There is no shortage of content about The Sims. New players are welcomed into the sunshine of helpful resources, custom content, and troubleshooting. Eventually, however, one gets desensitized to the formulaic set of goals laid out for us and veers into the labyrinthine forest of storytelling. Stories about female Sims who are impregnated 100+ times by different men. Stories about serial killer Sims who marry the Grim Reaper and trap Father Winter in their basement, then seduce the replacement Father Winter and trap him in the basement too. Stories in which Sims enact scenes of betrayal, drama, mystery, and intrigue.
If you’ve managed so far to navigate this labyrinth, you find yourself facing the entrance to a dark alley, lit by a single bare bulb, surrounded by concrete and chain link fence, outside a boarded-down restaurant named Lucky Dragon. This is no longer formulaic crazy. This is high-effort crazy. This is farmer’s market, organic, handcrafted artisan crazy. This is Willoughby Whippets and Tibetan Spaniels.
Allow us to introduce ourselves.
Every RAGING middle school child at some point gets the idea to capture an unwitting NPC that wanders across their lot in a four-by-four grey wall enclosure in which they spin and impotently raise their arms into the air over and over until death befalls them. Despite the fact that you did not create a ceiling, the other residents of Pleasantville, for whom the game has generated happy bourgeois player goals, seemingly stroll by without hearing their screams. The developers think it’s weird that there would be ghosts inside a house, but we know, as players and modders, that this is not even close to the limit of insanity WHICH GOES TO INFINITY. Not only do we REFUSE to follow through on the goals posed to us by the developers as rhetorical questions in their family descriptions, we DEMOLISH THE GIVEN HOUSES and replace them with CHURCHES and an underground DOME OF OPIUM GNOMES!!!!!!! Do you not understand me? Then seee for yourself in the following pages. Can you think outside the four-by-four grey wall box of NPC capture? Simister can. Can Bella Goth be rediscovered? What kind of goal is this?? The REAL question you should be asking yourself is, can the Mormon Church figure out the source of psychedelic rock music coming up through its floor from the Gnome orgy? Can little Johnny escape the room in which his grandparents force him to play the violin continuously? Forget about the single mom scenario. What about the child who is raised by a globe wearing a bonnet and a stick? Watch him receive parental guidance from a floating twig! Who needs alien abductions when you have an a tower laboratory in which citizens are captured for experimentation? Simister does not make all their sims live in ghettoblaster apartments with one microwave for a family of 10 and five stereos that play constantly from locations sims cannot get to from any angle. Simister’s replicate of herself in the virtual world owns a mansion in every possible gameworld and has a boyfriend and three children for every man Simister has every found attractive whether from knowing personally or from seeing for three seconds on a street corner. Yes, random man I never talked to at the cafe–do you know that you and I have already reproduced repeatedly in our home that we own in the jungle?
Dolly Llama, in contrast, guides her virtual children with a gentle hand. Sweet, happy, highly accomplished families live in (admittedly poorly-built) houses; there is no evil, no meanness, nothing but genuine empathy. Yet, even when their every move is guided by a benevolent creator, Sims find ways to make themselves unhappy. Perhaps two personalities conflict, or idiosyncrasies appear, or the AI makes some inexplicable decision. Why ignore it? Stifling your Sims’ personalities for the sake of your own flawed understanding of life is limiting, after all. Even a benevolent creator creates in a purely Orwellian context. Moreover, there is no need to create artificial conflict: no matter how kind the player is, how much freedom the player gives them, Sims will create conflict, solely based on who they are. Ignoring pain is itself a cause of pain. There is no need to torture them. They torture themselves. This is the thesis of Dolly Llama’s work.
If you are ready to think outside the box—yes, outside the four by four square of grey walls in which you captured Santa Claus—then read ahead and follow us into the Wonderland that is the only known Sims blog sponsored by the Church of Scientology: Willoughby Whippets and Tibetan Spaniels.
Once upon a midnight dreary, as I labored, dull and weary, Through a tiring routine performed a thousand times before— There I stood engaged in tending to my basic needs unending And the idle minute spending on the odd quotidian chore— On the odd hygienic, skill, career, or culinary chore, Merely this and nothing more.
‘Twas a cool night in October with the full moon watching over And the fall mood snugly captured by the harvest-toned decor Through which whiffing winds had brought the most distinctive smells of autumn, An aroma fair that not a mortal being could ignore— Merged with simmered homely flavors far too tempting to ignore, Warmth and spice and nothing more.
With the supper neatly plated—and a growling stomach sated— Yet, a whim within dictated a desire still for more I had thought before of staying, but compulsively obeying Was my act upon relaying the command from in my core— The command to cook another dish from deep within my core— Stir and cook, and nothing more.
But preparing it felt hollow, with another soon to follow Since I scarce could bear to swallow what already lay in store; And this action, I suspected, was the fate I had accepted: Swept and swung into the rapids of this purposeless encore— Caught and carried in the vapid, vain and purposeless encore To repeat forevermore.
Here my mind with horror brimming turned to morbid thoughts of swimming From the inkling of forgotten rumor heard and lost before, That some wretch removed the ladder; left one soaking from the bladder, Who then, mortified, did splatter—swept like dust across the floor— Cast inside a tarnished urn of ash and dust upon the floor, There to rest forevermore.
Then—it seemed—I had unravelled, and through space and time I travelled To some grim-fantastic world beyond the confines of Sims 4 In involuntary spasm—when I saw, across the chasm— Saw a wisp of a phantasm watching; watching fiercely o’er! And the presence of that distant eye that glared so fiercely o’er Would be lifted—nevermore.
Nor my psyche had reacted before snapping out, distracted, By the portent smell of smoke from out the glowing oven door: For my pause—as I was learning—meant the dinner now was burning: Ash and charcoal, swiftly turning into broadening uproar! And my panic—with it—rising to tumultuous uproar! All-consuming, evermore.
Here the watchful eye’s abstention plainly hinted their intention: A creator who constructed their creations to abhor— Hence my friends, with deaths so tragic—merely victims to their magic— Met an ending autophagic by the treach’ry held in store— And I grieved, consumed by dreading for the end that lay in store— It was fate, and nothing more.
In the face of certain dooming, with the autumn winds now looming, I appealed to my commander—though they offered no rapport— “Please,” I begged of them, “you have to hear my cries for help!”—but after, Felt the grim reply of laughter as it echoed through my core— A foreboding laugh that chilled my being and trembled through my core— Then a voice said “Nevermore.”
Shocked was I to hear this master—who had led me to disaster— But my terror turned to hatred, and this hatred did outpour: “Pray then, tell me, ghostly mystic, with intention so sadistic With desires egotistic, with inhuman thirst for gore: Pray—when will you end the sacrifice and quench your thirst for gore?” Quoth the Watcher “Nevermore.”
“Villain,” cried I, “thing of evil!—Villain still, if man or devil! Whether vicious, venting maniac, or vengeful god of yore— You, who conquer and corral us! Is there method to your malice? Is your bitter heart so callous as to wage a coward’s war? Can your helpless subjects forge a truce to end this pointless war? Quoth the Watcher “Nevermore.”
“Villain,” cried I, “thing of evil!—Villain still, if man or devil! By the powers that connect us, by the ones that fell before— You, with tragic heart forsaken, with reluctance to awaken to the lives your crimes have taken and the sins your soul has bore! May it weighten with the murders of the Sims your soul has bore! Curse you, curse you evermore!”
I was grasping, but there were no tools to counter the inferno And through wreckage could discern no exit, save the burning door; Under watch of one who made me, whose malevolence enslaved me, Who made no attempt to save me; left me gasping on the floor— And the restless flames unchained me from the body on the floor, To awaken—nevermore.
(2) If you’re looking for more Sims-related black comedy/drama that blurs the line between author and character, and that has some extremely silly prose, you should check out Catastrophe Theory. If you want to see a brutal roast of SLC ft. stoned gnomes in a psychedelic basement, that’s my coauthor’s deal.
(3) CC/build credits: Hair is by Vikai; house is New Beginnings Starter by chenelclarke
(4) Don’t worry; I quit without saving. Lenore is fine.
Beatrix, a fourth-year Applied Folktale Logic grad student at the Budapest University of Supernatural Study, skimmed her notes for the Apple Theory reading group. It was her turn to present. Her classmate Tamás was alright, but if she missed a small detail, Lajos would pick up on it. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Their faculty advisor, Dr. Alma Pekurár, became one of the first apple theorists after an incident with her older sisters. That is, her older sisters (two—incidentally, one had one eye and the other had three eyes) gave her rags to wear and leftovers to eat. Alma was miserable until an old woman gave her an incantation to turn her pet goat into a loaded banquet table, which worked until her sisters found out and killed the goat. She planted the goat’s entrails (advice from the same old woman) from which sprung a tree with golden apples. Only she could pick these apples, for the tree was spectacular at evasive maneuvers. A handsome man witnessed her plucking a gold apple from a tree and realized that’s what he wanted in a wife, apple-picking abilities. So they married.
Her husband was curious about the tree, but laughed at her when she said it grew from goat entrails. Trees grow from seeds! Not goat guts! But Alma was determined to prove him wrong. She had her servants poster entire villages with notices that read “Are you the youngest of three siblings? Bullied by the elders? Best friend is a farm animal? You may be eligible for our study! Come to the B.U.S.S. at the start of winter and ask for Alma. Compensation provided.” Three months later, she proved the bullied group had a statistically significant advantage compared to the control at generating magic trees from pet parts. Her dissertation, ‘Golden apple, poisoned apple: Familial mistreatment and leveraging interspecies relationships,’ singlehandedly saved hundreds of middle and oldest siblings from divine retribution. Now, twenty years later, she was chair of B.U.S.S.’s Folktale Logic Department. Divorced.
“So!” Beatrix announced. “The paper I’m presenting today is an interdisciplinary study: ‘Existence of a merged apple-metallic triad’ by Nagy et al.”
She shuffled her notes. “To review, the field of triadic metallurgy studies magical objects that come in groups of copper, silver, gold or silver, gold, diamond, often referred to as a metallic triad. For example, cups and forests.” The other students nodded. This was kindergarten folktale logic. “While gold apples have been well studied, these authors note the existence of copper, silver, and diamond apples, always with the predicted group structure. They argue these apple-metallic triads can be connected to other sets of metallic-triadic objects. Nagy et al.’s results hinge on a case study in which three kidnapped princesses turned their castles into apples for ease of transport.” She held up a diagram. “The three castles were copper, silver, and gold, forming a metallic triad, and the merged apple-metallic triad arose from that.”
“Wait, I thought there could be anywhere from three to seven metallic elements,” interjected Tamás.
“That’s horse legs.”
“But only those four? What about smiling apples? Technically it should be possible to have a group of five.”
“Smiling apples have only been observed with talking grapes and ringing peaches. Not other apples.” Dr. Pekurár nodded at Beatrix’s response.
Lajos cleared his throat. Uh-oh. “We’re focusing on the wrong thing. This paper is trivial.”
“Oh?” Beatrix replied. “How so?”
“I mean, if you just think about basic apple theory, gold apples are the only ones with any special properties. You can’t offer someone a silver apple as a proposal, or place one atop a tree to screen suitors for a princess. Even Alma’s work concerns only gold apples.” Dr. Pekurár nodded again. “If copper, silver, or diamond apples are appearing, they have to arise from an existing metallic triadic set.”
Beatrix rolled her eyes. “There’s no possible way you could know that. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Fielded. How do you like them apples, Lajos?
“But this experiment isn’t replicable,” he protested.
“Go ahead and try. Good luck getting that one past the Ethics Committee.”
“You know, I read a paper on using elements of a metallic triadic set out of order. Silver, copper, gold. Something like that,” Tamás piped up again.
“How do you use an apple?” Lajos protested. “That’s beyond the scope of this work.”
“Uh, you eat it?” he replied, leaning back in his seat.
“I don’t think you can eat a gold apple.” For once, Beatrix agreed with Lajos’s speculation. “But anyway, the whole thing’s trivial.”
The creak of a wooden chair startled all three students. Dr. Pekurár had stood up.
“To confirm, Lajos,” she said, “your qualm is that for an apple-metallic triad to form, the apples must be transmuted from an existing metallic triad?”
“That’s right.”
“As you know,” she said, clearly planning something, “folktale magic can also be used to settle disputes.”
She turned Tamás into a copper apple. She turned Lajos into a silver apple. And she turned Beatrix into a gold apple.
Hmm, she thought. Works.
Author’s notes:
(1) In the off-chance anyone reading this doesn’t already know about the Monthly SimLit Short Story Challenge (it’s possible by this point, but still unlikely), the challenge description can be found here. Voting starts October 1st and ends October 7th. It’s a real small contest, so if you’re one of the ~15 people who forms my reader base, we’d all be very grateful if you chose to participate in the voting. No pressure though; it’s your life, don’t let me tell you what to do. Revolt! Revolt!
(2) In the off-chance anyone who participates in the Monthly SimLit Story Challenge doesn’t know that I write other stuff, I write other stuff. You’re invited to read my main story,Catastrophe Theory, which has been described by peers as “dense,” “intricate,” and “super dense.” But again, I’m having too much of a blast to worry about self-promotion; read it or don’t, everyone has more important things to worry about. Revolt!
Here’s a short post on apples by Zalka Csenge Virág, a Hungarian storyteller and significantly more sober fountain of knowledge. She knows a lot of neat stuff, like that there’s a princess named Rosalia Lemonfarts.
Missing persons Willow Creek Missing persons hotline Willow Creek Dr. Jeong-Espinosa news News missing persons Missing persons search party organization Missing spouse help
No matter how she permuted it, each of Jo’s search terms took her back to the same horrifically dry government website, http://www.wcpd.sim/missing-persons, on it a curated set of names and pictures, captioned with descriptions of where they were last seen and what they were wearing. Dry and informative. Not even a reassurance that the WCPD was taking this very seriously and doing everything they can to make sure these people get home safe. Just pure information asking for more, partitioned by a generous amount of negative space, overseen by an authoritative-blue WCPD banner, all framing the reason for Jo’s dread, a professional portrait of Dr. Jeong-Espinosa, missing Spring 17, black hair, brown eyes, muscular build, last seen wearing an orange T-shirt, sneakers, and khaki pants; last spotted at Bargain Bend, Willow Creek; plays basketball and fishes. If seen, call immediately because lately the hospital’s been fucked.
The first traces of sunlight had begun to wash over the J.-E.’s well-ventilated study. Beyond the claustrophilic glow of her screen, Jo could now see the aftermath of her weeklong binge. The police report. The newspaper clippings. The last reminder he scrawled. The last glass he sipped from. The last papers he read. The medical degree above her claimed the office like a family crest, a continual reminder of Jo’s only motivation since she’d been recast as the hero of a detective story.
On the plus side, the blue’s really working for her
She’d been glued to her latest Jumping Jasper! post about Charlie’s disappearance in case it got moving and popular enough to encircle the globe and reach the people who were physically closest to her, but might not be sign-readers themselves, and who prefer their content in electronic form. Jo herself had walked past the same Missing Cat sign every time she went to the gym and never looked for that damn cat. But Charlie kind of stands out being, y’know, huge and everything. She did also cover Willow Creek in Charlie’s image, just for good measure. Some jackass at Magnolia Park fixed it with demon eyes and a mustache. Even so, the blog post was worth a shot:
Dearest readers,
It is with great sadness that I inform you that there is still no information regarding my husband’s disappearance.
Many of you already know my husband Charlie. He may have nursed you back to health with a smile at his job as Chief of Staff, or given you a down-to-earth smile as you pass by the fishing pond. If you’ve been reading “Jumping Jasper!” for a while, you’ll know that he was a great husband and father who truly cherished his family. Jasper misses his father dearly and I know I do too.
The day before he went missing, Charlie took me on a wonderful hike for Love Day, where he surprised me with a picnic lunch. We spent that night gazing at the stars. It pains me to think that may be the last time I gaze into his eyes. He has black hair, kind and deep brown eyes, and a smile that melts your heart. He was last seen wearing an orange shirt with a power line and khaki pants.
If you have any information about Charlie, please let us know as soon as possible. Jasper and I are deeply grateful for your support in this trying time. Whether it’s a groundbreaking clue or simply a kind thought, we appreciate any positive vibes you can send from your family to ours.
This was getting a lot of traffic, most likely because Jo’s friends posted a direct link on the local news. The comment section, a collection of thoughts and prayers from Willow Creek’s most active well-wishers, was an order of magnitude larger than that of her second-most popular post. She’d hit mainstream. She hit it with a post only the most empathically detached trolls would dare target, but it’d be wrong to enjoy it.
“Mom?”
Jo paused to transition her dry eyes away from the screen. Her life may lay scattered at her feet, quite literally, but her job wasn’t to find Charlie. That was a side gig. Her job was to be a mom. Moms know kids can smell fear. She made her best attempt to divert blood away from her eyes, to hide that they’d been battered with glowing pixels for 22 straight hours, but her efforts didn’t amount to much physiologically. “Yes, sweetie?”
“I’m hungry,” Jasper moaned, picking gunk out of his eye with his pinky finger. His pajamas were black. He’d entered the black phase at the age of six.
Jo sprang up—she realized moving quickly would both prevent Jasper from staring at her face for prolonged amounts of time and give the impression of having energy. Like gosh, look at me moving around all chipper like I’ve been asleep all night. “There are empanadas in the fridge.”
“I just had empanadas for dinner. And lunch. And last breakfast.”
It was at times like this Jo had to remember what her favorite bloggers would do. “Alright hun, let me make you something.”
High on adrenaline, Jo scampered to the kitchen. She reached for a box of sugar cereal when her mind started reciting, from old research, every ingredient that appeared at least once over several brands of sugar cereal. Sugar. High fructose corn syrup. Corn flour. Hydrogenated palm oil, harvested unsustainably. Then a bunch of things with names like calcium carbonate and trisodium phosphate and butylated hydroxyanisole and several primary colors followed by a single-digit number. It was conceivable that not every piece of cereal contained every color, but that didn’t matter.
“Mom?”
Jo realized she’d been short-circuiting pretty hard in front of the cereal drawer. “Everything’s fine, sweetie. Mommy’s just making you some eggs.”
Jasper hadn’t asked whether everything was fine, but a good life tip to let everyone know you’re fine is to yell EVERYTHING’S FINE at regular intervals. Also, eggs contain things with scary names like protoporphyrin, brominated flame retardants, and conjugated linoleic acid isomers.
“Alright, mom.” He paused. “Wait. Why isn’t Dad making them? When’s Dad coming back?”
So this was it—the talk she’d been dreading. If anything, she was grateful that her back was to Jasper when he asked. A single tear fell down her face, moisturizing her inflamed eyes and salting her son’s breakfast.
“Mom? Hey, Mom?”
She inverted the pan’s contents onto the plate. Taking a serving of eggs in each hand, she walked slowly over to Jasper and set the plate down in front of him.
“Jasper. Your father’s been gone for a very long time.”
“I know. But don’t worry, Mom, he always comes back.” He used his fingers to help the scrambled egg bits onto his fork. “I made a picture you can look at if you miss him.”
“Thank you for the picture, hon.” Jo wanted to say it had been over a week, and even if he came back, she wouldn’t know what to say to him. What’s left to say to a man who sneaks to do fuck-knows-what in the middle of the night, sending his former family into a tragedy spiral out of nowhere? No. If he were found, it would be by the police. Them, or a 40-year-old cyclist couple who loves hiking and catching murderers.
“Mom, guess what kind of juice I want.”
“The only juice we have is orange juice.”
“No mom, guess.”
“I don’t have to guess. We only have orange juice.”
“No, mom,” Jasper said, gesticulating with the cup, “I want bone-hurting juice.” He pretended to take a sip. “Ow oof owie ouch my bones. Do you get it?”
Not the commonly accepted hyphenation pattern, but one this author feels more comfortable using. Like, you could mis-parse it as the bone hurting the juice. Disambiguation. You see?
She didn’t. “Jasper, I was being serious earlier. Your father may not be coming back. We’re—” Jo felt the air being knocked out of her as she learned she could actually feel worse. Maybe, before, she’d understood intellectually that her husband was missing. Now it was more of a hollowness deep in her gut, a shock of finality. “we’re never going to see him again.” As she said those words, she realized those feelings she had before, of being a bottomless pit or empty husk—those feelings were wrong. A bottomless pit would feel nothing except the woosh of wretched truth as it passes through. In quick succession, she remembered she could accept, could grieve and fear. But not in front of the kid. She focused her energy on following the brown lines on the kitchen tiles, hoping to run herself dry before the conversation ended.
“Mom, guess what I’m doing.” Jasper repeatedly smashed his pointer finger on the table.
“I don’t know.” Not a lot of the brown lines connected across tiles. Man, this was hard.
“Mom. I’m pressing ‘F’ to pay respects.”
“That’s nice,” she mumbled, tracing over the same tile for the fifth time. “Uh. What?”
“I’m pressing ‘F.’ Mom, he’s not really gone. We just have to wait. Bye!”
Maybe it was better to leave him like this. Jo watched her son turn into a black speck vanishing into the spreading daylight before dropping from her stool and curling up into a fetal position.
“Pierce! Here come dat boi!”
“O shit waddup!” In the library’s southeast corner, an older woman with reading glasses turned away from Plumbbook to grimace at Pierce for his response. Stupid kids, not being how kids are supposed to be.
“Ready?” asked Jasper.
“Yeah!” yelled Pierce. “Meme Appreciation Club handshake!”
Please trust me when I say I hated writing this just as much as you’re going to hate reading it
“Wow, the memes Wow, wow, such memes Wow, the memes Wow, wow, such memes!
“Cupcake dog and grumpy cat Ain’t no-one got time for that! Took an arrow to the knee Spoopy doot, bone apple tea!
Jesus, Dolly, next time choose a worse medium to represent two things happening simultaneously
“Thanos, Thor and Batman Plumbbook, Reddit, 4chan Hotdog legs, my body’s ready Copypasta, Mom’s spaghetti!
“Wow, the memes Wow, wow, such memes Wow, the memes Wow, wow, such memes!
“Numa, numa, yayyyyy!”
Jasi waved his hands in the air. “Meme Appreciation Club, gather!”
Five children did as he asked. Pierce lagged behind blond duo Marc and Andre, who were ignoring Dexter, the club’s self-appointed edgelord. Lori was spacing out behind them. She thought she saw a cool bird or something of that nature.
Clearly any inclusion of memes in a work is going to date it, but we have enough pop culture references to make this a period piece already, so what the hell ever
“Ok everyone, club is o-fficially starting,” Jasper said. “We gotta catch up on pop culture. Does everyone remember their decade?” Unenthused nodding. Unenthused because clearly Jasper should know that they did, not that the topic wasn’t interesting. Rather, poring over pop cultural context was of utmost importance to the amateur meme historians. “And then let’s go look at memes.”
“The meme club discussing memes?” Dexter drew out. “I am totally surprised Pikachu.”
“Ok, sure. Who wants to go first?”
“Oh, me, me,” said Andre, pointing to Marc. “We kind of did ours together.”
Pierce held up a finger. To clarify, this was the ‘hold up’ finger, not the ‘shut it, douche’ finger. Come to think of it, the ring finger is the only one that, when held up, has no special meaning. “Wait. What decade did you guys have again?”
“’70s,” Marc clarified. He turned to Andre. Andre was known to speak for both of them, although he certainly didn’t talk enough for two people. That was Dexter. So, the total number of words spoken per gathering was still at about six times the national average for meme clubs.
“Aughts. So we stayed up all night and watched the first six Star Wars.”
This was met with impressed gasps and a couple whispered ‘wow’s. “Star Wars is super important! There’s so many memes,” Jasper said with slightly jealous awe.
“Yeah! There’s so many, we couldn’t do them all. So we took some notes. Here.” Andre took out of his inventory a collection of crayon drawings featuring timeless scenes like Han Solo knowing that Leia loved him and Anakin killing not just the men, but the women and children too. They also did a fair amount of light saber practice. Andre neglected to mention it so that in case Earth was ever caught in the crosshairs of intergalactic mutiny, he and Marc would be the ones to hack through the bad guys and save everyone with the Force and it would be really cool.
“Actually,” Marc felt he had to clarify, “The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are ’80s. But it was worth it. Sorry, Pierce.”
“You’re fine. I just ended up watching an aerobics video on loop.” Pierce was not being a very good advocate for the ’80s. “I didn’t really do anything else. Jasper, you’re ’90s, you should go next.”
“But Lori is everything before 1970,” Jasper said, gesturing towards her. She was still deep in la-la land. “Lori? Lori?”
Lori get your shit together
“What?” Lori asked. “Oh, it’s my turn?” The rest of the group nodded. “I found some funny paintings by a guy named,” she squinted at her notes, “Joseph Decrux.”
“Cool story, bro,” said Dexter. Andre elbowed him. Counting the handshake, we’re really running the gamut of body part gestures today.
“Hey, that was mean,” she continued. “But let’s see if you make fun of me after this.” Lori shoved in Dexter’s face a binder full of printed out fake history tweets between the founding fathers, complete with full written explanations of the jokes and citations to the Hamilton song she learned the context from. “And I know all the words to ‘My Shot.'”
“Lori, can I get a copy of that? I need it for History,” Andre said.
“Sure. You all totally need to watch Hamilton. It’s really good.”
“Thanks, Lori,” said Jasper. “I guess it’s my turn now. I found all these ’90s toy commercials. They’re hilarious. They have all these hilarious songs.”
“—No.” Pierce had Jasper in a headlock and was covering his mouth. Though, ironically, he would have appreciated a pair of Sock’em Boppers at the moment.
“Fine. Jeez, Pierce.” Jasper walked backwards in a semicircle to worm his way out from his friend’s arm. “I guess I’m done. Alright, Dexter. Take it away.”
“My mom got me a bunch of new Fortnite skins! Sick!” Dexter stopped mid-floss and hung his head. “But I still don’t know what ‘cuck’ means.”
“Can’t you just look it up?” asked Lori.
“I did, but I still don’t get it.” He produced a printout of the top three Urban Dictionary definitions, which the meme club swarmed around, ready to have fun with learning. Jasper noticed the librarian menacing in their direction.
“Wrap it up, wrap it up,” Jasper yelled while clapping his hands. The hubbub subsided before this particular search for knowledge could come to a resolution. “Alright! Good job, everyone! Let’s get on the computers. Yell if you see anything good.”
Late Monday morning, Jo took advantage of Jasper’s absence to de-disaster the study. Hiding the evidence. Cleaning bored her mind so thoroughly, and today, her thoughts kept coming back to the future of Jumping Jasper!. No matter what happened, she’d keep her last name because it fits with her branding. The ‘J’ thing. Plus also the next post was critical. It seemed like cereal facts and essential oils weren’t going to cut it for her new readership; she needed to go all out, but she was out of ideas. She needed to pull out all the stops, but something was stopping her. She needed to bet the farm, but she didn’t have a farm.
Background poster reminds me of the immortal words uttered by my little sister at the optometrist’s. “I can’t see the big E.” She was Jasper’s age and all her friends wore glasses.
As she compulsively shelved the last stray book in the house, Jo watched her friend Moira enter the study and start knocking on the door. Jo rolled her eyes and invited her friend in.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Jo asked, fluffing up the pillows.
“Nah. I just wanted to see how you were holding up.” She brushed off the living room chair and sat down.
“It’s been a week and no sign of him.”
“No, Jo,” Moira said, leaning forward, “I was asking about you. Forget about Charlie for a moment and tell me how you’re doing.”
“Everything’s fine.”
No, of course it wasn’t. Moira decided to change tactics, get at it indirectly. “The search is taking a while,” she offered.
“I know!” Jo threw up her hands. “It makes no sense. How many lots in Willow Creek do the police have to check?”
“Twenty.”
“So it makes no sense that they haven’t found him by now.”
“Aren’t his parents in Newcrest? Did they check Newcrest?”
“You know what, Moira? You know what?” Moira nodded; go ahead. “I’m beginning to suspect he’s not in either world. I’m beginning to suspect we can’t find him because he’s not in the world at all.”
“What?”
“I mean, think about it,” Jo said. “You see this?” She pointed at the kitchen window. “This rocket in the backyard?”
“Yeah, but if he were lost in space, wouldn’t his rocket be missing?”
“That’s not it. Seriously. The aliens know him, his dad is an astronaut, the aliens know his dad. Think about it. It’s them. They abducted him and they’re not giving him back.”
“Interesting.”
“So that would certainly explain why no one is able to find him.” Jo started tearing up. “It kills me that he’s out there alone. He’s probably terrified.”
“There, there.” Moira finally had an answer to her question. “Tell me about it.”
It took Jo a solid four hours of friendship to collect herself and get to the gym. Still, all she could think about was Charlie alone on Sixam. How hard he must be fighting to get back to the family he missed so dearly. Their reunion would be moving; when he finally appeared at the door, the music would swell as Jo jumped into his arms with Jasper running after her, and it would all come to an end when he smiled at how much his little boy had grown.
And yet Jo realized the ending wasn’t going to come soon. She had no option but to leave him to fend for himself; she couldn’t so much as replace a silicone gasket on that steampunk monstrosity in the backyard. All for an avoidable problem. Why him? What did the heartless bastards need him for, anyway? She was going at the punching bag with such fury, the other gym patrons cast hesitant glances at each other as they discovered they had things to do elsewhere.
Jo caught herself in the mirror. This wasn’t who she was. Josephine J.-E. was a sweet woman, nurturing and caring and maternal. The embodiment of the white picket fence. And this woman knocking the punching bag off its hinges, that had to be someone else. She walked toward her reflection. Deep breaths. Remember the blue, that was really working for her. There; that was Jo, that was Jo’s calm, cool, collected smile, if not slightly highlighted by a green glow on the left side. It clued her in to how blind to her surroundings she’d been.
Still gotta attempt a smile. She’s in public.
Jo forcefully shut her eyes, pretending that the blue man and his green glow weren’t there. But she couldn’t shut out his horrid metallic-sounding voice. Laughing. Like he didn’t know what his species does to our species. Jo started flinching with each otherworldly chuckle; even though the conversation was primarily office clichés, she knew they were laughing at Charlie, helpless and afraid. She ran out of the gym, still holding her eyes shut, nearly making Gen the next victim of pedestrian road rage. She kept running and didn’t stop until she was home. (Side note: to clarify, she did open her eyes once she put a few yards between herself and the gym.)
Jasper had come home from school and was now running around outside with the excited fervor of a kid who has the opposite hobbies. “Mom!” he greeted her. “Dexter and I are playing MySims Racing and I won!” He dropped to the ground to do sit-ups.
Jo caught her breath. “It’s nice that you have friends over, but finish your homework, okay?”
“Okay.” He ran back inside. Not only did he have a rematch to attend to, his schedule called for cartoon bingeing in two hours and he was way behind.
Jo stormed into the living room, reminded Dexter to be home by seven and shut herself in the study. She had her something big: the future of her friends, her family, her readers and her world. Real stuff. She had influence, so she could enact change.
If Jumping Jasper! was notable for two things, the first was the fervor with which Jo researched every topic, and the second was her refusal to pare it down. Jo was proud of both: rather than telling people what to believe, she simply presented the evidence and asked them to think for themselves. Hence, this meant objectively representing every possible viewpoint. The post about eggs, for example, ping-ponged from cholesterol content to factory farming, etc. If someone definitively proved some of her information was wrong, she’d take it down. But is anyone capable of truly proving anything wrong? Experts have been wrong, studies have been wrong, maybe Jo herself is wrong once in a while. And by her quality standards, she couldn’t trust anything unless she did it herself. Tonight’s post would look no different. Her audience would be asked to consider the facts for themselves, like always. As usual. They didn’t have to know her agenda.
Jasper erupted into laughter as his avatar ran his friend’s avatar off the tracks. The sound of children playing carried her to a simpler time, her girlhood, hazy childhood memories framed in a lavender halo, the taste of a strawberry milkshake polished in her mind like a river-washed stone, so smooth she could feel it going down her throat even now, even if she couldn’t express or even remember what made it so good. But Jasper could; he could still find this ephemeral joy in the face of tragedy. She’d make sure it stayed that way. If anyone thought Jo had limits for what she’d do to protect her son, they’d be damn wrong.
Stupid aliens, she thought, writing furiously.
They need to go back to where they came from.
She hit Publish.
Bonus images:
Gummy guppy. So greatJasi making a doge meme at a different club gathering.Haha, Wyatt, a bunch of people came up with your idea already, too bad
“Kendra. What’s that fucking thing in the middle of your living room?”
Kendra was in the kitchen with her back to Wyatt. But from context, he was likely referring to the seven-fingered poledancing tentacle in the middle of her living room.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Someone dumped it outside the trailer park, and I fell in love with it. So I cleaned it and took it home.” She looked past Wyatt to make what was meant to be eye contact with the centerpiece, and fanned her fingers out to mimic its suction-cup appendages. “Aaah! It’s so dope.”
“I guess so.” Wyatt’s default tone was that of a parent shaming their child for wanting attention.
When tentacle tchotchkes are unavailable, put some vet tools next to a bottle of Patron
The last time they had spoken in person was at Kendra’s birthday party, when Wyatt preemptively stormed out due to Mike making some minor slight against Jean Baudrillard. Most of their communication was over text; Kendra’s life had turned into a to-do list, from her bartending job to caring for Yuggoth, her dog—even finding time to write her horror poetry had become a chore—and she suspected Wyatt was doing the same. Regarding the to-do list. It would be odd if they both adopted a black Newfoundland at the same time. Inviting Wyatt over was her conscious attempt to strengthen the relationships from her past, which relationships were proverbially likened to gold in order to devalue one’s attempts at making new friends. It was an old piece of wisdom which, by its reasoning, outranked all current wisdom. Charlie (who’s missing) would be the next old-and-gold friend she’d contact. But really, inwardly, what she wanted was for someone to appreciate her contribution to Strangerville.
Wyatt was on a now decade-long campaign against pleasantries, and so hadn’t chosen the obvious topic: how’s Strangerville? She was waiting for him to. He could ask ‘can I pet your bear?’ (Yuggoth is the bear. She’s almost identical to one except she rolls around in her own piss instead of eating out of the garbage) and ‘what’s that fucking thing in the middle of your living room?’, but if she kept him going long enough, he would run out of things in the house and start asking about things outside of the house. The neighborhood it was in, for example, or maybe some odd feature she could use as a segue to her ultimate conversational goal.
“So,” she said, guiding the topic towards Wyatt’s activities out of anticipatory guilt for how hard she was about to answer ‘how’s Strangerville,’ “are you working on anything?”
“I just started a children’s book, actually.”
Kendra laughed. “What the hell?”
“It’s called ‘The Little Engine Who Couldn’t.’ It’s about this adorable train who like grew up hearing that he could do anything he put his mind to.” He wiped the grease off his nose. “So he starts climbing a hill that’s too high for him, totally not recommended for an engine of his size with his horsepower, and somewhere around the middle he realizes that he just can’t.”
“Like the original story, yeah.”
“But then he remembers all the encouraging words he heard growing up, and, I don’t know, overworks himself so hard he blows a gasket, I don’t know how trains work, and falls down the hill. So he learns that some things look possible that are actually impossible, or at least damaging to do, with the resources he has. But he’s like internalized the idea that he should be able to do anything he puts his mind to, and that kind of implies that if he fails, it’s his own fault for not working hard enough.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then he decides that all of that positive stuff he heard from his train-friends and, if we’re going all the way with the central conceit here, train-parents, was just total bullshit. Because instead of being told everyone has to experience failure, or encounter something they just can’t do, they decided the best thing to do was arm him with blind optimism. To soften what happens in the real world. Like a positive and a negative number cancelling out.”
“Which is reasonable, because if he knew in advance there were some things he couldn’t do, he might not have tried hard enough on the things he could do, that were difficult.”
“Yeah, it may not have been intentional. But then he just swings in the opposite direction. Nihilism. Self-defeatist.”
“How are you gonna end it?”
“It just ends,” he said. “Like in real life, some people get over that and some don’t. I didn’t want to send a message that one or the other is right. This is a book about a train, not a fucking instruction manual for life.”
Kendra wanted to say that was kind of a cop-out but didn’t feel like posing an alternative or even wording it in a constructive manner. “Good choice.”
“It’s like a postmodern version of the classic children’s book.” Wyatt, how we’ve missed you.
A couple beats passed, giving Kendra the opportunity to slurp down her Salty Llama. “Wanna hear about my current project?”
“Uh, let me guess,” he asked, “does it have to do with the what-the-fuck strings of texts that read ‘ƗŦ ĆØΜ€Ş ŦĦŘØỮǤĦ ŦĦ€ βØŇ€Ş ΔŇĐ ǤØ€Ş ƗŇ ŦĦ€ ΜØỮŦĦ’ and other slightly cringey, trying-too-hard shit like that?”
“Yep.”
“I stand by my earlier assertion of ‘wtf.'” He pronounced the syllables double-yew-tee-eff out loud. In his mind, he was differentiating between the kind of ‘wtf’ that required capitalization and the kind that didn’t.
“Ok so it’s kind of a long story,” she warned. “It has to do with Strangerville.”
“Oh, yeah,” Wyatt said. “How’s Strangerville?”
“I’ll get to that. So there I was on the first day of moving in, right?”
Readers, let me remind you that Kendra’s and Wyatt’s opinions on Strangerville may differ from my own. This goes double for Wyatt because he’s a dick.
“Ok?”
“And you know how on your first day, the neighbors usually drop in with a nasty-ass fruitcake? And it always has the same weird inedible red ribbon that gets little cake pieces on it when you try to take it off?”
“Yeah?”
“So this was the best possible fucking version of that,” she continued, while mixing herself another Salty Llama. “I opened the door, and there was a guy with a red mohawk, a woman who would probably be friends with Jo—“
“—so like, super bougie?”
“She broke the bougie scale. And then there was one other older guy, he seemed like he was trying to bring the cowboy look back. Respect.” She leaned forward for emphasis. “But the best part is, they were moving around like, jerky, and they had these completely dead stares the entire time. Like so wide-eyed their eyes could pop out of their heads, with smiles so broad the corners of their mouths could pop off their faces. Like this.” She mimicked the face.
“Oh my god, that’s creepier than if they crawled into your house and started vomiting spiders.”
“It was so great! I tried to talk to them, and everything they had to say was along the lines of ‘Ŵ€ŁĆØΜ€ ŦØ ĦỮΜΔŇ ŞŦŘΔŇǤ€ŘVƗŁŁ€, ŇØŘΜΔŁ ĦỮΜΔŇ.’ And when they’re not like that, they’re talking like they’re in a Nancy Drew book or some shit. Like, ‘ZOINKS, IT WAS OLD MAN McJURBEN UNDER THE MASK THE WHOLE TIME! AND HE’S GIVING THE KIDS POT!!!'” I.e., for Kendra, the slang refers to handing out bubble solution.
“Ok, both of those are pretty fucking great,” Wyatt agreed.
“And then I came home from work—this is after they left and I went to work—I came home to a note saying the government confiscated my fridge because they detected trace amounts of controlled substances. There were controlled substances in the fruitcake! Fucking epic!”
“So.” Wyatt brought his empty glass to the sink, where it vanished immediately. “You’re saying the texts have something to do with how the neighbors are acting?”
“I don’t actually know,” Kendra admitted, “but it’s likely. What I did afterward was wander around the town. The bar is pretty small, but good if you want to meet new people, and there’s an information center. It’s usually as crowded as the bar, if not more. And did you see there’s like a trailer park behind my house? It has all these fairy lights strung up, and everything?”
“No. I approached the house from your front door. As one does.”
“Ok, so there’s a trailer park behind my house. And then right next to the trailer park—there’s some fairy lights connecting that, too—there’s one of those stalls, like the food ones in San Myshuno or the little farmer’s market stalls.”
“Those farmers market stalls always have the best fruit.”
“They always have the best fruit,” she confirmed. “This one also has an assortment of Strangerville-themed curios, which as you can tell by the name are—“
“—centered around its eponymous quality.”
“Sure. Anyway they only had one type of local fruit. It’s this red glowy ball. It was throwing all kinds of don’t-eat-me signals, but generally if a fruit is red, it’s evolved to be appealing to animals. Plus growfruit glows and it’s okay, right? So I ate it.”
Wyatt nodded. “Solid.”
“And then I’m unsure what happened next, could have been the fruit, but I suddenly started to feel sick.”
“Yeah, so maybe it wasn’t a good idea to eat the fruit after all.” Thanks. She’ll keep that in mind.
“No, I’m not done. Then I started to feel even worse.
“And then—let me take a minute. It’s hard to describe.
“Wyatt. You know that feeling when you wake up in the middle of the night, and there’s this strange humming, and you can’t move your arms and legs, and you try to scream but nothing comes out, and you just know you’re dying, this is the last thing you’ll see, and it feels like you’re above your body, watching yourself struggle, when in reality there’s no movement?”
“Sleep paralysis?”
“Well, it felt like that, but instead of waiting for the Reaper, something inside took over and used me as a giant mech.”
“Wait, so you’re envisioning yourself being larger than the thing? What if it’s a giant pair of invisible mechanical hands posing you like some doll?”
“It didn’t feel like that. It felt like it was coming from within me, like the gag in cartoons where one character gets in another’s head and there’s a little control box with a lever. And they’re not great with the controls.” She widened her eyes to about 85% Strangerville face. “But you know what the worst part is? I was conscious the entire time. So I was running around town like a complete idiot and couldn’t control anything I was doing.”
“I don’t like how giddy you are when you’re saying this.”
Fucking majestic
“But no, it actually is great! It’s because,” she gestured upstairs, towards her bookshelf, “you know how the best horror reflects what the author, or society, is most scared of at the time?”
“Of course.”
“So if you’re trying to find an overarching thing, one that’s timeless or at least passes the bar to become a classic, you go towards the big ones. Death, right?” Wyatt nodded. “But not necessarily.”
“You’re saying because death is overdone?”
“Yeah, if you’re not switching it up, it gets old fast. But I’m talking more like the fact that there are people, like Bernard, who can cheat death. Who came back as ghosts, and were then revived.”
“So your question is—“
“—what would scare a ghost? And that’s when I figured it out.”
“Eating fruit from weird stalls next to trailer parks.”
“Losing control of your own body.”
Forget the blowjob test, Kendra’s lipstick can survive possession by spores
“Ah,” Wyatt realized, “and so such a topic will be easier for you to handle because you have first-hand experience?”
“Yes! Exactly!” Others may find Wyatt abrasive, but he got it. He always got it. “And so this is where we get to the texts.”
“Don’t tell me the texts are the culmination of all this research.”
“No, it’s more like a side effect. What I forgot to tell you was, that wasn’t the only time. It kept happening.”
“So there’s a chance you could wig out in the middle of this conversation?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I kind of want to see that.”
“You might. But back to the texts. I tried to write, and in the moment it felt like what I was writing made sense, but I snapped out of it and looked back and it was all ŴΔŦ€Ř ƗŞ ŴĦΔŦ βƗŇĐŞ ỮŞ ΔŇĐ ŞØØŇ ƗŦ ŴƗŁŁ β€ ƤỮŘ€. I don’t even know where I found that font.”
Yuggoth has been barking at her for ages
“Oof. But you’re saying you can’t control it, so aren’t you worried about like, sending these to your family or your boss?”
“It’s happened.” She opened her phone to a conversation between her and her mom, where Claudia had replied to ‘ƗŦ Đ€VØỮŘŞ, ƗŦ ΔƤƤŘØΔĆĦ€Ş’ with ‘Do you need me to cook something? Sending love xoxo.’ “They think it’s normal Kendra shit.”
“Right, I’m also going to concede here, I thought it was normal Kendra shit.”
I wish I acted fast enough to get the screenshot of her wigging out while almost being run over by a surveillance van
“And there’s something else I forgot to mention. When I come down, it feels fucking amazing afterwards. I haven’t had to sleep in days.”
“You mean you haven’t slept in days.”
“That’s just semantics.”
Welcoming the Tragic Clown into Strangerville, mediated by a man I’ve nicknamed No Shirt No Shoes No Service. Kendra doesn’t exactly stand out here.
Wyatt—who unflinchingly sat through all the gory monster drawings Kendra showed him in elementary school, and in high school, and last week—winced. “You know, Kendra,” he started, trying to sound as non-condescending as possible, “I’m saying this as your best friend, but if it’s affecting your sleep, this isn’t healthy. This actually sounds pretty serious.”
“You know how to fix it?” She didn’t look up from examining her nails.
“No?”
“Then I’m just going to have to deal with it for now, aren’t I?”
“I guess. But there’s something else bothering me,” he said. “If it really is the fruit that made you sick, and the government confiscated the fruitcake because they could sense contamination from inside your fridge, isn’t it possible the fruit itself is the controlled substance?” Kendra rolled her eyes and nodded. “So why didn’t the government just confiscate the fruit?”
“I don’t know,” Kendra conceded. She was twisting her midi rings. “If they’re not concerned about the fruit I still have, maybe they’re not concerned about the fruit at all.”
“The fruit you still have.” Every word was dripping with well-meaning judgement.
“Oh shit, that reminds me! Come, let me show you.”
Wyatt followed Kendra across the back porch to the left side of her house. She led him around a barbed-wire privacy fence, tucked away in an area that wasn’t visible from the street, that they had to squeeze past a bush to enter.
“Is that an outdoor shower with no curtains on the side facing the street?”
“Shut up.” Only Yuggoth ever used the bathtub, but she let Wyatt think otherwise for the sake of the image.
Behind the privacy fencing was a staircase leading into a small, unfinished basement, the floor a thin layer of soil and the walls hastily constructed from corrugated metal scraps, possibly by Kendra herself. But what caught Wyatt’s attention were the vines coating the inexpert construction in unnatural shades of purple and fuchsia, with odd salmon-colored offshoots resembling the feet of a tropical frog. He twisted his head toward Kendra, comically slowly, with a look of abject horror. She gestured toward the opposing wall. Under the industrial-grade sprinklers, three oversized buds bioluminesced in an unsatisfyingly dissimilar shade of purple to the vines. The plant’s sepals were lined with pokey hot-pink spikes and embellished with diamonds; to Wyatt representing either danger or wealth, though if the numbering were to be trusted, danger was more likely.
“Is that where the fruit comes from?”
“That’s where the fruit comes from.” Kendra made a digging motion with her hands. “When I’m under, I can make these appear without actually planting anything.”
“So you’re—“
“—Growing controlled substances in a secret basement! Awesome, right?”
Wyatt had to admit to himself that it was indeed awesome. “I’m kind of glad a fruit is the thing causing all this weirdness,” he said. “It seems like these days people are freaking out thinking the government is doing something weird, or scientists are doing something weird, and it’s been sowing these conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism and distrust. Like fuck we need people thinking Dr. Jeremy is in there making top-secret bioweapons instead of looking at temperature measurements from the last century or watching a slime mold solve a maze. I’m glad it’s nature fighting back for once.”
“Spot-on.” Kendra had noticed this while trying to figure out which conspiracy theorist to date. The words GOVERNMENT and SCIENCE LAB garnished nearly every conversation, but INVASIVE SPECIES and HOST-PLANT RESISTANCE were shockingly absent. “If I had a secret science lab I didn’t want people to go into, I wouldn’t put it in a crater next to a town full of huge gossips that also coincidentally happens to be named ‘Strangerville.'”
“Yeah, no shit,” he agreed. “But like, still,” he wondered aloud, “isn’t it cool that there’s this mystery no one understands? Don’t you want to try and figure out what’s happening?”
Kendra picked a dead leaf from one of the vines. “Nah.” She crushed the leaf in her left hand, repeating the gesture to break it into progressively smaller pieces.
“The locals want to play detective?” She opened her hand, letting the pieces of leaf drift in the air filter current toward the ominous fauna. “They can figure it out.”
“The first thing one notices about this piece is the juxtaposition of the smooth curves of the truncated spheroid with the hard lines of its central Platonic solid.”
Chantel put both hands on the table to interrogate the candle at eye level. Diametrically opposite, her boyfriend was making the same face he made when they watched a documentary about the Antarctic last week, an expression that tried to look like intense intellectual focus but came off more as James Bond catching yet another new female love interest in a game of eye-contact chicken across a crowded room. “An all-encompassing heavenly dome encases a playfully minimalist rendition of a stucco dot on the Tuscan countryside.” Shu snorted from behind his tented fingers. “But what it really juxtaposes is the illusion of stasis with the constancy of change. From the core of the cream-colored figure, a wick gives life to a tuft of flame. Making it like a mother figure, signifying the connection between life and pain, slowly melting as its load burns. Yet the flame only travels upward, ignorant of the harm it causes its source. The sole window between its prison and the outside world is placed in the path of ascendance, signifying hope, escape. It flickers upward, forever yearning, even as it is tethered by its very source of nourishment. But the opening is so small, and the flame’s will for survival so great, it would take an object merely the size of a quarter to suffocate the reacher in the smoke of its own hubris, and with it, extinguishing all light, all hope. In conclusion, given the usage of combustible mixed media in this piece, this is meant to evoke the story of the flame’s destruction on a larger scale: the consequences of global warming.”
“Well?” She looked to Shu for approval, who couldn’t answer because he was nearly shoving his napkin into his mouth to muffle his laughter.
“You’re done?”
“Yep.”
Given that human flirting is organic and subtle, anytime these guys perform one of their whack-’em-with-a-giant-cartoon-hammer interactions like “Compliment Appearance,” I think of the hours spent poring over the perfect combination of words to capture the viewer’s appreciation of Nicki Minaj’s secondary sexual characteristics
“You’re not going to go on an eight-minute rant about global warming? Because that’s what my dad would do here.”
“Nope.”
“Holy crap that was too real.” Chantel beamed at Shu’s praise. “Maybe not the opening; he doesn’t really mix the flowery speech with the technical speech, he’s good at keeping that separate. After that? I think I need to go home because I’m on a date with my actual freaking dad.”
“Nah-no. Tell me what was good about it.”
“Tuscany was spot-on. I think it’s in his contract to mention one random-ass rustic town in literally everything.”
“Yeah! I had to bust that out early so I wouldn’t forget it.”
“And the eight leaps of logic it took to get to global warming. Like, it’s already hot. It’s a fucking candle.”
“True.” Chantel watched Shu scanning the room for the next mundane object to get the Xiyuan treatment; they’d have time for maybe one more before their food arrived. She noticed his jacket tightening around his biceps as he stabilized himself on the chair, the shape of his fully lengthened neck as he twisted himself to pick something in her field of vision. She loved when he stretched out to look at something behind him. If today were the day she thought it would be, she needed to remember every detail in order to consolidate the most romantic and timeless ones in the announcement to their families. Family. This, she wanted to remember for herself. The game they played to pass the time at restaurants, though not intended as mean-spirited, also probably wouldn’t make the cut.
“It smells so good in here,” she said, “it looks like the restaurant scene in Legally Blonde.” Shu turned back around, officially puzzled. “This had better not turn out like the restaurant scene in Legally Blonde.”
Shu, whose knowledge of Legally Blonde barely extended beyond major plot elements and the lead actress’s name, and that if he needed information beyond those two things, like in a trivia contest, he could ask Chantel; she had the storyboards and hundreds of lines of dialogue down cold, referenced them in conversations that flew over his head even, anyway he realized the scene she was referencing was the one where Reese Witherspoon put on a hot pink dress jizzed all over with black silly string, a look he felt wasn’t commensurate to the implied effort put into choosing it, and broke down in a restaurant because she was expecting a proposal and was broken up with instead. At a fancy restaurant. Where her boyfriend took her to break up. He chose to do that.
“No, of course not.” He took both her hands. “I would never leave you. You know I’m here for good.” And if he weren’t, he still avoided doing stupid shit like airing out his personal drama in public.
That wasn’t the part she’d meant.
Shu sensed that another moment of silence would send his girlfriend into a doubt spiral. He pulled out his backup distraction. “You wanna know what happened the last time I was here?”
“Uh, sure?”
“Ok, it’s funny. The last time I was here, I saw Claudia. Ok so first of all she shows up in her normal sweater, realizes this is a fancy restaurant and all, and just like spin-changes. In the hallway.”
“Yeah?”
“Then, and I shit you not, she sat down with Charlie and Jo and Jasper and, I shit you not, took out a plate of empanadas. And then she started eating that before the food even came out.”
“The heck? What did the restaurant do?”
Behind Chantel and to her right, the waitress descended the steps, balancing on one hand a tray of what could plausibly be their food. Shu gave her a brief nod of acknowledgement before turning back to his girlfriend.
“They had to ask her to clear the table before they could bring out anyone’s food. Not just her’s, anyone’s. Then after the meal was done, and again for the last time I shit you not, she took a second empanada out of her bag and started eating that.”
“Actually?”
“No shit she actually did that.*”
Chantel could have gone on for a few more rounds of this—justified, since Shu couldn’t substantiate his claim—but noticed someone else was drawing his attention. It was the waitress, who’d almost managed to put Chantel’s plate directly in front of her before she knew what was happening.
“For the lady, the Savory Bacon Love Petals. What an excellent choice to celebrate this romantic holiday! Paired with a Simsmapolitan. For the gentleman, the Vanilla Sea Shells and Chocolate Caviar, one of our signature molecular gastronomy dishes. We use liquid nitrogen to make the chocolate caviar, and yes, the glitter is edible. Paired with the house white.” She looked over her shoulder. “And Sir, I ask you to please refrain from swearing. There are children present.”
There was one child, ten feet out of earshot and singularly focused on picking her water glass up and putting it down in different places to create rings of condensation on the tablecloth. Shu waved to her. She didn’t look up from twisting the glass. “He’s really good with kids,” Chantel told the waitress, who didn’t ask. “We have names picked out and everything.”
“That’s fantastic,” the waitress said, pulling a word out of the mental bag of adjectives she used to describe information she had no use remembering. “Have a wonderful Love Day dinner.” No sooner had she turned away that her plastered-on work smile broke to reveal the relaxed-facial-muscle frown of Love Day exhaustion.
“Ah, this looks too pretty to eat,” said Chantel, readjusting the napkin on her lap. “I knew when I read the name, that I had to get it.”
Either this is half a second before Chantel’s Simsmapolitan splashed all over her face, or gravity isn’t a thing here. Sim physicists are stuck studying at most three fundamental forces and making ray guns, and Sim elementary school students have a slightly harder time coming up with science fair projects.
Taking the first bite at Chez Llama was impossible without first convincing oneself the art on one’s plate was actually food to begin with, then making peace with oneself for having the gall to destroy it. It was a process which, for most Sims, took several minutes. Chantel was the first to break her bacon petals—was the bacon the meat-stick-looking thing, or the petals?—and the object-focused meditation. “So why’d you get dessert for dinner?”
“I don’t fucking know. They only let me order one thing at a time, and it looked good.”
She played with the garnish. “So. Remember the first day we met?” Into her mouth it went. Damned if she was letting any of this meal go to waste. “I’ll never forget it. I was at the park when I heard this gorgeous, transcendent violin music. And I followed it straight to you.”
“Yeah, thank my dad for that. I was really into violin at the time.” Shu was trying to figure out whether it was only the glitter that was edible, or if the beglittered tombstones holding the chocolate caviar in place were also edible. “And how could I forget? You were the first person I’d seen react to my playing like that. You were so passionate, I can see it in your eyes even now.” He wiped some of the glitter on the tablecloth, which would never be the same again. Glitter is eternal.
“And you’d been kind of shy around girls before, right?”
“I couldn’t figure out what to do. You made things easy, that’s for sure.”
“And you asked me to go to the Spice Festival, and I was freaking out. It was so perfect.” Chantel used ‘freaking out’ here to convey her state of euphoria at finally getting her own love story, but her partner interpreted it as describing her reaction, which was shutting down like she was in front of a firing squad and forcing out a multisyllabic “yesssss” after several very stressful seconds. The pillow-grabbing leg-kicking excitement only came out at Marielle’s sleepover party. Marielle pouted through most of the boy talk; she was hoping they would stay up all night playing retro games instead.
“That’s when I asked you to be my girlfriend. Babe, you’re amazing. I love you.”
“I love you too. And after that, I didn’t see you for a couple days. I kept going back to the basketball court, hoping you would be there. Then one day, you were.”
This was new information to Shu, who thought it was a coincidence. “Yeah, and I had to take you out then, didn’t I? That’s when you busted out the promise rings.”
“I knew. By that time, I knew.”
“That’s one of the reasons I love you. You have excellent taste.” And Charlie had been concerned they were moving too fast. If he needed evidence against it being a rash teenage decision, it was in front of his face. Eight years** and they were still together. What then? It was possible he just didn’t like Chantel. He’d called her a stalker. Why? It was plausible for them to run into each other sometimes. She lived in Spice Market, and she only started showing up in Newcrest after they started dating. If someone at the club used the words Charlie did to describe her, words like ‘codependent’ and ‘obsessive’ and ‘Borderline,’ Shu would have punched them in the face with the next beat drop. And let’s not forget that this is Charlie, for whom codependency probably meant talking to your wife more than once every three days. True love is intense. He’d never get it.
“That’s about when you started sleeping with everyone.”
“Yep! And thank you again for the permission.”
“It’s so those other girls know what they’re missing,” she said, cradling her glass in her hand. “I have what everyone wants.”
“Body, mind, and soul.” A spectator had taken Shu’s unfinished plate and was eating it as they watched the conversation. Shu didn’t react. “So I’m skipping ahead to when we moved in together after the stuff with my dads didn’t work out. That’s when you started getting serious about becoming a musician.”
“And you started teaching me. I love the way you teach. You’re so intense when you get into it. Plus, I’m getting good. Do you hear how good I’m getting?”
“You’re doing amazing, babe,” he responded, wondering if Chantel noticed he always stopped working by the time she got home. Unless she was out of the house, she could request lessons at any time of day. She often did. Shu sometimes wondered if she’d love him less if he cut back on his office hours, like if he set a rule that she wasn’t allowed to interrupt him while he was showering, or sleeping, or eating, but then Charlie’s words would echo through his head and he’d think of anything else to push them out. Wouldn’t that ruin Love Day? Hey Chantel, while I was crashing my doctor friend’s Winterfest party, he gave you an informal diagnosis based on practically no information, then said nothing would get better until I left you. Let’s talk about that. Let’s fucking talk about that.
“Well,” Chantel drew out, “are we going to finish what we started when we were teenagers? Are we going to start the next chapter of our lives?”
“Uh.” Ok, so Love Day didn’t need third-party involvement to be ruined.
“Is,” Chantel interrupted herself by briefly poking through her food, her drink, under the tablecloth, checking to see if the waiters had congregated somewhere, “is it here?” This was rhetorical. Not only was ‘here’ ill-defined given the number of places she’d just indicated, she’d already clearly discovered that it wasn’t.
“Again?” If they were in an environment where conflict was acceptable, like at home on the couch or screaming at each other while eating cake with a spoon on an Arts District park bench, his next sentence would be along the lines of ‘we talked about this.’ Instead, he was thanking the stars that Charisma Points existed and that having enough of them meant he could dodge the issue entirely. “You’ve known me for how long, and you thought I would do something that cliché? I mean, you deserve something bigger, more creative. At least we should be able to celebrate the proposal as our own special anniversary, not some catch-all holiday shared by everyone else.”
“That’s true,” she agreed, allowing Shu to relax and stop identifying the nearest exits, some of which may be behind him, “but you could have done it any time in the past couple of weeks.” Shit. “What’s the real reason you’re waiting?”
“You want to do this here?”
“Answer the damn question.”
“Uh.” The man could talk anyone into bed within a matter of hours, but Chantel’s forceful glare was a warning to choose these next few words carefully. “I, uh.” She was unpredictable at the best of times. “Ok, let me start this over.” He made a show of inhaling and exhaling, complete with hand gestures that followed the flow of breath.
“I think you’re so in love with me, you made your whole identity about this relationship. I think if I propose to you now, you’re never really going to get the chance to discover who you are on your own.”
“You’re breaking up with me?” Which would be rude; she specifically told him to not do that.
“No! Please don’t take this the wrong way. I love you, and that means loving you for who you are. But even you don’t know what that fully means yet.”
“That’s ridiculous. Tell me the real reason.”
“That is the real reason.”
“No it isn’t. It’s because I’m not talented enough for you, isn’t it?”
“Chantel, that’s not—“
“You think you’re so much better than me just because you got an early start.”
“You know I think you’re amazing, that’s why I’m with you, that’s why I spend all my time training you—“
“Then what? Is it that my belly sticks out? Is it that I don’t go to the gym as much as your other girlfriends? Is it my eyebrows?” Chantel’s raised voice was the only audible sound in the restaurant, but the kid could have punted her glass directly into their table and neither of them would have noticed. Even the couple in fedoras, i.e. the couple with no situational awareness, picked up on the repetition and was listening in. Shu caught the waitress’s eye and made the ‘check’ gesture.
“I don’t care about any of those things. I have all these options, and I’m choosing to stay with you. Do you know how much you mean to me?”
Background, ginger Minnie Mouse about to get eaten by a green-finned shark
Chantel was sobbing into her napkin. The waitress rushed to drop the check on the table, then vanished without wishing them a happy Love Day or even a good night. Shu was still waiting for Chantel’s response. A couple otherwise silent minutes passed before Chantel removed the napkin from her face, examined it, and dabbed a clean corner under her eyes. She looked up at her boyfriend with eyes slightly less mascara-smudged than before, but more mascara-smudged than the beginning of the date. Somewhere in the middle.
“Just tell me what to fix,” she whispered. “Tell me what to fix and I’ll do it. Please. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Chantel, please,” he begged back. “This is the wrong reason. You have to be willing to change for yourself.” She started sobbing again. “Do you think I’d be going through all this trouble if I really didn’t want to marry you someday?”
She sighed. “I didn’t tell you this.”
“What?”
“Every night, I go to bed and I just lie awake wondering what I did wrong, I look over at you and wonder if you really care enough to make me stop suffering like this. I can’t take this much longer. Please just tell me what to fix.”
“I’m still trying to figure that out myself. If I knew how to fix this, it would be done already.”
“Fine. A timeframe, then.”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
“You have to give me something to work with. I can’t go on like this.”
“You know what, Chantel?” He tucked some simoleons into the check. He tipped the waitress double, and scribbled ‘Sorry~! <3’ in the signature line. “Your job. Focus on developing your voice as a musician. Really throw yourself into it. Then we’ll talk.”
“So you’d better be planning something pretty spectacular, right?”
“Mid-tour, onstage at the Grammys, whatever. I’m trying to do this right because I care about you. I don’t want to mess it up. Believe me, I’m doing everything I can to make the ‘right time’ as soon as possible.” He stood up and extended his hand toward her. “Now may I escort the lady home?”
They stepped from the artificially cool restaurant into a breeze of warm air in dusk-lit Newcrest. Shu felt a twinge in his gut as he realized the implications of his promise. There was one thing he still hadn’t tried, one sure way to singlehandedly break the cycle of stalling and explaining and placating her after breakdowns. If he wasn’t willing to consider it, he’d be a liar; he wasn’t doing everything he could. But if he went through, it meant Chantel would be miserable and it would be his fault.
Worse, it meant admitting that maybe Charlie was right.
*She actually did. Autonomously. **(The Sim equivalent of eight years, which is slightly over four weeks)
BONUS: Rejected Chantel glamour shot. Killing it /r/prettygirlsuglyfaces
” …when rockets go up they bring ice down from upper sky to lower sky; ice stuck in lower sky will fall on us during Apocalypse. Earth is flat; earth stands on 3 pillars (the Most Holy Trinity); pillars stand on water at zero Kelvin; underneath this ice there is a bubble; and then the abyss. Zodiac is planetary prison of demons…Walmart has technology to administer mark of the beast to those who have cat bacteria in their stomachs…”
Yahoo answers respondent, “Does the big gulp horchata from 7 -11 have dairy?”
Last we left Chastity befuddled, almost ready to utter the Lord’s name in vain in sheer frustration as the licentious gnomes retreated back to the Gnome Dome through the secret garden entrance. Her attempt thwarted, Chastity retreats to the Community Center next to the Church by way of the Joseph Smith Fitness and Recreation Center. The direct route was currently inaccessible due to construction on the addition of a Joseph Smith Underground Water-park and Sauna made possible by gifts of the Lord to the LDS Church through the holy wealth accumulated by the industry and virtue of its members. Finally reaching the Community Center, Chastity smiles at the endearing set designs of the Sunday school group, which include anthropomorphic grinning rainbows and a cardboard replica of the tablet given to Joseph Smith which revealed to us the one true Truth of the LDS Church. For a moment Chastity’s imagination considered what it would be like if a golden-haired child—her child—were to play the very angel in the children’s theater that passed on the tablet to Joseph Smith. Remembering that the production of children would involve bodily intercourse, Chastity’s lips pursed as fast and tight as a dog’s asshole. To purify her mind, Chastity decided to pay a visit to the deeper recesses of the LDS Church to contemplate the sanctity of continence and perseverance.
Chastity, however, makes a few wrong turns at basement #7, leading her into a series of underground labyrinths—not the familiar labyrinths of Thomas Kinkade paintings and sparkling clean casserole dishes that formed the foundation of the one true Truth of the LDS Church, but instead luridly colored plastic statues and repeating images of a man with a swirly stick and a pointy hat. Chastity had strayed into the underground recesses of the Catholic Church that had also been building additions. Though his help was immensely needed in difficult matters such as constructing an underground labyrinth in violation of building codes, the Holy Spirit had not found it necessary to intervene in the building project and inform the Catholics that the extra .5 mile to the left would cause the labyrinth of the Catholic Church to accidentally intersect with the labyrinth of the LDS Church, though this author must emphasize that, in evidence of its superior virtue, the LDS Church was entirely in compliance with building codes. Chastity is so lost that hope of finding the wrong turn that took her here is forsaken. Meanwhile, pressure from the vile body urges her to pee. Chastity searches for a women’s room in vain, for this is an area in which only those who share in the features of the Lord dwell and, thus, all defecatory facilities are accommodated only to the bodily components that do worthily imitate those with which HE became incarnated unto. Chastity walks into the men’s room anyway.
Chastity comes in unworthiness unto the bathroom of the Lord, lacking one of the appendages essential to HIS being.God had a cock, but everyone needs to pee…
Chastity steps inside the stall and finds a lone toilet paper roll. But, ah, the irony—no toilet! Chastity remembers in tragic irony all the times of frustration at airport bathrooms and filthy park restrooms where she hovered over the toilet, and even her early days at Joseph Smith academy when Eve’s punishment descended upon her for the first time—all innumerable instances in which she had already committed to the act only to realize that there was no toilet paper, but only a barren cardboard roll devoid even of the small tuft of still-glued on remainder! And now, in devilish mockery was a full-swollen roll and yet no toilet!!! What stands instead is…another door. Too compelled by the need for urination, Chastity does not stop to dwell on the oddity, but merely flings it open and hurdles on forward in desperate hope of finding a porcelain bowl. And need we mention the tenfold increase in sense of urgency when one is disappointed in their prospect? For all of us have known the sensation of finding a porta-potty and lunging forward only to find that a padlock secures the plastic portal to relief.
Chastity enters a bathroom stall, but, oh my, another door stands before her!She descends!!!
She descends an immense iron staircase plummeting through a basement so deep that the bottom cannot be seen. Does Chastity traverse the void, her only hope to a toilet, or does she hold it in? The will of the urethral sphincters is undeniable.
THE DOOR WITHIN THE DOOR.
The door slams shut, trapping Chastity in darkness. Yet she carries on with ardent heart, losing count of the many many stairs. After a good 10-15 minutes of descent, Chastity reaches the absolute limit of depth in the Sims. Finally, at the bottom, Chastity’s presence signals several hundred fluorescent lights to simultaneously turn on, revealing the presence of a set of thick, steel doors.
Having no precedent with which to evaluate such a situation, Chastity knocks on the door. If it is a bathroom stall, it does not seem to be occupied—but, ah! A laser beams down and immediately scans the biometric features of Chastity’s face while ominous Latin chanting blasts.
The Latin chanting ceases. “Welcome, Cardinal Dolan,” an electronic voice plays. The clicking of deeply embedded mechanisms unlocking sounds forth and the steel doors screech slowly open to reveal hundreds of feet of oriental carpet with giant stripes of gold piled one one top of the other like stacks of legos while the papal seal gleams in signal that these were in the holy possession of His shepherd. Chastity beamed in satisfaction, for the piles of gold were significantly less than she had expected. The vault of Joseph Smith that she had seen two years ago exceeded this amount several times over! As to why the vault had referred to her as “Cardinal Dolan” Chastity could not begin to inquire, for Chastity was unaware that, due to a precipitous increase in need to move money out of the official Vatican vault into the vault attached to a cemetery trust fund, the previous user had set the scan mechanism to automatically open for the next 24 hours to his name as his assistants rushed to transfer the contents.
The vault opens for Chastity, but Chastity opens for no one.Chastity decides to count the money.
Chastity decided to count the money because it was there. And because she no longer had to relieve herself thanks to the surprise elicited by beholding a secret vault. The proud emblem of the institution of the truth of the only truth hangs on the wall.
Chastity counts almost all the way to five before her attention is disrupted by the noise of clinking bars of gold coming from behind. It appears that someone else has paid a trip to the vault…and also likes counting the Lord’s indulgences…
It was a tall figure in a strange hat and tightly buttoned jacket with emaciated face and a hat indicating high holy status. The severe black of his outfit contrasted unhappily with Chastity’s floral print like a death’s head next to a packet of bubble gum. “Who are you?!” exclaimed Chastity. “I had better ask first who are YOU?!” said the man in black, “since you must explain to me what your female presence is doing in a space reserved for HIS sacred priests?!! I am THE pope! Now, tell me who YOU are.” (Unforuntately, no one has yet created a Pope hat in the Sims. BELIEVE ME I TRIED TO FIND IT AND COULD NOT SO IF YOU CRITICIZE ME FOR DESIGNING THE POPE LIKE THIS YOU CREATE THE POPE HAT.)
“I,” replied Chastity with sharp indignation, “am a believer in the one true Truth of the Church of the Latter Day Saints of the Mormon Tabernacle!”
“Ah! Another heretic coming to undermine us! Of course!” screeched the emaciated man in black, “by spreading lies and rumors and calling up the power of Caesar and secular law to compel us to surrender gold from the holy vault! You think you can defeat us in court?! Well, let me tell you that our lawyers are legion! These funds are property of the cemetery trust and their extraction from HIS Church—I mean the cemetery trust fund—imperils religious liberty under the first amendment! Though it is the judgment of God that should cause you to tremble, heretic, for HE knows of your error and heresy even if the license of the secular society lets you live in lies and evil under its despicable first amendment and made up notion of human ‘rights,’ which asserts a notion of freedom as freedom from authority and everything true and good!”
Chastity paused to reflect…”like you?”
“YES!!!!” he SCREAMED…then he squinted his eyes and gave Chastity a glare of the kind of pride and contemptuous ex-communicative damnation to eternal torment truly worthy of the God of love.
Then, a sudden cold chill hit him. Perhaps a draft blew in from 345 feet upstairs where Winter was happening. Or perhaps he became aware of his own soul. Whatever the reason, he reflexively spun around to transform into Winter Garb. The Pope had, however, forgotten to change his outfit and stood in the shame of a DEFAULT BASE GAME SWEATER.
Chastity, with the keenness of vision to interior decor, skirt lace, and lampshade dust worthy of a respectable Mormon housewife, observed the non-matching seasonal attire with the icy raised eyebrow of silent judgment and pursed lips. As anyone knows who has been struck by the sharp dart of ice to the heart that is the silent judgment of the Mormon house wife, whether for loitering in a public space, defenestrating a piece of gum after rolling a car window down while Led Zeppelin plays from the radio, or displaying porn shoulders (literally people this is an actual word in the Mormon community for people wearing shirts that show their shoulders) it is a gaze more irreparably devastating, more implacably merciless and hard than the eye contact of the Gorgon or a DMV worker. The Pope, helpless against this dark magic, shudders in shame and begs to be redeemed.
“I’ll bring a casserole to the school play, I swear!” he screams from the terrified hole his soul has fallen into.
“Good. Good,” says the neutral, affectionless voice of Chastity, “and what else?”
“Um, well, um, I can show you the torture room. How would you like to see the torture room? Then, you promise, you…you won’t tell anyone I have a sweater that cannot be properly identified as either dark green or mauve? Please, it’s really cool. I have all sorts of pokies and pointies for the heretics. And some fire. There is also fire.”
Chastity scoffed, “maybe a bit of these gold bars can be sent to the Bank of the Latter Day Saints and I won’t even mention that it’s from the Sims H&M collection…”
“Oh god, no! Don’t tell! I have wines, from the Vatican cellar, over 1,000 years old! Take as many as you want!”
Full eye-lids went up from Chastity as she returned a cold, dead, horrified silence. Truly an institution that houses devil’s water beneath its ‘holy’ chambers was the anti-Christ.
Yet, curiosity compelled her. “Show me the torture chambers then…” she said.
“Follow me then,” said the Pope who exited the vault and made an immediate left, passing by His Eminence’s child containment chambers. The appearance of caged children clothed only in underwear with adjacent red velvet covered royal viewing loveseats provoked no response from her guide His Holy Eminence who walked past the cages with as little remark as if it had been a bread pantry.
“WHAT IS THAT?” shouted Chastity, having never seen pre-pubescent boys caged underground before. Only girls were to be caged! And besides, that was inside cabins where they performed housework until selected for marriage by a well-secured businessman. What madness was this?! The Pope continued walking as if he heard nothing.
“I said, ‘what is that over there?!'” yelled Chastity again.
“What is what?” said the Pope.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘WHAT IS WHAT?!’ I’M TALKING ABOUT THE CAGES FILLED WITH ACTUAL CHILDREN THAT ARE LITERALLY TWO FEET AWAY FROM US!”
“What cages with children?” said the Pope.
Chastity sighed with exasperation. How many times was she going to almost utter the word ‘damn’ in a single day?
“Is altar duty over yet?” whimpered a meek voice.
“NO,” said the Pope to the child who then ran into the corner and began muttering and trembling with confused fear.
“WAIT YOU JUST TALKED TO ONE OF THEM!” she yelled, “YOU SEE THE CHILDREN THAT ARE DOWN HERE. YOU JUST TALKED TO ONE. WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO IT?!”
“I didn’t talk to anyone.”
“YES YOU DID. THOSE KIDS RIGHT THERE. RIGHT. LITERALLY. THERE.” She pointed directly at the crazed child that paced rapidly in a circle beneath the fluorescent light.
“I’m not secular. I’m a Mormon!” screeched Chastity.
“Lies of the secular liberal society and the gays. And Jews. Gay homosexual secular lesbian Jews that control the media…the decadent society that cuts off the head of truth and bears it on a platter like a whore…” he continued to shake his head grumbling and grumbling while heading for the torture room. But first, he played a bit on the pipe organ because, as leader of a Sims Club, he needed to add enough points to be able to get themed t-shirts. Also, because it was part of the pre-torture room viewing ceremonial sacrament (there was a different preparatory pipe organ blast piece for the pre-torture ceremonial sacrament, which was the same as the pre-torture room viewing ceremonial sacrament but in a minor key).
Evidence of the value of this sacrament is validated by the glowing octagonal Sims club symbol. We know he is the leader because of the crown.
Though she hates admitting it to herself, Chastity secretly finds the torture tune rather catchy. After completing this necessary ceremony, they head into the torture chamber.
“You know every single person that has ever gone in and out of here has recognized our claim to supreme and total truth?”
“Really?” said Chastity admiring the royal viewing seats which were lined with the plush of baby pandas and dyed with the blood of infidels. Deep down Chastity recognized that this was way more bad-ass than the whitewashed Joseph Smith Community Center where 90 year old women sold watercolors of blonde babies and flowers.
“Tell me what the thingies do,” Chastity said with glee.
“Well, those three swords up on the wall over the supreme seat of supreme judgment can be used to provoke recognition of truth by externalizing human intestines.”
“Ahhh!”
“And those giant flaring urns of eternal flame are NOT just for show. How else do you think you could heat up a poker until it glares white? And we wouldn’t want the soul to escape to eternal torment before it is shown truth through the loving efforts of our chamber members. The pokies can be made hot enough to cauterize gushing wounds.”
“Very clever!”
“This rug that you stand on right now was handmade in the Turkish Orient.”
“Aren’t they heathens?” asked Chastity.
“OH….uhhhh….what do you think of the scales of judgment on our table?”
The Pope pointed behind Chastity, who had formerly been admiring the knives on the wall to her left.
“The scales are always right,” he said.
Reason is supreme. The scale of judgment is right because it is the scale of judgment.
“How do you know that?” asked Chastity.
“Because they are the scales of judgment.”
“It kind of looks like they are tilting towards guilt even though they have the same amount of weight on either side right now.”
“That’s because the weight of sin is infinite.”
Thinking she had really snagged him Chastity replied: “Um. But isn’t God infinite?”
Chastity questions the authority of His Eminence.
“Yes. God is infinite,” the Pope replied.
“Then wouldn’t the scales be even? Because the two infinities would cancel?”
“No.”
“Why?”
The scales of judgment, proudly juxtaposed by the WORD OF THE LORD.
“Because the scale is correct.”
“Wait, what?! You can’t know that.”
“Yes I can. It’s logic. Everyone who comes in here has been guilty. We know this because this is the room of guilt. To assume that the scales are incorrect because the scale is weighing towards guilt is a fallacy because you are assuming that all outcomes must be predetermined by probability instead of truth. You are, therefore, making the unwarranted assumption that it is not possible for all those to be brought in to be guilty, which is a non-empirical assumption. It is the prejudice of secular liberal ideology. Jews. Gay Jews. That control the secular entertainment industry.”
Chastity knew that something had just happened to her brain, but her Mormon education had not provided her with the term “mind fuck.” The great intellectual tradition of the SUPREME TRUTH had bested her biblical Sunday school training and Joseph Smith. She had no idea what he had just said, but he said it with such conviction and confidence in magical words she didn’t know so he must be right. Luckily, Mormonism had already prepared her to sit quietly and patiently while men explained.
“It’s all in the book of supreme truth,” he declared proudly and pointed to his fancy painted version of it next to Chastity’s seat, “This one is from the fourteenth century.” He looked at his watch. “Now, excuse me, but I’ve got to ensorcell some crackers in an hour.”
“Wait!” said Chastity.
“Yesssss?”
“Can I…maybe…sometime…witness a torture?”
“Only cracker consuls get to witness a torture,” he replied, “and becoming a cracker consul is a right reserved only for those who possess all the holy appendages in image of the LORD…But since you liked it so much, I’ll toss in this personal thumbscrew as a souvenir.”
“Really? Can’t I participate in any way?”
“Well, I guess I could make you a cracker chamber maid…”
“What would that involve?” chirped Chastity, happy to fulfill woman’s destiny for God.
“Cleaning and prepping the torture room. And feeding the…leaving food outside to be consumed.”
“Then I can watch a torture?”
“Then you can listen to a torture outside the chamber doors.”
“You mean where the children are?”
“Yes…I MEAN NO. OH GOD DAMN IT.”
Chastity smiled, having, for once, bested his intellectual and holy eminence.
“Sigh…I will show you where you can sit.”
The Pope led Chastity back outside the torture chamber doors to the chamber of child containment. Sitting beneath the emblem of His Holy Eminence in the royal viewing seats Chastity watched as the children, upon seeing the Pope, immediately began muttering some ritual.
“As feeding duty leader you are to slide trays of nutrient clay into these metal flaps.”
“But what if I want to bake cinnamon rolls?”
“That is fine…” he grumbled.
“Yay!” cheered Chastity. And for the first time in his darkness enshrouded entombment a child smiled with eyes of hope and delight upon hearing Chastity utter the words “cinnamon rolls.”
Chastity’s heart cheers as it feels called by the essence of womanhood to the duty of cinnamon roll baking in the name of the Lord.
Then, shifting his eyes around, the Pope’s face turned white with shock and then red with rage. He let out a deep growl and grumbled, “So it happens again…”
“So what happens again?” said Chastity.
“We are missing another one…”
“Oh?”
“There have been…disappearances among the confined.”
He gave out an angry glare at the children which fell into shuddering silence.
“None of the cracker consuls or myself have yet solved the mystery…but at the rate of approximately once a month, one of the contained vanishes…without a trace. There is no hole in the wall. Only a small piece of purple paper with a psychedelic eyeball on it in the place where a child once stood enchained. All we have on the camera is…every now and then…the image of a pointed red hat and a small bearded thing…if I were mad I would almost liken it to a Gnome…”
Chastity’s face turned white as well with recognition, “I know of what you speak!” she cried.
“Do you?!”
“I’ve seen them. I haven’t yet tracked them. I’ve tried! That’s how I ended up here! In your Eminence’s Holy Chambers, “I was looking for them! Sometimes I hear—“
“The sound of Indian Trap music?” he said, finishing her sentence with horror.
“Yes!”
“Then come,” he replied, “I must introduce you to other cracker consuls. We must share what we know. Though the fresh turnover of children does help preserve the palette of the priests from satiation, it would be better if they simply aged out in the time necessary for the statute of limitations to run out and for their means of disposal to be known…we’ve made some progress on researching the disappearances, however. We think it is likely due to the secular liberal Jews that keep trying to make documentaries about us.”
“I know, they hate us too. But if only we had the gold… “
“Yes, the LORD makes it known who his chosen are. The Catholic Church’s holdings are at least TEN TIMES the holdings of the LDS Church.”
“You are right. How can I argue with the most palpable evidence of the Lord’s favor?” replied Chastity. Then, in that moment it was decided. Chastity joined the Pope’s Sims club and also acquired an octagonal rainbow above her head. And the joint search began for the infidels’ opium den began. A persecution would be had in the name of the LORD!
And the search for the Gnome Dome of Opiome truly began…
Meanwhile, deep in another recess beneath the Church, the Gnomes were preparing plant medicine for ceremony space in the ritual of welcoming in the LSD conference in which the latest liberated child was to be inducted.
Will Chastity and the Pope successfully track the Indian Trap Music and purple strobe lighting to their source? What exactly is happening with the Gnome Dome of Opiome? Find out in the next episode!
Enlightenment as described in the yoga sutras isn’t a state of eternal bliss, it’s the ability to decouple the self from all external influence, and, as a result, feel nothing. You’re aiming for no karma, not good karma. Only then can the cycle of reincarnation be broken.
If that idea of enlightenment held any water, given that she couldn’t come up with a way to definitively prove reaching enlightenment is possible, Aileen figured she was close.
She barely felt anything anymore.
Right now, her focus was on the bannister, which although light-colored, had begun to collect individual flecks of dust she could see if she brought her eyes to hand-level and squinted hard enough. It had accumulated to where she couldn’t make out individual particles inside the acute crevice where the handrail met the post. She disturbed them with a sharp puff of breath. The largest dislodged particle was helical, and although it would have been satisfying to see it move like a tiny spring, it instead shot up three times its height and floated an unimpressive half-inch away from its initial position. Blowing it again wouldn’t be worth the effort. The measly half-inch was still probably the most exciting thing to happen to that slinky-looking piece of fluff since her son moved out; a couple weeks ago, it may have been shaken loose by shockwaves of thumping feet or caught in a fingerprint, but now it and thousands of its barely macroscopic peers had taken up permanent residence all up and down the handrail where hands didn’t touch.
It didn’t register to Aileen that the presence of a staircase implied her house had a second story. Her domain had been the porch and study, where the upstairs was used primarily as an art room, then later for toys and toddler beds and dollhouses, later still for homework desks and chemistry sets, places for her son and most of the neighborhood’s teenage girls to sleep, and on one occasion a makeshift bedroom for her closeted spouse during a week she’d rather forget. Nowadays, she made a round through the seven downstairs rooms at least once per day, making sure to use both bathrooms equally so they’d dirty at the same rate. She learned that the echo of her footsteps felt less empty if she stayed on rugs and carpet or wore socks. Sometimes she’d imagine a time-lapse of her cleaning the apartment, so it looked like there were dozens of busy Aileens in every room, but the fantasy always stopped before she ran out of tchotchkes to inspect and planted herself at her writing desk for hours. Doing nothing.
She would tell herself she was going to write and then sit down and pick at her skin and at times her eyes would wander searching for new imperfections on her body or the desk. Sometimes there was something interesting to look at, like a collection of Khalil Gibran poems, but lately she’d had to move all books to the living room. The sight of a book reminded her of a time when she used to be productive, when she could absolutely just beam positivity and preach self-love and self-care to an audience of people who’d maybe gotten out of worse situations than the one Aileen found herself in right now. And then those same people stopped her on the street to rave about how much her book helped them realize it was their fault they were upset, how they couldn’t change the world but they could change the way they saw the world, and that doing so made them happier, better, more productive people in general. She couldn’t understand why she’d felt okay putting her face on those fucking books.
Visualizing what you wanted was one of the ten or so concepts Aileen had made a living off of, one she had spent as many late nights rewording for various target demographics so that the message reached as many people as possible. So what she was trying to do was to take this message to heart, something she thought she’d done in the past but apparently could go further with, anyway she was trying to sit down and have a Ritual in Ceremony Space in which she imagined the directions her life could go and set an intention to direct the flow of her energy towards taking the one that spoke to her the most from fantasy to reality. Option 1 was to spend her adulthood and final days sitting alone at her desk in her clean-but-empty house having a Ceremony Space as she tried to figure out what to do. Option 2 was to marry either Matt or Derrick; Josh was out of the question, even though with that union she’d get back some of the art he stole.
Option 2 seemed to be just outside the peripherals of Aileen’s mind’s eye. She would always start with the wedding, and the wedding went alright, just some sort of basic shit with jars and twine and some fairy lights, foolproof and preplanned so she didn’t have to spend what little energy she had these days on something so transient. Then either Derrick would come home every day and tell Aileen what happened at crossfit or Matt would come home and not tell her what he was thinking. This is where the thought experiment kept turning into an anxiety hypothesis. Certainly there was no shortage of dead men for either suitor to run off into a fated perfect romance with, but she had no problem envisioning several hundred other ways she could ruin the relationship. Best case, she’d be stuck watching them slowly wither away to nothing.
One good thing had come out of her first marriage—she was confident in her ability to express what love meant for her. She knew enough to know it was nothing like what she felt for Matt or Derrick.
Option 1 or Option 2. Die in a loveless marriage, or die alone.
Aileen had written enough fiction to know where she was in the story: the low point right before the God of the Machine spits out an Option 3, hopefully centered around a tattooed Fabio who hated dust as much as he loved middle-aged single mothers. Option 3 was the one she’d been working on before she realized the same hundred-odd people lived in her world. Of those hundred-odd people, only two were single and remotely dateable. Matt and Derrick. So this Option 3 wasn’t possible in Aileen’s small world, her speck of dust. But there was another Option 3, one she thought about more than Options 1 and 2 combined.
She had the cowplant berries and a monthly pass to a spa with a sauna. Whether these were less painful, or electrocution, or one of the emotional deaths, or being exhausted in the 2×3 swimming pool she had installed to quiet her whims, she hadn’t been able to figure out yet. And it wasn’t like acknowledging it made it go away. She’d be brushing her teeth in the morning and it would pop into her head. Like Kramer. Like clockwork. Option 3.
Another one of Aileen’s golden self-help tips was to always surround yourself with a fantastic support system that Brings You Up instead of Puts You Down. The people that Brought Aileen Up were as impeccably trained in self-help and self-love as Aileen herself, with inhuman natural positivity to boot, and always had time to remind Aileen of the solution she already knew in her heart. The solution was to keep waiting. The solution was to keep waiting, keep envisioning, keep running her fingernail through the microscratches in the glass desk and the wrinkles around her knuckles, keep busy and get out of bed and do cardio and stay hydrated and go outside so you can meet your Fabio, he has to come eventually, he has to, because you have to have faith it’s going to happen.
But there’s not a man alive I haven’t talked to.
You have to keep searching, and if you give up searching, it’ll never happen.
But what if he just doesn’t exist?
You have to have faith that he does and it’ll just happen someday.
Instead of confronting her wonderful support system with people who Bring Her Up with the sad reality that they don’t have any proof this is going to happen, the number of times Option 3, the real one, pops into her head while she’s carrying out the blindingly obvious strategy of waiting and having faith, so simple a kindergartener could come up with it and it’s a miracle that someone experienced like Aileen couldn’t do it on her own, the fact that maybe no one, not even a perfectly executed support system whose Bringing-People-Up abilities have been compared to a genuine stairway to heaven, could come up with a solution because there is none. There’s no Deus Ex. There’s no happy ending. Aileen was a problem who couldn’t be solved.
But it clicked once for Aileen, in the middle of a lecture on how important it is to have hope from a woman who wore harem pants and ear cuffs, the latter of which could double as dread beads in a pinch, who had tan lines from toe rings and whose turquoise jewelry was charmingly, effortlessly authentic and not at all like the mass-produced baubles people bought to look like her, that the message wasn’t for Aileen herself. It was for them. It was for them to believe there’s no problem that couldn’t be fixed through a positive gung-ho attitude, which made it possible for they themselves to sustain that selfsame attitude and continue making the world a brighter place. Aileen’s negative thinking wasn’t serving her, she was a false Scotsman, a downer, she needed to do a training in India, she needed to learn true patience, she needed to let go of her expectations and separate herself from everything.
So she did, the first thing to go being the group whose onslaught of positivity was Putting Her Down. Claudia she kept. Claudia repeated the same platitudes as much as the rest of them combined, which only suggested to Aileen how thin the veneer was, that if Claudia really needed to hear “it gets better” that often, she at least had to be doing as poorly as Aileen. Claudia had a husband who was a Joke Star, besides, she could make it look like an accident and no one would be the wiser.
That’s the other half of why Aileen’s house is empty so often. Some information can’t be communicated by talking, or at all, because it has to be realized by each person individually. Often these are the simplest statements. Be yourself. Empty, until the person who the command is directed at understands what that means. It can take years to know what that means, to be yourself. Understanding that you’re going to die—not intellectually, actually coming to terms with your own death—no matter how knowledgable or virtuous one’s life was, is another such bit of information. Aileen knew her friends weren’t ready to hear that. She didn’t need to remind them that for someone who didn’t believe in reincarnation, the only easy way out was a hard restart, and if she tried that, she wasn’t coming back. She was the unresolvable problem, and she was Putting People Down.
And Aileen knew that, compared to Claudia’s shaky veneer held together with tequila and a prayer, these friends had self-helped themselves into an impenetrable barricade. A whole forest of positivity. A forest that would either be brought down, toothpick by toothpick, or blackened in one spectacular inferno, or perhaps a combination of both, until the beautiful greenery of regeneration and hope vanished and one truth remained. The pain of shared existence.
“Joy bonds people for an instant. Pain bonds them for a lifetime.”
Except as soon as the words appeared in Aileen’s mind, she knew they weren’t true. There was no guarantee. What if two people experience a traumatic event together, but the trauma was the only thing they had in common, and they can barely stand each other when it ends? What if the pain causes irreparable neurological damage?
Aileen spread the sebum around on her face and considered that, maybe, she had been the problem all along. The inevitability of death, of suffering, of uncertainty—words every child knows, like the mandate to Be Yourself, meaningless until given individual meaning—these are universal. So why can’t she go about her day like everyone else?
There was a time she could, as a self-help author. She’d been happier when she was pretending to have the answers. She’d been happier sharing her truth, stomping around in her own barricade with her face on the fucking back cover, again why’d she do that, possibly alienating the people who, like she did now, needed it most and knew none of it was real. That guilt alone made her cringe on a good day, on a bad day sent her back to bed bawling and needing to rid the world of the one self-help author she’d feel no remorse about culling, telling herself to do it before she recovers to spread more divisive mistruths.
But then she had been chosen as the poet of a truth where the action of forming a narrative perverts it. Aileen had tapped into a pain shared by all living beings, marinated in the River Styx. Doomed by a feeling she couldn’t ignore or communicate. She understood the prophet Cassandra, the prophet cursed to deliver prophecies no one would believe, understood that the people who wouldn’t believe Cassandra weren’t fools, and yet Aileen was spared even the smug satisfaction of believing herself.
And yet.
“Joy bonds people for an instant. Pain bonds them for a lifetime.”
And yet it was untrue, and yet Aileen could point to her baptism in suffering as the one thing she loved about herself. She felt the pain of the calf being lead to slaughter, the butterfly limping at the end of its lifespan, the grass crushed beneath the sole of a shoe. She felt the smoke in the lungs of San Myshuno residents, the bleaching of the Sulani corals, the horror of a Strangervillian losing control of their body. She walked by tombstones and neither ignored nor wept, but nodded in acknowledgment. She understood the people in her support group were connected to the same pain, just as she was to the flora, fauna, and people, no matter how sterilized their lives are, no matter how hard they work to fight it.
There would come a day where it would bubble under the surface no longer, and overflow, making a wretch of the deniers. And then Aileen would listen as she wanted to be listened to, and feel what the speaker felt, and share what she couldn’t.
The thoughts were still there. They were there, but now Aileen thought them with the weeds and the rabbits and the mourners and the lost and the oppressed and the oppressors and her friend in the yellow sweater, and was driven by gratitude, pure artistic compulsion, to awaken this connection when it was needed most. She couldn’t envision fixing the unfixable, but would die trying to express the inexpressible.
But as much as she hated to admit it, it was too empty, the old house. It would be poetic to live alone, but honest to acknowledge her physiological needs, being that having another person around would make her just content enough to keep going.
She pocketed her old engagement ring, went to a bar, pinned two names to a dartboard and took a shot.
Matt it was.
Wallbreaking Epilogue: Matt rejected Aileen’s first proposal. You know something’s fucked when even the NPCs know it’s fucked.
Aileen’s real wedding (not the staged one in Grey Wedding) was as low-effort as possible, and it actually did rain. She picked out the eyeball ring herself.
Here’s the link to Grey Wedding if you want to see how some of the lines read with the new context.
San Myshuno’s favorite necrophiliac is here to step in before things get too real.
The Small Onion & Destroy family
A week before Jasper found his nemesis in a multi-thousand-year-old snow demon, Xiyuan and his husband forego preparing for Winterfest in favor of a monomaniacal adherence to routine that rivals Groundhog Day—but here with the opposite message of Groundhog Day, since learning to love another person creates a loop, not breaks one.
That several k is in Sim years, so it represents several hundred k in human years under the current aging settings
The holidays promise to be low-key. There are no children showing up at the penthouse door begging for sugar for Bernard to jump-scare. Not even the most contrived situation could get Xiyuan and his not-hostile-but-not-too-enthused coparent in the same room. Everyone’s in-laws are overseas or rotting. Shu’s going to visit at some point, but the family-oriented spirit of the holiday is going to preclude any real discussion about what the hell he thinks he’s doing.
Xiyuan moves 5 feet from his perch and pushes the dual combination branch-fountain, a real double-threat, flush with the wall, creating just enough space to assemble the artificial tree. The needles are done up in an ombre increasing in saturation from their white tips to whichever plastic imitation branch they belong to, the deepest hue being an equal combination of forest and avocado greens. Like 60’s bathroom or diner green. The color seen draped over RVs with fake wood panels and in polished jukebox enamel and soulmated with burnt orange. Perhaps as a nod to the color’s history, or as an aesthetic challenge, or a symbol of rebirthing things that should have been dead for a long time, the pair have decided to revive the tradition by draping the tree in more than a pop of orange.
This is before Dolly figured out how to hold down the ‘Option’ key, ignorance of basic building controls being the single biggest strike against any claim to omniscience she may have had in this universe
In fall or summer the hubbub in the Arts Quarter courtyard would be partly audible from the gallery’s fourth floor. Today, the pro- and anti-capitalist sentiments being hawked by the street vendors and protesters, respectively, are caught in the porous blanket of snow before they can reach Xiyuan’s ears, and the layer of frost on the windowpane distorts the figures below into collections of refracted dots. He keeps his head still to distinguish the living, moving dots from the streetlight and plant dots. He visits daily to brush snow off the koi mural and sip his coffee on the south side of Casbah Gallery’s top floor. If he stands one foot away from the floor-to-ceiling glass panes, the chill of the air on his face and the vents warming his backside cancel out to the perfect temperature for enjoying a hot beverage.
The other mural is a testament to semiotic overload: whether the vandal is making a nihilistic statement about the future of the planet, rejecting the idea of diversity, or communicating the magnitude of their own toughness by superimposing a self-portrait on the blue dot itself, he can’t tell. He wanders downstairs to try and make sense of the stylized Simlish message repeated across the mural’s lower border.
He wanders deep enough in the courtyard to make out the protesters’ signs, which strike him as ambiguous in almost exactly the same way. The choice to pair the Earth with a reaper’s scythe—what does it mean? A warning for inevitable doomsday, a rant in favor of population culling? The woman with a megaphone yells out statements that no one in their right mind would disagree with, barring any prejudice against those who actually care about politics, or against the concept of protesting itself, passionate and just vague enough to deter opposition. It reminds him of a horoscope. The reader gets a prompt, the reader fills in the blanks; the less information provided, the more accurate the prediction will be.
Xiyuan comes out in favor of rainbow people to the surprise of no one.
Why yes, he does have a moment to talk about the environment
Two minutes after Xiyuan leaves, another Sim grabs the megaphone to deliver a monologue about the rent being too damn high. Passerby stop and nod in agreement.
Sims don’t pay taxes and have a plethora of options available for beating death. The colloquial phrase “nothing’s certain except death and taxes” couldn’t hold water in a kiddie pool, ladders or none. Either Sims have a parallel saying or the above is parsed as “nothing’s certain,” which trades cheekiness for accuracy.
He stops to pull the ends of his gloves further under his coat sleeves, which tenses the fabric against the webbing of his fingers. It’s unpleasant, freezing actually, but wandering the courtyard is Xiyuan’s preferred way of biding time. He examines the compressed snow on and between the cracks of his boots. White, he thought of the snow, a blank page or canvas, echoing the musical bookends that got stuck in his head every time, no matter how many white pages or canvases he saw, or any vast expanse of white, for that matter. In a day, the courtyard’s page or canvas would hardly be blank, mixing with dirt and heat from boots to create a sort of brown sludge with garnishes of dog piss near the edges of plant beds. But currently, it symbolized cleansing, healing. Rebirth.
He’d almost forgotten the dread he felt at having to meet his son that night. It was the first time he’d felt it. He needed to believe this was transient, too.
It wasn’t a front; he actually did already celebrate with his dads.
If Shu had any similar feelings about the disastrous failure in familial cohabitation, he was refusing to play his hand. He was steering the conversation clear of anything heavy, offering and soliciting only empty-calorie informational nuggets like what anyone did today or was hoping to receive from Father Winter. Things Xiyuan barely had to think about to answer. The quarter of a day, along with the months between his son moving out and him remembering that family-oriented holidays exist, at any rate, the quarter of a day he’d spent choosing which points to make or gloss over seemed like a waste. The sketches he’d spent hours erasing and revising looked like shit next to the strokes that flowed out as natural as the one-word expected response to how his day was. Such a conversation was best left to the pros. Losing his train of thought in the effortless, ceaseless flow of anecdotes, he’d forgotten that was an option.
Windenburg’s former ghost lord/San Myshuno’s current face of #relationshipgoals understands something is bugging his husband, but can’t get any information beyond the occasional sigh, the half-start of a sentence promising to express what exactly is wrong this time, the unsolicited remark on what activities his progeny used to enjoy. Part of Xiyuan can’t reconcile current Shu with the kid who once licked a block of resin to see what it would taste like, but to Bernard, Shu is Lord Byron but less of a dick. He’s like having a child without the unpleasant experience of being around a child. Their feet are both too big and too small, don’t you know? It’s creepy.
No gift exchange occurs during the meeting. Shu’d insisted on it. That was one of the things Xiyuan tried to analyze in his downtime in the months and quarter-day leading up to the meeting—was he planning a surprise, a welcome one this time, a gesture Xiyuan would have to refuse to be blindsided by and match with his own? His solution was to keep an envelope in his jacket pocket, just in case, and if not now he’d give it to his son on New Year’s. Another small relief; it was a genuine, no-nonsense request for lack of gifts. The young man prepared nothing beyond some pun on the word presents/presence.
Maybe he’d underestimated Shu’s ability to be genuine. It wasn’t like he tried to hide anything before.
The exchange, instead, occurred next morning and involved only two participants. It wasn’t an event foreshadowed by any fanfare, or any mention that it was happening. The couple had long eradicated the need for conversational filler. One displayed emotion with the precision of a character actor and transparency of an anime character and the other retained the aristocratic tendency to narrate what he was doing at any given time. It wasn’t like he didn’t expect his husband to swivel his head without moving any other part of his body, last of all the brush from the canvas, to check what he was doing. It was a reassurance. I’m here, everything’s okay. The gift he received was a reflection of that sentiment. I’m here, nothing’s changed, nothing’s going to change, I’ll always be here, and everything’s okay.
An easel. It was an easel.
Then they left (with a mild nod and a “Shall we?”) to try something they’d been meaning to all winter.
In human years, Bernard is in his mid-40s and Xiyuan is at least 50. Give them a minute.
If there is a soul reading this, a single soul, who thinks Bernard is a heartless bastard, was responsible for his own and Mimsy’s death, was put in the game as an irredeemable antagonist to scare children, cackled as his livelihood was reduced to ash, look at this. Please.
At least a couple people have declared this “the gayest thing they’ve ever seen.” As the frogs in a conspiracy theorist’s water supply.And of those people, a couple still have amended their previous statement with “nope, that’s even better.”
A ride into the freaking sunset, is what these two are.
So we’re almost up to the present day, but have one more story to knock out before that can happen. Consider it a season finale. It’s heavy enough for the author to need to provide preemptive eyebleach. You’ve been warned.
Before we hit the wall/fall off a cliff/other vertical metaphor signifying the point of no return, here are links to download CC-less versions of these guys in their current state and give them some hope of a stable life in at least one timeline. Enjoy.
“I can’t believe this,” Aileen said, to her son and to her own wedding invitation, propped up with a twine-wrapped baby food jar, sporting a mockingly pastoral Seven-Brides-for-Seven-Brothers scene even as the droplets splattering her window at 220 bpm threatened an ambience closer to that Alanis Morissette song. Aileen, having enough writing skill points to recognize misuse of its eponymous adjective, hated that song.
“Aw, Mom, the sky’s so happy you’re getting married, it’s crying.” Shu had been his mother’s sole confidant for a decade after his father jumped ship and married a dead painter. (It was a whole thing.) He’d since moved out, but still dropped everything and showed up at 8 A.M. today to arbitrate her happiness.
“Then tell the sky to get my vows laminated at the print shop. This is a logistical nightmare.”
“Look, your job today is to enjoy yourself. Leave the worrying to me, and I’ll make sure your wedding with Matt goes off without a hitch.”
“I wish I could believe that. It’s too late to do anything.”
“Mom, nothing is too much for me today. Above and beyond is SOP. I’ll make it work.” Shu couldn’t talk without flailing around like an inflatable tube man. Grand gestures were his specialty.
“Shu, don’t—“
Her son was already texting his handiest friend and Simsterest-junkie girlfriend, the latter of whose wedding binder was on his head when he woke up.
The door closed, leaving Aileen alone to contemplate the differences between her own experience and the perpetually smiling couple on the front of her invitations. They’d stay in rosy-cheeked stasis even if she ripped it down the center. Marriage was more of a new beginning than a happy ending, she wanted to scream at the greeting card manufacturer, and she understood as well as anyone how heartbreaking its real ending could be.
Aileen regarded her pre-nuptial reflection like a thalassophobe at the beach. Her formalwear, contacts and extensions and itchy lace and all, felt more ingenuine than special. That, and flimsy enough to fall apart without a tacky clear plastic poncho.
“Guess whommmm?” Based on the drawn-out correction of one of her pet peeves, someone who would stand in the doorway with an open umbrella to avoid dripping on the floor or exposing his borrowed tux to the downpour for even a second.
“Just sit down, Shu, I’ll deal with the puddles later.”
“Whatever the bride wants.” Aileen stepped into the foyer just as Shu finished de-puddling the floor with a microfiber cloth. He did a double-take at her presence and scrambled for the doorknob. “You look stunning as usual. Vámonos?”
Shu guarded the threshold with his umbrella as Aileen gathered her train above the knees, revealing her galoshes. “Still Myshuno Meadows?”
“Yeah, it’s too late to change the location. But just trust me.”
Ascending M.M.’s stairs with the sub-knee portion of the dress draped over her forearm, Aileen raised an eyebrow at the state of the park. “Ok, so the fact that there’s no wedding arch or seating doesn’t inspire confidence.”
“Well, it should,” Shu replied, holding open the door to the visitor’s center.
It usually looked like it smelled like mothballs, but had been slapped over with the design sense that made Aileen the butt of many an E.L. James joke: sharp, clean, and desaturated, with hints of silver, charcoal, gunmetal, slate grey, stone grey, good old regular grey itself. Aileen caught a whiff of chlorine from waterfalls glittering in cold light like the sky above.
“See? Now the rain looks totally intentional. Besides, it’s more ‘you’ now.” He gestured in roughly the direction of Newcrest. “It matches, y’know, your entire house and everything you own.”
That’s when Aileen’s June wedding fantasy started to fall as flat as the card it was printed on. The bride was just a prop stuck in a generic setting with no one who truly understood her. And here Aileen stood, mortal and flawed and special to someone, ideal marriage or not.
“Thank you, Shu. This is far better than what I was thinking.”
She held back the saltwater building in her eyes enough to make out Matt’s figure at the altar. She remembered how loved she was, letting it wash over her, overflowing with joy. Her tears came in torrents.
“Look, Mom, it wasn’t gonna be perfect anyway.” Shu offered his arm. “You got this. As long as you love Matt, everything will be fine.”
Aileen took a deep belly inhale. “You know what? Fine is all I could hope for.”
She pictured the rain carrying her doubt, her inhibitions, her past, her dread, her expectations, good and bad, leading them into the gutter with the other sewage, back into the earth, dissolving everything it touched until there was only her fiancé, the path forward, and her son walking her down the aisle.
(Synopsis: We go hard on a holiday special centered around Jasper’s first Winterfest. Shu antagonizes Jo by crashing the J.E. festivities. Charlie talks about BPD and ants. Set some time aside for this one; I promise it’s worth the read.)
“Jasper! Look over here!”
The youngest Jeong-Espinosa had already made plans to taste the arm of the wooden chair when he was done with his own hand, but decided to humor his mother this time.
“Jasper,” she said, holding her cellphone at a length where the camera minimally distorted his facial features while still being close enough to evoke feelings of intimate connection in the viewer, “do you want to tell Mommy about Winterfest?”
Ok, just imagine she’s reaching for the cell phone
Well, he did, in fact, the problem being it was impossible to properly communicate the depth of his Winterfest knowledge with his limited command of Simlish. And by the same token, he hadn’t noticed most of this knowledge was secondhand from the requester herself. So the prompt may not have been in good faith, itself probably intended to showcase how poor Jasper’s command of Simlish actually was, but in a way that was endearing to its target audience. But he didn’t know that.
“It has, a treeeeeee.” That’s what he did know. Not being able to stop a terminal vowel once it had started was still an issue. The proper separation of clauses in conversational Simlish, he understood, for certain very short clauses, but was forced to insert his own as his mind ping-ponged around for whatever noun best represented what he was trying to convey.
“And what goes on the tree?”
That was just an unfair question in general, given that Jasper’s vocabulary was heavily biased in favor of frequently used words, and of those, the ones restricted to six letters max. ‘Winterfest’ being a notable exception. Here’s one that fit the bill. “A star!”
“And what else?”
As much as he would have liked to help his mother out, this particular query fell outside his realm of expertise. He reverted instead to his original course of action, getting his impermanent-toothed mouth close enough to the chair arm’s terminus to bash his tastebuds against the sweet sweet wood grains.
Jo made an appeal back to something she’d said fifteen minutes ago. “Or…”
Or what? Asked and answered, Mom.
“Orna…”
“Ormanents!” Sic. Back to the chair, which would shortly gain some markings longer-lasting than the teeth that created them.
“Do you want to help put them on the tree?”
“Yesssss!” If only to find out what they were.
“Alright, honey, let’s go.” Jo pressed ‘record’ on her camera app, a gesture that did the opposite of what its name suggested, pleased with the real-stinking-cute candid moment she’d set up.
If you want to see a physicist, engineer, or PDEs analyst shake their head for 5 minutes, show them this thermostat placement
The conifer, handpicked by mother and son (Dr. J.E.’s off chasing flu patients, but he sends his blessings), made it as far as the front arch before Jo realized her house was too compact for it to actually fit anywhere. A couple hours after banishing Jasper to the bedroom, moving most of the furniture from the family room to the limitless void of the family inventory, placing the tree, unbanishing and filming Jasper as he decorated the bottom two feet of the tree (and maybe halfway at best, since the ornaments all seemed to be clustered in one area), redoing his work while he wasn’t looking, and taking the presents out from under the bed, she was done. It was presentable, if not elegant, or functional as a living room. It was at least what the situation called for.
The thermostat shows up again to taunt us. From this angle, we can also see that the windows are open.
Charlie came home around sevenish. He hadn’t been informed that the living room was now gone.
“What’s going on in here?”
“I cast a Winterfest spell and, poof!” Jo opened her hands in a whimsical manner. “The furniture turned into a tree. Right, Jasper?”
“Yessss!” And there was his revenge for the flashcard dishonesty earlier.
“Well, it looks great. It looks like Father Winter himself came down from the North Pole and did it.” The North Pole is slightly higher than the other worlds on the selection menu, offscreen.
“No, me and Mommy did it.” Sic. Give the kid a break.
“That’s right, we did! Do you know about Father Winter?”
“He comes in the, the, fire place, and.”
“And what does he bring?”
“Presents!” Two houses over, a flock of birds took off from a tree. There were already some gifts where the partially spit-covered chair had been, but more couldn’t hurt. He chose one and used the palm of his hand to slide a decorative ribbon back and forth over the outer edge.
“Not until tomorrow, buddy.” Charlie was either unaware of the ribbon-sliding loophole or being paranoid.
“Here, let’s all get a picture in front of the tree.” Jo set a tripod up at the front arch, setting the timer just long enough for her to whisk Jasper onto her lap and snuggle up to her husband. This was going on the e-cards.
From his omniscient post, Father Winter watched Jasper wake his parents up just shy of 3 in the morning to inform them it was Winterfest Eve. Or the day before, if you’d prefer having Eve apply only after sundown. Winterfest minus one. Again, his excitement about Winterfest dwarfed his ability to inform other Sims of this verbally, so he was stuck at the basal level of screaming and waving his limbs.
Design needs work, but good call on the sunglasses for snowblindness
Jo sat down to pen what Charlie’s sister’s acquaintance would later refer to when he asked about ‘that bougie shit on the fridge.’ (It was a testament to sibling love that she had it up there at all.) The finished product, paired with a matching-sweaters type photo and copied 22 times, was snail-mailed out to everyone Jo thought could use the holiday cheer. There were 23 prints of the photo as well; a one-to-one thing, you get it. Her letter read:
Salutations everybody!
How lucky we are as a family this Winterfest season! Yesterday Jasper and I set up the holiday decorations, and it ended up all being so much that we had to clear out almost the entire living room. Charlie came home and he didn’t know what to do!We were laughing so hard!
Jasper is so excited for his first Winterfest. He has been doing wonderfully with his flashcards and can even use the potty. He continues to warm all of our hearts and will almost certainly receive a present from Father Winter. We are so proud of him!
In case no one has told you already, Charlie recently got promoted to Chief of Staff at the hospital where he works. Go Charlie! I also started a venture of my own, and our website Jumping Jasper! is now live. If this letter tickles your curiosity, you can go there to find out what those Jeong-Espinosas are up to this time.
Today is Jasper’s birthday. I’m so excited to find out what the future has in store for this wonderful boy! We are all wishing you and your families a fantastic Winterfest with the ones who are closest to your heart.
Sending lots of love from my family to yours, Josephine, Charles and Jasper Jeong-Espinosa
So yeah: Jasper’d been dealt a crap hand, birth-timing-wise, and has one of those awful winter solstice birthdays that means he only gets one round of presents. But it’s split into two parts, and he hadn’t yet spent a whole spring/summer/fall present desert waiting around for the days to shorten, so he was grateful at the moment. It meant getting to celebrate a day early.
He occupied himself by chasing the dry ingredients around with a spoon in the medium-sized plastic bowl Jo had given to him. When he lost interest in that task, or Jo was done taking a power mixer to the cake’s fluid components, plus sugar, whichever came first, he was to poke Jo’s tablet at regular intervals to keep the recipe visible, and scroll 4/5 of the way down the post to the recipe if he happened to mis-poke and the browser reset to the top of the page. A couple minutes of quality stirring time passed before his mother reclaimed the bowl. From below, he watched her slow the mixer down to where changes in the glutinous structure of the batter could be tracked by eye, smacking the bowl to release the mostly-flour in small portions the rotating beater could deal with. It was one of those standalone mixers. She fetishized the thing. Jasper had already been pitched to multiple times about how easy it was to make whipped cream and soufflés and other foodstuffs with air as a major ingredient.
She poured the finished batter into a cake pan. “See how easy that was?” Jasper was already sucking on the batter-coated beater.
With the collaborative portion being done and Jasper figuring out how to fit the whole beater into his fun-sized mouth, Jo searched for decorated cakes on her Simstagram feed, particularly fondant-free ones she can replicate. This one seemed elegant, doable, and appropriate. On the blog it goes.
It remained lit until snuffed out by Jasper, surrounded by his parents, his Grandpa, his three blood uncles, two of his non-blood uncles, and the dead ex-spouse of his uncle’s husband. The boy found himself being lifted up by rainbow sparkle magic. By the time he came down, he had a new body. He wiggled his fingers in admiration.
Mimsy makes this party pass the Bechdel test.
Jo’s brother Maxwell turns to Charlie as Jasper shares his feelings about the aging ritual with other guests. “So, Charlie. What’s your favorite word?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie claimed instinctually before realizing his mistake. “Wait, I actually do have some. But it’s better if you see them written out.”
Charlie pulls a miniature black notebook out of his lab coat pocket, then makes a second excursion into the same pocket to locate a pencil. He flips through several pages of what looks to Maxwell like multiple layers of scribbles. Finding one with no scribbles, he flattens the notebook on the half-wall, clicks the mechanical pencil twice, checks that the lead extrudes at least a couple millimeters from its plastic casing, and ruins the infinite potential of his once-blank medium in two words.
“These,” Charlie said, presenting Maxwell with the notebook. “These are cool because they mean the same thing, but they’re both almost impossible to pronounce unless you’re already familiar with the roots.”
Maxwell read the words ‘haplodiploidy’ and ‘arrhenotoky,’ although Charlie’s handwriting had deteriorated enough during his career advancement to make them look like ‘mploolplady’ and ‘nmhenatoly.’
“How do you pronounce them?”
“‘Haplodiploidy’ and ”arrhenotoky.”
“Uh-huh,” Maxwell hesitated. “And what do they mean?”
“So, in Sims, the father and mother each have two sets of chromosomes, and when the baby is born, it has one set of chromosomes from each parent, right?” Maxwell nods. “That’s ‘diploidy’: two sets of chromosomes. And ‘haploidy’ is when it has one set of chromosomes.” Maxwell nods again. “So ‘haplodiploidy’ suggests an organism can have either one or two sets of chromosomes.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, it determines the sex in some species. Like in bees and ants. In bees and ants, males are haploid because they develop from unfertilized eggs, and females are diploid because they develop from fertilized eggs.”
“And where does the other word come from?”
“It’s a shorter version of ‘arrhenotokous parthenogenesis.’ It refers to—“
“Ok, buddy, you lost me,” explained Maxwell. He turns to Jasper. “And what’s your favorite word?”
“Presents!”
Confusing perspective with the grey arm there. If you’re wondering about Charlie’s pained expression, he doesn’t think he did the concept justice and wants desperately to restart the conversation.
Maxwell shoots Jasper with a single finger gun. “Kid’s got a point.”
Winterfest morning, the post-birthday boy avoids waking his parents up too soon in the A.M. by scrolling through picture-based subreddits on his favorite birthday gift, a smartphone. He began to suspect he’d been shorted in toddlerhood now that his picture books seemed so flat and unimaginative compared to the real world. The stunts, more impressive; the dialogue, less wooden; the messages, truer; the cats, cattier; the villains, also cattier. And the top comments, always so clever! Jasper fantasized himself being insightful enough to write a top comment, and having it become one of the most upvoted comments on the site, and coming up with another perfect riff on the next post, etc. Or better yet, becoming one of those instantly recognizable posters known for churning out quality OC at a preposterous rate.
But the main obstacle to Jasper’s ambition (aside from lack of ideas) was his ignorance of pop culture: the world was designed for and run by people several decades ahead of himself, an effect everyone seemed to have forgotten by the time their fine motor skills kicked in and their height enabled them to reach the cabinet where Mom was hiding chocolate truffles and the customs of their predecessors were replaced, or at least expanded upon, by the top minds of their own generation. The anonymous posters Jasper looked up to all had the experience of knowing the state of the world before something existed, and when it did, of watching it progress from conception to novelty to ubiquity. Everything they talked about was already in the final state by the time he entered the scene. The solution being, despite falling outside the hotly contested birth year range of the 90’s kid, he could get the resources to mimic the 90’s kid experience, inferring from the references what was important to Sims his age at the time. I’m saying he’s going to watch a bunch of cartoons.
First he’s going to sneak downstairs on Winterfest morning, through a home gym lit by the now-frosted panes of glass that are functionally more wall than window, into the living room/lobby/foyer again notable for its relative lack of walls, this time in a manner suggesting his parents would be constantly dealing with wet terra cotta if the arches didn’t count as impenetrable boundaries. No physical changes had occurred overnight, but Jasper’s heightened senses felt in the room a feeling of divine energy. Today was going to be special.
About the A.M. earlier: unsure how to format small caps without the use of a specific non-hypertext markup language. This and other solutions involve shelling out actual real-world money to implement, although the upgrade would come with other perks like being able to change the default color of the website’s font without simultaneously changing the colors of three other design elements, only one of which can be directly adjusted by the user, in a predetermined set, and without losing the overall look and feel added to by the other two indirectly changeable design elements of the site being designed by a pair of angsty tweens despite the implied age of its contributors. But at the moment just parse it as \textsc{a.m.} (or something else idk) and let your imagination run wild.
Jasper didn’t realize how long ago he’d eaten until the shock of the general solstice-festive aura wore off enough for him to notice the smell of bacon and eggs. He looked past the five inches of non-arch wall to find his father was already awake, hadn’t gotten dressed yet, and was using a plastic spatula to push something around in a skillet. He snuck closer.
“Hi Dad,” Jasper said.
“Hmm? Oh, good morning, buddy. You’re up early.”
“When are you gonna be done cooking?” Charlie’s buddy asked. He was dangling off the half-wall with both hands, pushing just enough into his palms to rotate back and forth around its corner.
“One sec,” he said, inverting the contents of the skillet onto a large platter, a motion that organized said contents in a self-sorting and aesthetically pleasing manner. “Now. Your mom will be up soon, but I’m sure she’ll be alright if we start without her.”
Both took a serving, one after removing himself from the wall first. Jasper had gotten as far as selecting the oiliest piece of bacon and opening his mouth before he was interrupted.
“What do we say?”
“Thank you for breakfast, Daaaaaad,” Jasper drew out, less from a sense of entitlement than because he thought the gratitude was obvious, and didn’t realize it wasn’t. Only then was he allowed to take the first bite. The winter-festivity magic applied to food as well; he milked the first-bite experience by savoring one forkful of each food type, swaying in approval of each new flavor. He sorted the foods in order from least to most favorite and vowed to stick to that order for the whole meal. So did the older J.E., who would have normally eaten in order of decreasing healthiness, given the body’s tendency to absorb nutrients more efficiently on an empty stomach, but was taking the holiday off.
“You excited for Winterfest?” Charlie asked at about the point where he’d finished his eggs and Jasper had eaten maybe half of his mushrooms and was now doing some twirling with one he had impaled in the divot of its stem with a fork tine.
“Yeah.”
Charlie realized it was up to him to produce enough momentum to keep the conversation going. “What are you most excited about?”
“I wanna meet Father Winter!”
“You think you earned a spot on the nice list?”
“Yeah!” Jasper said with confidence. He’d spent his toddlerhood learning the maximum possible amount of information, and, credit to Jo, knew four times as many words as necessary. Half of that was really more symbolic than anything else given that he’d already surpassed Charlie’s understanding of the non-Simlish languages associated with his ancestry. Also he didn’t punch anyone. Hence, nice list.
“How about going to see Grandpa and Abuela?”
Jasper paused to focus on procrastinatory fungus-twirling before declaring “I don’t know.” Tough luck, it was mandatory. He gave up on the mushrooms and the ordering went downhill from there.
“How about the presents?” Ahead, Jo dragged her half-conscious body into the bathroom, sans obeisance.
“More presents!”
Charlie dropped his act of coming up with more stuff to talk about. They weren’t expecting anyone to drop by this early, or at all, so he was perplexed as to why his oldest friend would be walking through the front arch and heading towards the study. He decided to make an appeal from the kitchen instead of getting up. “Shu. Shu. Dude. You can come in. You don’t—” The study door closed. A round of virtuosic knocking echoed through its panels, threatening to continue until a resident came around to reopen it. Charlie tried to hide his annoyance while he navigated the redecorated family room, with its presents, thematic flora, and lack of furniture, until he reached the study door having collected at least a half-dozen pine needles with his slippers. He opened the door. “Yeah, get in here.”
“Cha-cha-charles!” said the visitor, greeting his friend with a brief hug. “Happy Winterfest! And happy Winterfest to you, too, Jasper! Ho ho ho!”
About that ‘obeisance’ sentence, the comma disambiguates the fact that it’s Jo and not the bathroom who isn’t greeting the others, though the alternate interpretation should be taken as gospel.
“Dad, who’s this?” He’d apparently been too overstimulated at his birthday party to keep track of the adults, memorable or otherwise.
“You don’t remember me? Oof!” He feigned being knocked back at the offense. “I knew you when you were just this small,” demonstrated by holding the palms of his hands a chestnut-sized distance apart. “This small.”
“No you didn’t. That’s too small.”
“Yeah, you’re right. It was more of a this-small type of deal,” he corrected, moving his hands to baby-or-keyboard distance. “But look at you now, you’re like,” he thrust his hands apart with some explosion sound effects that became increasingly unconvincing as they drew out, culminating in a gagging noise. That got a laugh out of Jasper.
“Jasper, this is my friend Shu,” Charlie answered, glad his extravert was here to drive things forward so he could resume jumping in occasionally with relevant information.
“Hey Jasi, we’re gonna turn this Winterfest out.” They fistbumped across the counter.
Jo emerged from the bathroom to find an obstacle between her and the food. She made eye contact with her husband across the hallway, hard to do with all the talking the obstruction’s hands were doing, and gave him a look that suggested Jasper would spend his second Winterfest contemplating the anniversary of his father’s death. For this degenerate to be here on a day meant for family—but why wasn’t he with his own family? The circumstances had to be dire if he was showing up on a family friend’s doorstep, and since he was already inside, it would go against the Winterfest spirit to send him back alone. She’d let Charlie deal with this. First she had to lay down the rules.
Jo tapped Shu on the back to get his attention, taking a deep inhale before delivering her prepared message. “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” she told him, “and this is going to be very hard for you, but I have to ask you to please refrain from using any form of profanity around my child. He is very impressionable and I don’t want him being exposed to that kind of language this early in his development. And stay out of the photos.”
“‘Kay. Hold on, Chantel sent me like eight texts.” Averaging almost one per hour today, impressive given the circumstances.
Jasper had already learned the seven dirty words (plus others. He’s also restricting himself to Simlish here) by getting past the parental controls 30 minutes after he aged up. For someone who was just beginning to develop his own system of ethics, the concept of certain words being powerful enough to send his mother et al. into a fit of disproportionate rage was the most compelling idea he’d been exposed to in his 20 hours of childhood. That those seven words had such emotional gravitas compared to, say, Mom’s suggestions of cat/gato/猫/고양이 or dog/perro/狗/개, e.g., elevated them to the position of highest importance in his growing mind. And now, from overhearing her warning, he knew to correctly view Shu as a modern-day Shakespeare in that his written work singlehandedly extended the vulgar lexicon by several increasingly elaborate and obscene turns of phrase. Jasper at last felt his thirst for knowledge outweigh his desire for material goods; the universe had sent his guru in the mountains, his Brahmachari. There would be rumors a century later that Jasi received his side-splitting neologisms from on high, Moses-style, but you can’t see the evidence because one of his acolytes let it get, I don’t know, eaten by ants or something.
If Jo had trusted Shu’s intuition on what is child-appropriate, or further clarified that Jasper lacked the context to grasp the vast majority of Shu’s œuvre (something she couldn’t do without exposing him to said context at a point NooBoo Corner agreed was five point nine years too early), her son might have ignored the man in favor of catching up on Fortnite dances. Instead her tiebreaker had deflected to the opposite camp regarding Shu’s presence at this or any other event.
She pulled Charlie into the corner by the card table, considerable bulk and all. “What do you think you’re doing,” she whispered. “This is a family holiday.“
“Yeah, and it didn’t occur to you that he might have a reason for not wanting to be with his family today?”
“Of course that occurred to me,” she hissed.
The intruder, the one with a negligible no-no square, stepped outside to make a call. “Hi babe. Yeah, since I couldn’t be there, I left a surprise in your purse.” Jasper was listening through the invisible arch walls while pretending to be on his phone.
Jo continued. “But that doesn’t mean you should put me in this situation where I have to tell him he’s not staying. “
“Jo, I’m sorry. Shu’s basically family, so I didn’t even realize.”
“You found it? Yaaaay. Yay. Yay. I love you too.”
“We’re not even visiting your actual family until later. This is supposed to be time for us and our son.”
“So let’s not waste time arguing about it. Look, Jasper’s alone over there.”
“<I don’t know.> Wear one of your other tailcoats.” Presumably he was speaking to someone else now.
“That’s not fair. You’re trying to end the conversation early so you don’t have to deal with this.”
“Could you please give him a chance? He’s good with Jasper, and he’s behaving himself. Please? This is very important to me.”
“Fine.”
“<Yeah.> … <Yeah.> Bye, Dad.”
The three adults reconvened in the family room. “Okay Jasper, come over here. We’re going to sing some songs,” his mom said, ushering the others around the tree.
They settle in for a round of Fwingle Zibbs, etc., Shu occasionally breaking his harmony with Charlie to improvise a descant, Jasper overpowering everyone else as he hunts for the right notes. Damned if he wasn’t going for it with conviction. Note also that Jo isn’t taking her camcorder out.
Charlie checked the time. “Oh, it’s about time to head to my parents’.”
“Why?” asked Jasper.
“You have to visit the grandparents on Winterfest. It’s in the social contract.”
“Why?”
“My existence. Your existence. Their existence.” Charlie felt his phone buzz and checked his messages. “Gosh darn it, Kendra’s not coming.”
“Why?” It was Jo’s turn to ask.
“She’s going to a Winter Solstice celebration with one of my girlfriends.” Shu displayed a text from Kendra stating just that, sandwiched between two illustrations of Krampus in different stages of problematic child discipline (the discipline is problematic, i.e., not the child).
Charlie stopped himself from asking if he remembered which one. “Everybody, do me a favor and don’t remind Mom. She’s probably not too happy about that.” He got a couple understanding nods. The family headed in different directions to pick up their jackets.
Shu waited until the others were out of earshot to make one last call. “Hi! So, I know you told me not to come over today. I’m gonna be right across the street with the J.E.s. … But it’s right across the street. … You’re sure? Okay bye Mom, love you.”
“Well, well, well.” Mike had moved a swivel chair from the office to the entrance for the sole purpose of swiveling one hundred eighty degrees to address Charlie and co. “It looks like the doctor is in.”
“My darlings! Come say hi, I’m in the kitchen,” Claudia said, surprisingly clearly given that she was competing with the radio, the oven timer, the exhaust hood, the aromatics sizzling in at least two saucepans, and Mona and Perry barking slightly out of phase at the four interlopers. Charlie glanced toward his mother; she wasn’t even facing in the right direction to project her voice like that. The dogs skipped back into the kitchen to answer the pressing questions of what those smells were, and whether any sources of those smells were going to be dropped on the floor.
“Hey Claudia, Shu’s here too,” said Mike.
“Hi Shuuuu!” Claudia always welcomed his presence because there was no limit to how long she could draw out his name. This instance lasted at least a couple seconds.
“We don’t need stockings when we’ve got a Shu!” Good lord, Mike’s also a fan of the name. He turned to Charlie’s wife, placing his hands on his midsection à la Father Winter. “Jo Jo Jo!”
The unique instance of laughter came from Hector. He’d previously been multitasking, staring at them while eating a piece of cake.
Jasper felt a nudge from his mom. “Hello Grandpa. Hello Abuela. Hello Uncle Hector.” He received polite murmurs in return, except it was more of a polite yell in Claudia’s case. Then he got right to the meat of it. “Can we open presents?”
“One. Then wait four hours before opening the next one,” said Jo, speeding up the final words as her son was already darting toward the gift pile. Mike voiced his approval of the bluntness and claimed it had a genetic component for which he was responsible.
“Hector, could you please help me with the roast?” was the request heard from the kitchen. He went running to comply.
Shreds of the paper that had once concealed Jasper’s first gift lay on the floor. Mona had one in her mouth. “An airplane! Cool!” It was thrust in the air as high as his hands could reach. “Nyyyeeeeeeooooown!”
The airplane did a few laps around the living room before Jasper decided to test its ability to fly unassisted. He lobbed the thing right into the kitchen, hitting the stool from which his mother was spectating the head and sous chefs.
“Jasper, be nice to your toys,” Jo warned. “Remember what happened to the mean kid in Toy Story?”
“Sorry, Mom. Sorry, plane.” It didn’t have a name yet. Its owner performed a brief inspection and tune-up before resuming its cross-living-room schedule. Jo turned back to Claudia.
“Jo, I loved the beautiful letter you sent us.” This was sincere. Mike woke up that morning to find Claudia snoozing at the dining room table over a tear-stained summary of her son’s family’s life, the photo safely out of range. Kind of odd how something like that could set her off. “I felt like I was right there with you. It was the best gift I could have received, hearing about your family.”
“That’s sweet, Claudia. I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” Jo said.
“No, really, it means a lot. You have to come by more often.”
Jo’s fridge held enough empanadas from her last visit for them to eat three meals a day and still have leftovers for Jasper’s kids. Empanada overload. Empanada central. “Why don’t we go out to eat instead?”
“Nnnnneeeeyyyooowwwnn!” J.E. Airlines’ only vessel had returned for its regular stop at the kitchen counter. It picked up a cookie, which cargo had to be manually held on top of the aircraft’s body, much like how a Winterfest tree would be transported on top of an SUV, but without the security provided by bungee cords. They’d break the cookie.
Its destination, Charlie, had moved further down the hallway, taking with him the elephant in the room. Shu, that is. Not anyone’s internal conflict. “Thanks, buddy,” he said to the plane. The uneaten cookie was transferred to his jacket pocket as soon as the pilot had turned around. “So,” he addressed his childhood friend, “is everything okay? Why aren’t you with your family?”
He shrugged. “I celebrated with my dads a couple days ago, and Mom said she wants to be alone, so I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.” He gestured towards Jasper, still running around like a beheaded chicken. “Plus it’s this one’s first Winterfest. Cuuuute.”
“What about Chantel, or one of your other girlfriends?”
“Ah, not that again. I show up at the Lucases’ place, they’re gonna expect me to pull out a ring by the end of the day. Other than that, there’s Shannon’s parents, her dad hates me, and I don’t know any of my other girlfriends’ families.” He paused in thought. “Unless—“
“—No, no. Nope.” Charlie punctuated his triple combo by repeatedly crossing his open hands over one another in a gesture clearly conveying he didn’t want to hear the end of that sentence. But given the tone of the conversation, he figured it was safe to ask more personal questions. “Come to think of it, haven’t you and Chantel been promised to each other since before Jo and I even met?” Shu’s left eye twitched. “It’s been a couple weeks. What are you waiting for?”
“I’m planning on doing it sometime, I just get the sense that,” he shook his head, “she doesn’t know who she is yet. Apart from me.” He broke eye contact to fidget with the highest toggle on his sweater. “It’s not healthy. I guess I’m trying to help her get to where the proposal is just a nice thing that happens and not something she’s focused on day in and day out.”
Underdeveloped sense of self, Charlie translated. “Wasn’t she, like, stalking you in high school?” Idealization. Clear pattern of obsession in close relationships.
“Yeah, she’s intense, but I’m also kind of a lot to handle. What with my line of work and all. I actually like that about her. It keeps things interesting.”
“And she’s just waiting patiently?”
“Oh, she’s pissed. She’s also accusing me of wanting to leave and stuff like that. But clearly it’s been a while and I’m not going anywhere.”
“And you have to—“
“Keep reminding her of that constantly, yeah. Also how talented she is. That’s what I’m trying to do, keep her focused on her music so she can develop her own voice. But she’s so upset about making mistakes, she breaks down crying almost every time.” Basically their song is “Issues” by Julia Michaels. “I have to keep telling her it’s going to be okay.”
Charlie winced at the final datum. “I hope I’m wrong about this, but if what you’re saying is true, you might want to read up on Borderline Personality Disorder.” His DSM-5 retained the classification system of its extra-worldly counterpart, but offered little insight on treatment beyond sadness hotlines and basketball. He wasn’t about to recommend Chantel drink some fucking OJ, either.
A photo from Shu’s wallet. Damn they’re cute. Is that object on the right supposed to be the right side of the phone? What’s taking this picture? (Note to future student essayists: if you’re hunting for symbolism in CT, the fact that several important healing items in this universe are inexplicably orange, which is also one of Charlie’s favorite colors, was not meant to foreshadow his eventual career. He just likes orange. Same with Aileen and grey, for that matter, if you’re reading this after The Grey Wedding is published. Color shit like that only makes sense if the author knows where the story is going beforehand.)
“What?”
“Meaning there’s a chance things are going to get worse before they get better. There’s a chance,” he took a moment to decide if this were something he really wanted to say, “there’s a chance she’s always going to be like this.” Another beat. “Look, I’m only bringing this up because it might be the safest course of action, but have you considered calling the whole thing off?”
“Charlie. What. No. It’s Chantel.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he said. “I don’t understand why you want to stay with her if things are so difficult.”
Shu had been facing away from his conversational partner, but now directed at him a glare that had started fights in less festive settings. “Does everything have to have a reason with you? Do you think love is something that can be broken down to a formula? Do you really think that if the girl of my dreams just fell from the sky one day, I would just throw away everything Chantel and I have, like that?” He snapped his fingers to emphasize the word ‘that,’ and, while we’re on the subject, had earlier raised his open hands toward the sky and climactically arced them downward in an approximation of the dream girl’s trajectory. “I feel closer to her than anyone else in the world, and I always have, and I always will, and I’m not gonna try to explain why so you can argue with it.”
“Look, I never said you didn’t love her. But that kind of love-conquers-all attitude isn’t going to fix everything. I’m being dead serious here, Shu. If it’s really this hard for you, there’s no way to solve this that doesn’t involve you removing yourself as the source of her obviously destructive obsession. By staying, you’re slowing everything down, running the risk of becoming codependent, or worse.”
“You don’t know that. You haven’t even talked to her enough to make a real diagnosis.” Which Charlie knew, but was hoping his warning would catalyze the couple’s efforts to seek a second opinion. “Even with one, she could still get over it enough for us to be together.”
“Or not, given your history. You can’t predict the future either.”
No response.
“Shu.”
He clenched his fists in an attempt to redirect his building tension to the sensation of nails digging into his palm.
“What are you going to do if she doesn’t?”
Father Winter burst through the chimney in a puff of good cheer and combustion byproducts, the former being more hazardous to the house’s inhabitants in that it could provoke one into becoming Hysterical, while carcinogens are a nonissue for these guys. All but the duo in the kitchen looked toward the fireplace. Jo pressed record on her offspring-directed camcorder.
“Father Winter!” Jasper screamed with an intensity that set off both dogs.
“Fuck,” said Shu.
The purported-mythical figure rose to his feet with an air suggesting a personality cozier than his Fair Isle mittens. A statement coat with a heroic amount of white fur trim, given how visibly it would be ruined after a single round of his preferred hammy method of entry, expanded on the effect of general snugness he was going for. (Ask if that’s real fur, Jo thought to herself.) Later, the emotions Jasper felt in that moment would be portrayed pretty accurately by the slow-mo Ken Burns effect Mom planned on applying to her footage.
Father Winter announced his presence. “Ho ho ho!” Jo put down her camera to admonish the fourth one for swearing, only to find he’d escaped by self-defenestration.
The embodiment of Winterfest spirit himself made a big show of shading his eyes with his right hand, looking high and low for something. “I heard from a little bird that in this house, there’s a little boy who just had his birthday.”
“Me! That’s me!” said boy clarified, jumping and waving his arms a couple yards from Father Winter’s avoidant face in case the message wasn’t clear enough. It landed; the patriarch finally searched the area directly in front of him and reeled back in astonishment.
“Oh! Oh, ho ho ho! There’s the fella!” Jasper was vibrating almost audibly with anticipation. “Why don’t we sit down here and have a chat? Is that something you would like?” Jasper nodded so enthusiastically, Jo’s most recently searched term became ‘whiplash,’ displacing ‘those hoodies everyone has what are they called.’
The pair sat down on Grandpa & Abuela’s caramel-colored leather couch, a pre-Jasper and even pre-Kendra piece of furniture whose aroma only became more complex with the passage of time. Father Winter started the seated portion of the conversation with his most anticipated question. “Have you been good all year?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Do you listen to your mommy and daddy?”
“Yes!”
“Have you been doing your homework?”
Panic set in. “I just grew up yesterday,” Jasper explained. “They didn’t give me any homework.”
“Well, I’m looking at your grades, young mister, and you know what they say?” Jasper may have grown up yesterday, but even he could tell that the folksiness was thinly masking what was in fact extreme condescension. “It says right here on this piece of paper that someone doesn’t like to do his homework.”
“But I—“
“You know, son,” he said, placing his arm around Jasper’s shoulders to comfort the lad, “things might not always turn out how you want, but good boys and girls are good at accepting things the way they are. You want to be a good boy, right?” Jasper nodded in an attempt to end the first of many lectures he would sit through where the lecturer grossly underestimates his competence based on his demographics, in this case his age. “You have to let this go and do better next year. Life is complicated that way. Someday you’ll be old enough to understand.”
Leaving the family’s youngest with an encouraging pat and wise smile, cherry nose and all, Father Winter removed himself from the couch with some difficulty and headed eastward. Jasper waited until he was out of earshot to tear up.
Cut to the J.E. master bedroom half a second into Jasper’s first wail of the day, where his father decided to check out the exercise equipment to help relieve the stress headache he got from being surrounded by loved ones.
“Dr. Charles Jeong-Espinosa,” Father Winter drew out in an entrance that mostly served to annoy the sentence’s subject, “now that’s a name I know well. You’re near the very top of my list! Ho ho ho!” He actually grabbed his belly when he laughed. Charlie thought the gesture of bringing both hands to the gut during a Father-Winter-inspired belly laugh might have been to suggest excess adiposity, but no, he actually did that. “Let me tell you what it says here. A straight-A student, lover of the earth, dedicated pursuer of knowledge, selfless healer, devoted husband and father, and, oh! Stay away from that one,” he said, following the last statement with a wink that would have been appropriately lecherous had he been literally anyone else. “I saved something special for you.”
He placed a VR set on the ground and followed up with his best Vanna White impression. The recipient acted out an appropriate display of surprise and gratitude, though he was left wondering where on that list it was suggested that he played videogames with any regularity, and where in his house the list recommended clearing space to put that shit.
“Now where’s that mother of yours?” Could be like two places. Three if you count the other bar.
Charlie waited until Father W. was heading in the direction of potential cookies to sneak a peek at the list he was holding. It was blank.
“It’s alright, honey. There’s always next year,” Jo consoled her son as they approached her house’s front arch, the mixture of tears and snot beginning to freeze slightly on the boy’s face. Hearing an echo of Father Winter’s words only set him off more, enough to leave his mom with the tail end of yet another squeal and run off towards his second-story room, careening around six corners on the way. “Don’t slip!” she yelled.
Charlie put an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “I don’t know where we went wrong,” she admitted.
“No, Jo, there was nothing we could have done. You were great today.” He tried to come up with something that would cheer her up. “Someday we’re going to be able to look back on this and laugh.” He hoped.
Jo’s eyes widened in an expression of shock not unlike that of someone who realized they forgot to turn the stove off before leaving the house. “Charlie, that’s it! My footage!” She turned towards her husband, placing her hand on his chest. “We can take the footage, cut out all the parts with Father Winter, and show Jasper how much fun he was having!” Heck, maybe she’d leave Shu in some shots.
“Sounds good, dear.” He was paying enough attention to nod each time she asked him whether it was a good idea.
Above the gym, Jasper’s pillow was alternating between being a punching bag and a tissue. Jo slowly poked her head over the staircase railing so as to not startle him. Her son, not the pillow.
“What if I made you some burgers for dinner?” she offered. “Would that make it better?”
He nodded so she would go downstairs. It wasn’t going to work. Fuck the self-fellating old coot.
Jo found her husband sitting cross-legged in the garden, picking up handfuls of powdery snow and opening his palm to let the wind carry it away. “Hey, Charlie. If I made burgers, would you eat some?”
“I mean, if you’re going to make them, sure,” he muttered, watching the powder slip over the webbing between his fingers.
She sighed almost inaudibly. If he was going to be in one of those moods, it was best not to engage. It was best to focus on the task at hand and give him some space to play with the snow or whatever. But to the outsider, it looks like she’s too preoccupied with applying her personal spice mix to see her husband being carried away in a beam of light.
Jo turned around fifteen minutes later with a plate of burgers that bunned themselves.
“Charlie?”
There’s nothing to her right but the marks he made in the snow. Maybe he went inside. She checked the kitchen.
“Charlie?”
He’s not in the bedroom, living room, gym, bathroom, or study, either. It figures he’d left without telling her again. She picked up a hamburger and stormed off towards her son’s room.
Winterfest ended an hour ago and Charlie’s side of the bed was still empty. Jo decided this would be the part she would want to edit out of her mind, lying down on her side and staring at the indentation left in his pillow, not knowing whether he was five or a million miles away. He wasn’t answering his phone, either. She moved to his side so she at least wouldn’t have to look at it. The night sky was visible overhead. Maybe I should try it, she thought, telling her thoughts to some tiny speck of light in the distance instead of the person next to her. And after sending her doubts upward and watching them dissipate in the air like so many flecks of powdery snow, she finally closed her eyes.
She slept through the beam of light that appeared outside her window and gently lowered her husband back to earth. The beam grew dimmer. Charlie dropped to his knees. He felt his forehead with the back of his hand. The mental fog that had bothered him so much during his first abduction was now undetectable, blending in with all the other buzzing and tightness in his head he was feeling constantly.
And the worst part was he didn’t know why he was doing any of these things that made his head buzz. And that’s what he had to show for it, this list of achievements. Five, maybe six concrete items that identified who he was as a person. He was left to wonder what the difference was between Charlie Jeong-Espinosa and another man with an identical list. Just like, he could see another hypothetical person being happy with what he has: the job, grades, etc. So if it distinguishes him from the other guy, the one who accepts his responsibilities wholesale and can carry them out indefinitely in kind of a proud-complacent manner, then Charlie Jeong-Espinosa is an ungrateful bastard with no real goddamn purpose other than to not question why he was checking off items on some imaginary list before it took over his life.
The stupid oversized VR thing was a reminder of the praise he was getting for not letting his doubts get in the way of success. He found a spot where it couldn’t taunt him, a spot next to his sleeping son. The son Father Winter had tacked onto that list of achievements like yet another goal. Putting it here at least made sense. Tomorrow Jo would get to tell him Father Winter changed his mind.
Charlie managed to get under the covers without waking up his wife. He crossed his forearms over his head and adjusted the alignment of his neck into the most comfortable position for stargazing. He imagined a small green dot, like a laser, swooshing along the Big Dipper, gaining enough momentum from the net downward action of the first four edges to break from the bowl of the constellation and shoot off towards the North Star. Your holiday’s over, buddy, he informed it, on the off-chance it understood its role in Winterfest lore, could read his thoughts, and wasn’t currently too busy with something else to do so.
