SOMETHING WAS DISLODGED, AND TORE.
documented mostly truthfully by abby ARTEMAS MARCH. TWENTY-NINE. COMPLIANCE OFFICER. in an exclusive non-compete agreement with exchange.
DOCUMENT. SKELETON. PINTEREST. QUICK STATS.
todays bird
AnasAbdin
hello vonnie
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
KIROKAZE
occasionally subtle
ojovivo
trying on a metaphor
Stranger Things
styofa doing anything
Sweet Seals For You, Always

⁂
Misplaced Lens Cap
d e v o n
Jules of Nature
wallacepolsom
DEAR READER
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@secondism
SOMETHING WAS DISLODGED, AND TORE.
documented mostly truthfully by abby ARTEMAS MARCH. TWENTY-NINE. COMPLIANCE OFFICER. in an exclusive non-compete agreement with exchange.
DOCUMENT. SKELETON. PINTEREST. QUICK STATS.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON gives way to EVENING in typical March fashion (tight-fisted and wound-licking; a bile-adjacent aftertaste) and ARTEMAS offers the nearest to escape he's capable of: a moment of solace in the mouth of the labyrinth ╱ @culpabilities
"Bea – hey, Beatri – fucking jesus – Bea!"
He doesn't mean to shout. Nope – sorry, fuck that – Artemas does mean to shout, in the same way that he means to catch the sharply-cut, swiftly-evaporating silhouette of Beatrice Nassau-Fellowes. He means to shout in the same way that he means to grab at her elbow, which is to say that he does. Gently, as far as these things are generally concerned, but not as gently as he could have.
"Hey."
His thumb circles the hard hinge of her elbow once - twice - three times. It's a crude gesture, not quite over the line but certainly pressing right up against it. Fogging up the glass. In for a penny and a pound, as it were, Art slides his fingers down to that heart-renderingly slender wrist.
"Bea?" He ducks into her eye line. His voice is so gentle it has to scrape its way out of his throat. "Hi."
You see, there is another pair of footsteps retreating down this hallway; a gait only half as ghostly as Artemas feared. He shouldn't have, obviously. By legal rights if not moral, this is as much Portia May March's house as it is his, it's just that – well: Alden March would have met them at the gate if he was within ten miles of Highland grass, and given that he hadn't, Artemas had allowed himself this one, this one tiny, worthless, insignificant practically nonexistent shred of a goddamned hope. Fucking idiot.
So as it were, as it has always been and as it will, clearly, continue to fucking be, Artemas' stepmother clears the room with a lingering smell of Chanel No. 5 (and dry retching, but that'll be from Art), and he's left to kick the rubble under the bed before Dad comes home. Business as fucking usual. Smile with all those teeth he paid so much (ha) money for.
Only this time, and here his thumb nestles neatly between Bea's radial veins, there's a casualty.
Only this time, and he can't tell if that hammering heartbeat is hers or his, there's a little more at stake than stepping on some smashed Waterford that got just a little too embedded in the rug.
"Can you look at me, please, Bea? What the fuck did she say to you?"
toxic friends.jpg
child’s definition of love/game shows touch our lives, the mountain goats/power politics, margaret atwood/unknown/in the yard, del water gap
love is sweet poison: atticus / the wicked king - holly black / love slowly kills - adrian borda / fresco / romeo & juliet act 5 scene 3 - william shakespeare / the death of sophonisba - giambattista pittoni / seerat / the aeneid - virgil
a prayer
Les Félins (René Clément), Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar Wai), Malcolm T. Liepke, Gustav Vigeland (Eros and Psyche), Stephan Sinding (Adoration), Soul Eom (kiss, hug and die)
buy me a coffee
Claudia Rankine interviewed by Lauren Berlant / Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value
“Call him a Judas if you want but he did it for reasons much older than silver.”
— Toby Barlow: Sharp Teeth (via msfehrwight)
oh quote from joseph gordon-levitt on being second, we're really in it now
in which we rendez-vous at the pool 11 - 4 - 2016, friday evening
so here we fucking are. back at the scene of many crimes, the highland fucking estate. don’t listen to what they tell you, the difference in the volume of stars between this particular corner of bumblefuck and the city is negligible. not worth it. rarely, has it ever been worth it. shea, at present, is being held up at gunpoint by a parade of memories he’s reluctant to indulge. the one leading the pack is, somehow unsurprisingly, his grandfather. he’s got a .28 leveled at him: his outstretched palm, two cigars lying flat across it. one for shea, one for art. shea’s sixteenth summer. the sunlight flies outward from behind pop’s head, forms the vision of a halo on fire. he’s smiling through the tailend of a joke. shea can’t remember. “alright boys,” two hands dive towards his open palm, plucking the cigars with the fervency of seagulls on a starved beach. “now scram. before i change my mind. i’m… gonna go see if missus knightly is amicable to the prospect of hustling some fools at cards. this crowd, i tell ya… ripe with opportunity.”
back in november, obstensibly the present, several lifetimes away, shea presses his eyes shut, opens them again, presses them shut again, opens them again, and eventually clenches down on an exasperated fuck. the tie he took off hours ago is choking him around the neck. he can feel the tension in his body coiling tighter and tighter. shoulders knotted. chest heavy. a dull buzzing behind his eyes. there is this bottom of the seventh adrenaline, anticipation, a sort of running out of room feeling. it’s that in exactly two and a half innings: something ends. something is going to end. that’s the feeling sitting behind his ribs. but god, how long is an inning. he wipes a hand over his face. get it the fuck together, shea thomas. and he does. by the time he hones in on a familiar pattern of footfall (somehow unsurprisingly) coming up behind him, he’s at least gotten the better part of himself together. took one and a half cigarettes. one inning is approximately anywhere from five to five hundred cigarettes, if that helps. “mr. march,” shea greets artemas without turning around, in the cadence of a boarding school proctor and in a tone that balances on the razorsedge of familiar and distant. shea is in the rather adolescent process of ripping matches out of a book, lighting them, and flicking them into the pool, one by one. he’s sat on the edge, suit legs jacked up haphazardly, calfdeep in the water. everything echoes. “you are late.” he’s talking around the menthol in his mouth, or he’d suck his teeth here: “that’s a demerit.” he looks over at art, then, and tries to keep an even keel. equal measure is applied to reading art’s expression and schooling his own. the buzzing in his ears has stopped, but the thing in his heart is lifting dangerously close to his throat. “how goes the night?” there’s a note of something acid in there, for a close ear to notice. nothing outright, nothing on the face of it, but under everything: anger. just not the kind shea wants to share. he tosses aside the matches, slides the pack in art’s direction, braces all the way back on his elbows, and fixes himself on the reflections of light on the surface of the water. here we fucking are.
@secondism
A half dozen Artemas Marchs make the treacherous poolside descent in the dark. It's an uncoordinated procession. A small boy with a dark mop of curls darts between the staggering, stick-thin legs of his teenage counterpart that tries without success to grip for purchase at the nearest stone wall. A young man trails after, wiping his nose. When the teenager inevitably slips, he does so with the full force of his railroad-spike body and collides uncomfortably with a stone-faced child no older than twelve. He, in turn, braces himself against the much larger man behind him. Some follow, others chase.
Such is the act of remembering.
Equally fraught but somehow less difficult to navigate than who joins Artemas in swirling the sink drain is who waits for him at the bottom of the u-bend.
That's the problem, here in the lowest point of gravity: Art's been lazy. He's been neglectful, and worse, tender-hearted. He and Shea shared bite-toothed smiles at the misplacement of sentimentality in the parlor, but only because they know it lives here, greening the pool tile grout beside the algae and colonizing the grooves they've so attentively etched. The piping is fucking plaqued up with it, an artery not completely closed but difficult to squeeze through.
High blood pressure doesn't, technically, run in the March family, but only insofar as its comorbidity to the gaping fucking hole in his immune system shaped like Shea Thomas Walker, which very much does.
All of this to say that Artemas March could have taken a cement scraper to his heart and shaved off the excess any time he wanted to. He does it every fucking day, layer by layer, except for that last and most sensitive. And it's not that he's scared, because the only thing he's ever been scared of is a head that never bobbed back out of dark water, but simply that he's never had a surgeon's hands and the likelihood of sloughing something vital alongside the glut outweighs the risk.
It doesn't explain why he's here, though, kicking off his own shoes and hiking his own trousers to the knees. Why he's crouching, rather than splaying, or why he's not saying a goddamned word until the offered cigarette is between his teeth and the stolen (gently taken) match threatens to burn his fingertips in the too-frigid-for-November-and-only-going-to-get-worse air.
Except the obvious: he's a heart hunting after his own arrhythmia. He wasn't born with the double-beat in his chest, but he likes it there. It's not dangerous, it's not going to kill him, but its wrongness is something he can wrap himself around and squeeze down on. And he never lets it say long enough to hurt.
When Art finally looks at Shea it's with his chin hooked over his shoulder, cheek bunched up against the over-sharp bone and eyes cast upward beneath flat brows. Looking up at Shea, technically speaking. A rare treat, if you ignore how Art contorts himself to do it.
"Fuck off, maybe?" He scoffs around the filter, still not quite committing to a real inhale so the exhale dribbles out sadly between them. There's something wrong with Shea's face. Artemas can name it, and easily, but he won't. "How about what does Mr. Market Oracle say about this morning's pound sterling dip? Any sexy little graffs I can jerk off to when I'm tired of rubbing one out to SOP updates? Starting to chafe a little, if I'm being honest. Might have to sniff around FX for some relief soon."
Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente
— Frank Bidart, from “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; 'Guilty of Dust'”, published c. 2017.
yeah i’m fine i just need to moan into someone’s mouth
ok well it has been real but i am going to kill you with a hammer now
Herbert List
we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
— Gwendolyn Brooks, from “Paul Robeson,” in The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks
"And Cain says, “When you split me and my brother in the womb, you did not divide us evenly. He got kindness, and I got longing. He got complacence, and I got ambition. I want to kill him sometimes. I think sometimes he wants to die.”
- Nathaniel Orion, "Hevel"
“SUMMER” & “ABANDON” HÉLÈNE DESPLECHIN // 2016