Content

content/_index.md

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+---
+---
+
+![The book's cover](/cover-front.jpg)
+
+
+<script src="https://gumroad.com/js/gumroad.js"></script>
+
+> I just need out of this town. This stupid fucking town. This brown and flat and sad town. This restless town. This home to ennui and melancholy. This scrub of buildings and people and emotions spilled in the middle of an apathetic landscape like hay from an overturned truck.
+
+Restless Town is a collection of ten furry short stories from the fictional town of Sawtooth, Idaho, exploring the themes of identity, sexuality, and mental health.
+
+<div class="order">
+<script src="https://gumroad.com/js/gumroad.js"></script>
+<p>
+<a class="gumroad-button" href="https://makyo.gumroad.com/l/restless-town-ebook">Order ebook</a>
+<a class="gumroad-button" href="https://makyo-ink.square.site/product/restless-town/1">Order paperback</a>
+</p>
+<p>
+<a href="https://baddogbooks.com/product/a-wildness-of-the-heart-limerant-object-and-other-stories/" target="_blank">Order ebook from BadDogBooks</a><br/>
+<a href="https://furplanet.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=1084" target="_blank">Order paperback from FurPlanet</a>
+</p>
+<p>
+<em>Also available for many internet retailers, but consider supporting small businesses!</em>
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+Much of the book is available to read for free online if you are unable to afford purchasing, because the global panoramic is still a thing
+</p>
+</div>
+
+### Contents
+
+* [The Fool](the-fool) - A student and a motherly badger explore questions of identity through a tarot reading.
+* [Disappearance](disappearance) - A weasel attempts to escape from her life in Sawtooth to Oregon, but finds her old life still tied to home.
+* [Fisher](fisher) - A fisher walks and hunts for meaning.
+* [Centerpiece](centerpiece) - A couple heads to a BDSM play party where the wife will be the Centerpiece for the whole party to enjoy. With fertility already on the mind, will another mink showing up throw a wrench in things?
+* [You're Gone](youre-gone) - A husband grieves the loss of his wife through instant messages.
+* [Overclassification](overclassification) - A chronically neat otter's life is thrown into disarray when she takes a homeless ringtail in from the cold.
+* [Acts of Intent](acts-of-intent) - A coyote burns meaning into the world around him.
+* [Every Angel is Terrifying](every-angel-is-terrifying) - Derek MacIver struggles to hold his life together through the ups and downs of bipolar disorder.
+* [What Defines Us](what-defines-us) - Darren and his mother struggle with the rammifications of the past repeating itself.
+* [A Theory of Attachment](a-theory-of-attachment) - Living with obsessive-compulsive disorder is tough without a support network, so when Sélène's changes, stress runs high.
+
+### Content warning
+
+Many stories contain frank descriptions of sensuality and sexuality; *Centerpiece* contains explicit decription of a BDSM party and some shaky negotiation; *You're Gone* contains frank discussion of grief and death; *Every Angel is Terrifying* contains explicit description of depression, self-harm, and suicidality; *What Defines Us* contains mentions of abuse; *A Theory of Attachment* contains explicit description of mental health issues and a mention of abuse.
+
+### Advance Praise
+
+> A glimpse at the inner turmoil cause by the modern world through a collection of unique characters exploring internal conflicts such as mental health, complex emotions, or the need for physical connection.
+>
+> -- Phosphor Wulf
+
+&nbsp;
+
+> Restless Town is an anthology about rebuilding. At its heart is grief, anxiety, and loss, and their intertwining with a life in transition. It’s a living heart, wrought into words.
+>
+> -- Anon.
+
+<!-- [Southpaws Podcast](https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-tcfzc-c91925) 1:18:25 -->
+
+### Reviews
+
+> It seems strange to call a book 'gentle' when it comes with content warnings, but this collection earns the title with a series of introspective pieces in which thoughts and feelings are slowly and carefully explored.
+>
+> [Alice "Huskyteer" Dryden](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3066083728?book_show_action=true)
+
+&nbsp;
+
+> I expect that I will be carrying these stories in my heart and mind for quite some time. While not as heavy on anthropomorphic themes as some books I’ve read, the characters that drive these stories forward are all vibrant and fantastic. Restless Town gets a recommendation from me for anyone that wants to deeply examine emotions and understand the world from a different perspective. These stories have so much to offer, I look forward to reading more works from Madison Scott-Clary in the future!
+>
+> [Furry Book Review](https://furrybookreview.wixsite.com/blog/single-post/2020/02/15/Restless-Town-by-Madison-Scott-Clary)
+
+<div style="text-align: center"><strong><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48839037-restless-town">Rate on Goodreads</a></strong></div>
+
+-----
+
+* Cover by [Julian Norwood](https://patreon.com/Cadmiumtea).
+* Print ISBN: 9781948743099
+* Ebook ISBN: 9781948743105
+* Audio ISBN: 9781948743136

content/post/acts-of-intent.md

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+---
+author: Madison Scott-Clary
+categories:
+- Vignette
+series: Sawtooth
+ratings: G
+date: 2017-12-16
+description: A coyote burns meaning into the world around him.
+img: flag.svg
+type: post
+tags:
+- Furry
+- Magic
+title: 'Acts of Intent'
+---
+
+> *Lines and curves, lines and curves. Beginning now.*
+
+Seven o'clock, and the 13th Street crowd was headed to dinner, or focusing on a postprandial stroll.
+
+Jacob was focused on lines. On arcs and straight edges. On corners and angles.
+
+> *The cans of spray-lubricant had clanked onto the counter, earlier that afternoon. Three of them, some of the cheap kind.  The poor stoat behind the till scanned them numbly, seemingly on autopilot.*
+>
+> *To see someone with such dead eyes had led down some strange alley and into what felt like second-hand embarrassment for Jacob. Second-hand to what, he couldn't tell. Either way, the transaction had itched, and he had shifted his weight from paw to paw until it was done.*
+>
+> *Finally able to tap in the pin for his card, that itch had been scratched. The digits of the number across the pad always traced a pleasant, angular rune, and then the coyote was done, hurrying out of the store. The bag of cans had been dumped unceremoniously into one of the panniers of his bike, his tail clipped quickly to his thigh, and he had been off.*
+
+His breathing slowed and the jittery, speedy vibrations in his mind smoothed out.
+
+The heat along those lines grew, dull black iron turning first into a burgundy red, then glowing, picking up more towards cherry.
+
+> *Spring turning to summer had the days warm, but not uncomfortably so. The air still held enough spring in it that the light long-sleeved shirt Jacob wore never got too warm, even with the exertion of the brisk ride home.*
+
+Eyes focused on surroundings briefly, hunting for a patch he knew had to be somewhere here. Wander north, magnetic attraction.
+
+> *Ducking into the apartment had taken only seconds, enough for him to toss two of the purchased cans on a counter and another into a backpack, then back out into the evening air. Back onto his bike. Back on the road.*
+
+Cherry red and up to yellow, starting to put off enough glow that it crept into his vision, a light-leak in the camera of his eyes.
+
+> *Making it to the 13th Street Plaza had taken longer than expected, but perhaps that was for the best. The flames would shine brighter in twilight.*
+
+North, north along Linden. North to cross the plaza. North to pass the fountain.
+
+> *Jacob had parked his bike at a rack in front of one of the 12th street shops, locking it with care. Of his two prized possessions, the bike was the most practical, and the thought of losing it was something he would barely allow to register. He would be more than just upset, he'd be fucked. The commute to work would go from twenty minutes to more than an hour on the bus system, a fact he knew well from when it was too cold to ride. He'd saved up for three months to get this bike, a fantastic upgrade from what he'd had in college.*
+
+He could barely see now. Yellow brightened, headed more towards white. A sun made of lines, graceful arcs and definitive straightedges.
+
+> *The other prized possession was less immediately practical, yet even more dear than the bike. The small sketchbook, barely more than a few inches on each side, was truly irreplaceable. That sat snugly in his pocket; the backpack was too risky, even his apartment wasn't safe enough.*
+
+Toward the courthouse.
+
+Jacob was panting now. Cool as the evening was getting, it was no match for the searing symbol locked in his thoughts. Burning, some part of him reddening, blistering, flaking and charring.
+
+> *His Sigillarium sat distinct from his notes. Those were ash now, long gone. Their pages had held letters, all unique, warped and twisted through repeated passes of his pen, slipping and sliding together into some place between joy and fear, a place of too much meaning.*
+
+Past the courthouse now. And there, along the brick wall that surrounded the guarded parking lot. A place for moving the guilty to prison, maybe? There was the icy patch, freezing in the still-warm evening.
+
+> *Once the meaning grew overwhelming --- he'd know the moment when it came --- the Sigillarium was brought out, opened reverently to the next blank page, and impressed with the new sigil. He used a dip pen with India ink into which he'd stirred several drops of blood. As the ink dried, Jacob did his best to start the process of forgetting.*
+
+Strange place, strange place. Empty, yet meaningful. Locked up. Guilty and innocent. Shackled, manacled, clanking and clinking in chains. The patch on the wall likely wasn't actually cold to the touch, yet he knew if he touched it, frostbite would follow.
+
+> *Forgetting took days, weeks, months. It began with closing the Sigillarium, locking away intent and meaning while Jacob forgot the words themselves. He wouldn't look at the sigil again until the night before.*
+
+Obscured though his vision was, Jacob turned around, using his peripheral vision as best he could to check for others around.
+
+Empty street.
+
+> *Doubtless there were cameras who had seen him, but intent never left a visible mark, so no one had ever come after him. Intent was psychological. Magical graffiti for no one to see and everyone to feel. He would begin internalizing the symbol the night before, and hold it in his mind until the moment of, when it once more became unbearable.*
+
+Smooth movements. Smooth and sure. He took the can, focused on the frigid patch, and began spraying. He couldn't do it too quickly, even if he did need to hurry. There needed to be enough penetrating oil left to burn.
+
+> *Then he would bike and hunt for the cold he knew peppered the town.*
+
+The sigil was one unbroken line. One line that contained all those arcs and curves and straightaways and angles and corners. All sprayed dead scenter in the midst of that patch layering intent over what meaning was already there.
+
+Quickly, before he even capped the can, he fished his lighter out of his pocket and gave the wheel a rasp just at the final endpoint of the line.
+
+Blue flames, tinged yellow at the tips, spread fast, curling along the sigil, branching and curving whenever it came across a point where lines crossed.
+
+All that fire in his mind wound up on stone.
+
+All that patch of ice began to thaw.
+
+The coyote was already on his way back to the plaza, can of lubricant on back in his bag and all that unbearable meaning seeping from him as he slipped back into the evening crowd.

content/post/centerpiece.md

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+---
+categories:
+- Short Story
+series: Sawtooth
+ratings: X
+date: 2016-12-17
+img: flag.svg
+type: post
+pdf: centerpiece.pdf
+rating: X
+tags:
+- Furry
+- Romance
+- Sexuality
+- Kink
+title: Centerpiece
+cw: Sex and nudity, kink (BDSM, fertility play, humiliation), bad negotiation
+---
+
+
+"Hey E," Aaron mumbled, the cat nudging the turn signal lever up to make his way toward the right lane.
+
+"Mmm?" Erin peeked up from her book to see how far they'd made it into their journey. Still about twenty minutes. She lowered her gaze once again.
+
+"Put any more thought into the idea of a donor?"
+
+Slinking lower into the passenger seat, Erin gave a half-hearted shrug. "Not really any more than before. Just want someone we know already and who we trust. Don't want to go to a bank."
+
+Aaron nodded and settled back into his seat as they made their way onto the highway. "Anyone you can think of, minkypie?"
+
+Erin caught herself about to shrug again and shook her head instead, "Only really know a few other minks out there --- the Redstones from work, and there's that Matthew guy from your office...Matthew Lederer, was it? --- and I don't know if they swing or not. Come on, though," she laughed. "Figure out something sexier to talk about. We're supposed to be getting psyched for a night of debauchery, not figuring out sperm donor paperwork."
+
+Erin and Aaron had been one of those couples that had been insufferably cute when dating. When they'd been friends, they'd been teased about it enough, but when it turned to romance, it all seemed a bit much.
+
+It was the names that got most people, of course. They'd react in a few very predictable ways when they found out that the couple had homophonic names. Most folks would gush over how adorable it was, asking how they referred to each other when alone, what they'd name their children if they could have any, and so on, The rest seemed to fall into two camps: those that would ask, "doesn't that get confusing or weird in conversations?" and those that would make some lewd comment about sex, whether referring to threesomes or whether they'd ever played with another Aaron or Erin or something like that
+
+The answers were all fairly straight forward, too, especially after several years of being asked the same questions. They would say that they called each other by their names like regular folks; they'd joke that if they had kids, they'd name them Erin and Aaron; they'd say that conversations were made easier when eye contact signaled which individual was being talked to; they'd say their sex life was private but give a wink.
+
+Below the surface, though, were the more intimate truths. In private, they really only used each other's first initials, going by E and A respectively. They'd done the threesome thing quite a bit, actually, and even once with another Erin, it had been really rather nice, and they were looking forward to seeing her again tonight. And perhaps the most intimate truth was just how sore a subject parenthood was for the two of them, how much being an interspecies couple got in the way.
+
+Aaron laughed and nodded. "Alright, alright," he said. "You looking forward to being a useful mink tonight, then?"
+
+Despite all the planning and negotiation that had gone into tonight, despite all the times she'd heard it before, being called a 'useful mink' right before the first night in far too long where she really would be useful had Erin squirming in her seat, ears pinned back against her head.
+
+The cat in the the driver's seat laughed, "I'll take that as a yes, then. Tell me what you're looking forward to most, then."
+
+"Being...being useful."
+
+"Mmm, so it's more the serving others than the bondage?"
+
+Erin felt her tail start to frizz out, something she could never seem to help when agitated. A fact that Aaron was always keen to exploit. "Mmhm...mink wants to be useful more than anything."
+
+"More than anything?" Aaron asked, risking a glance away from the road to grin at his wife. "More than the pleasure of the act, you just want others to use you to feel good?"
+
+If his goal had been to make her flustered, Aaron was succeeding. If it had been to get her more worked up, it was also very, very much succeeding. "Yeah," she began, voice thick with embarrassment. "Yeah, I want...I want people to come away feeling fulfilled, I want to be a tool to help them feel that way." The mink thought for a moment longer before adding, "The sex is good too, you know I'll enjoy that, but being useful is what I want."
+
+Aaron nodded. "Not to drag us back to where we were, but is that part of why you want to be a mother so badly?"
+
+"Mmhm, at least a little part of it. It feels like the strongest, highest, and, well, purest form of being useful."
+
+"Well, that makes sense," Aaron said with a chuckle. "So..."
+
+"'So...' what?" Erin sat up within her seat. "What are you planning?"
+
+"Nothing, nothing!" Unable to lift his paws from the steering wheel, the cat did his best to imply a disarming gesture with his shoulders. "Only, I was wondering, what if you got to be useful at a party like this one, and that led to a child?"
+
+The mink in the passenger seat sat, mouth open, for a moment before finding the words to respond, "You...you're sure you're not planning anything?"
+
+"Promise. No plans, or we'd be negotiating a hell of a lot harder."
+
+"Well, I...I don't know." Erin realized that she was fiddling too much with her book, bending the pages, so she set her bookmark in place and slipped the paperback into her bag. "It would be a lot to process. But I'm pretty sure all of it would be good."
+
+Aaron grinned toward the road, making his way over to the rightmost lane once more --- they were just about to the end of the freeway stint of the trip, Erin guessed, so probably just a few minutes left. "Well, alright then. So if we wind up at a party like this and there just happens to be another mink there-"
+
+Erin cut him off with a quiet whine, her tail bristled from base to tip and swishing against the back of the seat. "A! Come *on*!"
+
+The cat's grin turned to a laugh. "What do you mean, 'come on'? You'd love it, you said so. You'd love to be a Centerpiece and come away with motherhood, I know you would! And you know I'm game, too."
+
+Brushing furiously at her tail in an attempt to soothe her nerves, Erin let a stony silence fall, fighting to sort out a turbulent mixture of embarrassment, arousal, and that longing she'd always associated with her drive towards motherhood, biological imperative and otherwise.
+
+Erin's silence and Aaron's grin lasted the next few minutes until they parked at the curb before a squat, suburban ranch house.
+
+Aaron turned off the car and tugged up the parking break, leaning over to kiss his wife on the cheek, "Sorry if that was too far, E."
+
+When Erin didn't respond, he reached for her paw, twining fingers with her. Looking back up to her face, he was surprised to see a bashful smile there.
+
+"No, was just thinking," she murmured. "I *would* love that."
+
+The cat's grin snapped back into place almost immediately, along with the start of a quiet purr. He leaned over to give another quick kiss before slipping his paw away and swinging wide the driver's side door. "Come on, then, grab the bin and let's get inside, catch up with folks."
+
+-----
+
+Those who travel among the play parties, orgies, and swing groups often think of themselves as being sexually liberated.
+
+However, they'll all be the first to admit that the time before the play party begins can be the most awkward part. Milling around with a plastic cup of too-sweet spiked punch in one paw and a little plate of store-bought cookies in the other sometimes made it feel a little too much like a social function put on by a group of employees.
+
+The hosts of this party, another couple that Erin and Aaron had known for a few years now, two ferrets named Elise and Joan, had set up a few things to help alleviate that feeling, though there's not much that could make it go away entirely. For every bowl of chips or plate of cookies, there was a bowl of condoms (with several different sizes present) or lube packets (silicone or water based). The cooler of drinks, normally holding just beers and sodas, also contained a few drinks made from stronger things. Small, printed signs listed the rules (play safe, wear clothes outside, and so on) near every doorway. The plans for segueing from "party" to "play" involved strip poker.
+
+Despite all of the effort, there was still some difficulty in loosening up. This was due in no small part, Erin suspected, to anticipation for later. Even the most sexually liberated could be in the time leading up to sex.
+
+Thankfully, as Centerpiece, she had little to worry about, in that sense. For her, the start and end to the night were clearly delineated. No strip poker for her. It would start when she was bound, gagged, and blindfolded, and it would end when she tapped out or was set loose, whichever came first. That would come soon, and the gear was all in the bin that Aaron had dragged in and set in the living room next to the neatly decked mattress that would be her spot for the night.
+
+"First things first," Aaron said, once Erin had gotten a drink. "Lift your chin."
+
+Erin did as she was told, letting her husband deftly swing a collar up around her neck and fasten it in front. Although she couldn't see the collar, she knew what it looked like --- black nylon webbing with some yellow nylon woven into it to spell 'TOY' along the back and a tag saying the same in front. Feeling the weight of it around her neck, the slight constriction of her fur beneath it, Erin tensed up and swished about, her short, rounded ears canted back.
+
+"Finish your drink, minkytoy," Aaron continued, waiting for the mink to down the rest of her soda before clipping a leash to the D-ring at her throat.
+
+When the cat gave an experimental tug, Erin felt herself jerked forward an inch or two by the collar at back of her neck. Beyond that, though, she felt that latent arousal that had been dwelling within her the last few days finally begin to assert its presence, felt sub-space start to surround her like a warm blanket.
+
+Her husband grinned at the obvious change and leaned in close enough to whisper to her, "Mmm, cozy there, pet?"
+
+Ears pinned back, Erin gave a bashful nod.
+
+"Going to be a good pet tonight?"
+
+Nod.
+
+"Still comfortable with this?"
+
+Another nod, more vigorous this time.
+
+"Going to be useful for everyone tonight, no matter what?"
+
+Erin let out a low mewl, tucking her muzzle down toward her chest and hunching her shoulders as though she could hide her embarrassment that way. "Yes owner," she murmured, tail lashing this way and that. "Will be useful."
+
+Aaron grinned haughtily and wound the leash around one of his paws a few times, giving another little tug to help reinforce his position over her. "Good mink. Let's go see who you're going to be useful for, then."
+
+Erin felt like they into a feedback loop of power dynamics. The more dominant that Aaron got in showing her off to the party's other attendees, the more submissive she felt. The more submissive she acted, the more that seemed to egg Aaron on. Before long, he was encouraging her to spin and show off, to curtsey, to make small confessions to the other attendees.
+
+This was one of the other things that Elise and Joan did to loosen up their guests. Each party --- and there were several a year --- included one guest who would be the Centerpiece. The Centerpiece had become a coveted role in the circles that attended this party, one that had to be applied for ahead of time.
+
+And it was indeed a role to play. The Centerpiece was the one who had to start moving the atmosphere from party to play while the two ferrets tended to more mundane things such as maintaining snack levels and ensuring that the rules were followed. Once the atmosphere had shifted, the Centerpiece (almost always a known sub, but once or twice, a more dominant figure had surprised the group by serving) was to become literally that: a fixture at the center of the party, immobile. A figure to be discussed or a toy to be used in a public fashion.
+
+Although this was Erin's first time being the Centerpiece, the role fit her naturally. Elise had leapt at the chance to feature the mink for the party. To have a willing critter who was already a well-known sub (and already quite knowledgeable in bondage) made the hostesses' jobs easier and the party more fun.
+
+By the time they had made the rounds of the patio, Erin knew that she had done well. The timbre of the party had shifted according to plan, the curtains had been drawn, and the game of strip poker had already begun in the den. The mink was buzzing with a mixture of arousal and pleasurable embarrassment, along with a base note of that nearly primal need to please.
+
+Which is precisely when her smirking owner and husband tugged on her leash to get her to look up, saying, "And this is Matthew. Matthew Lederer. I believe you've met."
+
+Erin found her gaze sliding up along the slinky form before her, hidden by a half-unbuttoned dress shirt, to the soft features of the other mink. He was sleek and well groomed, whiskers bristled as if caught in the middle of searching for an intriguing scent. As everything from the earlier conversations clicked into place, she found herself tense at the end of the leash.
+
+Another mink.
+
+And here she was, smelling of arousal and desire: the Centerpiece, the offering to the party.
+
+Matthew's mind seemed to be going through some similar calculation, as his gaze shifted from shock through bemusement to hunger, grinning at the slender mink-toy being presented to him by the cat, giving an appraising glance over the rims of his glasses.
+
+Erin watched him turn to face her husband, "Good to see you here, buddy! And yeah, I believe we have." That grin widened, showing the mink's pointed teeth. "Wasn't expecting to be so lucky in my choice of toys for tonight."
+
+Looking positively smug, Aaron tapped the tip of his wife's nose with the end of the leash, nodding. "Mmhm. Was my turn to bring the Centerpiece. Just about to go get her all trussed up. But here, stand up straighter, minkytoy."
+
+Able only to muster a soft mewl, Erin nodded and stood up straighter, her tail flitting about erratically.
+
+"The Centerpiece should greet all her guests while she still can. Go on."
+
+Erin nodded and leaned in to give the other mink an embrace and a whiskery, bashful kiss to the side of his muzzle. "W-welcome..."
+
+Matthew returned the kiss with a grin, seeming to pick up on some of Aaron's bravado. "Thank you, ah..." he reached a paw up to lift the tag on the smaller mink's collar to read it. "Thank you, toy. I'm sure I'll be most welcome indeed."
+
+-----
+
+"I thought you said you didn't have anything planned," Erin said, still shivering from the mix of humiliation and arousal as she tugged her shirt off.
+
+Aaron, already nude, looked up from where he had been rooting in the bin of bondage gear, "I didn't, E, I promise. I didn't even know he was coming until he showed up just then."
+
+Erin nodded, anxious. She slipped shyly out of the last of her clothes and knelt, nude, on the mattress.
+
+"Do you want me to call in Elise? We can tap out, if it's uncomfortable, or Elise can ask him to not interact with you as the Centerpiece."
+
+The mink felt herself flush beneath her fur, whiskers bristling. "Mmnf..." she managed, then, "N-no. I mean, now I'm all curious. I've...never been with another mink before, after all."
+
+Aaron grinned and sat down on the edge of the mattress, holding a pair of soft, locking bondage cuffs and a snap hook connector --- two lobster clasps joined by a strip of nylon with a D-ring situated in the middle --- for binding them together. "Oh, so you're eager, then, toy?"
+
+Erin squirmed at the pet name. She hadn't quite left sub-space, hadn't wanted to, and so the words played readily into that. "I...maybe," she admitted, squirming tensely.
+
+The cat's grin widened as he turned and crawled over the mattress to her, muzzle tucking in against her cheek, his paws working to fasten one of the locking cuffs around her wrist. "Toy sure *smells* eager," he breathed.
+
+Tilting her cheek to her owner's muzzle and lifting both of her paws to offer her wrists to him, Erin whined quietly in return. "Can't help it," she mumbled, her breathing picking up.
+
+"I imagine not." Aaron continued slipping the other cuff onto the mink's other wrist, making a show of checking the locked status of each before attaching the connector to the exposed D-rings of the cuffs, effectively locking Erin's paws together. Although cuffs were a common accessory for her, she always got a thrill out of having them put on by someone else.
+
+"Hopefully not too obvious?" she asked.
+
+"This is a play party, E, it's kind of expected," Aaron said. The cat's laugh made Erin lay her ears all the way back. He tugged on the strap connecting her cuffs together pulling her up onto her knees and then onto all fours, his paw pinning the snap connector to the mattress. The laugh turned into a low growl as Aaron murmured, "And besides, toy, everyone noticed." With a soft nip to her ear, he lowered his voice further to a soft purr, adding, "Everyone."
+
+Any distance Erin had managed to gain from the sexual dynamic to ask about plans was quickly obliterated with the firm treatment and teasing words. She quickly found herself back in that cozy submissive space, her paws clutching at the sheets of the mattress, held only as far apart as the cuffs would let them. "Was toy useful?"
+
+Dragging the tote of gear closer, Aaron nodded, his voice muffled slightly by the fact that he couldn't hold back a purr. "Very useful. You got everyone up and moving. Lots of needy looks when we left to get ready." The cat brought up another snap connector and with an insistent push, nudged Erin's shoulders down until her chin nearly touched her paws, clipping this connector between the D-ring on her collar and the one on the first snap connector, leaving the mink with her backside hiked up and exposed. "But you're only just getting started, minkytoy. You're going to be very, very useful by night's end, aren't you?"
+
+Erin nodded, her breathing quick and shallow in anticipation. She could smell her own arousal quite strongly, now, as well as that of Aaron, a scent she was well accustomed to. "Yes owner," she panted, breaths tinged with a whine.
+
+There was a bit more fumbling in the bin before Aaron lay a few more items out in front of her, close enough to see but not touch. A ring-gag. A blindfold. A small remote control type device. A bowl of condoms. Two laminated signs --- one with rules, the other with a space for tallying just how the mink had been useful. A marker to go with the signs.
+
+Kneeling before her, Aaron took the blindfold in one paw and the gag in the other and leaned in closer. The familiar scent of the cat's arousal was filling Erin's nostrils, his stiff shaft dead center in her gaze, but, again, just out of reach. The scent of him was overpowering the scent of herself, but she could feel that burning arousal in her belly, feel the cool air against her groin, caressing warm and slick flesh.
+
+"Even that mink? Matthew?" the cat asked. It was hard for Erin to pick apart whether her owner was purring or growling, or perhaps a little bit of both. "Are you going to be a useful toy for him, too?"
+
+Erin felt her fur bristle, that perennial reaction to humiliation no longer restricted to just her tail, but creeping up her spine to her neck and ears, heckles raising. "I will," she whimpered. "I'll be usef-*nngh!*"
+
+She was cut off quickly. She'd been so focused on Aaron's words and the sight of her arousal in the center of her tunnel-vision that she hadn't noticed the paw with the ring gag.
+
+With one deft movement, the cat had taken advantage of her open muzzle to slip the gag in place, wedging her muzzle open with the ring of stiff rubber. His fingers quickly traced the straps of the gag to their ends, velcro straps that looped around her collar to hold the gag in place.
+
+"I know you will, toy," the cat growled --- and it definitely was a growl this time. A commanding, possessive, domineering growl that ensured she knew her place.
+
+Erin could only whine and pant, huff and whimper. She nodded shakily, as much as the straps restraining her neck to her wrists would allow.
+
+Those teasing growls continued as Aaron set up, clearly leaving the blindfold in his paw until last so that she would be forced to watch. "I wonder if toy will be able to tell it's him," he said. "By shape or by noise. Or maybe he'll lean forward and whisper to you how he's taking you. Maybe he'll just scruff the toy. I bet his teeth are sharp."
+
+Whimper, pant, squirm. Erin couldn't manage a whole lot more, as she watched her owner set up the signs. "Please use condoms; no damage; Centerpiece will use buzzer to tap out" read one. "Cum count: In sex --- In muzzle --- In fur" read the other, the pen laid neatly at its base.
+
+"Maybe it'll trigger something in you," Aaron said. He picked up the remote control and gave its single button a quick press, the small box emitting a surprisingly loud buzzing noise, annoying by design. Slipping the buzzer into Erin's paw, he leaned in closer to continue, "Maybe your body will know him by his species. Maybe you'll know what it is that you're missing out by him using a condom with you, by being that close to having his kits."
+
+A more drawn-out whine this time, low and needy, as her owner sought out and tickled each and every one of her kinks in turn.
+
+She was gone. Totally lost in sub-space. And he was driving her deeper and deeper.
+
+"Press the button, toy."
+
+Shaking, Erin fumbled with the remote, getting the button aligned under her thumb before pressing it. She got a loud buzz in response.
+
+"Good. Don't forget that, toy." Aaron grinned and reached once more into the tote of gear. "I'll watch when I can, but I have my own fun planned tonight."
+
+With that, Erin watched as the cat stood, making as if to open the door for everyone, letting the play of the Centerpiece begin, still murmuring, "Maybe toy will find herself needing him, hmm? Craving that mink within her, fitting so nicely like only another mink can. Maybe some day you *will* wind up with his kits."
+
+The cat paused and turned back, looking as if he'd just remembered something. Erin noticed the blindfold left in his paw and squirmed against the bed, knowing that the sensory deprivation would only serve to drive her deeper into Useful Mink territory.
+
+Aaron knelt before her once more and lifted the blindfold, then set it to the side and instead lifted his other paw. In it was a safety pin, something from the emergency sewing kit in the gear tote. Holding his paws deliberately within her gaze, Aaron opened the safety pin, exposing the sharp point. With his free paw, he reached down to grab one of the wrapped condoms from the bowl.
+
+"And who knows," he said, grinning widely as he drove the point of the pin through the package, the condom inside, and clear through out the other side of the package. "Maybe he'll get this one."
+
+The condom dangled briefly from the safety pin directly before Erin's eyes. She watched, unable to speak even if she hadn't been gagged, as the cat slid the needle-thin pin from the condom and massaged it with his fingerpads, leaving it looking intact and unmolested. He then tossed it almost casually into the bowl of condoms, mixing them up lazily with his paw. Aaron closed the safety pin and dropped it back into the tote with a small rattle.
+
+Realizing that she had been holding her breath, Erin let out a gasp and a shaky moan before swallowing dryly, making a soft *glk* noise with the gag in the way. She could feel Aaron hesitating, watching her for any sign that she would need to back out.
+
+Her mind was reeling, her breath coming in ragged pants, her arousal out of control, her body coursing with what felt like electricity. But she gave a slight nod of consent.
+
+Her last sight was of Aaron grinning as he reached down to fasten the blindfold over her eyes, clipping that, too, to the collar so that it couldn't easily be removed. Sight gone, she could only rely on touch, scent, taste, sound.
+
+The rustle of Aaron standing, the feel of the mattress shifting beneath her.
+
+"Remember your buzzer, toy."
+
+Footsteps.
+
+The scent of her owner's arousal fading, the scent of her own taking over.
+
+The sound of the door.
+
+Traces of other scents, other people, other species, other arousals.
+
+Voices, soft applause.
+
+And Aaron's voice, "The Centerpiece is ready."

content/post/disappearance.md

@@ -0,0 +1,849 @@
+---
+categories:
+- Short Story
+series: Sawtooth
+ratings: R
+description: A weasel attempts to escape from her life in Sawtooth to Oregon, but finds her old life still tied to home.
+date: 2018-08-14
+img: alley-cat.jpg
+type: post
+pdf: disappearance.pdf
+tags:
+- Furry
+- Romance
+- Sexuality
+title: Disappearance
+cw: Mental health (panic attack), sex scene
+---
+
+"This is going to sting."
+
+I nod.
+
+"No, this is going to sting a lot."
+
+That warrants a dry swallow and a second nod, more nervous this time.
+
+The first thing they'd done at the mod parlor was shave my fur. A smooth line back from my muzzle toward my ears. They'd gotten all of both of my cheeks, down to the jawline and up toward my ears, though not quite all the way.
+
+It's not a good look for a weasel, this awful grooming.
+
+I'll have to live. I suppose it'll take a few months to go from stubbly to bristly and back toward soft, and then another few after that until I'm back to normal.
+
+Well, not normal. New. Different.
+
+"Alright, first bit," the rat begins, tugging over the lower part of a milk jug that's been cut in half. "Gonna get the bars super cold. You sure you want the straight lines?"
+
+"Yes." I don't sound sure, even to myself.
+
+The rat does that thing where he just sits still and silent, waiting on me. His ears have been tattooed black up along the backs, and the fluorescent lights shining through them cast blurred shadows, crenelated ideas of shapes.
+
+I sit up straight in my chair and give a firm nod. "Yes. Straight lines. Three on each cheek, spreading out toward the back of my head."
+
+The rat waits a little longer, then cracks a goofy grin. "Good. Good choice. I'm gonna start the middle one a little further back. And I'll use tapered ones rather than rectangular. It'll make you look speedy."
+
+We laugh at that, and I use the it to hide the terror. Not at the pain, mind, but at the sheer enormity of what I'm about to do.
+
+"Alright, lady." The rat stands, pads across the room with claws clicking on linoleum. There's a hissing, gurgling sound, a sound of something more complex than water being poured, and then a soft curse. A single curse is more a matter of form, though, and the lack of follow-up keeps me from panicking outright.
+
+The rat hurries back toward me, the half-jug in oven-mitt-clad paws billowing a sinking fog in his wake. This gets quickly set down on the steel table so he can shake the mitts off. The nitrogen fog continues its cascade, flowing over the table and onto the floor. From then, everything happens in quick succession.
+
+I'm laid out on my side.
+
+A thick petroleum jelly is smeared into the fur around my eyes, and a piece of aluminum foil massaged into that to create at least an attempt at a seal.
+
+Footsteps.
+
+A paw holds the foil in place. Another holds my muzzle down against a pillow in a sanitized paper pillowcase. A third, more spindly than the others, presses down on the side of my neck. Someone presses a rolled-up towel into my paws.
+
+Murmuring.
+
+A rush, a clatter, and then pain as something presses against my cheek. I grit my teeth, clench the terrycloth in my paws, and let out a sort of gurgled moan. Someone's counting down.
+
+The pain leads with cold, then turns searing, and then is lost in a labyrinthine landscape. Sere, white, a sun too bright to look at, and the smell of snow.
+
+The countdown reaches zero, and the pressure against my face relaxes. That 'something' that was pressed against my cheek is lifted away, and someone murmurs dryly, "One down, five to go."
+
+I spend the next half hour alternating between gasping for breath between each countdown and exploring that landscape: a tangled mess of chalk-white rocks, angular, thorny bushes with no leaves, lingering snow-scent, and a flute playing whistle-tones above it all.
+
+I'd never known how intricate pain could be.
+
+After the last countdown is finished and I am allowed to sit up once more, I finally allow myself a simple, "Fuck."
+
+There's laughter as the foil is pried away from my gummed-up fur and I blink my eyes back into focus. There's the rat along with his accomplice, a weasel far taller than I, sitting on a stool with a kerchief keeping unkempt headfur out of his eyes. On the table by him, a short copper bar clamped into a stainless steel handle is still oozing tendrils of too-heavy fog.
+
+"*Fuck,*" I say again.
+
+"Stings, huh?" The weasel grins, and I recognize his voice from the countdown.
+
+"Uh...I guess." I try to smile, feeling cold-burnt skin pull at my cheeks, and the smile turns into a wince. "Bit of an understatement. What does it look like?"
+
+The rat reaches to snag a mirror and hold it up to my face. Shaved cheeks---that much I'd seen---cutting fine brown fur almost down to the skin, and three bars on each cheek, radiating away from my whiskers toward the back of my head. The bars show up as patches of matted, crispy, burnt fur.
+
+"It'll turn white soon enough," the weasel says. He stretches out his arm and bunches up his sleeve, revealing simple coiling patterns of white fur amidst the brown of his fur. I'd seen it before in pictures (that being the reason I'd chosen this parlor), but seeing it in person made me all the more eager for the fur on my cheeks to grow back.
+
+"Now you just need some piercings." The rat laughs as I shake my head.
+
+I pay in cash. They accept cards, but I had more than enough on hand.
+
+-----
+
+From the mod parlor, I head home to take care of the apartment. All the stuff I need is already in the car, packed into a backpack and a suitcase. Nothing from inside, of course. This all has to stay. Still, it's good to make sure.
+
+Everything's neat. Not too neat, of course, as I can't keep up with Jarred's standards, and he can't keep up with the rate I make things messy. Stuff's on shelves, dust free. Clothes are put away, but the hamper's overflowing. The kitchen's wiped clean, but there's a stack of plates and glasses in the dirty half of the sink.
+
+Poor Jarred. Ah well.
+
+Once my account of the house is done, I begin to dismantle the life I'd built up for myself. I unwind it in slow, circular passes of the apartment, starting from the ground up. I carefully destroy what I was.
+
+I slowly untick a checklist, item by item, of the things that got me where I am, made me who I am.
+
+Drawers are tugged open and clothing strewn haphazardly about the floor. The bed sheets are pulled free of the mattress and shredded with my claws to look as though it was all done in haste.
+
+It's not. It's all careful. I have to be quiet for the neighbors, and I have to be deliberate for myself, even if it does feel like watching someone else work.
+
+The mattress is thrown askew as though someone had been digging for cash beneath it. The bathroom is mostly left alone, but pill bottles are dumped in the sink, looking like someone was hunting for something more interesting than aspirin. The top shelf of the closet is ransacked, with shoes tossed on the floor and the contents of my jewelry box tucked away in a backpack, along with Jarred's nice watch. I didn't care for the stuff, but I knew a burglar would.
+
+The living room is more difficult. We have a TV, which a burglar would latch onto immediately. I'd planned for this, though, and the TV is set neatly by my door while I see to the rest of the room.
+
+I tip over the speakers on their poles and scratch carefully crazed claw marks around their bases, a show of trying to detach them. They stay on the floor.
+
+The bookshelf is dismembered as quietly as I can manage. Books are pulled off in armloads and scattered around on the floor. One from every armful is bent and torn, my heart aching to do so. A yearbook tweaks memories and is discarded. Paintings are removed from their hooks and tossed on top of the books.
+
+The couch is shredded and exposed just as the bed had been. Nothing there, beneath those torn cushions.
+
+The kitchen is next. I step quietly over the pile of books and head on in. There's a cursory pass of the fridge and cabinets: pushing glasses and food to the sides to expose the backs of them. My concession to looking hasty is to put a glass in a plastic bag and crush it under my foot, then scatter the shards over the counter and onto the floor. A very careful “whoops.”
+
+The garage had been my space, and is the last to get torn down. We'd rented half a duplex and paid extra for the side with the attached garage, which I'd claimed for all of my painting stuff, but which was under constant threat of being slowly consumed by junk.
+
+I eviscerate my old camping gear. I trusted Jarred to never pull himself away from his computer long enough to even consider camping. So much time at the keyboard, so little to spend elsewhere; so much time spent on him, so little on anyone else.
+
+My easel is easy to deal with: I just tip it over. The rickety thing clatters to pieces just shy of the front bumper of the car. A sketch of a painting, burgundy on black, tumbles askew. Boxes containing old clothes are turned out. A clock is broken most carefully.
+
+Jarred and I, we'd never hidden anything together, but I have to look thorough.
+
+On my own, though, I'd hidden cash. Just shy of twenty grand in a locking cash box disguised as a two-quart thermos tucked firmly into my old backpacking gear in the mess of our garage.
+
+Or it had been. Now it was tucked into the car, just behind the driver's seat.
+
+My life isn't completely unwound. Not yet. But I'm getting there.
+
+I reach in the car and grab a bag of odds-and-ends fur sweepings. Little bits snagged here and there from shedding coworkers. Some from a grooming place. Even a bit from the mod shop's bin before I was shaved. I make a quick circle around the apartment, scattering fur on the most torn up bits
+
+I grab the TV on the way back to the garage---a flat screen thing that we only ever used for movies------and lay it down its back by the car. I give it a kick until it's squarely behind one of the front wheels.
+
+*Here we go.*
+
+I climb in the car and hit the button to open the garage.
+
+When I reverse over the TV, there's a delightful crunch. I can't smile without my newly branded cheeks burning, so I breathe satisfaction out on a sigh.
+
+-----
+
+My paws ache all the way to Oregon. I had thought it would be pretty easy to slash up the inside of my car before I abandoned it, but they were tougher than I had imagined. I'd managed to come out of the experience without breaking any claws, at least.
+
+Once the seats had been shredded, I carefully cut my finger along the side and smeared blood along the clawmarks. The car was trashed as I rolled it into a ditch. There was a tiny forest there, with crumpled cans and paper wrappers mixed in with the fallen leaves. After thinking for a moment, I squeezed out a few more drops of blood onto that garbage.
+
+The bus driver had greeted me with the tired acknowledgement of a fox who had seen much worse than a sloppily dressed weasel with newly branded cheeks.
+
+I'd never been on a long-distance bus trip. Jarred and I had never been wealthy, never higher than lower-middle class, and this wasn't helped by me having pretended to make fifteen-hundred less than I actually did a month at work, all that extra cash making its way into my thermos. A cross-country bus trip is unthinkable when you can fly, when you have a car.
+
+But you can buy bus tickets with cash.
+
+The seat is cramped. About what I'd expected, to be honest, but I wasn't prepared for this quite as much as I thought. No one sits next to me, but I still felt hemmed in on every side. I tell myself to just enjoy myself, enjoy this new life. This non-life. This life without history.
+
+Hard to do when you are bumping down the road at sixty-five and no faster.
+
+I use the toilet as little as possible.
+
+-----
+
+I have made a huge mistake.
+
+If I were a smarter lady, I would've spent more energy figuring out what to do once I got here than what I spent on that hour of unwinding my previous life.
+
+I can stay here, of course. There's a long-stay hotel that doesn't side-eye my cash too much, and there's a little kitchenette in the room with a two-burner stove that's plenty for cooking for myself. Getting groceries with cash is as easy as expected.
+
+But I can't get a job.
+
+If I were a smarter lady, I'd've changed my name before leaving, keeping it a secret from Jarred as best as possible...but even that isn't smart. That would've tipped off investigators immediately. "Weasel changes name, weasels out of debt." I can only imagine the headlines once I was caught.
+
+But I can't get a job.
+
+I'm educated and all. I was a fantastic accountant, and it felt awesome to be one of the few who actually uses her college degree for what she does for a living and *enjoys it*. I worked for a few CPA offices and was on the short track to moving up at the last one. I'm fantastic with numbers, which is why I thought I had this all set.
+
+But I just *can't get a job.*
+
+No one is going to hire an accountant with no name. With no history, no verified skills, no bank account, no credit, no social security number. No one is going to hire even the smartest weasel to run numbers if that weasel doesn't legally exist---or is at least trying not to.
+
+Fuck.
+
+I can't get a job, I can't rent a place, I can't open another bank account. I can't even change my name, since that would mean engaging with my old identity, the one I'd tried to kill.
+
+*Fuck.*
+
+I can live here for a while. I ran the math on my recently-purchased calculator (cell phone was back in the car, of course---no more net for me, much as I can help it), and I can live here for maybe a year and a half. Longer, if I find a cheaper long-stay. At least I have time to try and fix this.
+
+-----
+
+The proprietor, Adam, and I have been getting on surprisingly well.
+
+He's a good guy, which I hadn't picked up on at first. I'd taken his silence while handing over my key as standoffishness. There was certainly an element of caution to it, but he's also just a quiet guy.
+
+We exchanged nods daily for the first two weeks I lived here, then simple pleasantries for the next two. He came off as soft-spoken and content with where he was in life, and as far as I could tell, he was.
+
+A week or so into my second month staying in that little studio, and he's invited me over to the patio behind the office (which I suppose is also his home) to discuss arrangements for the future.
+
+"Discussing arrangements," however, has turned into sharing half a bottle of rum while sitting in deck chairs. The rum's fantastic, but comes out of a vodka bottle. The glasses are half-pint canning jars.
+
+I can't decide if it's hipster or hippie, but the more I drink, the less it seems to matter.
+
+"So." A pause to toss another cube of ice in his jar along with another inch of rum. "Why you out here?"
+
+I hesitate and swirl my own glass around, letting the melting ice water down the rum. It's definitely overproof, and almost certainly homemade. "Needed out of where I was, I guess."
+
+He does that thing---the thing that rat at the mod shop had done------where he simply waits in silence. There's no shared glances, and the silence is comfortable, but also expectant. Maybe that's a thing that people who are happy can do.
+
+"I needed out of that life. I packed my stuff and left without a word."
+
+"You seem like you ain't hurting for cash," he says.
+
+"Well, no. I brought along enough to live out here for a while."
+
+"Mm." He looks at me over the rim of his glass as he sips at his rum. Otter expressions, I'm discovering, are close to weasel ones, but use the whiskers more. The look isn't exactly crafty, but getting close, as he continues, "Problem with cash is no collateral. S'why I charge you up front."
+
+I nod. It tallies.
+
+"But you seem straight."
+
+"Straight?" A smile tugs at the healing brands on my cheeks. They're starting to come in white.
+
+He laughs, "I ain't making a pass at you, don't worry. Sex ain't a thing 'round here. Not for me, at least. Hell, maybe you like girls too. Not my business." He copies my swirl and we both enjoy the pleasant clinking of ice against glass. "No, I mean straight. You're a good lady. You're out here to get away, you say, and I trust that's all you're doing. No thieving, no running, you ain't in trouble."
+
+I settle back into the deck chair and attempt to use that 'silence' technique I keep running into. He just grins.
+
+"So what I'm asking is this. That number I said before?" He gestures behind himself, as though that's where the past is. "I'll cut it in half if you can do some work 'round here."
+
+"Work?" I tilt my head, turning over ideas of what that'd entail.
+
+"Sure. Work. What can you do to cut down your rent?"
+
+"Uh, I can...I mean, I was an accountant. I can run your books, file taxes, that stuff."
+
+The minute I say “taxes,” Adam perks up and his whiskers bristle outward with his grin. "Deal. Sight unseen. I'm good at what I do, but that ain't taxes."
+
+I laugh, I can't help it. "Half rent? For taxes?"
+
+"Sure," he says, sounding content. "Run the books and handle taxes, and I'll halve your rent. You can take the desk some days if you want a bit more off."
+
+I rub my paw over the short, bristly fur of my cheeks, a habit I picked up as it grew back in. The crisped, branded patches had largely been replaced by normal, soft fur, now growing in white. All the shaved spots were taking a while to grow in.
+
+"A secretary, hmm?"
+
+"Well, sure. It ain't grand. Accountant like you ain't gonna find anything grand without being legit."
+
+At that I fall silent.
+
+He continues, "Jobs these days, you need to be legit. You couldn't offer me anything but cash, not even an ID to hold. You needed out of life so bad, you left behind your legitimacy."
+
+My silence becomes darker, seems to close in around me. Ears pinned back, eyes burning, muscles tensed, I try not to visibly panic in front of Adam.
+
+"It's okay, though." He settles back into the Adirondack chair with a sigh. "You can get by without that. You're just gonna have to let go of the idea that you'll ever be a part of that world again. You might, but it's best to expect you won't."
+
+From then on, it's silence. I cry as quietly as I can. Adam pours me another inch of rum and leans across the table between us to tip another ice cube into my jar.
+
+-----
+
+Adam is *set.*
+
+He owns his property outright, and is up-to-date on all his licenses. Business is good. “Half rent,” for me, covers twice the cost of maintaining my studio---utilities, that share of property tax, everything.
+
+And he's happy.
+
+-----
+
+With my stay here nearly doubled, I've started exploring further into town.
+
+We're a ways out from Portland: I could take the regional bus there in about an hour and a half, but I never do. Instead, I stick to this little town I wound up in, a town picked because I got too anxious about Portland and got off the bus at the stop before. Probably my best idea yet.
+
+I'd just gone to the dinky supermarket before, but now I started taking walks. Originally, it had just been a "stretch the legs before shopping" exercise, but now I was even heading into town just to wander. There's a neat little café with huge single-pane windows and a rocket stove that I've taken a liking to. Something about the impracticality of the windows combined with that adobe stove behind the bar tickles me. And as long as I stick to drip coffee, it's not too much out of my budget.
+
+I even ventured to the lone grooming stop in town to get my cheeks checked up on. I had been worried that they'd be weirded out by them, but I was greeted by a punky opossum with a bright pink streak of fur from the tip of her snout down to the nape of her neck. She said my cheeks were looking good, then talked me into buying a tube of dye. She suggested pink, but I went for the blue instead.
+
+I don't know why I did that. Being an accountant wasn't just an occupation for me. It was a whole identity. I bought into the smart pantsuits and that sensible jewelry, the latter of which was still in my suitcase, to mark my position hard-core. The tight grooming and the calm speed of numbers, that's *who I was*.
+
+Now, I don't know. I have three pairs of jeans, a frowsy canvas skirt, and a bunch of long- and short-sleeved button up shirts and tees---only some of which fit well---I grabbed from a thrift store before this whole excursion began.
+
+Maybe I just figured I'd own it. I got the cheek brands, after all; might as well get the dye, too.
+
+Tonight, I'm dyeing a diamond shape into the white down my front. It'll sit just above my breasts, with a tendril curling down beneath them, and another tendril curling up over my front to my neck. I can hide it with a scarf if I need, but otherwise, it'll peek up from above my shirt. Just a little tease. One that could go “sexy” when I want, or just “artsy” otherwise.
+
+The thought's actually quite embarrassing, but it's been a long time since sex. Jarred and I were pretty into it at first, but then it became routine, and then scarce. We hadn't fucked for a month before I took off, and since then I'd been too busy hiding to worry about it.
+
+With this new arrangement with Adam, though, I don't know.
+
+Maybe being a little sexy will be okay.
+
+-----
+
+Holy shit, I may actually be able to pull this off. It'll be crazy, but maybe I can do it.
+
+I guess Adam did some talking after I'd asked about more possibilities, and now I've got the owner of Starry Night, the town's little café, as a "client" of sorts. He's having me do the taxes and help run the books. He even offered to let me run the till if things get busy. They haven't yet, but he's promised me it's still the off-season. Not cold enough to be winter, but not yet warm enough for holidays. He's not paying me anything close to livable, but with the deal I'm getting on rent, I might just be able to do this.
+
+It's such a small town. It looks bigger than it is, since so many of these kitschy stores and homes have so much space around them. The market has a parking lot twice the size it needs.
+
+There are folks living around the town in seclusion, I guess, but those who live in the town itself, who *are* the town, probably number in the low hundreds. Other than that, it's just a waypoint. Folks heading up to the mountains stop through and keep all the businesses going, but they never stay long. They're always on their way to more romantic locations or heading back through on their way back to the coast. The town itself holds together through the need to provide for all those who would only pass through. All those people on any one day, and it's still a small town.
+
+I've started painting again, too. Starry Night has a drop ceiling and each tile is painted a different color. After I mentioned having been a painter in my "past life," Stefan, the owner, perked up and sent me home with a blank tile, along with a few crusty tubes of acrylic and a brush that hadn't been used in a while.
+
+"Go nuts," he said, and so I did. Background of green and a symmetrical tree in black, limbs splitting into branches that became whisker-thin toward the edges of the tile. The leaves were vague suggestions of white that broke the symmetry. An idea of a tree. Just the type of stuff I painted up until four months ago.
+
+Stefan loved it, and here I am working on my second tile.
+
+This---working jobs all but off the grid, body mods, looking like a hippie---isn't what I'd pictured when I unwound my previous life. Now, when I look back on it, on all my planning and scheming, I don't think I had pictured anything.
+
+-----
+
+I've taken to working mornings at Starry Night and heading back to Adam's after lunch to run the desk there. If it's needed, I can even head back to Starry Night after to help out a bit more. We're well into the busy season, so both the long-stay and the café are happy for whatever help they can get. An accountant running the till is a weird fit, but at least I'm fast at it.
+
+It's interesting to watch the ebb and flow of traffic through the town.
+
+Starting about six in the morning, folks start trickling into town, but within an hour, it becomes busy, then frenetic. From there, it climbs steadily until about nine-thirty, dips for an hour, then picks up for lunch.
+
+I head out by one thirty or two to dash back to Adam's and start getting folks checked in and out while Adam does property stuff. Usually, he's out repairing the drive to the units (and the little one-room cabins in back, one of which I now inhabit). He's intensely focused on that drive; he's talked with me about the upkeep and maintenance of a dirt road for an hour or more on multiple occasions. I don't drive anymore, so I just have to trust him.
+
+Things clear up by five, and sometimes I head back to Starry Night. At that point, it's mostly a social thing. If I'm not chilling out back of the office with Adam, I'm here at the café. If not either, I'm painting. I've gotten about a third of the ceiling tiles done.
+
+The movement of people is fascinating up close, following the ways in which people move and change throughout the day. The before-coffees and the nine-AM-bounces and the post-lunch-siesta. The perking of ears and the bristling of whiskers. The droop of tails and stifled yawns.
+
+When you zoom out, though, it's grains of sand just below high tide. The tide rolls in, and there's a chaotic dance of spiraling movement. Each wave brings cars cycling around parking lots, small collisions of bodies, crimped tails, tantrums weighing down parents.
+
+And then tide rolls out, and the town settles back down into its ground state. Grains of sand compact nicely when left to dry, a comfortable stasis until the next high tide.
+
+In the midst of it all, the regulars provide a sense of weight, anchoring high and low tide to provide a sense of continuity. There's Adam, of course, and Stefan. I suppose I'm slipping into that role too. We are the wave-polished stones.
+
+And then there's Aurora.
+
+We've only talked once or twice in earnest, her voice familiar and quiet, but I watch her every day. She has a table all but reserved in the corner of Starry Night, farthest from the door but right in the elbow of two of those ridiculous single-pane windows. To her left, one window looks out over the parking lot and, across the street, the parking lot of the market. In front of her, three trees that have been planted too close to each other, forming a tiny grove between Starry Night and the back fence.
+
+She wafts in around six thirty and orders a latte, a soda water, and a pot of hot water for her and one of the teabags riding shotgun in her jacket pocket. If her table isn't free, she'll sip her latte at the bar until it is, and then set up camp.
+
+She drinks the latte first, then the soda water, then the tea.
+
+Once she's finished the soda water, she pulls out a pen and either a book or a stack of printouts and a clipboard. I've never figured out what she does for work, but she's always either taking notes or marking up printouts. A teacher, perhaps? An author? Editor?
+
+At noon, she orders another soda water and another pot of hot water for the second teabag. Some days she'll pull out a sack lunch, some days she'll order something from me---we serve a few simple sandwiches---in her comfortable contralto.
+
+She eats the lunch first, then drinks the soda water, then the tea.
+
+Once she's finished the soda water, she settles back into the chair and stares out the windows. Mostly, she just looks at the trees, but sometimes she'll rest a cheek on her fist and look out toward the market, her long canine ears canted cozily back. Something about the sight always has me watching her in turn. Something familiar, cozy.
+
+Then the coyote gets back to work, and, before long, I duck out to help Adam. On the few occasions I've stayed, Aurora will close out the shop with us, saying little but saying it kindly. Her silences, I expect, are a matter of course. They are absolute, and absolutely part of her. A stillness I can only dream of.
+
+I've never seen her out of the shop, but I think about her every time I walk or bus back home. I'll have inevitably forgotten by the time I get inside, though, as she's context-shifted around a corner of my mind.
+
+-----
+
+I'd imagined I'd done such a good job of cleansing my life of who I used to be when I left, that each time I’m confronted by something I'd accidentally brought along, it’s jarring, or even frightening.
+
+Undergarments had been the first such instance. I hadn't thought to grab any new panties before leaving town. This was probably fine, I reasoned, because anything missing would have been noticed. Unfortunately, this left me with only one pair---the ones I left in---and I'd had to visit the "essentials" aisle of the supermarket early on to grab a pack of bland panties. They fit so poorly, I'd largely stopped wearing any.
+
+What had me jittery, though, was seeing that old pair every time I did laundry. One last reminder that I'm no longer who I was.
+
+I threw them out soon after.
+
+Each time I come across some remnant, it reminds me of what I've done, in a very tangible way, even if not necessarily why. The "why" had already begun to blur on the bus ride, and I've never been able to make it gel again.
+
+It's not always negative, this process, but it's never positive. Other than a few useful items---the jewelry, for instance , kept for something pawnable in an emergency---I throw everything I find away almost as soon as I find it, stopping only to destroy it for the catharsis. It’s all too much risk to keep around.
+
+Thus me, crouched on my haunches behind Starry Night, hyperventilating as I try to destroy my old driver's license.
+
+How this had escaped me before was something of a mystery. An actual legal document bearing my actual legal name, tucked within my old wallet in the back of my suitcase, was not something I should have missed.
+
+This caromed straight into fear. Into terror. Into that agonizing sickness that settles into one's gut and closes off one's throat. I'd stopped crying as much, recently, and started smiling more, but I'm on the verge of panicked tears now.
+
+I can't say what made me tuck the wallet into a pocket at the start of the day. It was an interesting artifact, perhaps, nothing big or important, that I decided to keep on some whim. The credit cards that had once filled it lay scattered by my abandoned car back home, after all, so I figured it must be safe.
+
+The license won't tear. That was my first instinct, but my pads had slip off the slick plastic too easily, and my claw tips only scrabble ineffectually at its surface.
+
+I can bend it, at least, and I crease it this way and that in an attempt to fatigue the plastic enough that maybe I can snap it. ID cards are, apparently, designed to last, and despite repeated folds, I can't get enough of a grip to tear the card, much less snap it, though the ink along the crease fades and warps into whiteness. I don't have the leverage necessary to crease along my name, however.
+
+This isn't working.
+
+I stuff my wallet back into my pocket and dash over to the dumpster, flipping up the lid. I had intended to tear up the license and toss it in with the coffee grounds and banana peels, but the thought of it slipping out of the dumpster or falling out of the trash truck feels inescapable. With all the people going through the café during the day, though, there has to be...
+
+I tear through two of the shop's thin garbage bags before I find what I'm looking for: a cheap plastic lighter, yellow and scuffed.
+
+The rasp of the wheel against the flint sends my whole paw to buzzing, the snap of the spark too loud for my frazzled nerves.
+
+I flick at the lighter a few more times. It’s almost certainly dead, thrown away for a reason, so I just have to hope there's enough fluid in there.
+
+The flame finally catches, only barely peeking above the rim of the lighter.
+
+*It'll have to do.*
+
+Holding my breath and struggling to still my shaking paws, I carefully bring my driver’s license above the tiny flame, letting the diffuse glow settle beneath the photo of my face, the weasel there looking startled, backlit by flame. The plastic browns, sags, then starts to char and bubble. By the time the smoke, reeking of burning plastic, starts to make me cough, the image of my face and much the identifying details have melted away, the ink burnt off by the low flame of the lighter.
+
+Motion in the shadows cast against the dumpster catches my eye and I whirl around, Aurora startling back a half-step at my sudden movement. We stare, uncomprehending, at each other for a moment.
+
+"I---" I croak. "Hey."
+
+"Hey, uh...you okay back here?"
+
+I look around, down to my mangled license and the shitty yellow lighter in my paw, back to the coyote, struggling to come up with an explanation. A half-truth is the best I can manage. "Needed to, uh...expired credit card and all. Melting it, I mean."
+
+The quotidian mundanity of such an activity seems to click things into place for the coyote. She perks up and smiles, "I'd never thought of melting them before, I always just cut them into little pieces."
+
+The lighter is finally starting to cool down in my paw after it's extended use, which is good, given how much I keep fiddling with it. "Couldn't find my scissors once I got out here, figured this would work."
+
+She nods, squints toward my paws, then back up to me. "You from Idaho?"
+
+I gape, crumpling the license as best I can within my hand.
+
+"Just looked like my old card, I mean."
+
+I do my best to keep my ears from flattening and tail bristling, only to catch myself panting. So much for acting cool. "I...yeah,” I gasp. “Moved a while back."
+
+"Hey, no stress. I won't pry," Aurora laughs, holding up her paws disarmingly.
+
+I manage a smile, hoping it's convincingly embarrassed. "Sorry," I say, stuffing the lighter and warped card back into the garbage bag, before hauling the whole thing back into the dumpster. "I guess it's just a weird thing to get caught doing."
+
+Head tilted, Aurora grins at me a moment longer, then shrugs. "I guess, yeah. See you inside?"
+
+I nod, struggling to calm my breathing as I watch her round the corner to the front of the shop with a flick of her tail.
+
+When I make it back inside to prep her usual latte, Aurora smiles at me. I beam back to her.
+
+Something about the encounter by the dumpster has left me feeling giddy. Perhaps it was the thrill of nearly being caught, or maybe the relief of being rid of the thing. It's one fewer identifying thing about me that I need to worry about, after all; and beyond that, it got Aurora laughing.
+
+Why that makes me so happy in turn is beyond me.
+
+-----
+
+My brush-strokes are confident, each one is a smooth arc describing edges and boundaries, or perhaps reinforcing color.
+
+The tile had been given to me burgundy, and I'd chosen to leave it that way, painting within that dark red surface rather than covering it up. I painted in black, and I painted only shadows, not details, as though the scene were blown out towards white and the contrast turned to a hundred percent.
+
+It had started as an abstract gesture of a face, angular and canine, but had slowly headed toward something more concrete. Not realistic, but perhaps something from a comic. Hard-edged lines, but true to form with no liberties taken.
+
+Aurora at her table as seen from the espresso machine, cheek on fist, staring out of frame. The shape of her muzzle, the tilt of her ears, both familiar and new.
+
+My brush-strokes are confident. Black and red, no need for another color.
+
+"Season's winding down."
+
+"Mmm."
+
+Adam laughs and shakes his head, plopping down, then melting further into the deck chair.
+
+"S'good to see you painting, you know."
+
+"Mmm." I perk up as my mind parses meaning out of those sounds, and then flatten my ears. "Sorry. I got kinda into it. What'd you say before?"
+
+"Said season's winding down."
+
+"Yeah, seems like," I offer as I carefully shift the painting off the table to lay it flat on the ground next to me, replacing the bucket of ice in its spot. My poor-weasel's easel of the table between us returns to its former state as drinking space. I pour us both a drink.
+
+The otter has moved on from rum and is now trying his paw at whiskey. We've been cycling through batches over the last few weeks. The taste is far sweeter than I would've expected, but Adam says he doesn't have the cuts quite right yet.
+
+In my mouth, ice machine ice and homemade whiskey jockey for space with words. "Wha's li' in off 'easong?"
+
+"Eh?"
+
+I crunch down on the ice and brave the brain freeze to say more clearly, "What's it like in the off season?"
+
+"Same but slower," Adam says, chuckling down to his glass. "Way slower, some days. You got here before season started, but weren't really here in the middle of off-season. I'll probably beg your help deep-cleaning some of the units."
+
+"Sure thing, boss." I laugh as that gets me an ice-cube to the face. "Fine. Sure thing, master."
+
+Adam makes as though he'll throw the whole bucket of ice at me, before we both settle back into our chairs with jars of whiskey and ice, grinning. In the silence, I paint my claws idly with the black acrylic left on the brush from my work on the ceiling tile. The condensation off the glass thins the paint and it starts to seep into my fur. My paws are covered with the stuff anyway.
+
+The silence goes from comfortable to expectant, and when I look up, Adam's adopted a vaguely confused look with whiskers smoothed back, which he's directed toward his all-important drive. Just as I'm about to brush it off, he asks, "How'd you leave?"
+
+Anxiety brushes up against me, breaking through the veneer of calmness. It takes me a bit to respond, and I try to fill that space by nervously stirring the ice into my white whiskey. "If I just say 'very carefully', will that be enough?"
+
+The otter's expression softens and he shrugs against the back of his chair. "I s'pose. Doesn't mean I don't still want to know."
+
+"I just...I don't know. I spent a lot of time thinking about all the different parts there were of my life and thinking about what I'd be without them." I brush my paws over my cheeks, heedless of the paint. My fur has almost grown back completely, and the freeze-brand has indeed come in white. Still, it's become a habit. "And then I just set a date and went around to all those parts one by one, turning them off or throwing them away."
+
+"No going back, then?"
+
+"Not if I want to stay out of jail." I don't think this is true, but it sounds good.
+
+"So you turned off or trashed all these parts of who you were," Adam mumbles, pouring himself another inch of whiskey. "What's left?"
+
+I don't answer.
+
+I don't *have* an answer.
+
+When I think about it, there's just nothing there. It's like trying to see the inside of my eyelids. Just nothing there. I tore down what I was without any thought of what would be left. Even my license, that last proof of me-that-was, had long since burned. There was nothing after that. It was more a form of suicide than I'd wanted to admit.
+
+Finally, I shrug. "Just me, I guess."
+
+Adam laughs at this and stretches his legs out, splaying webbed toes. "Fair enough. You do a good job around here, though. It feels like you belong now. I don't know what you were like before, but you were scared out of your whiskers when you got here. Now you're just you."
+
+"A punky weasel living off the grid in a hippie town?"
+
+"That too, yeah. Took you a while to grow into the punky bit, but you're getting there."
+
+My turn to laugh. "Just missing the get-up, I guess. Second-hand shirts and jeans miss the mark a little."
+
+"Mmhm. And you ought to get a piercing." Adam slides out of the chair and stands, using his thick tail to give the leg of the table a thwack. "And it's good to see you painting.”
+
+-----
+
+For the first few months I was here, I'd get a little twitch in my paw when someone mentioned something off the Internet. A twitch in my paw and a little shift inside me at a sudden-yet-averted context-shift. *I could look that up,* I'd think. *I could answer their question, or laugh at their picture.*
+
+For a while, I'd countered it with lies. An "Oh yeah, ha ha" here and a "Yeah, I saw that" there. The anxiety that I'd mess up and be called out got to be too much for me, though, and I switched from that to nervous silence.
+
+I replaced that twitch early on with the gesture of brushing back over my cheeks. At first, it was obvious why: when I got to town, my face was still freshly shaved, and for the first few weeks, the freezer-burnt marks of the brand were plain. Soon, though, it became more of a habit than a coping mechanism. I'd brush my pads over the fur and feel the edges of the shaving, and once they became imperceptible, I'd trace my claws through fur, trying to sense where the brown fur ended and the white, branded fur started.
+
+Anything---*anything*---to keep from touching the Internet. It would be too easy for me to just log back on. The temptation to peer into a life that no longer existed was too great. My very existence here in this town depends on that life no longer existing. I’d destroyed it, and destroyed all that tied me to its remains.
+
+And yet here I am, panicking in the bathroom at Starry Night.
+
+There's a soft tap at the door, and I rush to straighten my skirt and apron, peeking in the mirror to make sure I haven't visibly cried.
+
+Aurora's there when I open the door, standing a scant few inches taller than I.
+
+"Sorry, I'm..." I shake my head. "I'm all done."
+
+The coyote tilts her head quizzically, a movement that brushes against old memories. "You okay?"
+
+"Yeah, I am." I stand up straighter and smile apologetically to her. "I will be."
+
+We slide past each other and I make my way behind the bar again, busying myself with wiping down the already-clean espresso machine, just to give my paws something to do. Not many people ordering coffee at six at night. This late in the season, the sun sets early too.
+
+Stefan hikes himself up onto the bar, the wolf's tail flagging off to the side. "You alright there, kiddo?"
+
+"Yeah." I nod eagerly, then decide eagerness isn't what I should be going for, and turn it into a shrug. "Just stomach stuff. Nerves, maybe." I laugh, and it sounds too loud.
+
+"You bolted right off, yep. Anything bring it on?"
+
+I look around, checking on the occupants. We're down to me and Stefan, a young fox couple, and Aurora of course. "Just...just something a customer...something that bear said. Or saw. I don't know."
+
+Stefan's brow furrows, and I watch as the his tailtip tap arhythmically against the wall where it joins the bar. "Saw? How do you mean?"
+
+"He had a tablet, and I guess I caught a glimpse. He was talking about it to someone. Someone on the phone."
+
+"Mm, yeah, I remember. What'd you see?"
+
+"I saw my---" My words catch in my throat. *I saw my husband. I saw my name. I saw the picture from my ID.* "I saw my hometown."
+
+The wolf grins and leans back on his paws. "Home, eh? You don't seem like the girl who’s eager to go back."
+
+At this, I laugh in earnest. "No. Not at all."
+
+"What about it piqued your interest, then?"
+
+I hide my racing thoughts with a shrug, and come up with a half-truth: "The headline had the word 'police' in it."
+
+Nodding, Stefan slips down from his perch on the bar. "Fair enough. Weird day in here, anyway. I'mma close down after this---" he gestures vaguely toward the customers, "So feel free to head out whenever you want."
+
+I think of the bus back to Adam's and being alone with my thoughts. I could walk, but that'd just mean more time turning that glimpse of an article---something about “police” and my old name, something about how long it had been---over and over in my head. "I'll stick around, help clean up and stuff."
+
+Stefan shrugs, "Sure thing. Maybe I'll take off early, then. You okay closing up?"
+
+"Mmhm," I nod, tamping down anxiety with a jokey grin. "Wipe everything down, put all the food away, put the chairs up, steal all the money from the drawer..."
+
+The wolf laughs. "No more than ten percent, please. And girlie," he reaches out and pinches my ear between his claws. "Get your ears pierced with all sorts of crap or something so you can turn into a real punk. You're too wholesome-looking to be thieving."
+
+"Adam suggested the same thing. This town must be in sore need of a punk."
+
+"Yeah, all we've got is Aurora."
+
+The coyote flips him off without even looking away from her book. He laughs.
+
+-----
+
+Stefan's really good at disappearing when he's not needed at work anymore. If he doesn't have to be there for closing, he'll be nowhere to be found.
+
+Oh well, that's fine. I don't imagine I'll be here much longer anyhow.
+
+I start by cleaning down the bar and arranging all those bottles of flavored syrup for the drinks. Next comes flipping over the “open” sign and wiping down the empty tables, stacking chairs upside-down atop them.
+
+The fox couple picks up on the hint quickly and we settle their tab.
+
+I make a quick pass of the bathroom, but it's clean enough as is, so I mostly just wipe down the sink.
+
+Back out in the café, I turn off the soft indie pop on the house speakers, and then something clicks within me.
+
+I clutch at the edge of the bar as all of those emotions, eight or nine months of them, crash into me. All those months of living in at least some state of fear, all those days of holding back on feeling anything else, they all add up to time past-me only borrowed. All those past-due feelings make themselves felt *now*.
+
+My grip on the bar tightens as I gasp out a stifled cry, and then I'm crumpling to the floor, wedged between the milk fridge and the end of the bar where Stefan had been sitting only a half hour ago. Anxiety crescendos into panic, and then far, far beyond that. My muscles are tensing, and my perception of the world, my entire awareness, is shrinking to something the size of a coin, chalk-white pain smelling of snow.
+
+I come to on my side, gasping for air and choking on sobs. I'd been sobbing the whole time, apparently, as my cheeks and the sleeve of my shirt are soaked. Drooling too, from the looks of it.
+
+My body hasn't figured out how to move, yet, but I can see a dark, angular shape above me. I try to push away, but all I can manage is to tense up further.
+
+"Hey, hey, chill. It's okay." Aurora. It has to be.
+
+"Mmnglh."
+
+"Let's get you upright, at least a little. See if you can stand." She helps lever me up until I'm leaning back against the bar. "Come on, legs out. You uh...you fell over. Let’s at least get your legs in front of you."
+
+I can't figure out how to work my voice, so I just continue to moan and sob as the coyote helps get my skirt untangled and my limbs out from under me. She slips her paws up under my arms and starts to lift.
+
+"N-nnn," I manage and clutch at her arms---far too tightly, if her wince is anything to go by. Too filled with terror, too struck by a sense of impending death to control myself.
+
+She relents and settles back down, then gives into my tugging and slips her arms around my shoulders instead. There's a little uneven rocking motion as she slides her legs out from under her, and then she's drawing me in against her.
+
+I don't really know how long I stay like that. The only thing describing the passage of time is my sobbing. Aurora is a warm bulk against me, something to wrap my arms around, some bit of stability. She doesn't coo or shush, just rests her head against mine in silence. A kind, patient silence. A silence with no expectations.
+
+Eventually, I run out of sobs, and settle into a gentle, almost calm sort of crying. Aurora gives me a bit more time before carefully leaning back. Letting our arms slip from the embrace at least enough so that she can look at me. Her smile's kind, rather than pitying. "Come on, let's get you up, okay?"
+
+My joints are loose hinges, too well oiled. Finding a way to be upright without wobbling onto the floor again proves difficult. It takes a few tries, but I wind up with my butt parked against the edge of the bar, tail crimped behind me. I leave my shoulders leaning forward to maintain my grip on Aurora. I'm loath to let go of her, so it takes another fumbling second for me to find a way to do so.
+
+"Sorry," I croak.
+
+She shakes her head and rests her paws on my shoulders. Once she's sure I'm steady, she steps away and grabs a plastic to-go cup from beneath the bar and fills it at the sink. She takes one of my paws in hers and guides my fingers around the cup, making sure I'm holding on before she lets go. "Drink. You cried yourself empty."
+
+I nod and sip at the water. It feels too full in my mouth. Too thick. It slides around like oil. When I swallow, I realize how thirsty I truly am, and finish the rest of the cup in one go.
+
+Aurora, meanwhile, finishes closing up; all that was left was her table, so there's just two chairs to put up.
+
+I refill my cup from the tap and straighten up, trying to dispel the wobbliness in my hips and knees, to shake off the dark sense of panic. "Thanks Aurora, you didn't have to---"
+
+"But you're in no shape to," the coyote cuts me off, laughing. She tucks her book and papers back in her bag and slips back behind the bar again. Shrugging her bag's strap up further, she snakes an arm around my back. "Let's get you home, though, okay? You good to walk?"
+
+"Mmhm. I can take the bus, though. Don't need to walk."
+
+"I meant to my car. I'll get you home."
+
+If I open my mouth, I'll start crying, so I just nod.
+
+-----
+
+Aurora's car is very...*her.*
+
+I don't really know how to put it otherwise. It's sensible, as she is; it's filled with books and stacks of paper, as her bag is; it's not messy, but it's got a lot going on beneath its simple exterior, like her.
+
+Still sniffling, I wait as she moves a sheaf of papers held together with a binder clip from the passenger seat to the back. Then I swipe my tail and skirt out of the way and slouch into the seat, clumsily clicking the seatbelt in place with one paw, the other still holding the half-full cup of water.
+
+The car smells of her too. My nose is doing about as well as anyone's would after so much crying, but I can tell that much. It smells like when she held me. It smells familiar, like something from years ago. Years and years. I have to swallow down a rising wave of guilt and terror.
+
+The coyote settles into the driver's seat and gets all buckled in before giving my thigh a squeeze in her paw. "Adam's, right?" she asks, smiling. "One of the cabins?"
+
+I nod. "Thanks again for driving me."
+
+Aurora waits until she's reversed out of her spot and turned onto the road before answering. "No way I'm letting you walk, and goodness knows I know how awful crying alone on a bus is."
+
+"Yeah, probably not a good look," I say. I can't quite laugh yet, but I do manage a sort of “heh.”
+
+"You are a bit of a mess."
+
+I look down over my shirt and skirt. They're both rumpled. My shirt's still damp from my tears, and my skirt has picked up a stain from the floor behind the bar---probably old coffee. I can only imagine how my face looks. I grin. "Fair."
+
+I let Aurora drive as I focus on rehydrating. I want to just gulp down the water, but I've made enough of a mess of myself tonight. No sense risking a spill. Probably better for me that way, anyway.
+
+It's about a forty-five minute walk from Adam's to Starry Night, and about twenty-five on the bus. I never realized how long the bus took, though, as it takes us less than ten minutes to get back to the long-stay. I laugh at the thought.
+
+"What's up?" Aurora says, pulling into the dirt-road drive, heading around the back of the suites toward the cabins.
+
+"Just thinking. First time I've been in a car here. Only ever ridden the bus or walked."
+
+Aurora grins and pulls into a space in front of the cabin I point out. "Bit faster, yeah. Still, it's a pretty enough walk."
+
+The car turning off leaves us in relative silence, my ears buzzing in my stuffed-up head from the lack of noise. My thoughts seem to be surrounding a blank space. Circling and swirling around it, around nothing. A black pit containing all the things I could think about my old life, of being discovered, of having to go back.
+
+"Hey." Aurora. She's smiling. That's a good thing to think about instead, that smile. "Let's get you inside."
+
+I fumble for my buckle and start to protest, but stop before I say anything. The coyote, the scent of her, it's all so comforting; might as well let her help. A few more moments together, at least.
+
+Aurora levers herself out of her seat and strides quickly around the front of the car. I've got the door open by then, but there she is, ready to help me out of the bucket seat. I grin, feeling bashful, and take her offered paw.
+
+She's got a bit of a wag going on, too, but I try not to read too much into that.
+
+I lean on her as we walk the handful of steps to the door of the cabin. Once there, I fish in my apron pocket for my keys---I'd taken to wearing my work apron with the skirt for the utility of pockets---and let myself in.
+
+Let *us* in. No discussion about whether she's coming in, too. She just is.
+
+I flip on the lights and cringe, both at the sudden brightness against the dusk outside and the mess. I've been using my suitcase as my clean clothes drawer since I moved in. It's just got a day's worth of clothes in it, though. Next to it on one side is a pile of dirty clothes, and on the other, a folding drying rack holding a pair of jeans, a shirt, and two pairs of panties hanging off the corners.
+
+Fuck.
+
+I turn to apologize to the coyote, but she hasn't noticed the laundry at all. Doesn't even seem to notice me.
+
+I follow her gaze, then cringe in earnest.
+
+*Fuck.*
+
+"Holy shit. Those paintings are yours?"
+
+"Yes," I say, trying not to sound *too* humiliated.
+
+"The coyote?"
+
+I can't come up with a reply. We stand in expectant silence: Aurora's eyes locked on the paints and ceiling tile, burgundy, with her silhouette in black; and me, with my eyes locked on the floor and my tail tucked in against my leg.
+
+She turns, mouth open to ask again, when I grab at her paw and rush to cut her off.
+
+"Yes, I mean. Yes. You're just...you're just always there." My eyes well up with tears---I'm surprised I have any left---as words keep coming, and I keep holding onto her paw. "You're just always there and so familiar and I don't know--- They let me paint the ceiling, and I don't know--- I should've asked, I'm sorry--- I don't know, you're just one of the only constants in my stupid fucking life and I didn't even talk to you until I---"
+
+"Whoa, hey!" she says, raising her voice to cut off my stream of babbling. She looks startled, but not angry. "It's totally okay but---hey..."
+
+I've started crying in earnest again. *Looking a fool, standing there holding a girl's paw, tears pouring down your cheeks.* I manage a strangled laugh, though it's caught up in a sob. *Looking fucking crazy.*
+
+Perhaps as an echo from the café, Aurora takes charge. She guides me over to my bed and sits me down on it before settling in next to me and just holding me, arms around my shoulders.
+
+It doesn't last long, and doesn't get a tenth as bad as the crush of panic at Starry Night, but it still takes me a few minutes to get to the point where I can speak again. "Sorry, Aurora." I pace myself, so I don't just start babbling again. "Didn't mean to do that. Just such a mess today. My life's a mess, and it all hit at once."
+
+"Tell me a bit about your life, then," she asks, low voice kind. "I want to hear."
+
+I feel my face tighten in an ugly rictus, teeth bared and whiskers bristled. It's been months, but the freeze-brand scars over my cheeks give a twinge of protest. "There's nothing." As the sobs pick up again, dry now, I have to eke out words between. "There's nothing there. I'm just...paper. Paper thin with no substance. No substance at all." I trail off and take a few gulping breaths to calm myself, forcing my expression into mere hopelessness, rather than that grimace of self-loathing.
+
+Aurora watches me, and, after I've gotten my crying under control, opens her mouth as though to say something, then seems to think better of it and leans in to kiss me instead.
+
+I jolt and tense up. I hold my breath. My mind goes blank. That sensation of being about to cry fills my chest, never mind the fact that I'd already crying.
+
+Then I just lean into the kiss. Return it. No discussion about it; it feels familiar, fulfilling. I'm calm. Still at last.
+
+Aurora seems comfortable taking the lead, using her paws and subtle shifts of her weight to guide me to lay back on the bed. Once I'm there, she leans up from the kiss and grins down to me with just a hint of silliness. "You feel substantive to me."
+
+I'm wrong-footed by this and it takes a moment to parse. Once it clicks, though, I giggle. "Thanks." I feel stupid just leaving it at that, though, and add, "That was nice."
+
+"Mmhm." Still grinning, she leans into give me another quick kiss, then moves to kneel on the edge of the bed, tugging me by the paw. "Come on. Scoot."
+
+I laugh and swipe at my face with the sleeve of my shirt---I must look a mess after all of this. Still, I scoot further up onto the bed at the coyote's bidding. "Alright, alright. How come?"
+
+Aurora shrugs, her grin softening into a kind smile. "I got you thinking less about whatever's up with your life, right? I hope so, at least." I nod, and she continues, "The least I could do is also let you be comfortable on your bed instead of half hanging off of it."
+
+"Good point," I laugh and haul myself up onto the bed, flopping back against the pile of pillows. I'd bought more once it was clear I was staying here a while, and I'm thankful for it now.
+
+Aurora moves too; as I make room, she moves up onto the bed to kneel next to me. "Doing better?"
+
+"Yeah, thank you." After a moment's thought, I ask, "Why'd you do that?"
+
+The coyote frowns down to me, ears splayed in embarrassment. "I wanted to. It felt like it would work, and like it would be okay. I should have asked, though. I'm sorry."
+
+"No!" I realize how loud that was and smile sheepishly up to her. "No, it was nice. Real nice."
+
+That slightly silly grin comes back, tugging on buried memories. Memories of a latrans smile. "Good," she says, leaning in to press another kiss to my muzzle. I return this one more readily than the last, sliding my arms up around her shoulders.
+
+This goes over quite well. Aurora seems to have taken it as a sign, and leans down over me more assertively, paws planted to either side of my shoulders. After a moment's hesitation, she leans up a little further onto her knees and shifts one up over me until she's straddling my waist. She's bigger than me, weighs more than I do. Maybe it's the way she carries herself, but her weight is more comforting than heavy.
+
+"Wait," I murmur, twisting my head slightly to pull away from the kiss.
+
+Aurora immediately tenses up, ears canting back. "Uh, sorry, I don't---"
+
+"No, no. You're fine," I mumble, searching for words. "Don't know why...why this is...doing what it is. Working. Stopping me from crying and all. Taking my mind off stuff."
+
+She stays silent above me. An expectant silence she waits for me to fill.
+
+I hunt for words as best I can. "Maybe I just...I don't know. I haven't touched---or been touched by---anyone since I made it out here. Before that, even. It feels dumb to say, I guess."
+
+Aurora gives a short bark of a laugh at that, then lays her ears back again apologetically. "Sorry. You mean not at all?"
+
+"Well, sure, I mean. I shook paws with Adam and Stefan, whatever. I've *touched*, yeah, but just nothing like this."
+
+At that her expression softens and she nods. "Been a while, huh?"
+
+I nod.
+
+"And this is okay?"
+
+I nod again and lean up to give her a quick kiss. "Yeah, very."
+
+She nods, muzzle dipping to turn that motion into something of a nuzzle, and I can feel her nose tracing along one of those white bands of fur on my cheek, then under my chin, dipping down to tease at the coil of blue fur---faded now to a pale aqua---peeking up above the scoop-neck of my shirt. Her soft, low voice is muffled by my fur. "This is okay, too?"
+
+Without tucking my muzzle uncomfortably low, all I can really see are her ears, so I lean forward to place a kiss between them, fur and familiar scent tickling at my nose. "Mmhm." I've given up saying more.
+
+Aurora responds with a kiss of her own against my sternum. It's a ticklish sort of feeling, and my squirming gets a giggle, muffled as before against my chest. She settles down from her crouch above me, bringing her paws from by my shoulders to brush along my sides as she rests more fully against my front. I slip my own arms from around her until it's just my paws on her shoulders.
+
+The sheer exhilaration of physical contact seems to be filling my mind---or at least that empty void within that I've only been able to tiptoe around---with something new. Something *else.* Something other than low-level anxiety. I can close my eyes and not wind up in some horrible hopelessness. I don't have to think, I can just be here. Goodness knows why, but I can just be here.
+
+I jolt to awareness from my wandering thoughts and tense up, and Aurora's paws pause halfway up my sides. Her fingers and claws are buried in my fur with t-shirt cloth bunched around her wrists. We both hold still in that silence, a few long seconds of just our breaths. For once I don't rush to fill it with words, and simply settle back down, relaxing into her grasp.
+
+The coyote hesitates a moment longer before edging her paws upward further, inching shirt up over fur. Keeping my paws on her shoulders as best as possible, I arch my back enough to let her slide my shirt up.
+
+The exploration continues in fits and starts from there. Kisses along the blue diamond and down over my chest. Aurora shifting her weight. Me tugging my shirt off to keep it out of the way. Soft coyote nose tracing spirals in my fur. One lasting sensation, a singular point of focus.
+
+The skirt, though, requires coordination. Aurora and I have to exchange a few glances, one or two half-words, and some soft giggles before the garment winds up bunched around my waist, spilling in pools of cotton to either side of me. And then there we are: me, with shirt off but for one arm still stuck through a sleeve, skirt bunched around her waist; and Aurora, looking nervous but excited, wagging as she looks up at me along my front over a pile of rumpled skirt.
+
+"So uh..." I begin.
+
+"Mm?"
+
+"Mm."
+
+Soft noises. Gestures of paws. The warmth of a tongue, slender and attentive. Finely-tapered coyote muzzle. Lithe, arched weasel back. Quiet moans and subtle shifts to express what works and what doesn't. Paws finding places to rest, to touch, to brush and stroke.
+
+And then something new, something different clicks within me. A rising swell of pleasure, and a sudden, uneven tumble of memories. A shuddering gasp and an attachment of name to place to time. A contraction, then relaxation of muscles and a line drawn between two points. A connection.
+
+Panting to catch my breath, and glimpses of high school, of nervous first times. Memories of a muzzle and an attentive tongue. That same muzzle, that same tongue
+
+A warm glow, and a name surfacing to memory.
+
+I collapse back onto the bed, slack, and stare down over my front. Aurora stares back just as intently shifting her weight forward once more, retracing her route of kisses in double time.
+
+"Wait, you're---"
+
+"Aurora. I'm Aurora."
+
+I start to speak, but she cuts me off.
+
+"I'm Aurora. You're you."
+
+I swallow compulsively, feel fear caving in my insides, terror at having been recognized, caught. "But you were...we---"
+
+"I know who you *were*, and you know who I *was*, but I'm Aurora. You're you."
+
+I fall silent, paws clutching at the duvet in search of something solid. Aurora leans up for the final kiss, more tender than heated, more earnest than fumbling. I smell her, and taste myself.
+
+-----
+
+"We all have reasons to disappear," Aurora murmurs.
+
+We've settled back onto that stack of pillows I've collected. My skirt's still bunched up between us, but I've managed to toss my shirt to the side. She's gotten her arms around me once more and her cool nosetip is teasing along those brands again from where she lays beside me.
+
+"I suppose," I begin, then shake my head as if to throw away a bit of the non-speech. "So you came out west and transitioned out here."
+
+A faint nod, nose exploring a line perpendicular to the stripes of my brands. "I tried back home, a bit after high school and, uh...us. My heart was half out here by then anyway, though, and no one wants a mopey, trans coyote, least of all my parents."
+
+I nod. There's still that hint of a name---I can think it, but would have a hard time saying it---and that memory of a tapered muzzle between my thighs.
+
+Memories from nigh on twenty years ago.
+
+A high school fling. Two dates, a night together, and drifting apart. She had seemed so uncomfortable with herself. We'd... Well, tonight had more than made up for that.
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Mm?"
+
+"Why'd you disappear?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+Aurora lifts her head a little, a hint of a grin turning the corner of her mouth. "You don't know?"
+
+"I don't." I tilt my head to press my nose to hers. "I think that's what got me today. I saw that thing on the news. About Jarred, about myself. About home."
+
+She nods, nose against nose and stifling a yawn.
+
+"And I just don't know why," I murmur. "I unwound all of that life and came here, and I think, when I saw it, I realized I don't know why I did it."
+
+"Were you happy, back home?"
+
+"No."
+
+Aurora tucks her muzzle up under my jaw and hugs her arm around me a little tighter. "Neither was I."
+
+I brush my fingers across her arm, plowing a furrow in gray-tan fur, then smoothing it back down. I push down memories of that gawky and shy coyote, and revel instead in the comfort of Aurora.
+
+So many months of panic following so many years of discontent. So much time alone. And now, comfort and peace.
+
+Muzzle tucked over hers, I ask, "What about me did you remember?"
+
+"Your paintings."
+
+"Have I changed that much?"
+
+"I mean, you looked like someone who could've been, uh, who you were. But it was your paintings." She yawns in earnest. "The lines. The shapes."
+
+The burgundy-and-black ceiling tile is behind me. I think of looking, of disentangling myself from the coyote's arms, but there's something much better here in front of me.
+
+"And you?" Aurora sounds sleepy. "What tipped you off about me?"
+
+I think of all the things I could say---the warmth of her breath, the trail of kisses, the way her nose drew lines through my fur. The way she rested her cheek on her paw, staring out the window. The softness of her form. Her very scent.
+
+We lay together in silence. A comfortable silence. The first in a long time.

content/post/every-angel-is-terrifying.md

@@ -0,0 +1,480 @@
+---
+type: post
+title: Every Angel is terrifying
+img: flag.svg
+series: Sawtooth
+description: Derek MacIver struggles to hold his life together through the ups and downs of bipolar disorder.
+date: 2019-05-21
+categories:
+- Short story
+tags:
+- Suicide
+- Mental Health
+- Furry
+cw: Mental health (bipolar II, self-harm, suicidality - no graphic description), mention of sex scene
+---
+
+I take the bus to the edge of Sawtooth, basically as close as I can get to the highway on local transit. Beyond here it’s all industrial. All warehouses and junkyards and hulking, silent buildings painted gray or beige, or not painted at all. Machine shops, garages, or simply anonymous buildings with rows of doors and loading docks. Beyond here, there is no living. It is a liminal space.
+
+That’s okay. I just need out of this town. This stupid fucking town. This brown and flat and sad town. This restless town. This home to ennui and melancholy. This scrub of buildings and people and emotions spilled in the middle of an apathetic landscape like hay from an overturned truck.
+
+I walk from there.
+
+I walk past the buildings until the parking lots are replaced with fields and, eventually, the buildings are too.
+
+I walk until the sound of the interstate grows from the sound of wind to the sound of a waterfall, and from there to the sound of wheels on pavement.
+
+I walk along the county road, across the bridge over the freeway. Halfway across, I fumble my phone from my pocket and let it tumble over the railing to the concrete below.
+
+I keep walking.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+At fifteen, I had been an anxious and gawky dog. Too anxious. Too gawky. I took to slinking around school from class to class in silence, letting my overful backpack propel me down the halls, walking close to the walls. Any time not spent in the desk furthest from the door daydreaming was spent in front of one of the computers in the lab.
+
+Sawtooth High had a few computer classes, but none of them warranted the lab that the school had. Twenty relatively high-end machines—at least, higher end than would ever be needed for the two typing classes, the Pascal class, or the HTML class offered by the school—and my favorite, two Linux machines tucked away in a corner. Babylon and Enterprise.
+
+I spent hours on those damn machines. Sometimes, it would be me, holed up in the lab itself, sitting in front of an aged CRT monitor, claws clacking on the keys as I taught myself one programming language or another, worked on homework, or just plain goofed off online. Sometimes, it was me me surreptitiously tabbing back and forth between what I was supposed to be working on in Pascal class and a terminal window opened to Babylon (Enterprise being the machine that ran the school’s website, we were discouraged from actually using). Sometimes it was me sneaking out of bed once I was sure my mom had gone to sleep and, muffling the modem with my pillow, logging on remotely.
+
+Most often, at those times, it was me logging into some text adventure or another. Where flashy video games had never caught my attention, I’d gotten hopelessly addicted to dungeon crawling with a small party over a MUD. Where instant messengers had failed to grab me, I would spend hours chatting on MUCKs.
+
+The limitations of text only fascinated me, and though I never wrote with any seriousness other than a well-worn blog, more journal than literature, I learned to weave my tales and use my words in front of a crowd.
+
+And it was there where I found love. There where I found love and lust and romance and flings. I dated. I TSed (we were, of course, too cool to use so vulgar a word as ‘cyber’). I set up relationships for characters in our games, and I set up relationships that transcended that, two hearts touching through only those white words on a black screen.
+
+Merlin and Marusin, The\_Prof and rranger386, people I would dream about and likely never meet. We were all young. We were in love with each other in our own little worlds, serially and in parallel.
+
+And while sometimes I would think about who they were beyond the screen, it was rarely for long. I was in love with Merlin the fighter who hated magic. I was in love with The\_Prof the student who desperately wanted to be a professor when he grew up, and didn’t care which subject.
+
+Sometimes I would think about who they were when we TSed, would wonder what it would be like to have their paw instead of my own around my erection, but never for long. It was easier. It was safer to not bother with it.
+
+But our relationships were as real as any collocated flings. More so, we told ourselves, for the purity of essence that came with no flesh to get in the way.
+
+I’m sure we all hungered for touch.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+I’m regaining my *I*. My *me*. My *self*.
+
+I’m no longer just Derek, that monster, that hollow shell, that desolate vacuum. No longer watching him from the outside, watching him move with mindless purpose.
+
+I’m regaining my I, and I don’t like what I see.
+
+I keep walking.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+It was toward the tail end of high school that I began to get plagued with depression and mood swings.
+
+I was a healthy collie. All the romance of a noble lineage had gone to my parents’ heads, and there was simply no reason one of my standing should ever feel bad. Sure, the family had come on hard times financially, and Idaho had been an inexpensive refuge for us. Flyover state or no, we could keep our large house and happy lives. How could any dog be sad?
+
+And yet I was. I was in spades. I would swing down for a few months, life slowly losing its color, until I’d feel nothing except an ache behind my sternum, eating only mechanically, and only when reminded.
+
+Then it would pass. It would be dinner and I’d realize that I was actually *really* enjoying the curried chicken. I’d realize that it had been days since I’d thought about falling asleep and not waking up. I’d have energy.
+
+I’d have a bit too much energy.
+
+Mom would shrug and mumble something about boys. “Men in this family, always so moody. You’ll grow out of it.”
+
+I mostly kept it to myself. When I did share it with friends online, it was to commiserate in the “Parents, eh? What do they know?” style that never goes out of fashion among teenagers.
+
+Still, as awful as it was, I learned the rhythm of it. I’d spend a month or so feeling terrible, three months feeling pretty good, and then a month feeling great.
+
+Not just great, *better* than great.
+
+I’d spend all of my allowance in a week. I’d sleep three, four hours a night. I’d write page after page of backstory for my role-playing characters. I’d scribble ideas as fast as they came to me and still not be fast enough.
+
+I still have a folder of those ideas. They’re illegible, unnerving.
+
+And then, over the course of a week at most, I’d be back underwater once more.
+
+Depression is a strange thing.
+
+I tried at several points to capture some sense of it in words, but nothing ever quite fit. Whenever I did, I found myself using a lot of ellipses just to fill in, textually, my fumbling for words with enough meaning. I came up with stuff like, “I dunno. My brain just isn’t all me. Like… It’s something else. It’s there and exerts influence on me life, but it spends an inordinate about of time trying to destroy me.”
+
+Or poetry. I tried to throw that at depression, too, but it just came out sounding stilted and weird. I’d wind up talking about fire a lot. Fire and birds, for some reason.
+
+Which was nonsense, really, but each in such a way that seemed to cover at least one small corner of depression.
+
+Depression is big. It’s vast and terrible and empty. Completely empty, and there you are, in the middle of it, feeling bad about nothing.
+
+There’s just no sense to it. No sense in trying to describe nothing. A ‘nothing’ which is also nonsensical.
+
+And yet I keep trying.
+
+All these words…
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+> *Every angel is terrifying.*
+
+The words start a whisper, a half-heard echo. They are a niggling thought, a loose tooth, a thread to be worried loose from a hem.
+
+And before long, they’re resounding within my head. They pound and boom in time with my steps, and I start murmuring them under my breath. “Every angel is terrifying. Every angel is terrifying.”
+
+As with all linguistic satiation, I can’t tell when it is that they stop holding any meaning. It’s as though I let my attention slip, and the next time the phrase rolls through my mouth, they’re awkward shapes tumbling from my tongue, buzzing in my nose, brushing past my whiskers. Poetry reduced to its bare building blocks becomes as clumsy as any other guttural utterance, though they may stack better than most.
+
+“Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich,” I try, hoping the original German might somehow waken something other than dread within me—it doesn’t—and then I bark out a laugh, realizing maybe it’s doing exactly what it was meant to.
+
+The single laugh does not echo. It dies among the weeds and crumbly blacktop of the county road.
+
+I keep walking. I keep murmuring my mantra. Keep muttering long after the words have lost meaning. Long after all that’s left is a bottomless, emotionless nothing. Long after all thoughts have left my head, except for the realization that I desperately, desperately want to die. Realize it for the million, billion, trillionth time.
+
+I keep walking.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+“LTS, this is Derek, how can I help you?”
+
+It was one of those staid lines, the standard greeting that everyone gets when they called our department, Library Technical Services. One of those lines that was so rote, such a patterned behavior, that I’d answered my own cellphone with it once or twice.
+
+I’d worked at the campus library for a year and a half at that point, and eighty percent of the problems we take care of were reported through a form on the library’s intranet. Even so, I’d gotten that line down pat. The line and the tone. I lowered my voice a few steps, spoke quietly and soothingly, sounding attentive. The people who called rather than using the request form were usually doing so for a reason: they wanted service right then, their problem was urgent, and usually affected more than just themselves. Most issues with customer-facing stuff—the public computers, desktops or laptops—were reported through a phone call.
+
+“I…I can’t find the photo editing program, and I can’t find the page layout program, and I can’t find email, and…and gosh darn it, you guys promised all of this would be on my new computer!” the frustrated voice whined from the receiver. I felt my ears cringe back and the fur at the back of my neck rise.
+
+“Alright, ma’am, slow up a sec, everything’s going to be alright, now–”
+
+“No, everything is not going to be alright! I was told I’d have all the software that was on my old machine back again, and it’s not, otherwise why would you guys ask for it?”
+
+“Ma’am, please slow down, I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said. “When we upgraded your computer, you were upgraded to the new email suite, so your desktop shortcut is probably broken. I can fix that and install the other software items you need here in just a sec. Can you compile a list of all the old software you had on your computer?”
+
+She was near tears by then. “I don’t understand why you guys even asked me what software I wanted on the new computer if you’re not going to install any of it!”
+
+“That’s where the misunderstanding was,” I replied hastily, tail tucking out of instinct. “We were asking for a list of software to be installed on *everyone’s* computer in Liaisons, not just your station. We install the same operating system image on everyone’s computer in that area.”
+
+“Well, this is absurd. I need email back, and I need photo editing and page layout…ing!” She sounded so much like a petulant child, I dropped the phone.
+
+No, tell a lie. I threw the phone. The portable handset skittered across the carpet and knocked against the far wall, battery cover snapping open and the battery pack tumbling free, smoking.
+
+Bad sign.
+
+I rushed to pick up the battery pack and hold the shorting wires apart so that I could tape them separately.
+
+I shouldn’t have thrown the phone, to be honest. It was just as childish and petulant as the employee I was talking to. No denying it felt good, though, that catharsis.
+
+But that day hadn’t been a good one. It felt like school and work were conspiring against me to make my life as hard as possible. Majoring in computer science had sounded so fun when I’d picked it, but the more I learned about computers, the more I learned to loathe them. The more I loathed computers, the more I loathed a key part of my identity, loathed myself as a whole. The more I loathed computers, the more I loathed school, the worse my grades, the angrier the calls home, the less I spoke, the more I hid.
+
+The last thing I needed was an employee throwing a temper tantrum and blaming me for her non-issues blown way out of proportion.
+
+We knew it was a non-issue, too. Her software had indeed been included on the list we were given with her name beside it, so we had checked her drive over the network and found that the last access times for the editing software had been only a few hours after their creation dates, more than a year ago. Always on a quest to trim down the size of the disk images, boss had gone on a bit of a spree—or the opposite of a spree, rather—pointedly not including software that people didn’t use on the Liaisons image.
+
+A minute and a half later found me sitting in my chair trying to fix the portable handset I’d just thrown across the lab with little success. The employee, a fisher, came peeking in through the door to LTS. I held up the phone toward her and mumbled something about having a little bit of trouble with the handset, simple mechanical repair, sorry for the dropped call. My boss peeked out of his office, glancing between us to see what the noise was.
+
+“Matt,” she whined to him. “When you gave me the new computer, I was told that I would have all of my old programs on it and they’re not there!” She sounded a hairsbreadth away from tears, and my boss’s eyes went wide at the tinge of hysteria, his muscles tensing as he backed away from this new threat. I noted with a small amount of satisfaction that the coyote’s own tail tucks as reflexively as mine.
+
+“I think there was a misunderstanding,” he said carefully. “Everything will be alright, if you just give us a second, we’ll–”
+
+I was already wincing away from the conversation at his very familiar words by the time she stamped her foot. Her tail was already bottle-brushed out, and I could tell she was only a moment away from hissing. I took that as my cue and quietly ducked out around her to slip out of the library.
+
+I walked around the building. I took the counter-clockwise route, knowing I risked being seen from LTS’ view of the parking lot, but trusting my boss to have things in hand.
+
+An unseasonably warm winter was heading toward a cold snap. I could smell it in the air, as though all of the moisture had been packed away for the weekend. Shortcutting through a grassy alley between the library and the psychology building, I crunched through dead leaves with paws buried deep in pockets.
+
+I wasn’t relaxed enough by the time I reach the front doors again and so I walked around the building a second time, thinking.
+
+Most of the employees in the library were meek, older, librarian types. I didn’t mind that. It made my job a whole lot easier. I told them to do this, not to do that, and they obeyed with a look of fear or reverential awe in their eyes. We had a few that were bad for thinking they knew rather more about computers than they really did; bad, because we got called in to clean up particularly broken messes.
+
+Still feeling surly, I decided this particular librarian was the last type: the customer. The customer is always right, even when they’re wrong, even when it’s to the detriment of the those around them.
+
+I really shouldn’t have thrown the phone.
+
+When I got back into the lab, my boss handed me a small stack of install disks and a list of downloadable software with an apologetic look. “She was awful…I think I’m scarred for life,” he mumbled. “I’m gonna need you to install those for her. She went home for the day, though, so feel free to do it remotely.”
+
+“What’s her computer again?” I asked resignedly. Fair’s fair.
+
+“N-W-A-I-T-E”
+
+“Nora? Nancy? I forget her name. Guess I blocked it from my mind. Should probably email her an apology.”
+
+He gave an abbreviated wag, always a sign of trouble. “‘I moan’ backwards.”
+
+I groaned, rolled my eyes at the strained humor, and set to work installing Mrs. Waite’s software.
+
+That night, I dully made myself a grilled cheese sandwich, poured a finger of precious, ill-gotten gin over stale ice, and holed up in front of my computer, wrapped in a blanket with tail draped limply from the back of my chair.
+
+For an hour, perhaps, I scrolled through blogs and forums. I read up on my friends’ brighter lives. I read threads I didn’t care about. After a certain point, I didn’t even read. I scrolled mechanically, and when I hit the bottom, I’d click the ‘next page’ button.
+
+Or perhaps I read, I don’t know. Perhaps the pattern-matching part of my brain that recognized letters and words and sentences kept on doing its job. Perhaps words and meaning did flow through my mind, but none of it found any foothold. None of it stuck.
+
+It was a flashing icon in system tray that caught my attention, and I sheepishly clicked over to chat, wondering just how long it had been blinking at me.
+
+There, tinted cyan amid the general stream of chatter in the room, was a private message. With a force of will, I crunched my mind back into gear, and read to understand.
+
+    Peter\_P pages, “Hey, you okay?” to you.
+
+Before I knew what I was doing, I was already well into my reply third reply, and by then, I had too much momentum to stop.
+
+    You page, “Yeah. I mean, I guess I’m depressed. Work is probably the highlight of my day if only because I have to be there and doing my job. Even with classes, I can just zone out in the back and feel bad almost in private. I come home and avoid my roommates and idle on here.” to Peter\_P.
+    You page-pose, “Piree sighs, ”I’m okay, though.“” to Peter\_P.
+    You page, “Or my life is okay, I dunno.” to Peter\_P.
+    You page, “Shouldn’t complain, I’m in a good spot. It’s just hard when it all feels so pointless and empty. Sometimes I get so desperately sad and everything hurts or whatever, but this is just like having my heart and brain replaced with cotton balls. It’s like thinking through gauze.” to Peter\_P.
+
+I realized, by the time I manage to lift my paws from the keys and cup them around my blunt muzzle, that I’ve started crying, the fur on my cheeks damp with tears. I wished I could delete messages. Erase them from the screen, from the server, from Peter’s mind, if he’d already read them. I wished I could take it back and just be empty in my room, at my poster-covered walls, rather than empty on the internet at distant friends.
+
+Greeted with silence, I tucked my muzzle down and covered the rest of my face with my hands and held my breath, willing time to stop, reverse its own flow, and drop me back at work.
+
+When I looked up again, I was greeted not with a reply from Peter, nor even simple silence, but a few lines on the screen.
+
+    Peter\_P teleports away.
+    MEETME: Peter\_P would like you to join them at their current location.
+    MEETME: type “mjoin Peter\_P” to join them.
+
+For another minute, I stared at the screen, unable to comprehend what would lead him to want to talk about this further, in some quieter room.
+
+“Ah, fuck it,” I said aloud, typed <span>mjoin peter\_p</span>, and whacked the enter key.
+
+    Peter\_P hugs!
+    Peter\_P says, “Tell me what’s up?”
+    Piree hugs and sighs. “I dunno. Depressed, I guess. That time of the month.”
+    Peter\_P says, “Yeah...”
+    Peter\_P says, “I know you’re poking fun, but it does seem cyclical.”
+    You say, “’it’?”
+    Peter\_P says, “Depression, yeah.”
+    Peter\_P says, “In you, I mean. You seem to go through these cycles of really energetic and really depressed.”
+    You say, “Yeah...”
+    You say, “That noticeable?”
+    Peter\_P sticks his tongue out. “Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s not like super blatant or anything, just something I’ve noticed about you.”
+    You say, “heh”
+    You say, “You pay that much attention to me, then?”
+
+I grunted and spent another moment wishing I could take back what I’d just sent.
+
+    Peter\_P says, “I guess :P”
+    You say, “Sorry, that came out snippy. I didn’t mean it.”
+    Peter\_P shrugs. “I guess I do, though. I like you. I worry about you.”
+    Piree hugs. “Thanks. That means a lot.”
+
+When I next looked at the clock, it was nearing two in the morning. I’d spent nearly five hours talking with Peter. I thanked him profusely for staying up so late with me—<span>“No problem, I don’t have work tomorrow”</span>—and signed off for the night.
+
+I went to bed…not exactly happy, but comforted. As I started nodding off, I realized that I’d disconnected in Peter’s room, my character had fallen asleep there. A smile tugged at my lips. It felt right.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+> *The beautiful is right at the margin of the terrifying.*
+
+And it *is* beautiful.
+
+With the sun at my back, I trudge east. The din of the freeway long ago softened through waterfall and back into the sound of distant winds.
+
+I feel those winds blow through me. Not just blow through my fur—the air itself was still—but through me, through my core. I feel hollow, empty. I feel like one of the pipes in an organ I got to tour some years back. I feel the wind blow through me, and I feel myself excited, humming. Hollow, but humming. Cold, but buzzing.
+
+I realize my breath is coming hoarsely now. My steps are heavy and my feet hurt and I’m breathing hard. I’ve been stomping without realizing it.
+
+I slow my pace and focus on walking like a normal dog. No sense in getting worn out early. I want to get away from town. I want to walk far enough away that the town of too many memories. Of so many visits with Peter, of jobs left behind, of feelings too strong to bear.
+
+I walk east under some other authority’s direction. I am not in control of my body anymore. I am not in control of my thoughts.
+
+I have no thoughts.
+
+I have no thoughts. Emotions well up, rage, and die within, ceaselessly and directionlessly.
+
+I have no thoughts. I ride my emotions from one swell to the next, surfing along, feeling that I, too, will rage and die.
+
+I have no thoughts.
+
+I keep walking.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Much of my undergrad was borne out of depression. School was just a thing I did during the days, but my time spent in front of a keyboard was a part of myself. Each story, each post, each role-play session was a piece of myself. Each was a tiny rock to throw at this vasty nothingness. Justifying the things I liked, delineating the craziness of lives real and manufactured, gushing about worlds fantastic…they were all ways for me to pound my fists against nothing at all.
+
+A scant two months into my second year at university, I crashed hard and tried to commit suicide, a private affair I never told anyone about, and after that, I just buried myself in it—in my computer and in the life lived there, the life I was soon sharing with Peter.
+
+I found ways to write more whenever possible, just to try and fill that big, quiet nothing. I splashed around in great heaps of words, scrabbling at every pebble of a story I could find beneath the surface. I prowled through the tangled thicket of fiction and nonfiction, hunting for ideas to highlight. I took way too many metaphors way, way too far.
+
+And you know what? It worked.
+
+At least, after a fashion. I started to feel fulfillment. I started *filling* my weekends with writing. I got in trouble with Peter for idling out repeatedly during conversations, words flowing into the editor instead of between the two of us. I started to gain energy just from the act of *spending* energy on something I loved wholeheartedly.
+
+In a flash of insight—or perhaps mania—I scheduled an appointment with someone in the arts department. Changing degrees and the course of my life was, it turns out, as simple as signing a sheet of paper and waiting a week for confirmation. The next semester, I would be able to start signing up for classes to work toward a degree in creative writing. It would likely extend my undergrad by a year, but thankfully, I’d gotten plenty of the core curriculum classes out of the way already.
+
+One of the downsides of working on insight is, by the very definition, a lack of foresight. Telling my parents resulted in them immediately pulling financial support for my tuition.
+
+“I’m not going to help buy you a useless future,” dad growled. “I can’t stop you from throwing away your life; you’re a fucking adult. That won’t be on me, though.”
+
+It was only by dint of luck that the current semester, plus my living situation for the remainder of the semester and summer was already paid for. That check had already been deposited.
+
+The thing that sealed the deal for me was that I still enjoyed my time at school even when the next downswing struck later that semester. I’d already realized that decisions made when I felt good weren’t always the right ones, but if they still felt right when I was depressed, I could be sure that they’d be more likely to stick.
+
+Such had not been the case with comp sci, it seemed.
+
+Depression was not solved by increasing quality of life. Its tenor changed, to be sure, but the dependable five month cycle continued throughout the years, souring summers and leaving me bedridden with “the flu” or “a cold” for days at a time.
+
+I would spend the days under the covers with the second-hand laptop I got from the library surplus and, depending on the weather, either a glass of gin and ice or a hot cocoa spiked with peppermint schnapps, alternating between writing and programming, masturbating to old TS logs, and crying.
+
+I would role play as my best, purest characters. Or perhaps, with Peter, I would role play as my better self. Someone happier than I was. Healthier, more responsive, more engaging.
+
+I would go to bed feeling guilty for wearing such a mask, consoling myself in the fact that without it, I might wind up without him.
+
+I would marvel the enormity of this empty space in which I inhabited.
+
+I would marvel at the film-like quality to my life.
+
+I would marvel at the diegesis of objects, sounds, tastes, smells.
+
+I inhabited a spotlight shone on a flat gray ground.
+
+I began relying on alcohol to feather the edge of it, making the boundary between myself and that emptiness softer, less cruelly sharp.
+
+I used the pain of plucked fur or hot knife-tip against skin to send up magnesium flares, enough to briefly light up the world around me and offer a sense of clarity, however superficial. The mundane, everyday-ness of wound care would ground me for a week, two. Before long, my arms were ragged, scarred.
+
+None of that made me any less of myself. They didn’t sweep away Derek. It simply became a part of me while I wasn’t watching. The pain, the gin, the days holed up in bed were a fine set of glasses for helping me see which things I was burning myself over were real, and which were just phantoms in that dreamscape.
+
+And then, with clockwork predictability, it would lift. With a sharp coolness burning my nostrils, I’d rise before the sun and walk the neighborhood, find my way to The Book and The Bean, and see eyes other than my own.
+
+With only a modicum of foresight or perhaps practiced nonchalance, I slipped from my undergraduate program to an MFA program in Moscow, Idaho, off in the far west of the state.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Memories, fragments, wordless things crowd me, wraiths tugging at my clothing and fur. I am caught up in these non-thoughts, these non-memories and non-words, buoyed up, borne aloft, buffeted.
+
+My steps falter. I stumble and weave. I fall once, twice. Tired. Exhausted. Spent. Drained of life and purpose and intent.
+
+Derek is gone. The collie is gone. There is only the *I*, the *me*, the barest speck of *self*.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+“Oh god, it’s so much easier to fly into Boise than Moscow or Sawtooth,” Peter grunted, luggage clattering to the floor as we hauled it from the carousel.
+
+I laughed. “The city does come with its benefits, yeah. Pretty good food, and it’s big enough to get you to visit more.”
+
+“Yeah, I turn into a pumpkin if I leave the five boroughs at all.”
+
+“Well, it’s not *that* big, and not nearly as tall, thankfully.”
+
+Peter smiled apologetically, tall ears splayed. “Sorry. Can’t help my apartment’s so high up.”
+
+Telescoping the handle out of one of the shepherd’s two suitcases, I guided him away from the crowd and over to the rental car stations. “You’re fine, love, promise. You turn into a pumpkin when you get out of the city, and I feel like any building higher than three stories is bound to come tumbling down.”
+
+“I know. Different strokes, I guess. I feel so exposed out here. It’s all so flat, I feel like the tallest thing around.”
+
+“And I feel like a tiny speck in New York.” I shrugged. “Despite growing up next to the mountains.”
+
+The rental car was a concession to life in the Midwest. It was all well and good to take public transit in a place like New York City, or even cabs, but even though public transit wasn’t exactly terrible in Boise, it was much harder to get from the airport to my apartment here on public transit than it was out east. Besides, it would allow us the opportunity to hunt down good restaurants or hunt for good hiking east of the city.
+
+We spent the drive back catching up. We talked plenty, both over text and phone, but for some reason, those first few hours after touchdown always felt like a period of reacquainting.
+
+I told him of life in grad school, of looking at doctoral programs, of the way that it always felt like stumbling when I started teaching in the fall, before I’d fall back into the rhythm of it, no matter how many fall semesters I taught. He told me about his design work in the city, and though I’d heard plenty about it before, it was suddenly more engaging, if only for the fact that I could see his wild gestures when describing it out of the corner of my eye as I drove us home.
+
+By the halfway point, we’d re-purposed the center console as platform to bear our clasped paws, and by the final mile, our paws had each wound up on the other’s thigh.
+
+The bags didn’t even make it to the bedroom. Neither did most of our clothes, for that matter. They left a trail of evidence for some keen-eyed detective from the entryway to my bed, where the heady scent of sex hung thick in the air: a final clue for why two dogs were sprawled, panting, fur matted with semen and lube.
+
+An hour’s lazy conversation, a shared shower, and a glass of wine on the patio led us to the conclusion that it was far, far too nice out to bother with eating indoors, and so we walked to the convenience store for a simple dinner and struck out for the park.
+
+“It’s a different kind of height.”
+
+“Mm?”
+
+“The mountains,” Peter said.
+
+We’d settled down on a pair of folding camp chairs in a small park and were sharing an inexpensive can of wine—though perhaps ‘inexpensive’ isn’t a necessary prefix to ‘can of wine’, but they looked like sodas from a distance, so they worked well for picnics. Before us rose a slow slope, the neatly manicured grass of the park ending abruptly at the base of a dun-colored hill.
+
+“That’s hardly a mountain,” I laughed.
+
+“Yeah, but, like…in Sawtooth. Those were real mountains.”
+
+“Fair. What do you mean, different kind of height, though?”
+
+Peter took a long sip from the can, and we sat in silence, waiting for the last of the sun to slip off the tip of Camel’s Back. Once it had settled into the evening with the rest of us, he continued. “It’s so haphazard. All the buildings in the city, they’re all so regular, even when they’re tall. I can stand by the base and look straight up and know—*know*—that I will see sky. I don’t feel that way with mountains.”
+
+“I suppose I felt the opposite,” I said after a pause. “I always felt like they were looming over me, like their whole weight would topple down on top of me if the wind blew wrong.”
+
+The other dog laughed. “I guess we’re the same, then, for different reasons. I always felt like the mountains were going to come down on me. They sit there to the…well, to the east, here, but back in Sawtooth to the west, and they just–” he waved his paw vaguely at the hill before us. “–they just stand there. Wild and untamed. There’s no order. You don’t know what they’re going to do. Not like in cities, where the buildings are…are manifestations of order. Order imposed on physical reality.”
+
+“You, my darling, are drunk,” I said, and we both laughed again. “But I think I understand. You feel like the mountains could coming crashing down on you, because there’s nothing to stop them from doing so.”
+
+“Mm.”
+
+“And I feel like there’s nothing to stop the buildings from coming down on me because I know how bad we are at ordering our lives; how could we possibly be any better at ordering nature?”
+
+Peter passed the can of wine to me to finish, waited for me to transfer it to my other paw, and then took my closer one in his. We sat, paw in paw, until evening settled into twilight.
+
+That night, as we lay curled together, I wondered aloud for the millionth time what kept Peter with me. He drew so much strength from order, and I was such a train wreck.
+
+“Sometimes I feel like you’re the mountains. There’s nothing to stop you from falling, because there’s so little order in your life. Doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
+
+I hesitated in the slow strokes of my fingers through his fur, frowning up into the darkness.
+
+“I’m sorry, Piree,” he mumbled, falling back to that comfortable name of years ago, a username turned pet name. “That maybe came out wrong. Maybe I’m still a bit drunk.”
+
+“No, you’re probably right.” I sighed, turning until I could tuck my muzzle beneath his. “I *would* have a hard time trusting order. I don’t have any proof that it actually exists.”
+
+We slept.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Shivering in the March evening’s chill, I come to a tee in the road. Staring out at the unbroken rolling plains beyond town, I linger. The sun sets, the moon rises. Stars fade into view, and still I stare at the low scrub.
+
+The first true thought that enters my mind is of how small I am. I mentally try to estimate how many of myself stacked head to toe and packed in cords it would take to equal just one of those low hills, not to mention just one of the mountains of the Sawtooth range behind me. And how little all my problems must mean to that many people.
+
+All that I love feels poisoned to me, tainted by the fact that I burned so hard in an attempt to light up all this nothing a little better. I feel forced to like these things because I’m trammeled by this indescribably empty space with them.
+
+No, tell a lie. I did this. I tore Peter up and threw him away because he wasn’t in there with me in the midst of that nothing. I was a coward: afraid to be alone, but more afraid to ask for help, so I removed my choice in the matter.
+
+All these words, all this burning bright in an attempt to light up vast, crenelated spaces of nothing…perhaps it’s just a hunt for a reason to incinerate myself.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+These upswings, if that’s what they are, have long since ceased to actually feel good. It’s just depression at the speed of sound. Depression, but if you stop moving, you die.
+
+And now that’s where I am. That’s *who* I am. That’s all that’s left. In the last week, all of that sludge of depression sloughed off and I was left jewel-hard and burning from within. All of that nothing had transmuted into hatred, utter revulsion for myself and everything good in my life.
+
+I am not myself.
+
+Burned too long, and all that’s left is a charred scaffold of a personality.
+
+I am not myself.
+
+In the middle of class earlier today, I simply gave in. I must have stopped talking for a long moment, as a hesitant “Doctor MacIver…?” came from the middle of the room. As my only response, I stood up and walked silently from the room.
+
+No, not ‘I’. I was not the one doing these things, anymore. Someone else was. Derek MacIver was. I watched numbly as he paced out the door.
+
+He didn’t stop in the hallway.
+
+He didn’t stop at the door outside, nor at the quad.
+
+He didn’t stop until he made it home.
+
+He didn’t stop at his door. Not until he made it to the computer did he stop, and only then to lean over the keyboard words spilling directly onto the screen with no thought to back them up.
+
+    You mail, “I honestly feel sorry for you. The only thing more pathetic than myself is anyone who would love me.” to Peter\_P.
+
+After countless nightmares wherein I would somehow find the one single thing I could say to hurt someone—no, not hurt, crush; completely and utterly destroy—any revulsion of actually doing so was lost amid the flames of boundless loathing for this Derek, this hollow shell of a collie.
+
+Then it was just a matter of him grabbing a few things and hopping on the bus.
+
+I had no thoughts.
+
+I had no thoughts.
+
+I had no *I*.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The sound of a car door shutting brings me out of my reverie, if reverie it is, and I blink at my surroundings. I’m standing at the side of the road with the barbed wire of the fence clenched in my fists, a small, cheap two-door parked about twenty feet away. It’s a small wonder I hadn’t heard it before, nor even noticed the headlights casting my shadow before me. There’s a dull pain in my hands. A far away pain. A someone-else pain.
+
+Once the driver walking towards me resolves from a blurry black cutout against their headlights to the features of one of my students—a solidly built mountain lion, glasses, feminine features on a masculine face; the one who had called after me in class—I relax my grip on the fence. Without saying a word, the puma leads me over to the passenger door of the car and makes me sit in the seat. They tear strips from a towel in the back seat to wrap my bleeding pads.
+
+My paws. My paws covered in lacerations and punctures from the barbed-wire fencing. They are not my paws. They are someone else’s. They are somewhere else.
+
+Am I me? Is Derek myself? Who lived this life? Who loved? Who destroyed? Great, choking sobs begin to muddle all the ‘who’s and obscure all the ‘why’s.
+
+With my student’s help, I use one of the strips to wipe the tears and snot from my face. The mountain lion shuts the door, pads back around the car, and turns it around on the narrow county road.
+
+When we reach the university, the cat finally speaks, asking me where I live from there. I mumble my address, and another two minutes of silence follow before we pull up in front of the condos I live in.
+
+Both of us get out of the car. They ask if I need help inside, if I need an ambulance. I shake my head, and the mountain lion gives me a hug.
+
+It isn’t a guy hug, isn’t that chaste, dry form of affection I’ve never been able to understand, though it’s far from any embrace I’d shared with Peter. There’s more support, more emotion, more understanding in that hug than in any of the many words I’ve been capable of hearing over the past week, month, year, lifetime, and I have to try my hardest to make it back inside before bursting into tears once more.
+
+> *Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the ranks of angels?  
+> And even supposing one of them took me suddenly to their breast,  
+> I would perish within their overpowering being,  
+> For the beautiful is right at the margin of the terrifying, which we can only just endure,  
+> And we marvel at it, because it holds back in serene disdain and does not destroy us.  
+> Every angel is terrifying.*
+
+I have found my *I*.
+
+I fumble the snub-nosed revolver from the waistband of my pants, swing open the loading gate, and, one by one, dump the rounds into my bandaged paw. Acting on serene autonomy, I lock the gun into its case once more, and tip the cartridges out of my paw and into the trash.

content/post/fisher.md

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+type: post
+title: Fisher
+description: A fisher walks and hunts for meaning.
+date: 2018-09-11
+ratings: G
+tags:
+- Furry
+- Death
+categories:
+- Flash fiction
+---
+
+Alv pinned his ears back against his head as he stomped down the length of the block. His boots were too much for the drizzle that the weather offered, but it was that or his threadbare sneakers, and some tiny part of his mind had done the calculation without the rest of him knowing, and he'd tugged the heavy things on for the walk.
+
+The air inside had grown too stuffy for the old fisher, or perhaps his eyes had grown too tired of reading, or maybe it was something in his joints, a feeling of too much space that needed to be compressed down. The solution, no matter the problem, was to move.
+
+His third time around the block, knees and hips aching from walking in work boots that were never meant for the task, and Alv still hadn't figured out what it was that kept driving him out of the house. He'd walk, day after day, until his tail drooped and his feet started dragging. Sometimes, like today, he'd circle the block. Some days he'd drive the mile to the supermarket and walk aimlessly up and down each aisle, eventually picking up a drink or a snack, just to make the trip worth it. Other days, he'd just pace in his building's parking lot.
+
+He didn't think.
+
+Or maybe he thought too much. Maybe that was it. Maybe the fisher's every step was taken to crush too many thoughts beneath the soles of his boots, pressing the life out of them through the sheer weight of his restlessness.
+
+He didn't know what it was that, day by day, drove him to his feet, drove him to walk until he couldn't walk anymore. He just knew that if he didn't, that ache within him, that burning, that itch would continue to grow, and he'd start to feel like his heart was being extruded through his ribcage, like his fur was coming out in clumps, like he couldn't possibly breathe deep enough.
+
+His wife, gone now these five years, had been fond of calling him a restless soul. He wasn't sure that he was capable of believing in a soul, nor that this increasingly restless state of being was confined to something so intangible. He was just restless.
+
+*Just*. *Only*.
+
+That's all he was. There was nothing to him except restlessness. After Naomi's death, he'd slowly become less and less of a person, until all that was left was the urge to move, the terror over being confined to one place for any length of time.
+
+His tail starting to sag, the fisher could feel all the calm he'd accumulated through the walk start to ebb, the tide of anxiety creeping in from the edges, from his fur inwards. One last trip around the block, he figured, was all he could manage before resting again.
+
+By the time he made it around to his building again, Alv was well and truly sore, knees and hips aching from the repetitive motion of stomping around the block. Still, he couldn't bring himself to head up to his apartment quite yet. The idea of being closed in such a space held negative appeal. Something about the thought of four walls was actively repulsive.
+
+So he sat on the damp stoop and watched the trees across the street.
+
+The drizzle had dried up --- though he hadn't noticed when --- and all that was left was the occasional *pat* of drop on leaf as some bit of water got too heavy and sought a new home closer to the ground. There was just that gentle sound. Despite the hour, the street was empty of traffic, as though the shoddy weather had chased everyone inside.
+
+"Would that my soul were that calm," he mumbled to the bare street at last and levered himself up creakily, climbing the rest of the stairs to head inside.

content/post/the-fool.md

@@ -0,0 +1,352 @@
+---
+categories:
+- Short Story
+series: Sawtooth
+ratings: G
+date: 2017-05-08
+description: A student and a motherly badger explore questions of identity through a tarot reading.
+img: the-fool.png
+type: post
+pdf: the-fool.pdf
+tags:
+- Furry
+- Tarot
+- Gender
+title: The Fool
+---
+
+The badger looms over a small table, the short sleeve of her smock tugged down toward the table by a glass candy thermometer. A deck of colorful cards rest neatly stacked on its surface.
+
+Contrary to expectations, the room is bright and spacious. No hint of incense or dark velour drapes, just a simple living room in a simple home, a simple badger and some simple cards. She can't be older than fifty, and she's of a more motherly bent than a mystical one.
+
+*More motherly than my mother, at least*, I think. *More earthy and far less mystical.*
+
+"Tell me about your day, Avery," she begins, and as I speak, she shuffles a worn deck of cards, nodding along with me. She draws cards yan tan tethera, and lays them face up on the table with a casual slowness that does little to distract from my words. Still, my language is stilted, and I find myself tracing the edges of the table with my gaze or watching her paws rather than making eye contact.
+
+"Now," she says when I trail off to an uneasy silence. The badger, the table and cards, a bright room with motes in afternoon sunbeams; an image more meaningful than I anticipated. And me --- dingy clothes draped over a broad frame I never wanted --- out of place. "Here are three cards. Look, and tell me the first thing you notice."
+
+"Notice?" I ask. I sound dubious even to myself.
+
+"Notice," she confirms. "What do you see? When you look at the cards, what jumps out at you? Colors, motions, angles and lines. What do you see?"
+
+I stare at the badger. She stares back, then lets out a kindly laugh and gestures down at the cards.
+
+Three cards, laid out in a line. I move my stare to those, more bewildered than anything, trying to pick out singular things. "From each of them? One at a time?"
+
+She shrugs, smiling not unkindly.
+
+*Odd,* I think. *How such a small task could feel overwhelming.*
+
+I puff out a breath of air, whiskers bristling, and tap at the first card. "Well, this one's upside down, for starters. The, uh...Page of Wands." Digging through memories, I try, "A page is like a squire or something, right? Someone who helps a knight?"
+
+"Yes, a young person, someone in training." She grins and nods down to the remaining stack of cards. "There are knights in the deck, too, but that's for another time."
+
+Whiskers still canted forward, I nod and hesitate for a moment. "So, what does it being upside down mean?"
+
+"You tell me."
+
+I roll my eyes. Still, she sounds kind rather than petulant or snide, so I think about upside-down cards. Upside-down figures, upside-down and tipped over, upset in the literal sense of the word. Upside-down meanings. Meanings inverted, reversed, turned over.
+
+"I think I see." I intend it as the beginning of a sentence, but seeing the badger's smile widen, I leave it at that. I shut out the other cards, focus on the Page. "In training, hmm? They looks like they're investigating or contemplating. The, uh...I guess the wand. The wand is the only thing growing, the only thing with green in the entire scene."
+
+"Learning about life. Investigating growth." The badger nods, but neither confirming nor sage. Simply agreeing. "But reversed."
+
+"Not learning?" At this, I sense her expression close down. It's not a visible thing; it's a sensation of her movement of thought being put on hold. "Not...not doing anything with learning, perhaps?"
+
+The badger nods. I can see the clip on her thermometer holding it to the over-washed fabric, see beads of sugar still clinging to glass, bobbing with her movements. "Wands are for beginnings, for doing. Or perhaps activating is better." She sets a paw next to the card. "This Page --- a bear, maybe? I've never figured that out --- is learning, but not moving, not beginning. There is knowledge, but no decision."
+
+"Activation energy!" I blurt, and, seeing questions in her eyes, continue. "Like in chemistry. It's dorky, but there has to be enough energy for an electron to jump from one sphere to the next; it just sits there otherwise. It needs the proper amount of activation energy to get going."
+
+Questions turn to understanding, but her gaze stays locked on mine, waiting.
+
+"I don't have the energy."
+
+"Perhaps not. Or perhaps you do, but you're --- you or something within you --- is not letting it reach the activation. The energy may be there, but blocked."
+
+I have to restrain myself from a snide smile. A reaction to my mom's mysticism, maybe. To crystals and blocked energy. In the badger, though, I sense only earnestness. "Energy as in will? Purpose?"
+
+She shrugs. My choice, apparently.
+
+"Everything's yellow in the card--"
+
+"Energetic color, yellow."
+
+"--yellow except for the black of the salamanders on their coat-thing."
+
+She nods, murmurs down to the card, "His creations, perhaps. How many full ones do you see?"
+
+I lean closer, nudging glasses further up my blunt snout. "Two, maybe three out of a dozen or so."
+
+"If the card were upright, those other ones would be creations yet to happen." Her voice carries knowledge, and more authority than she's shown yet. "Reversed, that becomes flipped around. It could be creations abandoned, or it could be things you're afraid to start.
+
+"These cards named after people or titles --- the page, the knight, the king, the queen --- they're sometimes about people. Maybe this card's about you. Or they all could be. Maybe--"
+
+I smirk, nod my head toward the second card. "So I'm the fool?"
+
+"Maybe they're just facets of yourself." She finishes, returning my smirk.
+
+Thus chastened, I look at the second card. "Okay, well, there's a dog, one of those breeds with short fur, though it doesn't look like any of the dogs I've met. He's--" I catch myself, seeing androgyny in the dog's features and tamping down the yearning for my own. "They're stepping toward the edge of a cliff, with a little spirit thing dancing at their feet. They have one of those sticks with a bag tied to the end, but their tunic thing is what has me thinking. It's all growing things." I lean in closer and add, "And little splashes of water. Green and blue with flowers on navy."
+
+We sit in silence for a moment while I think about the card more.
+
+"There's a good balance of colors, come to think of it. More than the Page, at least. Blue and green and red and yellow." I hesitate, staring at the lean canine muzzle: the balance continues there, masculine and feminine, hard and soft, focused and uncaring. I say nothing, and wonder why.
+
+The older woman nods slowly. "It's a fancy shirt, no denying. It'd look good on you."
+
+I laugh, to which she looks up, smiling. "Seriously. It's a good mix. You're a good mix, too. But you wear all drab colors. Why's that?"
+
+There's a sudden flush to my cheeks, at my appearance being so deliberately addressed. I lay my ears back. A blush along with the first hints of annoyance. These are soon replaced with simple embarrassment. "I don't want to-- I mean, I don't think I'd look good in bright colors or fancy clothes."
+
+"I think you would." She hastens to continue, speaking over my mounting disagreements, "I think you'd look good, if you dressed how you wanted. Don't you?"
+
+I frown at her. She continues, "You didn't say you don't want to dress in bright colors and fancy clothes. You started to say you didn't want to do something else."
+
+I held my breath. Anger is the wrong word for what I feel. Frustration? Humiliation, perhaps. Am I so transparent?
+
+"I don't want to," I begin in a rush of pent-up breath, feeling that struggle blown out with it. My shoulders sag, and I complete the statement more slowly. "I don't want to be seen like that."
+
+"The fool, here, they're everything. They're the beginning of all things, and they've already got all of the endings inside themselves. At the beginning of all journeys, there's the fool: taking that first step is a fool's gamble, after all." She pauses, looking at me earnestly, intently. "You caught yourself earlier, you said 'he' and then switched to 'they'."
+
+I hunch down into my slouched shoulders, muzzle dipping as I struggle for words. "They looked-- I mean, It's on my mind, I guess."
+
+"I'll come clean," she admits after a pause, dark paws fiddling with the remainder of the deck, straightening cards. "Your mom told me you were coming, so I know that much. Even if she hadn't, though, it's written on your face. I mean this in the best possible way, Avery, but you don't make a very good man."
+
+I close my eyes. I shut out the cards, the motherly badger. Motherly in the sense of speaking truths, in the sense of knowing children, in having seen them grow up. Motherly in lived experience. Experience lived in the moment, not in some dream world of crystals and chakras. *More motherly than my mom,* I think.
+
+When I open my eyes, her gaze has softened.
+
+"Why three cards?" I ask, deflecting.
+
+"Past, present, and future." She laughs.
+
+I nod, then sit up a little straighter, murmuring, "So it's more that past me that didn't have the activation energy?"
+
+"Or didn't want to use it, yes."
+
+"That makes more sense, then."
+
+"How so?"
+
+I shrug, continuing, "If I'm at the beginning of something now, it's because of how much time I spent fretting --- and not starting --- before."
+
+She nods. "And are you at the beginning of something now?"
+
+"I think so." I sound dubious, even to myself.
+
+"Why now?"
+
+"College," I say.
+
+"Away from home?"
+
+"Mmhm."
+
+She nods again. "It's a little freeing, isn't it? Being away from parents. So you, like the Page of Wands, have been investigating, leaving all that energy pent up inside. And now you're ready to...to what? Take that step?"
+
+I catch myself fiddling with the hem of my shirt. It's an olive color, faded further into drabness by countless washings, no fancy tunic; even her washed-out smock is brighter than my shirt. It doesn't go with my fur. Nor do the well-worn khakis. A darker animal dressed in those would look rough and tumble, ready for a hike. A mountain lion looks like a mess of dirty laundry.
+
+I look up from my dull self to the table once more, speaking to the cards. "I have an appointment to start talking about it --- talking about gender --- with a counselor."
+
+"Congratulations," the badger says, smiling. And I realize she doesn't need to say anymore. I realize *that's* what I needed from my mom. I realize that's probably why my mom sent me here. I realize that there's probably more to my mom than I gave her credit for.
+
+I realize I've stopped thinking of this --- the tarot card reading --- as something mystical.
+
+I speak up, "The third card, then."
+
+The badger returns her gaze to the table.
+
+"It feels impenetrable to me."
+
+She laughs and shakes her head. "It's not a book. You're not writing a report on its deeper meanings. You're picking up on some of those meanings, but you don't have to do it right away or all the time. Or at all, for that matter." Still grinning, guides my attention back down to the card with a gesture, badger and cougar looming over the table. "Just tell me what you see."
+
+Abashed, I return her smile as best I can. "Alright. It's a...well, I want to say a woman and a child being ferried across a lake or something, but the boat they're in has six swords in it. They're upright, like they've been stabbed through the bottom of the boat."
+
+"Stabbed? Like they're going through the wood?"
+
+"Yeah."
+
+"Is water coming up around them?"
+
+I look harder. The bottom of the boat is pitch dark. "I can't tell, but no one seems in a rush to get them out, anyway."
+
+This gets a chuckle. "No, no they don't. Maybe they're plugging the holes in the boat. Maybe it's best to leave them in."
+
+Nodding, I keep looking at the card. There are lines to draw the attention. The swords, the boat, the pole of the oarsman, the horizon, the water...the water. "The front of the boat, where the swords are, isn't sinking. The people still weigh something, though. Look, the back of the boat's low in the water."
+
+She nods, "Maybe they--"
+
+"Like they don't weigh anything," I add hastily, cutting her short.
+
+"--don't weigh anything, yes."
+
+I lay my ears back and grin, "Sorry, didn't mean to trample."
+
+She returns my grin, pats my tan paw in her black one. "You're excited. It's really nice to see."
+
+"So why swords?"
+
+"I don't know. What do swords do?"
+
+I laugh. "Cut and stab. Kill people. Stuff like that."
+
+"Fair enough," she chuckles. "Why would one do that?"
+
+Her words stop me short. "To...to kill," I begin. "But that's what I just said. Are you asking me why people kill each other?"
+
+She nods.
+
+"To get something," I murmur, fumbling for words. "To gain something. To get what one wants, or needs."
+
+"So, since this is the Tarot and there's bound to be a lot going on here, can we just say the swords are a tool?"
+
+"Well, I'm not about to hack and slash my way to get what I want."
+
+She leans in close to me, stage-whispering, "I'll let you in on a secret. None of the cards in the swords suit --- in any suits --- show blood. Death, yes. Change, definitely. But no blood. It's hardly hacking and slashing."
+
+"But they're still--"
+
+She holds up a paw, "They're still swords, but they're tools. Swords show work. Strife, sometimes, sure; striving toward a goal. But what they is show work. These swords aren't working right now, they're just standing there. So where is the striving?"
+
+"Behind them?" I ask. "They figures are all facing away from something."
+
+"Or toward something."
+
+"So," I say hesitantly. "I'm going to go on a journey?"
+
+She laughs, "Can you guess what my next question would be?"
+
+I shake my head.
+
+"My next question would be: are you? And then you sit and think about it for a moment."
+
+"I sit and think a moment, then say: no, of course not, it's about the work of going through something. The journey is the work." I hesitate, then nod and continue, more sure of myself. "Because I'm here at the beginning. I'm the fool, ready to take the step, and then I just have to take the next and keep going."
+
+She smiles and urges me on with a little gesture of her paw.
+
+"So if I was stalling by investigating every possibility, never starting," I say, nodding back to the first card, the Page of Wands. "Then I guess what I'm focused on is taking that first step, and after that, taking the next."
+
+"You're doing my job for me," the badger laughs.
+
+My smile falters. "Fair enough, but what do I do?"
+
+"That's advice, kid." That soft smile, again. She flips the cards over, one by one, and continues, "Advice comes from people, not from cards. And if I'm going to give you advice, you're going to need to tell me what's actually going on."
+
+She leans forward, folding her arms on the table, and looks past the cards and to me.
+
+So I tell her. I tell her all that stuff from childhood, all those stupid things --- the dress-up, the questions, the uncomfortable guidance, the frustration at forced roles. I tell her all those things that meant nothing, may still mean nothing, and yet add up to a picture of a different me than who I am now. A different shape, a different body, different face and voice and name.
+
+I speak more freely than at the beginning of the session.
+
+I tell her about my mom, about telling her bits and pieces of my feelings, and her insistence at first that it was just a blockage of energies, and then her reluctant acceptance. I tell her about my dad, and how terrified I am of him and his iron grip on masculinity. I tell her about leaving for school and deciding that becoming my own self mattered more than their financial assistance and what belongingness they could offer.
+
+"Your mom sent you to me," she states again, after a comfortable silence. "Did you tell her any of this?"
+
+I shake my head. "She knows just that I'm, er--"
+
+"That you're transgender?" she finishes for me. "Would that be fair to say?"
+
+"I...yes, that's fair."
+
+"But you don't want to say it?" she asks, kind eyes on my own. "You don't have to, can just say yes or no."
+
+"No. I mean, I don't want to say it, but I should. Maybe that's part of the first step." I hesitate for a second, ears flat and eyes averted, before murmuring, "She just knows that I'm trans."
+
+The badger nods, unclipping the thermometer from her smock and turning it over in her fingers. "Alright. And she sent you to me for advice? She told me to talk to you, mentioned vague facts."
+
+"Yeah, she told me to go to you to work on things." I give a wry smile and add, "Her words, not mine."
+
+She laughs and sits back in her chair, slouching and twirling that thermometer. "Your mom is nuts," she says. "I mean that in the kindest way, of course: I love her dearly. Have since school. I suspect she wishes the world worked differently for her. And for you, for that matter."
+
+The unabashed laugh and words of affection are contagious and have me grinning. "Yeah, she's nuts," I echo. "Still, can't say I'm upset with what I got out of this."
+
+"The cards, you mean?"
+
+"Yeah. I was expecting fortunes, I got--"
+
+"You got what you had when you came in the door," she asserts. "And a chance to talk it through. Now, you want my advice?"
+
+"Yeah. I want to know what you think I should do next."
+
+"About which bit?"
+
+"Coming out, I suppose." I scuff at the back of my neck, paw feeling clumsy. "Maybe starting transition."
+
+"Well, it sounds like you're on your way to both, right?" She clips the thermometer back to her smock and straightens the remainder of the tarot deck in deft paws. "You've told your mom, and you have that appointment, right?"
+
+I nod, brushing fingertips over the overturned cards left on the table. It felt like we were both acknowledging their presence in our own ways. "But I still haven't told dad, and I'm still freaked out what the counselor will say."
+
+"Anxiety, then?" she offers, waving a paw above the cards. "A bit of the Page of Wands still left over?"
+
+I nod again, silent.
+
+"Do you want to dig at that?"
+
+"Mmhm. Do you have any thoughts on how to get past that?" She shuffles the cards and opens her mouth to speak, but I interrupt, "Wait, don't tell me. Now you'll ask if *I* have any thoughts on how to get past that."
+
+Her laugh is kind and her fingers sure as she slips another card from the top of the deck, laying it flat on top of the first three.
+
+The image shocks me enough to get me to sit up straight, as if by gaining some distance from the card itself I could escape it. "What the hell?"
+
+"The ten of swords," she says, voice level, conversational.
+
+I count the swords sticking out of the anonymous figure's back. Ten. A feline laid flat on his front, a dark sky, a calm shore, and ten swords buried in his back, each as high as the cat himself.
+
+I clear my throat and manage, "I thought you said there wasn't any bloodshed in the swords."
+
+"Do you see blood?"
+
+Despite everything urging me not to do so, I lean in close and inspect the figure. "No," I admit. "Though his cloak is red."
+
+"The color of passion. And yellow, the color of action."
+
+"The dawn's yellow, too," I offer. I sound dubious, even to myself.
+
+"Dawn, then?" The older woman looks down at the card curiously. "Dawn or sunset?"
+
+I frown and shake my head. "Dawn, I think. It always feels like dawn chases the night, but sunset gives in to it."
+
+"Poetic," she says, and her smile is earnest.
+
+I count the swords again. "One in his ear, one in his neck. Three or four in his back." I stifle a giggle and murmur, "That's a lot of swords."
+
+Her eyes brighten. "Isn't it? Overkill, in the truest sense of the word. Like an overreaction."
+
+A thought occurs to me, and I lean in over the table. "Staring at the dawn, killed ten times over. Look, the water's even clear, like the--" I lift the last card up to peek, and continue, "Like the six. Like me staring at coming out and poking a billion holes in the idea without ever taking the step."
+
+Her eyes stay bright. "Maybe it's an alternative to the six, then. Too much emotion, not enough action. Passion and action pinned down, rather than the work of the six. You could keep taking those steps, or you could keep killing yourself with indecision."
+
+I nod eagerly and ask on a whim, "What's it like reversed?"
+
+She gives a little shrug and turns the card over for me to see. "The swords fall out --- that's a relief --- but he's still dead, isn't he? Resigned to his place on the shore."
+
+"Sure enough," I laugh. "Wait, 'he'?"
+
+"You said it first," she says playfully. "Seriously, though, most of the figures are ambiguous. Or androgynous, I think. What you read into them can mean something if you let it."
+
+"It could be nothing," I mumble. "Or it could be the old me. The 'he'."
+
+She shrugs. My choice, apparently.
+
+A chime interrupts us, me staring at the card and her smiling at me. A clock tolling slow hours. I check my watch to confirm it. Five.
+
+"Oh jeez, I'm sorry. It's way later than I thought."
+
+She laughs, "Conversations go where they will. There's no rush. I can pull together dinner for two if you want to stay." She taps at the thermometer with a grin, "I even made marshmallows, though they'll be sticky still."
+
+"No, it's alright. Thank you. I'm getting pretty tired, as it is." I shrug, realizing just how true that statement is. "This took a lot out of me."
+
+"It does that. It's a wonder we need exercise at all, when just thinking about things wears us out."
+
+I laugh with her, nodding.
+
+"Still," she continues. "You're in town, now. Don't be afraid to stop by, say hi. There's lots more we can talk about, cards or no. Don't wait for your mom to push you my way."
+
+I lever myself up from the chair, swishing ropy tail once or twice to make sure it hasn't fallen asleep, and offer my paw to the badger. "I won't. I know she thinks we'll work on things, but I just want to talk. This was more than I expected. I didn't know I needed--"
+
+She bypasses my offered hand and gives me a firm hug around the middle. Startled, I hold still. She smells of sweets. Sweets and baking.
+
+I feel unfortunately tall. A rectangle. A lummox. A big, dumb cat.
+
+I also feel understood, appreciated. Welcomed. I return the hug carefully. Then, with her farewell in my ears, take that first step out into the evening air.
+
+And then the next.

content/post/what-defines-us.md

@@ -0,0 +1,176 @@
+---
+date: 2019-07-01
+title: What Defines Us
+type: post
+description: Darren and his mother struggle with the ramifications of the past repeating itself.
+img: flag.svg
+series: Sawtooth
+categories:
+- Short story
+- Epistolary
+tags:
+- Furry
+- Family
+- Divorce
+cw: Mention of abuse
+---
+
+Darren,
+
+Haven’t heard from you in a while. Do you think I could come up and visit for xmas? Been a while since I’ve seen the little monsters. Let me know before prices go up.
+
+How are you? How is Leila?
+
+LYF
+
+Mom
+
+-----
+
+Mom,
+
+I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to you recently. Things on our end have been awful, if I’m honest.
+
+Leila and I are thinking of splitting up.
+
+I don’t know about Christmas. I hope you understand.
+
+LYFA
+
+Darren
+
+-----
+
+Oh honey, I’m so so sorry. What happened? Was it about work again?
+
+I still want to come out and see you. More now than I did before. Can I do anything to help?
+
+LYF
+
+-----
+
+Mom,
+
+Sorry, I guess my last email was pretty skimpy on the details.
+
+Yeah, the work thing got bad, then got a whole lot worse. I knew Leila was unhappy with it and all, but I don’t think I realized how unhappy. I mean, I’m not happy with it, either, but obviously it’s the life I live - and have lived - so it’s in my blood. She wasn’t happy hearing that.
+
+Well anyway, dozens of arguments later, it comes out that she got fed up enough to start sneaking out and seeing others. Maybe if she’d been open about it or whatever, I would’ve been more able to work with it, but I think it just goes to show that neither of us are happy and neither of us can trust each other.
+
+We tried doing the counseling thing. Even brought Jer and Eileen to some, but I don’t know, mom. I feel like I’m in a bad spot with that. I feel like I’d like to be the one to talk things through with the kids, not some very expensive stranger, you know? It makes me feel like I’m out of touch with how they feel about things, and like it would just sow distrust in them of us.
+
+I’m lost, mom. What do I do? This is all so overwhelming...
+
+LYFA
+
+D
+
+-----
+
+Darren,
+
+It’s not easy stuff to work through, I know. It sounds like you’re doing a good job of things, and certainly like you’re doing right by the kids.
+
+You both knew that there would be a lot of compromise going into this relationship, but maybe you just didn’t realize how much? I hope I’m not overstepping or anything, just that sometimes compromise works and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s just the way of things. You and I had to compromise on a lot, and it’s worked out okay (I think\!\!), but Justin and I tried and never could get it to work.
+
+As for what to do, just be honest. Painfully so, if need be. That said, you should be careful about Jeremy and Eileen. If you want to talk about all this and work on the divorce thing, \*don’t do it on your own.\* Do so with Leila. Both of you talk with them together, and don’t be afraid to talk about the problems you and L are having. They’re smart cats, they’ll be able to understand, and may have good advice for you, too\! Treat them like adults, and they won’t treat you (either of you\!\!) like mysterious unapproachable aliens throwing their lives into chaos.
+
+Call me if you need?
+
+LYF
+
+Mom
+
+-----
+
+Mom,
+
+Sorry for the delay. Things are up and down over here. We did as you said and have been talking things through with the kids, to mixed results. I can tell they’re uncomfortable and unhappy about it all, but I feel like they’re getting it, and having their say. And I feel more connected with them about it.
+
+The downside is that it’s splitting L and I’s thoughts on the matter in a weird way. When we talk about things in front of the kids, it feels like we’re saying one thing, but when we talk in private, it’s something different. We both act so civil around them because we have to, that it’s made our arguments in private more painful. Things were sort of a maybe until we started doing this. Now it’s feeling more like a definite.
+
+It hurts so much, mom. I love Leila, and I love the kids. If this is the direction we’re going in, I guess that’s what needs to happen, but none of this work stuff is going to look good to a judge. The thought of losing them has me not eating, not sleeping.
+
+I don’t know what to do.
+
+LYFA
+
+-----
+
+I know, honey. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I know it’s not easy stuff. When things have broken down this completely, there is no outcome of this that is going to feel fair, but you love your children. It’s plain to me, and I hope it’s plain to Leila and any judge in the matter. You won’t have them taken away from you. Just make sure you stay in their lives. Make sure you do what you can to help them want to stay in yours, too. (Not saying buy their affection, just show your love and appreciate (visibly) the love they show you.)
+
+LYF
+
+-----
+
+Yeah, the goal is not to be my dad here.
+
+*Sent from MobileMail*
+
+-----
+
+Darren,
+
+That’s not fair to me \*or\* your dad at all. He and I had our differences and we couldn’t work them out, but my goal was never for you to hate him. We shared our time with you as we did, for better or worse, and I tried to keep channels open. That’s why I’m saying what I am. Help them want to be in your life.
+
+LYF
+
+-----
+
+That’s just the thing, mom. You keep pushing me to him, but there’s nothing there. Not saying your advice is bad, it’s certainly good. It’s advice I wish you could give dad. The guy hit me, though. I was never good enough for him. He was an abusive jerk and you know it. Why would I want to go and show him \*any\* positive attention?
+
+Seriously, I’ve tried to handle this divorce shit and my relationship, hell, my fucking life the \*opposite\* of how you handled things. You both provided me with so many bad examples of how things could go. And yet here I am, reliving the fucking past.
+
+*Sent from MobileMail*
+
+-----
+
+Darren, honey, I’m so sorry.
+
+Not a day goes by that I don’t think about you. You’re my baby, remember? Long as I live.
+
+So please, please understand me when I say that I’m sorry. Both your dad and I handled that entire situation terribly. \*Both your dad and I.\* I messed up back then, and if I could go back and change things, I would. I don’t know if that means staying with Justin longer so that I could protect you or getting the divorce sooner to get you away from him. I don’t know how I can fix it now, other than to help you not \*become him.\* We’re after the same thing, here. Neither of us want you to be him, to wind up in his shoes.
+
+That’s why I keep pushing you toward him, though. I know it had to have hurt him for you to cut him from your life. I can’t imagine how much it would hurt if Jeremy and Eileen did that to you.
+
+I can’t speak to your relationship with Leila. You know that Justin and I were cordial to each other, but when things ended, they ended, and there was no going back. If you two can patch things up, then that would be great\! If you can’t, though, you’re right: don’t be like your dad and I.
+
+Love you forever
+
+Mom
+
+-----
+
+I’m sorry, mom, you’re right. I know things weren’t great for you and dad either, and I know you’re just trying to help. It’s just hard. It hurts a lot, and it’s making me really upset at the drop of a hat.
+
+Love you for always
+
+D
+
+-----
+
+And as long as I live My baby you’ll be\!
+
+The problem with being a parent (and you’ll understand this more and more as Jeremy and Eileen grow up) is that your children are both the better versions of yourself and also doomed to repeat so many of the mistakes you did. You took a lot away from how things were when you grew up. Like you said, you took away the things that went wrong and want to do the opposite. You have my blessing on that\! You make me endlessly proud when you do so.
+
+But you also took away my work ethic. That’s a good chunk of why Justin and I didn’t last. Not the main reason, of course, but still, it was there. And now it’s playing havoc in your life.
+
+All we can do is try and do better. What happened isn’t all there is to us. What defines us is also what we become.
+
+LYF
+
+Mom
+
+-----
+
+I don’t really know what to say. I didn’t realize that was a problem you and dad had, too. I’ll have to think about it.
+
+Things are still up and down, but have been a bit more up recently. I still think things are going to end in a divorce, but talking with the kids forcing us to be more civil has helped a lot, and we’ve started talking about an equitable split.
+
+Thank you, mom. I know I got snippy, but you’re right, and have helped more than you realize.
+
+Can you still come up for Christmas?
+
+LYFA
+
+D