#forking paths

[musicmakesyousmart]

TDL BWOY - Forking Paths

Raw Russian

2020

[strewbi]

Listen To Your Auntie Alice

Part 1 Part 2

Alice sits Bella on a log with a thermos of mint tea. They watch fat clouds pass over the moon. They are far enough away, had passed over streams and over treetops, they’d vampire-skitched on the tops of passing big rigs. Bella had cackled like a wild thing, death as impossible and far off for a teenager as it was for an immortal.

Bella sips the tea and Alice says “Close your eyes. Imagine for a moment, just a moment, that you dump my stupid brother. I’m not joking. Just try it. Good.” Alice says. “My brother’s gift is mind reading. Mine is clairvoyance. Do you want to know what your future will look like without him?”

“You don’t want me to date him,” Bella says.

“It’s not a threat. In this instance, Bella, you are not the one anyone has designs on threatening. Come on, you’ll love it, it’s pretty good.”

Bella shrugs, and says “Sure.” As unsure as she is.

Alice leans back and smiles as she sees it. 

Growing old, smile lines, and a long tumble of un-dyed, thick, grey-streaked hair. A house by the beach that looked exactly the way she wanted it. Friends, closer than family laughing over rosé and cards. Rolling her eyes at old familiar jokes, memories of road trips, and magic. A world opened once when she was young and never closed again. Werewolves, though Alice couldn’t recommend them, grilling up far too many burgers at a late hour and putting them all away. A witch’s familiar sits on a wolf’s shoulder. The witch in question puts a sprig of red blooming rosemary in Bella’s hair. A Greenman is drunk and laughing. He lays back on a dining table and draws new leaves out from old wooden furniture. Bella sits in the center, a pillow pressed to her chest, warm and glad. A life lived beautifully, richly.

“It’s only a possibility of course, but damn,” Alice says.

“There’s more than just vampires?” Bella’s eyes are wide with a child’s wonder. She clasps the cup of tea to her chest.

“Bella, the world is ginormous. There’s more than exists in that little tableau of your possible future.”

“I think I’m falling in love with him.” She says like a confession.

“Yeah, makes sense. He looks like that. He acts as though he’s tortured somehow when he just doesn’t have any hobbies. Immortality is wasted on some people.” She grins. “Anyway, like I said, if you keep your eyes open the world won’t stop being weird and interesting. A quartz old man who looks like a haunted doll isn’t the most exciting thing that’ll ever happen to you. That’s not a prediction. That’s lived experience. Here’s the most important bit, Bella, the first time you fall in love won't be the last. (Not a prediction.)”

“Does he do this a lot? Make girls feel like this?” She drowns whatever she’s feeling in tea.

“Honestly, no. We genuinely don’t know what’s gotten into him. He’s going through something and he’s dragging you into it.”

“Maybe I could help,” Bella says, young, and open-hearted, and brave.

“That is not your job.”

“But, he’s my friend. I should try to help him.”

Alice thinks about her response very carefully. “He’ll be fine. He has an eternity to figure himself out. You have, I don’t know upwards of 80 years (not a prediction). Spending your life trying to fix his when he’s been at it longer than you’ve been alive isn’t going to do you any favors. Oh shit.”

“What?” Bella said suddenly, sitting bolt upright at the tone in Alice’s voice.

“Did you do the history essay on the economic impact of the war in Vietnam?”

“Alice, you lived through the 70s.”

“On a remote farm training sheepdogs, Bella. It’s a grey area.”

Bella laughed. “Do you want to cheat off my work? Didn’t someone say you’d graduated High School a bunch of times?”

“Life is long, homework is so little of it.”

“I don’t know, you’ve been going to high school longer than I’ve been alive,” Bells says. “I hear I shouldn’t spend my life trying to fix your problems.”

“You’re a little twerp,” Alice says.

“My vampire boyfriend’s vampire sister takes me out in the woods and gives me my own shovel talk, then asks me for my history notes,” Bella says.

“See? Lots of fun stuff happens without Edward around to cry all over it.”  

“Tell me about the dogs.”

“Oh Bella, let me tell you about the dogs.”

[haverwood]

The OA Forking Paths

[strewbi]

Rosalie Ruins Dinner

a twilight fic in 2020

part 1

The trouble with this guy, Rosalie thinks, is that he really believes that being able to hear people’s thoughts is the same as understanding people. A man with the emotional range of a teenager who only watches teen dramas. That, she thinks, is what comes of going to and from high school and only playing the piano as a hobby. 

Rosalie left the house often, with her husband or not. She went to concerts, she visited museums, she joined local clubs, she signed up for interesting classes, she volunteered with that little charity group in town that collected formal dresses for underprivileged girls.

Hunger? She’d grown up having food tut-tutted out of her hands. Denying herself blood is nothing to being kept from the world and denying she wanted better.

And though she is smarter than surely anyone in the room, as she stands tossing a salad she can’t imagine enjoying she is baffled by the sixteen-year-old girl in her kitchen and the people, older than this child’s grandparents flitting around her play-acting as though she really were meeting her little boyfriend’s family. 

Rosalie understands most men on a forensic level. She had not figured children to be this man’s type, not when he had forgone women and men both for nearly a century and died a virgin. He scowls. Rosalie makes brief eye contact with Alice. Rosalie could do something about all of this. She could scream her head off, she feels the phantom scrape of it up her throat. This sour-smelling wet bowl of leaves could go right out the window, she could very easily toss the fork ended salad tong right into the little girl’s throat.

Edward growls subvocal, attention fully on her.

Good.

He’s in her face, wild, and just as suddenly Emmet, smiling, gentle Emmett is holding him back with one loose hand.

Is it hunger? Simple hunger that sets him sniffing at a young girl’s hair like a weirdo? Rosalie can smell her just fine and Bath and Body Works have yet to make a scent that truly compliments the body chemistry of anyone, much less a sweaty teenager. Edward thinks they’re monsters, creatures made of base urges. So is anyone, what is his excuse?

Her mind flashes with vicious and cruel memories, old enough to be dulled by a better life. A ruined wedding dress. Tearing hands. A young beautiful bride. Hunger and cruelty as human as greed.

She’s known this man since they were both actual teenagers. She knows he’s only self-flagellating so he can feel better when he goes ahead and eats a little girl’s life anyway. When he steals her time, her growth, her future, her body, her mind, the people she might know, and the relationships she might have.

Pretending to care wouldn’t make it better. He is a dirty old man copping a feel on a bus, he is a whistle in a dark alley. His monstrosity does not come from superhuman strength or the need for blood. His monstrosity did not come from being reforged by hellish magics into a ghoul with perfectly symmetrical features. He is exactly himself, as he would be without supernatural help.

He winces and turns to search out the girl’s face, to see what she must think of this strange unspoken conversation. Rosalie grins her real grin, the mean one. In addition to being a creep, Edward is also an idiot.

Emmett, beloved, good Emmett smiles the way he did when she watched him, human and smug with a winning hand. He hadn’t needed to ask what she was doing. He kicks out Edward’s legs from under him and sits on him. Emmett understands her completely.

Edward is...slavering. Throwing a fit as though he’s rabid. His legs scrabble on the floor, trying and failing to buck Emmett. Vampire strength or no, he’s a twig who died of influenza. It’s not about to work.

Carlisle and Esme speak to him, calling his name in gentle, calming tones. Sometimes when she thinks about her life she wonders what makes her feel the need to clean up this guy’s mess. Did a near-century of proximity really forge bonds so deep? People need to stop saying she’s not nice.

She presses her heel to his cheek and holds his face firmly to the parquet flooring.

“Would you collect yourself? You have a law degree. You’re ruining the floors.” His clawing hands stop.

“Where is she?” He says, panting indulgently.

“Why the hell would I know?” Rosalie says. 

He flails his skinny little bug arms around again and roars.

[qupritsuvwix]

[xaffzg]

Dear all,

The moment has arrived!

English Student Club X.a. is happy to announce the seventh International Student Conference for Young Scholars - ANGLOPHONIA: FORKING PATHS, which will take place from 16th to 18th May 2024 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences here in Zagreb, Croatia.

You can find the First Call for Papers here:

https://anglophonia.ffzg.unizg.hr/news/anglophonia-2024-call-for-papers

ENGLISH STUDENT CLUB X.A. is pleased to announce the seventh International Anglophone Conference for Young Scholars ANGLOPHONIA: FORKING PAT

And the application form here:

https://anglophonia.ffzg.unizg.hr/application

Application

Anglophonia Application Form

We look forward to seeing you in Zagreb next year!

[the-invisible-self]

Invisible Self, portrait for Reddit user var_username1 #100daysofinvisibleselves

[nonlinonlin]

Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely. I remembered too that night which is at the middle of the Thousand and One Nights when Scheherazade (through a magical oversight of the copyist) begins to relate word for word the story of the Thousand and One Nights, establishing the risk of coming once again to the night when she must repeat it, and thus on to infinity. I imagined as well a Platonic hereditary work, transmitted from father to son, in which each new individual adds a chapter or corrects with pious care the pages of his elders.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges