#m dash

[gillianthecat]

I appreciate tumblr being a safe space to experiment with semicolons.

It's been over thirty years since I learned about them and I still don't really know how to use them. Or the functional distinction between them and the various dashes, m and n.

;? –? —? It's all a mystery to me.

[playedwright]

for the writing meme that dash thing is called an m-dash! they're soooo much fun!

i’m just seeing this and i don’t know how that’s possible so i’m sorry but thank you !! i never know what they’re called but i use them religiously in literally anything i write!

[shootingstarcipher-blog]

Loved

Part 2 of The Stray

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12856626/chapters/29451591

Lacking an identity, other than his own made-up name, the grey-haired boy unknowingly slipped into a constant state of obsession, stopping at nothing not just to survive, but to uncover the life he used to have – before the Old Mill had become all he knew. In less than three months he had learned how to live off his wits and animal instincts, avoiding civilians and rarely straying from the cover of darkness, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to just survive. A continued existence meant very little if he had no identity, no awareness of his own character.

Out there, somewhere, there could have been someone looking for him. A family, perhaps. Part of him hoped so. A smaller part of him hoped they’d succeed, but most of him thought it was already too late. He wasn’t who he used to be. Now he was a stranger, a renegade, someone outside the law and outside of everything else as well. Dash X, on his own, a lone wolf, whether he had someone who loved him or not. Because as far as he was concerned, the idea that you should love someone simply because they were related was preposterous, and such emotions were nothing more than mere illusions anyway. They’d forget about him soon enough – just as he’d already forgotten them.

He often slept during the day and prowled the streets at night, but there were times when he needed to be about in daylight, like the days he spent hunting for information in old newspapers at the library, or questioning as many strangers as possible about anyone else they may have seen with hair like his own, in case he did indeed have a family somewhere in Eerie, waiting for him to come home. They would have found him by then, surely? If they did live in Eerie, of course, and there was no guarantee that they did.

When he did occasionally break his rule regarding disrupting his own solitude by communicating – which really, where Dash was concerned, meant interrogating (and not peacefully either) – with the Eerie locals, he always made sure to keep his hands out of sight (at first by tucking his hands up inside his sleeves until he managed to acquire a pair of black gloves through means unauthorised) and never mentioned the marks on them, even if they were probably the likeliest of ways to get someone to pay attention to him and help him uncover the truth about himself.

Not knowing what those marks meant was potentially dangerous. He wouldn’t have put himself passed being some sort of criminal escape artist, on the run from the law because of those symbols on the backs of his hands. Maybe he belonged to some kind of gang? He hoped so. He could definitely picture himself as the leader of one. And he wouldn’t have put a so-called stranger passed caging him or putting him in some freak show, especially if those marks were as important as he suspected they were. They could have meant anything. But for now, they were nothing but his name.

His days and nights were mundane, a repetitive routine encompassing his obsession and eventually causing it to dwindle. Sleeping, eating and hunting (either for information on his forgotten past or for anything that would help him to survive for at least one more monotonous day) until finally, his routine was broken.

It took three months for Marshall Teller to come into his life. Three months for him to break into the Old Mill, video camera at the ready, and shatter Dash’s dreary routine into a million pieces.

He was ready to declare war immediately. The moment he heard voices and footsteps approaching his, well, his home – rotten and derelict as it was – his curiosity was piqued. Instinctive defensive stance taken, he crouched behind a veil of shadows, listening intently as the intruders entered the Old Mill with caution, though little regard for anyone who may have lived there. What Dash felt as he hid close to the ground, a low, distrustful growl dying to burst out through his throat, was nothing short of contempt. There was no fear in his hollowed-out shell of a heart, but only scorn and derision. Nobody but him had any business there. He was always careful not to get caught trespassing and he would have preferred for others to do the same – or better yet, not cross over into his territory at all.

And to make it worse, he caught them rummaging through the few possessions he had to his name – a spare change of ragged old clothes, his next (stolen) meal, and a gun he’d found under the floorboards of the Old Mill, as well as the backpack he kept them in. He’d considered selling it when he’d first found it, on the black market of course, and not in the presence of police or the law-abiding citizens on Eerie, but then he’d seen sense. Nobody got anywhere on the streets without a weapon. That knowledge had by now become automatic.

And now his weapon, his only weapon (aside from his fists), was in the hands of a trespassing stranger.

His hoarse, brusque voice was the first indication of his presence he gave to the invaders. He cleared his throat and, as he stepped out of the darkness, mocked them both with the intimidating composure he prided himself on. They’d mocked him first, after all, questioning the sanity of a person who would dare live in a supposedly haunted house. All he did was question theirs. “Messing with a crazy person’s stuff? Not the brightest idea,” he scoffed, a knowing smirk appearing on his face at the sight of their horrified expressions. He wasn’t really going to hurt them. Probably. He just wanted them to leave. That was all.

It was amusing, to him at least – the way they dropped everything they were holding (but not the camera, unfortunately) the instant he made his presence known, and then stood there, utterly gormless, as if awaiting instruction. He decided he could get used to that – people waiting around for him to sit back and bark orders at him. That was exactly the kind of life he wanted to have.

Until Marshall suddenly spoke up and his illusions of the power he wished he truly possessed were splintered and smashed with a single choked-out sentence. “So why do you live here?”

Dash ground his teeth together in frustration, irritated by the sudden fragmentation of his delusion and not only that, but by the fact that his intruders – or at least one of them – was talking back to him, ignoring his mockery and already asking too many questions for them to have any hope at getting along. So, in retaliation, Dash ignored his question and snatched the gun up from the floor without a word, earning an anxious glance from the intruder who had not yet spoken.

After months of practising, though he had never once fired the gun, he’d learned to hold it steady in his hand even in spite of the freezing temperatures of the outside air. It may have been nothing but an act – a pretence stemming from the power he felt he was entitled to – but as he growled at them not to move, that it was too late for them to get away and that they’d seen too much already, it became clear that he was far better an actor than he’d previously given himself credit for. They were completely and utterly convinced. He could practically see their own lives flashing before their eyes. So he put them out of their misery and, with a dark, mysterious chuckle, replaced his menacing sneer with a more light-hearted one.

“Relax,” he laughed, a little more ominously than he’d intended. The intruders defied his instruction, remaining tense, which in turn only made him more intimidating. “I said relax!” he hissed, swiping at the one closest to him in a frenzy and snatching at his throat, his frustration outweighing his intention not to cause a panic. The slightly taller boy squirmed in his grasp and took a trembling step backwards, but remained far calmer than Dash X had expected him to. He was almost ever so slightly impressed.

“It’s kinda hard to relax when you’re yelling at us.” His voice faltered only slightly, but a sliver of fear was still visible behind his darkened eyes – something which Dash found oddly hypnotic.

His red-headed companion nodded eagerly in agreement and Dash finally stepped away, releasing his grip and softening his gaze. But he had no intention of apologising. “Yeah, well,” he began, eyeing up the trespassers with suspicion. “You should have thought about that before you came barging in here and…” He paused, steely gaze shifting to the camera they’d brought in with them, still recording. He couldn’t have that. He couldn’t afford for anyone else to find out he lived there (even if something like that could help him find the family he most certainly had to have, he doubted it was worth drawing so much attention to himself, especially if someone really was after him because of those marks) and he had no reason to trust these two interloping strangers to delete the video at his command, or to allow no-one else to see it.

With one swift, fluid movement, he crashed his fist straight into the camera and knocked it out of the dark-haired trespasser’s grasp, sending it plummeting to the dusty old floor. And, just to be absolutely sure it would never come back to haunt him, he slammed his foot down on top of it, crushing it beneath his weight with a smirk. That was one video the world would never get to see.

The hurt look on their faces as he demolished their creation was not something he’d been searching for, but he did not turn away from it. He was merely doing what was best for himself and felt no shame in that. No guilt, as far as Dash was concerned, meant no pain. But having said that, he had nothing to feel guilty about in the first place. They were the criminals. They were the gate-crashers. They were in the wrong.

Marshall and Simon didn’t see it that way.

They stayed for longer than Dash had anticipated. It seemed that, after most of their fear had been drained away, they thought of him as someone they could talk to, for whatever reason, and not be turned out into the street in anger. At first, Dash was sure that they were wrong.

But they stayed and talked and acted almost like what he imagined friends to be like, and he learned that the short red-headed one was Simon Holmes and the other – a taller brunet with eyes that looked as though they’d seen more than they could handle – was Marshall Teller, and that together they were, as Dash liked to think of them, a teenaged neighbourhood watch gone insane. Investigating the paranormal, exploring the weird and inexplicable… and somehow ending up right on Dash X’s doorstep – or, more precisely, forcing their way into the rotten old building he lived in.

Eerie was the perfect place for them. Nothing normal could ever be found there. Except perhaps for Dash, as he considered himself to be the most normal out of everyone who’d ever lived in Eerie, although Marshall voiced his disagreements without hesitation, stating that anyone whose parents would name them Dash as a first name couldn’t possibly be as normal as someone with a name like his own. And so, the grey-haired boy found himself forced to explain his own origins, or in this case, lack of.

“My parents didn’t call me Dash,” he started, confusion already seeping into his companions’ expressions. “I did.” At least, he assumed they hadn’t give him such a name, but he had no way of knowing for certain (it would have been an awfully huge coincidence if they had, however). Simon watched him in awe as he went on, explaining that he’d woken up there on the cold unforgiving floor of the Old Mill several months beforehand, his memories stolen and any previous knowledge of his identity having been erased entirely. Marshall appeared sceptical and frankly, he didn’t blame him. It was more like something out of a book or fictional television show than reality, though he supposed the same went for everything that happened in Eerie and Marshall should have been getting used to that by now.

When he realised that Marshall’s gaze had became dazed and dreamy, dropped down to the floor where his hands were resting, Dash followed his gaze and glanced down at his hands, the fact that the symbols that had given him his name were visible dawning on him only then. He covered them up on instinct, curling his hands up into the long sleeves of his oversized coat, but it was clearly already too late and he knew it – therefore, he saw no reason not to mention that those very marks were the reason he called himself what he did.

“Dash X,” he repeated, revealing the marks on his hands again (intentionally this time) and allowing Simon to get a better look at them. The expressions on their faces were indecipherable but one thing was clear: Marshall was a lot less sceptical of his story now than he had been before.

They left soon after that, leaving Dash to ponder whether he’d revealed too much about himself. They had no intention of ever seeing him again, he presumed, because as he usually tried to do, he’d scared them off. While he had initially planned on doing just that, he’d found himself peculiarly intrigued by these two gate-crashers – particularly by Marshall – and to that end he snatched his bag from the floor, stashed with all of his belongings, and headed out the door to see the brunet just at the end of the desolate street, about to turn a corner.

A plan had hatched in his dark, cunning mind as soon as he’d seen them leave. Maybe Marshall didn’t want to come near him ever again, but as far as Dash X was concerned, this certainly wasn’t going to be the last they saw of each other.

[chameleon3]

sorry it took me forever to respond😭😭

ahh that’s so cool!!! are the acoustics like fantastic in the room?? i hope they are if it’s new and fancy

same here mostly, except in pink pony club the woodwinds have to play the guitar solo and it’s kicking all of our collective asses right now

also i love my tag!!!!!!!! em dashes are the BEST and i WILL NOT let rampant chatgpt usage take them from me! i love them so much!!

yess the acoustics are great!!

HELP wait stop that’s so horrible why would they do that to you 😭😭😭😭

yippie ki yay!!! em dashes forever

[acuriousconstellation]

I ❤️ punctuation

[olganmwriter]

@JoRobinson176 clears out your #grammar doubts

via Em Dash or Ellipsis | Lit World Interviews

View On WordPress

[eliayase]

I have discovered the full potential of the footnote.

There is no going back.

My papers will forever be a sloppy mess of footnotes, parenthesis, and m dashes.

[feastingwithgans]

Mad Dash [NYT]