The speed of /c/ is a wall they say. Born in ā84, genderfluid, she/they (demiĀægirl?) contains less than 8% bees. Living in Michigan. Let me know if you want a tag! I tag anything with links to people's OF with "SW" and if you're under 18 or your local areas age of majority, please filter "Minors DNI". Nothing I post will ever, EVER be explicitly sexual but this is a comfort boundary for myself. My ask box is open to any questions but I reserve the right to mercilessly mock theĀ rude. This Blog Is Anti TERF, Anti SWERF, Anti FASCIST, Anti-TRUSCUM, too. I support Jewish people and Muslims and if you are anti-semitic or islamophobic, FUCK OFF. My tumblr!fic is tagged Story Time.
https://my-store-f328a3.creator-spring.com
Oh also, new followers: I know/am friends with/follow/etc several sex workers. While my blog will always remain porn free (I cannot guarantee always SFW), if I can reblog and support sex workers and help them with their income, thatās gonna happen. Itāll be tagged āSWā and āMinors DNIā.
Over and over, sex workers say the most valuable thing you can do to help them is to help them *get paid* and trust them to know what is best for their own safety and welfare. But my blog also falls over the dash of a lot of minors, so I am doing my best to be responsible to as many people as I can simultaneously.
Itās okay to not follow if youāre uncomfortable with that. My blog will involve lots of swearing and difficult topics. I frankly trust teens to be able to navigate that. So this is a saferĀ space, not a safe space. I am asking anyone who is a minor to please blacklist Minors DNI. If you arenāt comfortable talking about sex work, please blacklist SW. If you need any tags at all, please let me know and Iāll try to be good about them.
Racism in fandom spaces is actually insanely bad and if you ever try to downplay or avoid conversations about it because "fandom is supposed to be fun" then I'm not sorry to say this: You're adding on to the problem.
If POC speaking up about a fandom's racism issue offends you more than the racism itself, you need to think about that. You need to think about how POC fighting racism offends you more than the racism.
Apathy is the death of humanity, the sibling of hatred, and the child of PRIVILEGE. It must be so nice seeing discourse about racism as an inconvenience ruining your fun. Imagine having to actually LIVE within a racist system, and see evidence perpetuating that system everywhere you go, even in fandom spaces. Imagine how inconvenienced us racial minorities are--trying to speak up about oppression & discrimination & exploitation within media projecting subliminal or explicit messages that shape and mold the minds of audiences by triggering emotional responses based on LIVED experiences & dynamics--as you and all of your supporters gaslight everyone into thinking it's no big deal, it's not that deep, it's not about race, we're just sucking the fun out of the fandom. Imagine how much fun we're having being told our feelings & struggles & lives don't matter! Gosh, ignorance sure is bliss!
i am so genuinely blinded by how attractive masc women are that i will forget that the rest of society refuses to find them sexy until they reform into femininity. you would take a carving knife to a flawless painting and claim youāre the better artist.
who on earth is out there waking up early to get shit done??? the purpose of waking up early is to have QUIET TIME LOUNGING IN BED before the world gets LOUD & ANNOYING AS FUCK
So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason weāre doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. Theyāre plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and theyāre missing it.
Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until theyāre big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when theyāre able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we donāt have a major crash in a decade or two.
The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).
The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.
But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who havenāt settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely donāt even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldnāt have been there otherwise.
The first time I traveled to Tucson I was in a car full of zooted children. I would've preferred being one of those children, but alas, any medication that makes me sleep also makes me sleepwalk. And after an incident where I tried to climb out of the car while it was still going sixty (thank God for seatbelts), I was condemned to a childhood of car trip sobriety: No more poor-man's time travel. No more ambien. One less morally ambiguawesome parenting decision from my crazy-ass dad.
I was talking with him when it happened.
I can't remember exactly what we were talking about - something to do with our final destination in Mexico. But at some point, we woke up my little brother.Ā
(Nothing good happens from waking the dreamer. Best case scenario, the dream ends. Worst case, it doesn't.)
I remember starting when I felt one of his small cold hands reach up to grab my shoulder. Our dad did the same, and it jerked the car a little bit - startling someone whose hands are on the steering wheel has its risks. Dad and I both turned to look at him, but he wasn't even looking at us. He was leaning over the console, staring into the red and purple sunset ahead, watching the rolling skyline of Tucson like it was drowning in dreams. Like he was drowning in dreams.Ā
We waited for him to speak. It took a while. Normal social conventions don't apply to people when they're unconscious. The fact that he could talk was just some broken line code in the fabric of the world.Ā
"Wow," he said at long last.Ā
"Beautiful, isn't it?" my dad replied. And my little brother shook his head like he just heard the silliest thing in the world.Ā
"It's terrible," he said. "Awful. Is Mexico always like this?"Ā
"We're still in America," my dad said back.Ā
My little brother squinted into the sunset, doubt and derision etched into his face. After a few seconds, both emotions softened, and he nodded in wonder.Ā
"Eagle feathers," he said, chuckling softly. Like he'd just solved some clever little riddle. Then he fell like an angel into something deeper than sleep.Ā
ššš
(There is a word for angels that fall.)
ššš
The second time I went to Tucson, I hid from the sun.Ā
You'd be surprised how easy it is to do down there. Society accommodates it in ways you just won't find anywhere else. When it's 109 outside with single digit humidity, of course you stay indoors. Of course the outdoor markets open at 6 pm, and of course they don't close until 11. Of course. You make the sun mean enough, and everyone becomes a vampire.Ā
So I roamed the streets at night, kicking up red gravel, watching coyotes wander in between the sea of strip malls. Strip malls are such an Arizonan atrocity. Nobody bothers to build up because thereās nothing to be gained from density. The city will never be walkable, because the problem isnāt infrastructure. It's the sun. And you can't solve the sun, so you might as well lean into driving. Mash the whole city flat and crawl through the dust like rattlers.Ā
(I met a man once, by the canals, that said the strip malls were some sort of American curse upon the inheritors of Johnny Appleseed. There's one God in this world, he said, and it's the god of don't-eat-apples. But then we invented apple pie and gave it to everyone. So this is our hell.)
Still. It made the days long down there. Lurking at night and hiding all day gives you something like cabin fever. I needed something to do outside. Something that was outside, but also, somehow, inside. What's inside and outside at the same time? What kind of klein-flask ouroboros nonsense fits that bill?
Kartchner caverns.Ā
ššš
I wouldn't say the caves were like walking into Dante's hell - more like finishing the journey. At some point in my life, I'd blown past limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, and anger. I'd spent two decades plus change living in the fires of heresy. Every layer past would only get colder.Ā
And each step into that cave did.Ā
My tour guide and psychopomp was a friendly old man. Familiar in the way that all old people feel familiar to me. I view the world more as a pile of metaphors. He viewed it primarily as water-soluble minerals.Ā
It was a good work dynamic.Ā
"These here," he said, gesturing to a long, slender series of impossibly frail stalactites, "are called soda straws."
They were beautiful. I can wax poetic at the keyboard, but in real life, my exclamation of wonder is primarily Hot Damn.
"Hot damn," I said, and he nodded good naturedly.Ā
"They're pretty fun aren't they? Took a few eons to make 'em but I think it was worth the wait."
I was charmed by the way he talked. I knew it was just a fluke of tenses, but there was something funny about the way he described them - as if he personally oversaw each of the dainty little spires. We went further, and he pointed out more formations as we came across them.Ā
"Behold!" he said just a few feet further. "Fried eggs!"Ā
And I had to admit: There were fried eggs.Ā
"Behold!" he said further still. "A shield!"
And lo, there was a shield. It didn't look terribly shieldlike, but who knows - maybe he made the shields first and got better as he went along. The eggs were beautiful.
We kept walking, deeper, and deeper into the cave. At the surface, it had been hot enough for my sweat to dry into a stinging white powder. Down there it was cold enough to see my breath. The feeling of descending into hell was replaced with the feeling of being swallowed by some ancient, fossilized snake.Ā
"We call this serpent-stone," he said, gesturing to an expanse of wall.Ā
And then all I could see was the snake that was swallowing me.Ā
Now, I want to bring something up right about now. At this point, you might be tempted to write off the unease that I was feeling as claustrophobia. Which would make sense - caves unsettle a lot of people. But not me. I'm borderline claustrophilic. When I was a child, I didn't feel comfortable reading until I was wedged somewhere. Behind a shelf, or in a cabinet, or even underneath the beanbag my parents had intended for sitting. Those were my happy places. I liked being crammed into tight spaces.Ā
I did not like that cave.Ā
The section of serpent-stone narrowed the further we went. The room started off maybe six feet wide, but eventually it narrowed down. First to five, then four, then three. Two. And it didnāt stop at one.Ā
The old man put me in front at that point. Said that if I got stuck, he could just push me forward. Didn't occur to me until I'd gone another hundred feet forward, sideways, that maybe getting dragged out would be better. But I was strangely reluctant to bring it up. Iād already let myself get cornered. There was nothing to be gained from letting him know my thoughts.Ā
But the only way to keep them secret was by going forward. So I poured myself through the crack, slick as slip.Ā Ā
There's a grain to the scales of serpent-stone, both in the shape of the formations and in the texture of the individual pieces. They're metamorphic, but there's enough sediment left to āem that they have a grain. They bite when you go one way, and slide when you go the other. It felt like I was ratcheting myself in. Even if I could slip forward more, I didn't think I could go back. Not without wearing myself down into something skinless and screaming.Ā
Water began to pool up in sections. It was cold enough to avoid the stink that still waters normally carry, but things stranger than algae festered in the waters beneath my feet. The puddles felt thick, almost slimy. A dozen steps later I saw little ropes of the stuff trickling down my feet.Ā
Eventually, it got so narrow I couldn't turn my head. I could still hear the old man behind me, but only through little things - the occasional sharp inhale, or steps just an eighth of a beat off from my own. But never words. I remember stopping at one point, just to get pushed, just to know he was there. And he refused. All I heard for fifteen minutes was his breathing behind me.Ā
He'd called my bluff. There was nowhere to go but forward.Ā
ššš
I don't know why it took so long to get dark down there. I wasn't carrying a flashlight, and if the old man had been carrying one, I'd have seen it bob with his steps. There was a sort of soft glow to everything but that had faded hour by hour. Eventually it didn't matter that I couldn't turn my head sideways - I wouldn't have been able to see the man if he'd been two inches in front of me. I walked, and I walked, and I walked, and just when I was about to get stuck for real - stuck in a way where I wouldn't be able to step forward, where I'd have to be pushed (or dragged back along the sharpness of the scales) - I popped out of the serpent stone crevasse like a cork from a bottle.Ā
Plunk.Ā
I can't tell you the relief that I felt at that moment. It didn't matter that I didn't know where I was, or how I got there. I'd never been claustrophobic in my life, but at that moment, I couldn't stand even the proximity of the crevice. I scrambled forward, stumbling over the rough cave floor, desperate and eager to find the next wall. To get some sense of where I was.Ā
I never did. Even as I calmed down, even as the relief of being free of that infernal vice sat upon me like a crown, I never found another wall. Anywhere. I walked until fear made me crawl, as low and blind as any worm. I crawled until my pants tore and my knees bled and my spine ached.Ā
And I found nothing.Ā
When the vastness of the space truly sank in, when I realized that leaving that first wall had been a mistake, I turned back. But some choices can't be unmade. There were no walls. Not anymore. No matter how far I crawled, how hard I tried, there was no end. There was nothing but perfect darkness, broken stone, and endless snaking trickles of cold cavern water.Ā
I dipped a finger in one of the rivulets. Just to feel it. Just to ground myself in something. I felt the waters slither past, and I found something like sight in their motion.Ā
Water always goes down. Whatever else I lacked down here in the stone, in that moment, I knew up and down. And for the first time in hours, I had a choice. A real choice. No instinct or panic or too late realizations: Up or down.Ā
I went down.Ā
ššš
Iād visited a rope factory once. Watched the threads dance and spin and weave into something mighty. I got a blind manās sense of that from my trickle. I felt it meet more of its kind, braiding into them like thread. I liked pretending it was still my rivulet, but eventually, I had to admit it was lost in the mess. Picking out one thread from a rope would be easy, compared to picking out one trickle from a river.Ā
Funny how water can drown in itself.Ā
The first contaminant to the water was iron. I could smell it in the air -Ā strong as blood. It should have unsettled me, but Iād smelled water like that before. My grandpas well-water stained everything it touched rusty red. His sinks, his showers, his fields. Even his teeth. He was wealthy enough that he could've wiped the stains off decades back, but he told me once that he liked the way it made other people uncomfortable. The way it reminded everyone who saw him smile that by sacrament or soil, they too drank of god.Ā
The next contaminant was the thick water from before. Apparently, the stagnant pools werenāt as still as Iād thought. Somehow, over strange eons, they too could seep through the stone and make their way into this deep river. It was scentless, but I could feel it catch around my ankles on some steps. It seemed like a memory from a different life. I just didnāt feel like the same person that crawled through the serpent-stone crack. I was just some stranger wearing his shed skin.Ā
Then at long last came a smell of deep sulphur š. It was an odd contrast with the sharply cold air, and the strangely warm waters. It was the least pleasant of the bunch, but I endured it well. I followed until the tears streaming down my cheeks felt as normal as breathing. Until the rush of the river was replaced by the pounding of waves.Ā
Iād arrived on a beach. I couldnāt see the ocean in front of me, but I could hear how vast it had to be. There was a terrible stench, worse than the sulphur - the smell of some vast death. Godly carrion. A wound in the world long left to fester.Ā
I sat there on the beach of that ocean. Afraid to let those dark waters touch me. Thinking and waiting and worrying about what would happen next.Ā
A voice spoke just twenty feet behind me. I recognized it. I never wouldāve recognized it before, but there was a knack to the way this place wore me thin. Like a razor getting sharpened instead of a shirt going ratty.Ā
āYouāre very close,ā the old man said, and I remembered him from all those years ago - sitting cross-legged in the moonlight by the bank of the canal. Looking up at me, eyes dark, and calling me over to tell me a secret.Ā
There's one God in this world, he said then. One God. And it's the god of don't-eat-apples. But then we invented apple pie and gave it to everyone.Ā
So this is our hell.
ššš
I turned around. I donāt know why. I shouldnāt have been able to see him. I shouldnāt have been able to see anything. But I could see the outline of where he was on that shoreline. Not as aĀ bright thing, but as a darker shade of absence. A little hole in the dark.Ā
I could have run. But that wouldāve required taking my eyes off him, and at that moment I couldnāt bear the thought. He was the only thing to see down there. The only reason I had eyes. But somehow, more important than the joy of seeing was the feeling that as long as I kept my eyes on him, he was trapped. Pinned to this world like a butterfly on cork.Ā
There was a half second pause. The voice was a memory, but seeing through the gaps was new to me. The thing in front of me wasnāt an old man. It wasnāt even good at pretending. I was oddly embarrassed that Iād ever been fooled by it. What I was looking at was something older than this cave. Something trapped down here so long it could not bear the thought of light. The dream of something dead. The sloughed skin of a snake.Ā
The first apple eater.Ā
I could see shades of absence. More than the hole in the dark. I could look at the thing and feel the place where its wings should have been. Its first ones, at least.Ā
It lunged for me.Ā
Iād forgotten it could do that.Ā
It slammed into me like the water from the bottom of a dam. The power was nothing compared to the cold. I couldnāt see a thing, but what I could feel made bile climb up my throat.Ā
It was melting. Running down itself in little streams, like snow melting in the sun. Like the river I followed all the way down here. A hand ran over my face and I could feel it pouring into me, and in my fury I did the only thing I could think of: I reached up, and I wrapped my hands around its neck, and I clenched so hard that I could feel the tendons in my wrist sawing up through my skin, taut as piano wire.Ā
It was like squeezing wet clay. It deformed under my touch, stretching longer and thinner and smoother even as the muscular length of his impossibly long body wrapped around me. At some point the fists beating on my chest turned into wings. Stolen wings, to replace the ones that were stolen from it, and there was a scream in the cave it was so awful that I prayed it wasnāt mine.Ā
It was a terrible race. We were killing each other the same way. There was no question about someone dying here in front of the empty throne of god. I just didnāt want it to be me.Ā
Eventually, it could stretch no more, and my hands could crush more than just nightmare and shadow. The wings beat on me weaker, and weaker, until eventually some cartilage in its great neck snapped under the pressure of my thumbs.
It was like cracking a glow stick. There was a flash of light, brief as thunder, and I could see the waves in front of me. An ocean of rotting meat and bones. The outline of some great, dead serpent, fifty feet tall. And a tower of dead bodies, stretching back to ages that I could not recognize. The only corpses I could recognize were those at the top, with their strange helmets and iconic breastplates.Ā
Conquistadors.Ā
When the light went out, the body went with it. Most dreams donāt leave anything behind. Even when theyāre made by gods.Ā
ššš
I donāt know how I left the cave.Ā
I followed the river up. At some point, it stopped being the river I followed down. The tributaries feeding into it spread out like a fan, and fool that I am, I kept picking left. It shouldnāt have worked. Part of me wonders if I somehow bent the river to my will. Filled in for the dead thing bobbing in the lake, or the echo that I strangled on that starless shore.Ā
Or maybe I just got lucky.Ā
I can remember finally breaching the incline and seeing an exit into the desert. Not the one I stepped in through, but good enough. I can remember getting closer and closer, before stepping out into the burning sun. I thought it was finally over.
I thought wrong.Ā Ā
I can remember looking into the bright blue sky and seeing exactly what my little brother saw on that drive all those years back.Ā
I donāt know what I killed down in the cave. Some dead thing in the dark, dreaming it was alive. An altar of blood and bone, designed to hold a fragment.Ā
But the real thing sat there in the sky. Curled up so tight and so smooth, you could mistake it for a ball. Waiting, and watching, and hating. Alive but dreaming death. The mould that stamped out the form of what lay in the cave.Ā
Quetzalcoatl, I learned later. The feathered serpent.Ā
I moved the month after that. Went somewhere north, somewhere cold, somewhere that a snake wouldnāt follow. Most days now, I look up, and I just see the sun. A flaming ball of gas. A little, red, star.Ā
But only most.
ššš
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š³
Thanks to @qsatisfaction and @foldingfittedsheets for being my editors on this piece. And thanks to @dr-robert-chase-apologist for providing the prompt.
I think "fuck you, I hate your work and I will do it myself and I will do it better" is a really funny and epic sentiment. i started publishing poetry because an ex boyfriend of mine was publishing really ass poetry in a bunch of journals and I was like "Jesus christ, this is garbage, I could do that, and I could do it better." now I have a page in the Academy of American Poets and I've published a full length collection and his website says "former poet." You should win by succeeding way harder than they do. Spite is a legitimate energy source.
