Magpies and Shiny things

andy has a sleep schedule beyond mortal comprehension. lies down for the first sleep at sunset, sleeps for like 3 hours, gets up and starts wandering around. if it's a good (define "good") night she'll go out and stargaze. if it's a bad night she'll compulsively check her gear and care for her axe. if it's really bad she'll run

joe and nicky never adopted monophasiac sleep specifically because the those hours in the middle of the night have been their Special Alone time ever since they met up with andromake, neriko, and lykton. essential when they're on a mission and don't have time to themselves during the day. they have strange, winding, half asleep conversations in multiple languages. if there's anything that's been troubling them, that's often when they talk about it. i think they first realized they were having the same dreams during one of these conversations

booker stays up until 4 am reading encyclopedia Britannica articles and getting increasingly drunk. nile teaches him to use google earth and he becomes mildly obsessed. he likes zooming out to look at the whole planet and then zooming in on france

nile goes to bed on time with military precision and sleeps for eight hours the whole night through. the others find this mildly disconcerting. joe and nicky debate whether she's unwell somehow (''we don't get sick, my heart" "it's not like there's a rulebook, nicoló"). the rare occasion comes when nile gets up in the middle of the night. she encounters, in quick succession:

joe and nicky, having a bizarre conversation full of non-sequiturs, pidgin, and intricate, centuries-old in jokes. their eyes are still closed, and they're still spooning. it honest-to-god looks like they're still asleep

booker, massive bags under his eyes, pouring another glass of gin, britannica article for the Napoleonic wars open full brightness on his laptop

andy, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, sharpening her axe with a whetstone. scraaape, scraaape, scraaape

photographer: Cristina García Rodero

ITS NOT EVEN ABOUT LIKE... FORMING A PERSONALITY THAT SCARES ME, I just got out of a relationship I was in for a decade nearly, I was the one asking for marriage... it ends. half a year out now the chemicals in my brain that made me love them unconditionally are fading a bit and all my friends are having to hear horror stories I thought we'd "worked out" by ourselves. Like genuinely how are you supposed to know someone is good for you when they're all you know!! even if you're happy! it's so sick and twisted... anyways do you think we could make this about Hollanov.....

and then something like this

This was only 55 years ago. You can understand a lot of what’s wrong with the US if you realize that the average age of our elected senators is about 63. “Good old days” is a dogwhistle.

“The couple is given a choice: flee or go to jail. After they were arrested, the Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison. Then, a judge offered them a choice: banishment from the state or prison. They chose to leave Virginia at the time, but after several years, the Lovings asked the American Civil Liberties Union to take their case.Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, two young ACLU lawyers at the time, did.”

My father just had his 70th birthday.

When my parents first met it'd been less than a decade since the ruling was official.

They were convinced it'd be overturned and did not want their children to have to suffer for it, so they did not get married and searched desperately for each other in their own races. They could not find the love they had together in anyone else. They did eventually get married.

Too late for them to have the amount of children they'd desired. They had two, adopted a third, and that was that.

It was near enough to now that I, my sisters, and my parents were directly affected by it.

The Watsonville riots of the 1930's where white mobs attached Filipino farmworkers for being seen in dancehalls with white women, are part of a very long history of whiteness violently asserting its need to "protect" the purity of it's women and future children. And these kinds of backlashes are not in the past, we've just moved to different battlegrounds, the same accusations, of defiling the purity of white womanhood and white childhood are now leveled at the dangerous "othering influences" through book bans and other right wing conservative censorship efforts.

According to PEN America’s Banned Book Index, 41% of banned books include LGBTQ+ themes. 40% feature characters of color and 21% address issues of race or racism.

Remember, if we don't keep standing up loudly for equality the biggots on the right will be louder and keep dragging us further backwards from every step towards equality we make.

That's why I write stories for mixed, brown, bi, folks to see ourselves and our loves reflected in.