#broken bridge

Sans titre - Portugal - 2025

photographie argentique - Agfa APX 400

I think I have a new hobby of saving Goodwill guitars, past the scary part of fixing someone else’s bad bridge repair👍

They say that grief is a wrecking ball. That grief takes the breath out of your lungs and the strength out of your limbs and the will to live out of your very soul. In that moment, a large piece of Helmut Fullbear dies. With the passing of Bob Zanotto, the only light in Helmut’s life goes out.

(Razputin Aquato enters the mind of Helmut Fullbear to help him process his grief and to get his assistance in helping stop the return of Maligula. It doesn't hurt that his husband isn't...dead, per se. The hard part is convincing him of that fact.)

Helmut knows how this goes. It replays in his dreams every night. He's memorized every line down to the stage directions, the well worn script a hell of his own making.

After all: the man who let his husband die doesn't deserve restful sleep.

Everything about her is different. From how she holds herself to the way the water whips around her—no longer a partner in crime, but a beast that needed to be leashed before it could do anything other than bite the hand that feeds—there isn't a trace of their Lucrecia to be seen. Sharp and cloaked in fine furs, the malignant Maligula is a far cry from the threadbare but beloved Lucrecia they'd last seen. Instead, the Minister of War, the Lapdog for the Maliks, the Deluge of Grulovia, Maligula stands opposite them, her teeth bared in a derisive sneer. She is ready to kill them. She is willing to kill them.

At her side is the little red-eyed Alp. They barely come up to her knee, comically small in comparison. As they look back and forth between her and the rest of them, the Alp seems to remember something.

They reach up and tug on her coat to get her attention. When she bends down to hear them out, they whisper something, mouth and intentions hidden behind their hand. She laughs at whatever they say and waves a hand at them as she straightens back up. A beat later, she turns her full attention back to her foes.

Her grin lights Cheshire against the curtain blue sky, wicked sharp with ill intent. The presence of the Alp does little to change the mood of the scene—dour and tense as sandbag ropes. "Ah, my so-called friends!"

"We are your friends, Lucy!" Ford cries out. Doesn't he know that this is a futile effort? Doesn't he know that he can't save her? Doesn't he know that nothing good will come from him trying to redeem her?

(He's out of line, out of order, but that's become the norm. The little nightmare has forced rewrite after rewrite, each version worse than the last in different, horrifying ways.)

(At least it's something new.)

"Are you truly?" She cocks her head, sharp eyes scanning everyone. Otto, with his deus ex machina, is the only one she lingers on. Maligula eyes him with calculated hunger, as if feeding him and his ideas to her snakes would help her cause.

(Does she know about the Hyperhyglaciator? Is that why she's bothering with Otto this run?)

"Of course!" Ford pleads with her, everyone else only background to his moment. "We've always been your friends! If you would just let us help—"

That was a mistake.