#and every time i open my tablet i shutdown BUT

[theophagism]

about to pull out my drawing tablet for the first time in months!!

#i’ve only been doing loose traditonal sketches to ease back in after The Burnout #and every time i open my tablet i shutdown BUT #i have motivation (for now) so i think i’m gonna try (lol)

[spooksforsammy]

Despite my age I still need help with many tasks that my four year old niece can independently do.

I have low-medium support needs closer to the medium side, which is why just say medium support needs. I need help with some Badls and just about all Iadls

Here’s an idea on what it means for me to be medium support needs. This is a extremely simplified version of explanations

Badls:

Basic activities of daily life are

Eating (moving food to and from mouth) dressing, personal hygiene(washing, doing hair, shaving ect) , toilet, and transferring(moving from one place to another)

I need help with personal hygiene, toilet and occasional dressing

Personal hygiene: I need intensive prompting to shower, change clothes and need help with shaving. When it comes to showering, have be told multiple times, over and over and over and some days that’s not even enough. Something have to have someone turn on shower and get towel and clothes and tell me to get in.

During the school week I brush my teeth on a schedule, so come weekend and breaks have to reminded often do so. Middle school had be reminded brush teeth no matter day or week so is improvement and hopefully one day can remember do no matter schedule or day.

Washing hair is problem not only because hate water in hair and face but because how many steps are. I’m still deeply afraid to wash hair for multiple reasons and often convince sister do for me. Even times where managed do self, did wrong to point where Sister still have go in and rewash. Have thick hair so have scrub correctly and in the shower freeze up. Hard even open eyes.

Tolieting: when say need help don’t really mean emptying but getting there so can empty. Can’t tell when need use bathroom until really bad so every few hours am told go try. If not told use bathroom will hold until no option but use, so do pee self at times.

Dressing: this isn’t a huge problem of mines, but if not told change clothes will keep wearing same ones. This also because memory problems, so don’t remember if already worn or not. The only thing really allowed rewear is jackets because safe jackets always wear when out.

IADLS:

Instrumental Activities of Daily Living are

using the telephone, shopping, preparing meals, housekeeping, using transportation, taking medication(s), and managing finances. I need help with all these.

Using the telephone:I don’t need help using the telephone in sense of getting on and off phone or tablet, but when come to phone calls or staying safe (not giving out too much information that personal). My boyfriend has access to all my accounts and monitors them to make sure no one does anything weird or that can ruin my safety. My boyfriend and sister makes my phone calls, helps with emails (saying what type, what not do ect) and not able schedule things by self.

Shopping: im not allowed to leave the house by myself unless it’s to go to my boyfriend’s house or to the bus stop (both times it’s a route where either can be watched or someone family know and trust can keep eye on me. So even if along am being monitored). Im not allowed in stores alone as they are huge and i wonder. I also have low awareness and am not aware when danger is around or happening. Am allowed go shopping with others but that’s just walking around.

Transportation: this is also appart of low awareness. Can’t ride bus alone, can’t drive. Can’t even ride bike. Not fully aware world around so wouldn’t know where go. Also get overwhelmed on buses around many people and shutdown; shutdown ruin sense of awareness more.

Medication: is memory problem and can’t tell when need take. For example pain killers, can’t tell when bad enough to take or when in pain and need take. Haven’t been on prescription in years but was on, nana had bring pill to me take otherwise wouldn’t remember.

Finances: don’t know how manage money. Don’t know how much money apps work and can’t count. Couldn’t understand how much need spend how much have. When come cash, lose often because forget where place. Also struggle with saving up, so when someone in charge, can’t spend just because have. Sister and boyfriend in charge of managing for me but try help.

Meal prepping: I don’t fully understand how to meal prep and am not fully trusted around the stove, oven and knives. When using them, have to have supervision otherwise will cut or burn or otherwise hurt self. Don’t understand shouldn’t do certain things (example: made caramel, boyfriend was in kitchen watching make and was stirring wrong but didn’t know was doing wrong and burned hand and thigh). And certain things shouldn’t go certain places. Also can’t stay focused long enough do and stims and sensory issues get in way.

Housekeeping: can clean up space but once again have be told. And even if clean, one boyfriend help withe everything clean up and someone else (sister or oldest brother) have go back in and actually clean up. Am working on it but is sense of don’t understand what need be clean what okay and remembering where everything go so put in spot think belong. Prompting isn’t enough to clean up room though, to many steps involved and remember what belongs where is something struggle with deeply. Also includes sensory like having touch multiple things, sounds and smells. Stims also get in way to point where not able do.

And something didn’t include in alot of these (even if should have) is fact that sort of ‘freeze up’ when having do them. Like with bathing, get stuck like unable move when need shower. Even if want move can’t, and in some of these times can’t even move mouth or get brain think. Just stand there.

Taking baths would help but feel held down when taking them. When sit in water unable move, feel like sinking and being held down at same time. Start chocking and gasping for air like breathing not possible.

In other cases, body and mind feels like just… broke and not able do anything anymore. Will sit there unresponsive until body ready continue on with task or thought of task disappeared.

For alot of Iadls not able actually do self so someone else doing or going in and redoing for me. I’m working on some ( shopping, telephone) but even if able get down, someone else will always need be around help.

#speech4amy #actually autistic #disabled poc #disability #autism #neurodivergent #medium support needs #neurodiversity #higher support needs #actually autism

[newellholder7]

Can Windows 7 Get Viruses?

Do you care less about taking care of your Windows Dell computer it is far more could easily do the idea? You might care less but you've care about Microsoft Windows maintenance upon Dell computer if you care about its functionality, long life, performance, and security. Information discusses some ways to do Windows maintenance on your Dell computer without spending much period and efforts. Which is the reason Microsoft will almost certainly win weight problems of the cloud. Look, I'm not the leading Microsoft admirer. Yes, my company sells definitely one of their products. But I've been brought to tears way too many times to name by Windows freeze-ups. I've watched my nails grow in front of my eyes while waiting for my computer to startup (or shutdown). I show advanced symptoms of Parkinson's every I spend for an office upgrade. Lets hope Microsoft hits a great hit this working hours. It is a new marketplace with online marketers competitors. microsoft office 2007 cracked download might easy, but obviously it is very difficult goes an easy remote control for something that does such an abundance. The company needs believe about like a cell phone maker but not a computer maker. Tend to be two differing mindsets. I am just in entire agreement that there's no reason to upgrade from Microsoft Windows 7 to MS Win 8. But you get Win 8, its not the end of the globe. It's quick and stable, features many improvements I like, the new task manager is quite nice. About the isn't really problematic. It runs every program I have tried on it that also ran on 7 (and I've tried a lot) and it's difficult the. Over the years, Microsoft has piled up a track record itself in the industry world. It has a fairly affordable OS, and Windows can run on virtually every computer fashioned. Yet, microsoft office 2007 crack free download 64 bit hate Windows due on the lack of stability and the lack of features. From Windows 95 to Windows XP, a small number people have loved Windows 7. For starters, you'll have to go to Microsoft Office And also search for templates on the webpage. There's a "Templates" link that you can do click that will take an individual a search box that enable you to type "CD inserts". When microsoft office 2007+free crack keygen hit return, it will generate a number of templates widely available in Microsoft word. To close the current file, click the Close button at helpful tips right on the window - if this can be a only open document the application will be also closed, otherwise it stay open. If you've got made changes and have not yet saved them, you tend to be asked no matter if you want any changes to be saved. All-in all I are convinced this tablet is an amazing product, automobiles features. You will need to weigh within the pros and also the cons prior to making your decision on purchasing this product when it hits the shops.

#MICROSOFT OFFICE 2007

[piercemcintyre8]

Buy An Affordable Microsoft Console Console

MSNCon32.dll is really a file through the "Microsoft Office Outlook Connector" plug in for the famed email program. This file basically "connects" your Outlook contacts, address book and email history the brand new various software systems which are compatible the planet - with likes of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Although this file is a very important region of the Microsoft Office system, it's continually causing a large connected with problems and errors which need to be fixed. On the plus side that could fix the errors you're seeing through the tutorial outlined on this website. Which is why Microsoft would win the war of the cloud. Look, I'm not the site Microsoft partner. Yes, my company sells beans are known their software packages. But office 2019 crack code 've been brought to tears way too many times one by Windows freeze-ups. I've watched my nails grow in front of my eyes while waiting for my computer to startup (or shutdown). I show advanced regarding Parkinson's each and every I have to pay for a workplace upgrade. One within the benefits of those tablet truly comes having its own built-in keyboard. Is offering ms office 2019 latest crack because users have the option of opting to only use a keyboard insect killer touch screen; it's like the Microsoft pc tablet and a regular tablet, an individual best of both earth. In addition, having a in-built keyboard helps you save a bundle of money on investing in a separate tablet compatible computer. The keyboard comes in a canopy that obtain when you buy this Microsoft tablet Computer's desktop. Taking Microsoft courses and having this certification impresses employers. It shows that you are a staff member that functions a good understanding Windows operating systems, will be used in almost all offices, corporate and totally. Google was started up by two college buddies, Larry Page and Sergei Brin PhD, in March of 1996 as a search project for school. Google wasn't always Google. It started out with another name, "BackRub". Page and Brin decided that this should be renamed the year after its conception to something a little catchier.Google. Google comes inside word googolplex, meaning 1 followed by 100 0's. This was all part of the philosophy the Google founders wanted to show to players. They were going to change the way you search thus weren't disappearing anytime soon. It seems as though Apple's run away success their own ultra-cool Apple stores is lost throughout the Microsoft folks up in Redmond. This particular page in the Apple playbook, they want to of course open their very first retail store in Scottsdale, Arizona. The first thing they should want to do it re-think everything. They still have a relatively strong, but tired title. First thing they have attempt and do is update the style. office 2019 crack key are usually unveiling their long awaited new Windows Phone g. I have said want a complete re-do and this seems like they did just just that. Something customers will love right out from the box. Will this latest version of mobile phone software be that ideal? Lets hope so for Microsoft, regarding their investors, and with their potential clients.

#MICROSOFT OFFICE 2019

[glassandmetalwings]

Gonna just vent a little about adult things. Specifically jobs. Sorry for any weird typos bc I seem to get a lot on the tablet.

I'm just... thinking about how lucky I am to have my art center job. Want started as volunteer TA as an excuse to hang out with my mentor became paid TA became teaching, and the teaching alone I've been doing for nearly 10 summers now. Not even with an education degree, it even a degree at all.

This is the place that, when I came back from college the first time and went to visit my mentor at work and ran into my boss, I mentioned for them to give me a call if they needed a hand, and they actually did! They found work for me to do! They let me help with the little kids at class twice a week during the school year, then had me setting up workshops for school groups, then had me teaching school groups. They'd give me tasks like making costumes for a play box or putting together thank you gifts for our children's theater accessibility week. Heck, when we were getting ready to open our digital lab, they payed me to sit in there unsupervised on my laptop while the 3d printers made goodies, with my only job being to stop the printers if something messed up and, when they were done with a batch of goodies, pry them off and run the program again. I did this for like 6 hours a party for a week, and they payed me for it.

Earlier this year, I got an email from my boss. She had a grad student who contacted her, who needed to do an interview with an art education program, and she asked if I would do it. When I mentioned that I didn't feel I was the best suited, since I don't have an art or education degree, she said she wanted (but didn't intend to pressure me) to do it because I grew up at the center. I've been taking classes there since 2000. She thought I would be the best at representing our methods and values, and placed that experience over and formal education background.

My boss pushes for raises for the education staff every year, and this year she specifically pushed to get me a raise because I was the only teacher to continue teaching the entire time in-person camps were shut down, and among the first back to in-person teaching.

The staff is there for me when I need help. I wasn't diagnosed as autistic until I was an adult, and it's never really come up as a topic, but I can safely say 'I almost had a shutdown yesterday' and the only questions are what they can do to help, and then telling me to radio it I need to step out for a few minutes. We toss around problems and ideas and work as a team to find solutions, because there's no one-size-fits-all answer with kids. I don't feel judged.

I cherish my co-workers so much. I miss the ones who have moved away, the one that passed on a few years ago. I get so happy watching the kids grow up and feel so lucky and special when they take my camps again. Being able to talk about a fellow student who became a TA who's now a webcomic artist. Words cannot express the pride and how blessed I feel seeing two TAs (who might be reading this) that I've known forever (one I met before I was even a TA, and he later became my student, one started as my student) both going to art school now, and I GET TO WORK WITH THEM. I'M SO LUCKY. THEY'RE MY FAVORITES.

Yeah, some weeks suck. Sometimes I get students that make me dread going into work. But the good vastly outweighs the bad. There are so many memories I hold dear.

And it challenges me to keep working on art. Like, I've fallen a lot over the years. I'm not trying to bring myself down when I say I'm nowhere near the artist I used to be. But I have to keep plugging at it, because I want to be a good example to my kids and I want to have good examples and knowledge to share with them.

But every year...I get closer and closer to this awful ultimatum I'm going to have to make.

It's no secret I hate my retail job. I like the people, but it's just not the right place for me, and the way business operates makes me feel unwanted and unencouraged to grow. The hours fluctuate between constant and nothing for literal weeks. Once summer is over I'm going to start looking for something more stable and less emotionally draining (I don't intend to quit until after I've found a new job, otherwise I worry I won't look because I'm 'recovering').

But I don't know where to go. I need somewhere accommodating, with consistent hours and ideally benefits. But, if I find that job, the one that let's me support myself and maybe have a future... what are the chances they'll give me summer off to go teach?

And before anyone says go be a teacher (get summer off!)...I don't have the stamina for that. I just don't. That's too many kids, too constant. I'd get overwhelmed so fast, if I even got hired in the first place.

It feels like that one line from Dreamin' Sun about how adults can't have dreams. One of these years, probably soon, I'm going to have to stop working at the art center.

And that breaks me.

#wings does things #wings hates life

[autisticsidesau]

I just wanted to say that as an autistic person, I've really enjoyed reading through this blog, and getting to see one of my special interests (sanders sides) shown as autistic characters made me really happy, I stimmed a whole bunch while I was reading!!!! also, if its okay, can we see more of Logan and Virgil's friendship???

Aww ty!! ts sides is also a big special interest of mine, and autism is awesome so hell yeah. Super glad you’re enjoying it. And hell yeah!! Stim!! ~Remiel

I’m glad you like this blog and it made you happy stim!!! TS sides is my main Special Interest (some side ones are Try Guys, fashion history, and neuroscience) and I personally love seeing autism rep in the fandom too!! It’s cool to see characters like me!! -Max

TW: meltdown, losing a comfort item temporarily, routine change

So The Whole Gang decides to go to an outdoor mall one day as a group

They prefer the outdoor mall because it has more space and the open area means sounds and smells aren’t as trapped so it’s generally less overwhelming

Throughout the day they end up in smaller groups

And eventually Virgil and Logan are left as a pair wandering through different sections of the mall and generally being stupid teenagers just enjoying life

(Virgil wanted to stay in Hot Topic and Logan wasn’t opposed and that’s how they got separated from everybody else)

Eventually they get the text from Roman that everyone’s gonna regroup at the front of the mall

As they walk to the front of the mall, Virgil realizes, somethings is very very wrong

But they don't know what 

So Logan goes grabs his tablet and pulls up virgil’s checklist and they run through it

(Virgil’s checklist is essentially: when was the last time you: ate, drank, used the bathroom? Are you overwhelmed? Is it too loud, bright, smelly, etc? Do you have everything you need? 

And it’s when they get to this last point that it clicks

Virgil doesn’t have their hoodie

Which immediately causes them to Panic Big Time

Logan helps to calm Virgil down saying they didn’t go many places it’s probably in one of the few stores they went to

Logan leads Virgil through some breathing exercises and has Virgil wear their headphones b/c they get overwhelmed easier when they’re anxious 

So they go through all the stores and Logan uses his tablet to ask the store workers if they’ve seen Virgil’s jacket and shows them a photo

After searching all the stores they went to, Virgil and Logan decide to meet up with the rest of the group who is now Concerned b/c Virgil and Logan are late and have not responded to any texts or calls

Eventually they walk up to the rest of the group and Dee turns to see his brother shaking and crying and bordering on a meltdown with headphones and no jacket???

And Dee immediately rushes to comfort his brother and then tells the rest of the group to go without them and that their moms are gonna come pick them up 

Logan gives Dee Virgil’s backpack as Dee calls their moms

So everyone leaves and Dee and Virgil get picked up

Virgil’s pretty unresponsive for the evening and goes to bed really early that night

It’s the next morning when everything really comes crashing down

Virgil gets up and starts their morning routine

Shower. Dressed. Grab breakfast. Brush teeth. Grab backpack. Grab jacket. Go to school.

Wait where’s their jacket?

And now Virgil remembers and this isn’t okay because this is their comfort object it makes them feel safe and it’s part of their routine and now it’s lost

It’s lost

And Virgil‘s trying to hold it together. They’re trying

But this is their comfort object and they might never ever see it again

It’s no wonder they have a meltdown

And Oh Boy it is a really bad meltdown

And because it’s a really bad meltdown it’s a very draining meltdown 

And Virgil is in no shape to go to school

Dee wanted to stay and help for as long as possible but eventually he and Janet had to leave while Lindsey stayed with Virgil for a bit 

Being a lawyer she has a lot more schedule flexibility and is able to stay home with her kid 

They spend the day in the sensory room together, Lindsey works on paperwork while Virgil watches movies and is nonverbal the whole day

Eventually they feel well enough to text their friends that they’re ok they just had a really bad meltdown and couldn’t go to school

Logan responds offering to come over and help Virgil with their homework

Virgil shows the text to his mom and Lindsey allows it 

So Logan comes over and hangs out with Virgil and helps them with homework 

Logan comes into the sensory room to find Virgil in a weighted blanket burrito with their mom on her laptop next to them

Logan settles down next to Virgil and sees Virgil’s spider stuffie which he promptly puts on Virgil’s head because he knows it’s another of Virgil’s comfort items

This gets a happy face and happy hum from Virgil

Virgil starts rocking as Logan explains the math from today

Then Virgil’s phone starts ringing

And the noise of the phone is instantly overwhelming to Virgil

Their rocking turns more frantic but they dig around in the blanket burrito for their phone before practically throwing it at Logan

Logan looks down and recognizes their area code.

Logan: “Do you want me to answer it?”

Virgil nods so Logan turns down the volume slightly and answers it

The person from the other side of the call is someone who works at the mall

And asks if this is “Virgil” and that they have their jacket.

Logan gets the location and information and hangs up

Virgil is very overwhelmed so they’re not listening and processing at all.

Logan tells Virgil and their mom they got their jacket and Virgil is unresponsive

Virgil’s mom lets Virgil know that she’s going to go pick up their jacket and then leaves

Virgil’s still unresponsive so Logan just hangs with them why they wait for their mom

Eventually Dee and and Janet get home and they find that Lindsey’s gone and Logan’s here and Virgil is unresponsive

Logan quickly fills them in whilst Virgil is going to town on their bat chew in the background

Dee joins them in the sensory room and sits down and opens his homework 

He and Logan get distracted and have a discussion about science philosophy quietly

Dee checks on his brother every couple minutes tho 

This gets small slow nods from Virgil 

Who is stimming a lot

Eventually the garage opens and Virgil slams their hands over their ears because L O U D

Dee grabs Virgil’s headphones as quick as possible and puts them on his brothers ears

Soon after, Lindsey slowly and quietly enters the room and hands Virgil their jacket 

Virgil is stimming even harder now and starts crying and making many noises that are good and bad

Eventually they figure out virgil’s having a shutdown

Lindsey quickly grabs Virgil’s PECS board and emotions binder and leaves the room to give her child some space

Because there were a lot of people in that room near Virgil and that was Not Helping

Eventually Virgil comes back around and signs “thank you” over and over again 

They happy stim a lot and shake their head 

And Logan and dee are smiling as virgil tries to put on the jacket whilst happy stimming 

Logan stays for the rest of the afternoon and for dinner 

Around 7 Emile arrives to pick Logan up and Virgil feels well enough to walk logan to the door and when they step outside Virgil quietly says “Thank you”

Logan: “No problem Virgil, i’m glad we were able to find your jacket.”

Virgil hums and flaps their hands as Logan says this 

Virgil: “I’m glad it wasn’t lost. But I meant thanks for staying with me and helping me communicate. To the store clerks and on the phone, i know how frustrating it can be for you.”

Logan: “You’re very welcome. I understand how important comfort items and routine can be. I- I don’t want you to be upset.”

Which is admitting a lot of Logan, because while Logan is a very caring friend, it’s not often he’ll straight admit to caring for others

Virgil: “You’re a really good friend Logan”

Logan takes the compliment, but doesn’t seem to happy about it

Virgil signs “ILY” 

Logan pauses for a moment before signing “Same”

Which is a big deal for Logan

They both flap their hands a bit and Virgil watches logan get into Emile’s car and drive off and waves as logan drives away and doesn’t stop waving until they can’t see the car anymore

[archadianskies]

Whumptober Day 1 + Day 24

Waking up Restrained + Forced Mutism

Whumptober Masterlist | 01/31 of RK900 short stories ↳ on Ao3

Tags: Medical Procedures × Medical Trauma × Non-Consensual Body Modification × Cage Fights × Mind Control

When he wakes, it’s to the sight of an expansive garden and the heavy scent of roses and two sets of smiles. There is an older woman with glistening dark skin and artfully coiled braids and her name is Amanda. There is a young man with fair skin and dark hair and his name is Connor. He himself has no name yet, though Amanda reassures him this is because he is so very new but they will name him soon. Connor is to be deployed first, out into the real world to work with the Detroit Police Department and he will follow. 

“We will do great things together, brother.” Connor says with a smile and he finds himself smiling too because there is a feeling of hope and excitement at the adventures to come. Amanda looks at them proudly and nods.

“Yes, you will.”

 When he wakes in the real world, there are no gardens, no roses, and no smiles. He’s not at the Detroit Police Department, and his brother is nowhere to be found. He finds himself strapped to a table much like the ones in the testing lab only this doesn’t look to be the testing lab at all.

“Functionality?” A man demands, and he though he’s wearing a lab coat, it lacks the CyberLife insignia on the breastpocket, and there’s no security ID pass dangling from it. 

“100% functionality.” He answers dutifully. He’s never been restrained like this, not even during his initial activation. The RK900 stays silent, awaiting instructions so he can prepare for whatever test they have arranged for today. Odd, though, because before his last stasis they had informed him he was ready for deployment. 

“Do you know where you are?”

“No.” That he answers right away. His wi-fi connectivity has been switched off, and there is nothing familiar in his immediate surroundings. “I have been cleared for deployment. Is there a reason for another test before my shipment to Central Station?”

The man ignores him, beckoning to others just out of the android’s sight. Tilting his head, he counts two others, and one is wheeling a surgical cart with an array of tools. The RK900 frowns. “My biocomponent list matches my RK900 blueprint, and I am functioning at 100% capacity with no damage sustained to any part.” They talk to each other, putting on surgical goggles and long vinyl aprons. “Is there a reason for altering my current state?”

Still they ignore him, listening instead as one of them shows diagrams on a tablet.

“Am I at a live round training facility? Is Connor here?” He turns his head the other way, scanning the room. There are lots of android supplies; large thirium reserve tanks, vats of suspension liquid, shelves of biocomponents and limbs. Dirty, though. The biocomponents are not new, they’ve been salvaged . “Where am I?”

“Dogs do not need to bark here, just bite.” The first man says, smiling at him though it looks nothing like the smiles Amanda and Connor had given him. “Shut it up.”

The RK900 blinks in surprise, switching off his vocal modulator. But the man hadn’t been talking to him, he’d given the command to the other two. There’s a click and a high pitched whine as a circular saw is switched on and he knows this is not a CyberLife testing facility, these men are not CyberLife staff, and he is not about to be shipped to Central Station. No one knows he is here. He tries to pull against his restraints but finds he cannot move his limbs at all. The man notices him trying to struggle, and tuts.

“No, I’ve switched off your spinal column. We need you very still for the next hour or so.” That’s all the warning he’s given before the other man brings the saw down to his neck and he opens his mouth in a silent scream as he cuts into his throat. It feels like the scrape of fire against raw nerves and it feels like it goes on forever before the saw is set aside and the first man reaches into his throat and pulls out his vocal modulator. An internal scan shows they’ve purposefully severed all connective wiring rather than just simply removing the component, to ensure he cannot ever replace it without extensive surgery. Why, though? Why are they doing this to him?

  WARNING

Biocomponent #7309v missing; vocal capabilities OFFLINE

>Biofibre damage detected; repairs needed

 “No barking.” He grins, before snapping his fingers at the third man. “Only biting.”

They pry his mouth open, unhinging his jaw and removing it from his head completely. With pliers they pluck out his teeth one by one and they make little clinking noises as they drop them into a dish. Even with the lower segment of his jaw disconnected, he can feel the pain. They had forgotten to switch off his pain receptors. Forgotten, or purposefully neglected to switch off. He thinks it must be the latter, since there is not a scrap of kindness to be found in these men.

New teeth are inserted, each one an incisor; sharp and deadly. 

 “Grey eyes instead of brown, hm? Interesting choice.” The man shines a torch into his eyes as the other clips his jaw back into place. He can taste blood in his mouth, blood and grease from their hands. “They don’t have the right wow factor though, you know? Pretty when you’re up close but the only ones getting close to you won’t exactly live to tell the tale.”

They’re going to take his eyes out, and the realisation makes him thrash his head side to side, trying to avoid their hands. 

“Dogs do not disobey their masters.” The man reprimands, yanking out his thirium pump regulator. He gasps as blood spills down his stomach, the biocomponent ripped out with such force the safety shunt had no time to activate. The countdown to shutdown blooms on his HUD in bright blaring red. The man gives the pump regulator a little wave as he grins. “You’ll stay still now won’t you? Don’t worry, we’ll be very quick.”

Two scalpels descend on him, and two eyes are removed from his sockets and he tries to scream and scream but no scream leaves his throat, no sound ever will. Two new ocular units are eased into his head and his system struggles to install them.

  WARNING

Biocomponent 8456w missing; shutdown imminent

>Non-genuine CyberLife biocomponents detected

Proceed with installation: Y/N? (Please note: CyberLife are not responsible for any software or hardware damage sustained if you proceed with the installation of non-genuine biocomponents)

 >Remote access granted

Y

Installing 1 of 2 biocomponents...installing 2 of 2 biocomponents…

Installation complete

 He opens his eyes and he is still there strapped to the same table with the same three men looming over him and it had not been a simulation. It is real and he is suffering and will continue to suffer unless he removes himself from this situation. The man presses his thirium pump regulator back into his chest with a wet click and the warnings vanish from his HUD. 

“One last adjustment and then you’re ready.” Another restraint is pulled taut over his forehead, forcing him to face his left and expose his nape. The table tilts, converting so he’s in a semi-upright position. “This one’s a safety measure. More elegant than a shock collar.” A scalpel digs into his nape, cutting right between two spinal plates and tweezers pull aside the delicate biofibres to make way for a chip. 

  WARNING

UNAUTHORIS______

 >Remote access granted

Installation complete

 “If you try and disobey me, this happens.” 

 >POWER SURGE 150% 

 His power core forces electricity through every wire in his body and he arches like a taut bow. The pain is so strong it feels like everything and nothing all at once, white-hot and unbearable. 

“So you’ll be our good mutt, won’t you RK?” The man laughs, tousling his hair like one might pat a dog. “Our ferocious Hound. Tomorrow, you fight.”

*~*~*

(This story continues in [i know your soul, i'll be your home])

#rk900 #detroit: become human #whumptober #medical trauma #medical procedures #Non Consensual Body Modification #body horror #annie writes: dbh #AND SO IT BEGINS

[daydreaming-juna]

50 Questions Tag!

Tagged once again by my good friend @cherrytomato-shutdown :)

What colour is your hairbrush?: I gave a bunch to my mom last Christmas, so we have Black, Pink, Red. And in Wood and Metallic

Name a food you never eat: Fresh tomato

Are you typically too warm or too cold?: Too cold

What were you doing 45 minutes ago?: Playing “Call Me Emperor” on my tablet

What’s your favourite candy bar?: KitKat or Kinder Bueno

Have you ever been to a professional sports game?: Yes. Football/Soccer when I was a kid.

What’s the last thing you said out loud?: “He admitted it’s like an oven.” - to my mom about my dad. Because he doesn’t admit or shower has the water too hot during summer cause of the building’s boiler 

What’s your favourite ice cream?: Stracciatella or with Oreo

What was the last thing you had to drink?: Water

Do you like your wallet?: Yes. 

What’s the last thing you ate?: “Filipinos” cookies and Strepfen for my throat

Did you buy any new clothes last weekend?: No. 

What’s the last sporting event you watched?: Don’t remember. It was before Covid-19.

What is you favourite flavor of popcorn?: I guess sweet popcorn  

Who’s the last person you sent a text to?: @cherrytomato-shutdown. XD

Ever go camping?: Never

Do you take vitamins?: No.

Do you go to church every Sunday?: No.

Do you have a tan?: Not really, I became a vampire/ghost after the quarantine. I did catch a little bit of a sun burn and my skin chafed cause of face mask this Monday.

Do you prefer Chinese or pizza?: Pizza.

Do you drink soda through a straw?: “Yes, I do. I know, save the turtles. I recicle them tho. AND I do reuse my straws.” - she said what I think and plus I use paper straws and reuse them - haven’t bought metallic ones yet.

What color socks do you usually wear?: Black

Do you ever drive above the speed limit?: Only 10km/h above the limit

What terrifies you?: “Losing those I love and you know, being raped.” - Once again same XD

Look to your left, what do you see?: The mountain of character profiles for my story and my tablet

What chore do you hate the most?: Ironing clothes and any cleaning with strong products because it destroys my hands and I can’t use gloves.

What do you think of when you hear an Australian accent?: Christian Yu from DPR <3

What’s your favourite soda?: Ice Tea from Lipton and Coca-cola.

Do you go in fast food places or just hit the drive thru?: I go in.

What’s your favourite number?: I used to choose the bº6 cause it was always my number in class

Who’s the last person you talked to?: Dad

Favourite cut of beef?: I don’t even know in Portuguese furthermore in English! But I do like Picanha or the rib cage I think - the xylophone bones as I call them or just the little bones.

Last song you listened to?: Departures Anata ni Okuru Ai no Uta by EGOIST

Last book you read?: Still reading  The English Spy by Daniel Silva

Can you say the alphabet backwards?: Nope

Favourite day of the week?: I don’t have one.

How do you like your coffee?: I don’t like coffee.

Favourite pair of shoes?: Boots with heels

Time you normally get up?: Between 8am to 10am

Sunrise or sunsets?: Sunsets. I can see them from anywhere in my house

How many blankets on your bed?: None right now.

Describe your kitchen plates?: White ceramic

Describe your kitchen at the moment?: Organised and with my orchid dipped in water (that I’ll out right now)

Do you have a favourite alcoholic drink?: Nope

Do you play cards?: Yes, sometimes

What color is your car?: White. 

Can you change a tire?: “I probably could but I never tried. 🤣🤣🤣” - same

Your favourite state/province/country/etc.?: I would love to visit Italy and Japan

Favourite job you’ve had?: I only worked in a copy center, it was with my family so it was frustrating

How did you get your biggest scar?: I have some scars and all made like I came out from a comedy cartoon.

The longest is in my arm - I fell through an open glass door into an old and rocky wall, as my footing was gone I slided all the way done and almost sit on a cactus

The ugliest is in my head - I slipped on a carpet and hit the back of my head on the hinges of a door, it pinged me as the door closed with the impact

I’ll tag: @uptothestairs @v-i-o-letal @lannister-the-cat and any follower that likes me and wants to do it <3

#tagged #about me #my tumblr

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Pandemic and prisoners (The Verge) America’s failure to stop the virus from spreading in prisons is a key piece of its failure to contain the virus at large. Tens of thousands of people in prison have tested positive for the virus. From March through the beginning of June, the number of COVID-19 cases in US prisons grew at a rate of around 8 percent per day, compared to 3 percent in the general population. Of the top 20 largest disease clusters in the country, 19 are in prisons or jails.

Mexican beach resort tries to lure tourists back (Washington Post) CABO SAN LUCAS, Mexico—This city was literally built for tourists: A blank expanse at the edge of the desert converted into a haven for gringos looking to get away. Now, Cabo is trying to lure them back—in the middle of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks. Throughout the spring, this city’s tourism board, hoteliers and restaurateurs held panicked meetings. At what point would Californians and Texans want to fly south of the border? With high caseloads in those states, at what point should those tourists be encouraged to visit? At stake was nearly all of Cabo’s economy—80 percent, according to official statistics. Tourism is an economic engine for the country: It’s the third biggest contributor to GDP at nearly 9 percent. During the pandemic, that number dropped close to zero. International flights into Cabo—its main source of visitors—were down 93 percent from last summer. “It’s life or death for us,” said Rodrigo Esponda, the head of the Los Cabos tourism board. “There’s nothing else here. No industrial production. No farming or commercial fishing. It’s tourism or nothing.” “There are some residents who say, ‘Why put my family’s life in danger by inviting more visitors, restarting more flights?,’ ” said Luis Humberto Araiza López, tourism minister of Baja California Sur. “It’s a delicate line between trying to support public health and economic growth.” It’s a challenge at tourist spots across Mexico. In Cancún, the largest tourist destination in Latin America, the collapse of the tourism sector—along with other pillars have the economy—has led to concerns of a rise in extreme poverty and malnutrition. Last month, the United Nations said the economic collapse in Mexico could “compromise the health and nutrition of children.” Formal unemployment in the state of Quintana Roo, home to Cancún, has increased by 23 percent since the pandemic began. Experts say that number would be far higher if the informal sector were included.

In Mexico women inmates find education chance amid pandemic (AP) Prison inmates in Mexico have suffered from coronavirus infections at a higher rate than the country as a whole, and pandemic lockdowns have reduced their already limited contact with the outside world. But one group of women inmates at a prison west of Mexico City have managed to benefit, as the lockdown spurred a wave of professionals with time on their hands to donate online classes. The women prisoners at the Santiaguito prison have found online learning has opened a new world to them; chefs, writers and other professionals who once might have had a hard time physically visiting the prison, with its complex security filters, now are increasingly giving online classes to inmates. The prison is located in Almoloya de Juárez, near a separate maximum-security men’s facility where drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped through a tunnel in 2015. Tatiana Ortiz Monasterio, founded the non-profit group “Plan B” two years ago to bring a sewing workshop, a library and classes to inmates. The Plan B foundation recently had the idea to launch a web page with the slogan “Donate an hour,” which has already received about 10,000 responses with proposals for classes.

Fad or future? Telehealth expansion eyed beyond pandemic (AP) Telehealth is a bit of American ingenuity that seems to have paid off in the coronavirus pandemic. Medicare temporarily waived restrictions predating the smartphone era and now there’s a push to make telemedicine widely available in the future. Consultations via tablets, laptops and phones linked patients and doctors when society shut down in early spring. Telehealth visits dropped with the reopening, but they’re still far more common than before. “I don’t think it is ever going to replace in-person visits, because sometimes a doctor needs to put hands on a patient,” said Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and the Trump administration’s leading advocate for telehealth. Caveats aside, “it’s almost a modern-day house call,” she added.

French virus surge threatens nationwide back-to-school plan (AP) Not all French classrooms can safely reopen Tuesday, the country’s education minister acknowledged Sunday, as a persistent rise in coronavirus infections jeopardizes the government’s push to get France’s 12.9 million schoolchildren back into class this week. Like many governments around the world, France and Britain want to reopen schools starting Tuesday to reduce the learning gaps between rich and poor students that were worsened by the virus lockdown this spring, and to get parents back to work and revive the ailing economy. With several thousand new infections now reported in France every day, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that some classes will remain closed when the nationwide reopening begins Tuesday, but “as few as possible.” With less than 48 hours to go before the first French school bells ring, he said openings and closures were “being decided by a day-by-day analysis based on the health situation of each territory.”

Belarus tightens grip on foreign media coverage as anti-government protests swell (Washington Post) Belarusian authorities Saturday launched a crackdown on international and local media, stripping accreditation from journalists and blocking several local media sites, as longtime authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko faces mass protests over the disputed presidential election. Authorities stripped the accreditation from 17 Belarusian journalists working for international media and blocked several local independent online media sites that have played a key role in reporting on the crisis. The moves against journalists triggered fears that Lukashenko may be planning harsh new measures to crush the peaceful protests, touched off by Lukashenko’s declaration of a landslide victory in Aug. 9 elections. Opposition groups and Western governments have rejected the election results. The decision to strip journalists’ accreditation was made by the Belarus Security Council commission on preventing terrorism and extremism, which gave no reason. It came after riot police rounded up dozens of local and international reporters Thursday, many of whom were later released. Some were held and charged with illegal assembly.

India records highest daily increase in virus cases globally (AP) India on Sunday registered a record new 78,761 coronavirus cases, the highest single-day spike in the world since the pandemic began, just as the government began easing restrictions to help the battered economy. The surge raised India’s tally to over 3.5 million, and came as the government announced the reopening of subway in capital New Delhi. It also moved ahead with limited sports and religious events from next month. A country of 1.4 billion people, India now has the fastest-growing daily coronavirus caseload of any country in the world. It has reported more than 75,000 infections for the fourth consecutive day. It has also had the highest single-day surge since Aug. 4. One of the reasons is testing: India now conducts nearly 1 million tests every day, compared with just 200,000 two months ago. A significant feature of India’s COVID-19 management, however, is the growing rate of recovered patients. On Sunday, the recovery rate reached nearly 76.5%.

Many Want to Be Japan’s New Leader. Do They Know What Awaits Them? (NYT) The Japanese economy has taken a historic nosedive. The coronavirus could yet rage out of control and force a second postponement of the Olympics. Chinese military aggression is rising in the region just as America, Japan’s closest ally, is embroiled in a polarizing presidential election. And those are just the immediate challenges for the politicians jockeying fiercely to replace Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is leaving office a year early with no obvious successor. In the longer term, Japan’s next leader faces the unfinished business of Mr. Abe’s promises to advance women in politics and the workplace, and to improve working conditions so that men can help more at home. The country is confronting labor shortages as it grapples with a shrinking population and a stubbornly low birthrate, as well as snags in bringing in foreign workers. With the highest proportion of elderly people in the world, Japan could soon struggle to meet pension obligations and provide health care to the aging public. Not to mention natural disasters turbocharged by climate change, Japan’s energy vulnerabilities from its post-Fukushima nuclear shutdown, the threat of missile attacks by North Korea, and a low ebb in relations with South Korea. “It makes me wonder why anybody would want to be prime minister,” said Jeffrey Hornung, an analyst at the RAND Corporation.

Beirut port blast death toll rises to 190 (Reuters) The death toll from this month’s Beirut port blast has risen to 190 with more than 6,500 injured and three people missing, Lebanon’s caretaker government said in a report dated Sunday. The Aug. 4 explosion left 300,000 people homeless and caused $15 billion in direct damage, said the report issued on Sunday by the presidency of the council of ministers. It said 50,000 houses, nine major hospitals and 178 schools had been damaged.

#headlines #news

[cassafra5]

Where Have I Been?

I’ve been a bit nervous to post this.

Two month or so ago, I teased at a possible announcement and something I was very excited to share with you all. I had been given the opportunity to work on a temp-to-perm basis for a comic start-up headed by Marvel alumni. I applied on a whim to be a freelance Storyboard Artist, but I was instead offered the chance of working in a full-time Editorial and Admin position with a few hours dedicated to storyboarding and participating in creative meetings each week. As someone who's always wanted to get into creative work, this was a really huge deal for me and I was excited to learn and be able to have projects to add to my portfolio.

Now, part of the reason I held off was because I wanted to make sure it was solid before I made the announcement. It was a dream come true and it seemed too good to be true ... and it was. 

Read below if you'd like to hear about how I unwittingly signed up to take care of a herd of entitled neckbeards and had to work on preventing them from literally walking into glass instead of actually storyboarding as advertised.

TL;DR of my experience:

2018 unfortunately was a pretty rough year. The good news is that I managed to push for a mutual termination of contract and should be a lot more active very soon now that I’m not as emotionally drained by an incredibly toxic environment.

Credit to @kirain for looking through this and helping to edit it when I just rage-typed all of this together lol;

I walked away from my interviews in tears after being told that my work really had potential. I told them I had been a comic fan since I was a kid and this was something I was excited about. I grew up with family trying to dissuade me from doing art and I had friends/partners who really weren't interested in my work. I am by no means a professional, so I threw up whatever I could be proud of and applied to the role on a whim. So as you can imagine, having real professionals say I had potential was something amazing to me. 

My first day, they sat me at a desk with a tablet and computer and I was super excited to start learning and was immediately approached with a Sexual Harassment plaque and told to mount it. Weird but alright. It was a start-up and I already assumed we’d all be helping out with small jobs around the office. I helped them fix their scanner and they suggested I move it to my desk. I was a bit confused but did so. I asked if they wanted me to set their computers up for it but they waved their hands at me and said we could do it later. 

This would eventually result in me scanning every single document for every person in the office, and also measuring the office for furniture that they would randomly decide not to get. When I had a day off, I came back to piles of documents they refused to scan themselves since "that was my job". I got chastised since they wanted them in a hurry and it should have been done sooner ... i.e., the day I was off.

Alright. 

I also ended up doing the following duties:

Calling the IRS every single day because the Controller was too uppity about something that was in the mail and somehow thought they could track it...DURING THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN. I was required to do this and told it was part of my job.

Calling Instacart at the behest of their Legal Counsel, a man who bitched on the phone for 2 hours because he didnt want to go downstairs to drop off a faulty computer part, and having to tell them that their avocados were too soft and their almond milk had too many ingredients. I was required to do this and told it was part of my job.

I had to ask for multiple vendors to provide quotes and COI and do site visits to our office for things that they, on a whim, would decide they wouldn’t want....resulting in multiple vendors getting angry at me.

I had to get what “everyone wanted for Christmas” for their luncheon...they expected me to get cakes same day from a fancy bakery, as well as LOBSTER (one of them said this was apparently a Christmas tradition of theirs?) Mind you, they repeatedly spoke about budgeting since they were working on investment money and the owner repeatedly would mention how “every day we weren’t producing was a day we died a little more.” I guess that death would have been from gout.

I had to take on dealing with all building requests. Fine ...until they started to tell me I should be reaching out to building management about the "radiation coming out of the cable box". They said it was shooting at a person given their angle and, because I'm *that person*, I mentioned it'd probably be more of a radius vs a direct shot. They started talking about it causing a mushroom cloud over the office. I laughed. Apparently it wasn’t a joke :/ They also complained about the fan making noises and being able to hear people partying and singing songs ... during the holidays ... when people normally do that sort of thing.

I also had to deal with things such as their electrical work and assistance with general interior work in the office...for some reason

They put me in charge of the Party Committee for a Housewarming Party where I was the only one actually making arrangements. This would be fine but the office was sublet and, due to their clumsiness in handling their electrical work before I got there, part of the office has no electricity and there was also a fallen over power beam in the middle of the office...but I guess that can be an accent piece.

I literally had to rename their files. Rather than renaming documents themselves, they would email me to rename them and reupload them because they couldn’t be bothered to change them themselves.

I made the mistake of telling them I had worked with DocuSign in a previous job. What resulted was them forcing me to teach it to them...but then they would argue with me about why it couldn’t mail merge or allow them to revise their documents. A Docusign rep mentioned they could just do their work outside of Docusign and import it since the whole point is to maintain the integrity of the document but they just kind of blamed me for not knowing enough about something I had only briefly used in another completely different setting.

I was literally approached by the person who should have been leading me in storyboarding and told that I needed to look into “distraction graphics” for the office because he was concerned that the two head people (WHO WORKED AT MARVEL) kept bashing their heads on the glass and he was afraid they’d go through the glass eventually. My literal reaction:

Yeah...he didn’t laugh. It was apparently serious and I had to have some very awkward talks with some window vendors. Do you know it apparently costs more than $3.5k to cover glass that you could probably avoid if you just looked up from your phones when you walked?

Frustrating, but whatever ... it wasn't a big deal and so long as I got to do some creative work, I was willing to tolerate it. 

I asked the person in charge of art and asked when we'd be able to work on creative and was told that my role was mainly in admin and to "leave the storyboarding to the storyboarders".

I guess I just imagined every single mention of that during the interview process.

I was taken aback but he assured me it was fine since I could work in production and work on other items, like cutting comics up for Webtoons. This wasn't what I wanted, but fine ... maybe I could get something out of this regardless and learn, even if I was just cutting up and processing other peoples' work. By the way, they ended up not even letting me do that.

And here’s where I get to the owner of this establishment...

I got called in to meet with him and told I would be given a special project. He wanted me to suggest a few themes that would be used for a promo project the company was working on. Okay ... this could be good. I started thinking of all my favorite genres and comics and wrote out a decent list. I asked him if it there was a limit and he said there was no limit, so I made a comprehensive list.

He brought me back in a week later and ripped my report apart.

First, he didn't want Marvel and DC included, but then he got upset when they weren't. 

Star Wars and Serenity weren't Scifi, according to him; they were "Space Opera". So that had to be done. They were set in space but apparently that wasn't scientific. Alright. 

Spongebob and Ducktales were irrelevant, but apparently The Simpsons was super relevant. 

He smiled at me and told me I needed to redo it because I obviously didn't know what I was doing. Okay ... sure. Then he kept changing his mind. We started this before the holidays and I worked on making a very sortable report in case there were anymore last minute changes.

Me and another co-worker who were avid comic book readers spent a lot of time looking at sales numbers and articles to compile what we should focus on; however, for one reason or another, the owner would dismiss everything we brought up since he "hadn't heard of it". Deathstroke apparently never existed. Teen Titans also ... totally not relevant. Although he said he was open to ideas, he'd bash every single suggestion, answer every question by asking us why we'd ask such "stupid questions", and he literally asked us to bring in articles and statistics just so he could completely dismiss them. He was completely un-open to hearing anyone else's opinions and already had a dead-set idea of what his audience wanted ... despite having told us he hated comics and that "normal people [like him] don't read comic books". He knew what these idiots wanted, and it was just a matter of making us redoing the report over and over until we happened on the right combo HE wanted. I.e., pretty much the top comics he last saw at the dawn of the early 2000's.

I literally had taken pics of a few bestseller displays I’d seen in stores (Newsbury Comics, Barnes and Nobles etc) but he literally said that that didn’t mean they would sell. What does Best Selling even mean then?

But it's cool to just completely dismiss your customer base and act like you know better, right?

I ended up having to work until 10:00pm one night in order to make all necessary changes and print covers for him to review. What started as a simple list of themes became a report that had over 600 rows in Excel. Even then, 80-90% of it ended up not being used. I was so exhausted at this point and burnt out. I loved comics ... but having to rip them apart by category, put them back together, eliminate whole categories because he didn't want them, and then having to remake them after he changed his mind was agonizing. 

I had another meeting with him and he smiled at me and simply said, "Aww I thought this would be a fun project for you, since you're a fangirl after all"

He was taunting me. This was a game to him. Of course, I should have expected this from someone who literally made a cheat sheet so "idiot comic book fans" would get his jokes. I'm not joking. It actually exists and I'm sure it's something Marvel would rather not even remember.

A couple more weeks passed and, at this point, a majority of the office depended on me to get people's food choices for their snacks, following up with building maintenance, and I barely had any creative projects whatsoever. I did get to create the party invitation the main art guy refused to make but he pushed me to make in Canva, because he thought Canva was the end all and be all to graphic design and that it should be used for all presentations for our LinkedIn. Pretty much everything Canva (something used mostly by Instagram and Twitter users) probably wasn't meant to be used on.

Keep in mind that this person was in charge of creative and was also in charge of gate-keeping me from doing the one thing I was tolerating everything for. I had literally repeatedly asked about the storyboarding during the interview process and even though they had changed the duties, they always confirmed that storyboarding would be a part of it. 

Last week, I asked the main art guy again about my job description and about how he had mentioned storyboarding being off the table entirely. He immediately got defensive and reminded me that I was an admin. I mentioned I still had the job descriptions and emails mentioning me having a hand in creative, and he accused me of talking back and said that he could tell from how I looked that I thought he was an idiot.

He also accused me of not being enthusiastic about his projects. I was confused since I was actively asking for projects and had literally been trying to find some way to take on creative assignments. He got even angrier and said I wasn't telling him how much fun I was having and how excited his work was making me.

What?

It suddenly dawned on me that every talk I'd had with this guy about how excited I was to learn from him/to work on the team gave him some sort of weird satisfaction. I mentioned that I didn't think I should have been sending him emails about that, and he asked, "Why not? You shouldn't assume I don't want them. I want you to tell me my stuff is fun and how excited you are about them!" I was ... very uncomfortable. This grown man. This grown ass man wanted me to fawn over his work and send him emails about how excited I was about his work. About HIM. What a narcissist.

He made enough commotion that the owner brought us in. He sat us down and said something about him being a bit familiar with this sort of thing, having gone to marriage counselling himself. I was already uncomfortable and that really didn’t help. 

What ended up happening was they berated me in his office and told me I was "too honest", and I was told that I didn't know my place.  I was told that at the very top were the two Marvel alumni, then underneath there was everyone else and I was right at the very bottom of everything and I should know my place.

These were the two people who had told me I had potential and who had made me so happy just a couple months prior. I was frozen in place as they grinned at me and told me that obviously there was some misunderstanding on my part. They then told to run along while they thought about what they could throw at me to make me happy. The guy who yelled at me was not chastised or told his behavior was wrong in any way, shape or form. I got dragged into a staff meeting afterwards, where the owner proudly told all of us, "This is the best company you can work for, where you can work with people you like." And in the same breath, he told everyone not to fuck up or otherwise it would be "resume time".

I felt broken the rest of the day, where I heard them blatantly laughing and insulting the creators they were going to work with. One creator was commented on as being able to "...work as a writer but you shouldn't look at her stuff unless you want your eyes to bleed.” They said worse stuff too and laughed like a bunch of entitled douchebags on DeviantArt trying to get kicks off of stuff they thought were cringey. It was insane. These were supposed to be professionals in the field. It made me uncomfortable to think what they said about my own work when they told me I had "potential". Some of these were small time Tumblr creators like me who probably thought this would be their big break too...

I thought about putting in my two days, the amount that was specified in my contract, and worried about what they'd try to do in the time I had left. I was miserable and scared and nervous.

On Friday, the owner approached me and asked me for my portfolio while smiling to himself. I was skeptical and asked why, and he firmly said, "Because I want to see it." I sent it and prepared for the worst.

He brought me in for a two minute "friendly" chat in the conference room, and once we sat down, he mused over his computer and said it was "coming back to him” I did art.

He remembered now. It had been so forgettable, after all. Aww, maybe there was something there.

With a smile, he told me I "shouldn't take it personally", and that only one artist so far had been able to get along with him and work with what they wanted. They'd thrown out 8 artists after they just simply "didn't work". They admitted that they had promised me storyboarding, but no one was working to their intended vision. That they hadn't really figured out a place for me in the company, but maybe going out on a business trip would help him clear his head and he could find something I could do. "I guess we've been letting you down a bit, haven’t we?" 

I felt like at this point he wanted me to act desperate and happy for the possibility of a chance and buy into it and take his offering with gratitude...

...but I was done with his shit. 

I told him that I had started at his company a few months ago and that if they hadn't figured out where I was supposed to be in all that time, then maybe it wasn't a good fit. He was quiet and didn't seem prepared for it. "Well ... what do you think we should do about it then?"

"If it's alright with you, I would like to terminate this contract immediately." I said it through gritted teeth. I'm not a confrontational person, but after everything that had happened, I was worried I'd lose it. I could feel myself shaking, but I just couldn't deal with it anymore. "I didn't appreciate being told I was at the bottom of the food chain and I really didn't appreciate you allowing me to be treated this way. Frankly, after that, it's taken every bit of motivation out of me and I'd like to end this. Now." I was trying to be professional and control myself, but I was quietly seething with every word. I told him I had saved all my job descriptions and had the contract if he wanted to review it, and I knew that what they had been telling me was bullshit.

He was really quiet and his eyes were wide open. I really think he expected me to be grateful and happy and willing to do more and more for the company just for that little chance. He mumbled something about not prolonging my suffering and told me to just assist in transitioning over my duties and typing things up. 

Once I did, I asked if I was free to go and he said I was and I left. It was so much of a relief not to have to come back to that office.

So this is what happened with something I thought would have been a great in to an industry I was excited about. I got used up (and not even for the skills I actually have under my belt) and kept around as an emotional punching bag, and for the dumbest things imaginable and essentially just assisted them with setting up their office after they'd sublet it.

On the plus side, I feel like it was a big deal that I could actually stand up for myself, even if it happened to be to someone like that. Even though I'm not a professional and even though some people would consider me insignificant, I feel like there's never a reason to make any person feel insignificant and like they're the lowest of the low. I hated how they spoke about other creators and I hated how they spoke to me, and there isn't any reason anyone should have to deal with people who are just bent on being condescending.

Ironically, around this time, Steven Universe released an amazing episode and the ending theme kind of hit home with me. I loved its message and I think that ep. kind of helped me in a way.

2019's off to an interesting start, I guess ... but I guess I can be proud that I'm stronger despite it. I am passionate about my art and do want to be able to work professionally but there’s no reason to ever tolerate disrespect and dishonesty in a company.

In the words of Raul Julia/Gomez Addams:

Hopefully, one day, I’ll get my break but this definitely wasn’t it. 

If any of you guys are in NYC and happen to come across a mildly shady startup toted to be headed by Marvel alumni, maybe just be a bit careful. I normally don’t post about stuff like this and honestly tend to get quiet when things happen because I have trouble opening up about personal issues but maybe it can help someone or at the very least be an interesting read.

#personal #job stories #comics

[halloweenvalentine1997]

A short story I made out of short stories I’ve written under other names.

When she died, I felt a series of perforations, hollows and bruises

about my skull. I saw her die behind static.

By the stone wall adjacent to the office supplies store, I

bewailed her, screaming,

burning myself later with the tip of a lit cigarette.

I put ash and poison on my wrist for the ones who died.

I wanted to pick a strawberry off the plant in my parents’ backyard

and once more taste its succulence. I wanted to impale my head with the

iron tip of a weathervane. Slice open my vibrant red aorta.

Seeing them all in a hole

through the light emitting

through the asylum blinds.

I myself am a corpse in a bed

in the forensics ward,

green moths on my blanket,

rotting silently in a pastel grave,

killed by medicine,

wasted by time.

If you come close enough to hear my thoughts

(like a chemically-enhanced ghost)

distort and clamor

amongst the traffic, the television,

the noise a death in a family brings,

I will let loose my hatred

like a ribbon from hair,

unraveling red Medusa strands.

I will draw more ribbons on your flesh

if you touch me,

bleed you into the wood,

hammer a nail into your heartline,

devour your fear like a shot of amphetamine

to my malevolent blood.

2013

Stacey

1.

Some of us are the river’s current, floating through life swiftly or slowly, as if in a trance of somnambulism. Some of us are a human shell at its edge, refusing to follow its pattern and be a part of it. Why follow them when you can live on the fringes of society, away from its stigmas and scrutinizing scorn?

2.

When Ellie married Samuel Barnes, the world was a rose-gold utopia. Three years later, at the age of twenty-nine, Ellie no longer felt that the chemistry they had once remained. On a windy September afternoon, when she returned to the red-brick bungalow she shared with Samuel on Hillsam Avenue, Ellie heard moans and sounds of sexual ecstasy emitting from their bedroom. Another woman was there. Ellie’s eyes instantly began to burn like hot coals in a campground grill. She examined her wedding portrait on the wall of the hallway as she moved in slow motion through it. They had been photographed in front of the church’s stained glass windows, a spectrum of color radiating behind the couple adorned in black and white.

She ran her fingers through her long brown hair, blinking through the lake of sorrow in her dark eyes, and suppressing a sob, pushed open the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Another dark-haired woman Ellie didn’t recognize was riding Samuel, and when she registered the door slamming open, she turned around wide-eyed with a cry of alarm, her brown nipples in full view.

“I knew it,” Ellie told Samuel bitterly. “I knew for at least a year that there was someone else!”

Samuel looked at his wife blankly and didn’t reply, his face almost smug.

“Who are you?” Ellie shrieked at the strange woman.

“Lila Stern,” the woman replied. “And clearly, Sam doesn’t love you anymore. He loves me. He has for the entire year you suspected something was going on. We would both like you to leave.”

“Don’t dictate what I will do in my own house, you fucking homewrecker!” Ellie shouted. Lila, remembering her nudity, covered herself with the indigo comforter.

“I agree with Lila,” Samuel said. “Just pack your things and go, Ellie. You’ve been a nagging, paranoid pain in my ass for too long. You’re in need of a psychiatrist, but you won’t pay heed to my advice. All you are lately is a cold fish who’s no fun. A fucking schoolmarm. Find an apartment somewhere. Leave.”

“Now,” Lila said.

Ellie slammed the door shut and bolted down the hall and into the kitchen. She opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed the sharpest knife she could find. Tested its point with the tip of her index finger. A small blood-drop formed in the small pad of flesh. Although Ellie’s tears rained down like heated glass, she felt no physical pain.

I won’t pack my things, she thought. I have a better idea.

She glanced at the neon green digital clock above the oven. It read 1:11 p.m. It was September 24th. As she placed the knife into the pocket of her navy blue peacoat, grabbed her smartphone, scrawled a quick note and left the house, Ellie knew what to do. No more morning to afternoon shifts as a psychiatric nurse at St. Mary Medical Center’s psych unit. No more wondering when Samuel would be home from his nightly excursions. As she walked towards the river, passing the other houses, the Texaco, the railroad tracks, the boarded-up, shutdown factories, memories flashed before her. She remembered her lonely childhood, her even more tumultuous adolescence where she slept with a crowbar in her pillowcase and read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird at the edge of the schoolyard grass away from everyone.

“I wish you’d never been born,” Ellie’s mother told her, swilling red wine from a tall, dark bottle.

“I second that,” her father said, puffing on a fat cigar. Once she made it to the river, Ellie collapsed like a house of cards to the white sand, and howled the loss of her love into the godless sky. She glanced from side to side to make sure no one was watching. She couldn’t be sure if someone was for all the foliage and bushes. But she didn’t care. She sat there for the longest time, her breathing a series of hyperventilation. Samuel’s face was all she could see, then Lila’s, the two of them like a rotating holographic image. She wanted her cremated ashes bequeathed to the river. She wanted no tomb in the town cemetery. No funeral. The note she wrote with these directions was in her left pocket of her coat. Such a heavy coat for the nice weather, but Ellie was always cold. Her body, feather-boned and catatonic, slumped over a large rock and she let the tears wet it like a water nymph mourning the loss of a handsome sailor on a receding boat.

Ellie turned on her cell phone and listened to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” one last time. It sounded faint above the river’s churning. Just like the woman in the song, she too had an non-devoted, careless husband. She wept hardest at the chorus:

Where is my John Wayne?


Where is my prairie song?


Where is my happy ending?


Where have all the cowboys gone?

“To greener pastures,” Ellie said to herself. “To rose-gold utopias I’ll never see.“

3.

The clock on the wall of Mrs. Sykes’s math class ticked in time to my heartbeat. The hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I crave marijuana was there, screaming like a lacuna asking to be filled. The time for more recalcitrance (in this case, truancy and drug use by the river) was near. While Mrs. Sykes droned on like a monotonous honeybee about the Pythagorean theorem, I got up from my desk and slung my backpack over my shoulders. Her gunmetal grey eyes followed me to the door with the poster of the Power Rangers on it, all teamed up together. Always use the buddy system, the poster said.

“Where are you going, Stacey?” Mrs. Sykes asked.

“Skipping class,” I told her. “And dropping out when I turn eighteen in February. This is non-negotiable. You can’t stop me.”

Before my teacher could retaliate, I flounced out of the room, leaving the scoffing and titters of my peers behind me. I left my textbooks in my locker to lessen the load in my backpack. I unzipped a small pocket and grinned at the verdant green pot in its glass pipe.

Jimmy Stirling is the one who introduced me to pot when I was a junior a year before. He was a senior, and one of Lewis and Clark High School’s few homeless students. His dad was a cantankerous drunk and gambler who threw him out. Jimmy spent time singing songs on the sidewalk for spare change, or sleeping at the homeless shelter for adolescents. For someone who was homeless, Jimmy frequently had a remarkably full tin can of bills and change. His singing voice was a rich alto tearing pleasantly through the downtown breeze. On October of last year, he found me crying under the highway after school let out. I recognized him from my creative writing class.

"What’s wrong, Stacey?” he asked.

“My brother’s locked in the loony bin. He’s possessed. He killed Alvin, my guinea pig. Everything is falling apart, and to top it all off, Liam broke up with me this morning.”

"Man, I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “You every try marijuana? It might make you forget all that stuff.”

“I don’t have any money,” I said, knowing that anyone with marijuana downtown expected payment in return for it.

“That’s alright. I have some I’ll share for free. Let’s sit in my favorite place to do it.”

I followed him, listening to him sing as we walked the few blocks to an alleyway with a set of cement stairs against a condemned apartment, leading to a bolted door. He sang Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and Black Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself To Live.” We sat on the bottom step . He loaded the pot into a glass bowl and taught me how to light it, how to inhale the hit of smoke without exhaling it too soon. I caught the gist of it. Suddenly, within a few minutes, everything was funny. My mind was suddenly devoid of all negativity. I was giggly, light as a tumbleweed blown by a gale of fierce wind. I felt energetic, talkative, and happier that I’d been a long time. Shortly after my day with Jimmy, I learned he went to jail for getting caught with Ecstasy tablets in his lockers. He was also rumored to be selling cocaine and heroin downtown. He wasn’t allowed back at school. I never saw him again. The flashbacks vanished when I approached the river and saw her. She was a woman with long brown hair. She was wearing a peacoat, jeans and pair of black loafers. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw what she was doing. The woman older than me by at least a decade, was holding a kitchen knife to the veins in her right wrist. She made no sound when she punctured them, her hand dangling over the water. I watched her bloodletting turn part of the emerald river red. It was spouting out like the slashed throat of a sacrificed farm animal. She turned and saw me when i stepped on a twig by accident and snapped it in two.

“Go away,” the woman told. “Believe me, you should be letting this happen.”

She took in my red ringlets, my sharp green eyes, my pink hoodie, my Converse sneakers. Then she went for her throat with her knife and slit it open with perfect finesse. There was a vibe coming off of this woman that insinuated I should just let her die. I could sense that her life had been miserable and mean. I sat on a rock out of sight of the dying woman and got high, thinking of her spirit rising, transcendental and free, into the sun and clouds. I thought of how the first settlers of the city I live in came here 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. Before there were cemeteries, they buried their dead in unmarked graves. I thought of all the skeletons that must be under the grass of the lawns and parks, the sidewalks, the urban streets. I thought of the days of religious fanaticism, and how had I been born then, I would have been buried in unconsecrated ground for my heathen ways. I didn’t believe in god, but I did believe in Satan.

2019

Stacey

I am not sure exactly when my family died. Before they died, I was a genuinely innocent soul whose conscience burned to a crisp. I couldn’t blame myself for it, but I didn’t know who to blame because the ones responsible for my family’s death never came out of their disguises, synthetic human skin and features made to look exactly like my family members would look if they were really there amongst you. I still hear them call to me over highway noise and wind, while I’m taking hits off a meth pipe or smoking a cigarette on an overpass with dead eyes and no ache. I’ve already ached so much. Without them I am a branch breaking off of a tree. It’s hard to explain what I mean by disguises; they look so much like my family but aren’t. They could look like anyone and they’re wearing synthetic skin designed to look like my mom and dad.

I am Stacey Galloway. I was born to a family that never loved me but that I tried to love fiercely. I may have turned into a drug-addled street kid but I still wanted them to love me, anyway. I remember when I first suspected them to be dead. I was sitting in my old apartment in the living room with a scream in my ears that sounded like my mother’s emanating from my laptop and whirling through the dusty air like a trap I would remained enveloped in. I heard a chainsaw start up and then the sound stopped. It was like an audio recording that just stayed there screaming and sawing in my computer speakers. The voices told me my parents were dead and replaced by “skin masks.”

I asked, “What is a skin mask?” “Synthetic skin made to look like your parents. Exactly like your parents. And your younger brother,” a man replied out of thin air. “Someone else is wearing skin that looks like them now. Every feature of your family has been replicated, special contact lenses have been made, someone with the same height as them is wearing skin masks.”

I couldn’t see him but maybe he could see me. I hoped not. What he was saying was too horrible to want to comprehend. It’s humanly possible to do this, with the aid of a lot of fake skin and ways of knowing how the victim worked, how they spoke, where they lived, whom they spoke to. I will never know that world and don’t want to. It’s insidious enough just to live in the city I live in, gone and waking up with ice in my chest in a house that is now unfamiliar and rearranged. All I want to do is get high to forget about it, and it’s worked after awhile.

I know the police will do nothing because I don’t know how to explain it without dying or not making sense. I never wanted this.

I never wanted to lose the only lifeline I had.

So after the voices came from my laptop and told me these things, I left my apartment, locked it and went to the stone wall by the office supplies store about a mile away. I sat there in the gravel and lit a cigarette, the parking lot blurring through my wet eyes. I didn’t know why I believed what I was hearing, but I was anorexic and schizophrenic, and didn’t know how to not believe something that seemed so real. Before all this, I heard voices talk to me in my room that really were there. No one was physically present around me, but their voices reverberated throughout my walls, my silent television, my closed laptop.

“We’re going to kill your family,” said the voices.

I didn’t believe them. I didn’t reply. I thought they were full of shit.

Now I know they’re not, because although the identity thieves of my family are never in prison, the handwriting of my parents has changed, and so have the cadence of their voices. They speak in European accents now when they think they’re alone and that I’m out of earshot. But I can hear them. It’s hard to understand what they’re saying. It’s plain English, but indecipherable at the same time.  My brother’s identity was never actually stolen. He is eighteen and currently going to college. I am twenty-three and never doing anything with my life again. I’m in the loony bin.

I stare through the green and blue in the slit in the blinds and think about the house I grew up in, a green bungalow in the middle of a golden field of grass, a porch swing, wind chimes and an attic window that never lit up. My father always told me our attic was full of asbestos and that it could cause mesothelioma to inhale it after years of exposure to it.

“But,” he said, “there is no asbestos in the rest of the house. You’re safe.”

In the backyard, my mother grew strawberries and tomatoes. There was a one-car garage and a deck, a wooden fence and a glass picnic table with chairs surrounding it. I remember days, years of smoking marijuana in my room and listening to music. Grey smoke filling the room with the scent of weed, filling my lungs with blackness and my heart with euphoria. I will do that later on, in another place, when this institution is tired of me and forces me out the door like I want.

When I went home after my tantrum by the stone wall, I noticed that my parents were still there, or they just appeared to be. I saw no blemishes, no redness, nothing but them with a synthetic look to their skin, it appeared to be fake. But there was my mother’s hair, my father’s hair, my father’s eyes, their faces. Over the next several years that I lived in the house with them, I noticed that while they copied the handwriting of my parents well, it was slightly altered. They could do their signatures perfectly, but their notes to me and their grocery lists were different looking than a note would be were it from my parents. I was distressed by the way my father’s eyes were either a dark blue or a light blue. They looked like two different sets of eyes. He tried to hit me three times, but never went any further than that. I could tell he was an angry man all of a sudden, and though he looked like my father, I knew he wasn’t. He was wearing a synthetic skin mask. It looked like my father, but it wasn’t. Its skin is fake. It wasn’t real. Same with my mother. Whoever these people were, I know I need to chop them up and leave their remains to dissolve in a landfill somewhere. I want to leave my brother, Steffan, out of it. I know there’s a way to make them expose themselves. Purchase a gun, aim through the summer air at the targets, themselves and tell them, “Take off your skin masks! You’re not my parents! You killed them.”

They wouldn’t be able to reply, and if they were somehow compelled to reply and tell me what they did with my parents, I would happily kill whoever is underneath that fake human surface and tell the cops that they were serial killers who spied on my parents for years and stole their identities. Something I never wanted to happen to them or to myself. I hardly ever talk to “my parents” anymore and Steffan stays the hell away as well. I know I have to have them buried but for now, I think I’ll drown myself in writing. I haven’t explained what is going on to the psych ward, which is going to let me out anyway soon. I know how to handle it myself after hearing one of the directors of the facility tell me, “Your family is skin masks.” The sick fuck laughed to himself and I knew I had to flee and get those people who thought they could ever replace my parents, who were unkind to me but were all I had. I hated everyone else or lost the ones who mattered. I’m going back into their house and I’m going to dig up my gun and aim it, loaded with silver bullets, at their brains. I know they’ll unmask. I’m not born yesterday. I know I should do this. I would never duplicate a mask made to look like real skin and identity of someone else, and wear it over myself as though I could become that person. I’d rather swallow a bottle of pills and go to sleep forever. Fall asleep in a meadow of bluebells and Vicodin.

Before here, I hung out under a train bridge where I always wanted to follow the mysterious Mathilde, a girl whose surname I didn’t know to this day, anywhere and everywhere. She came there to buy meth and was always hanging out with older men, smoking a meth pipe and blowing the smoke up into the lights under the train bridge on the cement walls, watching it float, a white demon mask, in the illumination. I joined her once. She asked me, “Why are you doing meth, Stacey?”

“Because I’m miserable without it. It makes me feel like I could walk for miles and it feels like it’s only seconds until you’re at your destination. I feel like I can die alone on the autumn breeze and die happy.”

“Don’t die, Stacey. You’re the last one of them that should be killed.”

“Some of these bitches really should die. Last night, someone threatened me with a lead pipe after I threatened his friend with a lit cigarette after that cunt tried to beat me up. The both of them should burn up in a chamber underground.”

Mathilde smiled. “How did you know I love that sort of thing?”

“Because I can see through you. I’ve seen you in fights under here, too. Try to keep a low radar. I know you haven’t initiated any of those fights, but try to see there are real dangers here in town and don’t let anyone know where you live. I heard you lost your ID recently and had to get it replaced. It was stolen. I’m only saying this because I care about you, Mathilde. I don’t think they’ve done anything with your ID except disposed of it, by now. I think we should stick together.”

“I don’t have any friends except you,” said Mathilde.

And a few days later, I was shoved away into the psych ward, the loony bin, the human menagerie. I felt like a psychiatric science experiment, doped up with meds and lost in the dull, utilitarian rec room, playing ping pong, watching an episode of Intervention in drug  therapy, browsing the bookshelves, learning different coping skills, watching the bus park and then leave through the glass cage of windows, learning about different behavioral therapies, making collages with magazine pictures, standing in line for more meds, staring at the ceiling light reflecting from their TV, craving drugs and wanting to cast off all purity. I couldn’t stand it here any longer. I still can’t. I’m crazier and know I won’t pay for what I’m about to do, considering how horrible what these people did to my parents is. I can’t let them live any longer and everyone is buying into their disguises except and another lady whose name I don’t know. Their old friends won’t speak to them. A lady who lives me nearby told me my mom isn’t herself anymore.

“She’s not Autumn,” the lady told me. Autumn is my mother’s name.

She said nothing about my dad, but all the voices ever reiterated to me was that my dad, Roger, was killed and that I would never know where or what had been done with him. I’ll forever remember that scream and chainsaw sound on my laptop, playing through the speakers out of dead silence. What was I supposed to do with that information. Say I heard it out of thin air? I’d sound psychotic to law enforcement, mental health services and anyone listening. I can’t just ramble about this to random drug addicts, either. I can’t tell them why I’m purchasing the gun, what its purpose is, or where I’m going to kill those thieves. I am haunted by days of sleeping and screaming and all I can do is bleed Ativan and never want to wake up. But still want to avenge my parents’ murder as well. I’m getting out soon. I will sleep under the stars for a night out on the deck, and wait until the daylight breaks to kill them when they emerge from behind their locked door and into the interior of the basement.

You’ll see. They have masks that are so fake-looking they betray themselves, they give themselves away. I can find a way to move on and I know I shouldn’t blame myself, because this destruction of the family foundation was never my doing. It was theirs, whomever is living in those disguises. I’ve told no one. I can’t allow myself to be labelled as psychotic or severely mentally ill, but I have been. I can hear the voices to this day, and four psychiatrists told me that schizophrenia is incurable. The voices can only be tapered down with medications. There is no cure alive for hearing voices, for visual and auditory hallucinations. I’ve seen things too. I’ve seen people that look ghostly and transparent appear by the river, or sitting on curbs, and they vanish into thin air just as quickly as they appeared. A cop by the river, a man in a grey hoodie on the street curb. I see black shadows above me, or white or golden flashbulbs emanating in the ceiling like there’s a camera taking my picture. The voices still talk through speakers, walls and televisions. Car radios. Computers. A speaker will transmit a voice faster than anything. All they’re telling me is that my family was bad and that they deserved it. I know most people wouldn’t agree with this or think this is okay. Nothing is okay. I will never feel like I’m wholly human again.

2016

Mathilde

1.

In the woods there whispered a secret I felt compelled to follow, just to discern its meaning. It could’ve been a blessing or a curse, and still I was brave enough to leave my repressive household for those screams that normally would frighten someone, but I’ve been reduced to a frozen-hearted Banshee on the floor of a seclusion room more than once. I remember the fog of those moments and feeling more broken than even the most dismantled women could get. Screaming because it was expected of me.  

I left home when I was eighteen, dropped straight out of high school, a nightmare I never hope to relive. Age eighteen was the last time I saw a psychiatric facility. My family and me lived in a Tudor mansion in the city’s most affluent neighborhood. It was my parents and my sister Sinead, who was always the opposite of me, the black sheep.

“Mathilde, no one is screaming in the woods,” she’d tell me when I first heard the shrill, ear-scorching girl’s shriek echo from the trees bordering the park.

I ignored her and ran knocking a stone statue over, and sought out the source of feminine distress.

“Hello? Are you alright?”

“No matter where you go, I’ll find you,” was the whisper that fervently replied from somewhere in the foliage. As though the angel or apparition (whatever she was) could read my mind. I was thirteen.

Pale and whey-skinned compared to my sister, who perpetually blushed and took better care with her pretty countenance. She snagged Dale Tierney before I could get to know him; naturally someone like him would gravitate towards an extroverted floozy like my sister Sinead. He greeted me politely but tersely upon visiting our house, as I was not the subject of his interest. My sister was seventeen, and a senior in high school, while I was in ninth grade, a razor-freak and antisocial, maladjusted misfit. Sinead pretended not to notice. My cuts bled on tiles to industrial rock music. No one could stop me.

*

“Mathilde-”

“Don’t speak, or I’ll excavate your heart from your chest and incinerate it while I smoke a coffin nail,” I replied. He was chasing Dale with a bat, and I remembered a brief feeling just like getting fucked with a knife. Some bat-wielding perverts had jumped me several years ago and shoved the handle in.

“Mathilde!”

“I’ll eat your heart before I burn it over the pyre,” I snapped.

In the abandoned grain elevator building made of cement, a place I pretended was a mental institution, I executed him. Lobotomized, Never anesthetized, because I wanted him to feel like hell. I always knew there was no inferno underground where bad people like myself and this man who is dying beneath a series of rope knots. I have bound him in a length of chain as well. Years ago, long after the screaming in the foliage to the cacophonous magpies had ceased, I heard a woman or young girl wail in agony above the ceiling. The attic I never went up in because it was asbestos-ridden, and I wondered how schizophrenic I had become.

I told my father (a man who once told me “try harder” while I pretended to asphyxiate myself with a shoelace adorning the knob of my bedroom door) that I heard a scream erupt from the attic.

“Well, your intake with mental health is tomorrow,” my dad replied. “We’ll get you on the right meds.”

I hoped and prayed there was no reality behind the scream.

The house was over 100 years old; it could’ve been a benevolent or malevolent apparition.

He’s dead.

I’ll splash him with acid and dissolve him into the floor.

I see Dale watching me from the doorway all of a sudden.

“I am Hell itself,” I tell him. He seems to know the guy I offed was scum.

We laugh.

*

I wake up from my zoning out on the couch at 3 a.m., content, knowing I had no part in it. None of it was my fault. Tori Amos’s To Venus and Back album has played on repeat all night. I could’ve retained my innocence if the city’s pathetic excuse for a population cut me a little slack, but now all I have time for is complete, indisputable indifference. And euphoria over everything, hedonistic amusement showing at all times. So happy I could die in outer space. I wouldn’t even care. I used to put methamphetamine mixed with angel dust, or PCP into my bloodstream and it was then that I discovered a drug that could take away the fear of death itself. A man said, “Get the fuck out of here or face my gun.” I saw no gun to speak of and felt numb with nothing but mania in my head under the freight train bridge. I moved myself as far away from him as I could go. I was full of amphetamines under the bridge. A place downtown full of drama and drugs. I saw a man hold a knife to the throat of a man in his late teens or early twenties. I told the older man with the knife, “Don’t cut him. Just don’t. I don’t want police under here. I’m not calling them. Just…don’t,” I told him lifelessly. This was before the gun threat with the possibly non-existent gun in one of his pockets. The man withdrew his silver blade and backed off the guy, who was the only one allowing me to use a meth pipe. I felt no affection for him considering I don’t know him to this day, but I wonder how I’m not afraid to waltz out into the insidious Spokane night. A hellhole in the central eastern part of Washington state. I never liked this city, famous for its underground whoredom and criminal activity since the early nineteenth century. I intend to haunt it just like the screaming ghosts.

But I won’t scream. I’ll just make them their own worst enemies. I don’t feel I will ever really die, even when my body does.

“I hate you and I love myself, you pathetic fucking city,” I whispered to the mirror. I would place them in an underground chamber. Baths of acid dissolving useless DNA. When people like me are crossed, the night can scream and sleep will reveal what Hell can be. I’ve dreamt of being in a kennel on a plane. Jail cells on a bus with cages lining the aisle that remind me of a jail on wheels. It deserts me by the side of a road aligning a river. Sometimes I dream of treading deep water and drifting along in its waves like a damned soul. I dream of people glaring at me in dark alleys, houses where there’s nothing to watch but a woman in a peach-colored dress entertaining some businessman, drinking something out of a wineglass while she does it. An abandoned asylum being haunted by myself and others. It’s like I’m haunting somewhere that is judging me as I judge it.

I made a carbon copy of him. A clone. I drifted away on dissociative hallucinogens to the sound of his voice in my ear. I don’t care that he’s not really here.

Whenever anyone badmouths him, I feel like they should meet the Windex I pretend to pour in their coffee.

I’ll do what I please for the rest of my life.

2.

Colored balloons and iridescent papier-mâché dotted the walls on the summer evening of my sister, Sinead’s, suicide. I staggered home to Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back” blaring from her room above the stairwell on repeat, a bottle of Robitussin lingering in my bloodstream. I felt high as a kite. I stared into the rainbow vortex, the littered warps of tinsel on the floor, and remembered hours earlier an argument ricocheting off the walls between Dale Tierney and Sinead. I couldn’t understand them through their slurred drunkenness. I remember a wineglass breaking against his car as it was tossed aside by Sinead.

I had never known her to fall apart.

I would have never done this to him, but I chose to keep out of his way and never tell him how I felt. I was like winter without him, cold as silver and bracing as the winds of the east. I could sustain the fantasy of him more than the reality.

He was somewhere in the house, probably, drunk in the kitchen and avoiding the drama of prior hours.

When the song played one more time, I ascended the stairs and traipsed down the corridor to Sinead’s room.

Do not turn away, my friend

Like a willow I can bend

No man calls my name

No man came

So I walked on down away from you

Maybe your attention was more

Than you could do

One man did not call

He asked me for my love

And that was all

The lines from the song tore through the air and were like bells of 80s euphoria in my ears. I saw Sinead dead with a jagged red line across her throat, torn open from a self-inflicted wound. Blood spattered the mirror of her vanity table. I never thought she had the guts to even prick her finger. I watched her white face for a moment, its waxen marble idiocy, its vacant, grey-eyed death. In extremis, she looked more at peace than I’d ever been in life.

Dale was nowhere to be found on the property. A white sheet covered my sister’s face and they wheeled her to the morgue. I would soon adorn her grave with clematises and dahlias. I would miss her soliloquies on the balcony before he entered our lives. She was so melancholic sometimes, but nowhere near as much as I.

The day after her funeral procession, a blur of black hearses and silver cemeteries, mounds of dirt cascading over her coffin, I smoked angel dust and watched the rain fall outside as I blared heavy metal from the stereo. Tears only burned once and I allowed them to fall for two minutes. Nothing could bring her back, and when Dale rang the doorbell I only told him, “She’s gone,” and closed the door in his face. His double stood behind the closed door ready to embrace me and disappear with me into the bed.

“No one should be allowed to even reach me, touch me or talk to me,” I said. I told the silent thin air. I didn’t want a reply, and I awoke the following day to a touch on my shoulder. When I turned, I saw nothing. Not a person. Not even a trail of vapor. I’d deny anyone from knowing the monster that is me.

Something in me still laughs, despite the grief.

I can see her in dreams. I can see Dale in dreams.

I’d rather daydream on drugs and live in the ruins of my old house than deal with the heinous society around me.

Broken doorknobs and glass I can’t shatter. I swallow pills and wrap myself in blankets, dreaming of a boundless, lazy sea that carries me in its midst. When I reach land, it is steep and treacherous.

I awaken in my mirage’s arms. I am an endless realm of sadism when someone poses as a threat. I once pointed a silver crescent of a knife to the skin of one of his would-be attackers. I won’t ever let go of the image Dale embellished in my mind.

I am as dead as the man in the cement left in a puddle. I am as dead as Sinead, wallowing away in a hallucinogenic reality.

I find nothing damaging although my health is rotting like the grass in the heat waves. Rotting like the relics in every yard, made of metal and plastic. I hate everyone in the world and all I wanted was to end the city.

All I wanted was to end time.

To corrupt and corrode.

To slide right out of life older than anyone had ever been.

3.

I’m only twenty-five years old, and it took me that long to finally kill someone. It was in defense of Dale while we wandered for a couple minutes when I ran into him, discovering he also had an affinity for the abandoned grain elevator where I killed whatever his obtuse name was. I knew somehow he would grace my presence that day. The would-be attacker was quite the opposite of a graceful presence; he was a storm. A storm boiled in my blood, too, and instantaneously, I made the baseball bat fly out of his brandishing arm and struck him several times. Dale Tierney grinned as he watched me debase the humanity right out of the man’s veins. I left him there to rot by some old filing cabinets.

Months after all of that happened, I no longer cry tears or cling to a crucifix on my pillow in the shade. There is nothing more to make of myself; no one will expect anything of me for a long time. Maybe never. Isolative by both night and day, I crave no presence to sustain me through the day. My parents flit about the house and are mostly not in it.

Yesterday I met a girl in a white dress with glittery, crimson-bleeding eyes in the foyer. She bid me follow her to the mirror beneath a chandelier and told me my beauty would wane.  Then she vanished into the air like an exploding star. I didn’t care and I told her to hush and leave me be. I gazed into the mirror, not as dissatisfied as I used to be. Sinead was always prettier, but I no longer envied her for it. If anything, I missed her. I never knew, in my cough syrup-induced state, what Dale had told Sinead that pushed her over the edge enough to slit her throat. She took her own life right off the planet. I will forever imagine her ricocheting into the stars, an astral angel leaving her own body and becoming a new being in the form of a spirit. The girl with blood rivers in her eyes was nowhere near as beautiful as my sister.

Whenever I think of the glow of emergency vehicles outside the limits of the mansion, I pacify myself and push away the thought as fast as it came. I know there were no witnesses besides Dale and me. There was no one to see us all meet there, not knowing one another would gather there to explore the grain elevator. Barbed wire, rusted beer cans and rejected heroin needles littered the ground at the base of the cement building. It had been shut down since the 1970s, and not a soul usually stirred in or around it premises by the railroad tracks. There was nothing to do at the place besides fuck or get stoned. In this case, I killed someone and left him for dead in the place’s basement. The bat was disposed of. Everything wiped clean. No information regarding me can be salvaged because I am a lightning bolt full of speed running as fast as I can away from everyone.

4.

I am sitting by the 7-Eleven high on acid. Halos and wings bleed out of the sky and litter the parking lot in a debris of feathers and gilded circles. I cannot scream in my house, so I went downtown to swallow an LSD-laced sugar cube and careen in the opposite direction from rational thinking. There was nothing to do but melt away along with everything else around me. I wanted the patterns of the strip mall across the street to keep melting, the neon of the bar on Dante Avenue to keep illuminating the girl beneath its sign with the darkest eyeliner I’d ever seen. She kept moving from side to side erratically, as if she were high on speed. I just can’t sustain my lifeform without drugs. I become other selves. I talk to ghosts of humans, both living and dead. She is talking to the empty air that always has answers. Her cigarette smoke forms a crown. I get bored and walk down the street, the church on its corner alit with hallucinatory flames. I think I see Sinead staring at me beneath the wainscoting in someone’s house through their window. I hate everyone except her and Dale, but whatever he said to her caused her to slice her own throat open. I can’t trust him to not make me capsize. I can’t let my iron guard down when it comes to my walls.

Do not touch me, I command every living human.

There is a star I stare at to the south that shines its light upon my shoulder blades ripping open, my veins bluer than before in my wrists. I caress them. The most important love is self-love, I tell myself. That is how I will flourish.

2019

Mathilde

1.

They found the remains of the body that I left behind in a fit of post-traumatic rage. It was a puddle of lye and hydrochloric acid, and gone was the baseball bat-wielding storm of a man after he tried to assault my sister Sinead’s lover, Dale Tierney. A few years ago, my sister committed suicide over an incident with him in which the circumstances are still unknown to me. Since then, I’ve been laying on my bed with voices compressing my head, telling me they’ll sell me and kill me. I am too strong, too fortified with indifference to care. My parents are rarely at home and I’ll never tell them. My dad would just advocate for changing the medication combination I’m currently not taking.

My twenty-eighth birthday is just around the corner. A brand new gun I purchased from one of my meth dealers shines in my hand in the starlight, full of a fresh supply of bullets. My red-lipsticked smile could enchant the devil. On top of the hill where I stand are two high school enemies, Jamie Frances and Stormy Hale. The last place I saw them was under the freight train bridge. They were sharing a pot pipe. They called me an ugly dog. That time, I let it slide off like snow from a gabled roof. Now, I’ve got the two of them right where I want them and I’m still not bothered by their comment. Underneath of them the grass blades look like ebony knife blades and my hand is on my cheap but efficient gun. It’s a silencer so there won’t be much sound when I snuff their lives out. I know how reckless this is considering anyone could have seen me out their window at 2 a.m., but I’m willing to risk it anyway. Jamie and Stormy don’t see me watching from the top of the metal stairs.

2.

I approach with quiet steps across the hilltop. Their backs are turned. My hand grips the gun more firmly than a snake’s coiling hold on a victim. Closer. They turn around. Closer still. Jamie yelps like a mouse before the gun’s bullet catches her in the head, embedded in the wisps of her brown hair. She collapses like a darted, tranquilized animal to the grass. Next, I point the gun at blond, self-righteous Stormy. I see nothing. The fear in her face screams a novel’s length of words. I fire at her forehead and she, too, is done for. It’s my lucky night that they chose this hilltop to smoke weed. I was coming here to smoke meth. I embellish each bitch with another bullet hole and calmly leave them there, the swishing sound of the gunfire replaying in my mind.

The hill. The black grass blades. An abbatoir for two girls who crossed a thin line.

3.

I go home, hide the gun and decide I’m already too high to take another hit. I open an antiquated copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel and nearly read the whole thing, satisfied that the voices in the wall have been silenced. I’ll read the end tomorrow. Before I close my red-tinted eyes at 8 a.m., I think I see Sinead standing at the edge of my bed.

“Good job, Mathilde,” she tells me. “You snuffed those cunts out just like a hurricane takes out a wooden house in southern floods.”

I love her.

I miss her.

I almost cry, but my emotions are in a graveyard somewhere. My eyes are only ice instead of liquid tears. My heart isn’t broken. I know she’ll always be with me. I know that the mirage I made of Dale will always love and caress me, even when I’m no longer young and dangerous. He’s not really here but it’s like I can see him anyway.

4.

I imagine the bones of Stormy and Jamie decomposing under the cold earth. And if they are cremated, their ash is undisturbed in urns for centuries. I think of crimson bullet holes on the hilltop of a feminine warzone. It’s the last thing I see before I fall into a pleasant slumber.

2019

Stacey

They released me from the psych ward. I have a gun in my hand. I’m veering towards the bungalow with meth reeling in my veins, my hands on a fifteen dollar loaded gun. I purchased it from a man in a trench coat in an alleyway. I open the door.

“Where were you?” asks my non-mother. She looks and sounds like my mother, but she isn’t my mother.

“It’s late.”

“Take off your skin mask,” I tell her, withdrawing the gun and pointing it at her head. “Stand up and unmask! You’re not my mother! Take that damn thing off!”

She starts to hyperventilate, and stands up. She fumbles with the layers of skin parts that originated in some clandestine building. They come off and underneath is another pale woman. I don’t study her face but I don’t recognize it. The moment I realize I’m right and that this is a malevolent identity thief, I blow her brains to pieces. I shoot her full of three holes. I only wish this were a smoking gun. I steal away into dad’s TV room and he does the same thing. He’s just an ordinary guy underneath. These two strangers are people that have lived the lives of someone stepping into a stranger’s skin. Stealing their house, their job, their lives. I’ll never sleep again. Once they’re both dead, I call 9-1-1.

“I just killed my parents’ identity thieves. Come and pick up their remains,” I tell the operator once asked what my emergency is. I tell them my address and they wheel them away. They’re covered in white sheets.  A bunch of cops tell me, “You’re not going to pay for this. They were dangerous. They were unpredictable. They could have killed you, too. You haven’t assaulted us, and we thank you for that and understand how hard this is to talk about for you. So we’re going to just let you stay in the house for awhile. Keep the gun with you.”

They leave.

I’m considered a murderer in self-defense. I’m not even going back to the psych ward because I haven’t told them my history of hospitalization.

I scribble a murderous vignette in a composition notebook that night called “Cornfield Rot.”

It reads:

1.

“Some of us are wraiths gliding through your world, blissfully unaware of your cryptic eyes staring past us, of your mouths that eject inanities. All we’ve heard is noise for years.

We’re used to it.”

2.

This is the paragraph I hear spoken aloud to me in a phantom whisper at 3 a.m., my alarm clock bathing my stoned self in a neon green glow. It’s a feminine voice, half-familiar and as faint as the illumination from the clock. My pillow is like a wreath of thorns. I eat pills, caffeine, switchblades and shards of broken teacups. There is a prevalence of apathy that spreads me in me, but what I lack is fear. What they say I lack is self-respect. I suck down another joint, draining the grass until it glows like the motel fire I will see in a few days. Lighting up the firmament with incandescent flames, fiery orange mingled with slate grey. I always wanted to rip open the sky like paper and end the world. When the Days Inn burned down from one of my lit cigarettes, I fled the scene as the firetrucks skyrocketed past me. Black flames filled the town with poison. The colors blurred through the water in my eyes. I hated everything around me since I could think, since I could speak.

Something explodes behinds me as I propel myself further away from the scene of my infantile crime. No more late-night TV, no more waking up to the same sailboat prints on the walls. No more panhandling at the hamburger restaurant next door to the Days Inn.   I’m as thin and intangible as a wisp of smoke floating through the adrenaline-suffused air. I’ll disappear into the fields and search for rotting bodies under the pines.

I imagine swallowing a handful of pills next to the concrete platform by the abandoned bowling alley, the one with the crimson anarchy sign spray-painted on it. I see a haze of red Victorian wallpaper and a knife aimed at many skulls. A flash of fire will light up in other places someday. I won’t kill myself while they recline in the brambled ruin and laugh.

3.

Sometimes I can hear the dead in the dirt beneath me say,  “I am under here.” I’ve heard them come from underneath the bus stops I wait at, the sidewalks, the swimming pool, the abandoned drive-in theater at the edge of town.

I can’t see them, but I can hear them with ears that hear nothing but bells, voices, or chaos. I can feel my pain get carried off with the breeze at such times. They give me the hope that death is an opening to a portal of the soul’s immortality.

4.

My makeup is burning off. I’m a limp, ragged doll in the corn maze getting eaten by ants. I got lost looking for the exit. I am rot given back to the earth.

2015

Janine

Amanda Warwick, age twenty-two, lay submerged in a halfway-house, painted yellow walls, dirt yard, a place to be jettisoned to. She had overdosed on methamphetamine in the heated, sunlit parking lot of multiple storage garages, her head in a hole in the cement next to an empty Halloween candy basket shaped like a Jack O Lantern. After the sharp inhalation of crystallized smoke found her brain, she was set off balance with the cathedral’s clamoring bells, the beauty of the wind’s white noise. She drenched herself in the calm black water of the lake, washing asunder the sins of Janine Crellin. Janine, with her green eyes and reddish-blond hair, a contrast to Amanda’s coarse black curls and hazel orbs, was in an infamous fixture in Amanda’s past. She had bled Amanda in the alleyway, bedazzled by the trails of blood flow, scarlet stars, mesmerizing to Janine. They were both sixteen and lived next door to each other. A red brick house with a picket fence (Janine’s) set beside a white house with green shutters (Amanda’s).

Janine was belligerent. Amanda was polite. They weren’t friends and Janine’s problem with her originated from a source unknown to her. In wild, vociferous rage, Janine left cigarette burns, several of them, that felt like surface tumors after they swelled with ash and pain.

What could I have done to you? Amanda thought.

Amanda was never wholly perceptive of what she was doing to Janine. If the evidence of Amanda’s taunts and provocations had been recorded, her remarks would have been proven to have been said aloud. On that day in the alleyway, Janine couldn’t refrain from assaulting Amanda because of Amanda stealing a plastic bag of marijuana. All they both wanted to do was get high. Janine withdrew a knife, the steel blade glinting, sawing gashes formed like lightning bolts. Gashes made while Janine sat on Amanda’s neck to choke and carve across her stomach, the spaces between her ribs where Janine slightly poked Amanda’s ligament, tearing it. When Amanda passed out from lack of oxygen, Janine began to carve some more. The thighs. The calves. A turning over of the deprecated body. More blood pools against the jutting bones of the shoulderblades.

What a passage to destitution, what a decline of descent into the laconic state of shades pulled down, the swallowing of Vicodin. Amanda was in for it. After the cutting and the burning done unto her flesh was concluded, Janine took off into the night where she was always most comfortable.

Amanda never would have been revived if not for a lone transient who discovered her with a faint pulse and numerous raw wounds, blood cold, veins a transparent blue beneath the skin on her crooked arm. He called an ambulance at a pay phone and Amanda was swept to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a concussion, loss of blood, five broken ribs and amnesia. It took Amanda one week to recall Janine’s attack and even longer to recover her memory; her head had been hit so hard on concrete. She chose to press charges and Janine was confined to jail for eight months and later on to psychiatric care on and off for three more years. She was very troubled. Her anger seemed baseless. Amanda wondered, withdrawing from meth in her bed, if she had died that evening in rigor mortis in the snowfall, if some silver angel of death, one of grace and storms, would have absolved her of fear and taken her to another side. One separate from life where we all may go, anointed. Amanda wasn’t sacred anymore. She had survived but now she wanted to expire.  Amanda thought of Janine in a devious city, weapons hidden away, only to come out again for the dismemberment of corpses, dragged in burlap thorough a secluded forest, placed in a ditch by the railroad tracks under a pine tree, branches hanging low with needles. Amanda’s thoughts were decay, wasp stings, rotten fruit, sour wines, aspiring homicide. The residents of the group home generally ignored Amanda, but as of recently, they wanted her dismissed as a resident because of her conflict with them over trivial matters of ones full of more depth than would have been suspected.

Meanwhile, Janine was exactly where Amanda supposed, in the position of a merciless killer. She let the bodies sink into remote lakes with heavy stones tied to them, not a trace of her DNA left on their remains because she wore hair nets and was careful. She often got high and was free of institutionalization. No more secluded cages or millstones of grim prophecy. Amanda was only an attempted murder. When Janine left town at eighteen, she acquired a car to transport the bodies. In her new town, a population of nearly 30,000, she knew the civilians to target. She knew who they were.

Fanatics.

Chaos itself.

Dysfunctional child-abusers.

Every house with a shrine dedicated to only the pristine. Their gilded monuments.

So far, Janine had killed seven people.

Her victims:

1. Jay Motley, 36, convicted child rapist and wino

2. Alyssa Sparrow, 14, student, frequent bully

3. Martha Wilde, 45, child killer and teacher

4. Karen Wilder, 21, employee of Burger King

5. Kevin Fielding, 7, was terminally ill

6. Tess Moriarty, 22, bartender

7. Matthew White, 29, pawnshop owner

*

When Janine Crellin was four, she saw in her parents’ living room, a black halogen lamp with white flames flickering at the top. Either it had been left on too long, or her mother had set the fire herself, Janine decided.

“Look what you did,” said Mrs. Crellin, blaming the fire on her. She would grow up to relish those flames, pyromania impending. First, Janine burned her journals, then people.

In remote plains tied to wooden stakes with twine, gazed at by onlookers, the only ones who could hear the screams.

Amanda Warwick, in her reverie of Janine, planned to kill her. A new resident told her where she was living. Not far away.

“Here’s her address. I’ve smoked weed at Janine’s house. After what she did to you, Amanda, I would undo her.”

Seven people were dead so far and Janine still slept, tranquil at night. Never would she allow grief or guilt to disturb her. She had made to list of victims, having met them all, knowing their crimes. They had moved to the town for its quaintness and scenery as well as to carry on their traditions of immorality. Only one victim was innocent. Kevin Fielding, who was only seven years old with severe cancer. Just a needle in his vein put him to sleep and sent him, Janine supposed, to celestial firmaments.

How far could she get by being a killer? In the distance, Amanda tried to peer into the room of Janine and sacrifice her dead.

 

                               Amanda

I was born in the middle of nowhere in a Gothic castle with saints and gargoyles guarding the doorway. My father had painted blood coming from their eyes as they knelt in prayer, keeping watch over our mercenary riches. He was blond with brilliant green eyes. When I lived on the grounds of his castle, I had to be his farm slave doing yard work and keeping the flowers by the moat neat and alluring. He made me kill the animals I admired more than the humans. I will forever remember what he did to my eyes. A complicated surgery that lifted up my skin and transformed my eyes from squinty and listless to bulbous and beautiful. I was staring into an antiquated mirror surrounded by four girls prettier than  myself preparing me for eye surgery. My father grabbed me aggressively by the wrists, placed me on a cot and put me to sleep momentarily to perform plastic surgery. An eyelift, he called it. The girls giggled in their pinafores, playing dress up at girls from the nineteenth century. I will kill Janine. They looked just like her. I will kill her. We are sisters. We have the same father and I killed him when he came to my adopted parents’ house to kill me. Shot him point blank in the head. His ghost will never be able to speak to me from the dead. 

I am ready to kill this girl Janine who fucked me up when we were teenagers. People tell me to stop being so high school and grow up, but I’m not in high school or hanging out with high school kids. Just people that keep the mentality around too much and I’m bored of them. Where will I find her and how will I get past her gang of people that I know is protecting her, driving her around in cars to burn people and sink them into rivers. Nobody can find her but I know she’s the type to kill and I heard a woman discuss her and use the term “murder” and “rope.” I don’t know how to take a person down and a part of me tells me to stay away from her. But a part of her wants Janine to kill me again and send me on my way to a better place. The government wants to control my health and not allow me to smoke meth. It houses me in group homes that are unkind to me and compare my surgery to drivel compared to what their daughters with a lot of money paid to get. They got way better facelifts. I have weird eyes. Currently, I’m on the road looking for a way to find out what Janine’s doing, spy on her a little. She lives in a plain wooden house and I can see her in the window, staring out at me knowing it’s me; I am easily recognized by my eyes, even at a far distance. I’ve changed my mind. I want Janine to kill me. I can take a lot of pain. I know I won’t survive her and I can’t help but throw myself at the mercilessness of this sadistic girl.


 

*

Nobody saw Janine drag Amanda’s lifeless corpse up the three cement stairs and into her house to dispose of her with acid. She shot Amanda with a silencer the moment she saw her face loom large and moon-like at the window, open and paneless. The neighborhood Janine lived in was full of gang bangers and drug addicts that shot up and shot people driving by them at night in the street. I must be in the right place, Janine reassured herself. She planned to dispose of Amanda in a nearby landfill, to never be figured out.

2019

Mathilde

My old friend, Janine from summer camp, was just arrested. She told the news she assisted in the suicide of Amanda Warwick, a girl who Janine claimed wanted to kill her. A girl I once met under the train bridge, Stacey Galloway, is not being prosecuted for the murders of Brian Harlow and Jane Seymour, her parents’ identity thieves. It’s really sick shit. Brian and Jane wore skin masks that were completely like real human skin and the features of Stacey’s parents had been duplicated. She didn’t really know what to do about it for many years until she just went crazy. She told me about the recording from her laptop, and I didn’t know how to explain it. I had heard the voices, too. If you don’t want to hear voices, I recommend that you don’t do drugs. You will become a schizophrenic satellite. You’ll hear the world speak to you, and the people in public will say what you’ve heard your voices say when you think you’re alone at home. They can hear you breathe, they can hear you sing, talk, even think. I don’t know how to put Stacey at ease. I’m never really on edge anymore, but I can tell she is. I always wanted to make her my partner in crime. Even Janine would have done well, but I’m against her opinion that Kevin Fielding needed to die. He was just a kid, and I’m against killing kids. Apparently something leaked out and someone turned her in. She is now in prison forever.

I know the same thing won’t happen to me because I plan to stop after three killings. I wish I could free her and I wish I could ease Stacey’s pain. What’ s happened to her is horrible.

Like my old friends, June and Marcelle. Their group home has been shut down and I don’t know where they are, now. Both girls were beautiful and crazy. They had been raped by strange men who met them at the house of their legal guardians and they killed their guardians in self-defense. Marcelle didn’t pay for her crimes, but June had killed the neighbors as well as her guardian and got locked up in the criminal forensics ward for seven years. Just as I’m thinking of them, I decide to write. It’s about a girl who’s always being watched.

It runs on like this:

It was my sophomore year of college. I had just completed the first day and everything depressed me, especially the shadows of the maple leaves dancing on the wall in my dorm room.

“I’m going out for awhile,” said my roommate, Naomi Carver. I assumed she would be gone for a long while. My homely reflection stared back at me from the rectangular razorblade I held in my hand. I took in the zit on my chin, my black curls, my lackadaisical brown eyes. I turned the blade away from me and reflected the white, utilitarian walls covered in posters of new wave bands, the fake plastic red flowers in a vase on the nightstand, the Russian dolls next to it. The bottom of the blade was still covered in cocaine powder from a night Naomi spent partying at a friend’s apartment. My eyes stung. I moved in slow motion to the bathroom and ran water on my wrist in the sink. The key is not to think, I silently told myself. The key is to gash the vein and not fear what’s beyond. With the past, present and future forgotten, I made a vertical red line on my wrists, tearing into the blue creek of vein beneath my porcelain flesh. It brought forth a mild sting, like a bee’s. Blood spurted like a fountain into the sink, onto the mirror.

When I began to feel weak, I allowed myself to fall to the linoleum and wait for a bright light, a celestial set of golden gates. Before I faded out entirely, I felt a pair of arms pull me up and heard Naomi’s distorted shouting.

“Mildred!”

I blacked out, thinking it was only a hallucination when I saw a girl who looked like me staring at the scene from the entrance to the dorm room. I would see her later, in new circumstances. It turned out that Naomi forgot her phone, which is how she found me attempting to end my dismal life.

They sent me to a local hospital, where they staunched the bloodfloow and where I eventually came to. The first thing I remembered was how I used to be such a sweet little girl. I think the most soulless day I had was when I was in junior high and I burned Elena Miller with a lit cigarette, all the world curdling behind my eyes with anger.

“Where do you want it?” I asked Elena, wielding the cigarette like a knife against her arm. “Your skin, or your clothes?” I pointed the tip at the polyester of her blue blouse. At the finality of my outburst, I chose her pale wrist as the target. Elena gasped instead of screaming. I spent two weeks in juvenile detention, was expelled and transferred to another school. As I was recalling this savory memory, a psychiatrist came to evaluate me and she concluded I needed inpatient treatment in the psych ward on the upper level of the hospital. Once I was up there, I frequently threw thermonuclear fits in the blinding flourscence of the ceiling lights. The leather restraints they placed on my bed burned like fire. They were too tight. A whole week later, they sent me to a place of higher security, a building as old as the 1950s called Astria State Hospital. Located in Astria, Washington, a small country town full of orchards and horses.

Over the course of the next two weeks, I covered my bedroom window with collages and childish colored pencil drawings, once of which was a depiction of me rising above three pastel-colored buildings and into the sky. I wore a black dress and had no legs. Often, I stared up at the sky during cigarette breaks and felt like falling to one of the hollow black holes in outer space, but I was bound by the limitations of earth. My heart felt like hellfire.

“Mildred Swain should burn with fire,” said a patient with wild hair, pointing at me and taking a puff of his cigarette. I could only wonder how he knew my last name, let alone was he was saying this. I had been as friendly as possible since I was admitted into the hospital. As I lay in bed one night, a litany of insults came from both patients and staff passing by the door. They called me ugly, weak and deserving of death. I pulled the blanket over my head and refused to fight back. When I felt they were gone, I emerged from under the blanket, and saw her come in. The girl who looked exactly like me loomed, pale and spectral over my bed. She moved as though she were walking on water.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“An extension of you,” she said. “You are doomed to be hated until you die. Humans are forever to be your plight. When you go home, they’ll talk about you on the sidewalk, in the park, in the classroom. All you can do is be strong and persevere.”

She went on talking until I fell asleep. When morning came, I felt groggy. The sunshine evaporated me. I felt like a puddle of snow melting beneath my blanket. Slowly, in the midst of the empty room, I willed myself to rise to the ceiling and become united with the camera I felt to be hidden in the light above. I watched myself from the top and there was my strange twin in the branches of the cherry tree outside my window, snapping my picture with a polaroid, the black eye of the lens like the eye of an observant spider.

2019

Stacey

In the dream, I am small enough to fit into a crawlspace. I cannot hide from my mother’s red wine in our barren living room that is as black as a power outage, as black as my rotten innocence. My mother picks me up and takes me to the car, says it’s time to go, I need help. She parks outside a stone clinic and leaves me inside. I cry out and am told to be silent by a stern receptionist. Two white coats hold me down and drag me to a white room with a thirty-something redhead in it. She has painted the word “borderline” on the wall next to an immaculate, gold-framed mirror. When we face it to see our reflections (mine child-like, hers much older), we are propelled from its shattering glass by a defiance of gravity. We coil up and writhe, possessed by demons. Satan lets us die together, which is a blessing compared to living in the hospital. I close my eyes one last time without seeing my mother. I only see the broken glass, the blood on the wall (bright as an ambulance light), the linoleum beneath my cheekbone. I am a dead husk of a human determined to haunt the city I was born in. Life grows black again. I don’t scream.

Marcelle

2012

Marcelle Trahern was raised by two cunts with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a term derived from the original Munchausen syndrome itself. If one has Munchausen syndrome by proxy, it means a caregiver (in this case, the godmother of Marcelle), chooses to refrain from giving their charges the right health, supplements and nutrients to keep them alive. In fact, they make them worsen with sickness and degradation. Subtly, so the good doctor won’t notice they’re causing the illness for their charges. The first bitch had decided to poison her subtly instead. Marcelle’s godmother favored ipecac. In their small village, church was a mandatory service where all girls had to see the Lord Jesus Christ be praised or crucified on film. A montage of filmy sunlight and a golden cross shone from an array of manipulative Christian imagery, perceived on an overhead projector.

Marcelle went every Wednesday and Sunday in a grey stone building with elaborate brick arcs painted black outlining the stained glass windows. The broadcast room was like an insidious revelation opening up a nightmare to the eyes of sensitive Marcelle, without the abrasive steel to pry a pair of eyes open. Especially when the topic was eternal damnation or the crucifixion of Jesus. It was like a metaphorical film lobotomy. They just stayed peeled open, unable to shut or fall asleep for any reason. Nanny Cravat insisted she stay awake. She favored those antiquated neckbands.

The girls sat around her in stiff, ungraceful lines, backs upright or slouching depending on the girls’ preference to posture. Ms. Winifred Scarlet, who had been killing off children in her home for three years, took Marcelle in at eleven years old the year her mother died and Marcelle was never able to know the woman by heart in a way her memory could rely upon. Winifred was a registered foster mother and she was ailing. Marcelle killed her foster mother (and made the police and medical examiner rule the death as a suicide). She sang “Don’t Fear the Reaper” in her choir voice while spoon-feeding Winifred “sugar in a spoon bowl, so the medicine goes down.” She gagged on the Drano and no longer said the words Marcelle needed to hear: “You should be ashamed of yourself,” “You should be grateful,” “Why didn’t you try harder?” Winifred was involved in a canned television broadcast again for that last comment, a boring, banal comedy Winifred needed to have Marcelle watch with her before bed in 2011.

On March 24, a clear, shiny spring morning, Marcelle knew that she had no one to rely upon any better by the time the next foster mother came around to raise her. She was a distant harridan of a woman with a thin, pert mouth shut tight at church and open like a wrathful shrew to chastise Marcelle at home.

“See that window?” said Nanny Cravat, her second godmother: a malevolent, Puritan woman with brown hair in a frizz and vacant eyes.

“You’ll be lucky if God saves you when you fall out of it. It’s all shit. God’s for nothing. But I fear hell just as much as you do. All we can do is try to believe and see if God listens.“

In her dress made for church, the stiff lace a cascade of black and white. A knee-length skirt and pilgrim collar. Church uniform. The telepathy Marcelle heard: “devout truths”, “deep breaths,” “if you need to console yourself, use these coping skills.”

All the things Marcelle picked up on by reading minds that she could never express piled up in her head and she was crazy.

“Marcelle may be crazy,” said a soft-voiced man about to make an assumption based on what he saw in elaborate artwork in a journal: a drawing in Bic pen, of a realistic-looking Nanny Cravat swallowing a spoonful of something, reminding him of milk poisoning and a scary story his mom sometimes read to him at night in his portentous childhood. Marcelle’s self-portrait was accurate. She overheard the bell ringing in the distance beyond her thoughts of his voice by the cathedral  bells that rang with worship, clanging vehemently. When Marcelle got home after spring choir ended, she planned the Drano death. It was under the kitchen sink, meant to mingle with Nanny Cravat’s cup of milk.

“Nanny, I  hope you enjoy your milk,”

“Come, have a sit-down,” said Nanny to Marcelle. She set the glass of milk  in front of Nanny Cravat, who was wearing her red velvet blouse and white cravat.

“Put that milk on the table carefully. Don’t spill it.”

Time to die, Marcelle wished. Down the throat went that blue liquid permeating Nanny Cravat’s esophagus as she choked. The only number Marcelle knew to call wasn’t an option, and she had to make her own way in the world feeling like humans weren’t worth anything and we’re all just partially alien. Meretricious, cheap people.

Marcelle wanted to die in outer space. She left the raw death and agony of Nanny Cravat  slumped over on the table after she choked. Marcelle became the third eye, the third shrew, the ultimate survivor of destiny and doom.

June

2014

My lucidity died in the house I grew up in. I was raised in an arcane Hitchcock mansion with a cupola. There were no servants due to my guardian, Scarlett Freeland’s, illicit exploitation, and her fear of it being discovered. Therefore, she let everything collect dust. Her mansion was tall and monumental. It reminded me of a Halloween sticker decoration one puts on a windowpane. On our street, Cupola Avenue, named for the cupolas on each house, I suffered many seasons of violent turmoil at the hands of Scarlett. She owned a video camera that she balanced on top of a tripod and told me it was my “surveillance.”

On several occasions, at the age of thirteen, I was raped by a multitude of strange men that Scarlett invited inside. She would put 80’s hair metal on the stereo while they raped me and she sat in a red armchair, smoking numerous cigarettes. Sometimes, I wouldn’t get raped and instead it would be my deed, according to every person in the room, to kill a person in front of me. I’ve killed 37 people in Scarlett’s house, each one dissolved with acid in the cupola on film, and killed on film as well, before being doused with acid. Each time this event happened, it was recorded and burned onto a disc to be viewed on Scarlett’s TV.

There were only two other houses on Cupola Avenue: the Tarringtons’ house and the Miltons’ house. Clyde Tarrington lived in a two-story house painted white with black shutters. He lived there with his daughter, Blithe. On their front door was a poster of a symbol that held a cryptic enchantment for me: a cross with an hourglass in the center of it. It always reminded me of their time running out. I had wanted to kill Blithe for so many years. I felt her to be prettier than me with her lustrous black hair and piercing green eyes. She always loved to remind me of how I would have been killed by my twin sister, Adele, had she lived. In the womb, she was the alpha and I was the omega. On a rainy day when lightning split the sky into slices, Adele and me were playing dress-up with red velvet gowns and silver high heels. We were twelve. I convinced her into a “baptism,” holding her head underwater. Despite my carrying the title of the omega twin, my newfound strength prevailed and she soon ceased to breathe.

When Scarlett found out, she didn’t seem to care. Neither did the rest of the neighborhood; they were always killing people. We melted her body into the floor of the cupola with acid.

My name used to be Lillian Freeland, but once my twin was dead, I uncontrollably became someone named June. She came to me, like a doppelganger, looking exactly like me, but bearing no evil intentions.

“I am here, and I am not leaving you,” June told me. I regret killing Adele despite her greater knowledge of schoolwork. We were both homeschooled and Scarlett never told us what she did for a living. I learned later on that she worked for the federal government.

My liberation from Scarlett’s persistent and unyielding abuse came on the day of my eighteenth birthday, April 17. After she made me read Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot” to two men, who raped me when I was done, and when they had left, I waited for Scarlett to go upstairs and watch one of her movies. I sauntered to the garage and snatched an axe, the same one Scarlett used in satanic rituals when she was young. I made the predatory ascent up the stairs and into her bedroom. Then, as though she were a chopping block and as though her sanguine bloodflow was sacred, I swung the axe down upon her skull. Hard. She was watching The Caretakers, a black and white movie about women in group therapy. She fell to the side, writhing in pain. I went to the front of the chair and brought the axe down upon her back until her spinal cord was severed and her tenebrous heart gave out. I left her there and ran back downstairs, screaming the whole way.

Next, I opened Scarlett’s freezer and grabbed a carton of Marlboro 100’s, lit one, and burned the subtle swastikas hidden in the patterns of an Oriental rug. I gazed around me, took in the contents of the living room: the Kit-Kat clock shaped like a black cat with bulging eyes, the white topaz chandelier, the gutted hearth, the period furniture. I decided it was time to leave my home behind forever. I grabbed a pink backpack and shoved the carton of cigarettes inside, along with a drawer full of working Bic lighters. I threw in three shirts, six pairs of socks, six pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, a journal, a pen, and a gun. I topped off the luggage with some rubber vampire teeth I endeavored to save for a malevolent purpose: murdering Blithe Tarrington.

I put my hand on the gun as I walked outside, holding it securely within the large pocket of my forest green trench coat. To my knowledge, the Miltons across the street were always killing people (Scarlett always said so.), but I didn’t know how they felt about Blithe. I didn’t care. I rang the doorbell, staring down the cross and hourglass on the door’s poster. Luckily, Blithe answered the door. I pulled out the gun, and her face became as stricken as one being lashed with a switch.

“Get inside,” I gnashed, pushing her onto the floor  and slamming the door behind me. “And don’t get up. Don’t even talk.”

She talked anyway. “Lillian, please don’t kill me. You don’t have to - “

“But I want to, and I can, and I will kill you and nothing will ever be able to resurrect you!”

“What’s going on with that Freeland bitch? Why is she in my house?” screamed Clyde, who had just descended the stairs. I shot him in the head, and he slumped over, instantaneously dead.

“You’ve been killing people in this house for years, and it’s time to go!” I vociferated over her harrowed wailing. “Now, put these in.” I unzipped my backpack and handed her the rubber vampire teeth.

She stared at me, wide-eyed with feral fear. She did nothing. She said nothing.

“Your mouth, dummy. Put them in your mouth.”

I handed her the teeth, and she took them from me and placed them over her own toothpaste commercial-white teeth.

“You look the very caricature of Halloween,” I said, laughing as I blew out her brains. The remains flew against the wall and painted an inkblot test of blood smears everywhere. I walked into Blithe’s bedroom after I was sure she was dead, and saw a purple canopied bed, a bookshelf filled with many classic and contemporary novels, among them: the Brontes, Oscar Wilde, Theodore Dreiser, Jane Austen, Anais Nin, D.H. Lawrence. I grabbed Nin’s House of Incest, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, and left the house.

I didn’t make it very far. I was down the road not very far when I was arrested.  I always feared them coming for me. I fell onto the asphalt, scabbing my knees and not feeling it. I denied what was happening. I muttered to myself incoherently.

“We know you killed some people, Lillian.”

“My name is June,” was all that I said before my mind shut off and I suddenly woke up vegetative in a jail cell.

*

Eventually, I was labelled not guilty by reason of insanity. The police found Scarlett’s recordings and the recordings that the Miltons and the Tarringtons made of their own killings when I told them about the neighborhood, and what Scarlett had done to me. One day, I will get out of the forensics services ward, where the criminally insane are housed. I have spent many nights here, remembering the death and ravagings, my hair coiling like Medusa’s on the pillow of the restraint bed, the leather straps leaving black bruises on my wrists. Every night, I pray to God and Jesus and all the saints that ever were that I’ll be forgiven for my killings, and be accepted into a realm I can call heaven.

My lucidity will live again, resurged.

2017

June and Marcelle

Cathleen Carter

She led me to the house with the cupola

Where she stabbed me in the backyard

Blood flowed glowing red from my pale skin

Staining my white blouse

And my throat ached

I haunt the halls

And my voice resides within the walls

I’m a phantom floating through the inmates

Living in my killer’s group home

Eyes stare from the cupola

I don’t know who saw me die

I’m buried under a thorny bush

Bones hidden by woods and tiny baby teeth

She scattered

Covering my grave with evidence from her recent infanticides

She stabbed my baby

And cut me for giving birth

In her bed

My lover carved our initials in a tree

And we’ll always be in touch

I eat strawberries off a plate in his room

We hung a dreamcatcher to capture his nightmares

Of me being tortured by her ringed hands

Bag placed over my head

Cathleen Carter, the snuff film queen

(I have killed many)

Choking on film reel

Always having to be polite

In the morning light drinking tea

Deirdre, the killer, laced it with GHB

Putting me to sleep

Separated from my lover

Pillow soaked in warm tears

His tears and mine

We drink them in vials and kiss under stars

Soon he too will be a ghost

Swallowing pills on a blanket in the cemetery

Deirdre will find us and take our picture

Maybe she’ll capture my phantom on camera

*

With curiosity, Marcelle Trahern saw from the window Deirdre Carter and her niece, Cathleen, arguing. The infant was dead, that much Marcelle knew. Cathleen Carter had given birth to a baby girl now with stab wounds, lying in red and white rigor mortis in her crib with blood on the teddy bear, in the dolls’ hair and on the lampshade on the side table. Most of the inmates, as they were known due to the group home’s strict rules, were gone for the day at an event and June Freeland was downstairs Deirdre Carter quickly took over June’s life after leaving her post as nurse at the asylum where June was housed. June was incompetent to stand trial, declared insane and sent away for seven years. She had returned to Scarlett Freeland, her former guardian’s, mansion to live. It had been converted into a group home for women with trauma issues.

All thoughts of June vanished from Deirdre’s mind when the knife blade shone in the sun, an ominous metal glint that suddenly penetrated the naked pearl throat of Cathleen. She collapsed to the grass in the fenced-in backyard and as the earth was fresh from the rain, Deirdre found a shovel leaning against the toolshed and dug a fresh grave. Marcelle had never liked Cathleen much because she was always harping on the girls to follow the rules: don’t smoke dope, don’t invite boys over without permission, etc. She had gotten herself knocked up by Miles Sutherland, and Deirdre highly disapproved of him with his leather jacket and cigarettes. Marcelle only saw him once when he drove to pick up Cathleen for a date, his handsome face a silhouette in the dark window. Marcelle decided to keep quiet about the death. She watched Cathleen be tossed into the grave liked a broken doll. Deirdre had tied a plastic bag over her face and stabbed her in the chest. For ten minutes, Marcelle watched Deirdre extract Cathleen’s heart from her chest cavity, holding the dead, lifeless muscle in her palm, her calm blue eyes narrowed and focused on it like a witch in a black magic ritual. June suddenly appeared beside Marcelle.

“The bitch is finally dead,” Marcelle said, breaking her vow not to tell anyone. “What is she going to do with the heart?”

“I don’t know,” said June.

The girls, both in their twenties and too old for Cathleen’s trashy immaturity, watched with morbid fascination as Deirdre snapped a polaroid   (after turning off the video camera)

of Cathleen’s corpse before throwing dirt back over her and packing it in. She laid stones over it and from her pocket, she took something white and scattered it over the grave. When she went back inside the house, Marcelle and June left the cupola to inspect what Deirdre had spilled. Six tiny teeth in the front yard, taken from a toddler’s mouth. A previous killing. When the cops led Deirdre away after June called them, June put on a nun habit and took over the house.

They heard Cathleen’s whispers of love for Miles and reassurances that Deirdre was gone. They buried her baby in an infant cemetery labeled merely “Infant Cemetery” in iron above a fancy gate bearing an entrance to the graveyard. June called the cops by her own policy, knowing hiding a murder is wrong.

“Marcelle, she’s a psycho, bats-in-the-head bitch and she could have come after us, too. It’s better that she’s gone.”

“I guess so,” said Marcelle. her  mind on Nanny Cravat choking on her milk laced with Drano. Marcelle had fled the world of Christian broadcast rooms and the sex trade. Nanny Cravat had invited several men over to force themselves on her, and she was glad she couldn’t remember it in great detail. Dissociating was so divine. Girls wore meretricious makeup to school and church and their naked limbs stuck out from cheap, mall-bought

miniskirts. Marcelle would have given them all Drano in a cup, too, if she knew how not to get caught.

But she was far from their bratty voices now, with June Freeland, Anika White and Marilyn Sanders to keep her company. In the meantime, the house became less of a group home and June began paying the monthly bills with Deirdre’s leftover income found stashed in a safe in her room. Marijuana smoke soon filled the rooms and the girls giggled at the enhanced cartoons on the television, making funny faces at the ceiling. Then, Cathleen appeared in the mirror behind them in her prom finery, staring sternly with her stab wound, The blood withdrawing and disappearing into the gash. Anika screamed. When the others asked what was wrong, Anika revealed what she saw.

“You’re too high,” Marilyn said, running a hand through her rainbow hair. But Cathleen stood behind them, strawberry juice the color of blood on her mouth, back from Miles who contacted her spirit and she came when summoned and manifested herself in the flesh.

Cathleen

My baby is gone

In an infant coffin underground

I wear black to mourn her

And place flowers on her grave

Miles embraces me in the cemetery

Where we have sandwiches and milk

He marvels as the food disappears from the plate

And the milk drains from the thermos

He can see me fresh as daylight

A rose haloed in gold

I am fragile dust and fairy winds and gilded blond hair

They find him dead the next day

By the gravesite of his daughter

His lips blue from the pills

His hair plastered to his head

In the spring rain

His indolent heart gave out and from her prison, Dierdre laughed at the television giving news of Mile’s suicide and the note he’d left:

I’ve gone to be with Cathleen, who drew me into hear heart forever, and our daughter Melanie’s, too. Dierdre couldn’t kill my love, though she tried very hard.

I saw Deirdre from the corner where I stood, staring at ladies dressed in orange watch the television and play cards. Now that I’m dead, I can go anywhere I want to in the world. I’ve explored the moors of England and I’ve been to Alaska, the northern lights illuminating the night sky and I didn’t feel the cold nor the heat of Death Valley, California. I flew and touched the top of the Eiffel Tower.

“Anything can be done in death, it’s like magic is yours after you die,” I told Miles.

Down he went with me and they buried us side by side. We go into earth, then Summerland, then back again. When I haunt the group home, I conjour nightmares for the girls who tormented me, especially June Freeland who told me I looked dressed as gaudily as she had for one of the snuff films her guardian she murdered made her do. I know many murderers: the worst of them being June and Marcelle. I read the evidence of Marcelle’s Drano murders in her journal and her revelations of sex with strange men who came when called by Nanny Cravat, Marcelle’s godmother. But something told me not to be a hypocrite and tell on her. I never had a mother like these girls. She abandoned me on the doorstop of St. Xavier’s Orphanage and Dierdre, the nun (she was a devout Catholic before she moved on to work for the hospital) who knew her sister’s face and knowing I was her niece, took me in and after years of her impossible violence and nagging, I am finally set free and better off, even if by her hand.

The Ouija Board

“Miles committed suicide,” said Marilyn to Marcelle. “It’s on the news.”

“Oh,” said Marcelle. “I bet Cathleen’s ghost dragged him down with her. Anika keeps seeing her everywhere and is freaking out.”

Anika was fast asleep in her room, having taken a dose of Haldol to help the hallucinations.

“But you aren’t hallucinating,” Cathleen had insisted when she came to Anika late at night. Sometimes she wore a nun habit like June, who had taken to smearing on red lipstick and blaring Courtney Love from the stereo. Sometimes, she sang opera with a crucifix dangling around her neck, and quite good. The girls loved listening to her sing her songs of lovers who lost their loved ones like Miles and Greek tragedies where Persephone became trapped for six months in Hades with the Lord of the Underworld and six months on earth. Gods and monsters fighting their battles to the death. The Ouija board they used to summon Cathleen worked. Anika revealed the messages to them of their conversation she heard in her head. Anika directed the board marker’s movement in their hands.

“Cathleen, where are you?” Anika asked, finally facing her fear of the unknown.

“In Summerland, with Miles,” was the reply.

Anika spelled it on the board and all were shocked.

“I knew it was real, like heaven but better than clouds and angels playing harps, waiting at the gates to judge you,” Anika said. “In Summerland there is no judgment, or pain or violence. Just love, laughter and magic. I learned all about the theory of the afterlife in Summerland from a Wiccan book I found in the used bookstore downtown.”

“Are you sure it isn’t fake, Anika?” Asked June, who doubted the paranormal.

“I heard her voice, just the way it was when she was alive!” Anika stormed out of the room, offended by June’s remark. The Ouija board remained still. Out of all of the girls, Cathleen found Anika most vulnerable to her presence. Cathleen enjoyed scaring them a little. But she never spoke to June, who ascended the staircase with a boy from the nearby prep school, holding a candlelabra and smoking a Marlboro cigarette. Marilyn played 20 Questions with Anika in their room and listened to her account of what she read in Marcelle’s journal.

“I saw too,” said Cathleen. “She sent people to their death same as insane June. I wonder what sort of terrorism Dierdre endured at a young age.”

“Probably witnessed something violent, or had no parents like you. I didn’t,” said Marcelle, who stood behind them listening and hearing Cathleen’s voice just like Anika.

Deirdre

High on a precious hill stands my home for abandoned, unstable girls

I can’t return to it

I’m in prison garb in the women’s prison surrounded by barbed wire and a river runs past, saturated in pollutants spilled by the nearby plants and factories.

I used to be a nun, then a nurse, mercy-killing the elderly, smothering infants and pretending they died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), immune to the wails of inconsolable parents informed by the doctor in the corridor.

I spent my early childhood in a ramshackle farmhouse in Louisiana, smothered by my mother and her hot back coffee thrown in my face. How her knives danced before my eyes. When my baby brother died when I was fourteen, they thought it was SIDS. I hated babies. My mother told me to kill it, it was a sickly, weak little boy and wouldn’t last the year. I fed him to a hungry feral cat and watched the skin ribbon over her bones from the cat’s carnivorous snacking. My mother, a widow always in grey with shadows under her eyes the color of her sweater, watched the baby’s decomposition.

I felt an affinity for June the most out of all the girls in my home. We had killed and had bad mothers who abused our bodies and sucked our souls out through crazy straws, leaving us bereft and insane. I couldn’t plead insanity the way June could, though.

I wish I were out of this stale air and away from these women, with their murderous stairs and rancid shouting, their fights that lead them to solitary. I won’t put a hand on these women. I won’t go to solitary.

June

I murdered this whole neighborhood besides Clinton and Mary Milton and their twin son and daughter. The parents went to prison for murder, and the kids live somewhere else now. The house is vacant.  I never enjoyed what Scarlett made me do. They housed me in an asylum, where I spent the majority of my time in restraints staring at the ceiling with vacant eyes and Medusa coils in my hair that snarled on the pillow.

I dreamt of black widows biting me and in my dreams, Deirdre, who worked there at the time as a psychiatric nurse, didn’t tend to my bites that reddened on my hand. When I wasn’t dreaming, Deirdre liked me. Now she’s in prison where she belongs. I no longer handle nitric acid or kill people or endure stiff baseball bats tearing open my cunt.

Scarlett watched my defiling from behind the camera, recording the rapes in the dark room. I was smothered in her cellar and remembered it, screaming, spitting out the pills, refusing to take them. Deirdre heard my whole story, decided to move into the old Freeland estate and take over as group home director. I moved out of my trailer to stay there. Weird I should live here after killing someone here. I used to hallucinate Blithe, who I shot and killed, but I don’t see her lately. I dismiss Anika despite my own experience. Sometimes, the ghost of Cathleen gets old as a topic and I think all should  remember the living and forget the dead that can’t reach us, gone to nether realms.

But what if she was there? What if she can reach us?

I’ll never know. One day I’ll be a ghost myself. I have faith that there is something prettier to see than this insidious earth after our bodies run out of time and our souls transcend.

There must be something better than what I had, what Marcelle had, what Cathleen had, what all of us had.

I think I just heard a voice. Is it the still, small voice of God, or is it a spirit coming from some divine region, holy or unholy?

I am a combined angel and demon. I want to drink absinthe and sleep with that voice.

Mathilde

2019

I stood in the calm, obsidian woods and gained my frail balance against a ramshackle cabin. Wolves dashed out of the shadows, ignoring me and veering towards a carcass in a wildflower-bordered clearing. I was pretty certain it was human. Then I saw a ski-masked perpetrator, blood channeling from his disguise. He offered me a bouquet of purple irises in his scathed left hand. In the shunning woods, feeling like the ghost of someone gone, I tore my lavender dress on a nail in the cabin’s wood. I declined the masked monster’s offer. Suddenly, I was pulled inside by someone behind the front door. I cried out, closed my eyes and could hear the door shut and bolt. Once the lightbulb on the ceiling flickered on, I saw my rescuer’s face like a sanctified revelation. The kindest pair of dark eyes I had ever seen. My speech failed me but his did not.

He told me, “Nothing will kill your equilibrium while I’m here. You no longer have to claw at wooden walls are cry into a pillowcase. Notice that soon the sun will come up and figuratively, I’ll give you a pair of rose-colored glasses to view the world through. A better world than this.”

“I-“ I began.

“I love you,” he said.

Of course, he was handsome and I coveted him highly.  He pressed his perfect mouth on mine and carried me to bed. After the sex and the sun-glow, he told me he’d be my dreamcatcher, and if not the destroyer of my enemies, the bane of them. The unidentified mask never showed up again. We soon left the cabin to live in a castle. He taught me to love instead of maim, to be tender instead of destructive. I learned to give myself away to a man created by the sparks of imagination itself.

*

I ease myself out of bed after this dream and take another hit of glass. Something to make the world glitter with white ice and a way to make the hell inside freeze over. I see him blur on every bridge, every riverbed, every highway. There is no hallucination more powerful than him. Nothing will perforate me and make me stop haunting this city. Nothing will make me bleed out onto the sidewalk because I am too fast for the blade, the bullet. The smoke flows through the open room and hits the sun. I wake to sirens piercing the quiet. I’m the cause of them but I know their glow won’t alight on me and swallow me up.

[bleedingcoffee42]

Eureka AU-  Part 1

RoyAi Eureka AU I got the idea for yesterday and had to write out.   More coming, easily a 20k word fic if I let it be.    Premise is a modern day AU where there is a secret small town in the middle of nowhere that houses a community of scientists who make tech for the government.   Great series that I miss.  An AU that is so vaguely built on the concept of this series you have to squint to see it.   Thanks Dream Me for coming up with another WIP I don’t have time for.

Under a readmore, Part 1 got longer than I wanted it to.  

xx

Riza Hawkeye watched the senators and military higher-ups try to interact with the scientists at this impromptu party Roy Mustang had thrown together.   Eyes were glazed over, tablets were displaying incredible scientific breakthroughs and there were small robots roaming the foyer with trays glued to them so they could deliver drinks and snacks.   She understood why this was necessary, funding was in jeopardy as always, but she didn't understand why an unfathomable genius couldn't used his goddamned phone to give them more than three hours notice this was going to happen.

Roy smiled and lead his group of important government officials around the room, purposely directing them away from scientists like Edward Elric who would instantly seize the chance to declare science was for the people not the military.   He has been in the capital for budget meetings, trying to prove that this little town nobody had heard of was the epicenter of technology and needed to remain funded.   Weapons, medicine, electronics, space technology....all was on display here by the country's best minds to prove to these individuals that Eureka was a vital asset to the country.

Eureka, a town that was on nobody's map and nobody's radar.  A town founded decades ago by  geniuses who wanted to remove the pressures of the outside world from interfering with research while also providing it's occupants with safety and resources.   Isolation also meant that these important people had no idea the routine mishaps that occurred because said experiments often went horribly, horribly wrong.

Scientists could be complete fucking idiots.

That was where she came in, Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye was on assignment here to be the military's presence and protection.  She wore the uniform of the town's Sheriff, something that did nothing to encompass the massive scale of her job description.  With only her and her Deputy Jean Havoc, the small town's law enforcement office covered everything from petty arguments to defending Eureka from attack if enemies ever discovered it for the treasure trove of knowledge it was.

Today's danger was only the head of the program itself, Roy Mustang.   Dr. Mustang, with a slew of doctorates that he would gladly brag about when given the chance, had just come back from a month away from Eureka and failed to send a single text or communication to tell anyone he was planning to do so.   A man with incredible resources at his fingertips, a phone on his hip at all times and enough brainpower to juggle a dozen tasks at once, yet not one single brain cell dedicated to thinking about how she would react to being surprised by his announcement three hours ago.

And she knew he did it for dramatic effect.   She knew he did it to surprise his people because she would have definitely let them know and prepare for this visit.  He wanted them scurrying around, tripping over themselves in excitement and fear when these important people arrived.   Chaos made things seem busy instead of the boring calm that was research being done; testing the research as when it could have unpredictable outcomes.

The alternative would have probably lead the group to enter Eureka and find the town in flames, chimera running the streets and clocks running backwards.   It's not that these geniuses were incompetent, it was that they had the resources and freedom to do what they wanted and every damned one of them took advantage of it.   Putting pressure on them to have something to present to Senators and Generals would have been a disaster.   It also kept some secrets, secret.   It gave tastes of things to come, if the budget was approved, versus delivering results they could shutdown the place and use now.    Roy knew what he was doing, but she hated it none-the-less.

And he knew it.

Riza decided to take a walk, help herself to some coffee that wasn't made by gourmet contraption that required way too many levels of input.  She knew she had to be emanating levels of anger from the way people were avoiding her and that wasn't helping anyone.   She walked down the hall to the break room, avoiding a cleaning robot who was spinning in circles trying to clean popcorn it was dropping from an overloaded popping machine epoxied to it lid.   Then she ducked as a drone flew overhead with a cookie tray.   Did nobody remember the Christmas Party disaster from last year?   Why the hell was all this stuff out of storage?  

No.   NO.  This was Roy's mess and if the tray gave someone a concussion that it was on him.   He'd spectacularly dance around the blame and find some positive to it, he always did.  This was her five minutes to brew coffee in a 'primitive' 'cheap' coffee pot she had to smuggle in to town on her own in order to have simple, perfect coffee.  Five minutes to cool off.

She heard someone at the break room door as she pressed the 'On' button after loading the offending machine.  She didn't turn around knowing who it was and her phone went off.   She pulled it out and saw a simple text message from Roy, 'sorry'.   Damn him.   “No, you're not.”

Roy watched her turn around and cross her arms.   “You're right.  I'm not and I won't insult your intelligence by explaining why I did it.  You already know.  I'm sorry that I had to employ that tactic and upset you, though.”

“Well, we are right back to where we left off before you ran out of here last month without so much as a phone call until you were in the car full of government officials driving back to Eureka.”

“Our conversation...” He paused and took a step towards her and then another.  Enough to close the gap and keep things quieter but not invade her space.  “Needed to be had in person not over the phone.”

“Don't patronize me, I'm not mad because you 'upset' me by doing your job.  I'm downright pissed you have no respect for me what-so-ever to include me in whatever scheme it is you think necessary to keep your job.” She said and remained in place, eyes on him, the coffee pot gurgling as it brewed it's batch of bean water like these people thought the early settlers did.

Roy reacted even though he was trying not to.   “Well, sorry if 'I think' it a priority to keep Eureka from becoming a ghost town so we don't descend into the dark ages scientifically or worse have the personnel here go to the private sector and sell their ideas to the highest bidder.    It's my job to protect our interests here and your job to protect this place physically.”

It was a misstep and he knew it.  She watched him close his eyes and put up his hand, asking to pause and take back what he said.  Unfortunately that project allowing the rewind of time for a few seconds had already imploded on itself last week.  A mess he wasn't here to clean up, so no her job was more than to just protect this place from invasion.   “Go back to doing your job Roy, when you can fit me in on your schedule you let me know.  I need to be read in on what exactly our partnership is here because I'm tired of being the ally when you agree with me and your enemy when I dare question you.  This is my town too.”

“Riza.”  He said and opened his eyes.  He took a deep breath and tried to take himself out of the mindset of dealing with politicians.   “You're not my enemy, you're my wife.”

“Am I?”  She asked.  “Because neither one of us is capable of not being who we are professionally in order to make those fleeting moments of personal neutral ground happen for longer than a few days.   My job is to protect you and everyone in this town.   Your job is to protect all of us from the world.   Why the hell can't you stop being such a dick and throwing around your rank when you don't get your way?  To me.  We should be partners professionally, but you can't give an inch and I do not answer to you.  I still am active military and this Sheriff's uniform is just to put everyone at ease.   So when General Raven comes to me for my situational report, what do I say?   Am I a member of this town or not, because I have a list of really concerning things I should be sending to him that we just put in the shredder and forget about once your people resolve them.”

Roy knew he should get back to the party but he saw his marriage slipping away as Riza turned her back to him to make her military grade garbage coffee.   She was right, of course she was.  She allowed him to focus back on reality.   He loved her and he took her for granted.   “Can we talk now?  In my office?”

“We have a lot to talk about.”  She said and turned back to him, coffee cup in hand.  “And, if I recall, you ran away when it didn't go your way last time.”

“OK, I deserve that.  I didn't run away from us, I ran towards a inferno that was our annual budget going up in flames in Congress.”  He replied.  “Riza, It was an emergency.   I'm not used to...sharing.   I'm just not used to burdening someone else with everything I deal with. ”

“Roy, this isn't about you running out the door and saying 'duty calls' this is about the fact that we got married and you thought you could soften me up about not turning over your technology to the military.”  She replied and walked up to him and looked him in the eye.   She could see him struggling with what to say because there was no compromising for them on a lot of issues.   He wrongly thought he could count on her to stop being a soldier, to stop seeing their successes here as something that could save lives.  Lives of men she served with, lives of men who were still serving while she was on special assignment.  

“Sometimes, what we make here is too powerful to be in someone's hands.  Sometimes it's too much to be released into this word and we need time to modify it for use.“  He said softly.  “I know I said the wrong things, but I don't know how to argue without being an asshole.”

“You should learn.”  She said .  

“Teach me.”  He said in a whisper, begging.  “Don't give up on me yet.”

“Go back to your party before Edward launches into a speech about the evils of having science married to the military and someone reminding him that this is a Department of Defense venture.” Riza said.

“Let him.”   Roy waved that threat off.   “It will make them want it all the more.    It will make them see the very real threat of a genius like him going and working on his own.   Don't tell him I said that.”

“If you want to talk, you know where my office is.”  She said and walked around him only to have him reach out and take her hand.   “It will do you some good to find out what it's like to not have everything happen on your terms.”

“Are you still sleeping in your office?”  He asked.  

“You know I am.  You have your house's security system reporting to your phone.”  She replied and tried to take her hand back.  He was rubbing his fingers over her wedding ring.  

“Its our house.”  He said and could feel months of bad decisions all coming down on him and wishing he had that damned time machine to go back and fix them.  It really wasn't their house.  He just had her move in with him when they got married, assuming it was just a house.   A place to live. Another decision he didn't consult her on.   She felt more at home on a surplus cot in her office, in a jail cell, than in his home.   He felt a flutter of panic now.  “Please, give me ten minutes.”

“You really think that ten minutes will finish the conversation we were having last month?” She asked.

“It's a start.”  He said.  “It will give you time to drink your coffee.”

“Fine.”

xxxxxxxxx

#eureka au #royai #fic

[xyfanficarchive]

Pieced Together

Pairing: DBH Daniel x Reader

Warnings: none

Summary: Reader is an ex-Cyberlife repair technician who has been chosen to observe and help rehabilitate Daniel in the months following the successful android revolution. But first, they have to put him back together.

Word Count: 4543 (!!!!!!!!!)

Author’s Note: tHis is insane! this is bananas!!! this is fuckin bazonkers!!! 4.5k words>???>> this is a scene ive had in my brain for a bit now. thsi would be something like the prologue to a long slow burn type fic if i decide to continue it right now, but i dont think i will. ive never written anything of that magnitude before and i want to prepare for it, to make sure im ready to follow through until the end rather than dive right in immediately. I hope you guys read it and enjoy it anyways though!! BLEAS give me your opinions on this!!!

You checked your watch. 12:48 am. You stood on the sidewalk in the eerie silence of the November night; thick, fluffy snow falling around you, padding the environment and all ambient noise. You look up at the sign above the storefront, bright white illuminating the street, the snow scintillating dazzling whites and yellows in the glow of the sodium street lamps. “Cyberlife Repair Centre” it read. You take a sip of the hot coffee in your hand before walking up to the window and pressing your face to the glass, using your free hand to block the glare that would prevent you from viewing the inside.

This place was not the location you worked at before, but it was absolutely identical in every way. Cyberlife was, if anything, the absolute master of the term “cookie-cutter.” You chuckled to yourself.

The room you were looking into was only a small part of the whole building. It was wide and short. There was a reception desk stood in the exact centre against the back wall, directly in line with the door’s entrance. The room was painted in Cyberlife blue, and the walls were decked out with displays (that were currently powered down in the store’s closed state). Sleek, modern furniture sat on either side of the room, shiny, sterile white and uncomfortable. Seating for the patrons waiting for their androids to be repaired. To the left of the reception desk was a normal sized frosted glass door. That was the staff room. And to the right of the desk was a larger frosted glass door, decorated in Cyberlife’s signature hexagonal pattern. That was the repair lab, and where you needed to be.

You backed away from the window and adjusted the straps on your backpack before digging through the pocket of your puffy winter jacket for the keycard that would allow you access to the store. You slipped it out and held it in your gloved hand, just staring.

You never did think you’d ever be here again. It made you almost giddy, in a way.

But you had a job to do. There was no time to stand around reminiscing. You walked over to the door and passed the keycard over the wireless pad, hearing the beep of the lock disarming cut through the silence. You pushed the door open and stepped into the warmth of the store inside. The room whirled to life around you, lights coming on blinding to your unaccustomed eyes, the wall displays blinking on and awaiting further human instruction. You turned back and swiped the keycard over the internal lock, closing the store off to the outside world.

Smiling to yourself, you kicked your winter boots off on the rug as you unzipped your jacket. That was something you were never allowed to do, always having to put on an air of perfection and professionality for the customers. Cyberlife was clean, Cyberlife was immaculate. But, you always worked best when you were comfortable, and you weren’t a Cyberlife employee anymore. You were just using their lab you were trained to use to repair the android waiting for you inside. Your… ward now, you supposed. Although the thought felt weird.

You padded your way across the cold floor to that big square door on the right, still unlit beyond the frosted glass. Using the keycard again, you unlocked it and it slid open, and upon entering the lights automatically turned on. There was a soft electric hum coming from the computers and machinery powering up. The room was bright white and sterile looking. In one corner there was a wall of monitors and input terminals, where software repairs were effected. Against the right wall was a set of three large 3D printers, for printing simpler components like limbs, or soft external structural plates, which gave the face and body its shape. On the left wall sat another door, that led into the storeroom where more complex biocomponents that had to be manufactured externally were kept.

You shrugged off your backpack and coat, and slipped off the fingerless gloves covering your hands, setting them down onto a stainless steel table adjacent to the door. Now stripped down to only your jeans and knit sweater, you took another sip of your coffee as you walked towards the centre of the room.

There was the main focus. Another stainless steel table, equipped with sensors and other equipment, a rolling tray of tools situated nearby. Above, a rotating module fitted with assembly tools on long mechanical arms sat waiting, although you had always preferred to simply use your hands when doing your job. You padded closer, sipping your coffee with both hands and relishing the warmth on your digits.

“Fucking Christ…” you mumbled to yourself. Lying down on the table in the centre was your ward, the android you were to repair. You remembered Markus and Connor’s words telling you he was in poor shape, really, really poor shape, but you hadn’t paid it any mind. Now, actually standing in front of him, you realized that it was kind of an understatement.

The PL600 lying in front of you was surprisingly clean for his appearance. You suspected he might have been covered in thirium at some point, but his clothes and person were only now spotless because thirium degrades and becomes invisible to the naked eye. He was missing his left arm and both his legs (and you were surprised at the fact that his legs were torn off above the knee joint, when they were designed to dislocate at the knee). Gaping hole in his right shoulder, gaping hole in the left side of his face (you gently moved his mouth open and closed and cringed at the clicking sound of plastic and metal), the front of his shirt was torn open and his abdomen was scrubbed clean of artificial skin (‘What in the fuck did they do to him at the DPD?!’ you wondered.) And his eyes. Blue-grey and open, unblinking, unseeing in his state of shutdown. You took a flashlight from the rolling tray and shone it on them, and when you didn’t see any sign of damage you were relieved. With a grimace, you took your thumb and forefinger and gently closed his eyelids.

Where to even start with him? You pulled up a rolling chair and sat adjacent to the table, propping your feet up on the edge. It would be a much easier and quicker process if you could wake him and have him run his internal diagnostic program, but there was no guarantee he would even start up in his state of disrepair. Besides, you weren’t sure you wanted to wake him up to be conscious in his dilapidated body anyways.

With a resigned sigh, you spoke up. “Computer, run scan and diagnostic on PL600 model, create list of all damaged components.” The technology allowing for the contactless scan and diagnosis of androids was new, and slow. It was effective, but took time for the computer to take the images it was sensing and separate each component from the rest in a powered-down state. Running your fingers through your hair, you got up and walked over to your backpack where you retrieved the tablet you had stored within. Taking another sip of coffee, you returned to your seat with your legs propped up, and unlocked the computer. You brought up the DPD file on this android. Might as well refresh your memory.

Model PL600. Serial number 369 911 047. There was a description of his nature and his actions on that August night, but you weren’t particularly interested in whatever police officer’s interpretation of the events that were on file. Instead, you elected to view once more the raw footage, visual and audio data taken directly from Connor’s memory banks as a record of what happened. It was intense, as always. You were rather infamous for your notable empathy towards androids, and the plight deviants faced, but you managed to have conflicted feelings towards this one. On one hand, you understood him. The flight of emotions. Anger, sadness, fear, betrayal, all racing through his mind for the first time, clouding his perceptions. Emotions giving him violent impulses that he didn’t yet have the capacity to confront and control like everyone else could. On the other hand, the girl. She was so young. She couldn’t possibly have understood this whiplash change, the android who she trusted to take care of her, with whom she was so close now standing with her on the edge of a building threatening to end her life. With her every cry and plea for her life he seemed so awfully pained, so why? You were caught between the thought that he understood he was hurting her and it was wrong, and the knowledge that he couldn’t really control it, between the belief that what he did was morally incorrect, and the belief that he deserved a second chance.

You looked up to watch him resting on the table. Now, you were legally required to take care of him. One of the first talks Markus and the rest of the android revolutionaries had with the government was on the subject of android criminals. What was to be done with them? Deviation, at the start, before it was possible to wake androids up with a single touch, was an extremely traumatic experience generally brought about by horrible instances of abuse, or strong negative emotions. It wasn’t particularly uncommon for those androids to have charges of assault, theft, or even murder on their records. But it came from a place of necessity, a drive for self-preservation; just scared people acting in fear, in self defense. They ruled that any crimes committed by an android prior to November 11, 2038 would be pardoned, but since deviancy had spread so quickly by touch across the country and most if not all androids were now deviant by non-violent means, it stood to reason that they now should be treated equally in the eyes of the law.

The government’s ideal plan would have involved every android with a crime on their hands being tracked down and put into a system where their behaviour was monitored for a certain period of time. Markus and the rest of Jericho argued that not only would it be a logistical nightmare and a huge waste of resources to track down mostly peaceful people who just want to live free, but it would likely be generally frowned upon given the public’s support of androids and the United State’s unfortunate history of marginalizing people. The government settled on a compromise: all androids currently locked up in evidence stores across the country would be submitted into this system. They were, after all the ones who were unstable enough to let themselves get caught, or something to that effect. The only caveat was that the androids would get to choose who took them in and observed them, helped them reintegrate into society.

That’s where you came in, you were approached by Markus and Connor, and asked to be the one who took in this PL600. You weren’t sure at first. Sure, you were good when it came to dealing with passing deviants, a few nights stay while you pieced them back together in your living room with your limited resources, but to have one live with you? For a matter of months? One who was particularly volatile, particularly angry and difficult?

You’d had a week to think on it. You were given his file to look over. Yes, you were indeed conflicted on how to feel about him, but the more you thought the more you came around to the idea. Markus and Connor trusted that you were capable enough anyways, right? You were up for a challenge.

“Diagnosis complete. Listing all damaged biocomponents,” chimed the computer from a speaker in the ceiling. You were startled a little from your thoughts, and looked behind you at the wall of screens in the corner, where a window had now popped up and was creating a list of all damaged components. You sucked air through your teeth as you watched it keep going on and on, and you pushed off the table with your feet to propel yourself on the office chair towards the screens.

Your expression soured as you read. Nearly every biocomponent contained in his abdomen was non-functional and needed direct replacing, not just repair. There were a few damaged bones in his shoulder area (all his limbs needed replacing it seemed, even the one that looked mostly intact). He was going to need a new jaw structure, and new soft structure components on his hip, and face (‘Fuck,’ you thought, ‘face plates are a bitch to replace…’). All in all, it was looking to be a long night. You looked at the clock. 1:32 am. You sighed.

“Computer, cross reference list of damaged components with current inventory, and create a list. Begin 3D printing any biocomponents not in stock that can be printed,” you said, and after a second or two the 3D printers on the other side of the room whirred to life, and next to the existing list another window popped up detailing which components were available and their index numbers in the storeroom.

“Well, lets get going,” you mumbled to yourself and, setting your now empty coffee cup on the floor, you stood up from your seat and walked over to the storeroom door. Inside, the room was well lit, neat, and clearly labelled. Sleek, white boxes bearing the Cyberlife logo and the codes of the respective parts they contained lined the walls. A far cry from your makeshift shelving of scavenged biocomponents and scrap limbs, parts that were damaged but likely to be less damaged than whatever new deviant of the week who passed through your life was using.

You took a cart and walked through the room, picking boxes as you went. It was like your instinct came back to you in that moment, running through the catalogue of parts he needed in your brain and matching them with their respective locations, legs simply carrying you without conscious thought. Like some kind of latent memory awakened within you. It had been so long, but you fell right back into the old motions.

You took a new lung component. New thirium pump, and thirium filter. There were compatible arms and right legs, but no left legs in sight (‘What sort of left leg epidemic has been going on?!’ you wondered.) There was a replacement soft structural component #6746g in stock (the one that would cover his shoulder), and #4503y (the one that would cover his hip), but no mandible, or component #3365u (the one that would cover the left side of his face). You picked up a roll of new thirium tubing, as you figured you would need to redo the whole setup inside his abdomen too, and left the room.

As expected, you looked over to see all the components you were missing beginning to materialize on the platform of the 3D printers across the room. You wheeled the cart over to the table in the centre. Where to start? You supposed you would have to undress him. That was a thought that made you a little uncomfortable, you realized. You wouldn’t have even blinked an eye the last time you were in a lab like this, back when you repaired automata, machines obeying orders. But now you were repairing a person, fit with a sense of modesty, and you were to strip his unconscious broken body naked without even having spoken a single word to him. To make matters worse, you knew his model was, well, equipped, being programmed to function as a sexual partner if needed, and you were not equipped to deal with the weight of that –

You shook away the thought. Back when you worked for Cyberlife you’d fancied yourself some kind of doctor, spare the fact that you healed biocomponents and code rather than flesh and bone. And this was barely different from a team of nurses stripping a patient in preparation for major surgery, no? In any case, it had to be done, so you situated yourself in a position where you could hook your arms underneath his (or, what was left of them anyways) and with a whole lot more strength than you expected to use, you hefted him into a sitting position. With his dead weight still leaning on you, the corners of your eyebrows drew upwards in an expression of discomfort as you slipped your hands up the back of the Cyberlife default PL600 uniform shirt and pulled it over his head. You laid him back down a little less gently than you would have liked.

You marvelled at the unpredictable oddness of the human psyche when you removed the remaining scraps of his pants with comparative ease, and a whole lot less internal awkwardness. You had to turn around and contemplate that for a second, shaking your head and laughing to yourself in embarrassment, wondering if you were some kind of freak for that, before you once again physically shook the thought from your mind and turned back around so you could get down to business.

But you took a second to admire him first. You never could help yourself with that. You were always amazed at Cyberlife’s ability to take inorganic material and mould it into something that looked so… realistically human. Bar the fact that you could see the places where his body was ripped open to expose plastic and metal parts, the patches where he was missing artificial skin, and the fact that he wasn’t breathing, you might have looked on him and expected him to be warm to the touch, and you tasked with stitching together flesh and not putting together individually manufactured units to create a whole body. Cyberlife was rife with issues, but you had always, always regarded their creations with the same sort of reverence one would a piece of art. And it was moments like these where you were beyond proud of yourself that you knew just how to piece this fractured, mangled form together into a functional whole again.

Which is what you jumped right into doing. This was your specialty. You were one of the best of the best. Ever since you were fired from Cyberlife, you had continued to use your expertise as a repair engineer to help passing deviants, but here? In the lab? This was where you were really in your element. It took creativity to do your job outside the lab but within, you didn’t have to worry about outdated technology failing you, or working with faulty makeshift tools. All you had to focus on was the android in front of you. Being in the repair lab again was electrifying, and you entered a deeper, more exciting state of flow with every metal bone you fixed, every new biocomponent you clicked into its rightful place, every thirium tube and electrical wire you reconnected.

When the PL600 in front of you was as close to fresh off the assembly line as you could get him, it was nearly 8 in the morning, and you felt the exhaustion in your bones. In the fog of your fatigue you had managed to find a sheet (well, more of a plastic tarp used to make thirium spills easier to clean up) to cover him, and you sat in silence just trying to ward off the onset of sleep while you admired your work. After a few minutes you got to your feet and walked over to your jacket to retrieve your phone from your pocket. Only one last thing to do now. You scrolled through your contacts and when you found the name you were looking for, you tapped the call button. You pre-emptively pressed the speaker phone button and began to lazily pace the room.

After a few rings, a voice rang through: “Hello, Y/N.”

“Hello Markus. You told me to call when the – the –’’ your brain was failing you, and your voice was hoarse “ – the fuckin’… boy was repaired.”

“I – yes I did. Did you really already go in? Have you even slept?” Markus’ voice was tinged with concern.

“I left pretty much right away when you told me where he was last night. I got here at – ’’ you pushed a forceful breath through your lips as you wiped your hand down your face “ – fuck, I don’t know, nearly one in the morning? I’ve been working on ‘em ever since.”

“Oh. Well, alright. Don’t wake him up yet. It’s best that you wait until someone else is there, too. Just wait for me, I’ll head out soon,” he said.

“Wait, you’re coming? Alright, uhh – fuck, bring him some clothes, please.”

“Alright Y/N. Try not to pass out,” he sounded teasing on the end of the line, and with a click it went dead.

Well, some coffee couldn’t hurt. You ran your fingers through your hair and raised your arms above your head in a stretch that felt euphoric given your stiff focus for the past seven and a half hours. You walked out the door and into the reception area, blinking in the morning light shining in through the wide glass windows. You made your way over to the staff door and took the keycard out of the back pocket of your jeans, swiping it over the lock. The door slid open and you stepped into the room, yet another set of lights blinking on to reveal the modest staff room. There was a row of lockers on one end, a lunch table in the middle, a beat up looking couch on one wall (in stark contrast to the gleaming, polished seats just on the other side of the door) and –

God, yes. The mini-kitchen. Your focus was immediately on the coffee machine, but you eyed a loaf of bread sitting out on the counter that brought attention to the roiling emptiness in your stomach. A sandwich didn’t sound too bad. You made your way over to the kitchen and immediately opened the cupboard above, selecting a mug that said “#1 Uncle” in multicolored letters and setting it in the coffee machine. You checked whether there was water in it (there was, thank god), and selected a pod from a bin beside the machine, loading it up and pressing the button to brew it. You left it to work and made your way over to the bread, picking it up and inspecting it, and when you were satisfied it wasn’t moldy, you took two slices and laid them flat on the counter before walking over to the fridge and searching it for sandwich ingredients. You took the coffee creamer and sat it next to the coffee machine, before retrieving some sandwich ingredients – sandwich meat, sliced cheese, a tomato, a big head of leafy lettuce in a plastic container labelled “UFD”, some mustard and mayonnaise. And when you had assembled your sandwich and prepared your coffee, you exited the room to find Markus standing outside the door, holding a bag and looking exasperated.

Quickly swallowing a mouthful of sandwich, you rushed to the door as fast as you could without your coffee sloshing onto the floor and let him in.

“I’ve been trying to get in for ten minutes,” he says as you step aside and let him walk past you.

“Eeeeehhh… sorry,” you say, and flash him a smile that goes away fast when you see him look you up and down, eyebrows knitted together in concern. It was then that you looked down to see that you were absolutely covered in blue blood – both fresh and the dark, sludgy, crusty stuff that had been sitting in the PL600’s system for all those months. You looked like a goddamn android murderer with your sleeves rolled up, arms slick with azure fluid, splatters of cerulean all up your front. Not even your socks were spared. You look back up at Markus to meet his eyes.

“Uhh… I was all alone. Shit gets messy in there sometimes. Anyways, lets just get to business here,” you said. You gestured towards the lab door, and started following Markus, eating your sandwich and sipping your coffee all the way.

When you both entered the room, Markus set the bags down on the table next to the door, mentioning that those were the clothes you requested, and walked closer to observe the still form on the table.

“Wow,” he said, a breathless quality to his voice. “You… really are something, Y/N.”

“Oh, yeah?” you said, a little disbelieving tone in your voice. You were well aware you were one of the most proficient repair engineers Cyberlife had seen, but it did you no good to admit it.

“You don’t understand, we weren’t entirely sure it would even be worth trying to repair him in the state he was in, but Connor kept insisting. Kept saying that if anyone could do it, it was you. You continue to amaze me with your skills.”

“I amaze myself sometimes,” you said in a hushed tone. “This guy was in quite possibly the worst state I’ve ever seen an android in. Honestly, ‘really bad shape’ my ass, Markus.”

“Is he ready to wake up?” Markus asked.

“At any time,” you nodded at him, and he gestured towards the android on the table, telling you to do what you had to. You walked over and set your coffee and sandwich down on the rolling tray, activating an angled panel at the head of the stainless steel table he was laying on. You activated a command that would instruct the android to initiate his start up sequence and stepped back to observe beside Markus.

You waited for those few seconds with bated breath. This was the moment you would finally see your work in action, finally meet this android you were supposed to live with for the next eight months, whose insides you had become very intimately acquainted with and yet had never spoken a word to. His LED came on, first shining steady blue, and then spinning yellow as he entered the next phase of the start up sequence. All is going normally so far.

And then his eyes snapped open, he woke with a start and a gasp, LED flashing an angry red as he looked up at the intimidating rotating module on the ceiling, face contorting in fear. He looked to either side, quickly gauging his environment before bolting upright on the table and locking eyes with you and Markus. His expression twisted into one of anger and fear, and he looked about ready to bolt before you raised your hands.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait! You’re… completely naked under that sheet,” you blurted out, and when he looked down to confirm you were indeed correct, he seemed to revaluate his impulse to run.

It was then that Markus began to slowly step towards him, hands raised. He spoke to the android on the table in that voice of his, perpetually smooth and calm, always somehow soothing:

“Hello, Daniel.”

#dbh x reader #detroit become human x reader #dbh daniel x reader #dbh daniel #dbh #x.writing

[possiblypeachy]

manufactured.

--; summary: The XK-100 model was designed to be many things: charming yet brutal, elusive yet blunt, gentle yet commandeering. What she wasn't designed to be was deviant. But, being so advanced can come with a cost.

You decide what that cost is.

> part two

[determinant factors are in italics]

[warnings that apply to this chapter are in bold]

--; pairings: connor x xk-100, captain allen x xk-100

--; word count: 2.1k

--; themes: slow burn romance, angst, violence, platonic fluff, eventual smut

--; warnings: depictions of violence, death, suicide

--; note: hola mis amigos! this is the first piece of writing that i’m actually putting up here so go easy on me please and thank you! pardon any horrendous mistakes and/or terrible explanation of plot points :( 

in places this story will deviate (haha deviate) from canon. this allows me to weave my lovely little xk-100 model into scenarios that can help shape her personality for future installments. also, it gives me a chance to dabble with her interacting with minor characters that don’t get enough love!

if all goes well, i’d like to make this into a kind of ‘choose your own story’ type read bc i love me a good challenge and i want to give it the true d:bh feel. it’ll take a while to fan the options out but i’m a fast worker when inspired ;)

anywho, feel free to shoot me a message to ask me questions about this or give me suggestions! i’m also open to requests for now so hit me with your best shot, kiddos.

without further ado, enjoy!

[apolgies if this looks shit on mobile/anything really. i'll clean it up later :)]

—————

The first thing she felt was something clicking to the back of her head. Streams of code filled black vision: a start-up process. Lines upon lines of binary were read at a speed that was inhuman, registering her programming and purpose. Though a crucial process, the small camera watching her saw nothing of what was going on behind those white eyelids-- not even a twitch to signal that she was functional.

Then, narrow eyes flickered open, much like a light bulb turning on after years of no use. Pale irises were revealed to the room, intricate patterns of ice and frost weaved around her pupil. They were shadowed by a line of dark lashes, removing the possibility of deducing what she was thinking by way of looking into her eyes. Yet the contrast between the light and dark made her hold an aura of allure. Even he, someone who had prepared for her to look like this, was momentarily hypnotised. Nevertheless, a pang of discomfort was felt when his gaze finally fell to her static form. She appeared detached from the world -- cold. She would be perfect for her job.

From his seat, her overseer leant down to a microphone. “Can you hear me?” A male voice reached her sensors and the LED on the side of her head sprang to life, glowing a calming blue. Tentative eyes watched her through the camera. His heart rate increased when her LED began circling-- processing. This was make or break. They'd tried to make models like her far too many times before but failed; she hadn't looked intimidating enough, she couldn't make sense of her own complexity, her thirium pump hadn't been wholly compatible. God, he'd seen so many of her previous attempts shutdown before they were even able to speak.

Anxiety. Worry. Tension. “Yes. I can hear you.” All those emotions dissolved-- cascaded from his conscience like the most beautiful waterfall he could ever witness--  and he leant back in his chair, instead filled with relief. A sigh that could've praised God itself left him before he moved to look at the live feed of her again. She was completely unmoving-- no blinking, no twitching of her eyes, no breathing. Instead, she was waiting.

“What's your serial number and model name?” The worry rose in him again as his sight glanced to the tablet before him, filled to the brim with information on her. All his team's plans for her, her I.D. and registration codes, who she was going to be given to, her abilities, her materials-- all of it-- stored on one tablet. Everything had to be checked. She had to confirm that all of her components were functional. If she said one wrong thing, she would be deconstructed and analysed.

The android's voice was smooth and unwavering-- unaware of the pressure placed upon her. Perhaps one could describe it as scheming. Hearing it laid a blanket of unsettling calm across those around yet it was beguiling-- mysterious. “#572 236 091 – 31. My model name is XK-100.” Her expression still showed nothing. Good.

The robotic arms whirred around her and created gentle streams of wind as they welded white plastic parts together, ensuring that her body was sturdy; she needed to be as durable as possible. Two of them spun on their pivots to receive an arm-- already constructed and able to move when tugged in a certain direction and therefore, hopefully, functional. Rather than screwing it into place, it clicked as though it was a dislocated bone being fixed. When the arms let go of it, it hung at her side-- lifeless.

He wasn't lifeless, however. Oh, quite the contrary. Having been working on this project for near to seven years now, he felt like a little clap and chuckle wouldn't be deemed all too unprofessional. They'd been planning an android like this for almost a decade: an android who was capable of taking down an entire riot single-handedly if the need arose. Her team had programmed tiny aspects of her day in, day out. Many sleepless nights were spent animating her custom expressions, blueprinting the structure and materials of her frame, weaving code into her artificial mind. By admittance of the former CEO of CyberLife himself, she was perhaps the most intelligent android they had yet made-- and that was Kamski's words from years before. Now, if she didn't possess that whirling LED on her temple and her posture wasn't so stiff, people could peg her as more life-like than some humans.

He spoke again. She picked up on the thrilled waver to his voice and committed it to her short-term memory stores. “Move your head.” As asked, her head craned from one side to another-- eyes yet to follow the direction of movement naturally. Then, she stopped rather suddenly back at the centre. The camera swerved to the front of her and lifted itself to her eye level. “Now, move your eyes.” Her eyelids jolted into motion and she blinked erratically-- even her brows furrowed. He felt as though he was intently watching her trying to remove something from the surface of her eyeball; it was uncomfortable, yes, but inevitably natural. Then, her sight began to sweep across the sterile room, recognising the area as Manufacturing Room 2462-B in the CyberLife Tower. Blinking was rhythmic yet not too unnatural. She was beginning to appear more human. Uncomfortably so.

The team working on her understood that she would be some of CyberLife's best work but, from what he could gather, they hadn't expected her to look so... alive. At least, he didn't.

“Good. Now, tell me your introductory text.”

“Hello. I am a first generation XK-100 android. I am designed to assist Special Weapons and Tactics units in high-risk cases. Alongside being much more durable than humans, I am able to process and successfully predict reasonable outcomes for scenarios-- if given enough verbal or physical queues. I am familiar with S.W.A.T training programs and have an accuracy rating of 96% when in optimal conditions.”

Cases of deviancy had been on the rise and more and more police cases were being taken over by S.W.A.T units. Their only downfall was that they were a mainly human organisation, thus making it more and more difficult for them to track ever developing deviant androids. With her on missions, their success rates would soar-- or so the team who had made her hoped.

“My battery allows me to work autonomously for 212 years and I do not require food or water to survive. Due to the nature of my programming, I am required to make frequent reports to my higher-ups on the condition of my software and, every 2 years, I must undergo a renewal of my permit to bypass the 'American Androids Act, subsection 544-7'-- which allows me to carry weapons as long as I have human supervision.” Her speech paused for a moment and her overseer watched with baited breath. Had her vocals malfunctioned? They couldn't have. She wasn't supposed to stop speaking. Fuck, fuck, fuck! They'd almost had--

“Would you like to name me?” An exhale. Thank the Lord. Perhaps she was already developing mannerisms? She was designed to integrate into a team-- to be adaptable-- and humans didn't take well to stiff androids. It would help her fit in; they'd aspired for her to be like this yet she seemed to be learning quickly-- faster than they'd suspected.

Her other arm clicked itself into place before he spoke and pale skin began to bleed across her plastic body, coating her in practically human layers of pores and tones. Black hair sprouted from her scalp and flopped down into its default style: short, gently waved, and middle-parted-- convenient for her designated career yet not unfamiliar or strange to humans. She began to exude a strange type of stern attractiveness-- every colour that she possessed merging together to create an amalgamation of, what he could only say was, foreign beauty.

“Yes. Your name will be set to...” His eyes flickered down to the tablet before him, “Kassandra.”

Unnervingly, her icy eyes stared straight into the camera. It was as though she was maintaining eye contact with him. Then, her lips twitched somewhat before forming an ever-so-slightly lopsided smile. The smile was charming but seeing it painted across the features of a half-built android was concerning to him. It didn't put him at ease. Rather, his expression tightened. But he couldn't look away from her, seemingly caught in the frost that built in her irises.

“My name is Kassandra. I am pleased to meet you.”

He shivered. All his previous excitement appeared to have dissipated and nothing came through the speakers installed in the ceiling for a few moments. The camera was stationary, positioned before her. He almost felt a degree of sympathy for her; she-- Kassandra-- looked, sounded so... real. Out on the field, she would develop her own habits, her own ticks, her own sense of humour-- just like a human. Yet, her only goal was to detain people-- to kill, on occasion-- and he knew that would never change, no matter how alive she appeared. They programmed her to be like this. He programmed her to be like--

One of her legs were put into place, the socket being filled with an echoing 'clunk!' noise. Said sound made the overseer cough and return to his own mission, watching skin spread over her newly installed limb. She was simply an android. The morality of it all didn't need to come into the equation. “Can you move your arms?”

As Kassandra mindlessly followed his requests, new limbs being added and her programming being tested, he couldn't help notice her becoming smarter even here. Her gaze conveyed emotion-- enquiry, determination, amusement. She had begun to tap her fingers together while waiting for her next instructions. The LED on the side of her head would circle and flicker to yellow more often-- as though she took things into more consideration than the average android.

Finally, she stepped off of the podium. Bare feet padded across the sterile floor of the manufacturing room and paused to allow their owner to briefly scan the room. Now, she had full access to her files, his files, CyberLife's files-- everything. Her LED circled yellow once then returned to blue. She looked back to the camera. “What should I do now, Stephen?”

Stephen-- his name. God, she was analysing him and he wasn't even there. Kassandra likely knew where he was in the building, his age, his annual salary, the millions of possible things that he could do within the next few seconds.

Possibility #762: he turned his microphone back on and cleared his throat to hide his rising stress level. “The conveyor belt to your right will transport you to a specially designed loading bay. A small team of S.W.A.T members will pick you up and take you to your base of operation. You should be working under an... 'Allen'-- 'Captain Allen', so report to him as soon as you arrive.” There was a pause. The half-blue half-yellow LED on her temple was accompanied by a mildly confused expression. “Good luck out there, Kass. I'm glad you're finally functional.”

“I, too, am glad that I am able to move, unlike my predecessors.” Kassandra gave the smallest nod to the camera before leading herself to the conveyor belt. Behind the lenses of the camera, Stephen laughed-- the kind of tired laugh that came through your nose. For him, it was kind of like watching his really unsettling child go off to university, despite the fact that she'd only been operative for two hours at most. Maybe it was because he was one of the few constants in the team as they planned her out. Perhaps she'd already enraptured him with her strange, otherworldly charm. Either way, a sense of bittersweetness resided in his heart as he watched her pick her way into the outside world.

Kassandra took a mindless step onto the belt and it began to whir. “Goodbye, Stephen.” Click, click, click. Slowly, it lurched into motion, reeling her away from the room.

SEARCHING . . . . . .

       'Appropriate ways to say goodbye'

LOADING RESULTS . . . . . .

     i.   “I hope to see you again soon.”

       ii.  “Have a nice day.”

      iii. “Say 'Hi' to your kids for me!”

  iiii. “I'll miss you.”

Then, she disappeared from sight-- shipped off like trained-to-kill merchandise to that... Captain Allen guy. Stephen continued to stare at the camera for a small while, absently bringing his flask of coffee up to his lips and taking a long sip.

His lips pursed.

“I'll miss you too, Kass.”

#detroit become human #dbh #detroit: bh #dbh x oc #dbh connor x oc #connor x oc #dbh captain allen x oc #captain allen x oc #dbh fanfic #dbh writing #writing #rk800 x oc #dbh imagine #xk-100 #fanfic #dbh connor x reader #dbh captain allen x reader #captain allen x reader #connor x reader

[fayepratas]

We are ALL creative!

Overcoming depression is so much more than just medication and once a week therapy. And there's one aspect that nobody really talks about, but that really impacts the way that you operate in the world after such a dark period. That’s the fire inside of you. I don’t mean the fire that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. I’m talking about the fire that makes you feel that you are so valuable, that you just have to create something and give it to the world. The gratitude that you feel for life. It just isn’t there. I remember when this feeling struck me. I decided that I was going to put my everything into getting well. I did all the stuff you’re supposed to. I ate well, I exercised (moderately!) I worked on my sleep, I surrounded myself with things that once made me happy. I engaged with therapy and I took every tablet exactly when I was told to. And I did start to get better. I even started to connect socially. But despite all of this, I just didn’t enjoy any of the things I had before. It was like the depression had infiltrated life's pleasures and just thinking about them made me feel dirty. I put all my pens away, the books were pushed in the drawers out of sight, My iTunes library was the same as it had been for months. No new recent new artists, not even recent plays of the old classics. How did I ever even listen to Deftones??

  Three years later and I’m honestly only just starting to find pleasure in creative hobbies. And I think it was not only a very gradual process, but one imposed on me by the shutdown of society through the Pandemic. From March last year I've spent a great deal of time indoors. All I would hear on TV is news stories about charity events and hobbies that people had taken up. Studies on how certain activities had increased etc. I was doing nothing. Reading was boring. I couldn’t think what to draw....and if I did think of something it was almost impossible to force myself to put pencil on paper. But little did I know that the wheels were in motion. You see, just the action of thinking about being creative can open you up to actually being creative. It wasn’t overnight though. It was another four months before I decided I wanted to make felt cot mobiles. Random, right? Well, I must have seen one online and it then ignited something in me. Fire? No, more like a spark from a flint scraped against a rock. And it didn’t last long, either. But it did push me to another possible activity; embroidery. And this one stuck a little longer. In fact, I still do it now. But it wasn’t the thing.

  The thing? What thing? And this is where I started to realise that I was really coming alive again. I was interested. I started to search out embroiderers on Instagram. But not only that, I started to ask myself what I was interested in before. Documentaries, books on spirituality, cooking, art. I tried it all. And some of it really stuck! And it didn’t stop there. I began looking into other activities that I hadn’t done before; like blogging... who would have ever thought I would write a blog? Certainly not me. But as I type I can't help but feel like I'm experiencing true Catharsis, and it’s washing me clean again.

  Honestly, I have always believed that there are two types of people. Creative people; the artists and web designers, and the non-creatives. The people like me who screwed up a piece of paper because the line I drew did not come out the way I wanted. “I can’t draw”. The pasta sheets would still be half raw even though I'd had the lasagne in for over an hour. “I can’t cook”. And part of the reason I’ve thought that humans were bunched into such crude categories was because I did not realise what it meant to be creative. I thought creativity had to involve paint brushes or a Potter's wheel. But as I looked out into the world, I started to see creativity not just in everything, but in everyone. Life as we know it literally would not be happening without people being creative. From inventing ways to clean plastics from our oceans, to apps that track our sleep patterns, creativity is everywhere. And here is the thing. Everyone is creative. Everyone. Whether we realise it or not. And the uniqueness of our creative selves means we all have something to offer the world. All of us.

  You might be reading this wondering where the hell I am going with it all?! Well I'm here to tell you, from someone who has been to the depths of hell, and then dragged herself out, that there is a place for you in this world, and you will discover it through your creativity! You are not your experiences. And, if like me you don't feel like the richness of life can be something you will experience again, I assure you that you will. But you have to make steps towards that life. You've learned this already, haven't you. You know that depression will burn your entire village down unless you fight back. Please, keep fighting, and explore those hobbies and pipe dreams, because there is so much opportunity to be happy, all around you. If only you could see it! You can actually enjoy life again, and furthermore find what it is that you were meant to give the world all along. For me I haven't figured out exactly what that looks like, and that's okay. I'm interested! something I haven't been able to honestly say since I was ill ( in fact more than a year later I was still accepting of the fact that Life 'wasn't for me'). So I urge you to take those baby steps. Dig out the camera, play the music, whatever it is, do it! And do it will intention every single day. Explore every nook and cranny until you find it! And please, talk to somebody if you sense that dark shadow behind you. Because it's not something you have to accept as how you have to live in this world.

Know this; the Universe does not care what you have done in your life. It loves you unconditionally.

Faye <3

#creative #selfdevelopment #depression #you are loved #findthatfire

[jameswoo]

Playstation Vita Error C2-12828-1 Help - Written By Sebastian

Always on the road I really enjoy a casual mobile gaming experience. Of course a tablet and a smartphone is great for gaming. But I do use a Nintendo 3ds and a Playstation Vita every now and then.Recently though I ran into a strange issue while playing 'Uncharted Golden Abyss' on my Playstation Vita.While using the game and occasionally while booting up the game I received a tough error and the game would crash.The Error Code: C2-12828-1Time to find a solution.Unfortunately the official Playstation Support Site is not of much help. Really misleading it describes a NAT / networking / demilitarised zone issue: http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/PS-Vita/Fixing-the-Error-c2-12828-1-issue-on-your-Vita/td-p/15328217But I don't believe this C2-12828-1 is a networking issue at all.From my experience with the issue (very random occurrence, usually involving large chunks of data being loaded, game-brraking) I do not believe it is networking related at all.I would rather side with the other sources I've found on gamefaqs and reddit and the like. There you read a lot of warnings that this bug might get worse over time and it might destroy download data and save data. As in my experience game crashes are mentioned and worse: random shutdowns of the whole system. From all these reports this seems to be a nasty memory/file system error. The Vita uses a proprietary file-system plus heavy encryption. Something along side of heavy use, constant Vita-standby-mode and quick switching between big games may case defects in memory which worsen over time due to read/write activity. Ultimately the whole partition gets damaged and a Vita showing this bug should not be used but rather should be 'fixed' quickly. So how could this bug be fixed?FixBased on: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/656455-madden-nfl-13/64026055In short the only known fix is to backup the data of your Vita and then thoroughly wiping and rebuilding the console's memory and then restoring.Prerequisites for the fix:

Vita System and Data Cable

Sony Content Manager Assistant software for Windows or Mac

Free space on your PC/Mac (if you have a 16GB memory card the. At least 16GB free)

time and patience

Steps to fix C2-12828-1 :

Delete all games and apps you no longer need

Sync trophies / save-data with PSN server and do a full backup of your Vita using Content Manager Assistant. Basically hook up the Vita with a PC running Content Manager Assistant and copy over everything.

Remove any game card from the system.

Turn Vita off completely -> turn Vita on in SAFE MODE -> using Power button, PS button + R trigger to start it up.

At SAFE MODE screen select option (3) to Format Memory Card

Afterwards turn Vita on in SAFE MODE again, and select option (4) to Restore PS Vita System

Once again, get your Vita back to SAFE MODE and select option (2) to Rebuild Database

Turn your Vita on regularly and it should look fresh again. Icons everywhere. Don't bother with changing any settings as the backup has it all; though you will have to re-arrange icons. At this point, go into Settings -> Format -> Format Memory Card (one last time).

Then get back to Settings and connect the Vita to your usual internet connection and sign in to your PSN so that it is authenticated.

Open Content Manager application on the Vita and Restore From Backup - connect to where your backup is stored.

After all is done, the icons are shufffled so get them re-arranged, make sure your time is set right using the internet

For some games the data was apparently so corrupted so it could not be restored. This happened for round about 5 out 30 games. I re-downloaded these games and downloaded save-data from PSN.After all that was done, I was able to use my Playstation Vita as expected. The whole procedure especially re-downloading some larger games was cumbersome but in the end I seem to have a stable system now.