I Found Photos Of Those Pallas Cat Kittens Born This Year And Bye I'm Deceased

you want some?

Armed Kazakh Woman on the Steppes of Western China, 1982

also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.

HAMMOND B3 ORGAN CISTERN by GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI

Audrey Benjaminsen’s illustrations for Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

What would it take?

On the day of the shooting, Rebecca had driven up to DC to give an interview for the Post.

Ms. Nelson, your recent march in Charlotte has been criticized by politicians on both sides of the isle; some saying the “defund the police” movement is a brash reaction to singular human errors.

Yes… I’ve seen. Those criticizing it are largely establishment neoliberals, who have a financial interest in upholding the prison industrial complex. I encourage anyone who is concerned about ‘brashness’ to read what our platform really is.

[…]

Your stepbrother––republican senator David Nelson of North Carolina––is among the detractors. I can imagine your family gatherings are tense, if you don’t mind me asking? It’s uncommon for a progressive activist to be of the same ilk as a GOP member. Since our father passed away [the former congressman John Nelson] …we honestly haven’t had reason to see each other. My mom and I were never really part of the club, if you know what I mean. In fact, I haven’t spoken to him since he voted against legalizing gay marriage. For obvious reasons [laughing].

I see [smiling]. How has parenthood been treating you?

…Lizzy and I love our children very much. They’re who I’m fighting for. Having adopted them, I feel an extra responsibility to get it right––I’m not sure if that makes sense. But they’re my two little angels, Liam and Ella; I couldn’t have asked for better kids.

The reporter resumed her questions about police reform for a few minutes, until Rebecca was interrupted by a phone call from Lizzy. She politely excused herself from the table. As she walked towards the window listening to her wife’s voice, the publicity-smile died on her face. Confusion and fear took its place. Hand-over-mouth, she said, “Do they know what school?” The interview was never published.

…

Both dead.

Rebecca had refused to believe it…until she identified the bodies, that is. She doesn’t remember much from those first weeks. Her memory of them is a soup of shock and nausea: Lizzy wailing at Lego blocks, rotting care-packages, crying for so long that breathing became a chore. She couldn’t stop imagining their final moments––the confusion, the running, the fear-freezing…how they wouldn’t have understood what was happening, or why holes had been ripped through their soft little bodies, or why they were draining down into darkness––why she wasn’t there to protect them. Her life felt corrupted at the seams with evil. They didn’t leave the house for two weeks after the funeral. She was locked in a gas chamber of puerile horror; surrounded by unceasing absence. Any child-sized object was enough to poison her for hours with inky grief. They had released a public statement; she knew this would be a story. She hated every message of condolences that she received––each one was more evidence that the event had truly happened; each one pushing her further from the hope that things could go back. Most of all, she hated the letter from her stepbrother. She was blind to his words of sympathy, his “thoughts and prayers.” She obsessed over their past arguments on his policy: fighting gun-control bills on the floor, advocating for the very weapon her children’s shooter used; millions in campaign donations from the NRA. She didn’t invite him to the funeral. He called her on the day, but he couldn’t get a word in––she screamed at him about his liability until he hung up.

It was only after Rebecca had torn herself away from that sticky domestic agony, that she began to appreciate the moral power she now had over him. Endowed with a new purpose in life, she felt obligated to make something good come out of this; to make him pay for his professional sins. Had political leverage ever come in the form of guilt before? Unlikely, she thought, for such a shameless lot.

…

Four weeks passed. She waited outside his DC townhouse, squeezing and relaxing her strong fists. Her heart pounded. Bitter memories crushed in around her, accompanying the oppressive humidity. This city, this house––she knew nothing of them besides illegitimacy and exclusion. She remembered a teenage David referring to her as “daddy’s little bastard girl” at Christmas one year. David got dropped off by a black SUV, grinning at his iPhone as he walked. When he reached her at the door, his face looked agitated, as if at a loiterer; but upon recognizing her it became surprised, then guarded—on the defensive. “You’ve been hard to reach,” she said, pleased to have caught him out. She’d been calling him constantly in the past week, which he had started screening upon realizing that she wasn’t looking to him for comfort. He looked flustered, his mouth opened and closed. “…yes, I’ve been busy…very busy. Rebecca, I wish I could’ve seen you earlier… I’m so sorr––” “I read your letter already. No need to be redundant,” she said. A loaded silence passed, he looked at her blankly. She gestured to his house, “Fancy a drink? Old times sake.” Hesitation, ambivalence—could he really be afraid of her? She was elated to see him conflicted like this; for once she had the upper hand. Composing himself, he smiled. “I’d like that. I’ve missed you, Becky,” reaching out with a comforting touch. She played along, smiling sadly like the doe he saw her as. Hot blood rushed through her neck, she felt dangerous.

Once settled inside, she gestured to his phone and said, “not spoiling any evening plans, am I? I saw Christine is out of town.” His mouth smiled, his eyes didn’t. “…We’re having a rough patch, as you know.” His glare was steady––a warning. “And you? How’s your… y’all holding up?” “Ah, you know,” she shrugged. In reality, the marriage was quickly following their children to the grave. Too much damage had been done. But she wouldn’t dare tell him; for fear of sharing some bastardized solidarity. Icy minutes passed, and she hated him more with each one; he seemed inconvenienced by her presence, looking forward to resuming his unbothered life. She could feel evil radiating from everything––polished leather, antique tables, animal hides. His wealth made her sick, she felt her children’s death in every atom of his home. Her nerves were frayed, her vision was hot and red––she couldn’t wait any longer. He was facing the bar, pouring out a bourbon. “So, wanna talk about how you’re an accomplice to my children’s murder?” He stopped pouring. Her pulse quickened more. Finally, he turned around, and she was taken aback by the menace on his face–– “What did you just say?” “He used an AR-15 David. As I’m sure you know.” He smiled at her, as if he we’re looking at a child or a mental patient. “This is so typical.” She imagined kicking his teeth in. “I invite you into my home? And y––” “Tell me, how much money does the NRA stuff up your ass every year? Enough to blind you from the news? Or do you just enjoy sucking daddy’s dick so much you don’t have time to notice?” He laughs in her face. “The kid would’ve just used a different gun Rebecca! Is that not clear to you?? You really think if I had voted to ban AR-15s he wouldn’t have just got one illegally? Grow up. Don’t come to me playing politics when you’re clearly too emotional to think.” “Fuck you,” she spat. She hated that his condescension could bite her––he had the voice of her father. Childish tears filled her eyes, and she turned away; she couldn’t let him see her cry. She steadied herself against a chair. A few minutes passed. He sipped his bourbon. “Listen, Becky. I’m sorry…I–– I can’t imagine what you’re going through. To lose those kids, just––” “Save it.” Her words were thick with tears. Those kids. She couldn’t help but laugh. He hadn’t bothered to call them by name, just like her dad––again. Too brown, too poor. We’ll humor her little girlfriend, we’ll let her help these poor kids; but we mustn’t be seen with them. it doesn’t serve the party values. Hate pooled in her stomach. She faced him. “Just think for a second. What if it had been Adam and Luke when they were in school? Would you have done something then?” A few moments passed. He scrunched his nose––he seemed to be genuinely contemplating. “Now––I don’t mean to be rude; I hate to say it. These things are tragedies… truly. But they don’t happen in private schools.” She stared at him, shocked. She couldn’t speak…was he serious? She felt crazy. Was that all it took for them to sleep? A degree or two of separation? She almost laughed––the path forward was so simple. It struck her like a shaft of divine light. “Did you know that Liam was shot four times?” she asked him. “He was found crawling towards his sister’s classroom.” The words were corrosive; insane. How could they be true? Nothing was real; the room convulsed in violent anguish. Her life was forfeit long ago. She excused herself to the bathroom. She walked calmly to the hallway closet, where David had once flaunted the self-defense shotgun (locked and loaded!). Funny, she thought––if it wasn’t there for her to use, she would’ve just left.

…

Living out her days on a slab of concrete, Rebecca Nelson felt that she had completed her life’s work. Before she was arrested, she had posted a picture of David’s dead body, with the caption: Dear congress, the killings will continue until you take our guns away. Many would call the bluff, she knew. The media would chew her up and spit her out: a mental case, a far-left anarchist, a villain. But others would see the power in those words, the explosive potential. The fuse was lit, the ice broken. More than anything she had said before, at any rally or interview, that sentence had a real chance of inspiring some change. She could see them now, sitting in dim rooms––between bumps of coke, fingers drumming on mahogany. Hard to believe, man. Unbelievable. You know he went to Harvard with my brother, yeah? Lovely guy. I always knew she was a psycho. Say…you don’t think there will be others, do you?

Nate

Idyllic Sceneries 'The backyard's new! Did you change the landscaping here?' Prints | Ko-Fi | Patreon | Bluesky

when matsson took his hoodie off and casually flashed his abs and roman and kendall were just standing there like 🧍🏻🧍🏻 that was lgbt history

Raspberry Gummies

We arrived during the opener’s last song: lopsided indie rock. The backyard venue was buzzing with people I had never met, save for an oasis of familiarity near the middle which Tessa and I latched onto like a life raft—–rescued by smiling faces and friendliness. Eva, Aidan, Emily, Emilie… usual candied dynamics in a fun-sized portion.

We soon decided to both have another gummy––Are you feeling anything yet?

The sun slid steadily towards the earth­­––warm pink light clipping the top of the house––while an ambient glow trickled through the not-quite-blossoming branches of the Sakura tree to blanket us all in spring. A lull in the performance lineup left space for socialization. I finally learned the name of a person who I’d seen three times before on campus (all coincidences, and two of which was them complimenting me on my sweater), which I now know to be Sonia. I congregated with the band who was my reason for coming in the first place: Aidan, Micah, Isaac, Josh––when are you playing? will there be time? are you excited?

By the time the next band started I was feeling comfortable, things were a bit funnier than usual but otherwise I knew where I was. I was struck by the quality of the music; it was as if a professional rock and roll band had stumbled in from the alley in a drunken stupor, and had decided that the only way they would feel at home was by terraforming the unknown environment through the purity of their sound. The singer and lead guitar fancied themselves comedians, pausing between songs to tell stories and laugh at the crowd. One of the tracks featured a slow building lead-in to the chorus, where the singer led everyone to crouch down in a hushed conspiracy of anticipation; and all the while the drummer kept the beat pumping with a head-splitting veracity. The release into frenzy with everyone jumping up in unison was just as electrifying as you’d imagine. I realized during those bridges that drummers are the most moving musicians to watch; no other shows the life-and-death drama of their craft more clearly­––in every moment the body battles its physical limits with the lifeblood of the song on the line. There is something fatally attractive about it. It was near the end of their set when nighttime established itself over the yard, and it was under this cover of darkness that the gummies sprang their revenge.

Whenever I’m too high I tend to freak out, desperately grasping for continuity with every moment bringing a fresh wave of disorientation. I look at the person beside me singing along with the band, I search in my mind for what I should be doing, I try to copy them. I notice how the muscles of my face are being held, I am too aware of how air is hitting my arm right now. I swallow. It feels weird––my adam’s apple moving with its own agency. Someone catches my eye to the left, a guy around my height, wearing a denim jacket. His hair looks like mine did before I cut it, he nods coolly to the beat. The sporadic flashes of light illuminate his profile so I can see some of his face, and a numb horror washes over me as I realize that he is me. I feel foolish for having thought I was here as a person––no, I am a floating observer, a dreamy film camera here to capture my life from a few months ago. The more I look at myself the clearer this becomes. How strange it is to see yourself as others do––have I always looked that rigid? I’ve usually despised looking at myself in pictures, and while the hatred remained in person at first, it is starting to subside. Seeing myself in motion adds an element of sympathy that I could see people getting used to; a mouse face that announces its self-consciousness through animacy. I wonder what is so special about myself to get a filmic adaptation, but I make sure to frame the shot elegantly nonetheless. My trance begins to intensify, a dolly-zoom spinning sparks of parallax across my vision, when suddenly a hand grabs my shoulder and I whip around to see Tessa with an alarmed look on her face.

She said “what’s going on?” through wholesome giggles, and I immediately fell back into the evening as I previously knew it (back to past tense––thank god!). I told her that I saw another version of myself over there, and about my momentary freakout, and she laughs and I laugh, restorative light-headedness. She questioned me on it further, so I point him out to her, and he still looks exactly like me, but she says she can’t see him (wait wait, back again?). I’m quite a bit taller than her so she can’t see over the people between us and him, I lean over to give her room, and he turns away just as she looks at him. She says she can’t tell: it’s too dark.

We stood there gob-smacked and slack-jawed for a while, talking about how we couldn’t believe how high we were, before giving up on listening to the music and shuffling over to Kat––when did she get here? She was standing with Eva and Emily; we communicated our dismay to them and were met with amusement. Suddenly, in a non sequitur of consciousness, I found myself surprisingly deep into a conversation with Maggie about how her hair was shorter than it was last year, and I did my best to say what a normal human would in that situation. Returning to the druggy solidarity of Tessa and the others, we found enjoyment in saying the things we were thinking and marveling at how ridiculous they sounded out loud. Someone tells me to look down and before I know why or how, my vision becomes nothing but purplish white––an ocean of rods and cones crying out in pain. I exclaim and press my palms into my eyelids, the purple edges of the ocean start to recede and I finally realize that it was a camera flash: someone had taken a group photo from below of us all looking down. I can only imagine how goofy I must have looked. I open my eyes to find Tessa equally pained, waving her hands in front of her eyes––ohmygod ohmygod, and once again we are spurned into inescapable breathless laughter.

I noticed at some point that the bands had switched, now an alternative indie group whose name has slipped my mind. The camera flashes continued their assault on my retinas, but once I got used to them I found the beauty in their spectacle. Along with each one came my own personal snapshot from the moment of the light, a Polaroid negative printed in blue and green over my eyes. A figure with outstretched hands, a paintbrush hair-flip, Josh’s smiling face; a chemical slideshow of jubilation viewable by me and me alone. I felt a rush of gratitude for the magic of my sensory experience, that the illusory system produces beauty even when it is momentarily broken.

The light behind the band was steadily cycling through all the colors of the rainbow, and Tessa and I became transfixed by a pressing scientific discovery. We noticed that the leaves of the tree in the distance became more sharply detailed when the light was near the red end of the spectrum, and murkier on the blue end. I stared at those branches for way too long, riding the marry-go-round of visible light, running my imagination along the tactile crimson buds and stirring the indigo soup. It had been who-knows-how-long before I noticed the music building in the background, keyboard arpeggios dancing higher and higher, tickling my ears. I turned to Tessa to say “wait this sounds amazing!” and she nodded her head enthusiastically—Right?? The singer with dyed-red hair stepped away from the microphone to focus on their guitar solo, singing with metal rather than breath. Closing my eyes, I could feel the physical presence of the music, a rainbow orb spinning above the yard. Everything reaching crescendo, fierce melodies piercing my soul, I felt a white-hot ball of euphoria rising out of my spinal cord, before it was sling-shotted by the resolving note into my skull where it bounced around inside for longer than I thought possible. Vegas bulbs igniting with every supercharged pinball bounce, I made a noise halfway between a laugh and a scream, and I had to steady my dizziness against the tree, a floaty high made from the overwhelming distillation of the music and the people and the life into my brain. I told Tessa I couldn’t believe how good I felt at that moment, that I had no idea such a feeling was possible. And the best part about it was that the gummies weren’t what gave me that high; sure they might have helped a bit, but I had a confidence within me that it was produced by my environment, and the inconceivable effect it has on me when I’m able to truly appreciate it.

This is not to say the experience wasn’t scary. Early on, the host of the party grabbed the microphone and said his neighbors had called the cops for a noise complaint, which did wonders for my paranoia. From that moment on, any passing flashlight or unexpected movement was a SWAT team with guns drawn. Also, I would frequently fall back into my retrograde amnesia–whereamIohgod mindset, a sinkhole of unreality that came and went unceremoniously. All I had to do to trigger it was look across the yard at myself, unable to suppress my curiosity in this past version of me. Tessa later called my experience ego death, which seemed right. It certainly felt like dying––like this was my last opportunity to kiss my earthly body goodbye before pledging allegiance to the great nothing. There was so much I wanted to say to myself. And yet––like an estranged father on the run, I was condemned to make silent amends from a distance… observing my creation in all his damaged solitude through a one-way mirror, unable to salvage our relationship with words––I love you; I know you; I’m sorry. I made sure to keep my distance from him; it was hard to picture us interacting without one of us trying to kill the other. Tessa did well to diffuse my situation, repeating that the guy didn’t actually look like me at all, and approaching random friends to ask “are you nate? are you nate?” in a demonstration of my ridiculousness. She was right: when I eventually got close to him the effect vanished. But nothing could convince me that this wasn’t just another malevolent trick by whichever god was responsible for our meeting. There is strange part of me that refuses to recover from the existential test of that experience; some arcane allure to the idea that I am not the only version of myself in the world. Maybe it’s because it makes me feel less alone. It’s comforting to believe that there’s other ‘me’s bumbling around out there, making the same mistakes for the same non-reasons, who could join in on a collective shrug at our own expense. But then I remember that all of us––you and me––already have that in each other; all we need to do is cross the unknowable gulf that lies between us and have a chat on the dancefloor.

I was beginning to come down when Aidan’s band started their set. I had seen them play maybe eight times before, and this was up to their standard level of magnificence––no amount of complication could change my love and appreciation for them. To be in such close proximity to a creation so enlivening is enough to make me feel like the luckiest person in the world. They generate a sacred space at all their performances, one in which you can go bananas with your closest friends and give in to the insanity calling your name. Not only is it amazing to know a band so closely, but each of their concerts have been a gift—free of charge. They’re really out here making us all happy one weekend at a time, out of the kindness of their hearts and the strength of their art. The whole project has been oddly validating, as if it confirms the quality of our community. Part of me feels that the creation of something great from our friend-group was an inevitability; like a chemical process in which colliding enough interesting atoms together is bound to produce something beautiful––social alchemy.

By the time they finished, it was nearing eleven o’clock. Some people began to head for the alleyway exit, others shuffled forward in a congregation of thanks––this was when we’d ask for pictures and autographs if we weren’t already friends. After hugging everyone and doing my best to convey my appreciation, I noticed how fried my brain felt and decided it was time for me to leave as well. Of course, it only made sense to leave with Tessa––my comrade in the terrifying experience. I am endlessly thankful that she was there to keep me sane. As we were crossing the wooden threshold out of the yard, I couldn’t help but throw a glance back at myself, secretly hoping he was looking at me too. I saw him gazing up at the stars with a little smile on his face, breathing in the evening while it lasted. The smile was contagious, and I turned back contentedly to Tessa, ready to skip off into the darkness.

Nate