A conversation about the ox rib scene inspired me to go look at the tags I’ve used on previous posts about it. I hope you enjoy them almost as much as Aziraphale and Crowley enjoyed the ox ribs 😈😇😘
Edited to add context: NG was asked about the scene and he said “sometimes an ox rib is just an ox rib”😓
(I’ve divided them with a rainbow line because they looked very confusing otherwise, on my phone when I was creating the post)
In chapter two of doctor doctor Carlos refers to reader as Ford's assistant even tho he doesn’t really have a reason to. soooo… is that something that will be expanded on later or can you let us in on his thought process there 👉👈
This will be expanded upon in the next chapter/in other instalments! There's a reason I mentioned it and it's going to have a very useful.... use. In the future. lol.
Got the Clan fire star minis painted up! Tried CamoSpec’s glowing heatsink again, and I think it worked out pretty damn well. The 16th striker cluster is coming together nicely. Just need the command star, some elementals, and that shiny, shiny Clan Invasion book to round it all out.
This was the first time I ever encountered a person who I think had not properly moved on after death. I hope it's not too anticlimactic, because it's absolutely not a Real Cool Haunting Story but it was real cool and haunting all the same to me. I guess you can decide for yourself.
I was working at a mortuary that sent two people out on every death call. One night, we got a call at about 9:00 PM for a woman who had died at home on hospice. However, the family did not want us to come pick her up until the next morning.
Now, this is unusual, but perfectly allowable; in my state, a dead body must be either embalmed or refrigerated within 24 hours of death. Sometimes people are waiting for other family members to arrive, sometimes they just aren't ready to have the mortuary take the person away, and so as long as we're within that 24 hour period, they can have all the time they need.
So at 7:00 the next morning, my partner and I roll up to the house. It was a small house, tucked back behind an overgrown yard and under a big tree that dropped some kind of seeds all over the driveway. We always enter the home without our equipment first so we can meet the family and see where we're going and what we're dealing with. This house was old and absolutely stuffed with items accumulated over a long and interesting life. There were boxes of books, little statues, lots of souvenirs from exotic places. It was most certainly a hoarding situation; the path from the front door to the bedroom was little more than two feet wide with furniture and odds and ends crammed in on either side. I remember seeing a little wrought iron spiral staircase going up to the second floor in the midst of all the stuff and wondering how the hell you'd even get over there.
The family present consisted of three adults, children of the deceased. When we arrived, almost 12 hours after their mother had passed, they were all visibly distraught and crying as though the death had occurred only minutes ago.
Now let me be clear, just about any emotion or display of emotion or response to the loss of a loved one is normal and fine. But I will also say, having interacted with hundreds of grieving people, fresh and ongoing tears 12 hours after the passing of an elderly woman who had been on the decline is not common. Most often, by the time we arrive, people have either exhausted themselves emotionally or are focused on the task at hand. But these three children were still openly devastated despite having spent so much extra time with her, which again, was unusual, but not strange.
Now the woman in question was in her late 80s or 90s. She was thin as a rail, lying in her hospice bed with her daughters on either side of her. She had an elegant face, and most notably, her hair was in a long, white braid that coiled down to her hip. I don't recall her final expression, but I remember she was striking, especially that hair.
My partner and I set about wrapping her in a clean white linen and placing her in a canvas sling we used to carry her out of the house. The walkway was too small for us to bring in our cot, so we lowered it to the ground in the driveway and carried her all the way outside with the sling. Removals are like puzzles. Sometimes the hard part is figuring out the best way to get the person from point A to point B safely and respectfully.
All in all, this was a pretty easy call. We bid the family farewell, brought the woman back to the mortuary, and I think I went on to work a funeral service all day after that. I didn't think much about that family or their mother again, until two nights later.
I was on removals again and we got called out in the middle of the night. Different partner this time. We did the call, came back to the mortuary, and split up to get the post-call routine done quickly so we could go home and back to bed. We were in the basement, where we had our embalming room, the cooler, and where we kept the embalmed bodies. This was a pretty good sized funeral home. We had three embalming tables, our cooler could fit up to 14 bodies, and at any given time we usually had 6-10 embalmed cases out on tables or in caskets, sometimes more. I had been doing removals for a while. I had been around decedents in various stages of postmortem preparation. I was extremely comfortable being in the basement at night surrounded by corpses.
We kept our spare linens in a cupboard in the embalming room. We had a big portable speaker in there that we used to jam tunes while working. Someone had left it on, including the very bright rainbow-shifting rave lights, so I didn't even bother turning on the main light. There were two bodies on the embalming tables. One of them caught my eye as I passed. Something about her gave me pause. Something was...off. I don't know how to describe it besides saying...she didn't look dead.
When someone is dead, they very rarely look like they are sleeping. There is something missing. They may look just like themselves. They may look peaceful. They may even look better than the last time you saw them! But they do not look alive. Something vital has left, and all that remains is an empty shell.
So this woman caught my eye, because despite the fact that she was embalmed, covered in a sheet, very obviously and unquestionably dead, my brain registered something...different. For lack of a better description, something less dead. It took me a few seconds to recognize her as the same woman with the braid. It took me a few more seconds to realize that my partner was no longer in the basement with me and had not been for a while. And then I realized that I did not feel alone.
Humans have a sense for when there are other humans around. It's the difference between being in a room with another person and being by yourself. That awareness of human proximity is not something conscious, usually. Unless you are in a mortuary, where there should not be any awareness of human proximity. Then it becomes very, very conscious.
I continued making up the cot, kind of stunned, not really sure what to do. In the nearly six months I had been working there, doing removals and working funerals, I had not once felt anything like this. I hoped for spooky experiences when I first started the job and was very quickly disabused of that notion. There's nothing spooky about death. It's organic and predictable. We are a fairly standard collection of cells, and someday, we will cease to function. But I could not shake the feeling, couldn't second-guess it away. I knew I was the only living thing in that basement and I knew I was not by myself.
I finished my work, sent the cot back up the elevator, met my partner upstairs. I was a little freaked out by this point and ready to go home and go to bed. We parted ways with the standard goodbye: "I hope I don't see you again!" I got in my car and left.
A few minutes later, I was sitting at a stoplight waiting for no traffic to pass, the only sound the click of my blinker. And it crept over me again. I knew I was not alone.
I didn't feel threatened or unsafe. I didn't see a shape in the rearview mirror or feel breath on my neck. I just...wasn't the only person in the car. And I did not like this, because it was strange and unusual. So I did what we often do, when we feel a particular connection to a decedent. I talked to her.
I don't remember everything I said, but I remember how I concluded. I told her firmly, "You can't come home with me. Whatever you want, I am not the person who can help you get it. You have to stay with your body. You can't come with me." A few seconds later, the presence faded. The light turned. I drove home.
I don't know what happened after that. I assume the family held a viewing, and the children cried, and then she was laid to rest. I didn't interact with them again. I didn't see her body again. The next day, when I went to work, the building was bright and full of the living and I couldn't pick out anyone who wasn't supposed to be there.
Since then, there have been a handful of times when I felt that same sense of presence where there is meant to be absence. There was the time my partner turned to me uncomfortably and said, "...do you feel that?" as we left the home of an elderly woman who had died alone. There was the time we spent several hours in the apartment of a man who knew he was going to die and had left final instructions for his daughter. There was the time the family asked me if their son had given us any trouble (he had, in fact, and quite a lot of it). Sometimes, even if we move on properly, the energy of our selves and the impact of our lives lingers in spaces and people. Many times, I have felt the urge to do something for a decedent just because it feels like the right thing, something they would have wanted.
I don't believe in a higher power. I don't even believe in an organized afterlife. I don't know that our loved ones can send us signs or messages. But I believe there is something more to us than electrical impulse. And sometimes, I think it sticks around a little longer than it's meant to, for one reason or another.
i have just been made aware that my ask box was CLOSED. this is literally zero percent of the time intentional it’s open again i hate tumblr die hellsite die.
I’m telling you, this fandom thinks to the left of most issues in the book. It’s like you’re on the horizontals, the verticals but you’re just missing THE POINT.
If you think there’s an issue with Gwyn being young... or that she acts young, in the context of a potential relationship with Azriel, then perhaps you’re on to something. But you’re going to have to ask yourselves a few more questions. Does this only apply to Gwyn and Azriel or does this apply to all couples? Perhaps you should note the whopping age differences between ALL love interests, and how that’s portrayed. Then ask yourself, how is this issue being framed? Notice the difference in maturity levels, the power structure, the way characters are perceived. Note how it may come across, how this world is built around this narrative. Look at the difference and similarities between other characters and the relationship balances, even the ones you’d don’t particularly like. Ask yourself why you are uncomfortable with this idea, why you don’t like this idea in this context.
And after all of this... after asking yourself why you think this way and what led you to those thoughts, then you will have reached some conclusion. That you are either biased and are satisfying your own wants and ideals of the text and perhaps only reading the information in a way that supports your opinion no matter how *problematique* it is OR the text you’re reading may be flawed in a way you didn’t notice before and you may perhaps have just become a more critical reader.
