The Rather Extensive Consequences of a Failed Experiment, Chapter 4

 1932-1940s, Albert Holmes and Sherlock Holmes (I)

The Rather Extensive Consequences of a Failed Experiment, Chapter 3

1910-1914, Phineas Holmes, Sherlock Holmes (I)

The Rather Extensive Consequences of a Failed Experiment, chapter 2

2010, Pepper Potts & Mycroft Holmes (II)

The Rather Extensive Consequences of a Failed Experiment, Chapter 1

Just so everyone knows, there is a rather extensive author's note attached to this, but is included on the fanfiction.net page where it will be posted soonish. The following is why I have avoided reading, writing, or in general even thinking about crossovers in general at all. Enjoy?

Rapids of Kaink

Dwilly brushed her long black hair back, gazing at her reflection in the mirror her mother had made long ago. She made comical faces, twiddling her short mustache from side to side on her face—she looked like one of the great beasts that lived on the icy northern coast, a place she had gone with her sisters once to escape for a few months from the white city of Ellassar. Although she missed the look a bit, she didn’t have the long teeth of the creatures. Fynnar, who had never left the citadel, said he was glad she didn’t when she’d told him of her journey. 

Absence

They had been so quiet about their affections that the rest of the now broken Fellowship didn’t notice her pain. Gimli’s heart constricted as she picked up the cloven horn, the horn which Boromir had carried with a loving sort of awful duty. Aragorn was searching the loam, trampling spring flowers as he searched the footprints left by the Uruk-hai—while Legolas proclaimed softly that no living creature could have lost so much blood after such a struggle. Gimli knew this to be true as well, in her bones she knew that Boromir, son of Denethor, was gone. He had been taken from her. 

“All this comes from one, not many—the halflings may yet be alive,” Aragorn said, kneeling at the bridge where it appeared Boromir had made his last stand. His fingers trailed through the dead leaves, scanning them once more for clues about what had happened. Gimli bit her lips, the motion concealed by her beard, and she vowed on the blood that welled up from them that she would look after the little ones as Boromir always had. They had been his sons in a way, children in age and demeanor to a man so torn by war as he. She would carry on with the raising of them, for him. She would never have children of her own—she and Boromir had spoken tentatively of perhaps a life together, and she knew he was the only one for her. Dwarves were rash with their affections, but unlike with other impulsive creatures, Dwarven rashness led to lifetimes of loyalty.

“Then what are we waiting for?” she groused, wrapping a length of belt around Boromir’s horn—she would keep it and return it to Gondor, return it as Boromir never would. But first she had a couple of wayward, kidnapped children to find.

Revised: Pain Management

Duncan and I work the weekend shifts here at Kerry’s Grill. Kerry’s is an expensive place, mostly because it looks like a hole-in-the-wall and it isn’t. Sure, it built a reputation on being a small restaurant, but once the Boss and his wife had enough money, they bought out the rest of the floor and now they’ve outgrown their kitchen twice. Duncan takes care of the back, making sure Cook—who is a diabetic, all good cooks are—doesn’t scare off too many newbies or anything, and that the food looks good on the plates as it goes out. Kerry’s is one of those places that puts little streams of sauce all around the plate to make it look fancy, though not quite one of those where they put a little sprig of parsley to garnish it.

Strip

She is used to the heat of the furnaces in her smithy, but her husband is not. Boromir comes to escape his duties sometimes—and reluctantly, too, she can see how it eats at him in his eyes—in the full regalia of the Steward. After twenty minutes he will subtly shrug out of the over-robe required of his office, as well as the symbolic mithril chain denoting his duties and loyalties to Gondor and King Ellassar. Aragorn had told him nearly a year ago that he didn’t feel such demonstration was necessary—he knew Boromir’s quality had been tested during the last war of the ring. Boromir, however, had prepared for his entire life to bear the weight of such things and wanted to continue some of the ancient traditions of his house.

Covers and Kisses

He was twenty eight when he realized it. Cuddled close against Isaac, a man he was devoted to, he realized it. Isaac had never pushed, had never asked, and had never strayed, and suddenly Jude realized that he would never bend, would never acquiesce, and would never recover if Isaac left him over this. Isaac’s body was warm against his, warmer because of the chill of the apartment around them and the pathetic cloth couch they lay on. It wasn’t Isaac’s fault. Jude felt that maybe it wasn’t even his own fault, it was the world’s fault, it was God’s fault, it was Brian’s fault, and in the end it was just how it was.

Sitting in the library, listening to everyone, makes me want to learn Japanese and lose 100 pounds and move to Japan and never come to the US again. Just a thought, hearing it being spoken in the next cubicle over makes me just SO. JEALOUS. I could spend $1,000 dollars and take year one of Japanese, but my family would only look at me funny afterward like they looked at me funny after I took a year of German.

This just makes me upset.

Kim Lestrade

“Greg, you forgot your lunch,” John looked up from the papers he’d been looking at with Sherlock at the breathy, low voice. Lestrade, who had been standing across from them watching them work, started and turned around. His face was turning into a smile from what John could make out, and John followed the man’s eyes to the ma—woman?

“Kim! Thank you, I was in such a rush this morning and Sherl—“

Class

I burn out in creative writing classes really easily. There is just so much crap that we have to read that it is misery on my poor writing sensibilities (though my fanfiction tendencies probably would do the same to all the good writers I know) to endure weeks and weeks of it. But this term has been pretty good. I have two friends and a new acquaintance in this class and yeah. The four pieces we've had to read so far haven't been awful and we just got a fifth today. Well. No. Three of the four so far were decent, the last of which being actually sort of awesome. The first story we read was tripe.

Brothers of the Smithy

He flirted with her even before he’d known about her purposeful omission of gender. Gimli thought back on it the day after their little ones—because Boromir and Gimli were often in charge of the Hobbits’ well-being—had stumbled across her bathing. Boromir had been so careful and sweet—and she realized now, no trace of relief had flooded his eyes. She was used to the race of Men and their fear of becoming intimate with a woman who wasn’t barefaced, and she was also used to the relief which would flood a man’s eyes when discovering that their Dwarf comrade was a woman. They were normal in their own eyes, their affections directed at a woman. 

Jack "Halloween" Stardust

 The Stardust household had fractured that day. The day that Ziggy had made his prediction was the same day that Science had discovered the terrible truth--that Earth was dying. Ziggy's words had been the first of the day, and there was no way that anyone could have known beforehand. A few days later Science had gone to Government, all pale old men with sallow sinking faces, and the news had broken around the world. Jack, and of course Ziggy and Mother and Father, watched in awful terror as the newsmen on ever channel repeated the Government issued news.

Earth was really dying.

Jack and Ziggy were equally broken by the news, though in different ways. Jack chose to hone his skills of survival, leaving home and living from place to place on what he could find. He made up the new words that they would all need soon--because Earth would die first quickly, for five years, and then slowly waste away for decades or centuries. Not many people read the rest of the news Science had brought to the world--that it wouldn't end in a flash of light and thunder, the world would instead end in darkness and a whimper.

Ziggy chose to give the people hope, to tell them to be happy while they could be happy--and to live while they were alive. Each of the brothers saw how people would react to the news, and went their separate ways. Jack of course kept up with what his brother was doing. Ziggy was his little brother, how could he not? His heart broke as his brother, with such a beautiful voice and hands, lost himself. It was almost unconscious, but he made his way closer to where his brother was most often--that way when whatever happened to him, he would be there for him.

They'd left him for dead. The alleyway smelled of cheap beer and blood. Jack knelt and picked up his brother, so tiny with his hair pasted to his head, his lips swollen and his face bloodied. And then there were his hands. His brother's beautiful long-fingered hands, the fingertips habitually covered in calluses from his guitar-strumming ways. Those hands were crushed, bleeding and bent unnaturally. Five fingers were broken, one was missing a nail, and his hands shook still from the memories of trying to defend himself. Jack kissed each of Ziggy's eight fingers and each of his thumbs, and then he kissed his brother's forehead.

Jack walked out of that alley with Ziggy Stardust in his arms. Weird and Gilly were nowhere to be seen, but that didn't matter. They would soon meet their ends for the disappearance of Ziggy--their hands had the savior's blood on them, and his fans would see it no matter how much the two men washed it off.

Only a week later, the Earth shook--the convulsions of a dying planet. Jack nursed his brother back to health, but had trouble convincing Ziggy that what he had done wasn't wrong. Ziggy blamed himself.

Halloween Jack was born when some of Ziggy's followers found them, still needing Ziggy's voice to comfort them. They took his crooked hands--there was only so much Jack had been able to do--and kissed them in the way Jack himself had kissed them only months ago. They were wonderful--two men and a pregnant teenager, and they were wonderful because their faces brought Ziggy to sing once more in his reedy soprano. It was through their faith in Ziggy that Jack realized he had to write these times down--he had to pass on the knowledge of the end of the world, for any who might survive this generation.

He wasn't any good at writing songs, so he turned to Ziggy, and his three believers for help. So it was curled up on the tops of buildings or in small caves of rubble that he wrote the Future Legend, a tale of people who survived no matter what happened. He planned on singing it to the girl's child when it came--it wouldn't do for the child to realize only a generation had passed since the Earth began to die, it was better she thought the world had always been this way in one form or another.

Jack Stardust after that went by Halloween Jack, for the legends he spoke of so pointedly that the people he encountered soon forgot the world they'd lived in before. Instead they chose to remember the world which he sang of, and sat at the feet of the girl and her baby as he told them of the Sweet Things--the women who had to be cared for and fed and didn't it seem so easy to help them out? Didn't they seem so young, and wasn't that just the way of it these days?

Halloween Jack traveled from town to town, almost always found on the highest building he could find, with a broken-handed quiet red-head who murmured to visitors that they were wonderful, a broken-voice coming from a brokenly-smiling mouth. Wrapped around him was a man with only eyes for him, while sitting between the redhead and Halloween Jack was a young family with a little baby named Sweet Grace.

The people eventually forgot Ziggy Stardust, whose only lasting message was that they were wonderful--but after a while that got forgotten too. The people, Jack knew, would eventually forget the people he traveled with, and would eventually forget even him. But he could help them for now, in his own way. Whenever he coaxed someone away from the idea of jumping or giving themselves over to the gangs of Dogs--the Diamonds being particularly vicious to their prey--in hopes of getting food, Ziggy would wake from his daze for a moment. His younger brother's crooked smile would flicker on in that moment, and Jack knew he was doing right.

The Atomic Bomb

The end of the world will be at eight fifteen in the morning, on August sixth. That’s the long and short of it. The air won’t taste differently, the sky will be blue—or overcast, or cloud-strewn, the weather will be no different than ever before. Alarm clocks will go off, children will go to school early and play in the gardens. Doctors will be administering their doctoring, a child weak with fever—skin smelling strongly of sweat, bedding damp around them—or a nurse sterilizing knives one by one by one by one. Her hat is at a cocky, flirty angle because she was alone when she put it on in front of her mother’s mirror. Women will sit by their husbands, watching them read the newspaper as their children play at their side. Paddy cake, paddy cake, baker’s rye. The newspaper is folded over itself, but still thin because he has been giving her the sections he’s finished with. Bank tellers will just be counting the money out for the day and brewing the complimentary stale, weak coffee and setting out the stale, dried out cookies. Napkins, cream, one kind of sugar substitute, red plastic stir-sticks. Outside on the street, a bus driver will be stopped briefly—looking left to safely make a right turn.

And then the world will end. 

Immediately and completely, all humanity will go out of the world. A bright, Godly light will come over the hill. So bright that turned away with your eyes shut, it comes through the back of your head and you can still see it. You see God. You see God and He is terrible. The light is hot, so hot that the sweat that jumps to your skin will evaporate immediately. Your flesh will start to burn, and with that you finally turn to meet your Unmaker. This is not a creator God, because no one ever sees their Creator when they die. 

They see their destroyer, a God of Death. You realize slowly as the cloud goes up that the world has ended. Not just for you, you realize as that cloud goes up faster than your eyes can track as you get used to the heat. This is the end of all things. No person will ever live in the innocence of a drawn-out death, no one will go to sleep in one of the bunkers knowing they may die in a bomb-blast. As a black, roiling cloud follows that bright, beautiful light, and before it buildings, trees, cars, and people explode as they fall. 

You don’t close your eyes. 

To close them would be to hope. The prayer to meet a Creator demands to be made, but to close your eyes would be to hope for that. Nothing will survive this wave, the world is ending. There would be nothing to create with after that black cloud hits you. Perhaps not everyone saw that light in their bones, and perhaps not everyone will be shredded before that inky line. But the world has ended, so you don’t ask those questions too hard. 

The doctor and the bus driver and the nurse die instantly. You have become a god of death yourself, you realize, for only one such as that would know of and understand their deaths. They are your elder fellows because their eyes were turned toward that light the moment it struck the earth—they knew far more intimately and simply the fate of the world. That it was over. The bank tellers die slower. The shrapnel in the black destruction came from their suffering as the wooden paneling on the brick walls came apart—peeling away from the walls slowly, splinters careening towards them at the inexorable speed of adrenaline. The splinters move just slow enough for their eyes to widen, whites visible the whole way ‘round—and screams curdle in throats while sluggish hearts endeavor to pull reluctant muscles in frozen arms to protest such a sudden, horrific death. 

And then the bodies are gone, and they join you after their death-throes. 

The slowest to die are the children and the family. The family’s house is entirely collapsed above them, the whirlwind of black death shoveling more debris above them. They slowly suffocate, their awful cries to each other—of comfort, remorse, and love—strengthening the effect they will have over the world as it ends. Their bodies will be found unrotted, corpses preserved in that airless and cold cavity of their home. The children in the gardens are swept, still alive—still breathing, still fighting, still half-heartedly wondering if this is a continuation of their game—and are never seen again. 

Their world, your world, the entire world. It all ended. It ended on August the Sixth, at eight fifteen in the morning.

Culture Clash

Har’ili knew that Father was at his wit’s end. She had always been the ‘safe’ daughter in his mind, she knew. The eldest, with the most sense—the daughter with the most Dwarf in her, going wholly unnoticed through her teens by the Men of the city of King Ellassar. Dwilly’s flirtations during those years had occupied the First Steward’s mind far more often than her own interests in metalsmithing (while her mother lamented that she was choosing the working of metal over stone, but her mother had always had a preference for stony things). Her younger sisters, Lanny and Essy, acted like a hive-mind of strategy—they gave Father no troubles, rather serving as his helpers as well as his Dwarven heirs. The instant he’d realized that they enjoyed strategy and understood it as well as he did, Father had declared to the King in Erebor that the heirs of his line were to be his two youngest daughters. 

Pain Management

Pain Management

“My wife left me.”

Duncan’s hair is military-short, neatly trimmed because of the recent inspection—once a year, all hell breaks loose in the form of waterlogged bleach- towels, clean uniforms, timers, and thermometers. Managers like us have to have nice hair, freshly cut. Today there is a hint of stubble on his chin, evidence he could grow a thick beard if he ever wanted to. His hair, however, is thinning. He’s thirty after all. 

Children

His daughter is three when Gimli gives him another child, another little girl. Har’ili’s cheeks are dusted just barely with feathery auburn stubble, and she resembles her mother more and more every day. This other little girl has dark hair which fuzzes out from her head like a dandelion-head. He wants to give her a Dwarf name, as they’ve given their eldest. Gimli wants to give him a name from the race of Men. 

In the end it is their adopted-son Merry who starts it. He offers up his mother’s name—Esmeralda—to which their other adopted-son Pippen strongly advocates his own mother’s name—Eglantine—and then Gimli’s eyes turned to Boromir. She was named after her father’s mother, her mother had been named after her grandfather’s mother, and that woman had been named after her father’s mother—it was the way of the Dwarves. He knew it caused her relatives to talk and gossip, that Har’ili was given an entirely new name rather than her grandmother’s. 

Small Freedoms

While Merry and Pippin always disputed his wife’s claim as their adoptive parent, it was when Gimli gave birth to a squallingly-healthy daughter that Boromir started to believe that the hobbits’ protests were ones of duty rather than belief. The two doted on his daughter in a way which reminded him of how he had doted on Faramir as a child. The two young hobbits lived with the Steward and his wife, after having found their beloved Shire no longer to their liking.

The little girl was nearly bald, which Gimli tried not to be horrified at—and Boromir himself tried not to laugh too much at Gimli, who had threatened him with amputation of the face while she had been giving birth. She was a tiny child, cradled in his arms hours after her birth. Merry and Pippin had been sent out into the city to look for birth gifts, and their absence had given Boromir and Gimli time alone with their daughter. 

Wife of the Second Steward of Gondor, Princess of Ithilien, and Lady of Emyn Arnen

Eowyn kept her shock to herself that Aragorn’s Dwarven companion was a woman. There had been hints enough, she realized as she looked back, but no outright statement. The tears which had fallen so freely from Gimli’s eyes, the long tales about the legends of Dwarf women, the sadness in Gimli’s eyes when telling Eowyn that Aragorn seemed to have fallen, the intricately braided beard—far more lovely than any beard Eowyn had ever seen on a Dwarf. 

Drunk

 

She loved drinking. The heat sweltering off her cheeks, insulated by her beard, as well as the general fuzziness she experienced. She loved drinking with other people even more, because of the laughter and songs—and the disjointed, nearly unintelligible conversations which followed. It was because of her love of drink that she’d hated Rivendell. 

She knew of the dangerous quest they were about to embark on, it was because of it that they should take this night to celebrate life. But everyone had their own plans, it seemed. So Gimli and her father—and her father’s small retinue—drank alone on one of the balconies. Her laughter wasn’t quite as booming, or as raucous, as she would have liked, but it couldn’t be helped. 

Gimli

She was quite proud of her braids. The beads worked into them had been given to her mother by her grandfather as a wedding present, and she was happy to be allowed to wear them now. She was getting married, after all. When she’d been told, so many months ago, that he had fallen she had felt her heart rend in two. She was strong, of course, and had powered through her grief so that no one noticed how it had hurt her.

In her heart she had despaired.

But he was strong as well, and when Gandalf had hinted that he had survived—rather than being carried off and eaten, as she had been forced to accept—she had broken down in joyful tears. She remembered Lady Eowyn’s hands patting at her hair softly, asking what was wrong. She could barely choke it out, that a comrade who had been lost was not so lost after all. 

The two little ones were with him, Gandalf had said. His voice was soft, knowing. He knew of their budding romance, of course—he had to. It was hard to hide. She rode on a stout pony all the way to the White Tower of Saruman, trailing the group but brimming with spirit and happiness. She cared not for however she found him, so long as he was alive when she did. 

The heir to the Stewardship of Gondor was haggard and pale. His dark, curly hair was longer than she remembered, she thought as she knelt down with a little effort at his side. He had his arms around the two little ones, Meriadoc and Peregrin, the three of them deeply asleep. She blushed a little at seeing his torso exposed, bandaged as it was—her father had been rigorous with decorum, and his daughter, his only heir, was not going to be mentally damaged by the sight of naked man-flesh. As though teaching a girl how to wield an axe with intent to kill wasn’t mentally damaging already. 

Boromir’s eyes opened and her breath caught. His eyes were gray, always some sort of gray, but right at this moment they were that light gray of ancient granite. It was her favorite stone, as common as it was she hardly ran into it in the mines. Its crystals grew too close to the surface to be hallowed out into galleries and palaces. She had once carved out a bedroom in granite the color his eyes were now, a secret one high above her regular chambers. 

“You’re here, we thought you’d never arrive, that Gandalf would take you on to Minas Tirith without us,” there was a suspicious sort of pain in his eyes as he spoke of Gandalf, but she passed over it in favor of taking his hand. It was bloodied and scratched, but unbroken. 

“Aye, we thought to travel on to that white city, but Gandalf had unsettled business here it would seem,” she paused taking a calming breath to steady herself, and Boromir’s hand tightened over hers, “I thought we lost you, Laddy.”

“I thought I lost me too, Gimli,” he said softly. His free hand was buried in young master Meriadoc’s hair, ruffling it slightly as the little one slept deeply. Gimli felt her eyes crinkle with a bit of unforeseen joy. She hadn’t lost him, and it seemed they already had children to look after. The two young hobbits would of course protest, but after the not merry at all chase she had been led on she was in no mood to hear it. 

“Gimli?”

“Yes?” her voice was low and gruff, more vulnerable than she’d like it to be around Boromir. He had a way of hearing that vulnerability that made her hopping mad sometimes, while at the same time endearing himself to her. 

“Should we survive the coming evil, I should like to ask your father for your hand,” his eyes were half closed, but she knew his words were not the phantoms of his drowse. His hand was still clutched hard around hers, after all. She smiled, wide enough that it must have shown through her beard properly. 

“And what of that father of yourn?”

“My father can chuck himself into Mordor, I cannot attempt to care about what his opinion will be,” Boromir said. There was a hint of malice and a pinch of regret to his teasing reply. Gimli wished she could lay down next to him and cuddle into his body like the young masters were, but knew she couldn’t. Not yet. 

Later, Gandalf had taken Peregrin to the White City. The rest of them travelled to Edoras, recovering their strength and healing. They decided that Boromir would remain among the Rohirrim to make his recovery, whatever happened. He had survived his ordeal by dumb-luck and little else, and she chose not to think of how close she had truly come to losing him. Meriadoc wanted to talk, and talk, and talk of how Boromir had saved them. But she couldn’t bring herself to hear it. 

When they left to go to their doom, Gimli and Meriadoc themselves had tied the Steward’s son to his bed. Her goodbye had been as tearful as his nearly had been—neither of them wept, but Boromir wanted so badly to go to the Pellenor Field, to ride among the Rohirrim as one of them. He wanted to earn his place, and to aid where and as he could. Gimli had kissed him, she could do little else. Her glove-less fingers stroking slowly through his soft curls. 

“If I am to die in this fight, I will die knowing that you live on to defend this world as I could not. You shall help me best, Laddy, by being alive when I return here. Promise me not to get yourself killed? You would do such harm to all around you if you did.”

That had been the last time she had laid eyes on him for weeks, and when she did again she nearly had a stroke. He had felt the lessening of the evil in the world, had felt it nearly going out of the world, and had known it was time. Boromir seemed to have stolen away from Edoras in the dead of night and ridden alone to Minas Tirith. No one knew who he had encountered on the way, or if he had seen even one face during that long, lonely ride.

Gimli was sitting with Eowyn as the frail woman waited on the second son of the late Steward. She had glanced down briefly—idly lamenting in the back of her mind the ruined stonework, and that should her father see the white city in such a condition he would fall to the ground weeping—and she had seen him. 

He looked stronger now than he had been, but she knew for a fact that his wounds couldn’t have been completely healed. He was threading his way on his horse up the stairs, a determined look on his upturned face. Obviously Boromir had asked someone where the Dwarf Gimli could be found, and he was on a mission to find her. 

Finally he had walked slowly into the courtyard, and Gimli stood up just as slowly. His smile had been many things over the months she had known him—smirking, playful, self-deprecating, shamed, shy—but the one on his face now could only be described as rakish. 

“Gimli, the day you left I left as well. I rode for the mountains your father calls home, and when I found him I asked for your hand. He gave me these,” he said, taking her hand and turning it over. He put twelve beads in her palm, and looked up at her. Gimli felt herself choking on air. These beads had been in her family for thousands of years, taken from the deepest parts of the world. 

One was a blue diamond, for trust. Three were white, for goodness, clarity, and wisdom. Two more were rough basalt, for faithfulness and passion. Another was red, for a fertile marriage, and its counterpart was green, for a long marriage. The last four were yellow obsidian, for happiness and a sharp wit. Boromir’s eyes were dark gray as she closed her hand around the beads and stepped into his arms. He sucked in a gasp as though he had been worried she would reject him. His arms around her shoulders were definitely nice, she thought, letting her face burrow for the first time into his chest.

She would wear the beads in her beard, arranged at her own discretion, until the birth of Boromir’s heir. Dwarven culture decried birth-order systems, calling them unnatural and unfair, and parents were expected to have many children and choose from among them once they were somewhat grown. But she was marrying a man of Gondor—her first male child would be declared heir, regardless of his parents’ wishes. 

 

This, however, could not distract Gimli as she was married to Boromir. The ceremony in Gondor was small, intimate, and simple. A far-cry from Dwarven weddings which could last days, often being interrupted by random outbreaks of song, dance, and ale.

Writing

I have been making up stories ever since I could remember. Every writer says that as though it is special, but I do intend to claim "special snowflake" status with this statement. You see, I didn't--wouldn't--learn to read until the age of eight. Eight. That is second or third grade, or something.

Visitor

Che Guevara stared at Lucy from the third row back. No one else seemed to see him, but then again he was rather well behaved today. The man who brought him along didn't look like he would have been a typical friend of Che's, but Lucy didn't judge who made friends with who. It was nice to see that Che could branch out and make friends with privileged rich kids—at least ones he admitted to and hung out with in public. It was good for him to have friends at all.

Of course he just seemed to be zoned out completely, so he might just be high, without the knowledge exactly of who he was with. Like Lenin getting carted around by Stalin. He was simply powerless, and was getting taken hostage by this well-meaning rich kid. Because Che, like Lenin, would never hang out with the types of people who took on their ideals like a wolf dons a sheepskin. Lucy hadn't brought anyone with her, at least not anyone that was willing to admit they were with her. Lauren and Calvin were pretty subdued, and they had just tagged along with really a larger group. They weren't really Lucy's friends, more of mutual acquaintances of many people in the class.

Che was really the lone-wolf, sitting silently next to his companion. He looked fierce, like a campaign poster-photo, but that was to be expected—he was a doctor, back in a house of learning. He was also fascinated by the people his friend chose to speak to, twisting and turning around as his friend spoke, trying to see everyone at once, trying to silently represent his political ideal by his simple existence.

Lucy felt he was making a pretty good go of it. His mere presence had gotten her to think about Marxist theory, even, which was far more of an accomplishment than any Lauren could brag of. Calvin didn't have an opinion, he was too busy crossing his arms disapprovingly at Che's friend. Lucy gently cautioned him into giving a more inviting appearance by uncrossing her own arms.











The Che Guevara on the T-Shirt kept looking proudly up into the distance.

People You Meet In the Middle of the Night

"You can go now, Erin."

It's four minutes to three in the morning when Alan has me clock out. We look at time, at work, like soccer players do—and if I clock out at three, then I will be "in the sixth hour,"—and he'll have to give me a half hour break. By law. Technically. So I'm off work, the night shift—my first, and hopefully my only—and I am exhausted. The muscles in my back are twitching with fatigue, and my eyes won't track like they normally do.

Critique

Just got critique back on "Rock & Roll Suicide."

Redheaded Liars

She had been in his class, must have been ten years ago. Her hair had been brown back then, almost a default color, with only very bright light bringing any other colors to light. It had a weird red tint to it now, a look which he didn’t think much suited her. She must have thought differently because her hair was very definitely Red on further inspection. He wrote because he wanted to be a different person, she dyed her hair. Really who was he to judge? But seriously, where the brown had had little variation, the red had none, it was all just red. He was going to judge, he just had to. 

Dear Tanya Katz

Hi.

This is Alicia. One of the fat girls in class this term, the one with short, light brown hair. With the opinions and the interrupting, who absolutely hated the Joyce Carol Oates story but still had something good to say about it. Maybe. The one who turns in papers printed in blue ink on white paper. Yeah, that girl. She's me.

I'm a history major here at OSU. I've lost what I'm doing and where I'm going and just everything. I'm taking your 324 class mostly because I want something fun to do and I had the prerequisite. I took the 200 level from Jacob Mercer, a grad student who graduated last year or the year before. He had a nice smile, and he was from New Mexico or something. That's actually the class where I met my friend Monica, so there's that.

I have been thinking about making a blog for my writing for a long time. No, I haven't looked into whether or not that's a good idea. No, I can't really bring myself to care. People seem to have to fight so hard to get published, and they work full-time at it. I don't, and so forgive me if I don't seem all that worried about posting my stories and ideas online.

My stories are all my own. If you search through this blog--After of course, having googled some portion of my writing, looking for whether or not I'm plagiarizing, shocked when you get a verbatim result. Or maybe more annoyed, I don't know how professors feel when they think a student has plagiarized. 

Plagiarism is a sin against academia and all that is right in the world. I would never do it. 


But I realize that posting my work online would make you suspect that I didn't write it. This is why I waited until the day after I turned in an assignment to create this blog. How can I possibly have stolen work from a site which wasn't created until after I turned in my work? Just covering my butt, and since it's a large one you're getting a letter. --you'll find that most of the things I have posted here are from my own endeavors or from the 200 level from Jacob Mercer. Sorry, he was too young-looking for me to call him Mr. Mercer, and it was and IS too weird to call him just Jacob so he will forever be Jacob Mercer and there's nothing you can do to make me stop it. Short of finding me a new way to reference him.

I do plan on posting pieces generated by your class to this blog for the time being. However, I plan to post them after their due-date. So there's that. Rather large behind, I feel, has been successfully covered.

Imaginary: The Erasure of the Life and Memory of Kyle Ormond

This is a brainstorm for the sci-fi movie I would want to make. It has holes, I know. 

Characters:

Kyle Ormond (Young), Mr. Ormond, Mrs. Ormond, Sophie Williams

Jerry Kent (Second Life), Olivia Kent, Nina Kent, and Sophie Kent

Brian Terrance Jones (Third Life), Terese Jones, Abby Robertson, Jake Weston, Tommy Weston-Jones

Claude Parks (Fourth Life), Gloria (the cat)

Kyle Ormond/Alan Williams (Old Age/Fifth Life), Sophie Williams, her nieces and nephews.

Names

He had books. A small bedroom with a closet making it not square, filled with books. The wall which wasn’t a window or a door had a six foot high bookcase—pine wood with Not Ikea Bolts, built sturdy—for books. Piled high and hazardously were small books which made the smell of old socks oddly attractive—printed on cheap paper which wasn’t Bible-tissue-thin but would yellow just as fast. Cheap books, Borders wouldn’t sell them for more than six bucks. Their multicolored Goodwill tags peek at odd places on their spines and backs.

Rock & Roll Suicide

The dishes were drowning in the sink, surrounded by water Robert could easily describe as fetid. He’d never before found a reason to use fetid in his own day-to-day life, and the discovery pleased him despite the situation. It was probably the green beans in one of the sunken bowls. Rice developed that hot, sour smell of decay, and chicken had a musty quality to it. Vegetable matter, on the other hand, could really rot.