Northern Lights were in rare form all night long. Quick snap of what I saw stepping out the door at 4:30 this morning
Stranger Things
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Claire Keane
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
AnasAbdin
taylor price
trying on a metaphor

Janaina Medeiros

shark vs the universe
hello vonnie
Sade Olutola
Game of Thrones Daily
Peter Solarz
One Nice Bug Per Day
$LAYYYTER

@theartofmadeline
h
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from United States

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@ashesofmypast
Northern Lights were in rare form all night long. Quick snap of what I saw stepping out the door at 4:30 this morning
Not Jeremy
Mack put on his new-car-salesman smile before he even finished the handshake. “I’m Mack,” he said, voice varnished smooth. “This wasn’t easy to pull. But I’m confident we got what you’re looking for.”
Linda didn’t smile back. She had two men with her—real muscle, not the discount kind. Carl wore flat black cargo pants and a sleeveless muscle T-shirt, the kind that didn’t brag, it just told the truth.
Carl didn’t posture. He didn’t need to. You don’t posture with arms built from lifting things that fought back.
“Carl,” Linda said.
Carl moved like a switch had been thrown—no wasted steps, no flexing for the crowd. His hand closed around the back of Mack’s neck, big and unhurried, and Mack stiffened like a dog feeling the chain tighten. He didn’t even finish the little “hey now” rising in his throat before Carl pivoted him toward the door.
The sound of their boots faded down the concrete bay. Then came a short, meaty thud and the soft thunk of a trunk closing—quick, efficient, final. The noise hung in the air, faintly metallic, like it knew exactly what it meant.
Silky’s breath hitched like a misfired engine. She moved between Linda and the boys without thinking, a jittering wall of fear and nerve. Her hands were slick, knees locked. A stale breeze drifted through the half-open bay door carrying the burnt-oil tang of the shop floor. Somewhere behind her, one kid cracked open a Happy Meal toy and it made a sharp little pop like a starter pistol.
“You’re the one who called me,” Linda said.
“But not the one who wanted to do this,” Silky mouthed, voice barely making it past her teeth.
Linda scanned the room once, fast and exact. None of these boys had Jeremy’s face. Too short. Too dark. Wrong eyes. Not him.
“How many kids?”
“Seventeen.”
“I see fifteen.”
“Two in the bathroom.”
The fluorescent lights above them hummed softly—an insect-wing drone that made the silence louder.
“Whose idea were the Happy Meals?”
“Mine,” Silky said. “Cost thirty-seven bucks.”
Linda fished a couple of twenties from her pocket and laid them down on a bench like she was tipping a deserving barmaid. The bills made a dry papery whisper on the cold metal.
“Mack? Was that his name?”
Silky nodded, noticing the redhead had already slipped into past tense.
“A guy like Mack always keeps a rainy-day fund. A smart girl might know where.”
“She might,” Silky said. Her voice trembled in the middle like a frayed wire.
“And what would a smart girl do with money like that?”
Silky swallowed. “Get her ass out of Dodge.”
“He’d probably have some pills or candy mixed in with the cash,” Linda added.
“He would,” Silky whispered.
“Leave the candy. Take the cash.”
Linda turned slightly toward her other man. “Give me fifteen minutes to get clear. Then get clear yourself and drop a dime. It won’t take the cops more than three minutes to get here, and I doubt these boys get in any trouble in that window.”
A plastic cup tipped over near the bench with a hollow clack that made Silky flinch. One of the boys laughed softly, grease on his fingers, sauce on his chin—completely unaware that the air in the room had just shifted from bad to dangerous.
Linda walked toward the door, boots whispering on the concrete. She didn’t look at the kids. She didn’t need to. Her eyes brushed across Silky instead—a quick, measuring glance, cold as a razor’s edge. A test, and a promise.
Then she was gone.
Chapter 1 - The First of His Last Days
Tuesday, May 5, 1983 — Sumter, South Carolina
An elementary teacher for thirty-one years, Beatrice Daugherty believed two things: One, first grade teachers should not have a favorite student. Two, she had a favorite student. It was little Jeremy Mailer.
“Mrs. Daugherty, Mrs. Daugherty!”
As usual, it was Tara the Tattler breaking the classroom rule against speaking while the teacher was either absent from the room or had her back turned. Tara’s high, whiny voice carried through the room as usual.
At the blackboard, Mrs. Daugherty chose to ignore the child. With only a month left in the school year, if Tara hadn’t learned that rules applied to her, there wasn’t much point in beating a dead horse, as the saying went.
With a posture so impeccably straight it could shame a yardstick, Beatrice Daugherty kept sketching a cat, a mouse, and a doghouse. She used bold, sweeping strokes and four different colors of chalk. It was one of her funner lessons, one she’d been giving for years—on things that belonged and things that did not. Once the main characters were complete, she added a piece of cheese, an Easter bonnet, a kazoo.
Mrs. Daugherty was slim—almost painfully so—and as she worked, the hem of her purple-flowered dress swayed against her knees, reminding some of her students of the brass bell she rang three times a day to signal the end of recess. Her left hand clutched a crumpled tissue, curled behind the small of her back. Her salt-and-pepper hair was tied in a terse bun. Were she ever to let it down, it was doubtful any of her students would recognize her.
“Mrs. Daugherty!”
This time the plea carried genuine fear, and it wasn’t Tara speaking. It came from Gerald, a chunky little boy who spoke so seldom that Beatrice barely recognized his voice.
“There’s something wrong with the new kid,” Gerald went on, sounding almost surprised at his own boldness.
“He’s not new,” Glenna hissed. “He’s been here since Christmas.”
Beatrice paused, set the chalk on the tray, and turned. In the small cotton-farming community of Sumter, these children had gone to preschool, kindergarten, and first grade together. By “new kid,” they meant Jeremy.
At first, she’d been skeptical about accepting him. For the first half of the school year, his parents had tried homeschooling. Then they recanted—not because it was hard work, but because they realized there were things he wasn’t getting. Things like learning how to make friends. Another concern had been Jeremy’s size. Runt wasn’t quite the word, but he was smaller than most of the kindergartners.
What the boy lacked in size, he made up for in grit, determination, and healthy doses of old-fashioned optimism. His reading was well beyond grade level. Twice a week when the class went to the library, Jeremy was the only one brave enough to choose a chapter book. In her experience, that alone made him rare.
His spot in class was the front row, dead center, and instinctively her eyes swung that way.
But it wasn’t Jeremy sitting there now.
Whoever—whatever sat in his chair flooded her with revulsion.
It wore Jeremy’s white shirt with the broad flat collar, but it was soaked through, dripping as if he’d just climbed out of a swimming pool. His hair—short, crew-cut bristles of white—was drenched too, rivulets running down his forehead and neck.
His head was turned away. His arms hung slack at his sides. He could have been a mannequin. Nothing about him moved.
“Jeremy? Sweetheart?” Her voice wavered. Cold spider-legs of dread skittered up her spine.
Jeremy heard her. He was a good boy—or at least he tried to be—and when adults spoke to good boys, it was polite to look at them. So he began to turn his head.
But why was it so difficult? Why did it hurt?
Oh. He knew. Carl sat behind him. Carl was what Mrs. Daugherty called a prankster. Sometimes Carl leaned forward and grabbed Jeremy’s ears. Jeremy didn’t like it, but Carl didn’t have other friends. And a person couldn’t be happy without friends.
Jeremy bit down and tried harder.
Finally, he got his head to turn.
Why was it suddenly so cold?
For the rest of her life, Beatrice would swear she heard the tendons inside Jeremy’s neck wrench and snap, like someone twisting the head off a desiccated mummy. She clamped a hand over her mouth.
This—this thing—no longer had the tender face of a little boy. Not anymore. His skin was translucent and crisscrossed by deep purple, pulsing veins—or were they cracks?
Then Jeremy’s eyes found her.
They were wide. Unblinking. The color of watered-down bleach. But worse than the color was the focus.
Whatever those eyes were fixed on, it wasn’t in this world.
No recognition. No confusion. Just that awful, vacant stillness. As if he were staring through her into something far away.
Then he smiled— and buckled forward.
Hard.
His face smashed into the wooden desktop with a sickening crack. For one stunned second, he didn’t move. The class gasped.
Then, just as suddenly, he sat upright and smiled the odd, bashful grin of a little boy who had just farted in front of everyone.
Blood poured from his nose, spraying with each exhale, streaming down his upper lip and soaking his shirt. His eyes rolled. He gave a shaky inhale.
That’s when the screaming started.
Chairs toppled. Children cried out and scattered. One slipped in the panic. A boy tripped over a backpack, hit the floor, and kept crawling. Somewhere, someone sobbed Jeremy’s name. Another just shrieked over and over.
But Beatrice’s eyes stayed locked on him.
He was swaying.
Unstable. Loose. About to fall sideways.
And if he did, he’d crack his head wide open on the tile.
She didn’t think. She didn’t plan. She moved—diving like a ballplayer stealing home, terrified she’d be too late.
She caught him just as he pitched sideways out of the chair.
His body collapsed into her arms—boneless, cold, and too light. His head lolled back, blood smearing across her blouse.
“Jeremy,” she gasped, arms trembling as she cradled him. “I got you, sweetheart. I got you.”
But he wasn’t moving.
Music while writing—yay or nay?
Tell me what works and why!
🎧 Lyrics on
🎶 Instrumental only
🔇 Silence to draft, music to revise
🌀 Depends on task/genre
Character Mishap
One of my characters broke her middle toe by closing it in a closet door. Didn't bruise any of the others, broke just the middle toe.
Recognize Yourself?
If you recognize yourself in one of my stories, perhaps you should have treated my better in real life.
Snippet from 'A Shadow of Absence'
Set in 1983, in the (fictional) office of Lt. Veronica Vaughn
“Los Angeles County Sheriff, Hollywood Division, Lieutenant Vaughn speaking… Oh hey, Tomiko. How’s Midi? You both holding up?”
“Mm-hmm… yeah, I figured. Heavy like that, huh?” “He had a what? No, back up—he had a what? With a silencer? Girl, the last kid you pulled in set your living-room drapes on fire. And now this one’s packing a suppressed pistol? Who cares if he's only seven?” Her nails started digging grooves into her desk calendar, scoring lines between the dates.
“…Say again? Whoa whoa whoa. A million? In hundreds? Oh—a million four?” Vaughn leaned back, let out a long breath through her teeth. “Tell him I love him. And tell him I need a new car.”
As Tomiko continued Vaughn’s nails stopped digging, but only because her face was going ashen. “He has their passports?”
Their call ended soon after that with an admonishment to hide that gun with the silencer and stay near a phone while she does it.
***
Being a lieutenant gave Veronica Vaughn a radio unit in her office, its mic always within reach of her swivel chair. She spun, snatched it up, thumb pressing the bar across its base.
“Station ninety, unit fifty-seven.”
The pause that followed felt longer than it was.
“Unit fifty-seven.” His voice came back steady. He knew exactly who was calling, but no way would he ever say Lieutenant Snuggle Bunny over the air.
“Your twenty?”
“Lexington and Highland. Multi-vehicle crash.”
“Ten twenty-one at your earliest convenience. Station ninety clear.”
Sweetwater’s reply was a simple but a sharp double click of his mic.
Fifteen minutes later, her desk phone rang.
“Detective Sweetwater.” All business, his tone clipped. For all he knew, her office was full of brass and she had him on speaker. Such actions would not be a career enhancer for either of them.
“Yes, another case did come in, but no, I’m not giving to you.”
“Who? No, Tompkins.”
“Yes, he’s ready. Stop clucking like a mother hen. Guy ran into a liquor store with a Beretta, yanked it out of his waistband, and shot his own junk off. Bled out before the bus got there.”
“Yes they tried but that’s not exactly a wound you can simply slap a tourniquet around.”
She let out a sharp breath through her nose. “No, I would not.”
“Keep dreaming there buddy. Anyway, this is important. Tomiko called. Jeremy is awake and she went through the boy’s backpack with him. You’re never going to…”
“Still there? Okay, good. He’s carrying one and a half million in hundred dollar bills, a ladies’ stylish little pistol with a silencer, and this, oh you are going to get happy over this one- the passport of the man who beat up on them.”
“No, serious, I shit thee not.”
“Yeah, I can do that. See you there.”
After hanging up Veronica poked her head into the bullpen. “Hey, Maki. Hold down the fort, I’ll be on mobile for a couple hours.”
Lost in Translation at the Monkey Cage
Back in the mid-90s I worked weekends at the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley as a security officer/EMT. Great job. Loved every minute.
One blistering Sunday in August, I was walking the trails toward the main building when a woman’s voice tore through the heat—loud, furious, unbroken. As I rounded the corner by the monkey enclosure, I saw her: late twenties, maybe early thirties, well dressed in a blouse and skirt, hair neatly pinned. She had a professional grade portrait camera (A Hasselblad) with a rental tag from West Photo in downtown Minneapolis and a long shutter release cable running to the lens.
She was screaming at the monkeys.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, stepping in. “There are families with children. Let’s keep the language down.”
“It’s these f’n idiot monkeys,” she snapped. “I need a photo with them in the background and they—” She spun back toward the enclosure and shouted again. “—they won’t turn around!”
I kept my voice even. “Ma’am, these are Japanese snow monkeys. They don’t speak English.”
Her face changed all at once—the anger falling away, embarrassment flooding in. She whacked her forehead with the heel of her hand and said, quietly, “How could I have been so stupid?”
Got Another Published
I started this purely with the intention of providing something for my father to occupy his mind while on hospice. Now it's turned into a series, and this is the first volume.
One Good Line
You, madam, have the eyes of a woman about to do mischief.
Sitting With My Father, Writing
My father is on hospice. The hallway between us feels short and endless at the same time. He sleeps. I sit nearby with my laptop open, working on a novel because my hands need something to do while my heart waits.
It’s quiet in the way hospitals and chapels are quiet—shoes soft on the floor, the hum of a machine, the rise and fall of a chest that taught me how to breathe a long time ago. Every few sentences I stop and listen. I don’t know how many hours we have. I don’t know if he hears me when I say I’m here.
Writing feels strange and right at once. Strange because how can letters matter at the edge of a life? Right because this is what he taught me without ever saying the word: keep going. Do the next small thing. Fix what you can fix. Hold what you can hold.
So I’m holding this: a story, his hand when he stirs, the thin moment we’re in. I’m not trying to make this beautiful or meaningful. I’m just trying to be honest. If he wakes, I’ll close the laptop and give him my whole attention. If he sleeps, I’ll keep typing quietly, making something steady in a place that isn’t.
If you’re reading this and you’re in a hallway like mine, here’s what I’m learning today: there’s no right way. Sit. Stand. Pray. Swear. Tell a joke. Cry in the bathroom and come back. Say “I love you” out loud, even if their eyes are closed. Drink water. Breathe.
For now, I’m here. The words are a small light I can hold, and he is the reason I know how to carry them.
Back from the Ashes
“Some doors are meant to stay shut. This story begins with the one that didn’t.”
First glimpse of the cover for my current project. Shadow, memory, and the kind of truth that takes lives apart — that’s what waits inside.