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alarawriting · 4 years

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52 Project #27: The Pale Bro

Five friends drove up the mountain into the forest, where the vacation cabin waited for them. It was their senior year of college, so it wouldn’t be long before they’d be graduating and going their separate ways, and who knew when they’d all be able to hang out together again? So they’d decided that this year, instead of going on spring break someplace where there were a ton of other people, they’d spend break together in a cabin in the woods, because there was no possible way that that could go wrong.

They were just five totally ordinary college guys. Steve, a white dude with brown hair who loved video games and playing guitar; Trevor, a black dude with short hair who was on track to graduate magna cum laude and had already been accepted at a top medical school; Harrison, an outgoing, short, red-haired white dude who played soccer, but not, like, at career athlete level or anything; Evan, an Asian dude who kept his hair in a long ponytail, and whose family owned the cabin, who was planning on taking a year off after graduation to backpack around Asia and had sold it to his parents as an exploration of his heritage; and the Pale Bro, a twelve-foot tall dude with paper-white skin whose fingernails were like long razor blades and who was completely covered with eyes and mouths, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cut-off shorts that would have been nearly pants on any other guy, and a pair of Vans on his feet. Just five ordinary young fellows, like anyone you might know.

Steve was driving the minivan, kinda wishing it was his dad’s SUV because of the effort of getting a minivan up the slope, but his dad’s SUV was in a different state and besides, it wouldn’t have had room for the Pale Bro. The minivan was the kind where you could put down the back row of seats to expand the cargo capacity, and the Pale Bro had laid out a thick sleeping-bag style blanket on top of their suitcases and was laying on them now, curled sideways because there was no dimension where he could stretch out in the van. Must be rough for him, Steve imagined, always having to bend down or curl up to fit into buildings and vehicles with his bros. He never complained about it, though. He was a great friend.

“How much farther is this place?” Harrison asked. “I gotta piss like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’ve been unfortunately next to you at the urinals,” Trevor said. “I’d believe it.”

Steve checked the GPS. “Shit. The GPS has just decided to get the vapors because it’s up too high. It’s telling me I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, look at this.” He showed the screen to Evan. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t even drawing the road.”

“Don’t worry about it, I can guide you in from here,” Evan said. “Just stay on the road another 20 minutes or so.”

With a voice that rumbled like the sound of tectonic plates grinding together and the hiss of static from the birth of the universe behind it, the Pale Bro conveyed that there had better be some fucking food at the cabin, because he was starving.

“You and me both, buddy,” Trevor said.

“We all just got Burger King like, two hours ago,” Steve complained.

“Yeah, well, me and Pale are tall dudes. We need more food than you.” Trevor smirked.

“There should be food, I had a grocery delivery scheduled for earlier today and one of my parents’ employees was supposed to swing by the place, pick it up and put it in the fridge.”

“There’s a fridge at this cabin?” Harrison asked.

Evan looked at him. “Yeah, dumbass, you think I’d have suggested coming here if there was no fridge? There’s running water, too. It even gets hot if you run it long enough.”

“Well, excuse me for not being so rich I can afford to go to a cabin in the woods, ever, before now.”

“What else has it got?” Trevor asked.

“Well, there’s three bedrooms, one of which has a king-sized bed and the other two have bunk beds. I figure, Pale Bro gets the big bed and we break up into two’s and do the roommate thing. There’s a sofa bed too, in case someone really can’t stand having a roommate. We don’t have a washer or dryer, but if you only brought one pair of underpants and it’s getting really rank, we’ve got detergent and a clothesline so you can wash them in the sink. There’s a dishwasher.”

“I would have put in a washer and dryer before I put in a dishwasher, personally,” Steve said.

“Yeah, well, my mom had a different opinion. Anyway, it’s camping in the woods. It’s not supposed to be just like if we were at home.”

“I call top bunk!” Harrison said.

“There’s two top bunks. Both rooms have bunk beds.”

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice like a Gregorian chant of nightmares that he wanted to know if there was a bathroom in the master bedroom, because that shit would be sweet.

“Naah, man, sorry,” Evan said. “But there is one of those really deep claw-foot bathtubs that you like.”

Like the rumbling of an oncoming avalanche, the Pale Bro opined that that was excellent.

***

“I don’t believe this shit.”

They had just disembarked, the Pale Bro in the rear bringing his own suitcase and the beer cooler, which was the size of a mini-fridge, and everyone else dragging their suitcases in… except for Evan, who had gone directly to the kitchen without bringing in his own stuff yet. He came stomping out. “Joe never showed up, the bastard! I’m totally having my dad fire his ass.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked.

“I mean that food order never showed up. So we have canned food, and boxed food, but we don’t have anything perishable. No bread, no lunchmeat, no eggs, no bacon, no orange juice, none of that shit.” He sighed. “I’m gonna have to drive down into town myself to get food, and we just got here.”

“Hey, man, I can still drive the car,” Steve said. “You just need to tell me where to go.”

“Steve, you’ve been driving for 6 hours, you’re probably wiped. I can drive,” Trevor said. “It’s the least I could do with Evan buying our food.”

“Yeah, but you bought the beer, man,” Evan said. “So maybe Harrison needs to drive.”

“Uh, hey, before anyone drives anywhere, maybe you should call and find out if your parents even know where that Joe guy who never showed up is, and if he’s all right?” Harrison called from outside.

“Why?”

“Just… everyone come take a look at this!”

Everyone went outside and congregated around Harrison’s find, which was a roughly humanoid, but clawed, tread that was at least three times the size of a normal footprint. Experimentally the Pale Bro put his own massive foot into the tread. Harrison whistled. The footprint was about 25% bigger than the Pale Bro’s.

“Dude. What is that? Is that a bear?” Harrison asked.

Trevor shook his head. “Those are sneaker treads, Har. Bears don’t wear sneakers.”

In a voice that was the perfect auditory personification of the Zalgo font, the Pale Bro suggested that it looked like one of his cousins was back on its bullshit again.

“Goddamn,” Evan said. “That’s a big fellow.”

“I think maybe if we go into town we should all go,” Steve said.

“We’ve just been driving all this time, though,” Evan said. “I wanted to relax, crack a cold one, put on some MP3s. We don’t get Internet worth shit out here but I’ve got a huge music library on the stereo’s hard drive.”

The Pale Bro opined that before anyone drove anywhere, maybe he had better find his cousin and make it clear that if his cousin touched any of his friends he would shove its head so far up its ass it would be blinking shit out of its 27 eyes for a month.

“That… sounds reasonable,” Trevor said. “Since we don’t know what happened to Joe. We can hunker down here and wait for you to get back.”

“I’m pretty sure I got instant just add water pancake mix,” Evan said. “And my mom stocked this place with crappy dehydrated chicken pieces like the kind doomsday preppers buy. I could make a shitty chicken soup, we’ve got bouillon and noodles. Oh, and there’s a few cans of chili. Canned stuff is shit but I could maybe perk it up with some spices, some extra beans… put some rice in the cooker, I bet my mom left rice here, she buys like 100 pound bags of rice.”

Like the sound of Jupiter hovering in orbit above, rotating ponderously, the Pale Bro agreed that some canned chili with extra spices sounded pretty good considering how fucking hungry he was, and as soon as he found his asshole cousin he’d be back to eat with the rest of his bros. He also reminded them to save him some beer.

“Dude!” Steve laughed. “We’ve got three keggers’ worth in that cooler! There will be plenty of beer for you.”

Evan called his parents as the Pale Bro left the house, and reported back, somewhat gray-faced. “They said Joe never called in to say he got to the house. He reported picking up the groceries, he was headed up here, and then nada.”

“Oh, well, then, you work on the chili,” Trevor said, “and me and the rest of the guys are gonna lock up all the windows and doors and put someone on watch for when the Pale Bro gets back. You don’t have any guns up here, by any chance, do you?”

“Nope, my parents aren’t really hunters,” Evan said.

“Well, I’ve seen your kitchen at home, I know what kind of equipment your mom likes to stock. We’ll have plenty of sharp knives, I’m betting.”

“Yeah.”

And so as Evan attempted to turn six cans of canned chili into something his bros would find edible, and the Pale Bro stalked through the forest on the mountaintop looking for his asshole cousin, the other three made sure everything was locked up, that the car keys were secure, and that there were wicked cooking knives within easy reach, but not line of sight from the outside, of every door. Just like ordinary bros do, every day.

***

The Pale Bro stalked through the woods. Now, you’d think that being twelve feet tall and having a foot easily the size of a car tire’s diameter would make it hard to walk through a thickly wooded forest with plenty of underbrush, but the Bro’s long, skinny arms and legs could easily step over bushes and shrubs, and could pivot in directions that didn’t seem to quite exist within three-dimensional space. So he had very little difficulty making his way through the dense forest.

In the beginning, he was tracking the large treads that may or may not have been left by his asshole cousin, but the trail disappeared as it crossed a small creek. In a tone that sounded like the anthropomorphic personification of the trumpets of Jericho, the Pale Bro groaned, recognizing that he’d lost the trail and would have to search for it.

And so he went up the creek, and down the creek, and out from the creek, and up the trees around the creek, looking for any sign of his cousin… until he heard, in the distance, human voices.

Human female voices.

He stumbled through the woods, suddenly much clumsier than he’d been, following the sound of girls, until he half-fell out of the treeline and ended up in a clearing around another cabin, like Evan’s but bigger. The sounds were coming from around the corner of the cabin. The Pale Bro slid forward, long long legs making long long strides through the yard around the cabin, until a hot tub with a wooden deck came into view. The hot tub was on, and populated by five smokin’ hot girls.

There was a fair-skinned blonde girl, in a skimpy blue bikini that showed off all her curves, whose wavy hair floated angel-like around her head, improbably given that she was in a hot tub. There was a short, delicate black girl with hair in very wet braids and a soft, beautiful face, wearing a candy pink bikini. There was an Indian girl with long hair and an athletic build, with a red bindi mark on her forehead and a pale turquoise one-piece bathing suit with a little skirt, sitting on the deck and kicking her feet slowly in the water. A red-haired white girl with tan Mediterranean skin, tight curls, and a bright white bikini that stood out against her tan, had turned away from the tub and was looking directly at the Pale Bro, a slight smile on her face. The fifth girl was green and scaly, with webbed hands and golden eyes with nictating membranes; she didn’t have hair, but she had betta-like, beautifully colored fins on her head that looked hair-like.

All of them were absolutely gorgeous.

The blonde girl shrieked and ducked into the tub; the black girl bounced and climbed out of the tub, a big grin on her face. “Hi there, stranger!” she yelled from the rail around the deck. “Why don’t you come over and have a beer with us?”

The Pale Bro admitted in a tone like the creaking of an ancient rusted machine at the base of an abandoned windmill that that sounded awesome.

The green girl rolled her eyes. The Indian girl gave the black girl a questioning look. “Are you sure, Kayla?”

“Come on, Nandi,” the red-haired girl said. “I think he’s cute.”

The blonde girl came back up. “Are you inviting him over?” she asked, sounding horrified. “What if he’s a psycho killer?”

“Oh, right,” the green girl said. “He’s pale and tall and has eyes all over his body so he must be a psycho killer. Racist much?”

“No! He’s just a strange dude, that’s all! You have to watch out for strange dudes!”

The Pale Bro explained in the voice of a broken subwoofer booming at outdoor concert sound levels underwater that he didn’t really want to scare any of the girls and he’d go if they didn’t want him here.

The green girl leaned her elbows on the edge of the hot tub. “Forget Ashlee, she’s just paranoid.”

“You didn’t want him coming over either, Y’lehna,” Nandi said quietly.

“I just knew that if Kayla invited him over, we’re gonna lose Rhiannon for the rest of the night,” Y’lehna muttered.

The red-haired girl, presumably Rhiannon, was smiling broadly at the Pale Bro now. “Hey there,” she said. “We’ve got hard cider and hard lemonade, Bud, Corona and a couple of local microbrews. What’s your pleasure?”

In a voice that was actually surprisingly normal-sounding for once, the Pale Bro said he’d have whatever Rhiannon was having, which turned out to be hard cider.

He clambered up onto the hot tub deck, pulled off his sneakers, and soaked his feet in the hot tub, which barely came up to his knees.

“So what are you doing around here? You don’t live near here, do you?” Kayla asked.

And so the Pale Bro explained that he and his bros had decided to spend their last spring break of college together, in a cabin in the woods, because once graduation came they might never see each other again, and certainly even if they made excuses to get together on occasion, they’d see each other a lot less.

“That’s so sweet!” Kayla said.

“We’re juniors,” Rhiannon said. “Except Ashlee, she’s a sophomore, and Y’lehna’s technically a senior but she’s planning on doing a fifth year. But we decided to hang out here because Ashlee’s parents just put in a hot tub.”

“Hot tub!” Kayla sang out, and slid back into the tub. She was maybe just a little bit drunk.

As it turned out, they all went to the same university, and Y’lehna and the Pale Bro chatted for a bit about sports. “I tried out for the swim team,” Y’lehna said, “but when they found out I had gills, they disqualified me because apparently part of the point of the sport is that you are only allowed to breathe gaseous oxygen?”

The Pale Bro commiserated, as he hadn’t even tried trying out for the basketball team like he had once dreamed of, realizing that they would never allow someone who was taller than the hoop to play.

***

“I don’t know, though,” Ashlee, who had warmed up to the Pale Bro once another hard lemonade was in her hand, said. She was lying in a deck chair rather than in the tub. “Normally I love this place, and the tub’s great, but something just feels really creepy today.”

“You’ve been on edge since we got here,” Nandi – whose full name turned out to be Nandini, but she insisted that the Pale Bro should use her nickname – agreed.

The Pale Bro was thus reminded that his bros were expecting him to track down what might be a killer who may or may not have murdered Joe, the guy who was supposed to bring in the groceries, and also that he was very hungry and the hard cider wasn’t doing him any favors on an empty stomach. He pulled his feet out of the tub and confessed, in a voice like the grinding of the gears of the machinery that runs the universe, that his bros had sent him out to find a monster – he didn’t mention that the monster was probably his cousin – who might have killed someone, and also that dinner was waiting for him back at the cabin.

“Oh, you should bring them over!” Kayla said cheerfully.

“Are they all like you?” Rhiannon asked in a tone that might be considered “sultry” by anyone not as oblivious as the Pale Bro.

The Pale Bro shook his head and admitted that his bros were all much shorter than he was.

Rhiannon put a hand on his arm. “Well, that’s too bad, but I guess one handsome, tall fellow in a group is all I can expect, right?”

The Pale Bro looked at Rhiannon’s hand like it was an inexplicable glob that might be ice cream and possibly should be washed off, but equally possibly should be licked up.

Y’lehna said, “Why don’t you bring them over? They might be cute.”

“Yeah,” Nandi said, “we can’t all fit in the hot tub at once, but didn’t you say you had four friends back at your cabin?”

“That makes five,” Ashlee said, “and there’s five of us!”

“Also,” Nandi said, “we’ve still got, like, five pizzas in the house.”

This made the decision for the Pale Bro. He took the girls up on their offer of a couple of slices of pizza – they were cold, but he didn’t mind – and then headed back to the cabin to let his bros know about the girls’ offer.

***

The Pale Bro knocked on the window of the cabin, which apparently gave everyone inside heart attacks, even though he’d just meant to warn them to open the door for him. “Jesus, Pale,” Evan complained. “There’s a door.”

Within a few minutes – and after dropping his hard cider bottle in the recycling bin, because Evan’s family were big on recycling and the Pale Bro wanted to be polite – he had explained the situation to his bros.

“Let me get this straight,” Evan said. “You didn’t find any sign of Joe, you didn’t find your cousin or any other kind of monster or killer, and you want us to leave and go hiking through the woods to go hang out at a cabin full of strangers?”

When Evan phrased it that way, the Pale Bro admitted that it didn’t sound like a great idea, but on the other hand, there were five incredibly hot girls, plus a hot tub, plus pizza.

“Now let’s talk about this,” Trevor said. “Has anyone considered that if there’s really a psycho killer or a monster loose in the woods, those five girls might be in a lot more danger than we are? Maybe we should go over there to help protect them.”

“Yeah! And we could bring some of our beers, and Evan’s chili and rice—” Harrison suggested.

“Fuck no, I’m not making anybody else have to eat this chili,” Evan said. “It’s shit. It’s just the best I could do with the supplies I’ve got.” He sighed. “Too bad I can’t bring my tunes.”

“We need to be careful about locking everything up,” Steve said. “We really don’t want to come home tomorrow morning and find the psycho killer waiting for us here.”

“Or a gaggle of rabid raccoons,” Evan said. “That’s a thing around here.”

“Did any of you guys bring condoms?” Harrison asked. “Because I didn’t think we’d be seeing any action this weekend, so I didn’t bring any…”

Trevor chuckled. “We haven’t even met these girls, Har. Aren’t you jumping the gun a little?”

“Hey, I like to be prepared.”

“I’ve got a handful in my wallet, but I don’t think I’ve got five of them,” Steve said.

The Pale Bro pointed out with laughter like the rolling of thunder in a distant cavern that probably none of Steve’s condoms would fit him anyhow, so it would be fine.

“You don’t have to eat that chili, man,” Evan said, observing that the Pale Bro had dumped half a rice cooker’s worth of rice onto a plate and then all the rest of the chili that the other bros hadn’t eaten on top of that, and was currently chowing down. “It’s shit. I admit it. And you said you had some pizza.”

The Pale Bro declared that he was too hungry to care what it tasted like, that two slices of pizza weren’t nearly enough, and besides, it tasted fine to him.

So the five bros armed themselves with the sharp knives from Evan’s mom’s kitchen just in case they ran into a psycho killer along the way, locked all the doors and windows to the cabin and the doors to the car, and the Pale Bro carried the beer cooler as he led the way back to the house with the five hot girls.

***

It wasn’t particularly easy for the Pale Bro to retrace his steps through the woods; it’d been just short of sunset when he’d found the girls, and now it was full dark. His myriad eyes could see well in the dark, of course, but his bros couldn’t, so he had to watch out for them, and they were also a lot less flexible, and tall, than he was. Also, he hadn’t been toting a beer cooler the last time he came through here.

It didn’t help that his bros were very jumpy, freaking every time a night bird called or a twig broke loudly. The Pale Bro got it, he did – there might be a psycho killer in the woods, or a monster, or his cousin who was also a monster, and they couldn’t see as well as he could, or defend themselves. But this was just ridiculous. In a voice that was an auditory personification of the concept of dread, he suggested that they stop being such big pussies and concentrate on not tripping before they accidentally stabbed each other trying to brandish knives at random bushes.

“Yo, man, we can’t all be twelve feet tall,” Harrison said, sounding pissed but also still really anxious.

In a voice that was best described by some kind of metaphor implying a deep and scary sound that hopefully hasn’t been used already in this story, the Pale Bro offered to give Harrison a piggyback ride.

Trevor said, “Not in the middle of trees, man, you’d brain him. Walk right into a tree branch and knock him off.”

“Yeah, I gotta turn that down,” Harrison said.

“You smell that?” Steve said. “Smells like someone’s firing up a grill somewhere. I can smell the charcoal.”

“Did the girls have a grill?” Trevor asked.

The Pale Bro admitted that to the best of his knowledge, they did not, but on the other hand they had Hawaiian pizza. This, of course, triggered the old argument, where Steve and Harrison insisted that pineapple did not belong on pizza, and Evan and the Pale Bro insisted that pineapple on pizza was quite valid. The argument continued, with Trevor’s exhortations to show some common sense and save the argument until they were not walking through a dark forest that might contain a psycho killer going unheeded, until Steve accidentally fell in the creek because he couldn’t see it, and in the process lost one of Evan’s mom’s good cooking knives.

However, the Pale Bro mused, this was a potentially good sign because he’d found the girls while walking alongside the creek. So the bros walked alongside the creek, Steve muttering that these girls had better be hot after all this, until they heard the sound of female human voices, exactly like the Pale Bro had had before.

They entered the clearing, observed the very large cabin, Evan making comments like “I bet it’s a bitch to keep clean, ten to one that thing’s not sanitary” because he was jealous that the cabin was bigger than his family’s, and then around the corner to observe the very hot girls, who were all still very hot even though some of them had pizza sauce smeared around their lips.

“Well, hell-o, ladies!” Harrison said, trying to be suave and cool, and failing miserably.

The Pale Bro wondered, in the voice like the echoes of a rockslide in a canyon, if there was any of the pineapple pizza left, because unfortunately he was still hungry. He gestured at his very large body somewhat self-deprecatingly.

“Hi, guys!” Kayla, who was obviously the group’s ambassador to guests, said, with possibly more bubbliness in her voice than was currently in the hot tub. “I’m Kayla, and this is Nandini, and over there in the blue bikini is Ashlee, whose cabin this is – I mean, really it’s her family’s cabin—”

“I get it,” Evan said. “My family’s got a cabin too, that’s where we’ve been hanging. We just got in today. My name’s Evan.”

“Cool!” Kayla said. “That’s Y’lehna in the lawn chair with the wine cooler, and Rhiannon went to the bathroom but I’m sure—”

“I’m back!” Rhiannon announced. Trevor’s eyes widened and then turned heart-shaped. Metaphorically.

“And I’m Trevor. Hello, ladies,” he said, sounding much cooler when he said it than Harrison had.

“I’m Harrison, and this is Steve, and he’s kinda shy!” Harrison punctuated this by shoving his kinda shy friend forward.

“Uh, hi,” Steve said. “I kind of fell in the creek on my way here?”

Kayla’s eyes went wide. “Oh, wow! Hey, Ashlee, do you mind if I bring him inside and show him the shower?”

“Long as he takes his shoes off,” Ashlee said, coming to the deck railing. Steve saw her angelic hair, beautiful skin, and ample charms shown off by the rather small bikini, and fell in love.

“Oh, definitely. I’ll definitely do that. I – yeah. Thanks a lot for letting me use the shower, I’m all covered in mud. Which you can see. Because you’re standing there, looking at me covered in mud.”

Kayla laughed. “Oh, yeah, let’s get you cleaned up!” She took Steve’s hand with surprising alacrity and lack of reluctance, given that he was covered in mud.

Evan said, “The guy who was supposed to bring over the groceries never showed, and I made some chili and rice out of canned stuff for my friends, but it was kinda shitty. Pale asked if there was any more of the pineapple pizza? I could definitely go for a slice if you’re offering.”

Ashlee lit up. “Oh! Sure! I can take you in to get some pizza!”

Rhiannon had by then walked over to the Pale Bro, and put her hand on his arm again. “You know, I could definitely go for some more pizza myself,” she purred.

Meanwhile, Harrison was trying to chat up Y’lehna, and also strip to his boxers so he could get in the hot tub, without looking like he was doing it in a creepy way. “So, where’re you from?”

“Massachusetts,” Y’lehna said, lying back in the lawn chair and wistfully gazing at Trevor, who had followed Rhiannon, the Pale Bro, and Ashlee in for pizza. “A little town called Innsmouth, on the coast. Little more than half an hour north of Boston.” Y’lehna had legs, but they were covered with scales and her feet were large and webbed.

“Cool. I’m from New Jersey, but, you know, like the south end. Not the part that’s all gritty like Newark and Jersey City.” Harrison slid into the hot tub. “Oh, man, this is nice. You wanna get back in?”

“After I finish my wine cooler, maybe. Ashlee doesn’t like it when we eat or drink in the tub.”

Evan was the first to come back from the pizza hunt, carrying a beer and two slices and had actually had swimming trunks at the cabin – they hadn’t planned on going swimming on this trip, but Evan kept some clothes here all the time, and he’d already changed into them and then put his clothes on over. He stripped to his bathing suit and then went and got into the hot tub near Nandini. “Hey.”

Nandini barely noticed; she was too busy looking at Harrison. Evan had to say it again to get her attention. She turned and looked at him. “Oh, you can’t eat those in the tub. Or drink the beer.”

“What if I sit back from the tub and just soak my feet, until I’m done with the food?”

Nandini shrugged. “I guess that’d be okay, but you’d have to ask Ashlee. Can I ask you something?”

Evan beamed. “Sure! Whatever you want!”

She nodded her head toward Harrison. “Does your friend have a girlfriend?”

Evan’s first reaction was dismay – Nandini seemed to not even notice him as a man, and was just making eyes at Harrison, who was obviously captivated by Y’lehna. Then he narrowed his eyes and decided to make problems on purpose. “Oh, sorry, Harrison is gay.” Actually, Steve was bi and the rest of them were straight – Evan thought, anyway, unsure about the Pale Bro and if he even had a sexuality, but he did seem to like to look at girls.

Nandini sighed. “Aren’t they always.”

Ashlee was the next to come back. She sat next to Evan. “You know, if you want to get into the hot tub and still eat your food, I normally have a rule about that but I could let it go this time. Just as long as you keep the actual food and drink out of the hot tub so it doesn’t make everything gross.” She smiled at Evan.

Evan smiled at her, because it was always good to smile at your host, and it was also always good to smile at a pretty girl, and Ashlee was both. “Thanks,” he said, not planning to take her up on it because what if he dropped the pizza?, and then turned back to Nandini. “What’re you majoring in?”

“Ugh, I hate having to explain it to people,” Nandini said. “It’s… complicated. It’s a discipline that’s part economic theory, part psychology, part sociology and part anthropology. Basically, I’m majoring in the question of why do people do dumb things when they’d be better off doing smart ones, and how that impacts our understanding of economics.”

“That sounds really interesting,” said Evan, who had quit his business major because he was bored out of his mind by economics. “I’m doing Asia studies. Yeah, it’s a cliché.” He’d gone into Asia studies after he quit his business major because it was the only thing he thought his parents would let him get by with if he refused to study business. Some kind of “Mom, Dad, I really want to get in touch with our heritage and understand the culture of my grandparents” bullshit. Also, statistically you were more likely to find a girl who considers Asian guys hot in Asia studies than any other major, he suspected.

“That’s pretty cool!” Ashlee said. “Which part of Asia is your family from? China, Korea…?”

“China, originally,” Evan, whose real name was Haoran, but who’d been going by Evan since second grade, said. His pizza finished, he slid down into the tub and turned back to Nandini. “So, we came over here to warn you – and maybe help you fight if it comes to it – but we’re worried there might be a killer or something in the woods?”

“Omigod, really?” Ashlee asked, eyes wide with terror.

“Why do you think that?” Nandini asked, seeming completely calm.

“Well, my parents had an employee, Joe, buy food for my cabin. He was supposed to drop it off… but he never showed up, and he never called my parents, and he’s not answering his cell. Meanwhile, we saw this absolutely huge tread in the dirt, and the Pale Bro thinks it might be his cousin.”

“Yeah, he told us all that,” Nandini said. “Except for the part about it maybe being his cousin.”

“So, a monster?” Y’lehna asks. “Because there’s a difference between a psycho killer, who’s human, and a monster, who isn’t. You don’t know what the monster’s capable of, but when you see them, you know they’re a monster.”

“Yeah, but just because they look like a monster doesn’t mean anything about what they’re like!” Harrison said. “The Pale Bro looks like a monster, but he’s a really great guy!”

“I’m guessing his cousin sucks, though,” Y’lehna said.

“Well, we don’t know his cousin,” Harrison said, somewhat diplomatically.

“Do you really think there’s a killer?” Ashlee asked, getting into the hot tub right next to Evan – and inconveniently, between him and Nandini. “But you’ll protect us, right?”

“Uh, some of us can protect ourselves…” Nandini said.

Evan got back out of the tub so he could see Nandini more clearly without Ashlee in the way. “Absolutely. I’m not trying to say that we’re offering our protection because, you know, we’re guys and you’re girls and we think we’re tougher than you. That’s not it at all; I bet most of you could kick my ass.” He did not actually think this; Evan was in pretty good shape, since he was preparing to backpack all over Asia next year if he got the chance, and also, he bicycled a lot. It was pretty clear to him, though, that Nandini was invested in thinking of herself as someone who could protect herself, and who knew? Maybe she was a martial arts master or a crack shot. “But we figure, there’s safety in numbers. Plus, if it is the Pale Bro’s cousin, he can get it to back the hell off.”

“Good point,” Nandini said.

At this point there was a glass-shattering, horrible screech, and then something, some unknown creature moving so fast it was a blur, leapt out of the hot tub and charged directly at Evan, Nandini and Ashlee. All three of them screamed, as it slashed bright pain across Evan’s legs, right above his knees.

And then Ashlee started cracking up, as the horrible assailant stopped at the edge of the deck and began washing itself vigorously. “Phenyl, you dumbass. I know you like to sleep on the tub when we have it covered, but couldn’t you see we have it open and it’s full of water?”

Evan’s heart was still pounding, but now that he could see the creature that had slashed gashes into his thighs, he took deep breaths to calm himself down. “That’s your cat?”

“Yeah, her name is Phenylephrine and she’s a dumbass. She catches rats, though. One time she chased off a raccoon who’d gotten into the trash.” Ashlee attempted to pick her cat up, but the almost-entirely-black-except-for-white-bib cat jumped down off the deck, apparently not sufficiently recovered from her ordeal to tolerate interacting with humans. Evan decided not to ask why the cat was named after a decongestant.

“So what are you majoring in?” Harrison asked Y’lehna, trying to come across as casual. “I’m doing liberal arts, you know? Just a little of everything.”

“Shakespearean literature,” Y’lehna said.

“Oh, wow! You know about the theory that he didn’t write his own plays, right?”

Y’lehna rolled her eyes. “Of course I do. It’s bullshit.”

And as she explained all the reasons why she thought the theory was bullshit, Harrison listened to her raptly with imaginary hearts in his eyes.

***

Steve was deeply grateful to Kayla for taking him in to find Ashlee’s shower. The cabin had wooden floors, thankfully, so the gunk still dripping off his body could be easily cleaned. It made sense – it was a cabin in the woods, after all – but Steve had some vague idea of what rich people houses were like from visiting Evan, and carpet played a big role in his mental image of a rich person abode.

He was less impressed with the towel Kayla found him, after he came out of the shower. It was very… brief. Bigger than a hand towel, but not by much, it covered the territory it was required to cover and not very much else.

“I hate to ask, but does Ashlee have any brothers or other family members who might be around my size? This towel is kinda…”

Kayla laughed. “I think you look cute in it, but yeah, I can see why you’d want something bigger!” She stuck her head in the kitchen, where Ashlee was serving pizza to Evan, Rhiannon, Trevor, and the Pale Bro. “Hey, Ashlee! Does Hunter have any swimming trunks or t-shirts here?”

“You can check. He usually uses the middle bedroom.”

Steve called out, “I can have them cleaned and returned tomorrow, I just… my clothes are all muddy… I don’t want to impose, but this towel’s kind of tiny…”

“No problem, I don’t even care if you keep Hunter’s stuff. It would serve him right for being a douche,” Ashlee said.

Kayla checked, and came back with a NASCAR t-shirt and a pair of swimming trunks with grotesquely grinning emojis all over it. “Sorry, I hope it fits! It’s all he had!”

“No problem, NASCAR’s cool,” Steve said. The sum total of his knowledge about NASCAR was that it had something to do with cars, probably, and that guys who drank warm crappy beer and drove pickup trucks liked it, and that was all. But if Ashlee’s family was into it, maybe it was worth checking out.

He and Kayla walked into the kitchen, now that he was vaguely decent. “OMG I am so sorry,” Ashlee said. “That shirt is awful. Is that really the only one Hunter had?”

Steve shrugged, understanding more about Ashlee’s relationship to her brother’s interests. “It’s not like I’m into NASCAR or anything, but beggars can’t be choosers, right?”

The Pale Bro chose this moment to inform everyone in a voice that echoed like a portent of doom that there was no more beer in Ashlee’s fridge, and this was a problem, because he and his bros had brought beer for 5 people for three days, but now they had ten people, so what if they ran out?

Steve privately thought it was good that the Pale Bro wasn’t majoring in anything that needed math. Ten people would burn through the beer for five people at twice the rate, but twice the rate of three days would be a day and a half, more than enough time to go get more beer, unless the psycho killer or monster slashed their tires or something.

Kayla spoke up. “I’ve got more in the trunk of my car, but I parked kind of crappy.”

“Well, no matter how crappy the parking job was, more beer’s always a good thing,” Trevor said.

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was like the crackling of atoms fusing together in the unfathomable heat of the sun that he’d be happy to go get them out of Kayla’s car.

“Uh… no, I think Steve should do it,” Kayla said. “Because he’s shorter, and it’s a really crappy parking job. Trust me, you will bonk your head on trees about six times just trying to reach my car.”

“Did you park it in the woods?” Trevor asked.

“Um, sorta… I was kinda excited about getting here and waving to my friends and I accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and I ended up in the woods… yeah.” She looked up at Steve forlornly. “I’m such an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” Steve said, because it was always a good idea to tell a pretty girl who said she was an idiot that in fact she was not.

In a voice like the echoes of a NASCAR race going on over one’s head because one was in a sewer system under the track, the Pale Bro offered to help Kayla get her car out of the woods, if it was stuck there.

“That’s really sweet of you,” Rhiannon purred. “Probably better to do it in daylight, though. There’s a cliff drop near there, and you don’t want to accidentally slip over the edge.”

“Or worse, drop the car,” Steve said, and laughed. Kayla laughed with him.

The Pale Bro expressed to Kayla that if there was a cliff face near there, then he was very glad that she hadn’t accidentally driven off the edge, because that would have been bad.

“Yeah,” Kayla said, “but it all worked out so no harm done, right? Unless, like, I punctured the gas tank with a tree branch or something. That would definitely be bad.”

Steve, Trevor, Rhiannon and the Pale Bro all agreed that that would definitely be the case.

***

After Steve and Kayla had left to go to Kayla’s car to get more beer, Rhiannon asked the Pale Bro what his major was.

“I’m pre-med,” Trevor inserted, not actually having been asked.

“Mm, nice. I’m trying to become a physicist, myself. What about you?” She repeated the question in the Pale Bro’s direction.

In a voice that was muffled and full of pizza, the Pale Bro conveyed that he hadn’t heard the question, sorry.

“I just wanted to know what your major was,” she said.

The Pale Bro confessed that he was majoring in gender studies, having decided that hotel management was not really a good career path for him.

“Oh, really!” Rhiannon brightened. “You don’t see a lot of guys majoring in gender studies! You must be very secure in your masculinity.” She said this as someone who seemed very secure in the Pale Bro’s masculinity, herself, as she pressed against him.

The Pale Bro mumbled in a voice that really didn’t sound all that different from anyone else’s mumbling that he just didn’t like how society treated women, and added that his mother raised him to respect and look up to women. He confided that she had torn apart giant megafauna with her bare claws and fed them to her brood of spawn while insisting on table manners, and that he couldn’t imagine any job more difficult than being the primary caretaker of children. Children, he admitted, scared him.

“Oh, yes, the little rugrats can totally bring the chaos,” Rhiannon laughed.

The Pale Bro clarified that actually chaos was perfectly fine by him and the natural state of all things that the universe must someday return to; it was their high-pitched screechy voices that really bothered him.

“I never knew that,” Trevor said. “Weird, what you learn about people. Rhiannon,which kind of physics are you concentrating on? Like, space, or quantum, or what?”

“Haven’t really narrowed it down like that, it’s going to depend on what grad school accepts me and which programs I can get into,” Rhiannon said. To the Pale Bro she said, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk? It’s really nice out.”

“It is, but there might be some kind of killer or monster in the woods,” Trevor reminded her. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to go wandering off by yourself?”

She rolled her eyes and gestured at the Pale Bro. “I’m pretty sure that Pale here would be able to protect me if anything came up,” she said.

The Pale Bro confessed in a voice that echoed like the infrasound rumble of the collapse of a concrete building, but an embarrassed and regretful tone, that actually he wanted to wait right here, because he wanted more beer and also his feet hurt.

“Well, why don’t we go back to the hot tub and let you soak your feet for a bit?” Rhiannon asked.

“That sounds like a great idea,” Trevor said. “We’ve got our own beer cooler out there, remember? You brought it over.”

This was true, the Pale Bro admitted, but he couldn’t eat or drink in the hot tub, and he wanted another slice of Hawaiian pizza if there was any.

“Oh, but you’re a big fellow,” Rhiannon said. “You could totally sit back from the hot tub and dangle your feet in it while you’re eating, and you wouldn’t be close enough to the tub to bother Ashlee.”

In that case, the Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like the rumbling of a train full of dead bodies, he was all for the hot tub, because that shit sounded great.

***

The group joined back up around the hot tub, all except for Kayla and Steve, who were still in the woods, ostensibly getting beer out of Kayla’s car. Ashlee had brought out chips and pretzels, which, she said, were not to be eaten within five feet of the hot tub. This meant that the Pale Bro could soak his feet while he snacked, as promised, but no one else could actually eat near the tub.

“Come on, that’s not fair,” Y’lehna, who was considerably more drunk than she had been earlier in the evening and probably really needed to fill her stomach with chips and pretzels, complained. “I’ve been good all night but now I’m starving, and you know my skin needs to be moisturized.”

“I keep offering to let you try some of my Oil of Olay,” Ashlee mumbled.

“If I wanted to cover myself in something oily, I’d use fish oil, it’s traditional around my hometown,” Y’lehna said sharply. “I wanna be in water. Like, H20.” She looked up at Trevor, pleadingly. “Do you think I’m asking too much? I don’t think I’m asking too much.”

“I think you should definitely eat something,” Trevor said.

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask,” offered Harrison eagerly.

“But I don’t want to get any food in the hot tub,” Ashlee whined. “It’d be gross, and we’d have to drain it and clean it…”

“Well, I want to be in the water and I want goddamn pretzels, is that too much? Is that really too much?” Y’lehna yelled, making Ashlee quail.

At that point they all heard the sound of clanging and shattering, and Kayla and Steve screaming like they were being murdered.

Ashlee shrieked in terrified response. The Pale Bro, Trevor and Nandini were all off the deck and running toward the sound in a second, followed by Rhiannon, Evan and Harrison. Y’lehna took the opportunity to grab an entire dish of pretzels, drop herself into the tub, and stand at the edge of the tub, facing the concrete around the tub and stuffing her face. “I can be responsible,” she muttered. “I can not get pretzels in the tub. I don’t have to eat underwater. I don’t even want to. Pretzels aren’t like fish. They get soggy.”

No one was there to hear her, though, because they had all gone into the woods.

The Pale Bro had only gotten in a few feet when Steve yelled, “Don’t come any closer, guys!”

“Are you being murdered?” Trevor asked, loudly.

“We will totally fuck them up if someone is trying to kill you!” Harrison said, clenching his fists.

“No, guys, it’s good… it’s all good.”

“It’s not good at all!” Kayla wailed. “I spent so much money on that beer!”

The Pale Bro heard the word ‘beer’ and conveyed that if something was going on with the beer he absolutely needed to know, right now.

“We dropped it!”

“We dropped it off a goddamn cliff,” Steve moaned. “Kayla had this whole big cooler—”

“It was so expensive! So much beer!”

“And we were carrying it together, and then I tripped on a tree root, and slipped, and Kayla tried to grab me… and we dropped the beer.”

“Off the cliff!” Kayla couldn’t have sounded more heartbroken if she were a young lady during the Vietnam War being told that her betrothed, who had been her childhood sweetheart since she was three years old, had had a completely sober four-way with two Vietnamese twins and their pet goat, and then had been killed by the Viet Cong while he was still cavorting with the goat.

In a voice that sounded like the auditory representation of hair raising combined with the scream of nails on a chalkboard, the Pale Bro expressed that he couldn’t believe this and Steve had been such a fuckup.

Steve, actually kind of intimidated, raised his hands. “I know, man, I’m sorry! We didn’t mean to!”

The Pale Bro then lectured the two of them about how if he’d been allowed to help in the first place, he wouldn’t have accidentally dropped the beer off the cliff and right now they would all be knocking back some sweet brews, but instead they insisted they could handle it and now all that beer had been tragically lost, cut down in the prime of its life, its yeasty lifeblood spilling out across the rocks and stones below where none could drink it except maybe some squirrels who would get themselves totally fucked up.

“Come on, man, it’s just beer,” Evan said. “We can get more.”

“Not if there’s a killer out there!” Kayla wailed. “We won’t be able to leave to go get beer until morning! What if the killer slashes our tires?”

The Pale Bro conveyed that if that happened, it was fucking on because no psycho killer, monster, or cousin was going to get between him and more beer.

Trevor, trying to be the voice of reason, said, “Folks, we’ve got a lot of beer in our cooler and we’ve barely touched it. There’s no use crying over spilled… beer.”

“Yes, there is! It’s very cryable!” Kayla declared, starting to cry.

“God, you’re drunk,” Nandini muttered. “Maybe you shouldn’t be hitting any more of the beer anyway.”

“Come on,” Steve said, putting his arm around Kayla. “It’s gonna be all right. Don’t cry. Trevor’s right, we’ve got a lot in our cooler.”

Kayla turned toward him and cried against his chest, as he hugged her with one arm and awkwardly patted her head with the other.

“Wow,” Nandini said. “You’re really into this guy, aren’t you?”

Steve turned red, which they could all see by now because they’d made their way out of the woods and back into the outside lights of the cabin. “Uh, I don’t think so, I’m just trying to comfort her…”

“You’re a white guy touching her hair and she’s putting up with it,” Nandini said. “Kayla’s been known to punch white people who touch her hair.”

“That was that bitch Madison and it was one time!” Kayla cried.

Steve removed his hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I just…”

“No! I like it when you touch my hair! I don’t like it when bitches like Madison touch my hair after they’ve just said some racist bullshit, but you’re being so sweet! You can officially touch my hair,” Kayla said, and then started sobbing again, hugging Steve tightly.

The Pale Bro audibly sighed, in a voice like a dude who’s just seen one of his best friends score a date with a chick he was really into and he can’t even be mad because it wasn’t like he got anywhere with her himself or even admitted to anyone how cute he thought she was.

***

The group returned to find that Harrison had wandered back to the hot tub as soon as it was clear that no one was being killed except maybe a large number of innocent bottles of beer, and was sitting outside the hot tub but right by Y’lehna, who was in the hot tub eating chips.

Nandini said, severely, “Y’lehna! Ashlee told you not to do that!”

“Ashlee can tell me herself,” Y’lehna said with chips in her mouth.

“I’ve been watching,” Harrison said brightly. “None of the crumbs have fallen in the water! It’s all good!”

Trevor snorted. “Well, of course you think so, Har,” he said. “You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?”

Nandini frowned, and then scowled, and glared at Evan. “Wait, you told me he was gay!”

“You said what?” Harrison was shocked.

Evan held up his hands. “Sorry, Har. But…” He looked over at Nandini. “I thought that if I told you that he only likes really unusual girls, you’d feel hurt because it would sound like I was telling you you were basic or something, and that’s totally wrong. You’re gorgeous and you could probably get any guy you wanted, except Harrison, because you don’t have scales or feathers or six eyes or something.”

“Well, you could have said that,” Nandini said.

Kayla said, “I get it. Rhiannon’s like that, too.”

“To be fair,” Harrison said, “I am bi.” This was information Evan had not known. “I just haven’t yet met any weird dudes who aren’t related to Pale here, and it’s just way too weird to date one of your bro’s actual brothers or something.”

“Does anyone know where Ashlee went?” Steve asked.

Everyone looked around. There was no Ashlee.

“Could she be in the bathroom, maybe?” Nandini asked.

“Don’t think so,” Y’lehna said. “She ran off while you guys were running to the woods. I wasn’t gonna get in the hot tub and eat pretzels if she was still here!”

“Uh, yeah,” Rhiannon said. “That’s a little long to be in the bathroom.”

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was exhaustedly done with this bullshit that he could look for her.

“Nah, man, I’ll do it,” Trevor said. “I know your feet are hurting, and I’m the next biggest guy after you.”

“I could go with you,” Steve said.

Trevor shook his head. “Steve… that is a cute girl who is very, very drunk,” he said, pointing at Kayla. “I don’t know her tolerance, but I’m pretty sure that if she isn’t at puke bucket level now, she will be soon. You need to stay with her and make sure she’s okay.”

“Yeah, good point,” Steve said.

Nandini turned back to Evan as Trevor walked away. “I can’t believe you lied to me, though. I mean, I know Rhiannon. I could have accepted ‘he’s only into weird-looking chicks’—”

“Thanks, Nandi, that’s sweet,” Y’lehna said.

“You know what I mean,” Nandini said, waving her hand dismissively.

“Look, I’m gonna come clean with you,” Evan said. “I really thought you were great. You’re hot, you’re smart – I’m not dumb, but when you talked about your major, I realized you could run rings around me – and you stay calm in a crisis, and I really respect that. But you asked me if Har had a girlfriend, and I just – I’m sorry. It was like you didn’t even notice I’m a dude, and that made me feel bad. So I did something shitty, and I gotta apologize to both you and Harrison.”

“I mean, no problem on my end,” Harrison said. “It’s all good, bro.”

“Damn,” Nandini said, running her hand through her hair. “I didn’t even think about what that sounded like when I asked you. I’m sorry, Evan, what I said to you was a shitty thing too. I mean, I still think what you did was worse because you were lying, but I understand why you did it.”

“Hey, I know you didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.”

“Evan’s right, though,” Harrison said. “I mean, not about me being gay, I like girls just fine, but…” He shrugged. “Girls that look like normal human beings, even beautiful human beings, it just doesn’t click. Y’lehna here’s really different-looking, and that is so hot.” He turned to Y’lehna. “You know you’re super-hot, right?”

“Yes,” Y’lehna said, “but boys like you don’t usually agree. So that’s nice.”

“I guess I can forgive you,” Nandi said to Evan. “But you’d better not lie to me again.”

“I am pretty sure you could kick my ass if I did, so I won’t. I like my ass un-kicked.”

“Your ass is okay,” Nandini said. “I’ve seen better asses, but yours is all right.”

Rhiannon had offered to give the Pale Bro a foot rub, since his feet hurt. A guy as big as he was suffered from foot pain frequently, so he’d agreed, while apologizing in a voice like a church organ in a cave for his toenails. Some might say his toenails were worth apologizing for, as they were about four inches long and razor sharp.

But Rhiannon disagreed. “Your toenails are great. Look how white they are! I never see guys without all kinds of grody fungus turning their toenails yellow. And I bet you’re amazing at climbing trees with them.”

The Pale Bro allowed that this was true, and that climbing in general was one of his talents.

Steve, meanwhile, wasn’t exactly sure what he ought to be doing with Kayla, who was now lying on her back, her head in his lap, rambling about stars and how far away they were. When she’d asked for another beer, he’d gotten her cold water instead and reminded her that water was important to avoid hangovers. She’d finished most of the water – the rest had spilled – and now she seemed to be close to falling asleep in his lap.

“You’re really into stars, huh?” he asked. “You an astronomy major?”

“Oh no!” Kayla laughed. “Math! I’d tell you all about it but I’m waaaaaay too drunk. I just reeeeally like stars!”

“That’s cool,” Steve said. “I’m a comp sci major myself.”

“Are you gonna build an AI that wants to take over the world and enslave humanity?” Kayla asked.

“Hey, I’d be happy if I could build an AI that can identify rocks as not sheep,” Steve laughed.

***

Trevor had very quickly guessed where Ashlee might be.

Ashlee was nervous and reacted badly to things that startled or scared her. Ashlee was also at her own house – well, cabin. So odds were, Ashlee had gone into the cabin to calm down.

The cabin wasn’t very big, and Ashlee wasn’t in any of the rooms in an obvious place. So Trevor started checking the not-obvious places, like a closet in a room that looked girly enough that it might be her room. He knocked on the door.

She shrieked, inside the closet, but he said, “Ashlee, calm down! It’s me, Trevor. Can I check on you to make sure you’re okay?”

“Uh… okay,” she said, and Trevor opened the door. Ashlee was sitting in a lighted closet, on the floor, completely covered to her shoulders with stuffed animals.

“Wow. Are you okay?” He squatted down. Being a big black man, Trevor had learned many strategies for making himself look less threatening. Not towering over somebody was one of them.

“Not… really?” Ashlee said.

“I know you were scared with all that noise. Hell, I was too. But it turned out to be nothing. Steve and Kayla accidentally dropped some beer over the cliff.”

“It’s not that,” she whispered. “It’s just… it’s too much. Too many people.”

“Yeah?” He sat on the floor crisscross applesauce, making himself even lower and more relaxed-looking. “You want us to go?”

“No! I mean, this was supposed to be a weekend with just my friends, and then you guys show up, but you’re nice guys! I like you guys! But it’s just so many people, I started to wig out.” She lifts an arm out of the sea of stuffed animals. “So I do this thing when there’s too many people and I start to freak… I find a tiny place and I fill it with soft things and I lay in them until my tachycardia goes away.”

“Tachycardia?”

“Oh, um, that means fast heart beat. Sorry. I just always call it that because it sounds scarier than fast heartbeat and it really is scarier so I want people to know it’s a problem.”

“I know what it means, I’m a pre-med. I just wondered—”

“Oh wow! I’m in pre-med, too!” Ashlee sat up , some of the stuffed animals falling off her. “I guess we’re not in any classes together because you’re a senior and I’m a sophomore, but did you have Lessing for Organic Chemistry?”

“You’re doing orgo in sophomore year?” Trevor whistled. “That’s fast.”

“Yeah, I, um, my high school had like this program where good students could do science classes at a nearby college, for college credit, in senior year, so I took chemistry then, and bio last year and also the math I needed, so I get to do orgo this year.”

“I hated orgo. It’s just memorize a bunch of prefixes and suffixes and string them together. Couldn’t we find a better way to describe methylethylpropylene than that?”

She laughed. “Is that even a real thing?”

“I don’t know, but it’s pretty ridiculous that I can put together a string of prefixes and make something that sounds like a chemical even if it doesn’t exist.” He shook his head sadly. “And yeah, I had Lessing. She’s tough. She giving your brain a real workout?”

“Yeah. It’s a challenge. Everyone always told me, ‘Ashlee, you can’t just coast along getting straight As without ever studying. Ashlee, when you go to college it’ll be a lot harder. Ashlee, you need to learn how to study or you’ll fail in college.’ Well… I haven’t failed yet, but… it might be close.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I must sound so stuck up with my humblebrag. ‘Oh, it’s so hard to be a gifted student who gets straight As!’ But it really is hard. Because if it was too easy for you in school you don’t learn how to handle it when it gets too hard, and I’m just, like, totally stressed.”

“I feel you. My mom made me study, and I was like, ‘momma, I do not need to read the book and highlight all the important parts and then write them in an outline and then read over the outline! I got it the first time I read the book!’ And that was what she said. ‘You take shortcuts now because everything’s easy, you’ll be in a world of hurt when things get hard.’ And hell, I ended up in a world of hurt in orgo anyway.” They both laughed.

“Anyway, your friends are worried about you and I don’t want people to think we both got bumped off by a psycho killer, so I figure, there’s three options here. I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and I leave you the hell alone; I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and then I come back and we keep talking; or you and I both leave together and we both tell everyone you’re okay, and then we get to eat some chips, if Y’lehna and Harrison didn’t get them all already.”

“She’s in the hot tub eating chips, isn’t she.” It was not a question.

“Yeah, sad but true. At least she’s leaning over the side so the crumbs get on the concrete and they don’t fall in the tub.”

Ashlee sighed. “I guess I better get back out there. But I do still want to talk and stuff. And I wanna check up on Phenylephrine so maybe you can help me find her.”

“Phenylephrine?”

“My cat. The cat before her was Sudafed so when she died and I got a new kitten I named her Phenylephrine.”

“I get the joke there, but why was the first cat named Sudafed?”

“My mom was allergic to cats and she said if we get a cat we might as well name it Sudafed because she’d be taking so much of it, and then we did get a cat, so she did name her Sudafed.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten a cat if she was that allergic?”

“Oh, no, my mom loves cats. She just says wiseass things sometimes. Anyway, Phenyl lives here at the cabin and the cleaning service makes sure she gets fed. They call her the head of Mousekeeping Services.”

Trevor laughed.

***

Outside, it turned out there was no need to turn out a search party for Phenylephrine, as for some entirely inexplicable reason it turned out she liked chips, and also Harrison’s lap, where he was feeding her chips. She didn’t actually eat the chips, she just licked them.

The party was starting to flag just a bit; Evan suggested putting on some music, but the internet wasn’t good enough here for Ashlee’s Spotify playlist and she didn’t have MP3s on a hard drive like Evan did. Evan was regretting not putting a bunch of MP3s on a flash drive and bringing them with him. Nandini had a CD in her car – the girls had all come up here in their own cars, except for Y’lehna who couldn’t drive – but it was hit songs from Bollywood musicals and no one here knew any of them, and she was self-conscious about whether anyone would even like them.

And then, as they discussed what to do about tunes, a shadow fell across them, blocking the moon for a moment.

They all looked up, even the Pale Bro. A shambling monstrosity, 20 feet tall and brick red, with sprouting tentacles where its face should be and eyes on the tentacles, and Edward-Scissorhands-length blades for fingernails, loomed over them.

Several of the group screamed. The Pale Bro got to his feet.

“D̶̫̊̚Ũ̸̟̝͍̘̮͒Ḍ̸͋̽̀E̷̛̝̹̗͈̊͌̍,̷̨̖̲̺̤̝͂̈́̎͘ ̴̛̱͚͗Y̶̧͔͉̙͋͊̊͋͘Ô̸̢̥̙͙U̴͖͍̳̭͗̊̌͘͘͜R̷̫̜̘̀ ̶̼̘̠̾̐̈́̒̚Ṃ̴̡̡̦̮̖̿͗̊͋͝Ȯ̴͛ͅM̴̺̱͕̳̀ ̷̱͔̄̃̎́I̸̙͐̍͑͐S̶͉͉̲͋̊͒̽̄͜ ̵̤̙̬̫̒͋́͛P̷̧̧̧̰͔̦͠Î̴̢̜͒̅͘S̷̛̝̤͂́̍̐S̴̭͉͆̋̿É̴̢̺̲̫̝͋́̋̚̚D̴̥͈̠̋̅̅̀͝͝ ̴̡̡̖̬̓A̵͈͚̣͂̆̔̍̂̕T̷̡͙̠̙̫̎̈̄͝ͅ ̴͔͗̀̋͗̏Y̴̤͇̪͕͇͎͆̌̀̊̈́Ơ̸̡̢̙̭͇͕̒̐̕̕U̸̡̩̠̚.̸̣̖̼̫́͛̄,” the entity boomed.

In a sound like the rushing of lava through underground caverns just before a volcano was about to blow, the Pale Bro demanded to know if the entity had eaten any people lately.

“S̴̙̱͕̀H̴̭͐̈́͠I̷̘̟͉̝͊͐̄̋̀̑Ṱ̷̢̫̮͓̲̐̑͗̈́̀,̵͓̥͖͈̾́̏̇͘ ̵̣̳͍̿Ń̵̟̦̰͖̺͜O̸͉̓̈̊͛̔̕.̷̣̜̗̩̈́ ̸͖̋̓̀̀͝͝Í̶̘̗͓̱̗̬̀̈́'̴̗̯͈͈̥͎̎̇M̷̹̻͉̼͑̎̓̐̏̀ ̴͚̻͚̱̇̿͛̏͒͠O̴̩̪̣̯̤͙̐̐̚̚Ņ̶͇̘̤̗͗͗̑͛̏̇͜ ̸̡͎̔̽͛A̷̢̘̪͎̗͊͐̌͝͠ ̸̤̺͉̫̖̫̀̓̑̕̕D̴̡̜̤̻̉Ĩ̸̡̯͉͔́̓̂͘͝Ę̶̨̫͇̬̳̉̽͑̈̊͐T̸̥̝̹̑̾.̷̢̟̻̭̲̿ ̴̧̣͌̆̃̕ͅÏ̷̟̰̫̰̹̽̐̐F̶͖̂̉̌ ̵͔͚̊̐Y̸͔̆Ö̴̞̦͕̘̀̒̀͘Ṳ̶̪̝͙̎̿͘ ̵̥̀̏͗E̵̦̣̲͍͉̥̊V̶̑͒̏ͅȨ̷͚̪̲̎͜ͅR̵͎͖̀̓̈́͑͠ ̷̣̀̀̓͋C̸̲̗͎̞͔̭͌̈́̕͘Ã̶̝͉̮͉͉̓̄͒̈́͜͝M̵̙̮͎̹̌E̷̥̪̎̓͗́͝ ̷͎͓̙̺͔̗͂̑̕H̶̢̍͗́͋͊O̴̗̎̽̆M̴̮̭̮͐̑́̚Ë̶̩̦̹̞́͂̈́̆ ̴̩̻̈́͘Y̴̨͍̣̩͈̎̅͘͘O̵̠͉͒̐̈̕͝U̶̪̝̳̺͑͆̇'̸̖̋D̶̗̉̓̿͐̓ ̸͉̍̀͠K̷̥̞̼̍͛́̇͗͝N̵̡̹̠͚̥̰̋̈́̌̈́͘O̸̻̠͍̲͋̉Ẁ̸̞͎̺̀͆̌̀ ̴̛͔̙͗͗̉͠T̸̨̓̀̎H̶̡̱̘͈̹͐̔͗͂͘A̷̠̠͉͎̫̰̿̄T̴̡̰͍̦͕̉̌,” it said, rolling tentacles clockwise around its face in an approximation of an eye roll.

If that was the case, the Pale Bro shot back, explain why this entity’s footprint was found right outside his bro’s cabin, and a man was missing.

“Į̴̙͈̻̓͗͜ͅ ̷̙̑̔͛͝W̷̺̯̲͗͝Ã̸̹͕̊S̷̹̲͆̏ͅ ̵̝̈́̒͗̓̍L̸͖̺̊͛Ǫ̶̗̥̼͍̥̒̒̌̊O̸͙̊̎̋̏̕Ķ̴͚̫̤̈̔́̅͑͝Į̵͑̍Ṉ̸̨͌͂́Ǵ̵̭̥̹̮̞̏͂ͅ ̷͚͙̹̋F̸̧͕͉͓̊̾͊O̵̲̙͓͛̌̄̏̕̚R̴̬͚̠͉̬̘̽̀̌́͊ ̴͎̀̏̐͋Y̴͈̘̮͌͋̍̃̍̈́Ơ̷̞͉̝͙̻̒U̵̦̭͈̻̪̽͂͗̚,̴̳̐ ̸̢̠̙͕̰̐̅D̸̟̫̋͑̅̈́̄͜͝ͅŰ̵̡̜̤̺̿̍̃̈́M̵̼̜̳̊͊̋̈ͅB̷̧͖̲̮̤̜͋̐͑̔Ȁ̶̼̪̟̼̱̐̔̋̀͘S̷̨̳͂S̶̨̡͈̈́̐͂̿͜͠,” the entity said. “A̷͕̎͆Ṷ̴̢̣͙͐Ņ̷͓͔͕̙̟͛̿́̐͝T̶̠̹̜͇͐̾̊̂̚ ̸͔̐͋̓̓͐͝€̶͉̦̍̊̅₯̷̟̙̗̱̤̈́̋̌͂͌̚ῥ̷̠̩̇ῗ̶̦͎͚̃͊̾ᾗ̴̤̞̰͕͓̈́͜Ỷ̸͔̫͙̦͐ẞ̶̦͕̱́͂͑́͊̈́ ̵͉͍͉̼̐͑̈́͋͝S̷̢͇̽͗͛͊̏E̸͉̲̓̉̎̈N̸̤̾Ț̷̻̍́̍ ̴͓̱͉͍̝̄̐̀͜ M̷̹͖͝E̸̘̖͓̍͋͜ ̶̢̲̘͋ T̴̠̘̲̼̍̈́̄̏̃͝ͅǪ̷̨̡̤͕͎͠ ̴̬͑͊ T̵͚̫̆̏͘E̴͚̗̯̠̊͗͌̕̚ͅL̴̫̺̫̀̄̽̃̕L̶̡͚̫̬̈́͑̇ ̴̲͙̼̖̘̺̈͊̓̂͠ Y̸̰̳̰̑Ơ̵̢̼̯͕̌Ų̶̜̜͚͇̕ͅ ̶̟͎̫͌ Y̴͔̱̼̅̋̄̀͜O̴͕̰̰̎̄U̶͓̜̼̝͑̃͂͘͝ ̸̨͎̀͊Ṅ̵̢͙̙̹̀Ë̸̖E̵̢̪̪͛̒̈D̷͍͖̀̈̏͊͋̚ ̶̦̙̫̺͓̉͂͠T̸̙̮̬͚̚Ó̷̖̘̩̘̝̌̄ ̸͇͍͋͒̃̑Ṽ̸͉̞͔̘̱̃͑̌I̷͙͛͑͝S̸̢̗̬̞͂̽I̵̺̿̾͗̀̓̅T̷̢͈̺̹̀̇͊͐̊̍ͅ,̵̭̔ ̷̹̥̺̟̣͋̄͜Ş̵̺̱̃Ḩ̴̙͙̼͙͉̔̎̍̐́̃I̷͔͚͂̇̑͂͜T̷̲̱͔̬̓͠H̶̝̝͌̏͐Ę̴̨̰̙̤͖̎A̸͔͠ͅḐ̴̻͚͔̯̏́͐͘.̵͚͎̪͖̼̻̇̉.”

The Pale Bro replied, in a voice like the whining of an engine underneath the whapping sound of helicopter rotors, that he was on vacation with his bros and he was not here to visit his mom and she could just deal.

“A̶̱̘̬̪̝̓͌͊͐̚R̸͙͌̉̆̆̇̔ͅE̵̡̱̙̯̮̅͗ ̴͈͒̐Y̶̮̤̽̄O̴̢͓̙̝̮͉̾̆̈́̔̚͝Ų̸͚̗͓̞͎̀͝ ̶̡̬͚̄̆͌͋̉̆F̷̙͊͋U̷̿͊̊̽͌̚ͅC̴͙̦̼͕̈́̊̒K̴̬̘͆̀̑͒̐I̸̅́̈͒̅͠ͅŅ̴̪͍̭͂̈G̴̗̥͎͌̔̽̑̈́ ̸̻̰͆̈̕Ȟ̶̱̜̎̕Ī̴͎̝̖̼̤̱̏̐G̵͚͙̊͆̃̍̅ͅͅḦ̸̡̾̄̕?̵͉̫̠̉̈́̓ ̸̡͕̔͐Y̵̨͒͊̈̕O̴̮͓̼̽̓͝Ú̶̝̺͜ ̴̛̪̚ͅͅC̸̣̆͛̿̓̂Á̸͇͈̦͐͗̇͝N̸̞̭̲̻͖̦̽̈́̈'̶̪̪̐͐̈́T̸͔̘͌̄ ̴̨̪͙̫̩̐́S̶̩̋̃A̷̡̨͙͉͕͑́̔̓̌͜͠Y̸̯̝͕̋͗̄̾ ̵̲̜̥̥͆͊̾̑̊͜͝ͅT̴̟̭̼̲̐̄H̶͚̦̯̱̐̔͝Ą̴̥̤̅̃̄̂̾T̵̞̜̱̍̈́̔̕͜ͅ ̶̤͇͐Ṱ̷̃̾̚Ȏ̷͇͈͓̰͇͓ ̶͓̘̟̉̄̀͌̽ͅẎ̸̢̠̿Ỏ̸̧̢̹̹̀̓U̶̢̬͚̞̘͂́̃̆̽̔Ṛ̵̬̱̯̟̀͐̓̎̃͠ ̵̨̮̏̑̐̐M̷̽͜͝O̴̪̙͙͕̥̕͘M̵̨͉̫̭̩̔͑̈́̈̈͝!” the entity exclaimed.

“This is your cousin, bro?” Evan asked diplomatically.

In a voice like the moaning of the wind through a forest of dead things and disappointments, the Pale Bro admitted that this asshole was indeed his cousin, and was carrying a message from the Bro’s mom that he needed to come visit her, because somehow she’d found out that he was vacationing in the area.

“Well, why don’t you just tell him that you will go to visit your mom, in a few days, right before we head out? It is rude to be right near her house and not go visit her, but on the other hand you’re on vacation to spend time with us, so just do it at the end,” Evan suggested.

The Pale Bro expressed that if he absolutely had to visit his mom, that was probably the best way to handle it, and could his cousin kindly fuck off now.

“Ö̵̡̩͙̠̮͌̓̍K̶͈̬̳̰̺͂̋̂́̕Ạ̸̢̬̪̠̠̽͝Ÿ̴͓̰̰̻͔́̏͒̌͆,̶̮̉͒͒̿̏ ̵̦̺̠͓̩̲̍͆̉B̸͕̽͆Ư̵̟̔̈́̌̏͒Ţ̵̳̞̙̣̪̏̂ ̶͈̲̃͐̈́͋͛Y̴̝͍͌̈̍Ơ̶̙̝̱̘̈́̉́̊͒Ū̷͎̦ ̸͚̓B̷͕̥͊͗̿̒͝Ë̴͕͖̪͇̃́T̶͉̓̾̌̃̀͘T̵̨̟̠̩͚̜͂̎̚̕͝Ḙ̴͈̳̮͗̆͋̐́̈́R̶̡̛̪̮͖͓͙̍̈́͌́ ̸̧̘̻̞̣̈́͆͑̄͜N̷͎̦̬͊͌̆̌̕O̵̧̫̾́̾͜T̵͔̉́ ̸͔̒̀̐͆̌F̵̣͉̖̺̱̚ͅÒ̸̯̜̼̖̋̑͘͜R̶̲̦̱̭̱̙̆̈G̵͓̘̞͎̑̅E̴̲̓̿T̴̝̝̑͌̏̊̄̕ ̴̧̡̮̮͓͓̐͒T̸̡̛̖͈͒̕Ḥ̸̬̭͙̪̲̈́͌̈́̚͠͝Ì̸̡͎̝̎̈́̾͂̕S̷̠̻̣̈́̓͘̚ ̶̧̤̀̈́Ţ̴̧̛̫̫̑͗̓͌̉ͅÏ̵̧̘̰̆ͅM̶̮̤̎̉͜E̶̘̬̟͓̜͔̓̕̕̕,̶̗̈ ̶̖͇̞̀̾͑̓͜͠D̷̡̢̧̹̖͙͛̂̒̏̏I̵̛͍̘̜̲̥̓̏̅͐͂̋͝P̴̧̢̡̱͖̣͔̰̦̊̀Ṡ̸̳̺̓̓̕H̷̰̭̣͂͗Ị̶̢̧̜͇̅̎̓̈̉̂̃̐̕͜͜ͅT̶̰̰̋͐.̵͍̜̠̰͊͝ ̷̝͔̼̞͘ͅI̶̩͍̘͎̺̓'̷͕̟̗̣̳̻̀͂͠L̵̹̣̃͗̇͆L̴̢̛̩̤͖̬̆̚ ̸̲̬̲̈́͛͑̌B̴̘̹́́̈͝E̵͓͐̋͒͐̏̎ ̵͇̹̂͒Ẇ̵̨͎̣̝͔͘ͅA̷̻̗̫̍͑̈́̇̐T̸̥̱̘̲̳̋C̶̪̀H̵̢̏͜Ì̸̡̨͙̜̠̲͘N̸͖̹̦̿͊́͛̈́͝G̵̡̨̘̼̀̑̅̎.̷̍̑̆.” The giant creature lumbered off, back into the woods.

“Your family sounds like mine,” Evan said, commiserating.

“Mine, too,” Nandini said. “If I was within 50 miles of my mom while I was on vacation and I didn’t stop by to see her, I’d never hear the end of it.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met your mom,” Steve said.

The Pale Bro suggested that that was just as well.

***

Kayla was napping on Steve, whose legs were starting to go numb but he didn’t want to risk waking her up. Trevor and Ashlee were talking animatedly about terrible professors and classes that were absolute bullshit but required for the pre-med track. Nandini, having forgiven Evan for lying to her about Harrison, had agreed to go on a date or two with him once they all got back to school, and see where things went. Also, she’d helped him recover his mom’s good knives, which they’d all dropped in the dirt when they got here so the girls wouldn’t be scared of them. Rhiannon continued to hit on the Pale Bro, who either didn’t notice, or was so flustered by a girl paying attention to him that he pretended not to notice. Y’lehna, somewhat overheated by spending too long in the tub and not drinking enough water, had a headache, and Harrison was tending her by getting her glasses of water with ice from Ashlee’s freezer.

Everything was going pretty well, and a lot of fun, except for Steve and his numb legs, when a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a bloody knife came out of the woods.

Everyone except Trevor and the Pale Bro screamed. The Pale Bro growled, less like a dog and more like the sound of the devil’s car engine, down in Hell, when the devil is revving it because he’s just challenged the Archangel Michael to a race in a demonic replica of NASCAR. Trevor took note of where Evan and Nandini had put all of Evan’s mom’s kitchen knives, and yelled, “Can we help you?”, preparing to grab a knife from the pile and go knife-fight the dude, just in case the Pale Bro was too drunk to simply lift the fellow up and toss him off the cliff that had already claimed Kayla’s case of beer.

“I hope so!” the man yelled back. “I’m in the middle of cutting up steaks for the grill, and I realize, I don’t have any potatoes! I was gonna do the potatoes on low and slow so they’d be nice and soft inside, but turns out, all my potatoes rotted and I haven’t got any, and it’d take like forty-five minutes to drive into town. And now it’s too late for baked potatoes, but I haven’t got any kind of starch, so I was wondering if you guys have any French fries?”

Trevor blinked.

“Uh, why are you wearing a ski mask?” Nandini asked.

“Oh, this!” The man pulled off the mask. “Haha, almost forgot I had this on! I’m anemic, so my face gets cold. I wear ski masks around to keep warm, but I forgot how that would look to somebody else. Wow, that was dumb of me.”

The man was a good bit older than any of them, maybe late 20’s or early 30’s. He was a white dude with a tan complexion, like Rhiannon’s, but it was a little grayish and unhealthy looking in the bright lights around the hot tub, which could be due to the anemia. His black hair was wavy and longish, parted on the side and going down to his shoulders, framing his face, and he had a mustache and beard. “My name’s Jason,” he said. “My girlfriend and I just moved back in to the cabin – we live here in the spring and summer months because my girl can’t handle the summer sun, she needs some shade – and I brought the steaks with me to celebrate, but I thought I had potatoes. I forgot, potatoes don’t survive being stored for four months.”

“Whew.” Evan shook his head. “That’s nasty, man. I hope you were able to get the smell out of wherever you were storing them.”

“It might take a few more good scrubs,” Jason acknowledged, grinning. “Hey, do you guys mind if I put the ski mask back on? I know what it looks like, but my face is really cold.”

“Go ahead,” Trevor said.

“Yeah, we don’t mind,” Nandini said. “If you turn out to be a serial killer, it’s not like you’re not a serial killer when the mask is off.”

Jason laughed again. “Well, I can eat a whole box of cereal in one sitting, so I guess you could call me a cereal killer.” Many of the college students groaned at the pun.

“You and your girlfriend, do you have kids?” Harrison asked. “Because that was dad-joke worthy.”

“Haha! Nah, no kids yet, dunno if that’s in the cards ever to be frank. Angella’s not much of a kid person.” He pronounced the name On-zhellah rather than An-jellah, like it was French or something.

“I don’t think I have any fries,” Ashlee said. “Or anything, really. When I’m here at the cabin I mostly drive down into town and get takeout. I mean, I’ve got bacon and eggs and bread for toast, and I could make you a PB&J or a lunch meat sandwich, but no real food.”

“That’s better than what I’ve got,” Evan muttered, and then, more loudly, “You got any tomatoes or peppers? I could chop them up and fry you some Spanish rice; I’d just have to go back to my cabin to get rice and spices.”

“Hey, man, that’d be awesome,” Jason said. “Yeah, I’ve got tomatoes and peppers. We’ve got a lot of steak and I don’t think even Angella’s appetite for bloody meat will put a dent in it, so if you guys wanted to come over and get some steak…”

The Pale Bro said in a voice like the moon had crashed but was still orbiting, scraping itself along the Earth’s crust as it went, that steak sounded sweet and he wouldn’t mind having some steak.

“Bro, you are just, like, an eating machine,” Harrison said. “But yeah, wouldn’t mind a steak.”

“I prefer seafood,” Y’lehna said, “but I don’t dislike steak.”

“Guys, Kayla’s asleep and I can’t leave her alone here,” Steve pointed out.

“I’ll stay here with Kayla,” Ashlee suggested. “You can go get steak.”

“I don’t feel great leaving you guys by yourselves, though, you sure you don’t want me to stay?”

At this point, Kayla lifted her head and asked blearily, “What’s happening?”, which solved the issue of who would stay with her; when steak was explained to her she cheerfully agreed that steak would be nice, and everyone else agreed that Kayla had had enough to drink that, assuming she didn’t puke it up, putting more food in her stomach might be a good idea.

Trevor and a couple of knives went with Evan back to Evan’s cabin to get the rice; the Pale Bro went with the rest of them to Jason’s cabin, both to make sure nothing happened to any of his friends, and because steak sounded awesome. Since Evan’s family had been coming here for vacations since he was a kid, he knew the area well enough to know how to get to Jason’s house once Jason gave him the address.

***

Jason’s cabin was about the same size as Evan’s, and it did not have a hot tub, but it did have a barbeque grill. Not one of those tiny little portable things that run on charcoal, either. This was a large fancy propane-powered grill of the kind that could practically be used in an industrial kitchen.

“Honey! I brought guests! And they brought beer! And their friend is gonna make us some Spanish rice!” he called.

A woman came out of the cabin, looking so goth she might as well have invented it. She had incredibly pale white skin, without even the undertone of red most healthy human beings have; she wasn’t quite as pale as the Pale Bro, but it was close. Long black hair slunk down her back like she was cosplaying Morticia Adams. She was wearing hip-hugging black jeans and a long-sleeved black blouse, and a chain around her neck with an Egyptian ankh on it, and her lips were blood-red.

Then she opened her mouth, and it became immediately apparent that she had fangs.

“How do you do,” she said in a vaguely quasi-European accent. “I’m called Angella Darque, with a q. And you are?”

The college students introduced themselves, Nandini wearing a very skeptical pair of eyebrows the entire time. After introductions were done, she asked, “Is your last name really Darque?”

Angella looked taken aback. Jason said, “It’s really Duncan, actually, but she’s getting together the legal paperwork to get it changed because she hates her dad. Deadbeat, never paid child support, you know the type.”

“Oh, Jason, I had no idea today was ‘let’s tell total strangers all about my girlfriend’s private history’ day. Is that what we’re celebrating?”

“Sorry.”

“His lips are so loose,” she confessed to the students. “Sometimes I just want to… sew them shut.”

“Isn’t she hilarious?” Jason laughed. “We met at a support group for people with anemia, five years ago, and we’ve been together since.”

“Um,” Ashlee, obviously very nervous, said. “Uh, we brought some beer if you want. And also wine coolers. Would you like a wine cooler?”

“No, I never drink… wine,” Angella said. And then, “Do you have anything like a Jaeger?”

“Evan’s got vodka back at the cabin,” Steve volunteered.

“Does your cell phone work up here? Maybe you could call him,” Jason said. “Or I could, if he’s got a landline.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to put anyone out,” Angella said. “I have 151 here, and that’s quite fine. Would any of you like some?”

“Yeah, slip it on me!” Kayla cheered, somewhat mangling her idiom.

Nandini and Y’lehna said at the same time, “No.” And then Y’lehna clarified. “I’m a little drunk, but she’s, like, totally plastered. We can’t even let her have a beer at this point. Soda’s cool, though.”

The Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like a million marbles suddenly gaining sentience and stampeding for a cliff to fling themselves over like lemmings, except that lemmings don’t really do that, that he would appreciate a rum and Coke.

Angella went back in the house to make the Pale Bro a rum and Coke with dangerously-high-proof rum. Harrison, Steve, and the girls looked at each other. Finally Rhiannon said, “I thought maybe I saw… your girlfriend has fangs? What’s up with that?”

“Pretty cool, huh?” Jason said cheerfully. “Now you guys need to let me know, should I use the rosemary garlic marinade, the pineapple ginger, or the Brazilian steakhouse?”

“Why not mix it up?” Harrison asked. “You got a lot of steak there, you could do ‘em all!”

“I don’t think pineapple ginger would go well with steak,” Ashlee said uncertainly. “Doesn’t that sound like more of a pork thing?”

“Or fish,” Y’lehna said. “Oh, but wait! Nandini, can you even eat pork?”

“I can eat anything,” Nandini said irritably, “but my family’s Hindi, not Muslim. I’m supposed to stay away from beef, not pork. But some traditions I don’t even believe in is not going to stop me from eating a nice steak.”

“I could add pork medallions, if you thought it was a good idea,” Jason said.

“Nah, man, you’ve got a lot of meat here,” Harrison said. “It looks great! Maybe if you had like a swordfish or tuna steak for Y’lehna, but if you don’t, no worries.”

“I got a salmon.”

“Pineapple ginger might go really well with salmon,” Y’lehna suggested.

Meanwhile Angella had brought the Pale Bro his rum and Coke, and they were currently discussing literary trends in fiction aimed at college-educated women.

***

Evan and Trevor returned with rice, spices, dried vegetables, and coincidentally, a can of pineapple chunks. Jason ended up preparing the salmon with the pineapple chunks after defrosting it in his microwave, and Evan made the Spanish rice he’d promised, and no one actually questioned why someone had started grilling steaks at midnight.

The salmon was done first, and Y’lehna and Nandini, who was feeling just a little bit guilty over her earlier decision to eat beef, got most of it. Angella got the first steak that came up, when it was barely warmed, still dripping blood. Then the rest of them, as the rest of the steaks were all done around the same time, along with the rice.

At some point, Evan suggested that everyone return to his cabin, because he had video games and music and nice speakers; Jason and Angella turned the offer down, Angella saying, “The night is young, and has yet to yield all its delights”, which was really corny and pretentious, but given the look she gave Jason when she said it, none of the guys questioned why he was staying at his own cabin tonight instead of going with them. Ashlee also insisted on staying at her own cabin; after a whole night of having ten people at her house, she was kind of burned out on people, and needed to get some sleep. And everyone agreed that Kayla should stay at Ashlee’s cabin; she was still cheerful and fun, but she was still pretty plastered. Because of the potential threat of a killer, Steve volunteered to stay with the girls; he knew Evan’s landline number, so he could call in reinforcements if necessary. Everyone else trooped back along the road, many carrying tinfoil-covered plates of steak and spicy rice, back to Evan’s cabin.

There was blood dripped onto the driveway.

The Pale Bro noticed it before anyone else, with his multiple sensitive eyes. His arm went out to block Evan from going any further, and in a voice like the rumble of an entire river’s worth of water pouring from a broken dam, he warned everyone of the blood and suggested he should go first.

Evan put up his hands. “No problem, man,” he said. “You take point.”

“I’m right behind you,” Trevor, holding one of the knives in front of him, said.

“Okay, I’ll bring up the rear,” Nandini said. “Harrison, Y’Lehna, Rhiannon, Evan, you go between us.”

Harrison looked at Nandini, who was taller than him, and then at the others. Evan was maybe the same height as Nandini, maybe very slightly taller… or very slightly shorter. It was too dark for Harrison to accurately judge.

He, too, put up his hands. “Works for me,” he said.

Evan looked back at Nandini. “I feel like I should be back with you,” he said. “If Pale’s got Trevor as backup…”

The Pale Bro pointed out, in a tone that conveyed deep irritation, that he didn’t need backup because if it was a human killer he’d make short work of them and if it was a monster, only he had a chance, and anyway it was probably not a monster because his cousin had claimed to be on a diet and the only reason they’d thought it was a monster in the first place was his cousin’s footprint. He then walked forward resolutely.

The door to the cabin was hanging open. The Pale Bro ducked his head way down, which he was pretty much used to doing any time he was going through a door, and pushed through, followed by Trevor. They’d left all the lights on, with the shutters closed, so that the light leaking around the edges of the shutters would make someone think they were home, and also because the lights were LED bulbs so seriously, that was probably like only thirty cents worth of electricity wasted. In that light, they saw blood all over the floor.

All of the group looked at each other uneasily. Ever since the Pale Bro had found the girls and the hot tub, no one had really been acting as if there genuinely was a potential killer out there; they’d given lip service to the idea, they’d certainly gotten scared enough every time something bizarre happened – and a lot of bizarre things had happened – but they hadn’t really treated it as a serious risk. Now it seemed possible that someone had been murdered in Evan’s cabin, or had been stabbed somewhere else and staggered into Evan’s cabin, despite the fact that all the locks had been locked.

The Pale Bro went forward into the kitchen, following the blood trail – and stopped in confusion. This caused everyone else to stop short, without being able to see into the kitchen because the Bro was blocking the doorway.

“Come on, bro, what’s going on?” Evan asked.

The Pale Bro slid sideways out of the way in a fashion that didn’t quite look like a real way anything could possibly move, and Evan pushed forward to be right behind Trevor, both of them crammed into the doorway.

A middle-aged white dude wearing a baseball cap advertising Evan’s parents’ company was at the sink, his front covered in blood. He had turned to face all of them, his hands clean but his sleeves completely saturated with something’s death juices.

“Joe?” Evan said disbelievingly.

“Evan!” Joe said. “I’m so sorry about the mess, man, and the hour, I know you’re pissed and I don’t blame you, I’d be pissed too, I know I’m really late—”

“Joe. Why are you covered in blood? What happened?”

“The meat defrosted,” Joe said. “I was driving around this mountain trying to find the cabin for so long, the meat defrosted, and when I pulled it out of my trunk, the bag caught on something and ripped and all the blood from the meat defrosting was all over me. I’m so sorry.”

“Why are you—” Evan glanced at a fancy cuckoo clock on the wall that actually ran on batteries, not solely on clockwork. “—getting in at two fucking am when you were supposed to be here before six?”

“I have been driving around this mountain since four in the afternoon,” Joe said. “My GPS stopped working halfway up the mountain, and I swear I tried to follow your mom’s directions, I swear, but I couldn’t find Long Leaf Lane no matter how hard I looked, and I went back down and asked at the gas station but none of them lived on the mountain, so I bought a paper map but it didn’t help at all because Long Leaf Lane wasn’t even on it—”

“It’s a private drive, I don’t even know if they put those on maps,” Evan said.

“Evan, if this is your guy with the food and he’s not dying of stab wounds, I’m going to use your bathroom,” Nandini said. “Where is it?”

“There’s two, one upstairs with a claw-foot tub and one down on this floor, go back out of the kitchen and it’s the door on the east side of the living room,” Evan said.

“Great, using the downstairs one,” Nandini said, and ducked back out of the doorway.

“Are you okay?” Rhiannon asked Joe.

“I’ve been driving for ten hours. Last six of which I couldn’t find my way back down the mountain either, and I didn’t have any food and the only water was the ice that used to be in my Sprite that melted—”

“Come on, man,” Evan said, sighing. “Yeah, the GPS situation really sucks around here. I wouldn’t wanna try to find Long Leaf Lane if I hadn’t been coming here every summer for, like, ten years. Let’s get you upstairs and get you cleaned up.” He looked over at Harrison and the Pale Bro. “Guys, you know more or less where the stuff in the kitchen goes, right? Can you put the food away?”

“The ice cream melted,” Joe moaned. “I’m so sorry…”

“No, come on. Let’s get you a shower and a change of clothes. I’ll borrow something of Steve’s while you’re in the shower, he’s about your size.”

“I think I know,” Harrison said. “We put the meat in the freezer?”

Rhiannon and Evan said, “No!” at the same time, and Rhiannon added, “You’ve got to put it in the fridge. You can’t freeze most things twice, they get freezer burned.”

“Huh,” Harrison said, looking over the sheer quantity of meat that Joe had been trying to carry in a paper shopping bag with handles. “I guess we’re gonna go back to Jason and Angella’s at least one night this week, ‘cause this is way more meat than we can eat before it goes bad.”

The Pale Bro, who had just picked up the bag of melted ice cream and slurped the whole thing down like it was a milkshake, said, in the voice of a creature whose mouth was entirely full of melted ice cream, something very much like “Watch me.”

“Lemme go throw this shit out,” Harrison said of the paper shopping bag, whose bottom had almost disintegrated from holding way too much au jus for even a strong, well-made paper shopping bag to handle, and which smelled like a murder had been done, or at least that someone had lost an arm and was bleeding out.

Evan took Joe upstairs to the bathroom to wash himself, broke into Steve’s suitcase and took a random t-shirt and pair of shorts, and advised him that he could stay overnight, sleep on the couch, and have some eggs and bacon in the morning, now that he had brought the eggs and bacon.

And then they all heard Harrison screaming.

Evan got down the stairs approximately as fast as Nandini came racing from the bathroom, but Rhiannon, Y’lehna and the Pale Bro were out the door faster, having been closer.

Harrison was on the ground. The trash can had been dumped over. It was mostly cleaning products used by the team that cleaned the cabin between uses, but there were some banana peels and candy wrappers – and now, a bloody shopping bag – in the pile of trash.

Standing over the pile of trash, looking kind of pissed, was a black bear.

In the voice of a guy who has finally, finally gotten the chance to use his strength and size to protect his friends after like what seemed like twenty-seven false scares tonight, the Pale Bro said something that could possibly be understood to be “Fucking finally,” and charged at the bear.

The bear had a lot of mass, even more than the Pale Bro, who was a very, very skinny dude, but the Pale Bro was around twice as tall as the bear, had much longer claws, and was doing something weird to the space around the bear, making lensing effects that distorted all the angles of the trees and branches behind the trash can. The bear flailed a bit, and then the Pale Bro lifted it and held it straight out from his body, where its much smaller paws couldn’t hope to reach. It snarled and kicked and scratched, but the Pale Bro relentlessly carried it into the woods, where they both disappeared.

“Well.” Evan said. “Who wants to help me clean up this trash?”

“’Want’ is a strong word,” Harrison said, but he helped, and Nandini and Rhiannon pitched in. Y’lehna would have helped, but she had to run back into the cabin to run cold water over her arms and legs.

The Pale Bro returned minutes later, without a scratch on him. “Where’d you put the bear, dude?” Harrison asked.

The Bro conveyed that he could possibly have gone out to the cliff that ran alongside the road – the same cliff that, in a different location, had claimed the life of an entire case of beer – and by the way, did any of them know that bears bounce? Because he hadn’t.

“Dude, you didn’t have to kill it,” Evan complained.

“Yes, he did! It was gonna kill me! I don’t want it coming back for revenge!” Harrison gabbled out.

The Pale Bro declared that he hadn’t killed it. Before anyone could feel either relief or fear over that, he added that his mom lived down that way someplace and she would probably kill it, because eldritch spawn eat a lot and he had a lot of brothers and sisters.

***

And so the first night of their vacation ended, with the Pale Bro staying up all night playing video games with Trevor, who’d returned to the cabin with Steve once they’d both been informed that there was no psycho killer and Joe was actually fine, he’d just gotten really lost. Evan, Harrison and Steve went to bed like normal people, or rather, like normal people who are young men in college, around four am, after walking Rhiannon, Nandini and Y’lehna back to their cabin like gentlemen, because psycho killer or no, the woods were dark and any number of things could happen. In other words, it was a perfectly normal night on vacation, just like any group of friends in college might have.

As for anything that might have happened the next day, or any of the other days of their vacation… that’s a story for another time.

#52 project #spooky 5 #comedy #horror #except not really

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the-desolated-quill · 4 years

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If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own - Watchmen (TV Series) blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. if you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own feels like a tale of two episodes. One has well written characters, emotive storytelling and exciting possibilities, whereas the other contains ham-fisted, painfully obvious subtext and annoyingly long infodumps told to the audience with all the grace and subtlety of a brick to the face.

Let’s start with the positives. At the beginning of the episode, we’re introduced to the character of Lady Trieu, played by Hong Chau, who buys a farmhouse from an Oklahoma couple by offering them a genetically engineered baby. I love this scene so much. It’s by far the most tightly written and engaging scene so far this series, and serves as a perfect introduction to a genuinely interesting character.

Lady Trieu is a Vietnamese born trillionaire industrialist who absorbed Adrian Veidt’s company after his disappearance and seems to take heavy inspiration from him, even going so far as to have a gold statue of him in her complex. It’s unclear whether she knows about his involvement with the squid (how could she possibly know?), but she clearly shares his vision of making the world better.

Or... does she?

That’s precisely what I love about this character. Trieu is clearly the secret mastermind behind whatever is going on here (more on that later) and it would have been easy to just simply have her be a carbon copy of Veidt, but she isn’t. There’s a subtle, but clear distinction between the two. In my review of Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, I talked about the paradox of a liberal capitalist and how it’s often not enough for Ozymandias to simply save the world. He needs to be seen to be saving the world. He wants something with spectacle in order to appeal to his own vanity. This is true of Trieu as well, except, despite all his flaws, Ozymandias clearly at least wanted to help people, albeit in an incredibly flashy way for his own aggrandisement. Trieu doesn’t even want that. She just wants the attention and the good will.

The opening scene is a perfect illustration of this. Giving that married couple their own DIY baby was one thing, but all the crap with the hourglass and the silly monologue and everything, there was no need for any of that. And lets not forget, she didn’t give this couple a baby out of the goodness of her heart. She did it solely because she wanted their land so she could claim a fallen object from space. The same is true of this Millennium Clock she’s building. I’m pretty sure its purpose isn’t just to tell the time, but that’s not the point. It’s described by her daughter as not the Eighth Wonder of the World, but rather as the First Wonder of the New World. Plus, of course, she is a trillionaire. If she just handed out even a small portion of her vast wealth, it would make a huge difference, but then there would be nothing in it for her. Nothing to gain. Unlike Veidt, Trieu is a character driven by pure cynicism. She has no interest in saving the world, but rather the attention and adoration of the world around her. She wants the world and the people around her to rely on her to save them. Basically if Ozymandias is an altruist tempered with narcissism, then Lady Trieu is a narcissist tempered with altruism. It’s a beautifully realised character and one I’m most excited to see more of in the episodes to come.

I also like the connection she has with Angela. Both were born and raised in Vietnam, except Trieu’s mother was a native to Vietnam before the US invaded and absorbed the country, turning it into the fifty first state. This puts Angela in an interesting position. Being an African American, her family obviously has history of being the victims of colonial oppression, but in this alternate history where Vietnam is part of America, Angela is also now in the role as one of the colonial oppressors. A settler in a country stolen and plundered from the natives. It’s an interesting position for her character to be in and I’m very curious to see where the show takes this.

After taking a backseat in the previous episode, Angela mercifully gets to take the lead again this time around and she’s great. With the FBI breathing down her neck, Angela continues to get to the bottom of the mystery involving her grandfather, the murder of Judd Crawford, and the Seventh Kavalry, and I really like where this is taking her character. She privately confides in Wade about what she has learned, even asking him to hide Judd’s Klan robe. This is the kind of character stuff I wanted to see in the previous episode during the funeral. How do you react to the knowledge that one of your closest friends was a hateful bigot? And from the looks of things, it seems as though Angela is doing her level best to protect Judd’s memory, at least until she gets to the bottom of what the fuck is going on here. I love this because it feels totally believable.There’s still a part of her that doesn’t want to accept Judd’s racist ties to white supremacy and clinging onto the idea that he might be misunderstood or that there’s something else going on underneath. This is an excellent internal conflict that has so far been handled exceptionally well. You don’t think less of Angela for not wanting to accept the truth because it’s totally understandable and believable.

Also I just want to briefly talk about what we learn about Wade, aka Looking Glass, in this episode. The man’s a doomsday prepper, living in a bunker in his back garden, preparing for another squid attack. I LOVE this so much. It makes total sense in the context of Watchmen and, like with Lady Trieu, it serves as a really nice inversion of an existing character. Like Rorschach, Looking Glass is a paranoid conspiracy nut, but unlike Rorschach, there’s actually some truth and logic behind his paranoia. Again, it’s a subtle distinction, but it’s enough to allow the character to go off in his own direction.

Here’s the thing. The bits I like about this episode, I really like. Unfortunately the bits I don’t like, I really don’t like.

Let’s begin with Laurie. What is she even doing here? Not only is she so utterly divorced from the character in the graphic novel, she doesn’t even contribute anything meaningful to the plot, other than to bicker constantly with Angela (which, considering this is the first time in Watchmen that we’ve had two female characters together interacting with each other, it feels immensely disappointing that this is the best the writers can come up with) or to spout gratuitous fanwank and pop psychology. The pop psychology in particular irritates me because it simply doesn’t gel with the tone and themes of Watchmen. I’m really hoping all that stuff about trauma and wearing a mask to hide the pain doesn’t in fact apply to Sister Night, otherwise I’m going to be extremely annoyed. Not only is that cliched beyond belief, it also stands directly against the whole point of Watchmen as a concept. Alan Moore’s intent was to scrutinise the reasons behind why someone would put a costume on and fight crime. Some just want the attention, others want to compensate for their own inadequacies, and some just want to live out their own violent, hedonistic fantasies. Only Rorschach fits the trauma model proposed by Laurie, and even then it’s not really accurate. Rorschach uses his trauma more as an excuse than a motivation. Watchmen serves as a deconstruction and criticism of superhero archetypes, so to potentially give Sister Night an obligatory tragic backstory would feel like a grave disservice to the source material.

The pop psychology also represents another problem this episode has. It seems to spend an awful lot of time telling its audience about its themes and commentaries rather than just showing them. One of the things I loved so much about the second episode was that it respected the audience’s intelligence. The connections it was making between the police and mob psychology, the superhero genre and its roots in US propaganda, and the KKK and the moral absolutism of most comic book heroes were apparent in the episode’s visual language and symbolism. It didn’t try to highlight them in fifty foot high neon lettering, instead trusting the audience to make the connections themselves. Here, however, completely the opposite. At numerous points, it feels as though the episode is sitting me down like a naughty school child and straight up telling me the plot, rather than trust that I’m a grown man who is perfectly capable of following this by himself, I pinky promise.

Take the whole subplot with Adrian Veidt for example. By watching the previous episodes, you can deduce that he’s trapped in a prison of his own making and is trying to escape (although admittedly it turns out that the clones aren’t in fact his creations, which is a pity because I think that’s less interesting, but still). Awesome idea. Love it. But showrunner Damon Lindelof is clearly worried that the idiots sitting at the back of the class didn’t get this, so Adrian spends his limited screen time here just explaining his subplot to the audience. It’s really annoying.

Or what about the Millennium Clock? The Seventh Cavalry are clearly in league with Trieu for some unknown reason, and in their video message to the police in the first episode, they say ‘tick, tock’ a lot, which is clearly a reference to the Clock. All a bit goofy, granted, but do you know what’s even goofier? Will getting up out of his wheelchair, staring dramatically into camera and saying ‘tick, tock’ for no fucking reason whatsoever other than to spell out the connection for the slow people in the audience who didn’t make the link. Dude, I promise you, we are following this. It was just pointless. But not nearly as pointless as...

Good God, do I hate Lube Man!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against there being humour in Watchmen. The original graphic novel had moments of dark humour, but there’s a time and a place. It just feels weird and kooky just for the sake of being weird and kooky. And again, it serves as a less than subtle reminder to the audience of the themes of the show. The police are abusing their powers and letting smaller crimes fall by the wayside, but rather than let that come up naturally in the story, we get a random excerpt from the Silver Slider here. All I can say is Lube Man had better play a vital role in the episodes to come, otherwise I’ll be pissed.

See, when Good Lindelof is writing the scripts, I’m enjoying this show immensely. When Bad Lindelof takes a turn at the keyboard, however, that’s when I start to get worried.

#if you don't like my story write your own #watchmen #watchmen hbo #damon lindelof #dc #hbo #review #spoilers

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erintoknow · 4 years

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Book Reviews

Falling behind on my book review work!!!

The Poison Eaters by Gail Jarrow This is a really well put together primer on the history of drug and food safety in the United States. The narrative style does a great job of both relating the history while keeping it grounded in at a level that makes it accessible to younger teens. The use of art, photographs and other primary documents to expand on the text is also excellent.

The Stonewall Riots by Gayle E. Pitman The format of the text as a kind of 'museum in a book' is an interesting approach to the subject matter. It certainly makes for an interesting way to cover multiple angles of history. I'm not sure how appealing the format really is though. Like, I thought it was interesting but.... eh?

Internment by Samira Ahmed I don't know what it is, but I really struggled to stick with and get through this one. I'd perhaps would have been better served skipping it and moving on to other titles. But everything about it seems to be right up my alley. There's just something about the work as a whole that's leaving me cold. This one is comparatively popular at our library, and I feel a little guilty for monopolozing it for so long to try and stick through it. Timeliness-wise the book seems to be pretty transparently a reaction to the current administration. I don't think that's a bad thing. Fiction that can directly speak to modern anxieties like this one does are valuable conversation starters and empathy builders.

Let's Call It A Doomsday by Katie Henry This was a really fun read, and it was refreshing to get a depiction of generalized anxiety disorder that felt true to life like Ellis's does, and Ellis's voice is fun to read. I was worried at first that Hannah was going to be a vary particular trope of character, but I'm pretty happy with how that plot line worked out. The doomsday prepper angle is a pretty good hook

Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kistoff A fast-paced Science Fiction action adventure. It’s pretty clearly setting up for a trilogy, but it remains coherent as a stand-alone story. (Compared to say something like Once & Future which ends with a literal ‘To Be Continued!’) I wasn’t crazy about the team being a literal paint-by-numbers collection of tropes, but they start to grow beyond that through the book which was nice to see and the target audience might not be as jaded by the formula as I am at this point.

We Set The Dark On Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia A dystopian Latin-American-esque setting with a clear allegory to a certain border wall that’s been popular in the news lately. There’s a follow up / second half to the story coming out these year, while WSTDOF doesn’t end on a straight up cliff-hanger it’s pretty darn close and you’re obviously not getting the full story without the follow-up. Another review I saw called it a ‘gayer handmaiden’s tale’ and… yeah, I can see it. The romance felt very sudden, but like, once it did get started it felt like one of the stronger parts of the book. I could see this being of interest to those on a ‘Handmaiden’s Tale’ kick and the dystopian Latin-American island fictional setting is at least a switch-up from the usual fair.

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisginer, Steven Scott & illustrated by Harmony Becker Takai’s account of living through the US government’s internment of Japanese Americans coupled with Becker’s clear and easy to follow artwork is brilliantly told. The contrast between Takai’s lived experience as a child with what he knows now was a great decision. Uh, that’s it. I don’t really have a lot to say on this one. It’s good, go read it.

Jane Anonymous by Laurie Faria Stolarz I had to take breaks while reading this novel. It is intense. The main character, ostensibly writing the book under the pseudonym ‘Jane Anonymous’ was kidnapped and held-captive for seven months and the book flips back and forth between ‘Then’ and ‘Now’ comparing her ordeal to survive with her difficult adjustment back to a ‘normal’ life, dealing with PTSD, repressed trauma and suffering from having been psychologically manipulated. It’s a story about healing from trauma, essentially. Jane’s behavior as our protagonist feels very real to me, as does the behavior of her family and friends. Stolarz really did her homework. I found it to be a very powerful, and ultimately hopeful book. But it’s also A Lot. I don’t know what it says about me but I really identified with Jane throughout the story. Looking at some of the reviews, there’s people talking about how they ‘saw the twist coming from a mile away’ but like, I don’t think it’s meant to be a twist for the reader? I can’t really talk about it without giving it away. But like, I don’t think this is meant to be some kind of mystery or horror/thriller style book. Don’t go in expecting that.

#jane anonymous #they called us enemy #we set the dark on fire #aurora rising #let's call it a doomsday #Internment #The Stonewall riots #The Poison Eaters #Book Reviews

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jc-castillo · 5 years

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NAME: Jackson “JC” Castillo AGE: Thirty-One GENDER IDENTITY: Male, he/him ORIENTATION: Bisexual OCCUPATION: Construction Worker HOMETOWN: New York City, New York

Head of Security ⟼ Hello. Your 48 hour mandatory quarantine is now over. Before letting you into the populace I need you to answer a few questions. Please state your full name, and date of birth. “Hey…” He forced a smile, simply trying to appease the statuesque man. “Jackson Castillo, but I go by JC, and um… Why do you need my birthday?” Letting out a sigh, he shook his head and answered. “December seventh, nineteen-ninety-three…”

Head of Security ⟼ Thank you. In the last 48 hours have you experienced Infected like symptoms? Looking down at the hazmat suit on his body, and the helmet in his hand, he chuckled softly before putting his stone face back on. “...No. I’m pretty sure I haven’t…”

Head of Security ⟼ Are there any ailments, disabilities, mental illnesses, or medical conditions that we should be made aware of? “Not that I can think of. I mean, I’ve been underground for the past five years, so I’m not sure if that’d…. Cause anything? Stir-crazy, maybe?” He suggested, scratching his chin in thought before finally shrugging and moving on to the next question.

Head of Security⟼ Can you give us a little background on yourself. Your family life, work ethic. What kind of person are you? “What family life? My parents died at the beginning of all this. They were the first infected I saw. They were doomsday preppers and they had a doomsday shelter in the backyard, so… When this all started, I went to get in it with them, and my dad had already turned and gotten at my mom…” Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and continued. ”She wasn’t dead yet, but, she was clearly not gonna make it... I ran in there myself and locked myself in. That’s where I’ve been since this started. When I ran out of food, I climbed out, put on this hazmat suit, ran into another survivor, and we made our way over here together.”

Head of Security ⟼ Can you list for us 3 skills that you are proficient in? “Free climbing, I’m a pretty fast runner, and I’m good at building, and construction work.”

Head of Security⟼ Excellent. Now, three skills that you are not proficient in. “Pretty much everything else. Not good at killing, scouting, and… farming? I guess?”

Head of Security ⟼ Last question. If you had to, would you be able to kill someone you knew if they became infected? “Um… Someone I knew?... I haven’t even killed one of those�� But uh… Yeah. Yeah, I could.” He lied through his teeth, hoping the security officer wouldn’t pick up on it.

Head of Security⟼ Thank you. And welcome to Fortuna.

#fortunatask #fortunatask1

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fanfictionconnectionwordpress · 6 years

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Mystic Messenger Fanfiction | SevenxMC Good Ending Continued | Ch.18 Indestructible

***Here we are! It's the end of this fanfiction. I went through so much personal stuff throughout the writing of this one, and I'm so grateful to everyone not only for being patient but for even reading anything I write in the first place. The Good Ending Continued Series project was something I started just to have fun and started posting thinking no one would ever read it, but boy have I been pleasantly surprised. Thank you. Really. For my patrons, there is a new hidden scene available to you of Seven and MC raising their teenagers. I'll be returning to work on posting up my commissions and focusing on Tagged again as we wait for the After Endings for Saeran and V. Thank you again to all of you. ~Let's Connect! FFC***

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Why was my phone ringing at this ungodly hour of the night? I rolled over with a grumble, taking a few tries before I managed to actually get my hands on the item in question. After struggling all day with the boys not wanting to nap and the girls creating messes all over the house, I was not really in the mood for a phone call. Seeing the caller ID made me question just what crisis Yoosung could possibly have that would require my attention.

“Yoosung? What is it?” Saeyoung stretched lazily next to me, putting his arm around my waist and pulling me slightly closer to nuzzle my bottom. I swatted at him as I tried to make out what the blond was talking about. A lot of it didn’t make sense at first as he was talking about how he heard strange noises and that he’d seen something running around in his house. The only thing that did make sense was when he asked if Saeyoung was home.

I furrowed my brows and looked down at my husband. Had he been up to something? Yoosung started talking again about how he kept hearing Saeyoung’s voice in the house. A prank? Saeyoung still had his eyes closed, but there was definitely a grin on his face. With a sigh, I answered Yoosung’s question. “Saeyoung is home. He’s in bed with me right now.”

That seemed to perplex the blond further, but he apologized for waking me and hung up. Saeyoung’s phone must have been on silent. Now that I looked over at his nightstand, I could see the device flashing green because it had new messages waiting. “What are you up to, Saeyoung?” My husband just nipped my butt and I reached over to smack his before he yelped and rolled over, holding up his hands in defeat.

The grin on his face completely betrayed the lie. “Nothing, nothing! I haven’t been doing anything.” There had to be something going on. Even though I was tired, I was more intrigued than upset at being awoken. Though, my phone was going off again. I picked up much more quickly this time to find it was again Yoosung. “Are you sure Saeyoung is in bed with you?”

I looked over at Saeyoung who was starting to snicker and rolled my eyes. Whatever this was, it had to be a pretty good prank. “Yes. He’s in bed with me. Would you like to video chat?” It was easy enough to change the voice call into a video one and Yoosung’s eyes went wide as Saeyoung waved at him.

“Hey there, Yoosung. Why’re you waking my wife so much?” He’d managed to make the blond pale completely with that question - now starting to make apologies and again describe what was happening. Yoosung appeared to be getting more and more upset, even to the point where his chest was heaving so much that I was almost certain he was about to cry. That was when I saw it.

Something was walking up behind Yoosung on the floor space leading to his bed. The item in question looked an awful lot like a small doll of my husband that he’d once shown me. This only had me further furrowing my brows. Yoosung must have noticed me squinting at the screen, because he stopped mid-sentence. “MC…is something…?”

Almost as soon as he’d asked the question, the blond noticed on the small ‘preview’ window of his own video feed that there was something creeping up on him. He shrieked - dropping his phone and giving us a view of his covers but an excellent audio feed as there were crashing sounds and soft curses. Saeyoung burst out laughing, and I couldn’t keep myself from snickering either.

Obviously, my husband had been testing out a new robot creation of his. I felt bad for Yoosung being the victim of yet another of my husband’s little pranks and tests, but I couldn’t help finding it hilarious either. Yoosung returned on screen - the small robot clutched in his hand so hard that his knuckles were white. “You come get this in the morning Saeyoung or I’m going to smash it!”

The blond’s face was red with anger and probably some embarrassment as well before he abruptly ended the call as my husband only laughed louder. With the call ended, I could join him in the belly-aching laugh until our eyes were teary. Poor Yoosung…but my husband had managed to make Yoosung think that he was being haunted by the ghost of a living human being.

When our laughter finally cooled, we were still both staring at the ceiling with occasional small bouts of the giggles before I rolled over to snuggle into my husband’s chest. “What did you even build a robot you for anyway?” That was accompanied by a giggle of my own, but it died as I felt Saeyoung tensing below me - pulling me a little closer. Was it something worth tensing over?

“I wanted to make a version of myself that would outlive me. A way for me to be around after I’m dead.” That made me tense as well before I pulled back, my hands on either side of his head and hair falling around me as I looked down at my husband’s face. “Outlive you?” Saeyoung looked completely serious as he responded. “Yeah. I made one for you, too.”

This wasn’t exactly an easy topic. He tended to be a little on the eccentric side and obsessive about things I couldn’t even begin to understand like supernovas and the infinite cosmos, but having your husband preparing for your deaths was a lot more disturbing than that. “Why would you be making something like that? Is there something wrong?” My best guess was that Saeyoung was secretly a doomsday prepper, but that didn’t really make much sense, considering.

He’d started to chew on the inside of his cheek, probably because of the look I was giving him, but now he moved to push some of my hair behind my ear. “I just wanted…in case something ever happened to us, I wanted the kids to have a piece of us. They’re still so young…” My heart clenched painfully in my chest at the look on his face. His eyes were showing an intense pain beneath the surface. This wasn’t something he’d created just for fun or ‘just in case’, there was a real reason behind it.

“I grew up without my dad and with a mom who hated me. I was alone for so long…and I don’t want that to happen to them.” Now my heart absolutely crumbled, a tear I didn’t know I’d shed falling onto his cheek before I bent to kiss him long and hard. Saeyoung was creating these ‘outliving’ robots because of all the abandonment he’d suffered when he was young - wanting to keep that from happening to our children.

When I broke the kiss, I wiped my own tear from his cheek and gave him a light peck on the nose. “You’re a wonderful father, Saeyoung…” I gave a soft laugh before shaking my head and lying back down beside him. “I hope we’ll never need it, but you better go get that robot tomorrow before Yoosung throws it down his stairs.”

Saeyoung gave a little laugh of his own before rolling over and tickling me for a short while before I could grab his hands away. “Don’t worry, MC.” His smile was positively wolfish, almost the same sadistic one he gave when he was playing the dominant in our bedroom. “That robot is pretty much indestructible, so he can throw it wherever he wants.”

***

Their children could have run the RFA all by themselves if it weren’t for the fact that it needed some organization. Thankfully, Jumin had adopted a daughter who took over that aspect as well as Zen and Jaehee’s son. Only one of MC and Saeyoung’s children had any sort of danger filter, and it made for rather interestingly themed RFA parties after the old RFA retired.

Saeyoung and MC’s life was filled with activity all around, even in their last days. With as many children as they had, their grandchildren multiplied quickly, and rest was hard to come by. Neither of them really wanted rest - not when there was fun to be had as a family. Nearly every grandchild inherited the vibrant red hair, and that more than anything showed Saeyoung just how much evidence of his own existence he’d left on the world.

MC would always remember the night her husband passed as she drove him out for what he called ‘one last ride in my babies’ to a grassy area outside of Seoul. He’d been ill for some time, no longer able to walk as his body was reaching its limits. Saeyoung had never taken the best care of himself physically, and it was really showing in his old age. As they’d lain there under the stars, Saeyoung spoke of the emptiness of non-existence and the way MC had saved him from that life. He mentioned that he hoped the reset would start again so he could live this life over, but she simply hushed him and said that whatever came they’d always be together. That seemed to soothe him, and they laid there quietly until he breathed his last.

It was several hours later before MC found herself able to call the medics and let go of her husband. She was right to think that his robots would never be a replacement for him, though she still dug the little thing he’d once terrorized Yoosung with from its hiding place. She was found clutching the item when she passed - the little robot still singing her a lullaby and asking her if she’d fallen asleep.

In their time working for the RFA, they were able to help raise incredible amounts of money. Saeyoung gave up most of his hacking activity and lived a far more legal life than he’d had to before - able to be reunited with his brother and have his own family. The existence he’d never thought he’d have was now a permanent mark on the organization as well as their family left behind. Who could forget the eccentric redhead who’d once protected them from the shadows? His legacy was as indestructible as the robot he’d built.

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#mystic messenger #mysmes #mystic messenger fanfiction #saeyoung choi #sevenxmc #sevenxmc good ending continued

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thelifetimechannel · 6 years

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#tlcstuck #rose lalonde #dirk strider #walkaround 3

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My Top 25 Movies of 2020.

It is indeed time… or at least, as is tradition, it is indeed now overdue for me to dust off the cobwebs from my Tumblr account and post my Top 25 movies of the year. This time for 2020. That funny old year, huh? Where - if some are to be stupidly believed - “no films got released because of the pandemic”.

I thought I was done with this after 12 years and concluding with my Top 25 of the decade effort and yet here I am. Back rather egotistically because 2 people told me how much they look forward to reading this. Go figure! Years 2008 through to present are available in the archive. Frequent visitors know that I’ll throw out a few special mentions to all the films that I wish I could’ve included but couldn’t make them fit yet believe they deserve a shout out regardless and then I get stuck in to what I think are the 25 best films of the year.

As always, films listed are based on their UK release date whether that’s in the cinema or on DVD, VOD etc. Anyway, without further ado, here’s the ‘also-rans’ and ‘near-misses’ separated per genre that very nearly made the final list:

Setting my stall out straight away, Steve McQueen’s Small Axe was very much TV to me and won’t get ranked within my film listing. I loved two of the efforts a great deal (Education and Mangrove), liked two but found them lacking (Red, White & Blue and Alex Wheatle) and did not get what everyone else seems to from the other (Lover’s Rock).

In terms of documentaries this year, I thought Frank Marshall did a fabulous job with The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart; a comprehensive study of the personal complexities and professional excellence of an incredibly underappreciated band. I found On The Record to be a difficult but inspiring watch and its background ‘politics’ exposed the hypocrisy of Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey in a manner we’re not talking loud enough about. Hitsville: The Making of Motown was an extensive, lovely historical tribute to an era and a style of music, full of great tunes and equally great talking head anecdotes. And finally Belushi managed to find fresh angles and previously untold stories about one of the most mythologised comedy stars of all time, simply by pulling the man to the forefront ahead of his talents.

For dramas, I enjoyed Trial of the Chicago 7 a great deal and am an absolute sucker for the work of Aaron Sorkin but bad casting (Eddie Redmayne) and stunt casting (Sacha Baron Cohen) hurt this film. I’m a sucker for a disaster movie and Pål Øie made an incredibly entertaining one with the Norwegian high-melodrama, The Tunnel. Edward Norton’s long-gestating Motherless Brooklyn was a solid, old-fashioned PI yarn with some great casting to back it up. It’s the most alive Bruce Willis has been in years and it served to remind you that Alec Baldwin can be quite the terrific actor when he’s not being an utter joke of a human. I liked The Vast of Night a great deal when in the throes of watching it but liked it less in the aftermath. Cut Throat City was the underrated dramatic gem of the year in a lot of ways and showed that RZA has a great deal of skill as a legit filmmaker, when not being caught up in the ‘gimmicks’. O.G finally landed here via Sky Atlantic of all places, rather than any sort of VOD release, and it was an enthralling drama that served to remind us all how brilliant Jeffrey Wright can be when not overacting to the point of cringe or being stuck with really terrible writing (hello, TV’s Westworld!).

With the blockbuster season at the cinema all but dead from the outset, the joys of the action genre were to be found in the little b-movies tucked away on streaming platforms and VOD. Quick notable exceptions were The Outpost which was a reminder that Rod Lurie can deliver a hell of an action sequence, blighted by truly awful film-damaging casting and Extraction which was a well-directed derivative piece of hokum. Donnie Yen delivered an earnest, entertaining end to one of the surprise action franchises of the last decade with IP Man 4 that not even Scott Adkins could fuck up. Hack director Deon Taylor accidentally delivered Black and Blue; a pretty good ode to the ‘man on the run’ non-stop action thrillers of the 80s and 90s – with Naomi Harris killing it in the lead role. Netflix tucked away two of the greatest b-movie actioners of 2020 with The Decline (a ‘Doomsday Preppers’ training camp goes horribly wrong) and Earth & Blood (a sawmill owner uses his place of work as a battleground to take on the cartel). And, finally, the Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee) Taken rip-off Unstoppable arrived to streaming and turned out to be vastly superior to all of the films it was a knock-off of.

It was a great year for horror, especially if you were open to the sort of scares you were after. Sea Fever didn’t stick the landing but delivered an ace sense of foreboding and tension building for the most part. Harpoon was a sneakily nasty, surprisingly engrossing, violent little film. VFW was a lot of fun but nowhere near as good as its concept and cast suggested it was going to be. It’s also been subsequently marred by the stories coming out of its production and the revelations about Fred Williamson. I thought Come To Daddy was an absolute gift of a horror comedy that kept swerving whenever you thought you had a handle on where it was going. And Elijah Wood continues to show himself to be an American national treasure. After Midnight was an intriguing relationship drama with a horror bent and You Should Have Left, the Stir of Echoes reunion we’ve all long sought, would work as an off-kilter double-bill with it. Kevin Bacon is brilliant in it. Vampires Vs The Bronx is a totally disposable but immensely fun ode to The Lost Boys and The Monster Squad that’ll serve you well on a lazy Saturday night. Black Water: Abyss was a really good little creature feature with a ridiculous ending that infuriates. And Train To Busan: Pennisular was a pretty shit Train to Busan sequel but an immensely entertaining post-apocalyptic zombie action movie.

Onwards is worth mentioning for the fun and moving animated ride it initially presents as but, like too much Pixar nowadays, it does not hold up to repeat viewing.

Comedy-wise, I thoroughly enjoyed Bill & Ted Face The Music but thought its gag-rate was far too hit and miss for it to take a place on the top spot. Buffaloed was a kind of “M’eh” blue-collar Wolf of Wall Street with yet another fantastic ‘How the fuck isn’t she a huge star already’ turn from Zoey Deutch. Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made was a quirky out-of-leftfield oddity that me and my eldest son enjoyed a great deal. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga was not the travesty you would’ve thought it’d be, mainly because of Rachel McAdams, but if Will Ferrell had just leaned a little harder towards his more absurdist style of humour (the killer fairy shit for example?) this could have been so much more. Finally, the second Borat film had some utterly majestic moments of cringe-comedy that make it worthy of a mention but the mechanics of joke-execution and faked set-pieces were far more on show this time around.

And now, if you’re still hanging in there that is, here is my actual Top 25 films of 2020…

25. Skyfire

I don't know whether it's because I’ve been starved of my usual 'Summer Silly Season' this year but I absolutely fucking LOVED this. It's the stupidest, most ridiculous, relentlessly bonkers "Jurassic Park - but with volcanos" fare you could ask for. I have no idea what the fuck Jason Isaac is doing in this but I’m so glad he is because it just adds to the glorious WTF-ery of it all. It's 30 minutes of mechanical lay-up followed by 60 minutes of non-stop, audacious carnage. It's been a long time since me and my wife have had this much fun watching something.

24. Bad Education

Dropped exclusively to Sky Cinema here, this is a great little film that has a shocking true story at its centre. Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney are absolutely terrific. Both of them are the sort of talents who've been in bad movies but never ever given a bad performance regardless.

Here both Jackman and Janney are having a ball with the material and they elevate a very good film into something that demands to be seen.

23. Blood Quantum

This was definitely one of the first-class b-movie horrors of the year for me. It does wonders on screen with very little AND it gives a shot in the arm to the zombie subgenre. It leads you into thinking you're getting yet another zombie-breakout film before expertly wrongfooting you into growing into something else. It's a Native American NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD meets MAD MAX!

22. Bad Boys For Life

This was a first-rate blast, it really was. From the inexplicable reusing of the 'Simpson/Bruckheimer' production card to the reworking of Mark Mancina's original theme, it draws you straight back to that 1990s blockbuster vibe. It's not just very funny and stacked with some pretty decent action sequences but, rather bizarrely, it actually has something interesting to say about ageing and masculinity... because nowadays Joe Carnahan is killing it when it comes to introspective recalibrations on what it means to be a man. If you were to spoil this movie for someone and reveal what the "twist" is it would sound like the stupidest, hokiest shit ever. And yet inexplicably they make it work. And furthermore, Martin Lawrence goes from the tag-along in this franchise to the platinum level MVP here. The entire final third is held up higher by his insanely good line delivery ("Would you fuck a witch without a condom?") and it's most likely how he plays shit as to why that stupid, hokey plot twist works as well as it does.

Over the course of three separate decades each BAD BOYS entry has, in itself, served to be a somewhat accidentally perfect reflection of the very cinematic decade it landed in: The first is possibly one of the last to truly and wholeheartedly successfully land that perfect marriage between the 'MTV era' and the blockbusters; bringing about the boom of the "music video director as filmmaker" that the 1990s became well known for. The second was a pitch perfect reflection of the gratuitous, often empty-headed, completely excessive pop culture period we were birthing in the 2000s. And the third lands now, right in the very time period where masculinity is being put under a spotlight and men are being asked to be more self-reflective about themselves and their conduct.

With that said, the fourth will obviously therefore land sometime in 2029 and deal with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence wandering a pandemic-ravaged Miami wasteland.

21. Wolfwalkers

This is one of the most lovely, visually wondrous, sumptuous animated films you'll experience this year. Or in quite some time, actually. It’s not just a great adventure film but it’s also a really effective ‘message’ movie that manages to teach about tolerance and friendship along with the perils of fear-mongering, without ever being overly preachy.

20. An American Pickle

This was one of the surprises of the year for me; I THOUGHT I was getting a quirky Seth Rogen fish-out-of-water comedy and instead I got that... with a massive dollop of heart, humour and interesting things to say about legacy and 'cancel culture'. I liked it a lot. It's also further evidence of how intriguing a talent Seth Rogen is becoming; jumping between broad commercial fare and original off-kilter stuff like this, producing and developing fascinating projects for film and TV and working to pass the ladder back down to others too.

19. Get Duked

I say this with only a modicum of bias as I know someone who worked a little bit on this film but this was genuinely brilliant - the absolute laugh-out-loud delight we all need right now. At the time I watched this I don’t think I’d smiled in nearly a fortnight but this broke through with me. Its wrap-up is a little too silly for its own good but that aside, this thing is absolutely stuffed with some TRULY great gags! This is one of the best comedies of the year for me.

18. Host

I had been giving this the big ol' swerve because it sounded like unoriginal, overhyped pish frankly and... fuck it, if that hype isn't absolutely deserved: It's a lean, effective, scary incredibly enjoyable ride. Made all the more fascinating by the fact it was made remotely on a shoestring with the director apparently never being in the same room as his cast at any one time due to Covid restrictions.

NB: I could not find a GIF to represent Rob Savage’s Host sufficiently so here’s Jack Black doing a backyard pandemic dance instead...

17. Sweetheart

What a crackin, lean, little horror thriller it is. It gets straight underway from its fade-up and never overcooks itself or leans hard on lazy exposition, silly character actions or bad deus ex machinas. Remember when Jonathan Mostow made BREAKDOWN and it felt like such a shot in the arm for the man-against-the-odds/standard thriller? This is like that - but for survival dramas and creature features! It commits fully to its high concept, helped along by a truly excellent performance by Kiersey Clemons and some really well-delivered set-pieces (that first flare scene is very well done!). If you watched Tom Hanks in CASTAWAY and thought to yourself "This film is great but what it really needs is a monster!" then this is definitely the film for you. And if you believe the rumours, it’s allegedly a sneaky Creature From The Black Lagoon redo for Blumhouse’s expanding ‘Monster Universe’ too.

16. Soul

I really connected with this. I like Inside Out a great deal but I’ve never understood why it's spoken of as a flawless masterpiece when it's overlong, tonally all over the place and has clunky as fuck casting. In the same breath, I don't understand why the reviews for this are so disparate. I thought it was a wonderful way to spend 100+ minutes. It was visually inventive, funny and inspiring. It doesn't quite seed its VERY deep otherworld-building foundations and Graham Norton doesn't really work in his role but overall I thought it was a delight. And, unlike Onwards, it really does lend itself to repeat visits.

15. Tenet

I had real trepidation about seeing this what with the reviews being all over the place but... well... Is it complete, barely comprehensible bunkum of the highest order? Yes. Could the film have benefited from Nolan letting his brother Jonathan have a pass at the script? Hell yes! Is it most definitely not the majestic masterpiece of masterpieces it thinks it is? Yup. Yet in spite of ALL that I had an absolute blast with it, I really did. If you give it a seconds thought it crumbles completely as the utter egotistical piffle it really is. But where it excels is in looking so gorgeous, being so kinetic and massive with its action and casting with actors who sell the shit out of a hokey script that you're so consumed with the spectacle you don't smell the bullshit until its over. Washington Jr has come out of nowhere these last few years to make me a big fan of his work - and Robert Pattinson has went from being an actor I couldn't fucking abide to being someone I now really rate and who I came away from watching this thinking "Yeah, that's your goddamn perfect James Bond right there!"

14. Da 5 Bloods

It works infinitely better as a 'men on a mission' action adventure shot through the off-kilter lens of a Spike Lee "joint" then it does as a searing commentary about race, war, etc. And that's probably why Spike's choice to include real war atrocity photos and documentary footage alongside the narrative doesn't land as successfully as he probably intended it to. But as an overall film, it's a genuinely great watch. Delroy Lindo has always been one of the greatest working actor. Here he perhaps delivers his ultimate masterclass. Regardless of whether awards season moves online or not, you cannot have any SERIOUS dialogue during it that doesn't have his performance heading the conversation. Ignore the dickheads online putting this in the same bubble as TROPIC THUNDER or DIE HARD (??). This is a wink and a nod to TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE and APOCALYPSE NOW, through and through. It's big, bombastic, broad and unafraid to swing out in every direction. It's not flawless but that doesn't mean it's not fuckin ~great~!

13. His House

This very much stands as both one of the most impressive debuts and modern horror movies I’ve seen in quite some time. It's an effective, lean, interesting film that buries under your skin and takes up residency there. Go into it knowing as little as you possibly can and then let it scare the shit out of you and, in its reveals, kick the shit back into you.

12. Tread

I really, REALLY liked this. It's my favourite documentary film of this year - made by that fella who did the bonkers-bad killer dog in the warehouse movie with Adrian Brody, no less! It's an absolutely fascinating true story I knew nothing about, brilliantly intermingling talking heads, archival news footage, dramatic reconstruction and audio recordings. It'll really drop your jaw - it's most definitely one of those 'needs to be seen to be believed' type deals because if you described this to someone as having happened they'd never believe you!

11. Bacarau

No plot description really does this film justice and the less you know going in the better an experience you’ll have. It’s an odd, deeply violent, unsettling, darkly funny, bizarro confection of The Most Dangerous Game meets Assault on Precinct 13 and… well… even that doesn’t really do the film any justice whatsoever. It’s a critique of dire political circumstance mixed with political satire mixed with the tropes of the Western, the siege movie and both horror and comedy. It’s very much its own thing. And that’s what makes it so wonderous.

... and it’s sort of both wondrous AND weird that when searching for Bacarau related GIFs, this was the Brazilian offering I was given! I apologise.

10. Alone

I found this came out of nowhere to be one of my favourite films of the year; a crazily efficient, brutal B-movie without an inch of fat on it that works its propulsive and well-structured screenplay hard to make you feel like you're seeing a new variant on the "stalked woman in peril" film. John Hyams - son of Peter and the man who reconfigured the UNIVERSAL SOLDIER franchise to superb effect - has made one hell of an effective movie that beautifully captures the vastness of the Pacific Northwest: this is one part DUEL, one part FIRST BLOOD, all parts odes to everything from THE GREY, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and the last third of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. It's very easy to make films like this. But it's clearly hard to make them as great as Hyams has done here, otherwise everyone would be doing it. Maybe coz what those films don't have is lead performances as strong and brilliant as Jules Willcox and Marc Menchaca give here.

9. American Murder: The Family Next Door

This is an incredibly powerful true crime documentary on a horrific tragedy, in which Jenny Popplewell tightly and clinically weaves through police interviews, news coverage and Shanann Watts' phone, laptop and social media to weave a moving and ultimately devastating portrait of her and her children's death at the hands of one of the worst forms of evil I’ve ever been exposed to. This still haunts me to this day.

8. Greyhound

I was really impressed with this. A crisp, lean, tension-drenched watch with yet another rock solid Tom Hanks performance centring it. It strips back all the tropes of these war pictures - the character backstories about post-war hopes and dreams, the cutaways to the families back home, the subplots involving the villains - and keeps a propulsive commitment to just this situation, this boat and the people on it; who only talk to one another about the job they're doing. As a result, it's completely involving and committed with action set-pieces that are clean, tense and entertaining as hell. Genuinely had a great time watching this and highly recommend it.

7. #Alive

Whilst the TRAIN TO BUSAN sequel earned rightfully shakey reviews, think of this as an unofficial prequel / 'side-sequel'. It is a tight, disciplined thrill-ride that throws up some interesting spins on old zombie set-pieces (climbing zombie vs. toy drone, for example). It may well deflate as it heads to its denouement but all before it was strong and entertaining enough for it to stand as one of his favourite horrors from this year.

6. The Invisible Man

This started good... then got very good... then got quite frankly flat-out tremendous and then entered a final third flipping anyone the 'bird' who thought that the trailers gave too much away. There is some truly tremendous, inventive and not at all 'cheap' jump scares. In fact, the whole second act is nothing else BUT terrifically effective scare after scare. All bolstered by a REALLY committed lead performance by Elizabeth Moss. Between this and UPGRADE, Leigh Whannell has not only become seriously one to watch but he's possibly just outed himself as John Carpenter's one-true heir.

5. Lynn + Lucy

I was left completely broken by this - what a truly fantastic piece of British cinema; a dark, uncompromising morality play for the modern age with a truly jaw-dropping performance by Nicola Burley. And, Jesus Christ, what an unbelievable find Roxanne Scrimshaw is?? THIS is her acting debut? Holy SHITBALLS! It's harrowing stuff that'll really make you think.

4. Parasite

This really is absolutely ~everything~ people are claiming it to be and more too! It's an exquisite piece of work, in love with the art of spinning out a story, narrative layers, sociological parables and effortlessly terrific direction. It builds and builds in an utterly enthralling manner and then... the pressure valve pops, taking you down a whole other audacious avenue that'll have you giggling at the insanity but still completely hooked.

3. Uncut Gems

It’s alright been memed and GIF’d to death but that doesn’t change the fact that it really is an astounding film - it's completely exhausting and quite honestly one of the most anxiety-inducing films I’ve seen in a long, long time. Even on multiple go-arounds, I found myself screaming at the screen, begging Adam Sandler's character to just fucking STOP for five seconds and... and... it's inescapable as to the direction down in which it heads but it goes there at such a propulsive rate, it is actually scary. An absolutely astounding film - it's like a John Cassavetes film shot with the adrenaline drawn from a Michael Bay action movie... and believe every bit of the buzz: Adam Sandler is jaw-droppingly fucking excellent in this!

2. Wolf of Snow Hollow

I thought this was a complete delight. Once again Jim Cummings has taken a film 'type' you THINK you know and infused it with his own very specific sense of humour to give us something that's very much delightfully off-kilter. What's more, as a sophomore directing effort, Cummings deserves all the plaudits for the massive advancement: There's action scenes and scary set-pieces that are really first rate and are way more accomplished than what you'd expect from someone only on their second movie and have never worked in the horror genre before. Cummings is REALLY funny in the lead role too but it's Robert Forster's final performance that'll break your heart. He was a hard miss anyway but this very much drives home what a great guy we've lost.

1. The Way Back

Gavin O'Connor has hit the trifecta with this, Miracle and Warrior on making a masterful sports drama and using it as a platform to 'say something' and draw a career best from a talented but under-appreciated actor (first Kurt Russell, then Nick Nolte and now Ben Affleck).

Affleck is astounding here. Fallible, real and pained. He's truly brilliant. There’s a realism to every movement he makes and every breath he exhales that only someone who has struggled with addiction will recognise. And around him is a deconstruction of the sporting underdog movie as we know it - it's only by the end that we truly realise that this has always been about the connections made through the game rather than the game itself.

Like with Warrior, you can go back and watch this umpteen times and find different strokes in the human and unspoken moments. If ever there was a secretly feel-good film for 2020 it is this – the movie that tells us that it doesn’t matter how hard or how far we fall, we are defined only by the moments in which we rise again.

And that’s that. See you all next year. Maybe ;)

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thecoroutfitters · 6 years

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Written by R. Ann Parris on The Prepper Journal.

One of the things that has made us a successful species is our ability to wield fire. Getting a fire started and variations to make them efficiently and specific to purpose have huge benefits in survival settings and off-grid, no- or low-power scenarios.

Some of the information out there gets used and passed along without a lot of consideration to the conditions, though. I think sometimes we’re just looking for a DIY or a “craft”, especially if we’re on a tight budget, and don’t really test or think it through before we go whole hog. Sometimes we’re overlooking something even more compact or versatile. Sometimes, having two parts to a whole still separated has a lot of value. And sometimes, I rarely even see the most effective helpers mentioned.

Candles v. Waxed Dryer Lint

One of the things I see constantly is using dryer lint (and makeup pads) for fire starting. It regularly makes me crazy. It’s just that it’s not the be-all fire starter – alone, or with the addition of wax – that it’s made out to be.

Hey, I have some. Bags, front seat of truck, grill kits. Plain lint can be enormously helpful for catching a spark … if you also have other tinder ready and waiting.

The lint (and cardboard) catch first. Lint is a smoldery or flare-up catch, depending on your laundry. The amount and type of cardboard used around the lint extends the burn time a little.

They don’t actually burn long enough to “catch” charcoal, arctic stove bricks, or most kindling sticks, especially in wet or windy weather. You still largely need a feather stick, twisted wads of paper or cardboard, dry grasses, or hen-of-the-woods innards – the same tinder sources you’d use to nurture a spark or match if you didn’t have any handy fire starters.

It’s largely a waste of wax and time to make the “better” versions – where you pack an egg carton or muffin cups with your dryer lint and then pour melted candles, paraffin, or beeswax over them. Those versions are actually even tougher to get started with strikers, paper matches, and Bics, too.

You’ll have a lot more success getting fire helpers like wax cakes and the wax-dipped makeup pads started if you scuff them up good before lighting, even if they’re in cupcake wrappers or egg cartons or combined with cotton strings trimmed from clothing or used garden twine that are supposed to be helping you there.

I guess if you used a big chunk of the egg carton, not just one lobe, it would catch kindling directly. That’s not exactly portable and it requires a big stash of egg cartons for your doomsday or autumn-spring wood stove.

You can improve them – enormously, into something that will burn longer and hotter. Just add some wood shavings, fine chips, sawdust, or some pine cone bracts to the dryer lint. The thin wood is tinder, and dry pine cones are some of the best tinder-kindling to be had.

Even so, skip the wax. You don’t actually need it and it can get messy. Just smoosh it all into TP rolls or egg carton sections with your dryer lint, or snag small pine cones and wedge dryer lint into the gaps.

If you’re dead set on waxed versions, make doubly sure they’re in tight-sealing plastic baggies if they’re in your vehicle.

I carry un-waxed versions, but I also use tea lights and birthday candles a lot for campfires and bonfires. Those “gag” candles that don’t actually go out are a goldmine for a backpack and pill bottle kit.

My candles will typically burn long enough to dry out even damp tinders and kindling without issue. If it’s particularly damp and wet, if I’m particularly rushed to get a fire going, I’ll use both, a candle and a backup or emergency fire starter.

It’s just faster and easier. Plus, they’re a more versatile option.

If I need to be under a quickie shelter, I can still use my candles inside a can or a jar – for cooking, to very effectively take the damp or chill off a small space, for light. I can also use a match to light a tea light or birthday candle, and then light others from that stronger flame.

You lose those options when you melt your candles or paraffin into disks of tinder helpers.

Cotton, Vaseline & Foil

I like “foil fire nuggets” a lot. Again, it has to do with versatility. The petroleum jelly dipped cotton doesn’t run in our heat, and it doesn’t evaporate as fast or as much as hand sanitizer or stove alcohol. You can control how big a hole you create, and how much you pinch out, which affects how big of a flame you have – which impacts how long each burns for.

The foil provides “handles” for moving them, and can be shaped to help protect them from a draft or to reflect light one way or another. The foil also gives you a somewhat “safe” zone around your “candle” that increases the times and places it can be used.

They’re nice for starting fires, and they’re also nice as “candles”. Because they’re small and contained, they’re suitable for times you’re in a small shelter without a lot of room. Stick them in a metal or glass bowl or cup, and you can have light for 3-5 minutes.

They’re not as effective as something like a votive or 4-6” emergency candle for burning off some of the damp and warming a tiny space, but if you make them with two or three balls instead of just one, or set up a couple more, they have applications for getting inside and set up or drying out tinder and kindling.

Now, if you’re inclined to soak them in hand sanitizer, I’d say hold off. You can carry the two parts separately and just combine when ready. I’m also not high on waxed versions of cotton balls or tampons – again, unnecessary steps (and mess), more costly ingredients, single-purpose items, and the scuffing-up step before you use them. Without the foil, they also burn too fast to dry or ignite many kindling.

Oddball Fire Starters

If you’re looking for something else to help your fires along, check out your kitchen cabinets and the packets available at fast food restaurants and hotels when you get coffee.

I by total accident discovered that grits are enormously flammable when I sneezed and spilled half a tub across a flat-top electric stove. The grits hit the still-hot stove, and while the little isolated and single-layer bits just glowed and cindered and extinguished super fast, the grits that landed in lines and lumps went up like I’d been scraping magnesium. Some of the dials were actually deformed from the heat

(The glass stovetop recovered from this misadventure like a champ.)

The other oddball I pretty much never see is powdered coffee creamer. It comes courtesy of Mythbusters.

The “B” (better) team were doing one of their tests of viral videos, seeing if you really could create an enormous mushroom cloud with a sawdust cannon, and tested other whoosh! options. Carrie (I believe) tested coffee creamer.

Wow.

Creamer has benefits. It’s also a little scary. (Test this after it rains, peeps.) Like the magnesium rods we can scrape to add oomph to our sparks, powdered creamer is a flare-up kind of helper.

To say that a little goes a long way is an understatement. You only need a little bit at a time to help you – like, fractions of teaspoons amounts, especially if this is getting added to the surface of dryer lint.

Upside: This means a little jug goes a very long way. You won’t need much in each various kit, which makes it suitable for even tiny pill bottle or Altoids kits. It’s even less-expensive than grits, and even more resistant to damp surfaces while you’re making fires.

I cannot overstate the need to not have this blowing around dry grassy/leafy areas, your bag and tent, your hair if you use alcohol-containing products, or if the air is swirling and this might end up back in your face. Also, add fire to your creamer; do not be the many morons on YouTube who light fires and then pour the creamer on.

If you’re inclined to make those drinking straw kits, please be very conscientious of the fact that you use fire to melt the straw ends closed.

Feather Stick

One skill absolutely worth mastering, that will save an enormous amount of time and effort in starting a fire – and reviving it if it falters – is a feather stick. By peeling up curls of wood, you create kindling and tinder with excellent “catchability” and oxygen flow. You can also benefit by exposing the inner wood, which can be much dryer than small kindling sources after days of rain or snow melt.

You can make them out of whole raw sticks and branches, batoned branches, split logs, or pieces of junk timber and dimensional lumber. They’re pretty easy. Just remember the general safety rule of cutting away from yourself.

Parting Tip: Bring a Briquette

Keep 2-4 charcoal briquettes in your car kit, camping and kayaking kits, and your packs. Keep a tin of them handy for your rocket stove or fire pit. They weigh nearly nothing and they take up less space than those egg carton sections people love.

To use, stash one under your kindling with your tinder, inside your teepee or frame. You’ll need the tinder and kindling to get them going, but once you have, they generate a great deal of heat, and stay hot for a while.

Combined with a tin can, they can also help us carry fire from one location to another, or through part of a day. They can be used to help dry out kindling and smaller fuel wood, or to revive a fire without striking more sparks or matches. That’s especially useful if we’re out-out and we need that fire, when our hands are shaking (or mittened), in wet and windy conditions, and while we learn the nuances of banking a fire for the night.

Fire Starters

Getting a fire started can be a big advantage, but it’s really only the tip of the iceberg. How we build and feed that fire, where we position it, and what we combine it with impacts its effectiveness for heat, for cooking, and for signaling. Changes affect how long that fire will last, how much smoke it produces – and where that’s blowing – and how high the flames are reaching. In some situations, we’re also controlling how much light it gives off; looking for brightness, or limiting the visibility of the flames and-or the smoke.

Especially if we’re counting on fires when we take to the hills or for wilderness accidents, we need to know what is and isn’t actually going to work. So practice the whole process, dusk to dawn, not just sparking tinder.

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from The Prepper Journal Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

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infolearn · 4 years

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7 Successful Amazon Affiliate Websites (That You Can Learn From)

Heard a lot about Amazon affiliate websites but have no idea where to start? Take inspiration from these seven examples. Amazon affiliate websites make money via commissions from their affiliate program: Amazon Associates. Here’s how this works: A person visits an Amazon affiliate site. They click on an affiliate link to buy a recommended product on Amazon. Amazon pays the site owner a commission. In this post, we’ll share some inspiring Amazon affiliate websites, why they’ve done so well, and how you can replicate their success. Let’s get things started.

1. The Prepared

Key stats Domain Rating: 36 Number of referring domains: 901 Number of keywords it ranks for: 40,600 Estimated organic traffic: 31,900 Site age: 2 years Estimated revenue: Unknown Founded by John Ramey and John Adama—former advisors at the Obama White House—The Prepared is a survivalism website that publishes practical guides on preparing for emergencies ranging from potential car accidents to war. Why they’re doing so well For starters, the doomsday prepper market is huge. According to Finder.com, an estimated 160+ million Americans have either recently purchased survival gear or are already in possession of some. Of course, The Prepared is not the only website focused on survivalism. There are tons of websites in this niche. The success of this particular site falls largely down to its owners’ focus on creating content about evergreen topics. Evergreen topics are those with consistent interest and search volume over time. For example, we can see that The Prepared targets keywords like “best tarp.”

According to Google Trends, this is a topic with increasing interest over time:

They’re also committed to updating their content regularly to keep it evergreen. After all, a list of the best tarps won’t stay fresh forever since new products are released all the time.

If they update something, they’ll mention what changed in the post:

The benefits of this approach are obvious: They don’t have to worry about waning interest in their topics. People will still be searching for “best tarp” 5 years from now. They can get consistent organic traffic over time. Google tends to favor fresh results for queries like “best tarp” because old posts are out of date and no use to searchers in 2020. By publishing regular, minor updates as new products become available, the guys behind The Prepared can maintain rankings long term. What also makes them stand out is the quality of their content. For their reviews, they test every product before publishing, and they’re transparent about the testing process.

Essentially, this is the Wirecutter model (we’ll talk more about them later!). The Prepared simply took the idea and focused on a single niche. How to replicate their success Focus on creating “best ” posts for evergreen product categories. These are things that people will still be looking to buy in years to come. For example, a list of the best dishwashers has longevity since there are always people in the market for a new appliance. That’s why Google Trends shows consistent search demand over time.

Of course, some topics are seasonal such as “best tents.”

This isn’t an issue because its popularity is consistent year over year. You’ll just experience more sales during certain parts of the year. What you want to avoid are non-evergreen topics with waning interest, like “best fidget spinner.”

The benefit of creating content about evergreen product categories is that it has the potential to attract organic traffic long term. Just make sure your SEO strategy is sound and you keep the posts updated. Learn more about how to do this in our guide to evergreen content.

2. Homegrounds

Key stats Domain Rating: 63 Number of referring domains: 1,320 Number of keywords it ranks for: 136,000 Estimated organic traffic: 244,000 Site age: 3 years Estimated revenue: Unknown Homegrounds is a site that teaches “home baristas” how to brew and enjoy better quality coffee. Why they’re doing so well I reached out to the site’s founder, Alex Azoury, to find out. Here’s what he said: Firstly, we commit to publishing content that is better than our competitors. This is because the coffee brewing market are switched on, and they definitely appreciate content that actually solves their problem, rather than content built to simply target a keyword. Secondly, we reverse engineer our competitors via Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to uncover content and backlink opportunities that are working for them. If it works for them, it will most likely work for us. Finally, we dig deeper into keywords and think about search intent, rather than just looking at search volume. The topics that eventually perform the best from a financial perspective are rarely the ones that look the best on face value. Again, Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer has been an invaluable resource for this.

Alex Azoury, Founder & Editor How to replicate their success If we distill what Alex said above, we see that what worked for the Homegrounds team is to focus on the basics: Do keyword research and find topics with traffic potential. Create content that aligns with search intent and trumps everything else on quality. Build links to the content by replicating competitors’ link building strategies. Learn how to do this in our guide to ranking on the first page of Google.

3. Dog Food Advisor

Key stats Domain Rating: 76 Number of referring domains: 5,890 Number of keywords it ranks for: 203,000 Estimated organic traffic: 594,000 Site age: 11 years Estimated revenue: Unknown DogFoodAdvisor is a site that helps pet owners make better decisions when buying dog food. Why they’re doing so well The pets market is enormous. It’s estimated that $75 billion was spent by pet owners in 2019, with $31 billion on pet food alone. And therein lies the key to this site’s success. Instead of writing broadly on pets or even pet food, they chose to focus solely on dog food. It also helps that the keyword “dog food” has a global search volume of 117,000 searches per month.

This focus helped them to stand out in a saturated niche, and almost certainly also helped them to rank for thousands of dog food-related keywords.

How to replicate their success There are plenty of things to emulate, but lets drill down on two aspects: 1. Create content hubs Their page on the “best dog foods” ranks for over 1,300 keywords, sending them an estimated ~20,284 US search visits per month.

Given that there are so many types of dog foods available for different breeds and for various purposes, it would be impossible to answer the question of “what is the best dog food” in a single article. Instead, what this page does is internally link to more specialized articles on the subject, allowing readers to choose the one that applies most to them. This is known as a “content hub.”

Besides creating a better user experience, “hub” pages are also beneficial for SEO. This is because more “authority” is transferred to DogFoodAdvisor’s most important pages as subpages link back to hub pages and vice-versa). This is almost certainly part of the reason why this page is ranking so well. Learn more about the types of content hubs in this post. 2. Create useful content that attracts links Dog food recalls are surprisingly common but also easy to miss. DogFoodAdvisor solves this problem with their up-to-date list of dog food recalls.

To date, this page has links from 390 websites.

Takeaway: Don’t focus solely on “best ” keywords. Create useful, informational content that attracts links and boosts your authority. Learn more about how to create content that attracts links.

4. PCPartPicker

Key stats Domain Rating: 74 Number of referring domains: 8,810 Number of keywords it ranks for: 785,000 Estimated organic traffic: 3,100,000 Site age: 9 years Estimated revenue: Unknown Many people want to build their own PC, but the process isn’t that straightforward—particularly for newbies. This is where PCPartPicker excels. Choose the parts you want for your PC, and PCPartPicker will provide compatibility guidance and up-to-date pricing. They also publish “build guides” for those who are unsure how to start building one. Why they’re doing so well PCPartPicker is interesting because it deviates from the traditional affiliate model of targeting “best ” keywords. Instead, it’s a tool. Knowing which components to buy is a big problem in the “build your own PC” world. PCPartPicker solves this by letting you shop for the latest PC parts based on performance and budget. It then automatically cross-references them to check for compatibility. Then, based on what you’ve configured, you can purchase directly from Amazon (with PCPartPicker’s affiliate links.)

The most remarkable part about this is how much trust the site has built with its audience. A big issue with affiliate sites is they often recommend products based on the highest commissions. This “strategy” quickly erodes trust, causing many affiliate sites to fail. But PCPartPicker’s tool is unbiased. It doesn’t push any particular products. All it does is allow users to choose their own configurations, and then make commissions off those choices. Because the tool is so useful, it markets itself via word-of-mouth.

Along the way, the tool page itself has picked up 835 referring domains—many of which come from authoritative, high-DR sites like The Verge, PC World, etc.

How to replicate their success Not all Amazon affiliate websites must be “content sites” to do well. There are other ways to excel. Is there a big problem in your niche? Can you build a free tool or resource to help fix that problem and potentially make some affiliate income along the way? Sometimes, you have to think outside the box. Learn more about how to find these opportunities in this guide (skip to example #4)

5. Equipboard

Key stats Domain Rating: 58 Number of referring domains: 2,560 Number of keywords it ranks for: 722,000 Estimated organic traffic: 354,000 Site age: 5 years Estimated revenue: Unknown Equipboard is a site that showcases the gear, tools, and products used by famous musicians. Content on the site is partially user-generated. The founders (Giulio and Michael) review products and create content targeting “best” keywords, and users contribute content about the gear their favorite artists use. Why are they doing so well? As an affiliate site, Equipboard targets “best” keywords in their niche. That’s to be expected. But they also tackle the affiliate model from a unique angle. A big part of their site is the breakdown of the gear and tools that famous musicians use. That’s pretty smart. In the music world, people want to be more like their idols. They want to play the guitar like Slash, rap like Eminem, or sing like Ariana Grande. Not only that, they want to use the same gear as these people. In fact, Giulio, the co-founder, says this is how Equipboard started. As musicians ourselves, we understand how musicians search for a certain sound and shop for gear. That led us to create a site around the way people explore gear, specifically by looking up to the pro musicians they admire.

Giulio Chiarenza, Co-founder This is also where Equipboard takes it to the next level. Think about it: there are thousands of musicians from every possible genre. It would take them forever to cover every single one of them. The solution? Enlist the help of their audience. On Equipboard, anyone can add content related to their favorite artists’ gear. Then, with the help of a few community moderators, the founders fact-check sources and ensure the suggestions are accurate. This allows them to scale content production at a relatively low cost. It also helps them to: Get traffic. Most of these musicians are famous, so there’s plenty of search volume for relevant terms (e.g. “jimmy page gear”.) Get affiliate link clicks. Since fans are already interested in the gear of their favorite musicians, it is likely they will click on their affiliate links. Get backlinks. Since they’re the most credible source for musicians’ tools and gear, they get tons of links from Wikipedia and other reputable sites. How to replicate their success Equipboard’s key to success is their unique selling point (USP): the breakdown of tools and instruments that famous musicians use. But here’s the cool part: you can apply this same concept to other niches. Run a golf site? There are plenty of people searching for what’s in the bags of famous golfers.

Run a book review site? People want to know what books famous people recommend.

The examples are endless. You just need to find them, which is where a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer (pictured above) comes in handy.

6. Territory Supply

Key stats Domain Rating: 26 Number of referring domains: 275 Number of keywords it ranks for: 27,700 Estimated organic traffic: 26,600 Site age: 4 years Estimated revenue: ~4‑figures per month Territory Supply helps people find hiking, camping, backpacking, and travel adventures in the US, while also showcasing the best outdoor gear they should use. Why they’re doing so well The first thing you’ll notice when you visit Territory Supply is how much it looks like an online magazine, rather than a typical affiliate site. And indeed, they do run their site like a magazine. As an affiliate site, they have articles targeting “best x” keywords. But they also cover plenty of other topics that don’t link to any products. They’re also committed to linking to the best products, even if they can’t make money from their recommendations. For example, their post on “DIY teardrop camper kits” generates an estimated 1,800 search visits per month, but has only one link to an affiliate product.

Dustin Christiensen, the founder, reaffirms my thoughts. I think one reason we’ve had success with Territory Supply is that we’ve tried to provide more value than your average affiliate site. For example, a lot of our product recommendations come from small brands or retailers that don’t have an affiliate program whatsoever. But, those brands make some of the best products, so we’ve included them in our content because that’s what’s most valuable to our readers. We don’t just find five Amazon products and call it a day—we’ll put a lot of research into each product category to find unique products and brands that no one else is discussing since most sites can’t make money off of them. Secondly, we’ve invested heavily in our brand and appearance. Instead of putting up a cheap WordPress theme, I spent thousands of dollars on a custom designed website with some unique outdoor aesthetics that work well for the outdoor community. We tried to build something that didn’t look like a cheap, thin affiliate site and instead, wanted something that looked trustworthy, valuable and impactful. Last, we also do a lot of content that isn’t related to products or affiliate marketing at all — like hiking and camping guides that include the best locations to explore in different areas. These articles are research-intensive and we try to find writers who live in or explore the areas we write about so that they have real, accurate value for our readers. We do so much more than just product-based content that I think it helps find an audience that a lot of affiliate sites might miss out on.

Dustin Christiensen, Founder How to replicate their success Not every Territory Supply reader is ready to buy. Sometimes, they’re just curious. And when they read articles like “10 Stunning Hikes in Death Valley National Park”, they might be inspired to start exploring the outdoors more often. Or they might even be fired up to start hiking on the coming weekend. This will lead them to wonder about the gear they’ll need for hiking, which Territory Supply also helps with. The takeaway: just because you run an affiliate site doesn’t mean you should only cover “best” or “review” topics. You should target topics at every stage of the marketing funnel. Learn how to do this in our guide to finding and mapping keywords to the buyer’s journey.

7. The Wirecutter

Key stats Domain Rating: 82 Number of referring domains: 23,100 Number of keywords it ranks for: 3,700,000 Estimated organic traffic: 4,100,000 Site age: 8 years Estimated revenue: ~$10 million (2016) Founded in 2011 by Brian Lam, a former Editorial Director at Gizmodo, The Wirecutter has grown into perhaps the most famous and well-known Amazon affiliate site on the planet. Frustrated with the never-ending chase for pageviews in traditional media companies, Brian quit Gizmodo and started The Wirecutter as a small review site focused on gadgets. It was acquired by the New York Times in 2016 for $30 million. Why they’re doing so well Short story: they rank on the first page for 62,000+ “best” keywords in the U.S. alone:

The longer story: they’re the absolute champion of product reviews. When it comes to “best ” type posts, most affiliate sites simply curate whatever’s currently selling well on Amazon. Not The Wirecutter. For every category, they’ll thoroughly sample and test every major product. Where needed, they’ll hire professional reviewers.

They’re also transparent about how they test the quality of those products. Further, to prevent bias, the staff writers are not informed about what commissions the site receives for different products. And that’s not all. The Wirecutter understands that not everyone wants to read a lengthy review. They just want a reliable and trustworthy source to tell them which product to buy. So, in the first paragraph of every post, they get straight to the point. They build your trust by telling you how they researched it, then telling you exactly what to buy.

For the impatient, this is perfect. They can click through immediately and make the purchase. But even if they don’t buy right away, it’s okay. For Amazon affiliate sites, the click itself is important. After all, Amazon has a 24-hour cookie, which means that the site owner will receive commission on anything the person buys in the next 24 hours. That said, The Wirecutter doesn’t just cater to the impulse buyer. For those who are obsessed with researching every aspect of a purchase, there’s plenty of research to read.

How to replicate their success Focus on creating thorough, well-researched posts for “best ” type keywords in your industry. That means testing the products yourself where possible, and potentially even coming up with innovative ways to do so. If you’re starting out and can’t afford to purchase every product in the category, focus on delivering in-depth research. Not only does this approach build trust with readers and entice affiliate link clicks, but it also helps to attract backlinks.

That said, while the quality of content certainly plays an important role here, we also suspect that employing an inhouse SEO team doesn’t hurt matters.

And that brings us to a crucial point: You shouldn’t try to replicate this model like for like on a site that reviews everything under the sun. Niche down and do things on a smaller scale. Coming full circle, that’s what The Prepared did in the preppers niche—and it worked out pretty well for them.

Final thoughts

Most successful Amazon affiliate sites follow roughly the same formula: They target commercial investigation keywords like “best ”; They create best-in-class content by actually reviewing products; They work hard to build and attract backlinks to improve rankings. None of this is rocket science. It just takes hard work, persistence, patience, and a focus on long-term over short-term results. Read the full article

#amazonaffiliateaccount #amazonaffiliatecommission #amazonaffiliateindia #amazonaffiliatelinks #amazonaffiliatelogin #amazonaffiliatemarketing #amazonaffiliatemarketingprogram #amazonaffiliateprogram #amazonaffiliateprogramrequirements #amazonaffiliateprogramsignin

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