiledrebelsscans for the translation.

In the interests of full disclosure I read Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (aka Mo Dao Zu She or MDZS) after seeing The Untamed Okay so I saw it twice in quick succession, sue me. This prior knowledge meant I know the endgame to a degree I know the villains, I know most of the main players and I know the general plot. This review, as all my status updates did may contain so minor spoilers. But given the popularity of MDZS's adaptations, it's more than what people likely already know coming in. This review uses the standard short forms for character names.

The plot is gritty and at times nearing grotesque. If you are reading a translation chances are it is the Exiledrebelsscanlations version, heed their warnings there are some things that you really don't want to read while eating. The writing is layered and complex. You are required to keep track of time and people, weapons and families. One of the most telling quotes is “We are all human.” It is something that is at the heart of the story. Humanity, love. And the price we pay for both. It challenges your ethics and your concept of perception if you let it. Or you can just treat it as a fun ride. But you do need to think enough to follow the characters and plot.

My familiarity with The Untamed lead of course to comparisons between the source material and the adaptation.

The most glaring difference is the treatment of women. MXTX is a woman, it makes sense that her women are strong characters. Madame Jin is so much more than we see. Like Madam Yu, she is a fierce woman who intimidates her husband. Both these women are feared in the novel but Jin is played differently in the adaptation.

Separate post for Wen Qing. The Untamed did not do WQ justice. You know those scenes where her and Wei WuXian are searching for a way to help Jiang Cheng? Core regrowth or transfer in eps 17 & 18 yeah they are redundant. Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's vision of WQ is a badass. She created that process herself, well before WWX and JC the theoretical nature remains but she created it. Why would you remove that? The lady is a boss.

Writing allows for characters motives and actions to be better explained. JC and Jin Ling in the endgame. WWX and relationship with Xiao XingChen, his sympathy. Su She and his whole deal. Everything is still set up. But it's easier to keep secrets where required.

The characters are more balanced. As in WWX is still his prodigious self but he doesn't know everything. People have the knowledge they impart to him and Lan WangJi. Such as LXC and NHS.

The glaring difference is the use of sexuality. This is a Yaoi novel. WWX uses Mo XuanYu's homosexuality as a weapon. And there is a typical level of homophobia given the appearance of the apparent time. That said, MXY/WWX is referred to as a cut-sleeve as a slur, it comes from an amazing place and I love it

I want to ramble about the Yi City Arc (aka the Grasses chapters). This arc is dangerous to emotions in all forms this is something that fans talk about a lot. It is so well written it's a brilliant use of narration and skill. But to me, The Untamed did it better. Wang HaoXuan's performance changed a whole character and added depth. My favourite comment on Yi City (which I could talk about for hours) is "in a world of noble families Yi City is just four orphans destroying each other body and soul" Among the extra chapters there was one I liked. Villainous friends add some depth to the Yi City Arc characters. It adds Xue Yang's courtesy name, how he met Song Lan & Xiao XingChen, and the slight that started their deterioration. Also Song Lan's mysophobia. The rest of them aren't great. I can see why they exist by I wish I hadn't read them. (See also my rant on consent)

Okay. We need to address the elephant in the corner. Consent. For reasons not made especially clear one of the main characters wears an intimate accessory in full view and within reach of everyone at all times. The nature of this item is not readily explained but for another to touch it without permission is a violation. This violation occurs multiple times and it's never addressed not really. There are some worrying issues with drunken sexual activity, WWX knows LWJ isn't in his right mind and proceeds anyway. To a degree, I think this might be a cultural thing (ie BL/ Yaoi) but it made me hesitant. Not nearly as much as the rape fantasy, just thrown out there with no discussion. Or the two-time travel extras. They are rape (? I think, I skim read) and adult!WWX having sex with only-just-legal!LWJ (kind of, it's complicated). Though Bichen being used as a toy is certainly something. Look there is explicit consent, implicit consent, dubious consent and non-consent. This book runs a very fine line sometimes. It is a book I know, and I'm judging by western standards but the medium doesn't negate the need for clear writing, particularly when the target audience is young/ new adult. Usually with consent this murky it would lose a star it hasn't because I'm truly not sure where the fault lies.

Right to wrap this up because this was a rambling mess. I think fans who read this will have the same problem I did. Comparing it to an adaptation. This is Chinese, the adaptations have the issue with censorship. This has more freedom and allows some women to be strong and do their thing. There are some problematic elements but they are cultural. But it is beautiful and well worth reading if you follow along. If you can get through the first few chapters you can get through the book.

Goodreads

If you haven’t watched The Untamed the full mainland China version is available through Viki.com

Shy girl - statement

Previous statement

 For this class and second half of summer quarter I want to engage in a performance and dialog with female archetypes on the internet. I have always found the platform of internet a rather hostile black hole, yelling into the void so to speak. It also has been a place where I have discovered a lot of things that have helped me feel less isolated and have brought much inspiration to my life, a great outlet for my maximalist aesthetics. So, I have seen as someone growing up with the internet being around for the birth of Facebook and beginning my internet career on Myspace, that the internet is a place of duality. I haven’t much in my work engaged in a particularly feminist dialogue in my work as to not be pushed into a realm of all my work being an expression of the female but I guess I have still done so but not as overtly. I have also never explicitly created a character for myself during a performance as frankly I found it a bit to campy. I have created a persona based of a mash of a type of alternative female archetype that has found its place on the internet specifically, the E-girl. A popular and at the same time very much mi lined persona mainly a great target of specifically a lot of sexist vitriol from other online born groups.it is also a female persona that is much outside of my expression so I am interested in placing myself in the uncomfortable position in such a blatant misrepresentation of myself as well as having that character engage with some of the worst aspects of online culture and addressing that place and stereotype of woman in it. I am also interested in differences in male and female performance and tropes of expression and discourse found online mainly YouTube and other video formats. My character’s name will be named, shy girl and to further disguise is from myself I will be altering my own voice for speaking parts mush of the performances will be bringing more Avant-Garde concepts of performance to the mainstream such as john cages water performance with audience participation.  Also, I want to produce short work more consistently which is a mode of work I have not done up to this point so I will be putting out longer video content once a week.  

 Add on:

To update my artist statement and to speak to my progress with subjects related to the creation of my alter though I’m not sure how much I want it to be viewed as persona but more of a way to remove myself. This alter , Shy girl,  has so far no set type of format or type of content other than videos at this point and photos and maybe live capture online as I progress with platforms but that will very much change the nature of the performances as they will move from being captured into film , to being performance again the temporality will change as well as the source of control. which will affect the performances greatly but that will be addressed when the time comes, I think live streaming is a huge new question and place for performance art.  Back from that side tracking so far in terms of subject my videos have in initial conceptions been touching on but not limited to, Para social relationships, hostile male communities such as Inscels, the gaze, make up beauty/ identity, Vtubers and anime subculture, the body, multiples and an exercise in thought on distance and new space relationships found in the online environment. There is much more intertwined with in all of the videos I have done up to this point but these are some of the starting points for my video concept drawings and shot lists which I will be posing. The biggest development of this alter has been my creation of not only a 3D model based on my outfit and make up created for my performance in my own body. But now also a 2D model, so at this point I have created this group of performers which has been an interesting way of layering levels of abstraction of the original persona created. My video “shy graces” was the first time we were all together as I have been working with green screen to place myself into my online gallery/performance space, though it has been a passing thought but definite one that being my irrelevance now that I have these digital avatars. Which leads to something I suspected might happen that being my own disenchantment with my body which in a way lead to the next video “skin study’s” based on the work of ana Mendieta “glass on face” and my own push to recess the nude and the body online. This video for the first time bought in anime references as well which I did so for the obvious reason that these alters made online where very influenced my anime culture and manga illustration. As a western fan and a reclusive member of the subculture I have always seen interesting territory for discussion about the role of women in the anime but also in the community, being as if suffers from much of many “nerd subcultures” suffer from, sexualization, fetish, nerd bro culture and so on. But in particular anime’s relationship to the female body and projection of female presenting people is rife with conceptual fodder that I couldn’t begin to pick at this is quite long but has been developing. But one of the biggest draws is anime has been the first to bring this type of idealized body and form they have created into a living space in the form of projected 3D models like that of the Vocaloid characters which were developed as mascots for products along with new figures like project melody on streaming cites as well her move into adult content as a Only fans personality, Adult subscription cite. There has even been the creation of objects of comfort mimicking a body in the form or body pillows, which I used in one of my “music cover” videos integrating my own limbs with this printed body. And the creation of silicon full dolls not always used for the purpose of being a sex toy but as recreation of characters from particular shows that people use for companionship not that there is not a sexual element at play. A lot of this rings true to what I think is happening online these things are rather inseparable as I have moved into looking into the Vtuber community for my models and “copies” which the collective element being that all the programs that I have seen or used all by default use this anime form and all Vtubers use this anime avatar weather that be the 3D models or the 2D models as I created mine from scratch based on my performance persona and examples of popular Vtuber forms. There is this whole new level to literally not only changing your persona online as most do but actually taking on a new form and based on anime which is about the creation of whole other reality’s and which has an element of as a lot of media, escapism. These works as of this past class have been as I have been speaking about very bodily and quite grotesque as is the history often is of female performance art which I had read of and reminded me of such in Vergine body as language which I will link. This writing hit many points in relation to my work and I think is a far better resistor of a lot of what is a part of my content currently. One of originators for these past few videos not only the most recent two skin studies and shy graces was when I published my 3D model on Vorid studios there was a pop up that askes you about the licensing the avatar and it asks who can use it but what most stuck out to me was it asked if the creator would allow sexual content or violent content which became a big influence on the tone of that video. As well the video “shy Graces” which addressed the fact to be able to inhabit my new bodies I needed to pay more money to be able to do something as simple as move the arms of my 3D model as you would need an add on called leap motion.my thoughts and conceptual development may seem rather scattered at the moments but much thought has go into them and as far as the writing about this work it will develop as the work has over time.  

As for more technical aspects and materials, I have been pushing myself as far as the structure of my production of these videos as I want to make them all in accessible places with tools that anyone can access and I am trying to produce content weekly as on YouTube the speed of videos outputted is key to that structure and algorithm. The sets, outfits I have been using are also something that its easily accessed or recreated by anyone I guess I am focused on using almost modern-day working-class materials. As I should have started with saying at the beginning of this re brief this project at this point has not end game as it were I have the content that I am expressing as I want to use this avatar to engage with an audience that is outside of say a space in an art institution as I was inspired much by the work of fellow art student and internet artist molly soda. These alters and accounts have become my new studio work place for me to work on a continuous performance practice which is something I have not yet undertaken and I feel that will push my practice outside of my own comfort zone and open me to a space of pushing myself and very making mistakes and gaining new understanding to developed my practice.

 Definition: Internet art (also known as net art) is a form of digital artwork distributed via the Internet. This form of art has circumvented the traditional dominance of the gallery and museum system, delivering aesthetic experiences via the Internet. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.

 Net artist may use specific social or cultural internet traditions to produce their art outside of the technical structure of the internet. Internet art is often—but not always—interactive, participatory, and multimedia-based. Internet art can be used to spread a message, either political or social, using human interactions.

 The term Internet art typically does not refer to art that has been simply digitized and uploaded to be viewable over the Internet, such as in an online gallery.[1] Rather, this genre relies intrinsically on the Internet to exist as a whole, taking advantage of such aspects as an interactive interface and connectivity to multiple social and economic cultures and micro-cultures, not only web-based works.

Beauty Compelled

Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold

Characters: Belle (Once Upon a Time), Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Grace | Paige, Maurice | Moe French

Additional Tags: Arranged Marriage, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, A Monthly Rumbelling (Once Upon a Time), Beauty and the Beast Elements

Summary: Years ago, Moe French endebted himself to the nobleman, Mister Gold. Unable to pay the debt by any other means, he promises his daughter, Belle, in marriage to Gold. Now, on the day of her 18th Birthday, the contract is to be honored, and Belle must go to her new home, Adelram Hall, and to meet her husband-to-be, Mister Gold, who has a reputation for darkness.

Read on AO3

Beauty Compelled

Such arrangements were supposed to be a thing of the past, so when her eighteenth birthday dawned, brighter and clearer than it had any right to do so, it was with a sense of dread in her belly that she greeted the day.

Since her father’s inauspicious return, so many years ago now that it would have been lost to her memory but for the jewel she wore on the ring finger of her left hand, the day had been a constant specter hanging over her. She had been unable to remove the ring since she had accepted her fate: to give herself to him, or for her father to lose his fortune and suffer the slow decline into destitution and death. Her guilt had driven her to agree, for how could she refuse when it was because of her that her father had trespassed, and incurred a debt which he was unable to repay, all for want of bringing her back a gift.

She sat with her father that morning. The mood was somber on what should have been a day of celebration, as they took tea with barely a word spoken between them. A letter had come that morning, and he slowly slid it across the table to her.

The paper was soft velum, the folds were crisp and sharp. The hand upon the front of the sealed missive was in looping cursive, in a deep red, almost black ink, and the seal on the back was made of heavy wax, and was layered, decorative, though to be decorated with a skull seemed more than a little disturbing.

“Aren’t you going to read it?” he father asked quietly, sounding almost as fearful as she. She took a deep breath, and then hooked her thumbnail beneath the seal, preparing to break it. Then she froze. Words encircled the grotesque image in the center, and she lifted it closer to her face to peer at them.

We know what we are, but not what we may be.

She frowned as she read them, and a slight shiver went through her, like a warning, or some kind of expectation.

“Belle?” her father prompted.

She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, and tugged at the seal until it broke from the paper and she could unfold the letter, swallowing hard as she did.

The message was short, and to the point. It read, “Miss French, My carriage will call for you at 2pm, and my footman will escort you to your new home.” and it was signed with the same flourishing hand as the script on the envelope with a single name. Gold.

She felt her eyes fill with tears and fought not to let them escape as she slid the letter over to her father. She had agreed to this after all.

Her father read silently, then said, “So, he means to go through with it then.”

“Did you doubt that he would?” she remarked rhetorically. Gold had a reputation, after all.

The farewell had not been tearful. She would not allow it to be, and had followed the silent, tall, and gaunt footman to the carriage, and accepted his help to climb inside. The journey was long and taken on unsteady roads which, in spite of the modernity of the conveyance, still jostled her, leaving her as physically rattled as she was emotionally. It was coming on evening when the house came into view, it’s three towers of dark gray stone, loomed beneath the almost-black of the slate roof, one in the center, above the main door, and one either end of the enormous building. The house - almost large enough to be called a castle - stood at the end of a long, sweeping driveway that curved around either side of a well manicured lawn. It stood four storeys tall with many chimneys in the same gray stone, and many arched and dormer windows graced what she could see of the front of the building as the carriage came closer. It was imposing; intimidating.

All too soon the carriage came to a halt with practiced precision directly in front of the main doorway, and the carriage rocked slightly as the footman alighted, and came to hand Belle down and then to escort her inside, through a spacious vestibule and into the large open space that was the main hall dressed in marble, with statues and other artifacts adorning shelves and display cases, and waiting in the hallway was a young lady that could not have been much younger than she herself.

The girl was modestly dressed in a long, dark blue dress, with a white blouse beneath. As Belle was brought to a halt by the footman, the the waiting girl lowered herself in a deep curtsy. Belle swallowed, unused to such genuflection, since it wasn’t required in her father’s household.

“Welcome to Adelram Hall, My Lady,” the girl said. Her quiet voice held the accent of the low country, though it was well refined. “Mister Gold has asked that I attend you, show you to your room and help you get settled.”

Belle smiled at her as the girl rose from the curtsy, and said, “Thank you, and please… I’m no lady. My name is Belle.”

“But, Miss Belle, you’re to be Lady of Adelram hall,” the girl said, sounding perplexed, and Belle supposed she would have to get used to the honorific. It seemed that kind of household. The girl then turned her attention to the footman, still standing beside them, and said quietly, “Thank you, Mister Dove. You can have Miss Belle’s things sent up to her room.”

He gave a wordless bow of his head, and then a lower, more respectful bow to Belle as he turned from them, and left the two women alone.

“Should I show you upstairs, Miss Belle?” the girl asked then. “I could show you the Oak Sitting Room, and then when your things are brought up, I can help you to dress for dinner.  Mister Gold has asked that you join him.”

“Of course,” Belle said, and felt a nervous flutter in her belly. She had yet to meet the man to whom she was promised and, if his letter and the house was anything to go by, she could not imagine he would be any less austere. She clasped her hands together to prevent them from trembling, and then said quietly, though she didn’t at all feel it, “I’m ready. Lead the way.”

The Oak Sitting Room was so named because it was entirely paneled in oak wood around the walls. Entry to the room was gained by a double door from the corridor outside, and at either end of the room there were two smaller doorways. Belle wondered where those other door led.  Beside one of the two doors was a sizable fireplace, where a low fire burned already against the coming chill of the evening, and nearby the fire, an area carpet in rich browns and reds covered the wood paneled floor on which the rest of the furniture, tables and chairs, and desks for writing at, stood.  Over the carpet, however, was a comfortable looking couch and high backed arm chair.

“Should I send for some tea?” the girl asked as Belle came to a stop after visually examining each corner of the room.

“Thank you,” Belle said, turning a smile the girl’s way, “I should like that… and… how should I call you.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Miss,” the girl said and blushed slightly as she went to the bell pull at the side of the fireplace. “My name is Grace.”

“And do you…” Belle asked carefully, “… work here?”

Grace gave a soft little laugh. “No, Miss Belle, not the way you mean,” she said. “My father is a… business associate of Mister Gold, and his lordship is kind enough to give me a home while my father is away on their shared ventures… which is a often.”

Belle’s breath came out of her in a rush. “Oh, thank goodness,” she said in the midst of that relieved exhalation, “For a moment I thought…”

She shook her head at herself and then grinned at the other young lady, who was also shaking her head.  “No,” she confirmed as though she could read Belle’s mind, “Mister Gold just thought you and I might be friends, that’s all.  That we might each like to have a friend, and I… well I, for one, certainly should.”

Belle reached out and took hold of both of Grace’s hands and squeezed them tightly in her own. “I should like that too,” she said. “Very much.”

Grace beamed, and without letting go of Belle’s hands, drew her toward the couch, just as a maid entered the room carrying a tea tray, which she brought wordlessly to the coffee table nearby to the couch, setting the tray down first, before bobbing a curtsy.

“Will there be anything else, My Lady? Miss Grace?” she asked softly.

Grace shook her head, and Belle answered, “No, thank you.” The maid curtsied once more, and then withdrew, and Belle groaned softly as she turned to Grace. “I shall never be comfortable with all of this,” she said. “They’re behaving as though I’m royalty.”

“Here, you are,” said Grace simply. “Mister Gold, is lord and master here, and no matter how close some of us might become to him, it is well to remember that, and since they know you’re to be his wife…”

Belle’s belly clenched again as Grace’s words brought back, starkly, the reason she was hours away from her home, in a strange, grand house, filled with fine things, and people she did not know - though at least Grace was a flicker of light among it all.

Sharing tea with Grace helped to settle her nerves but a little, as Grace told her about her new home, and presently the two young women rose and Grace led her toward the other of the two doors, which led to her chambers, and told her that Mister Gold’s room was at the opposite end of the sitting room, by the fireplace. The thought took the ends of the knot in her belly and pulled it a little tighter.

Her room was opulent, with a large canopied bed with drapes of red and gold. In fact the entire room was decorated in the glorious color of sunlight, the floor length curtains at the three bay windows were a golden yellow with the same red and gold color valances as the bedspread and canopy. Even the skirts around her vanity matched the curtains and bed-skirts, the entire room was so well coordinated. Belle imagined that the morning sun would make the room light and airy indeed.

For the moment though, the curtains had been closed, and a fire lit in the hearth to warm the room for when Belle would eventually return to it, her trunks had been unpacked, and a black evening dress hung up for her to wear to dinner.  She supposed she would have servants after all.

As though Grace was once again reading her mind, the girl chuckled and said, “You didn’t imagine Mister Gold would let you do everything all by yourself, did you?”

It seemed to Belle to take an age to prepare for dinner, and Grace fussed endlessly at her hair to have it fall just right about her shoulders, but just as she feared the younger woman would make her late to dinner, Grace declared her ready, and prepared to lead her downstairs to present her to her intended.

“You’ll dine in the Breakfast Room,” Grace told her in a half whisper as they began to descend the stairs. “Mister Gold thought it would be more intimate for the two of you.”

“You’re not joining us?” Belle asked, feeling a sudden rush of panic tighten her belly, and Grace chuckled.

“Of course not,” she said, “There will be plenty of staff to see propriety maintained, and besides, you don’t want me twittering on when you meet him for the first time.”  She leaned closer as if she were about to impart a huge secret and whispered, “I think you’ll like him. He’s not at all as fearsome as people think. You’ll see.”

Before Belle could answer they had reached the bottom of the stairs, and began walking toward a room from which she began to hear the sound of chamber music. Grace suddenly grasped her hand excitedly, and Belle started. Her nerves already frayed.

“Oh, he is playing the gramophone,” she said excitedly, “You are in for rare a treat!”

Belle blinked.  She had heard of a gramophone of course, but her own family were far too old fashioned to have possessed such a thing, and she wondered at what it would be like to hear it properly instead of from a distance. Her silent question was soon answered, when they reached the doorway to what looked like a Salon, where electric lighting - also a commodity that was not so familiar to Belle, at least not in her father’s home - had been switched on, and the warmth of a fire in the hearth reached out to caress away the chills of the stone corridors and the staircase down which she and Grace had come.

As they entered, a man whom she presumed to be Mister Gold, came to his feet, and swiftly buttoned the front of his dress suit jacket as he turned to the ladies. Grace did not wait for the two of them to meet formally, and for the moment Belle was glad of that.  The younger woman simply bobbed barely a curtsy and then almost rushed across the room to greet Mister Gold, standing on her tiptoes to brush a kiss to his cheek.

“Miss Grace.” Belle watched, the frantic beating of her heart subsiding just a little as he indulged Grace with a smile. “Are you certain you won’t join us for dinner? I can easily have Stiers set another place.”

“And get in your way?” Grace teased softly, “Absolutely not. I’ve already arranged with Mister Stiers, and Miss Bernadette to allow me to share supper with them.”

Gold made no comment on this, merely raised an eyebrow, and as if remembering something, released Grace’s arm, which he had been lightly supporting, and walked to the sideboard to retrieve a folded letter.

“A letter from your father came for you today,” he told her, offering it to her.

She took it with a smile, and threw what looked to Belle to be an impulsive hug around Gold’s chest, with a heartfelt, “Thank you,” and then pulled back, clutching the letter to her chest and withdrew almost at a run toward the door through which they’d entered, catching a hold of Belle for a moment and turning her around, almost full circle as she hugged her too. “Enjoy your dinner, Miss Belle,” she murmured as she did, and then was gone leaving Belle standing almost with her back to Mister Gold.

“She’s quite the force of nature, is she not?” Gold’s voice washed over her, like a rolling wave, deep and with a fondness that belied his upright appearance.  At his words though, Belle turned, back to him in time to see him picking something up from atop an untidy fall of papers on his desk, before he approached her, carrying it in his hands.

He came to a halt barely a step or two away, and held out a single red rose toward her.

“If you’ll have it,” he said quietly.

She smiled shyly, and reached out to take it from him, thanking him softly, before she realized she had not shown him the proper respect, and dipped into a deep and graceful curtsy. As she rose, it was to find that he returned her a low and equally respectful bow. She found herself surprised and it must have shown in her face, because he tilted his head a look of query in his eyes.

When she shook her head, uncertain what to say, nor trusting in herself to say… whatever it might have been with a steady voice, he chuckled and nodded, even as he held out his hand to her.

“Ah,” he said knowingly. “My reputation.”

She blushed more fiercely, and set her hand into his, allowing him to lead her across the room, closer to the fireplace.

“I didn’t mean…” she stammered, faltering as he shook his head again.

“No matter.”  His voice was gentle, calm and almost without inflection, but when she looked up she saw a flash of pain and anger move across his eyes, as he said, “In my position I suppose it is only to be expected.”

“Your position, Mister Gold?” she asked, frowning as they came to a stop before the warmth of the fire.

“As the Lord of this Estate,” he answered, “And the lands beyond it, I’m certain there are all kinds of unsavory rumors spread about.”

“Oh,” she said, “Oh, I don’t think—”

“Am I unreasonable?” It took her a moment to realize he was not asking the question of her, but of the rumors themselves. “No, I simply expect that my tenant farmers and laborers honor the terms of our agreements, and pay their dues on time. Everything has its price, Miss French.”

She swallowed hard, tugging her hand from his, the tone in his voice sending tendrils of ice through her blood. The rumors she’d heard said that, yes; that he was a hard, but fair task master, but there were other, darker rumors; rumors of a stranger nature, that hinted on the hidden, the occult, to use the vernacular - dark magic.

“I understand entirely, Sir,” she said.

Her words seem to waken him from his tirade, his momentary lapse of propriety, and he closed his eyes for a heartbeat before offering her a soft, sad, smile.

“Forgive me, Miss French,” he craved quietly, and after a moment or two added, “I don’t know what kind of tales you’ve heard told about me, but as you have entered into our arrangement in good faith, and though we shall be wed, as our contract agrees, I promise you, my dear, that I shall command of you, nothing, and no moment, to which you do not consent.”

She swallowed hard, blinking at him owlishly, a fierce blush rising in her cheeks and she studied him. Rumors also spoke of him as disagreeable in form, a beast with no mercy, and yet, he had shown her nothing but gallantry and kindness since her arrival, and - her blush deepened - she certainly did not find his appearance in any way offensive. Quite the contrary, in fact. His high cheek bones, his long hair and full lips, and the depth of his eyes, their deep crystalline brown, like dark amber, drew her in; made her want to be in his presence… get to know him…

“Do you understand?”

At his softly spoken question, she realized she had made no comment on his promise, and it would be expected that she should say something.

“I,” she began, unsure of how to proceed, “thank you, that is most noble of you.”

“Hardly noble,” he said, his voice dry with cynicism, “I would simply prefer you to be happy here.”

He held out his hand again then, toward her left, the one that bore his ring, and without a thought to objection she placed her chilled fingers into the warmth of his palm.

“You are free here,” he told her softly, “to come and go as you please, so long as it is safe for you to do so and you go accompanied, either by Grace, or by one of the footmen if it is outside of the grounds.”

“I understand,” she said quietly, but inside her heart was pounding. Here was a man to whom she had expected to lose all of her free will, who was offering her a freedom that she had not even enjoyed in her father’s home.

“When I entertain guests,” he went on, “I would hope that you would attend our gatherings at my side as my wife should.”

“Yes,” she agreed readily, it was only fair, and why would she not want to attend such balls and soirees as she had heard were held at Adelram Hall?

“You will oversee the household management, and provisioning of our needs, as would be expected of the Lady of Adelram Hall,” he said, and again, it was no less than she had expected, and had been schooled for as the daughter of a landowner after all.

“Got it,” she confirmed.

“Oh,” he added, as though he had just remembered something very important, his face a mask of seriousness. “And once a month, when the moon is at its peak, you will accompany me to the basement to participate in my rites of dark magic.”

She gasped audibly then and pulled away from him so suddenly that she stumbled backwards into a round table by the hearth, dislodging a china tea cup, finely decorated with pale blue flowers, sending it tumbling to the Persian rug on which the table stood.

The color drained from her, and she felt a band of panic tighten around her chest, both at his words, and for fear of the damage she had done to the tea service, and stared at him in something approaching horror, only then noticing the slight twinkle in his deep brown eyes.

“That one was a quip,” he told her, “Not serious.”

She breathed out a nervous laugh and a whispered, “Right,” before she bent down to pick up the cup, biting her lip as she noticed the chip in the rim of the cup.

“Oh, my…” she said as she lifted the cup from the rug and began to hold it up for him to see. “I’m so sorry. It’s… it’s chipped. You can hardly see it…”

He approached her slowly, carefully, as though approaching a fearful deer whom he thought might bolt, lifting the cup from her fingers and cradling it for a moment.

“It’s just a cup,” he told her softly, as though confused, or somehow testing her.

“You’re… making fun of me,” she accused softly, as he set the cup back on the tray. He turned back to her then.

“Making fun, yes,” he said, “but not of you. Never of you. Simply mocking the rumors that I’m sure you’ve heard. I too have heard the things they say. That I’m a beast; A monster that revels in dark magic.”

“I’m so… sorry,” she said as she noticed that flash of that pain again, but then like a summer shower it was gone once more, and he shook his head, smiling.

“No, the apology is mine, my lady,” he took her hand, and she gladly allowed it, “Can you ever forgive me?”

“Of course,” she said, offering a smile of her own. “No man should have to endure to have such blatant stains cast upon his character, especially as untrue as they are.”

He gave her bow over their joined hands, and asked, “May I?”  She nodded briefly, and he tenderly raised the back of her hand to his lips, to brush her skin with a soft, warm kiss that tingled over the whole of her, following the path of nerves through her body, like lightning seeking to ground.

She shivered and blushed anew as he slowly released her hand.

“Dinner will be a while,” he told her with regret. “I thought we might enjoy some music while we wait.”

“I should like that,” she answered, with a genuine smile. “Grace seemed quite taken with your gramophone.”

He chuckled then as he began to search for a record from the stack beside the player.

“Her father brought it to me,” he said quietly. “It is a treasured gift - for both of us,” he straightened up then, a disk in his hands, held carefully by the edge, and added with a smile, “For you too, I’d hope. A little Chopin, I think.”

She returned the smile, and nodded her accord, not so very well versed in the music of the classical composers to be able to recognize many, but not so ignorant either. Chopin was a favorite of hers. She couldn’t help but wonder if he somehow knew.

She closed her eyes for a moment, listening to the gentle strains of Raindrops Prelude, letting the piano sounds wash over her, until she felt a sudden heat prickle at her and wondering at it, opened her eyes to find him watching her, a quiet half smile on his face.

“Would you care to dance, Miss French?” he asked.

“Oh, I…” she began, about to refuse, but then, something inside her unfurled a little at the look of supplication on his face, and stepping toward him even before she knew what she was doing, she said, “I should like that.”

As she reached him he offered a low bow, and she responded in kind, a curtsy from which he raised her, lightly taking her into his arms, and beginning to turn with her about the open space in the Salon.

At first her hand trembled a little on his shoulder, and where their hands met she felt as if a tingling passed between them, only softly, but it made a strange feeling fizzle in her lungs, a tenderness and excitement that she would never have expected to feel from a stranger - and stranger he was, for all that he would be her husband.

Their movements matched the gentle nature of the music, the light piano tones guiding their steps, and she followed him with ease, and with delight. Then the music darkened, moving to a minor key with many crescendos. He tugged her closer, and she held fast to him. The gentle fizzle becoming an ache, a need to be subsumed by the music, by the man that held her, turned with her, pressed her close to move as one, his thighs parting hers to step, to move around the spaciousness of the room that yet did not feel large enough to contain them, and she became lost in him.

And then…

As if a dream, the power and energy that had possessed her, possessed them both, faded as the music turned again, to fall over them as the gentle patter of rain, washing them both clean, bathing them, blessing them together, and they came slowly to a stop, she breathless, and he…

“I rather fear I forgot myself,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Forgive me.”

“Nothing to forgive,” she whispered in return, and pressed a hand to his chest to feel his heart beat strong, fast, but slowing against her fingers.

Basement

Ausland grabbed a knife from the kitchen block. He descended the stairs two at a time. Wood planks creaked like the neurotic swing of a cradle, seconds after the footsteps that threw her head into the table. She panicked, she tried to hide, but there was no hesitation from him. His chest heaved after a half mile sprint. His ribs were on fire. Nettles from the trees hadn't been shaken off his arms, pine needles in his Chucks-

He didn't trust the visions pushed through his head. He wanted to believe that all this faith in her wasn't for nothing. He had to see for himself. Asclepius' warning didn't help. He swung off the handrail, crashing onto the ground floor of his basement. Whatever it was that lurched up his throat, lumpy and burning like bile, was easier to swallow than the body laying there at his feet. “It's not something I want you tangled in..." He told her. Two weeks prior was their six month anniversary. The moment was magical in every sense of the word until it wasn't. It was marred and the culprit was foreshadowing only visible in retrospect. He held onto her that night. His fingers intertwined with hers but his grip was anything but soft. Desperate, he held on like he'd lose her. "It's not something I want for us. Not when we have plans. Trust me. Trust me. Please?" The request was simple. That should have been the end of it. But she didn't call. She didn't ask. She went into the basement. What was a relationship without trust? What was a promise- twice made- if she couldn't keep it? Every blood vessel swollen from its root. Wide-eyed, he prowled over her body. She drew wispy breaths through her bangs. Blood that pooled around her head gave a slight shake like gelatin. Her phone laid cracked to her side, spinning in a slow rotation after her fall. He wanted just one sign that this was an accident. A mistake. That this can end in him sweeping her off the floor, and tending to her wound in the kitchen with a chuckle and a kiss. That stopped being probable when her phone was left unlocked. 9-1... displayed across the screen. His gut sucked in. His abdomen knocked against his spine, as a a convulsive gasp threw him onto the floor. Trust was broken, but he'd made promises to more than her. His opposite hand, one that worshiped her like a Goddess, dug into her hair. He pulled her head from the floor, hand knotted and ready to slam it back through the wood until Mia, his Mia, a self-fulfilling, ingrown parody of Orpheus and Eurydice, soaked through in the floorboards she was never supposed to touch. 'Stop.' Asclepius' said. An amalgamate of flesh and stone towered over them. It had fallen into the backdrop once its grotesque moment in the limelight was over. Ausland didn't pay it mind. Leniency wasn't available when his heart was hammering, when his pleas for her safety and his future had depended on her not doing one thing. Just one thing, the only thing he had ever asked of her. Hesitation nor opposition stopped the swing of the knife- but what pulled the momentum was clarity: his head was blank. There usually was an X. An arc, a graphic connect the dots of where he had to strike to incisively end it. Killing did not come naturally. There was no muscle memory when it wasn't extended. It was always there- but not that he could see. Her face would be cleaved at a slipshod angle. The blade would get jammed in cartilage. She'd wake, screaming and crying, steel between the eyes, and try to say something. He'd listen to a bullshit apology through a sectioned face, split lip weeping an excuse why of he should forgive- He twisted his wrist like he was pulling a rope. His hand wound in her hair so tight it stretched the skin from her skull. He could do it. He could do it. He could ignore Asclepius and finish it, but the fact of the matter set in: Their life was over. She was always on his mind. She was never not on his mind. The last six months was a break from the endless morbid monotony. She was the one. His soulmate. The fixture his future would be sculpted around, the lively ying to the third party in the room. Asclepius had his psyche mired in a warped reality, but the need for normalcy was inherently human. It was inscribed in the bones so deep years under its oppressive power hadn't yet shaken it. His whimpering bordered on incoherence. Asclepius was hardly a sympathetic ear but he had no one else. "She shouldn't be here." He broke. Nose to nose, he pulled her in, openly weeping into her unconscious cheek. The hold he had over her scalp had her eyes open- just a sliver- offering no motive. "Why? Why did you do it? I didn't want you here, Mia, I didn't-" 'Neither did I.' Asclepius said. It's exposed rib cage expanded and deflated slower now that the excitement passed. 'But am I surprised?' "You were right about her..." 'And I wish I wasn't.' His knuckles blanched around the handle. Mia laid as a blondish, pinkish blur at his knees. Motionless, she hadn't moved since he'd arrived- despite how much he wanted her to explain. How much he wanted to scream, to ask why. And how much he wanted to punch a hole through her brain when asking lead to further deception. Hatred and heartbreak were a volatile cocktail his body didn't know how to process. 'She saw the best sides of you and took advantage of it.' Asclepius narrated his thoughts. 'Boston wasn't going to happen. That future she fabricated? A pipe dream. She wanted in your head.' It said. 'And it worked. Because you are compassionate. You're a beautiful soul and she saw the idealist in you, the creative artist- but she's a manipulative parasite who takes and destroys. She was only out to corrupt everything you worked for.' He saw the cabin. The dirt road sprawled through the woods, in a sweeping view until the brush broke onto the asphalt. The highway drew a distinct line between obligation, his past, and everything else life had to offer. The City On The Hill was a fantasy. It was a bustling metropolis where he could pluck a guitar in a different hipster joint every night, singing his heart out to the captive audience of a coffee shop And she was with him. Mia was warmth. She was comfort. She was inside jokes, domestic bliss. She was inspiration, words coming to him easy in the quiet moments were fondness filled his chest cavity like helium. She'd be in the papers. A household name. He'd tell everyone on the street who he was with. He'd sing about her, she'd write about him. They'd be proud, dumb, in love, and they'd build a house together. They'd meld their styles until it produced something so distinctively theirs that they couldn't imagine life any other way. But that fantasy caught flame. Colliding with the Earth, it burned like the Hindenburg, razing along Interstate 93 and following them back to where they were now: her head in his lap, and a knife focused for her temple. Tightly wound tendons in his fingers ached. Curls wound in his palm shook loose. His grip slipped as he trembled but he couldn't hit her if he tried. "I could've run away with her. I could've ruined everything." 'Drop the knife.' "What if I had gone? What would she have done?" He swallowed, though his throat felt like ash. "You said that's what'd happen, you've been right the whole time-" 'Did you think that's what this was about? Do you think this is vindicating? Look at me.' His head- eyes red, and ringed with guilt- lifted. When he blinked back the tears, its eye focused on him. It rolled into the stone web of petrified fingers to meet his gaze. It's pupil narrowed to a pinprick. It was sympathetic, when everything human deceived. 'When you said you loved her more than me- I was not thinking about myself. I was thinking about you. You refused to see how dangerous she was. Do you understand what that's like? Watching you poison yourself? Watching you get sicker every time you looked at her, hanging off everything she said?' An ashen limb reached out. Attached at an angle too obscure to be anatomically correct, it rubbed rhythmic circles in his back. Its knuckles grazing his shuddering shoulder blade. Asclepius' presence was smothering in a way he found familial. It wanted the best for him, even if it meant tough love and everything that came along with it. 'You didn't see her scoping the house when you were 'sick.' You didn't notice the knife she left on the kitchen counter. She went for the basement on your first date and you thought it was an accident? It wasn't chance she found you- she was hunting you down.' The handle was slipping. His hands were sweating. Every good time they had disintegrated. She was subterfuge. She was lies. He was right. Down to the Superlike, she'd been playing him. She pretended to love his poetry, the art she inspired. She kissed his neck, saying all the right things and making the right moves to make her worm her way into his heart and rewire every capillary until it functioned for her. He buckled. Folding over, his torso blunted the explosive, plangent wail from his chest. He had no neighbors for miles, but his cry sent birds from the trees. "THEN WHY CAN'T I END IT?" His shoulders racked with a sob. "Why can't I end it, huh?! Why can't I cut her off, why can't sever this? She destroyed everything. She made me think we had a future- that I'd have a white picket fence. That I could have a dog, a family, a life I can put on Instagram and be proud of. Someone I could bring home to my parents. She made me think I could balance you and the American dream, that I could love you both-" Asclepius' arm crackled. Joints of a closer, separate arm that hadn't moved since rigor mortis closed around the hand holding the knife. His head buzzed with a steady command, borrowed a voice different from his own. 'Drop it.' 'Drop it.' 'Drop it.' It chanted. 'No one understands more than I do how much you're suffering.' It layered over the cadence. The rock's eye, soft without a lid to inflect, dipped low. 'I am the only one who understands. But there's more to this than what you're feeling.' 'Drop it...' 'Drop it...' "No." He swiped his eye with his shoulder. 'You will reprimand her for the breach of privacy,' It intoned. 'But you will forgive her. You will call me an art project. You'll tell her it's not done.' "You're letting her go!" He railed. "You're letting her go. Why do you want to save her? You showed me how to throw her head into a faucet. You told me to sink her in the lake every chance you got. I've seen you imagine every bone in her arm breaking, but this is where you quit?!" 'And this is the time you choose to doubt me?' It said. 'Think.' His head flooded. Memories- not of Mia, but his life. Every time fight with his parents. When his band disbanded, and every girl that broke his heart from high school to college. The degree whose chance he spoiled, Exam after exam failed, results in envelopes he shredded before opening. Asclepius was always there, ready to console and build him back from the ground-up... But this time felt different. Ausland's posture slipped, falling off his ankles and onto the floor. "I can't do this, man. I loved her." 'You can, and you will. I would never hurt you like she did. Drop the knife.' Necrotic fingernails sank into his wrist. Gently, it pressed, until his thumb slacked. The blade fell. It notched the wood, severing a curl with it. An errant, twisted ankle kicked it away. 'Good. And now...?' It provided the next step. Imagery burrowed into his head like a parasite. The guidance he craved, the resolution to this heartbreak wasn't supposed to be mercy but it was all Asclepius was offering. This request in particular was sadistic. "Why are you doing this?" He asked. "You want to talk to her?" 'Ausland...' He felt the contrasting sensations of what it was asked of him against his palm. Warm blood against stone. Asclepius had a spot picked out, lovingly offering a blank face of caprock, ripe for the taking. Blood meant he would be continuing the charade. "I loved her, man. I loved her so much..." 'I know.' It said. 'There will be time to deal with that. But trust me.' It refreshed the favor. Surrendering to the only force that'd been a constant, his hand moved. Blind, apathetic faith, he followed the direction the phantom thought laid out. Blood spilled over his fingers. His palm smeared a layer off the ground, and crosshatched it across the slate. He painted in broad strokes, splitting his own palm with the pressure. The game would go on. This time, with two players. 'This isn't the end.' Asclepius rewarded. 'The world feels like its over, but this is the start. You did the right thing.' Various limbs bristled. The red, pulsating glow from its 'chest' momentarily brightened. Ausland didn't know what it meant but he wasn't considering much of anything. Pent up rage and sorrow receded. In its place was a numbness, a coping mechanism, so when she opened her eyes she wasn't staring abject homicidal intent in the face. 'She's waking. Wipe your hand. Straighten up. You're a concerned boyfriend. You want to know how she hit her head. You were so scared. You were crying because you were worried. I will handle the rest.'

🌸 — for mary

Send 🌸 for three things my muse likes about yours.

1. That’s she’s genuinely intelligent. 

“She’s intelligent, and I don’t just mean she’s smart enough to read books and...pass on some level of knowledge to the idiotic student body of Baxter High. I mean real and actual intelligence, the ability to read, research and then...interpret, apply it, in her own unique way. Mary thinks for herself, without having the world tell her what she should be thinking. When she has a conversation, it’s not simply...regurgitating facts. They’re her own conclusions, opinions...and they’re usually surprisingly insightful”

2. Her sexual choices/her relationship choices 

“Perhaps by the standards of mortal society, and, for that matter even many witch societies too, Mary isn’t...exactly the norm, she doesn’t really follow the...expectations for a woman of her age, and appearance. Yet, she hasn’t let that push her into something she doesn’t want. That’s something that’s shockingly rare...even in Hell. Mary is a virgin, yes, and at her age, the world would be quick to condemn her for that, mock her, label her....it would be easier I’m sure if she’d consummated relationships, gotten married...all before she was ready, simply because society demanded it. But she hasn’t allowed herself to be forced to...submit. She’s kept her choices, her freedom”

3.  Her sense of style

“There were things in her wardrobe that were...discarded to the back of the cupboard and others that were...altered, yes, but for the most part there wasn’t much I had to add. But as for her home and her office....the painting, the fixtures, the books and colours, the mirrors, in fact her entire aesthetic wasn’t something I had to change at all. It’s....different, something that rests between worlds, dark and light, twisted and normal, grotesque and beautiful....I really love it. Personally, I think it shows there’s more layers to Mary Wardwell than most people choose to see. She’s not quite as...predictable as others think she is. She doesn’t really fit in a box”

@unofficialhistcrian

Highlighted Excerpts from Miranda July’s “The First Bad Man”  5 STARS, absolutely loved this book, it literally changed my life.

The NPR book review: 

This cataloging of unglamorous inner life could be grotesque (and sometimes is) but there is something hugely generous about it. Writing about sex is a particular skill of July's — it is beautiful but real, not rapturous or misty or scene-lit.

Her humor comes from a careful literalness: a dragging out of the truth, and placing it in startling juxtaposition with the surface of things.

Quotes and highlights below. Expand to read.

YOUR KINDLE NOTES FOR: The First Bad Man: A Novel

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 7

“When in doubt, give a shout!” “Excuse me?” “I’m here for you. When in doubt, just give me a shout.” What silence. Giant domed cathedrals never held so much emptiness. He cleared his throat. It echoed, bouncing around the dome, startling pigeons. “Cheryl?” “Yes?” “I think I should go.” I didn’t say anything. He would have to step over my dead body to get off the phone. “Goodbye,” he said, and then, after a pause, he hung up.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 19

Once Carl had called me ginjo, which I thought meant “sister” until he told me it’s Japanese for a man, usually an elderly man, who lives in isolation while he keeps the fire burning for the whole village. “In the old myths he burns his clothes and then his bones to keep it going,” Carl said. I made myself very still so he would continue; I love to be described.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 22

As I walked to the door the map of the world detached from the wall and slid noisily to the floor. Not necessarily an indicator of anything.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 28

He was nervous—men are always sure they’ll be accused of some horrific crime after they talk about feelings.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 40

“Does it feel like we’ve known each other for longer than we really have?” “Kind of.” I could tell him or I could not tell him. I decided to tell him. “Maybe there’s a reason for that,” I ventured. “Okay.” He blew his nose again. “Do you know what it is?” “Give me a hint.” “A hint. Let’s see . . . actually, I can’t. There are no little parts to it, it’s all big.” I took a deep breath and shut my eyes. “I see a rocky tundra and a crouched figure with apelike features who resembles me. She’s fashioned a pouch out of animal gut and now she’s giving it to her mate, a strong, hairy pre-man who looks a lot like you. He moves his thick finger around in the pouch and fishes out a colorful rock. Her gift to him. Do you see where I’m going?” “Kind of? In that I see you’re talking about cavemen who look like us.” “Who are us.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 43

“She’s big-boned,” I said. “A lot of men think that’s attractive.” “Sure, a woman with that kind of body has a fat store that allows her to make milk for her young even if her husband isn’t able to bring meat home. I feel confident about my ability to bring meat home.” The words milk and fat store and meat had fogged up the windows faster than leaner words would have. We were in a sort of creamy cloud.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 44

“You’re the female me.” My heart started swooping around, like it was hanging on a long rope.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 45

I must have sat across from him at a hundred meetings of the board, but I had never let myself really study his face. It was like knowing what the moon looks like without ever stopping to find the man in it.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 47

His hand had a heat and weight that only real hands do. A hundred imaginary hands would never be this warm.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 53

This was probably the sign of a good therapist, seeming familiar to everyone.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 59

At the Ethiopian restaurant I requested a fork. They explained that I had to use my hands, so I asked for it to go, got a fork at Starbucks, and sat in my car. But my throat wouldn’t accept even this very soft meal. I put it on the curb for a homeless person. An Ethiopian homeless person would be especially delighted. What a heartbreaking thought, encountering your native food in this way.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 64

Our relationship is much more powerful and moving to me if we don’t compact our energy into our genitals.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 67

It’s one of those things that seems like a drag at first and then becomes second nature, until not doing it feels rude, almost aggressive.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 70

Suddenly it occurred to me that nothing might be happening. I’d done that before. I had added meaningful layers to things that were meaningless many, many times before.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 72

We’d been prehistoric together, medieval, king and queen—now we were this. It was all part of the answer to his question What keeps us coming back? He wasn’t done with me, and I wasn’t done with him.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 80

When she shoved me against my own desk I head-butted her and everyone else who wasn’t capable of understanding how nuanced I was.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 81

My eyes fell on the gray linoleum floor and I wondered how many other women had sat on this toilet and stared at this floor. Each of them the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someone to put their love into so they could see their love, see that they had it.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 82

I ate a pastry made out of white flour and refined sugar and watched the couple next to me feed each other bites of omelet. It was hard to believe they played adult games but most likely they did, probably with their coworkers or relatives. What were other people’s like? Perhaps some mothers and fathers pretended to be their children’s children and made messes. Or a widow might sometimes become her own deceased husband and demand retribution from everyone. It was all very personal; nobody’s game made any sense to anyone else. I watched seemingly dull men and women zooming past in cars. I doubted they all had written contracts like Ruth-Anne, but some did. Some probably had multiple contracts. Some contracts had been voided or transferred. People were having a good time out here, me included.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 83

This is nothing. We’ve seen fire and we’ve seen rain, I’d reply, quoting the song.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 85

Before every raw impulse there was a pause—I saw us through the homeless gardener’s eyes and felt obscene. Being outside society, he didn’t know about adult games; he was like me before I met Ruth-Anne, thinking everything that happened in life was real.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 90

Any two foes can fight in anger, but this was something rare. I was reminded of the Christmas Day soccer game between enemies in World War I or II. She still repulsed me, I’d still shoot her in battle the next day, but until dawn we’d play this game.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 92

Laughing like friends always emphasized that we weren’t. This wasn’t real like the laughing she did at home.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 92

“So what if it’s real for her?” she said, suddenly dropping her hands. “Real comes and goes and isn’t very interesting.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 103

The noise shook everything out of my head. What a magical way to get around. I’d always thought of these types of machines as toys for uneducated people who didn’t care about the environment, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe this was a kind of meditation. I felt connected to everything and the motor volume held me at a level of alertness I wasn’t used to. I kept waking up and then waking up from that, and then waking up even more. Was everything redneck actually mystical?

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 113

HER COWLIKE VACUOUSNESS DIDN’T REALLY bother me anymore. Or it didn’t matter—her personality was just a little piece of parsley decorating warm tawny haunches.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 114

She furrowed her brow and looked at the V my fingers were making. I had no idea what I was doing.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 120

It wasn’t really an appropriate card for a young girl; a group of rough-looking birds in rakish hats were playing cards with cigars in their beaks. It said something I can’t remember, but on the inside was a phrase like a virus or a self-replicating parasite waiting for a host. When I opened the card it flew out, gripping my brain with merciless talons: “Birds of a feather flock together.” It couldn’t be said just once, only repeated and repeated and repeated.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 123

It sort of worked. It wasn’t like saying abracadabra to make a rabbit disappear, poof. It was like saying abracadabra billions of times, saying it for years, until the rabbit died of old age, and then continuing to say it until the rabbit had completely decomposed and been absorbed into the earth, poof.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 125

Of course the point of being on the board was to be near him, but taking his place was interesting too. Almost better. For the first time I understood cigars and the urge to light one up and lean back.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 128

She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 130

A cool breeze moved past and I knew how nice that must feel on his sweaty face, but that was all. I didn’t know how anything else would feel to him.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 131

We listened to the squeals change as the animal approached death; the pitch had entered the human register, every exertion contained a familiar vowel. If words began to form then I would go out there and break it up. Words, even crudely formed ones, would change the game entirely.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 145

“Do you really think it’s necessary?” “Necessary? No. All that’s necessary is that you eat enough to survive.  Highlight (Yellow) | Page 147

I could see it so clearly, the zygote—shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 148

All these years I’d been looking for a friend, but Suzanne didn’t need a friend. A rival, though—that got her attention.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 148

When the meeting adjourned we both went to the staff kitchen and made cups of tea in silence. I waited for her to begin the conversation. I sipped. She sipped. After a while I realized this was the conversation; we were having it. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 151

But eventually she wanted it more than he did, and this made her lower than him. There was no way to knock down a woman who was already lying on the ground.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 152

He walked to the elevator. He pressed the button and we both listened, my therapist and I, and waited for this part to be over—the part where he had already left but was still with us. 

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“This is the worst you’ll ever feel.” “Ever?” “Well, maybe not ever in your whole life. We don’t know how you’re going to die—that might be worse.” I had veered off course. I put my face right in front of hers. “You can do this,” I said.

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A bag of blood was rushed in; it was from San Diego. I’d been to the zoo there once. I imagined the blood being pulled out of a muscled zebra. This was good—humans were always withering away from heartbreak and pneumonia, animal blood would be much tougher, live, live, live.

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Her braids lay on her chest and she looked leaden with sorrow, like a picture from the Dust Bowl. You just knew her whole life was going to be hard, every second of it.

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After a long time, ten or fifteen minutes, the kissing slowed. There were a series of closing kisses, goodbye kisses, kisses placed like lids on boxes—then the lid would pop off and need to be replaced. There, this is the final kiss—no, this is the final kiss. This one is, it really is. And now I’m just kissing that kiss good night.

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Soft was the wrong word. Satiny? Supple? A new word, I would come up with it right now—which letters would I use? S, for sure. Maybe an O. Was this how words were made? How would I announce the word? Who would I contact about that?

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followed the doctor across the room. I yearned for a lawyer and the right to make a phone call. But those rights were for arrested people. We got nothing. Whatever he told me would be the new reality and we’d just have to accept

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They belonged here, both of them equally, as did the nurses and the doctors and Clee. None of them recognized the interloper among them, but they would soon. I’d gotten swept up in the drama of the situation and mistakenly involved myself.

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Almost! I said. There was no good way to be, so I was being cavalier, lancing my own heart. We came pretty close. See you next time!

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The last of her crying came out in a clotted sigh after the first kiss.

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We began a series of impatiently off-center ones, as if we were too hurried to land them properly; then our mouths became fingertips, moving blindly over the bumps and hollows of each feature.

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It was like a dream, where the most unlikely person can’t get enough of you—a movie star or someone’s husband. How can this be? But the attraction is mutual and undeniable; it is the reason for itself. And like a surprise on the moon or a surprise on the battlefield, astonishment was native to these parts.

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They were terrible people, even slightly worse than most.

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Should I introduce myself or try to kill them? Not violently, just enough that they wouldn’t exist.

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Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?

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WOKE WITH A START like a passenger on an airplane—for a moment I could feel how high I was and had an appropriate terror of falling.

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A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling.

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Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one. It just feels good all over. It’s like wearing something beautiful and eating something delicious at the same time, all the time.

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“Can the writing be a little more fun?” she said. “You mean a different font?” “Maybe.” I put everything in chubby cartoon letters as a joke. “That looks good,” she said. She was right. The cartoon letters had a love of life in them, and wasn’t that what we were celebrating here?

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Suzanne fired him on the spot—her face shaking with regret about things she had not nipped while they were still in the bud.

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Clee held me from behind and our bodies interlocked like two Ss. “Not many people could do this,” I said, squeezing her arms. “Everyone does this.” “But not fitting together so perfectly the way we do.” “Any two people can do it.”

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I didn’t bathe him because I was too afraid he would slip out of my hands or his belly button would open. Then one night I woke at three A.M. certain he was rotting like a chicken carcass. Only as I lowered him into the sink did I realize this was a crazy time to wash a baby and I began to cry because he was so trusting—I could do anything and he would go along with it, the little fool.

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Clee asked if he could see in the dark like a cat and I said yes. Later I caught my mistake but it was five A.M. and she was asleep. The next day I forgot. Each day I forgot to tell her he couldn’t see in the dark like a cat and each night I remembered, with increasing urgency. What if this continued for years and I never told her? My body was so tired that it often floated next to me or above me, and I had to reel it in like a kite. Finally one night I wrote “He can’t see in the dark” on a slip of paper and put it by her sleeping face. “What’s this?” Clee asked the next day, holding the slip. “Oh, thank God, yes. Jack can’t see in the dark like a cat.” “I know.” Suddenly I was unsure how this had begun. Maybe she had never asked. I dropped the subject with dark thoughts about my own mind.

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But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway.

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If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?

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I began to understand that the sleeplessness and vigilance and constant feedings were a form of brainwashing, a process by which my old self was being molded, slowly but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mother. It hurt. I tried to be conscious while it happened, like watching my own surgery. I hoped to retain a tiny corner of the old me, just enough to warn other women with. But I knew this was unlikely; when the process was complete I wouldn’t have anything left to complain with, it wouldn’t hurt anymore, I wouldn’t remember.

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After smiling came laughing, then rolling over. The days and nights began to unwarp; three A.M. became an ordinary time. The first few months were hard for all new parents, a test, really—and we had passed!

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For the first time in my life I understood TV, why everyone watched it. It helped. Not in the long run, of course, but minute by minute.

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what it felt like to be a mother, to be terrifyingly in love without the option of getting off.

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It must happen all the time, a fleeting passion overwhelms someone’s true course and there’s nothing to be done about it.

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one lone voice in an infinite cathedral, climbing and echoing and praising. The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of this life, even for the agony.

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Rainbows are alone; they’re the only thing like that. The crystal began to wind the other way, sending the bright fleet back across his body. I could tell he didn’t believe me; it did seem unlikely. I racked my brain for others of the species. Reflections, shadows, smoke—these things were morose and distant cousins at best.

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I cleared my throat. “I love you.” His head shook with surprise. My voice was low and formal; I sounded like a wooden father from the 1800s. I continued. “You are a sweet potato.” This sounded literal, as if I was letting him know he was a root vegetable, a tuber. “You’re a baby,” I added, just in case there was any confusion on that last point.

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we had only spent a few hours a day in the NICU with him. That wasn’t enough. It was enough for us at the time, but now it haunted me. Twenty hours a day he’d lain there alone. There would be other unpardonable crimes, I could feel them coming—things that in retrospect would become my greatest regrets.

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Ruth-Anne, I would say, can we put the past behind us? Better not to phrase it as a question. The past is behind us. That was good. Who could argue with that?

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It was like being accused of a crime committed in a dream.

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As she looked up at him her whole bearing shifted; she became luminous. Not with the light of life, but like a husk lit electrically from within.

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Just his name on a piece of paper could set her off. Even a word like Broyard—barnyard, backyard—sent her into an exhausted loop of fantasies. Everything else in her life, including her own therapy practice, was faked. The spell consumed 95 percent of her energy but she was surprised to see that no one noticed; the wafer-thin 5 percent version of her sufficed.

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Something strange was happening with Ruth-Anne. It didn’t seem good.

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Each word he said was boring, but collectively the melody of them lulled me.

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I tried to resist, but just the weight of him, in pounds and ounces, was a relief. Always being the heaviest person in the house had been exhausting.

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“Of course I’m here for you,” I said. It was a relief; being angry at him was hard work.

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I’m the woman who just told her her feet smell; I could still see her enormous smile and how it fell.