pretty shiny things to pick at

There's one country-western club in my town, which is a bit odd considering the town itself, but I gotta specify that by club I mean CLUB. Not bar. I think by default all bars in this town are country-western bars. First time I went to this club, I ended up line-dancing to No Diggity. They also have a ladies mud wrestling night, winner walks away with $250. Even had it set up tournament-style for awhile, the 6-weeks winner gets a cool grand and, obviously, bragging rights.

So my cousin Naomi, she shows up at granny's and says she's gonna go for it. Her brother's a bronco rider, she figures if he's got a drawer full of buckles for staying on a horse for 8 seconds, she can take out a couple hillbillies in a mud ring. She's strong, true, but she's also a sweetheart with a penchant for the cannabis, so I give my beer to granny, step out of the kiddie pool, and ask her what her moves are gonna be.

"Moves?" She looks at me blankly. "Like, plan them out? It's mud wrestling, you just go for it."

This is no good. I pat her hand, say, "I'll help you sweetie," and stroll into the garage to get more beer and make a call. She needs practice. Coaching. Some solid advice from some solid professionals, and that's not me. There's family pride at stake here. If she goes down in the ring, all the old bags at the bingo hall will be heckling granny for months.

I stroll back out, hand a Busch to Naomi and granny, knock back half of mine.

"Emma and Justin will be here soon, so drink up," I tell her, then turn the hose onto the garden patch we left fallow this year. It's 98 degrees out and has been for weeks, so the dirt is hard and packed but, obviously, we need some mud. I sit back in the kiddie pool and prop the hose up to get the ground nice and gooey.

Justin and Emma show up 10 minutes later. Emma's birth name is Paul, and Paul is a nice mild-mannered sort of guy, but if there's a wig on the head, she's Emma, and Emma is a nasty, unpredictable bitch... which is what you have to be, it seems, if you're gonna be riding around a cow town in Carhartts and a blond wig without getting beat up regularly. Exactly the kind of role model Naomi needs right now.

Justin, though... Justin's been in and out of jail, did some terrible things in the army he'll never talk about, and he gets right into it. While I haul myself up, get more beers, turn off the hose, he prods Naomi into the mud and starts talking.

"Rules - you can't get high first, but you can have a few shots of tequila, get yourself riled up and a little loose. It'll hurt less if you go down. Girls fight dirty, so you wanna go for the head and face. Get an arm around the neck, a leg around the ankle, you're maybe good to go."

Naomi nods, all seriousness, then shrieks as he pushes her shoulder and falls back into the huge mud puddle.

"No, see, no good... it's slippery, obviously, and you gotta find your balance," Justin says, nudging her in the side with his foot. "Stand up, give me a good crouch."

Naomi stands up, laughing some, and flexes her knees. This time when Justin pushes her, she sways but doesn't go down. Fast learner. Did I mention she was smart? Real smart girl. Besides ideas like this, that is.

"Now, what's your opener?"

Naomi just shrugs; so Justin turns to me, "She needs to actually practice, can't swim around in the mud and call it good. You hop in there."

I shake my head. I'm not gonna wrestle my little cousin. Sure, I outweigh her by a good 50 pounds, but she's got height and reach and youth. Also, we're a close family, but not that close. We all turn to Emma, who took it upon herself to pull the curlers out of granny's hair and start teasing it up into an old-lady puff. Nice thing about Emma, she's up for anything. She bounds toward Naomi and without a word lunges at her legs. It's on. Justin stands back to avoid the mud flying while the two grunt and heave and, now and then, shriek a little when some hair gets pulled. Or in Emma's case, shriek a lot - it's not her best wig, and she's gonna have to clean it good tonight, but if it comes off she'll lose her shit.

Granny's covering her eyes, I'm laughing, Justin's yelling advice: "Keep your center of gravity! Twist! Hold her down, no, HOLD HER DOWN!"

Emma and Naomi break apart, panting, and Justin walks back up, crouches down, and says, "Look, if you're losing ground, or outmatched from the start, there's two things you can do to take your opponent completely by surprise: First, and nobody - NOBODY - expects this, is slip a finger up the ass. It'll freak anybody ou-"

Emma interjects, "Not me," and bats her eyelashes at Justin.

"Okay, yeah that's a good point. If by some chance it doesn't freak the other person out, it's a whole new ball game anyway, and you still got the element of surprise and can run away while they're figuring their next move." He glances at Emma, and adds, "Or, you know, you can roll with it, but that's a jail yard thing. Finger up the ass, fight's over, one way or the other."

Naomi can't help but giggle at this, despite the dead-serious look on Justin's face.

"Second thing, with girls, you don't got a real clear target. You're up against a guy, you go for the balls. Generally you can go for the kidneys, but when you're grappling it can be hard to get a clear shot. Girls, you can sometimes get a foot to the cooch, and that hurts, but it takes some room to maneuver. So go for an ovary punch, just low on the stomach and off to the side."

He traces, lightly, right about where Naomi's ovary is, and she nods, eyes big. I file this away in my head. My fighting days are long gone, back in the days of coke and whiskey, but it seems like good advice.

"Plus you can disguise that a little, it's not so obvious a move. If your girl's fighting dirty, go for it, right there. Slam her in the ovary then sit on her back and shove her face all into that mud."

Turns out it's good advice. When the real deal happened, Naomi took down her opponents hard and fast and bought textbooks for the next term with her winnings. As we sat there, whooping our heads off, granny beaming with pride, Naomi turned to me and winked and mouthed, "Ovary punch," then took her victory lap around the ring.

( bonus picture )

Big Spoon, Little Spoon







I don't like sleeping
with other people touching me,
he said, stroking my arm

Neither do I, I replied. I
never slept deep enough to dream before,
not next to someone, until I laid down
with you.

It thundered so loud, I woke up in a panic. Like
a bomb went off, he said.

It's all right, I'm here now, I replied,
stroking his hand.

It's not
all right
when you're
not here
with me,
he said.

He turned.
I turned
with him,
here now.

This has been an entry for therealljidol, please check out the other submissions and, importantly, vote!

My father played with my brother and me a lot as children - chess, checkers, '30s bank robbers*, baseball, basketball.... we didn't have a TV for some years, so mom read to us, and dad played games. When I was 6, we moved to a new town in a neighborhood full of my kids my age. All the neighbor kids loved my dad - they'd call him "dad," in fact, as did my classmates. We'd moved to this town so that my parents could attend college, and we lived exactly 1 block from said college, with access to all its fields and tracks and racquetball courts.

It was on one of those fields on a beautiful sunny day that dad organized all the neighbor kids for a game of baseball. Dad had played baseball as a kid and always insisted he could have made the minors, if he hadn't started smoking the dope (and dropping LSD and eventually shooting heroin, among other things) when he was 12. We grabbed our gloves and bats and balls and some mats for makeshift bases, and trooped out together to start a glorious game. If you've seen Sandlot, this game had that same sort of childhood fairytale sense around it. I was on second; I don't remember what was happening up at bat, but it wasn't going well, and I desperately wanted to steal third.

I was always a short kid, by the way. I couldn't run fast, but at least being low to the ground gave me a good center of gravity. If you've ever seen a Corgi run, that's about what I looked like - stubby little legs blurring forward. Dad was the second baseman. He knew what I wanted to do. He approved. He encouraged me. He whispered that he wouldn't try to tag me out, he'd help me get to third. He always liked the "get ahead no matter what" mentality, and being the second child, the unwanted daughter**, I desperately wanted his approval. And to win. I don't know what happened to my competitive spirit, but that day, oh I wanted to win.

After much hesitation, I went for it - my little Corgi legs took off. But I'd waited too long, hesitated just the right amount. I heard the crack of a bat, the soft whump of the ball landing in a glove, and mere nanoseconds later, the touch of the glove on my shoulder, dad tagging me out.

I burst out crying, to dad's great perplexity. While I sobbed and sniffled that he'd promised, he'd supported me, I was going to get to third, he hugged me and patted my back and said that I never should have trusted him; that's how the game is played. His refrain all through my childhood, "life isn't fair," was trotted out yet again, and the game went on.

Dad stopped playing chess with my brother, David, when David started beating him, sometime in grade school***. David and I kept playing, and as dad got busier and busier with school and work, we played together more and more often. Anything we could get our hands on, to alleviate the boredom and fill the time while our parents were busy. When I was about 9, David got a deck of cards and the Hoyle's book of card games. I had ADD as a child, although it wasn't diagnosed. The last thing I could do was concentrate on rules and explanations for anything. But there were something like 100 different card games in this book, and by gum, we were going to get through all of them.

It was David who taught me about cutting the cards while we learned to play a bewildering variety of poker games. It wasn't a big deal, simply a precaution, a normal part of the game. Every game we learned to play, card or board or computer, David would read the instructions while I fidgeted with the pieces or stared out the window, then explain the basics and walk me through a practice game before getting down to the details. No fuss, no flurry, he'd hand me the deck of cards to cut, not minding when I picked up all but two and cut it that way, or wanted to cut it a bunch of times because why not? David and I, we never cheated each other. It was just part of the game.

The thing is, life isn't fair. I get that. But life is also what you make it. You have to trust others enough to navigate through, but learning to take precautions, to protect yourself, to be cautious - that's important too, and it doesn't require making small children cry to teach that lesson.

( Footnotes under the cut )

So, uh, as I announced previously I'm doing the LJ Idol mini season - there's spots left, so if you're into writing (and not totally burnt out on NaNo), check it out! It actually won't start until December 1, so it won't overlap with NaNo much (well, not at all in a time sense, might overlap in the weary of word counts sense). There's something about pitting myself against other writers in a friendly way that doesn't quite reduce me to tears the way sitting down to the computer with the intent to Write The Next Great American Novel makes me dissolve into a total wreck.

Then of course there's the Sitting Down To Type And Blanking Out Completely problem.

Introduction: I feel like I have a few introductions here on my LJ that could give an overview of me. In writing specific terms, I'm just sick of my habit of starting things then never finishing. And by finish I mean polish up, have a few people read through, then submit somewhere. Anywhere. It could be Sky Mall Magazine, for all I care. I mean, my few rejection letters made me feel like a real writer, but one acceptance would make me feel like an even realer writer. Notable projects I have abandoned in the past: Children's books, including one "Henna the Hermaphroditic Cow," intended to introduce children to fluid concepts of sexuality (which I started in high school... which was 17 years ago); comics, including "Sad Oregon Girl Goes to New York to Drink Copiously" (working title) which never really got off the ground; an overview of the State of Jefferson (a regional thing); and of course the hundreds of ideas that have been written down on scrap paper and ultimately lost. Genius ideas, probably. Let's just assume.

I also have a "35 for 35" list - the idea being that as I'm now 35, I should do 35 awesome things. Some of these aren't done (it's now too cold to go rafting, at least in the "float down the river with a rack of beer in the hot, hot sunshine" sense), and I don't mind carrying them over into my "36 for 36" list, but one of the items was, in fact, to submit something - anything - for publishing. Again, anywhere, though I'll be straight up and admit I'd swoon if Glimmer Train took me up.

I have until February to accomplish this goal... and to quit smoking, though I think somewhere not too deep in my brain there's this idea that it's perfectly okay for frustrated writers to chain smoke... So I'm really hoping this mini season will jump start me - get some new stuff out there, start my brain churning, and finish the process. Even just to get more of those ironically-validating rejection letters.

edit: I'm 99% sure I said hello to everyone - if I missed you and you're here commenting on mine, lemme know so I can go check out your intro! I'm real excited (and getting suddenly nervous even with it being a week or so away), and I've really enjoyed 'meeting' everyone so far :)

Trigger warning - sexual assault( Read more... )

I need to call my dad. I need to, actually, answer the last email from him that's been sitting there about 2 weeks, the one where he floats the idea of moving in with me then immediately makes a joke out of the idea, which is what lets me he know he actually desperately wants to come stay with me.

It's almost Father's Day. The last Idol post was about Father's Day last year, before he went to jail and I saw him in that stupid fucking blue velvet cloak* in person for the first time. It was 3 years ago that was the worst (3? really? weird). I was still living with the Gentleman Caller, who was getting sick of the whole "crazy dad" situation, and it had culminated in February-ish of that year when we went down to so I could try and talk dad into going to the hospital, or at least support my family. Because of that fiasco, dad had sent some nasty emails and GC had washed his hands of it all (and rightly so), but also was actively an asshole about my continuing to feel emotions about this whole situation. In March(ish) dad got evicted. Mom had already left, and although she cleaned as much as she could beforehand, there was still some left to do. My brother had gone over to help toss things in storage and clean up as much as possible; this was when dad assaulted David (besides some corporal punishment as children, and one notable time when I was an adult, dad never lifted a hand to us), but David felt bad calling the cops and then found out dad had called the cops on him and it was sort of a mess, so... anyway. Dad was in a bad state. He had "friends" over "helping" and was selling stuff left and right, so David kept having to buy family stuff out from under dad's friends** in order to toss it into storage.

From there, dad went camping. First he started off in Medford but quickly got into an altercation with a younger gentleman down at the park where the Juggalos and hobos and junkies hang out, wherein the other man tried to steal dad's bike. Dad has studied aikido for years; he has, I believe, done 2 tests, so this is one of the weirdest things about the last few years - he never seems able to defend himself. He gets angry, puffs up like a rooster, then somehow ends up with a rib sticking into his lung or a broken face. Besides my brother, and David said it was a very odd half-hearted fight, I'm unaware of dad doing anything but getting beaten in situations where beating is an option. So dude tries to steal dad's bike, dad tries to get back, ends up on the ground with what turns out to be a punctured lung from a broken rib, requiring a week in the hospital with chest tube drainage. He made the front page of the paper.

From there, dad goes up to Cave Junction, which is this tiny town towards the middle of nowhere renowned for its lack of a police force and the area's general lawlessness. If you don't like authority and love drugs and have nowhere to live, it's the most logical residence. When dad had been evicted he had, as far as I know, asked nobody for help, which was a relief to most of the family I would guess. The sad part is, nobody offered - and it's sad mostly because not offering was the logical thing to do when he was out of control drunk and on drugs and physically aggressive, but to him, that would have been another kick in the teeth. So he does this very stoic "I've got it all under control and have a plan" thing, and even talks as though he's really looking forward to a summer of camping. I totally bought into that one, actually - partially because to me it's a very enticing prospect. World crashed around you? Go camp in a beautiful area, hang out with hippies and bikers all day, drink a lot, and smoke what you get for helping the medical growers trim their crops. Take a break, figure shit out, you know? Except this only would have worked for him if he'd cut the drinking/smoking part out, and that's what he refused to do.

So as Father's Day and his birthday draw closer, I'm getting more frantic, and GC is getting more visibly annoyed with the fact I can't/won't disown dad and frolic off to happiness, which is pissing me off more and more, so I make plans to go south and find dad. Phone reception being spotty, we'd hammered out a basic plan to meet, and I'd enlisted the help of Paulo to drive me out there, because I was afraid to be alone with dad. And dad ended up really liking Paulo. Every time dad would start talking about the portents of a recent comet (or meteor shower, I dunno), I'd get confused, dad would get disgusted at my ignorance and/or willingness to be lied to by the government, and Paulo would take another drag off his cigarette, nod, and know exactly what dad was talking about and make (what dad considered) enlightened responses. They'd been listening to the same late-night conspiracy radio show, apparently. The visit itself was uncomfortable. To put it mildly. Dad and I were both winding up inside, but I bought him food, gave him a backpack and some old archaeology magazines as a gift, and drove away trying not to cry.

I don't know at what point it occurred to me, but at some point I realized dad had hoped I'd be there to take him home. That he wouldn't have to ask, that I would welcome him immediately, perhaps even imagined how he'd resist once or twice, to save his dignity, then hop in the truck and leave his trash-filled campsite behind. That's what Paulo said, as we drove away -"His dignity's hurt real bad," and I think that's when the realization started to dawn. I'd just left my dad with a backpack's worth of canned goods, $20, and my castoff magazines, in the middle of nowhere, where he would soon get beaten up, his workboots and a bundle of stones stolen, and a broken zygomatic arch... my dad who was obviously malnourished, sunburned, getting eaten up by mosquitoes. But also my dad who refused to stop drinking and doing any drug he could find, so if I had brought him home would immediately have started all the same behaviors up again. Though the bright side of that would have been that I could call the cops on him without the eyes of my family on me, and perhaps gotten him to a hospital finally for the checkup we all wanted.

Plus, there was GC at home. GC, who for months I'd wanted to kick out but for lots of reasons that, honestly, only other abused people can fully understand, I'd let stay there. If I'd shown up with dad, it would have been an instant shitfest with GC. But even then, maybe he would have left. Maybe we would have broken up way before the bad stuff happened. Or maybe he would have seen that empathy and compassion can be good. Or, more likely, we would have slumped along in resentful hatred for awhile, so that's a dead-end to think about. So on the one hand, I didn't feel safe with dad, and I was on the breaking point of stress as it was. On the other hand, I think I did the wrong thing by leaving him there, on a couple levels. Now when he's real mad at me, that's what he throws in my face, that I "left him in the dirt" as he puts it. To get over the sting of that, I have to deal with the truth of the situation, and part of the truth is that even at the time, I felt I was making the wrong decision but shoved it aside because it was more comfortable at the time.

Now it's almost Father's Day again, and I still haven't answered that email from dad, asking if he can stay with me. Because the answer is basically no, even though it'll also be yes - as long as he goes to rehab first. Preferably also with a neurological workup and definitely followed by ongoing counseling. Even though in another sober email he recently said he'd been looking into AA, I can't bring myself to believe anything will change - even with AA. He needs something more concrete than meetings; he needs a break with this new reality to balance out the break with the old reality. Father's Day only serves to highlight how little anything has changed over the years. Maybe it won't be like this forever, and maybe it can change at any minute. I don't know if I'm being cynical or realistic here; it's hard to be objective about all this, to take a step back and analyze for any grain of hope. As of yesterday, he's officially homeless again. This is exactly the time for me to step up and be supportive - anniversaries are real hard for him, any reminder of how isolated he is makes it worse. This is a great time for me to balance what I see as past deficiencies. I even got him a Father's Day card (there's some ironically tragic shopping for you). Any time I think too long about how dad must have felt, there in Cave Junction, it feels like a gut punch and my heart imploding all at once. Even if dad never changes, I'm sort of thinking the only way to make that feeling stop is by continuing to do what I can. If I can get the courage up to just, you know, answer his phone calls or reply to his emails. Baby steps, right?

*No offense to people who like blue velvet cloaks. I myself would love a blue velvet cloak, which I think would be perfect for Faerieworlds, which I will not be able to afford to go to anyway. In the context of dad, a blue velvet cloak symbolically represents the complete turnaround in his life, sort of how, um... well, I can't find a metaphor. It's throbbing with symbolism, let's just say that.

**Someday I'll talk about my mom's role in this, but in a big way it's a lot more complex than dad's and harder to grapple with, but this is one of those situations where I look back and wonder what the actual fuck she was thinking.

Felly scurried through the late-night city streets, passing a checkpoint that she got through only because she gave the guard a capsule of Scoop in lieu of a valid night pass. She had to get to Cedric, and fast. The red alarm on her implant was blinking furiously, her head pounding in time. She got to Cedric's building, a post-war hive of concrete and hopelessness, sped through the front door, whose mag locks were always fritzed out, up three flights of stairs and down a murky hall.

Half-collapsed against Ced's door, Felly pounded until she heard the snaps and clicks of a dozen locks, and practically fell onto Cedric himself, looking far too alert for 2 a.m. and not at all happy to be interrupted. Clutching his shirt front, panting in short breaths, Felly looked up and blurted, "I've caught a bad meme. It hurts. I need it out, Ced, you have to get it out."

Peeling her fingers away, he pulled her inside and relocked the door. "You've got a top scanner, and you still caught a looping meme? Did you restart?"

"Yeah, Ced, of course I restarted. It's still there. I blanked the left eye screen but there's still flickers, and I can't get it to stop. My skull is splitting in half." Felly looked it, her pupils dilated so wide almost none of the blue showed, her hands shaking.

Silently Cedric cradled Felly's head in his hands, tilting it to one side, and brushed his thumb over the stats nub. He had an ancient pair of glasses, so clunky even the most desperate thieves passed him by, that he'd modified into a tiny walking interface. He didn't like the 'plants much, though they kept him in business, but he preferred his tech removable. His eyes unfocused as he scanned the readout on his glasses screen.

"Where, um, where did you pick that up?" He didn't move for his toolset, the mag reader, or even ask for payment, but stepped back warily while Felly plopped to the floor cross-legged and tentatively rubbed her temples with her hands.

"I was curious about the silo bombings and started trailing some links. I ended up on this fansite, real weird stuff, and one of the posts had a thumbnail of the floozer meme, so you know, I wanted to see... well, I like that one, a weasel dressed like that, you know? I just wanted to see how in the world someone would caption it." Felly's pupils were still dilated, but her breathing had slowed, and she watched Ced's face crumple in thought.

"It's not weird someone looped a meme, but it is weird your wall didn't block it, or at least ping you. No ping? Nothing?"

"Nada. I got the first meme up, then it started scrolling through a bunch of different captions so I figured it for a pop-up, but it didn't redirect anywhere. It's scrolling, just scrolling nonstop, and it hurts. I've never had a meme glitch like this."

Ced rummaged through the bin next to the computer and came out with an interface cord. He poked an end into the port behind Felly's left ear, causing her to wince, and the other into his stand-alone, the computer he used to prevent the spread of infection. He called up a diagnostics program and stared at Felly while it went to work. She stared back for the first minute or so, then dropped her eyes to her lap and tried to relax instead.

A tiny beep, and Cedric was up like a shot, scanning the readout, clucking and shaking his head. "You've got a tracker, but a new one. It's bizarre. The code is real dense, very elaborate for just a meme, definitely too elaborate for an average pop-up ad. You were looking at... a fansite? Of people who supported the bombings?" Just a week ago, a group had bombed and burned the huge silos at the edge of the city, destroying bread rations for the next month. Why anybody would be a fan of that act was beyond Cedric.

Felly nodded, still staring at her hands. If Ced couldn't fix it, she might have to see a licensed specialist, and she didn't have enough credits for an office visit - plus a pesky outstanding warrant or two. Ced was still staring at her thoughtfully, glancing at the code now and then, and back at her 'plant. He leaned over and tapped the power switch once, to restart. But the red light came back on when it rebooted, and the ghostly flicker of the meme was back in Felly's screen.

Ced sat down and started tapping out a sequence to change the part of the code he thought might be the loop, but when he ran it, nothing changed. He turned to another computer and started checking forums and boards for mentions of a code like this. He figured he'd have heard about it by now, unless it was brand new. When he finally found a mention of similar meme glitches, he sucked in his breath, and Felly whimpered again. If it surprised Ced, it couldn't be good, as far as her experience went.

"Sorry, Felly. It's definitely a tracker. There's not much info on it, and there's definitely no patch up yet. The few people who've seen it are saying to pull the 'plant. And most of them think that's point."

Felly was almost speechless. Pulling the 'plant was a delicate process; the neuroelectrical interface required sterile conditions and a legit upper-level tech, not someone she could trade gas rations and a few Scoop capsules to, like Ced here. "Ced, if that's the point, then... then the council's trying to pull in suspects by forcing them to a clinic?"

Ced nodded tiredly. "Yeah, seems like the best conclusion. If they're willing to risk censure by downloading trackers into people, they might be desperate and pulling 'em in however they can. News has been quiet so if they're not making much progress, well... Unless you can handle it and wait for a fix, the only way to end this meme is to see a tech."

Felly held her head in her hands. It hurt so bad, the constant input and flickering of the meme making her head throb and making it even harder to think. There was another option. A terrible, unreliable, possibly not even real option she'd only heard rumors of. He, or she, the rumors were unclear, had lost licensure at a posh clinic years back but stole enough equipment on the way out to set up... somewhere. The rumors were also unclear about that. Felly's realm was drugs, not tech, and she'd never had to cross that line before. But logging a visit to a med/tech clinic and bringing council security down on her was, in Felly's mind, not much of an option.

Finally she raised her head, looked Ced straight in the eye, and said, "Alright. I'll get it pulled. But I'm not going to a clinic to do it," and as doubt and dismay crept over Ced's face, she finished, "I want you to help me find the Mole."

to be continued

Dear LJ Idol friends: I wanted to leave so many comments and reply to all comments but am traveling and this is the slowest internet I've seen in months. Maybe years. Also am on tablet & large storm coming thru, and seriously forgot a midterm due tomorrow. Excusses! But decent ones? Non LJ Idol friends, Denver is still sorta rad. I wish I had more time here. vous about scholarship dinner. Argh! Nervous! I forgot my stylus, this is ridiculous. Exhausted. Must study. Bullshat my way thru today but luckily read some of it years ago. I should've saved this for tomorrow... boy with pretty dreads in class, otherwise middle-aged preachers in training who unaccountably kept repeating "balls to the wall" to describe their attitude toward school. Felt awkward, squirmy inside every time. Thunder whee!!!

Derrick stretched, yawned, and chewed on a piece of straw while sauntering over to the drafting table. He peered over Brad's shoulder and made a long sucking noise as Brad tapped the pencil against the table.

"Seriously, don't chew that thing in my ear," Brad snapped, and erased another line, his brow furrowed.

Derrick just sniffed and examined the blueprint, and after long minutes pointed to a section in the middle of the plan. "I think it's there. I think we can fit it in there, and not bother with anything else. See, once they get to that tunnel (gesturing off to the upper left), there's no going back anyway, so why make it more complex than it has to be?"

Brad cocked his head to the left, then the right, peered closer and wished for glasses, reared back and squinted in thought.

"Derrick, I think you may have it. Can't believe I didn't see it before, in fact. It's such a small change it won't affect the load-bearing walls at all, and won't change the cost much either!" Brad was so relieved he didn't even twitch when Derrick started chewing open-mouthed on the straw, still talking.

"If we move that thingy 2 cm over and replace it with that, with that, you know what I mean... It could work!" Derrick settled his thumbs into his belt loops and looked extremely smug.

Brad shook his head in wonder. When he'd asked for help on this project Derrick had been the only one to volunteer, so they trooped off to the little office in the back of the barn as often as possible. Through stifling heat, dust and hay flakes, working around the stablehands' schedules, stealing every moment they could, they had drawn and planned and erased and redrawn.

Brad had to admit, despite his almost complete lack of engineering or construction knowledge and his deeply irritating personal habits, Derrick had surprisingly helpful flashes of insight.

Brad, so carefully, erased a few lines, drew new ones in a few centimeters over, made a notation for the builder to add a tiny spring, and dropped the pencil. It would be the best mousetrap any mouse had ever seen. Sleepless days and nights blended together while he and Derrick despaired. Or really, Brad despaired and Derrick chewed through half a bale of hay, claiming it helped him think. But it was done and none too soon, for the courier was coming in the morning.

Brad and Derrick beamed at each other. "We'll be famous! Our names will go down in history!" Derrick exclaimed, and indeed they became known all throughout mousedom as the heroes who ensured the best mousetrap in the world had an escape hatch.

As soon as they pulled up to the farmhouse, weathered gray and ivy-covered in its copse of shadowing trees, Laura felt a shiver. While her parents talked to the landlord and her brother read in the car, she wandered around the grapevines, past the falling-down paddock, to the front yard. She tripped up the front step, and for a few heartbeats the ancient holly bush was gone, and a woman in a long dress was pouring out drinks for children. A slow blink, and the tableau vanished. She ran back to the kitchen and tugged on her mom's shirt, the story spilling out in gasps. The landlord laughed and said, "There's plenty of ghosts here! They don't seem to bother people, just make for good stories."

Laura's eyes rounded in fearful delight, and the adult conversation continued around her. The house was so old it was registered as a national historic house; the landlords insisted they couldn't put in insulation because of the restrictions on renovations, and the downstairs walls were rough, unsanded boards painted a dark brown sometime in the early 1900s. They were unevenly spaced, some cracks wide enough to stick a finger into. At night the scratching and scrabbling of rodents would keep Laura awake. Her mother told her it was squirrels because she thought it would be less scary, but the cats would sometimes leave half-eaten mice and rats on the carpet. Two of the bedrooms were papered in thick dusty paper, in some places peeling off to show a layer of older, dustier paper underneath.

For months after moving in, nothing more happened. The landlords told stories about the pioneers who built the place, the 5 or maybe 10 or maybe only 2 children who slept in the attic and died of flu or maybe smallpox or maybe it was a fire; of the two blind brothers who strung a line from the back porch to an outhouse so they could feel their way to the shitter, refusing to move from their familiar home until they, too, died. Then Laura started having nightmares. She heard voices whispering, felt eyes watching through the windows, couldn't take the garbage out at night because the sense of being surrounded by cruel intent was so strong it made her skin crawl and her neck hairs stand on end. She awoke screaming on the nights when a black cloud came to hover over her bed and slowly, slowly descend, threatening to suffocate her.

Erik, Laura's brother, never noticed anything. Too logical and too wrapped up in avoiding everybody while he wrestled with puberty. Then one night a family friend came to visit. Nobody would tell Laura what happened, afraid it might give her bad dreams, but after a night on the couch he refused to ever sleep there again. Her mother saw children peeking around the door jamb between the dining room and kitchen, giggling. She chose to call them angels. When the sense of being watched in her bedroom became too much, Laura demanded her brother switch her, but still the black cloud found her at night, and the feeling of watchers was so strong she expected to see faces peering in through the windows if she looked up. She never looked up.

Laura's mom invited her brother over, recently converted from a life of drugs and drink to ecstatic religiosity, to drive out the spirits. Laura watched her uncle and her father walk through the house with an open Bible, praying, dipping their thumbs into a dish of blessed olive oil, drawing dripping crosses over every doorway. They were satisfied. Laura was not. She felt shivery, numb, and despairing at the same time. The house didn't feel cleansed, it felt dormant.

Well after the olive oil crosses had faded to shimmers, in the middle of a day in the middle of summer, huddled in the corner of the couch with that sense of being watched, being loomed over, but all alone, Laura made a break for her room. She bolted through the living room, the dining room, turned a hard left into the kitchen and ran up the first rise of stairs. Where the stairwell jogged to the right was a small landing, and despite knowing the stairs like the back of her hand, it was here that she tripped. Her hands slapped down to break her fall, but Laura was on her hands and knees, and when she caught her breath and looked up, it was dusk. The stairs were no longer painted a dark red; they were bare wood but polished, the walls also stripped of paint and covered in cobwebs. As she drew in her breath for a scream that no one would hear, a cobweb brushed her face, and she noticed three spiders crawl toward her, another dropping from the wall, its front legs waving with interest.

She shoved herself up, arms windmilling as she took a step back over what seemed to be a missing stair, and the spiders vanished. The cobwebs were gone. The stairs were no longer polished wood but the usual faded brick red, the walls thicked over with the usual brown paint. The midday sun streamed through the window at the head of the stairs, illuminating her way as she carefully, purposefully not counting the steps, picked her way up the stairs.