hi @gottagobackintime! i was your secret samta! :) here's a cindy-centric fic, i had a lot of fun writing it, i hope you enjoy <3
read on ao3! (2063 words)
(@secret-from-the-samta :))
so sits the ghost calling love home
At 3:00 PM, Cindy sits on the cold dirt before her mother’s grave, as she has for six years past. Christmas is a time for family—her indulged delusion. If nothing else, the dead cannot disappoint her or hurt her the same way the living can. This pain aches a different way, sand scratching at her skin and ocean waves crashing over her head and pulling her under.
December 25th, 2022 for Cindy Campbell.
—☃—
haunt (v.) of uncertain origin, perhaps from Proto-Germanic haimatjanan "to go or bring home"
—𓉸—
Christmas Day for a family that barely celebrates goes something like this.
In the morning, Cindy climbs up into the rafters and lies down on the wood that has held her weight for over half a decade, staring at the ceiling and listening as the forge comes to life. It is almost as if she climbed out of her bed only to return to it. The forge is her cradle in a way that goes deeper than her bones and will never leave her. She is spun from its sugar and steel and splinters—far more, she thinks some days, than even her parents’ blood.
The blacksmith-bakery is loud in a different way than her father can be. The clanging metal and spinning gears can be a kind of deafening that drowns out the grief instead of creating it—the tide and storm rather than the wreckage itself. Though her father’s fury leaves sea-soaked planks strewn across the beach among the seashells and oysters, his hammer has only ever echoed through Cindy’s ears and curled up in her skull—a clamor called home.
Her father is a wreckage as much as she is splinters. Cindy can read between the lines; she is no longer a child who cannot hear pain in an angry voice. When he tears into her soft tissue and rips feather from plumage with spitting rage and cutting remarks, he is bleeding with grief so palpable that it could nearly be smashed with a hammer. And though she bleeds that same grief, it isn’t any less unfair.
Cindy doesn’t watch the two of them work below her. She doesn’t need to. After so many years, she doesn’t need to look to know the routines her father and Victor go through—fire, butter, sugar, chocolate, milk—whose movements she has memorized and copied and practiced, nor to know that her father will never look up and see her there. On Christmas, though it is far from the spring days her mother died on, her absence cuts deeply enough that the sight of the smelting pot would twist the knife further than Cindy can allow it to go.
Sometimes Cindy thinks: What does it feel like to burn away?
Her mother died in the heat and the crush and so too has the fire burned Cindy’s hands, unforgiving and unkind. Fire does not obey willingly; it is brought to heel. Like so, her father does not seem to know how to curb his harshness when he has lived by the flame and will die by it. Not so for her—fire is not her inheritance. Hers is the blood of hunted things, of haunted things. She sees the shape of it all too clearly: the ghost of her mother sitting by the smelting pot. It clings to her father like pearls around the neck and guides her hands in stolen hours.
Cindy lifts her hand above her, staring at the smooth skin, uncallused and unworn. How infuriating it is to have a body that betrays her, a body that cannot have the time it needs dedicated to building it up. She cannot afford the years of daily work when all she is afforded is scant hours hidden in the rafters to learn in scavenged glances.
At noon, she climbs down carefully and slips into the forge while her father and Victor pause for lunch. Her craft is quieter and gentler than theirs—through necessity more than preference. Beyond lacking the strength for such force, the booming noise would attract their attention. Hers is delicate work, closer to glass than wrought iron or steel, ever so slowly melting it all until even the hardest metal has softened under the fire and bends to her will. She puts her creations into a little plastic bag and ties it up with a ribbon, already pushing it for time as she is.
“What’re you doin’ in here?” Her father’s shout is thunderous. As usual, it asks no explanation of Cindy, only incisive judgment. She is guilty by existence.
It is times like this that her father seems a tiger, made only of wrath and biting—the weight of a beast trapped in the cage of a man and bearing down on mere flesh. Cindy is not afraid of her father; she refuses to be. But in the rush of air into his lungs, the growl rolling from his throat, the scorn for her—a miserable, pitiful creature—
Is a ghost a monster? Are the dead—by nature, by instinct, by compulsion—malicious? Did her father die the same day her mother did?
At 3:00 PM, Cindy sits on the cold dirt before her mother’s grave, as she has for six years past. Christmas is a time for family—her indulged delusion. If nothing else, the dead cannot disappoint her or hurt her the same way the living can. This pain aches a different way, sand scratching at her skin and ocean waves crashing over her head and pulling her under.
She sweeps the dirt and debris off the stone before setting two one-and-half sided hobnobs, a strawberry tart, and a white chrysanthemum on the base just below the words etched into the gravestone. With a lighter she burns banknotes for her mother to use in the afterlife. She drops the paper into a small metal box—she remembers her father leaving it there on the grass the one and only time they visited ma together—where it crumples and smolders.
A thousand years ago, people might’ve been burned or buried and sacrificed along with a noble’s death. In such a way, Cindy supposed that should the fire consume her or her father one day and melt their flesh and bones into molten iron and caramel, it was only the path that would lead them straight to ma—a far clearer path than the aching, muddied ones they trudged along now. If Cindy walked a line beside her father that had not yet crossed, were they parallel, destined to never meet, or did they cross in the past, somewhere she no longer can reach and already missed?
Were her yearly rituals even meaningful to someone whose heritage had never asked for them?
At 5:04 PM, it starts snowing.
At 6:21 PM, Cindy rises from the ground. The smoke that floated from the ashes had long since blown away. She walks home, leaving a trailing procession of footprints in the snow. Superstition was not something Cindy necessarily believed in, but if the unsleeping ghost of her mother were to trace her steps and follow her home, Cindy would not mind inviting such a spirit home for a night. Then, maybe the ghost of her father too would follow and settle on her shoulders in a facsimile of embrace and find his way home.
And so, Cindy does not stop anywhere on her way home, does not linger in town, does not pause to step over a fire before entering her home. She simply shakes off the snow from her boots on the doormat before slipping them off her feet and slinks near silent towards her room.
Before dinner, she stands just out of view from the kitchen doorway and watches her father move with fluid familiarity beside Victor in the kitchen. Where hunger lies, something ugly and vicious rears its head. Victor is as much family as her mother was and is more family than she herself has ever been. It is less that her father only knows love in calluses and providing that stings like lemon juice dripped on cuts and more that her father doesn’t only know how to love in one way. The only one he doesn’t know how to love, it seems, is her.
The worst part is that she remembers a time when her father had held her with arms stronger, more protective, and warmer than any bed frame or blanket. In the middle of a thunderstorm that boomed and rumbled, he kept her from being torn out of the ground or split by cracks of lightning. For the daughter that exists now, her father only held the whole weight of a ship bearing down and carving a gouge into the soft sand of her belly and guts.
And despite all this, she often feels that in his eyes, he is hunted—that she is the one hunting him. To convince prey that it remains prey, that it cannot grow teeth and eat that which is larger than it, that grief cannot touch it if another pain bites in first, her father is a snarling beast, pacing the forge like a forest. The only line between becoming the tiger herself is that she will not let it.
They sit at a table for four, her father and Victor elbow to elbow and the seat across her father empty. As always, she is diagonal to her father, the furthest from him. As always, the ghost of her mother takes her seat next to Cindy.
Her father is unpracticed at kindness and the shape of it forms clumsy and misshapen in his hands. Countless rituals play at affection: the bowl he places in front of her without a word filled to the brim with steaming rice, the peeled orange he sets down beside it—as if the juice could run golden in her body as the ichor of immortality—a carp that wishes fortune.
It is not like she is unfamiliar with the exact arrangements of her father’s anger. It does not bruise her skin, but rather breaks on wood and porcelain like shrapnel. Collateral shatters at her feet even as he pushes her back from the danger, as if he does not know how to balance fear and rage—as if she cannot learn cruelty and grief as easily from his mouth as from his knuckles.
If her father does not wish to talk above the clatter of chopsticks on plates and the shouts of the day, then Cindy is more than happy to fill the silence and talk around the things they refuse to mention.
“How was your day, Vic—”
“Stay out of the forge, Cindy. Don’t touch anything in it.” Her father’s tone is sharp and snaps against her fingers as hot as sparks of oil jumping from the pan. “You’ll just hurt yourself without managing to do anything useful.”
This is how she knows that superstition is not real, that she cannot eat luck by swallowing fish eyes or bring home ghosts. She has grown tired of picking the fish bones out, resigning to swallowing them whole and letting them prick her throat. She has grown tired of the burn that comes with breathing in salt water and fighting against the current that won’t abate—what use was there in asking the sea to relent its terror? To drown did not require water to flood the lungs, only the lack of air—just as a fire instantly extinguishes without oxygen. With a tongue made more of thorns than muscle, how does he know she won’t bleed out and burn away into nothing more than cinders? How does he know that the taste of fire will not be sweeter than that of his grief?
Before bed, she gives Victor his gift. In return, he hands her a small box wrapped in Christmas paper. Every year, she wonders if he has ever wished for a more festive family than theirs—if, for him, this mockery of merriment is a disappointment as bitter as she is to her father.
For her father, her foolishly, nonsensically persisting love and longing is worn into the dishes she scrubs with soap and places with care back into their cupboards. His gift she leaves on the table for him to find in the morning just as she has years before. Between her father and her, she does not know a love that exists in words.
At 11:11 PM, Cindy slips into her bed, quiet as a grave buried with a wish under her tongue. Tomorrow morning, she will lie in the forge’s rafters like the heart rests in the ribs and her hope will bloom and wither again like white orange blossoms.
extended poem for the lines that bookended/title of my recent cindy fic (tumblr/ao3) because poetry is just such a wonderful thing it makes me sick /aff /pos
Australian Special Forces "killed illegally" 39 Afghan civilians: report
Australian Special Forces “killed illegally” 39 Afghan civilians: report
[ad_1]
<!-- -->
War crime: Australian forces killed 39 unarmed civilians.
Canberra, Australia:
Australia’s top general said there was credible evidence on Thursday that his special forces killed 39 unarmed civilians and prisoners during the war in Afghanistan, referring to the case as a special war crimes prosecutor.
After receiving the findings of a year-long investigation into military…
Angus Campbell Says Australian Special Forces "Unlawfully Killed" 39 Civilians: Report
Angus Campbell Says Australian Special Forces “Unlawfully Killed” 39 Civilians: Report
[ad_1]
<!-- -->
War Crimes: Australian forces unlawfully killed 39 unarmed civilians, a report said.
Canberra, Australia:
Australia’s top general said Thursday there was credible evidence that his special forces unlawfully killed 39 unarmed civilians and prisoners during the war in Afghanistan, referring the matter to a special war crimes prosecutor.
Australian Special Forces "Unlawfully Killed" 39 Afghan Civilians: Report
Australian Special Forces “Unlawfully Killed” 39 Afghan Civilians: Report
[ad_1]
<!-- -->
War Crimes: Australian forces unlawfully killed 39 unarmed civilians, a report said.
Canberra, Australia:
Australia’s top general said Thursday there was credible evidence that his special forces unlawfully killed 39 unarmed civilians and prisoners during the war in Afghanistan, referring the matter to a special war crimes prosecutor.
