shut up gray

embarrassing sideblog for saying words and reblogging things. view creative content on tumblr at cineresis or on AO3 at Gray_Days. I accept fic and essay prompts for when I have the inspiration and energy to fill them! Ask me about DC's Crime Syndicate/Earth-3 universe or check out my writing meme tag for ideas. You can find past responses and prompt fills, as well as other original posts, under the tag for $8000 a month i will stop. if you came here because of the fanfic alignments post, there's a tag.

[prokopetz]

Look, I get what you're saying, but sometimes you've gotta reach for the low-hanging fruit. Let's get you a proper meal, refill your meds, and unfuck your living space as best we're able; if after that you still want cute girls to kill you with axes, you'll be in a much better physical and mental place to pursue that goal.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Writing advice #?: Have your characters wash the dishes while they talk.

This is one of my favorite tricks, picked up from E.M. Forester and filtered through my own domestic-homebody lens.  Forester says that you should never ever tell us how a character feels; instead, show us what those emotions are doing to a character’s posture and tone and expression.  This makes “I felt sadness” into “my shoulders hunched and I sighed heavily, staring at the ground as my eyes filled with tears.”  Those emotions-as-motions are called objective correlatives.  Honestly, fic writers have gotten the memo on objective correlatives, but sometimes struggle with how to use them.

Objective correlatives can quickly become a) repetitive or b) melodramatic.  On the repetitive end, long scenes of dialogue can quickly turn into “he sighed” and “she nodded” so many times that he starts to feel like a window fan and she like a bobblehead.  On the melodramatic end, a debate about where to eat dinner can start to feel like an episode of Jerry Springer because “he shrieked” while “she clenched her fists” and they both “ground their teeth.”  If you leave the objective correlatives out entirely, then you have what’s known as “floating” dialogue — we get the words themselves but no idea how they’re being said, and feel completely disconnected from the scene.  If you try to get meaning across by telling us the characters’ thoughts instead, this quickly drifts into purple prose.

Instead, have them wash the dishes while they talk.

To be clear: it doesn’t have to be dishes.  They could be folding laundry or sweeping the floor or cooking a meal or making a bed or changing a lightbulb.  The point is to engage your characters in some meaningless, everyday household task that does not directly relate to the subject of the conversation.

This trick gives you a whole wealth of objective correlatives.  If your character is angry, then the way they scrub a bowl will be very different from how they’ll be scrubbing while happy.  If your character is taking a moment to think, then they might splash suds around for a few seconds.  A character who is not that invested in the conversation will be looking at the sink not paying much attention.  A character moderately invested will be looking at the speaker while continuing to scrub a pot.  If the character is suddenly very invested in the conversation, you can convey this by having them set the pot down entirely and give their full attention to the speaker.

A demonstration:

1

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

“What?”  Drizella continued dropping forks into the dishwasher.

2

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

Drizella paused midway through slotting a fork into the dishwasher.  “What?”

3

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

Drizella laughed, not looking up from where she was arranging forks in the dishwasher.  “What?”

4

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

The forks slipped out of Drizella’s hand and clattered onto the floor of the dishwasher.  “What?”

5

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

“What?”  Drizella shoved several forks into the dishwasher with unnecessary force, not seeming to notice when several bounced back out of the silverware rack.

See how cheaply and easily we can get across Drizella’s five different emotions about Anastasia leaving, all by telling the reader how she’s doing the dishes?  And all the while no heads were nodded, no teeth were clenched.

The reason I recommend having it be one of these boring domestic chores instead of, say, scaling a building or picking a lock, is that chores add a sense of realism and are low-stakes enough not to be distracting.  If you add a concurrent task that’s high-stakes, then potentially your readers are going to be so focused on the question of whether your characters will pick the lock in time that they don’t catch the dialogue.  But no one’s going to be on the edge of their seat wondering whether Drizella’s going to have enough clean forks for tomorrow.

And chores are a cheap-n-easy way to add a lot of realism to your story.  So much of the appeal of contemporary superhero stories comes from Spider-Man having to wash his costume in a Queens laundromat or Green Arrow cheating at darts, because those details are fun and interesting and make a story feel “real.”  Actually ask the question of what dishes or clothing or furniture your character owns and how often that stuff gets washed.  That’s how you avoid reality-breaking continuity errors like stating in Chapter 3 that all of your character’s worldly possessions fit in a single backpack and in Chapter 7 having your character find a pair of pants he forgot he owns.  You don’t have to tell the reader what dishes your character owns (please don’t; it’s already bad enough when Tolkien does it) but you should ideally know for yourself.

Anyway: objective correlatives are your friends.  They get emotion across, but for low-energy scenes can become repetitive and for high-energy scenes can become melodramatic.  The solution is to give your characters something relatively mundane to do while the conversation is going on, and domestic chores are not a bad starting place.

[porcupine-girl]

I actually first learned this lesson when doing improv. Always have your character doing something, but don’t make the scene about what your character is doing. Come in and start putting groceries away and confront your roommate about sleeping with your boyfriend while you’re putting the groceries away. Be working in a clothes store folding shirts and be reunited with your long-lost cousin while working. Etc etc.

And then much later (partially bc I started writing regularly years after I started doing improv but even then it took me way too long to figure it out) I realized this can be applied to writing, and it’s great. Anytime there’s a long dialogue scene and it feels flat, rewriting it so they’re doing something else - something that on the surface is totally unrelated to the conversation - is a sure-fire way to make it more dynamic and open up whole new avenues for conveying thoughts and feelings to the reader.

[adubioussoul]

We learned this in my comic mfa program as well. Comics are a showing over telling medium but sometimes you have to do a “talking heads” section where it is just characters talking at length and having your characters doing an activity makes the panels you draw more engaging. It gives you more options for framing things as well.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Any advice for writing host centered fics? Like how would one write trauma? Consent stuff? Any resources would be fun if you have nothing to say on the matter. Love your blog btw <3

I feel like this is the kind of topic that it is not really possible to be an expert in — other than through reading Animorphs, which I assume you've already done. However, some resources I found useful when writing Eleutherophobia:

Writing Relevant Tropes

Trope Talk — Mind Control. Does a great job of breaking out the different types of mind control, including the complex questions of agency raised by each one.

The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth. A somewhat dry read, not gonna lie, but extremely good for explaining how to make conscious choices about narrative voice.

dub-con, non-con, trigger warnings and you: a post about how not to do it wrong. The best breakdown I've ever seen about how consent works in fiction and why it matters.

Nonfiction and Memoir

Spoon Theory by ButYouDontLookSick. Super relevant for explaining invisible disability and the difficulties of communicating about it.

Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius. Memoir by a man who spent his adolescence with "locked-in syndrome," which prevented any movement or communication.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. One of the funniest and most relatable memoirs about writing and perfectionism I've ever read.

Psychology

Human Subjects Research Training by CITI. The formal training all psychologists complete about, among other things, the definition of consent and the power dynamics that complicate it.

Frontiers in Psychology: Kids. A great open-access peer-reviewed journal that's all about making topics like synaptic pruning accessible for a non-expert audience — as proof of concept, every article has to be approved by a child before publication.

The Burden of Stigma on Health and Well-Being: A Taxonomy of Concealment, Course, Disruptiveness, Aesthetics, Origin, and Peril Across 93 Stigmas by John E. Pachankis, Mark L. Hatzenbuehler, Katie Wang, Charles L. Burton, Forrest W. Crawford, Jo C. Phelan, & Bruce G. Link. It's less accessible (in case the title didn't make that obvious) but also a super-interesting resource about the universals and specifics of stigma, from anti-childlessness to ageism and everything in between.

Fiction and Fan Fiction

The Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail by Owlet. One of the best uses of experimental writing techniques I have ever seen, specifically focused on agency and recovering from mind control.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer. A romantic adventure story built around proving that consent is sexy, even between a human and a mind-controlling alien.

City of Lies and Hollow Empire by Sam Hawke. An epic fantasy series whose protagonists both have invisible disabilities, with some of the best plotting I've ever read.

Animorphs-Specific Research

The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. Remember the Enron scandal? Remember how the specific culture of turn-of-the-millennium California helped give rise to the Enron scandal? If you don't, this has all the dirty details.

Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member by Sanyika Shakur. This one is obviously about a very different subset of a similar time and place, but it's also a shockingly frank account of what it's like to be a 14-year-old American caught up in a war.

The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris. In case you were wondering, there's a ton of science to back up the "your friends make you who you are" truism.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Adding more that I've read since then:

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman. It's got excellent sociological analysis of how various political, pop cultural, and economic forces converged to make U.S. 1990s culture (especially west coast U.S. 1990s culture) what it was.

The Nest by Kenneth Oppel. Anyone who thinks that "fantasy for 8-to-12-year-olds" and "graphic horror novel that grapples with moral dilemmas around mortality" are mutually exclusive genres has not read this one.

An Immense World by Ed Yong. Does its best to answer the question "what's it like to be a bat, from the bat's point of view?" as scientifically as possible, with many many animals other than bats.

Endling, Wishtree, Crenshaw, Willodeen, Odder, and Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate. The more you come to understand KAA's politics, the more they shine through in Animorphs: she really is that radically anti-racist, anti-classist, pro-environment, anti-capitalist.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer is a biologist who went into the field to understand what makes certain plants beautiful together, and she expands on that perspective all throughout this book. Her stance on ecology is unapologetically emotional, personal, holistic, and spiritual.

[prokopetz]

A problem with the whole Important Queer Media™ discourse is that a lot of folks don't seem to be able to parse "Important" as anything other than a moral judgment, and it's really not. Art is a dialogue. All works are in conversation with other works, and sometimes, works that have merit are deeply in conversation with works that suck. Acting like we can't talk about the latter at all is essentially demanding that we imagine an alternative universe in which those works weren't part of the conversation, yet somehow we ended up in the same place – and while alt-history may be a fun intellectual exercise, it's not a great critical lens.

[ravabiye]

I would apply this to people celebrating certain works as well as criticizing them—to pick an easy example, many people seem convinced that because rocky horror is important historical queer media, there's Nothing Wrong With It and anyone who's bothered by its transmisogyny is just a puritanical whiner. if you refuse to apply critical lenses even to stuff you like and its inspirations, you rob yourself of the ability to understand how bigotry is perpetuated.

[blinkees]

updated the character limit on the blinkie maker! previously 15 characters, you can now attempt to cram a whopping 25 characters on your blinkies!! certain fonts and font sizes WILL cut off. use your best judgement ok?

[fasciation-fascination]

perfect

[muzaktomyears]

no context beatles books

[wildehacked]

things in fic I'm used to people kind of faking their way through writing about:

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

what french toast is

[headspace-hotel]

read through the notes on this one trust me

[kiragecko]

Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

ANIMALS:

catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear

piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave

pluto-lichen: horses

misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like

pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially

SEX:

dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.

dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”

SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:

thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad

shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze

sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon

alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices

dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.

the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes

typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy

draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices

11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note

fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is

emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣

NON-FOOD STUFF:

red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.

bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket

nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English

sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp

danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author

meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does

vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'

leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake

fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?

dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic

msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate

shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September

baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird

twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)

waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up

violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours

purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.

[risingoflights]

these are great

i don't read a lot of fic anymore but i'm forever thinking about stephen king's 'it' where the characters went into a chinese restaurant and were greeted by a waitress wearing a kimono

[pillsopa]

it looks like we’ve made it to the end

[bideogaymes]

one thing about me is i love me some Black Detroit Ballroom & Swing! you always see Black dance couples of all different sizes and shapes just getting down and grooving, i love it.

i really became my ol folks as i get older and i aint mad it, lmao.

[literary-sparks]

“Why don’t you use ai” idk man beyond the obvious environmental and “this machine causes psychosis and encourages people to kill themselves” thing I think asking the equivalent of a solid D student who is also a pathological liar if they can answer my question/do the work for me seems pretty fucking stupid

[qwiddit]

[partlymadeofgold]

This map was designed by Kenyan artist Priya Shah.

You can read about it here: https://minds-africa.org/fabric-map-of-africa-the-art-of-storytelling/

and buy copies of the map here: https://www.miakora.com/fabric-map-of-africa

[awritersrejections]

saw your tags @did-sm1-say-catfish and yes, that link is broken! I looked into it, and it's because there are now multiple maps, including a map of India—

Here's a new link for purchasing purposes

[viralfrog]

[dragongirlbunny]

[sophisticationsequels]

Credits:

Endorse 082184001125

[loki-zen]

has anyone considered that it was probably her house too. where else was she supposed to put her chintz?

[polytropic-liar]

I like this question because I think it really gets at the power dynamics at the center of the poem!

The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.

This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.

The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.

There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.

Noting that "to keep it real" is AAVE, we can also introduce race as a potential lens; is the narrator, despite their dominant language, subordinated based on race in this dynamic? Is the narrator not just claiming a dominant role, but perhaps also stereotyped and limited into it as a Black person? Is the disdain of the chintz also an expression of class difference, of a rejection of the display of white wealth on the part of the wife? This is pretty speculative, of course: the use of AAVE could also be appropriative, which would suggest another tactic by the narrator to lay claim to masculinity and toughness, since non-Black people often use AAVE to try to invoke racist stereotypes of strength, violence and resilience.

I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?

Great poem, great discussion question, love everyone in this bar <3

[goslinggf]

"girl dinner" "boy kibble" can y'all just eat a meal gender neutrally

[goslinggf]

gender neutrients

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[ladyshinga]

Updated version of Boy Who Cried Wolf but there are actual wolves every single time and no one ever believes the boy - they get closer and closer every time he tries to warn them, until it's too late and the whole town screams at the boy for not warning them "enough", and blame him for the wolves at their door.

[flashysparklesonthewater]

Once upon a time, there was a boy who said, "Hey, guys? This is a big wide mixed meadow and woodland with a river in it."

"Yeah, isn't it great?" said his companions. "It'll be awesome for the sheep once we get the village built."

"Don't you think this looks like a spot where wolves would wait in the trees to ambush animals that come down to eat the grass and drink the water?"

"Dude," said his companion, taking the boy aside by his elbow. "Cut the wolf talk, alright? You're gonna freak everybody out and they're not gonna want to settle in this obviously fruitful place. This will be good for us, so don't mess it up. Tell you what," the companion added, tone turning placating. "If we see wolf sign around, then we'll worry about it. Okay?"

Once upon a time, there was a boy who brought the gnawed skeleton of a deer to the campfire. "Look at this," he said.

"What the hell?" The other settlers were tired after the day's construction, and grouchy at having their dinner interrupted. "Why would you drag that nasty thing into our campfire circle? Nobody needs to see that! We're trying to eat here!"

"This is proof that wolves hunt here," said the boy.

"It's a health hazard, is what it is. Get that shit out of here."

The boy pointed stubbornly to the bones. "Look at the marks here and here. Those are teeth marks. You can see how wide the jaws were."

"That could have been anything," said one settler.

"Yeah. Or it could be old," said another.

"I don't even see what you're talking about," said a third.

"Yeah," they all said. "Those don't even look like tooth marks to me. Those could have been made by rocks, or birds pecking. You're worrying about nothing."

Once upon a time, there was a boy who led his reluctant neighbors to the riverbank. They picked their way through the mud, grimacing, until the boy stopped and gestured at the ground.

"What am I supposed to be looking at?" said one villager.

The boy said, "It's a footprint." He pointed. "And here's another and another. Lots more."

"Lots of animals leave footprints," said the second villager. "Doesn't mean they're wolves."

"You guys told me specifically to watch out for wolves and signs that wolves are around," said the boy. "I went and studied the tracks and sign of every animal around here, under the best trackers and trappers, because you asked me to. This is wolf."

"Yeah, but," the third villager said. "Listen, kid. We can't just go running off on a wolf hunt with only circumstantial stuff. It's lambing season. I've been awake for nineteen hours. I left my boys fixing that hole in the fence so the ram can't get stuck in it again. I'm already behind schedule, and I took time out of it to come look at some mud."

The other villagers nodded. "Yeah," they said. "Yeah, we're busy working hard. We can't be dropping everything every time you see a shadow. You better have something real the next time you raise this kind of alarm."

Once upon a time, a boy awoke a sleeping village.

"What do you want?" they grouched.

"Do you hear that?" the boy said.

The villagers listened for a moment. In the middle distance, an eerie howling rose, held, and fell, only to be picked up by another and another.

"That's disturbing," said one.

"What do you think it is?" asked another.

The boy pointed to a pattern of prints outside the village gate. "That's wolf," he said. The pointing finger moved along the line of the fence. "That's wolf spoor," he said. He raised the finger to the sky. "That howling? It's wolves." He led them to a place where dirt had been clawed out from under the fence. "I came and woke you all up because I found a wolf digging under our fence. Here's a tuft of its hair. Here's where I hit it with my knife and shed its blood. If you get close to the fence, you can smell its musk. There are wolves in this valley, just like I've said from the beginning, and they're getting closer to the village sheep."

The villagers looked at the tracks. They looked at the scratches and the fur. They wrinkled their nose at the spoor. "Gross," one said.

Finally, from the middle of the group someone muttered, "Well it's not here anymore, is it?"

The others made 'good point' faces and murmered along.

"I mean. Crisis averted, right?" the speaker continued. "Nobody's sheep actually got got, right?"

"Yeah, because I was here watching and chased the wolf away," the boy began.

The speaker gave an apologetic grimace. "I don't know, bud," he said. "I've never seen one of these wolves with my own eyes."

"Yeah," said another. "No offense, but you are our wolf watchman. So you'd have an incentive to maintain the narrative that wolves are at our doorstep."

"What? But they are!" The boy gestured at the dig site. "You told me to watch for wolves. You sent me to be trained to track wolves so we'd all know I wasn't imagining or misinterpreting things. You asked me to stay up at night to watch for wolves, and now that I've seen one and chased it off, you don't believe me?"

"Hey, we're just saying none of us have ever actually seen a wolf," said one of the villagers. "Only you. And you do objectively have a bias towards wolf-spotting."

Once upon a time, a boy sprinted screaming across a pasture. He held his sword two-handed, braced against his side. The blade was deckled with crimson. Ahead of him a shadowy hackled body lurched and limped, yelping. In the wake of the two figures, a ewe lay dying, crashed to her knees but still holding her heaving body between the retreating predator and her lamb.

"Holy shit!" their shepherd hollered, running up to his animals. "My sheep! What the hell? I thought we were supposed to be safe from attacks here!"

The boy stumbled to a halt, unable to catch up to his nemesis. He panted, staring after it into the trees.

"Yeah, what the hell?" the other villagers agreed, gathering around the stricken sheep. "Look at this! Are you kidding me? What do we keep you around for, man?"

Wearily, the boy trudged back to the little group. He swayed as he walked. The sword was chipped, the grip worn. He wondered when he could have last been truly called a boy.

"This is the fourth attack this week," he told them.

"Yeah, buddy, it sure fuckin' is!" The villagers surrounded him, red-faced. "We can't keep losing sheep like this! This is unacceptable!"

"It was wolves again," he said.

The villagers threw hands in the air or rolled their eyes. "Oh, give us a break. Always wolves with you."

The boy stared back at them. "Okay, so what do you think it was? It had four legs, right?"

"Obviously. We all saw that," said one.

"And it was hairy?"

"Don't be insulting," said another. "You could see the hair a mile away."

"Big teeth?" the boy asked, gesturing at the lamb's wounds.

"Well it didn't kill it with a hammer," the shepherd said caustically.

"These tracks," the boy said. "Canine, would you say? And these clumps of fur, are they thick and grey?"

The group scoffed and chorused variations on "duh."

The boy looked around at them all. "So all that adds up to...?"

"Lost revenue," the shepherd said loudly. "I can't afford another one like this. Hell, I can't afford this one."

"But what was the animal that dug under your fence to sneak into your pasture to kill your sheep, that we all saw, that had four legs and thick gray hair and had big teeth and left canine prints?"

One of the villagers clapped a weighty hand onto the boy's shoulder. "Kid," he said, "that ain't nobody's job but yours."

"It was a wolf! The last three times were all wolves! It's always been wolves! I've been showing them to you for years! I am your wolf watchman and I am telling you right now that wolves keep getting in here to kill the village sheep, because none of you are listening to me!"

The villagers straightened, drew together. Faces hardened. "Don't you dare take that disrespectful tone with me, boy," said the one who felt he was owed the most deference. "If you want listening, you ain't gonna get it by ranting and shouting."

Once upon a time, a boy stared from the grinning faces of his neighbors, to the animals panting alongside them, and back to the neighbors.

"They're going to protect our sheep," said one of the townspeople.

"Yeah. Fight fire with fire," said another.

The boy found his voice. "You're going to put wolves... in your flocks... on purpose?"

"Hey now, these are different. They're our wolves."

The other shepherds nodded and said things like "Yeah!" and "Our wolves!" One of the wolves was staring, drooling, at a young ewe.

"How do you know they won't, oh I don't know, just eat all your sheep the second you turn your back? As a random, non-specific example?" the boy asked them.

"They're not for eating sheep, they're for defending them," said one. "Totally different."

The boy raked his fingers through his hair. "How are these different, exactly?"

"Well, we're using them, obviously," said the first villager who had spoken. "They're totally legal. The mayor got the council to write it into the town charter. Every shepherd has the right to protect his flock."

One of the wolves was stretching its jaws wide, seeing if it could fit them around the head of a lamb. It noticed the boy watching and hesitated.

"Are you guys seeing what that wolf is doing right now?" the boy said, pointing at it.

The wolf made a split-second decision. The jaws snapped shut and it dragged the lamb away, behind its shepherd's house.

"What the hell!" The boy looked back up at the shepherd's face. "It literally just snatched that lamb out from under your nose! It did it in front of everybody!"

Another shepherd patted the shoulder of the one who had just lost the lamb. "Tragic," he said. "It always hurts, losing a lamb. I'll pray for you."

"What do you mean, pray?" The boy drew his arm back and pointed even harder in the direction the wolf had vanished, as if by gesturing violently enough he could make them react. "The wolf is right over there! We could go chase it or kill it!"

"Whoa there, son," said the prayerful shepherd. "Just because tragedy's hit us today doesn't mean you can just take away our sheepdogs."

"They're not sheepdogs! Who told you they were sheepdogs?"

"Dude, I thought you would be on board with us protecting our sheep from wolves," said another townsperson. "There's no need to slander the business who hired them out to us."

"Which business?" the boy demanded.

"Wolves R Us." The townsperson raised both hands in a placating gesture. "I know how it sounds, but the guy who runs it is totally legit."

The boy strode up to the speaker. "Who? Who runs it?"

"Chill out, dude. It's the mayor."

Once upon a time, a boy fell against the double doors of the town hall, shoving them open. Dust swirled in the shaft of sunlight that slanted into the gloom from the doorway. Every curtain was drawn tightly closed, blocking out the light. He staggered inside, towards the shadowy shape of the mayoral desk at the far end of the hall.

"Sir," he called as he went, "I'm sorry to interrupt you. I know the council told me never to set foot in the town hall again, but this is urgent." He grimaced, glancing down at the hand clasped to his middle. "They're inside the town walls. I don't know why, but they just invited them in like - like nothing would happen." He braced himself with his free hand.

"You're bleeding on my desk," said the voice from the mayoral chair.

The boy blinked. "I was attacked on the way here."

A deep sigh. "Well, son, I'm sorry you feel that way, but you have to admit you sure do rile people up around here. What did you say to provoke them this time? Let me guess - it was wolves all along."

"What? I didn't - sir, I'm the wolf watchman. I watch for wolves and raise the alarm when I see one. That's my job," he added. "I don't think I deserve to get attacked for doing what the town asked."

The chair squeaked as the figure within shifted position. The boy frowned, suddenly realizing something was off.

"I wasn't born yesterday," said the mayor. "We all know something's wrong in this town. People are afraid. Sheep are dying. It's bad for business. But your way isn't working, is it?"

"That's because-"

"Would you let someone else do the talking for once?" the mayor growled. "If you really cared about this place, you'd stop hogging all the attention and just admit you haven't been able to solve anything. I'm handling the problem now. I love this town, and I don't want to see you causing a panic by making a bunch of wild accusations."

The boy sank slowly into the visitor chair across the desk. "Sure, Mr. Mayor," he said, unable to muster the energy for sarcasm. "What a big heart you have."

The mayor's grin gleamed all the way up and down his muzzle. "All the better for running a town with."

"So what's your plan?" the boy asked flatly.

The mayor readjusted his bifocals with a dewclaw. "Fortunately, son, you won't have to worry about that," he said. "It's become clear to me that you and I aren't going to be able to work together. I'm going to have to let you go. Consider yourself terminated, effective immediately."

Later, the boy stood over his threadbare bed, wondering if there were any point to packing his things. He didn't own much; there had never seemed to be enough time to get a proper house built for himself, let alone accumulate possessions. It had been years since they first settled the valley. Tiredness pounded in his sinuses. His knees creaked, his wrists and elbows twinged from long use of his guardsman's sword. He would have liked to have been able to retire. Or at least take an apprentice. Or at least feel like anything he did mattered at all.

Outside, the town had been gathering. Their stares were accusing and their murmurs hostile.

"I heard he's actually been a wolf this entire time," he distinctly heard someone mutter to someone else.

He felt his shoulders tense. He expected rage to boil, but when he turned around he suddenly realized if he went postal now, the rumors would only be worse.

"There are wolves in your flocks," he told them. "They're going to continue killing your sheep until you decide to do something about it. I'm not going to tell you again."

The crowd parted for him, bipedal and quadripedal members alike. They watched him go.

One of the villagers broke the silence when he turned to look at the wolf next to him. "Get a load of that guy," he said. "What an absolute killjoy."

[endless----pain]

By Wealthy Loser on Instagram

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#TEMPORARY AND SMALL JOY IS STILL JOY NONETHELESS   (via smokeandsong)