i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.
There's a disconnect happening here because the primary function of social media for most casual users is to form a circle of friends around the usual things that friendships are built on: shared interests and lifestyles and ideas of what is important and what is unacceptable. When people are mainly doing leftism on social media, this encourages thinking of leftism as centered around establishing high-minded social clubs.
For anyone who still isn't getting it from someone who helps people IRL: There's a difference between whom you're helping to feed at the mealshare and whom you're choosing to hang out with for fun after the mealshare. You don't have to invite a hungry person with opinions you don't like to play board games with you, but you do have to help keep them from starving if you're serious about leftist organizing.
[Image ID: Tumblr reply with username blocked out reading: *volunteering at the soup kitchen, holding a bowl hesitantly to my chest* what do you think about age gaps in ships /End ID]
this painting by andrew wyeth has got SO many ghosts in it. most andrew wyeth paintings have ghosts in, but this is off the scale!
this painting by dragan bibin has only one ghost as far as i can tell, but it's a really scary ghost (the dog thinks so too)
this painting by meraud guevara looks very peaceful, but unfortunately it has a ghost in it. i can't tell you where, but it does
you might think you can see the ghosts in this dorothea tanning painting, but you're wrong. the little girls are just ordinary girls. the actual ghost is behind one of those doors.
So Fury started up the Avenger Initiative after meeting Carol, specifically looking for more Carols. The funny thing is, this ties directly into that bit of weirdness from the Iron Man 1 post-credits scene. Where he's like, "You think you're the ONLY superhero?" and then it turns out that, uh. Yeah. At this time, he kinda is.
Like. Looking back, it's hilarious. Fury's been searching for Carol-types for like 13 years and he had nothing to show for it. Then he sees Iron Man on the news and he's like, "This is it. This is IT. Get Coulson down there right now. We've found our guy! This is it! THIS IS--"
One conversation with Tony Stark later. "Okay, who else we got? I want to keep my options open."
I like to think there were scattered mystery man types like say, the Flaming Skull or Thin Man, but nothing Fury could really bring himself to build a team around.
Still on this unfortunately but like the way fantasy functions in white nights is so fascinating
Like that the narrators whole thing being that fantasy has swallowed him whole. Not just his current life, but his past, whatever family or other connections he may have once had. He is a man that to us (and to himself) exists only in the present and only within his own dreams. Even the backstory he gives to nastenka doesn't provide any context. almost no concrete details of his life are ever given. The fact that matryona only actually appears to us at the very end, when his purely imagined fantasy is dead, as is his real-fantasy w nastenka.
The reality can't coexist with either of those, but once he has a taste of that real-fantasy, he can't return to the pure one, so once the real-fantasy is dead, all he has left is reality. And the way thats almost mirrored in his initial greediness, for lack of a better term, w nastenka. He tells himself want he wants from her is so small, but the moment he gets it, he demands more, and that pattern repeats. If he cld ever have actually been satisfied w the reality he had, he wld never have had to live w that reality
on setting up audience expectations, and either satisfying or defying them
i told myself i wouldn't write an essay about tadc, because i should have got my fill of trying to argue with people on bluesky whose critical analysis starts and ends with 'the creator said so'. but i unfortunately do feel very strongly about storycraft, so i'm going to write an essay anyway, focusing mainly on one scene from the finale and how it creates an expectation it does not satisfy, nor meaningfully subvert.
i'm going to be discussing how tone, visuals, and familiar tropes work together to create an emotional expectation, and what could have been done differently to support what is the supposed intended read. while the essay is going to be taking the stance that this scene failed in what it was trying to do, my intent is not to diminish readings that it succeeded. if anything i'm only using tadc and the scene as an example to talk about the greater concepts of narrative catharsis. i'm not here to convince anybody how to feel about the work itself, just make a point. it's educational. i like talking about writing and visuals. it's not a review and there's no moral stance being taken about what is good or bad.
okay?
and to be clear, i'm not going to be referencing or including anything the creator has said, because i've not read any of it, i'm not going to, and i don't need to. 'the creator said so' is a rhetorical dead end that stops discussion in favor of a solid single answer. i'm not interested in fandom discourse surrounding the creator. that's not what this is about. my reading is based entirely and exclusively on the text of the work itself and my interpretation of it.
okay?
okay.
and obviously this will contain spoilers for the final episode
we're going to talk about jax's final scene, 31:30 up through 36ish, conveniently timestamped. for those of you that don't want to watch the whole six minutes again, i'm going to lay out the major beats. in pink, i'm going to point at the musical cues, visuals, and dialogue that i want you to pay attention to.
pomni confronts jax in the center of his psyche after reaching into his abstracted mind to find him. he pleads for her to leave, claiming nobody is supposed to care about him, or love him, and that she's making it harder by being there. gentle, insistent string music sweeps to a crescendo as pomni approaches.
pomni embraces him. jax claims it's too late, that there's no coming back from abstraction. pomni entreats him to talk to her, and he turns and kneels to hug her. the music remains soft, gentle, and sweet.
jax says he doesn't want to go, and starts breathing heavily. pomni tells him to stay with her. he begins glowing bright white.
we cut to a montage of jax scenes, set to a cover of stevie wonder's Isn't She Lovely, a song about the birth of his beautiful baby girl.
pomni keeps holding on to the glowing white body of jax as the music continues, ending on the lyrics isn't she lovely, made of love. the screen goes entirely white.
zooble and the others pull pomni out of the glowing white body of jax. they lean over her and say "you weren't going to try and take care of him all by yourself, were you?" and "i'm glad we weren't too late" and "like you guys keep saying, we're all in this together."
the song continues without the lyrics as they put jax in a pillow fort tent.
those are the basic facts of the scene and the musical cues. yes, there are more details, but these are still The Basic Beats between pomni finding jax, and the end of the scene. two characters emotionally embrace, the music swells with hope, one of them starts glowing white, the most joyful, loving song of all time starts playing, and the whole cast shows up, eager to help, happy they weren't too late, reminding us that they're all in this together.
how is the scene setting your expectation for what comes next? what sort of feelings do the music choices lead you to? where have you seen similar scenes play out, and how did they end? the music is hopeful and positive. the characters smile tearfully, and speak words of encouragement. the character in crisis glows white when embraced by a friend who refuses to give up. obviously the answers to my questions are subjective, maybe you hear isn't she lovely kick in and you come to the immediate conclusion jax is dead forever and get sad. but the answer i'm trying to lead you to, and that i would argue all of these elements combined are leading you to, is a positive resolution. you're led to believe something good will happen to jax. that the power of love will overcome the abstraction, and jax will come back from the brink knowing that he--or she, as the case may be--is loved. isn't she lovely, made of love?
but that's not what happens. we leave this scene and move to a montage of building a pillow fort tent, into which the abstracted jax is dragged like an animal and left. nobody joins pomni in her attempt to pull jax out of abstraction, seemingly all they're glad to have done is not lost pomni in an explosion: "i'm glad we weren't too late." but they were too late--for jax. the character we've spent the past two episodes and thirty minutes examining under a microscope, the character who was in crisis, the character who needed help, and never ultimately got it until it was, factually, too late. the world state of "jax is abstracted" did not change. we, and pomni, understand him better for having insight into his mind. but no change occurred. if you're standing outside of all this, pomni went into a room, turned off the lights, and then was pulled away from an abstraction that glowed white and then...never stopped being an abstraction. nothing has changed. there is no positive resolution beyond "nobody else got hurt worse".
this is tragic. it is a tragedy! and i do sincerely believe it's meant to be tragic. but everything outside of the literal facts of the scene, the music, the tone, the way the characters talk, directly contradicts that. it is not presented as a tragedy. an instrumental of isn't she lovely continues playing as they build the tent and put jax away, but it's an entirely straightforward cover, still upbeat, still positively coded. there's no contrast between the use of the song and the way the scene is presented that would make it "bittersweet", nothing in the way it's shot tells me this is sad. the situation is only logically sad--if i feel sad, it's because i know i'm supposed to. i'm not being made sad.
and that's where the issue is. if the scene is supposed to be sad, if it's not supposed to make you think 'the power of love and friendship can save you', then it's not using the tools at its disposal effectively. it can still make you sad, but is it doing it the best way that it could? everyone's familiar with the old sarah machlachlan ASPCA commercials. images of sad cats and dogs in shelters, while she mournfully sings in the arms of the angels, to make you think about the fact that many of these animals will be put down without finding a home. the imagery and the music cues are working together to make you feel sad. now go mute that commercial and play grover washington jr's just the two of us overtop it. how does that combination make you feel? maybe it evokes hope, maybe it makes you want to adopt a pet. just the two of us, we can make it if we try. adopt a dog, you can make it if you try! it's a far cry from sarah's plea.
obviously this is a commercial, it's trying to sell you on an idea (however noble an idea it is), but that's not really any different from a story. the story is trying to sell you on the idea it wants to convey, and how it wants you to feel, and it's using music, visuals, and dialogue to achieve that. by the way, if you intend to respond to this essay in a reblog to argue with me, turn one word blue, otherwise i'll know you didn't read it closely all the way through and just wanted to fight. anyway if the scene is meant to make us go "oh my god i thought it was going to work out but it didn't" then it needs to convince us it believes it didn't work out. because as it is, it presents putting jax in the pillow fort forever as the positive resolution, because that's what the music is telling us.
so what do we do about this, if we want to ensure the audience comes to the "correct" conclusion? number one is, of course, the music. isn't she lovely is a great pick if you want to lead us to a trans girl jax ending, but if it's supposed to be tragic... you have to change the tone. you have to make it sad. jax doesn't get to live as a girl, make me sad about it! bring down the tempo, change the key. if it's meant to be mournful, it has to sound like it. and the music surrounding it, the music in the void as pomni and jax embrace--that too should not be so hopeful. bring in the cello, bring in the piano, take out the steven universe plinky synths. we know what sad music sounds like. make it sound sad! or at least contrast it with the visuals. if you want to use an upbeat song for dramatic irony, that's fine, but irony requires going against expectations. i expect an upbeat song to be accompanied by happy hopeful visuals. make pomni scream and reach for jax and be held back while the song plays, make her suffer. make it contrast.
then there's the visuals. the glowing white light. embracing somebody who's glowing white can be considered neutral, but, in tandem with the music, it leads to a reading of a coming transformation, a rebirth. something new is going to come out of that white light. rewatching the scene, i guess it's supposed to be a literal explosion triggered by the abstraction creature stepping on the grenade, but like... c'mon? c'mon. it's not ABOUT the grenade. it's about jax falling apart and losing himself fully and pomni trying to hold on.
and if that's what it's supposed to be, make his model start going abstract when he enters his panic attack. make it absolutely clear that we're losing this last piece of jax and can't get it back. turn the model black, make it warble, make it grow the eyes. the fact that we don't see jax abstract on screen originally, that it's just something that happened elsewhere, is another problem i have with the finale, but is not the point of this post. if the story doesn't want to show it the first time, that's fine! but if it wants this to be the moment when jax goes to the point of no return, it should make sure we know that's what's happening. a glowing white light is hopeful. a growing black shape is not.
and finally, the dialogue/the way the characters behave. i am not convinced by jax saying "there's no coming back from this" because i'm not convinced he knows that. of course he would say that! of course he would believe it! but that line is a band-aid over the problem of WE don't actually know that. we've never seen it tried. we don't KNOW that all of your friends coming together and genuinely caring about you isn't enough to bring you back. much like we don't KNOW exactly what causes it or makes it so irreversible, because we don't see it happen. i'm absolutely on board for abstraction being a metaphor for this or that, but because it is still a literal event in a world that isn't built exclusively on metaphor, we still need literal information about it and its rules. this is a problem with science fiction. you can do plenty with metaphor and analogy in the genre, but you can't metaphor the hard facts that make up the world. those of you who've been here long enough know how much chobits makes me insane because it acts like the reset button being in her pussy is happenstance in service of a metaphor for sex changing you and not a choice her freak roboticist father had to make in the lab when he built her. some things you do have to address.
anyway. i'm getting off track. if the story wants me to think jax really can't come back, i need to know that's impossible in order to be sad about it. and if i don't get to know that until this exact moment in the story (which is fine!) then i need to know it through failure. if everyone is going to walk up like thank god we're all here! we're not gonna let you try alone! i... need the group to actually try, and i need them to fail. otherwise, everything else being exactly as it is, hopeful music and all, i'm led to believe friendship could've save the day--if they'd just tried. but for some reason, they don't try. they just put jax in the tent and i'm left questioning why nobody else tried to hug him better. the expectation that something could be done was set up, and then not followed through on, nor subverted. if they failed, that would have been a subversion, the narrative playing on my expectation that love conquers all in order to make it more impactful when it says 'no, it doesn't.'
that's what i think it wants to say, anyway. that is the logical conclusion, based entirely on the events, and ignoring all the narrative devices surrounding them. but i'm unsatisfied by the logical conclusion. i don't want to have to examine cold facts when trying to deduce a story's conclusion. i want the catharsis of having my expectations raised, and then either met--which is still good storytelling--or subverted. a story doing exactly what you think it's doing is not inherently bad, it means you heard what it was saying. i don't think tadc would be worse if pomni and the gang loved jax back from the brink and she was reborn into an avatar with a cute bow on her head and started making an effort to be better. and i don't think i'd be unsatisfied by a narrative that said no, you can't save everyone no matter how hard you love them, if it said it clearly and confidently.
it just doesn't successfully do that.
phew. did you make it all the way down here? do you understand what i'm trying to get at, even if you don't necessarily agree with it? i hope so. if you read all that and want to yell at me for saying the cartoon clown show could have been better, please consider: nobody would spend their sunday writing an essay about a cartoon clown show if they completely hated it. i must have liked it well enough. i just want it to be better. you should always want better from the work you take in, and for the work you make. tadc already exists and can't be changed, so this essay is ultimately for YOU 🫵 to think about your own work and how you can use the tools you have to elicit the feeling you want in your audience.
that's one of the reasons for critical analysis. if you can identify what doesn't work in somebody else's story, and can identify how it would improve, you will be better at identifying these things in your own work, and your work will be better.
I wrote this in response to this prompt. Ivan Alexander recorded this story, so if you like audiobooks, click here to listen. I cannot understate how talented he is.
She’d watched him walking over the horizon for almost six hours now. She loved getting guests - loved seeing the resignation of men half dead with thirst, trading certain death in the sands for possible death near her waters.
And they were hers. The promise of Ramses still stood, even if it had been a millennium since the concord. By rite of blood and writ of paper she was the queen of the deeper duat. And it was a queen’s privilege to choose her guests. And, occasionally, kill them with her claws.
She could have flown over, but she had time. More time than anyone. More than enough time to wait.
Her guest was not half dead. He was, to be technical, less than a quarter dead, but that was only if you measured things in years.
He was young. His face certainly seemed less lined than her own. There wasn’t much else she could judge age from - the lines of her form folded into wings and furs and claws at the same point that his folded into silks and beads.
He’d prepared for the meeting by bringing a wealth of spices. It was a trick common to royal travelers: If sweat couldn’t be prevented, it could at least be masked. She could still pick traces of it up under the sandalwood and myrrh, but it was pleasant. Salty and metallic and sharp, underneath all the soft wisps of smoke.
He’d brought her gifts. When she told him that the gifts were not acceptable as passage, he said that wasn’t how gifts worked. Gifts weren’t given in exchanges - they were given for the joy of giving. And it brought him joy to share with her.
She didn’t know how to respond to that, so she simply asked if he intended to cross through her duat.
“Maybe,” he replied. “What’s your price?”
“A riddle,” she’d said. “If you get it right, you can pass. But if you get it wrong, I will devour even your bones.”
He grinned and it wasn’t false bravado. He’d known the cost before she said it.
“I love riddles. I accept.”
She loved this part. She loved the tension of it, that singular moment of truth where she wasn’t just a mind or a monster, but something straddling both worlds.
She spoke.
“I can survive beyond death, but can be broken without force. I can summon without breath but-”
“A promise.”
She looked at him wide-eyed. It wasn’t her best riddle, but it was one she’d made herself. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy.
She let him pass but she did - to her great shame - sulk. To his credit, he only lingered an hour or so in the shade of the oasis. There was a longing to him that she couldn’t describe. It unsettled her, but it went away when he took his camels and continued past, traveling on into the deep duat.
She forgot about his gifts until long after he’d passed the horizon. She’d expected human trinkets - gold and gems. Useless baubles. The pelts that had been carefully rolled up and placed inside the chest were strangely thoughtful.
She carried them back to her cave, and laid them flat across the floor. That night she slept better than she had in many, many years. In the morning, she woke up and smelled myrrh, and was almost happy to imagine the prince coming back. If she was disappointed to realize that the smell was coming from the scents soaked into the furs, that was a secret she could keep even from herself.
She recognized his outline on the horizon. She had a good memory, and beyond that, he’d made quite an impression on his first meeting with her.
He’d begun to run low on his spices, and his clothes were looking far more rumpled than they had at the start. That travel was beginning to wear him down should’ve meant nothing to her. Now, she felt odd. Would she still feel victorious if he failed her riddle? Or would it haunt her, knowing she could only catch him at his worst?
(Did she want to catch him?)
She waited for him to make it to her oasis again. It seemed to be part of the ritual, to sit and watch the speck on the horizon grow to the size of a man. They didn’t exchange pleasantries when he arrived. Instead he gave a small nod to acknowledge her before climbing down from atop his camel. She hadn’t demanded it prior because she knew all too well how easy it was to catch a camel, but there was still something respectful in the gesture. Here was a prince willing to die with dignity. Here was a man who lived and died by rules.
Could she be blamed for admiring that?
Only when he was fully settled in to listen did she begin her riddle.
“Toothless maw that eats all these:
Raw flesh, dung, fresh air, and trees.
At night I’m bright, in day I’m black,
I die, I’m gone, but always back.”
She was on the third line when she saw his face light up. He waited to answer this time, more focused on being polite than showing off how clever he was. She liked that. She knew he was clever, but now she knew he could be patient too.
“A campfire.”
It was one of her favorite riddles, and the joy she got was twofold. She was happy for the prince, happy that he would survive another day, and happy for herself too. It was infinitely preferable to lose with skill than to win through circumstance. She would feel robbed, if she had to eat the prince on a bad day. If he lost, he needed to lose at his best. He needed to lose in a way that mattered.
He went through the oasis again, but lingered far longer. They spoke in moments about each other’s lives - her memories of the time before even Ramses, and his experience as the seventh in line to the throne. He was trusted to act as an emissary specifically because he was so far from inheriting the throne.
“Not that I’d want it anyway,” he said. “A camel is a better throne than any silly golden chair. The seat in the palace only lets me see the bald spot on the high priest’s head. The saddle on this camel lets me see all the beauty in the world.”
His head wasn’t turned towards her when he said that, but she could see his eyes glance over her.
It was easy to pretend she didn’t notice, and he did nothing to press it further. She showed him the best trees for picking dates, the best ponds for catching fish, and the first cave she’d set her lair up in - back before even Ramses. Back when she was much, much smaller.
She slept in the next morning. The sunlight made a soft beam through the cave, over the pelts, before landing across her face. Any other day it would’ve been a wonderful way to wake up, but the realization that she’d missed her chance to say goodbye made her scramble. She made a short flight over the waters to see if he was gone, and got her answer before even landing - there was no camel tied to the palms.
Still, he’d left her a gift. The boar roasting over glowing coals had clearly been caught the night before, and the fact that it was unspiced meant it was for her.
It was also another oddly thoughtful gesture. How many humans would realize that unseasoned meat was a sphinx’s preference? How many would research that far?
She landed near the meal and approached. Down on the ground, there was so much more detail to see. The tracks of the camel, the care taken to not leave a mess. The simple note left besides the firepit.
She reached out and read.
I’m sure you don’t depend on travelers for your meals
But I do feel bad, having deprived you twice.
Enjoy the boar. I will be back in two weeks.
She hadn’t taken a bite yet, but she could pretend the warmth in her stomach was the meal. Two bites was all it took to make the illusion complete.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected - a sandstorm, perhaps, or a heatstruck camel. Instead, it was only a few minutes flight before the smell of blood caught in the back of her throat.
It was hard to describe what happened after that. Sometimes, she was more mind than monster. Sometimes, she was more monster than mind. That day was a monster day.
He’d lost a lot of blood by the time she found him. A frankly terrifying amount of blood. She could carry him back to the oasis, but that’d only delay the inevitable.
But sphinx knew many things that humans did not.
She carried him, and he was light in her claws. Light in the way that humans were, but some small, scared part of her brain was worried that the blood loss made him lighter still. Like a date left in the sun.
She followed the trail through the desert until she found the thieves that did this. They had his gifts and his spices. They’d have taken the clothes off his corpse if they’d been able to catch his camel.
They’d have taken his life. The one human life she’d valued in one-thousand years, and they’d have taken his life.
It was hard to hate humans. They were so small and short lived that taking them personally felt childish. But this day, she hated, and it made killing easy. Five of the six bandits were extraneous. The last, thankfully, had blood that smelled like the prince.
(He was much less thankful about this than she was).
She took them both back, the prince held gently in her front talons, the bandit half crushed in the back. The transfer spell took exactly as much as it needed. It would’ve been crueler to let the bandit suffer the same fate he’d intended to inflict on the prince - to struggle on with too little blood, until his body failed. It was tempting, but she felt a sick gratitude that he had what she’d needed when she needed it, so she made the end quick. Or, quick enough.
Thirty seconds isn’t long, but it’s an eternity when falling.
The prince recovered enough to speak after three days. He asked her to tell him riddles, and if she was as jealous of her domain as she pretended, she’d have said no. But good riddles were the tool she used to rid herself of unwanted guests, and this guest was… wanted.
So she read riddles to him for days at a time. Read all the ones she’d hoarded from scholars. Read ones she wrote herself, just for fun. She started with her best riddles because she loved his praise, but moved on to her earlier ones because what they lacked in cleverness, they made up for by being earnest.
He loved those riddles the most.
One week stretched into two. He spent his days swimming after fish, chasing after boars with spears made of stone (she hadn’t seen that in a very long time) and scurrying up the trees to pick dates. And his nights, he spent imagining riddles around a campfire.
She knew it wasn’t going to be permanent, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be beautiful. She’d outlived so many things in this world - seen rivers change courses and lakes run dry. If impermanence was a poison, then it was a poison she couldn’t avoid. There was no wall she could build to keep death at bay. She could only share her home with it and hope that one, one wonderful, far away day, that even death would die.
But that day would not be soon.
The king’s men found the oasis after a month of searching. There were no riddles this time. The prince left willingly, and the men with bronze blades stayed respectfully far from her part of the duat. It went as good as it could have gone, all things considered. If some part of her felt empty afterwards, well, maybe she just needed to eat.
Regular gifts did find her way to the duat, as thanks after that. Herds of goats were released near her borders, to hunt at her own leisure. Soft pelts from the northern lands were delivered in chests, and she luxuriated in their fluff.
Most importantly, a regular shipment of blank vellum began to make its way to the duat. She was told was explicitly that it was for her to write more riddles. And also, if she had a spare moment, she could send letters back with the vendor. The prince always made sure to send at least one out to her, and she always made sure to send one back.
She couldn’t see how humans were like this. She’d written with him six months ago! He’d been sharp as ever. Sharper, even. Time had winnowed him into a razor’s edge, and she'd been so amazed to see him change. And then he’d gotten busy, and they’d stopped writing letters for just a month, and then it was two months, and then three and now-
Now he wasn’t well.
The last letter she’d received hadn’t even been from him. It had been from his eldest brother, the reigning pharaoh. And it had broken her heart.
He was forgetting… everything. His mind was breaking. Decades of brilliance, and now he was falling apart at the seams. Some days, he didn’t even know who he was. But on the days that he did, the only thing he could talk about was going to the oasis one last time.
And his brother who had kept him close, who had been so protective of him after his near death with the bandits, had finally agreed.
He was going to be arriving any day now. The note had a sort of helpless plea attached - that he didn’t know what to do at this point, but that whatever it cost her to keep him comfortable, he would repay tenfold.
She sent a letter back saying it was a gift. She was the queen of the duat, and it pleased her to give this to her neighboring kingdom. Nevermind that her kingdom had no subjects, nevermind that she had no armies at her disposal. What she had, she could give, and this was… easy.
It made her happy to write the letter. It remind her of the first words the prince had spoken to her, all those years ago.
He arrived a few days later, escorted by fifty soldiers. She was grateful that he was in one of his lucid moments. She couldn’t imagine how it would be, to be seen and not known.
She didn’t wait for them to make it all the way to her oasis. She flew over to meet them, and then carried him back. The traditional wait was from when she thought she had time. Before she'd realized that there were ways for even an immortal to find themselves in a hurry.
He spent his first day back chasing fish, the same way he did before. The boars he left be - seventy, he insisted, was far too old to be messing with boars. And when the evening came, they gathered by a campfire to share riddles.
They went back and forth, laughing at each other's crafts. It was only after an hour of reminiscing that she actually asked him her favorite riddle, the riddle that she had permanently written in as His riddle. The one with toothless maws and meat and light in the dark, and he stared at her - not blankly, but worse, confused, because he recognized the riddle, but could no longer answer it.
She could see the distress growing in him, and it broke her heart. He hemmed and hawed, but right when he looked on the brink of giving up, he looked at the fire and started in relief.
“A campfire!” he said, and they laughed, and if he could pretend his tears were mirth and not mourning she could pretend that hers were the same.
He knew who he was, thankfully, but he didn’t remember getting there. He stumbled around almost dazed until he saw her. Then he sighed in relief.
“This is my favorite dream,” he confided in her. “I’d like to get back here for real one day - but this dream is lovely. Can you read me some more riddles? Just like last time. I've never forgotten.”
She didn’t even touch her later works. She went to her earliest ones, the easy ones, and the way he pondered minutes at a time made her stomach clench.
He woke up the next morning completely confused. She’d prepared her first riddle as
“Who sits in the sand
Beside my lair
Who swims through fish
With thin white hair
Who braved the desert and survived
Then returned home alive and thrived?”
But after several seconds of silence she couldn’t take it anymore.
“It’s you,” she said.
“Oh!” he replied, surprised.
“What do you know about this place?”, she asked, after several more long seconds of quiet.
“…Not a lot,” he admitted. “But I know I love you.”
“I love you too,” she said.
That was the only riddle she had for the day. He fell asleep in the midmorning, and she took the time to go catch a goat for them. He was still asleep when she returned and remained that way the rest of the day. She stayed awake long after sunset, watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest and praying it would never stop. She wasn’t sure when she fell asleep - she just knew that when she woke up, her prayer had gone unanswered.
The vellum vendor arrived at the start of the deep duat only to find the oasis empty. He looked for hours, but there was only a single vellum left behind in the cave. He grabbed it and read the half finished riddle.
I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.
Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.
A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made.
I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens.
Which brings me to my wife.
Before meeting my wife, I did not often go to places with crowds. I didn't really think of it as avoiding them - those places just didn't seem fun to me. But she liked those places, and I really liked her, and being with someone who really likes something can kind of sell you on liking it too, so I'd take her to places and watch her Visibly Enjoy the Fair and go: Alright. The fair is pretty sweet.
Which is a thing that happened. After fourish months of dating, I took her to the fair. And she fell very visibly in love with a large series of quilts, and she stayed near them for a while, which she thought was very embarrassing, and I got to pretend to be understanding as an outsider, because I thought it would be much more impressive than also being the type of person that would fall in love with a quilt.
Do not do this. The gods punishment for my hubris was that the room next to the quilts was full of butter sculptures, which was an entirely new thing to me, and I immediately fell embarrassingly in love with all of them. It was like the biggest, sappiest non-sexual crush you've ever had, but not only did the other person not recipropcate, they could not, because they were made of butter. I actually got yelled at for pressing my face against the glass, which is fair, but also, I hadn't realized I was pressing my face on the glass, I just started leaning forward because after approximately 30 minutes of staring wistfully at a cow made of butter my legs got tired. And I think I should be given some grace for that.
Anyway. My wife was very patient with me taking more time to look at the butter sculptures than the average person might spent at the Louvre, and she also felt much less embarrassed over falling in love with a quilt, and we had a good laugh about it on the ferris wheel.
A few weeks after that was my birthday. And I don't know what I expected, exactly - but I did not expect what she did.
Dear reader, she made me a butter sculpture. Of a duck.
She picked a duck, because our first kiss was at a Japanese friendship garden. It was our second date, and she'd made up her mind not to do any kissing until the third date, but as we sat on the grass, a duck walked past me, and I'd just seen the hold-duck-gentle-like-hamgurber meme,
so I sort of impulsively reached out and snatched it. I honestly didn't think it would work. I don't know who was more flabbergasted, me or the duck. But we looked at each other, and then I looked at her, and then she looked at the duck, and she looked so incredibly envious that I assumed that must have wanted the duck so I just handed it to her.
It turned out she was actually envious of the ability to just grab a duck as it walked by, but she accepted the duck and stroked it a few times before releasing it. (She also made up her mind to kiss me in that moment, which was very nice.)
Anyway.
She made me a butter duck of my own. Obviously, I fell in love with it immediately. I cleared out all of the freezer-portion of my mini fridge, and I put the duck in there, and for the next several months, when I felt sad, or lonely, I would open the door up and spent some quality time. Just me and my duck.
But this is, of course, not the end of the story.
Because.
After several months.
The mini fridge died.
I really didn't use it that often. It was mostly my duck storage container. But one day, I walked by it, and it struck me that it wasn't humming. So I opened the door, and it was just. Far, far too late. The duck was dead. Dead dead. Turned into a foul-smelling slime dead.
I cried. I did. After the rubber chicken thing, I thought I had changed, but I had not changed, and the unexpected death of my butter buddy left me pretty shook. I texted my then-girlfriend now-wife about how sad I was, and she actually came over to help me say goodbye. We didn't even bother scraping the duck out of the mini-fridge, we just said our goodbyes to both and threw them together in the nice dumpster behind the chapel, because it seemed appropriate to put it in God's dumpster. And it did actually help quite a bit. I certainly did not go 36 hours without eating again.
And that was, for some time, the end of the butter duck.
However. Three (or four?) years ago, for my birthday, my wife was looking around thrift stores. And she found something interesting.
The original butter duck had an odd pose. She'd sculpted it laying flat, intending to raise it up later. But the butter was less flexible than she thought, and she was afraid of cracking it so she left it down which left the duck with a very elongated, very in-motion appearance. And she found a brass statue of a duck in the same, running posture.
It wasn't the original. But it was oddly on the nose. It was a yellow brass, it had the same strange posture, the same crude little face feathers.
I think it was $3, but it remains perhaps the most thoughtful gift I have ever received. I got very choked up when I unwrapped Butter Duck, The UnDying.
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