Tumble About It

And when people are like "awe, your boyfriend didn't want to come with you?" I can be like oh no he's right here, check it out, and whip the pocket open and my boyfriend's there staring at them like

Rumi, checking her emails: Bills, fanmail, bills, stupid ad deals, something that probably should have gone to Bobby, fanmail... oh huh. Someone is asking if they can make a parody of one or more of our songs.

Mira: People already do that, don't they? We encourage it.

Rumi: Yeah, but this guy's asking anyway.

Mira: Huh. That's considerate of them. Who is it?

Rumi: Some parody artist named Alfred Yankovic.

Mira: Oh, I think I've heard of him, isn't he kind of a big deal in the states-

Zoey, kicking open the door: YES YES YES TELL HIM YES A THOUSAND TIMES YES A MILLION TIMES YES LET HIM DO WHATEVER HE WANTS WITH OUR MUSIC

Mira: Definitely a big deal.

Zoey: ASK HIM IF HE'S DOING A POLKA MEDLEY PLEASE I NEED TO HEAR GOLDEN ON THE ACCORDION THIS IS A DREAM COME TRUE OH MY GOSH DO YOU THINK HE'LL LET ME CAMEO IN THE MUSIC VIDEO-

Rumi: So... we tell him yes?

Mira: We tell him yes.

Interviewer: Well, we definitely saw her there.

Al: And of course, when one of the male dancers showed up and was six foot five, we had to pair them. I'll never say no to an easy visual gag.

Interviewer: So is that when you had the idea for the throw?

Al: Absolutely not. We just told the dancers to do some basic spins and end it with a dip during the climax, but apparently she got inspired. We did not tell Zoey to lead him during the dance, and I certainly didn't plan for her to throw him in the air and catch him in a dip. Fans say they can see the wires, I guarantee you we did not provide wires during that day of shooting.

Interviewer: But surely she didn't actually throw him?

Grace fuck, why would you invoke her name like that???

Okay, fine, gather round children, buckle up because we’re going on a bumpy ride back to everyone’s collective least favorite place: 7th grade.

Some background: I went to a very small Catholic school. One class per grade (we were the largest with 19 kids), everyone knew each other whether they wanted to or not. Despite basically every teacher and faculty members insistence that we were The Best And Most Special Class In The School and that everyone loved having us, the longstanding 7th grade teacher Mrs. O’Hara decided to retire in the summer of 2008, meaning the school had to find us a new teacher for the upcoming year. This would be like, the first new teacher in the school in a while, and as she was getting the ‘best class’, it was viewed as a Big Deal. Somewhere in like July or August we got a letter announcing Mrs. Stubel, and it came with a list of books to pick for the summer reading, and that was basically all the information we had.

So…the first day of class. She seems nice enough. Very…ditsy, I guess? It was very easy for her to get herself off topic while talking. She constantly paced around the room, never staying in one spot for longer than a second, complaining she has restless leg syndrome. Which like, I’m sure she did, but she was in the middle of introducing herself and then went on a 20 minute tangent about restless leg syndrome without anyone prompting her. It was almost like you could see her scattered thoughts flying around her head.

So anyone, she eventually gives somewhat of an introduction- she had only taught in public schools before, and kept worrying she ‘didn’t know’ how to teach in a Catholic school despite the entire class insisting literally nothing was different, you just teach the curriculum, twice a week we have religion class with Sister Mary King, that’s literally it (she still talked over us in worry), she told us about her kids, she told us about her obsession with Emily Dickinson, stuff like that.

And then she hands us this worksheet.

She’s like, “Oh, these are just some basic questions for you to answer! Just so I can get to know you guys better!” like in lieu of an icebreaker game, which is fine, but…the questions. The questions were all “What is your most haunting fear?”, “What is your deepest regret?”, “Have you ever experienced the pain of loss?”, “What was your worst injury?”, “What was your worst nightmare?”, all questions like that, and then on the back she wanted us to draw a gravestone and write out what we wanted our epitaph to be.

We were twelve year olds, mind you.

Oh my God and one girl missed the first day because of her grandmother’s funeral, so when she came the next day and saw what the teacher was insisting she do for homework, she almost had a panic attack? And the lady still made her do it? Literally who wants to think about death anymore at a time like that omfg.

Okay, so then we get to the summer reading book reports, right? Now, she had given a list of maybe, 20 books that you could pick from, read it, and then present an oral report on it. You had to have notecards and you had to be able to answer questions from the class at the end. All in all, I’ve had worse projects.

So, on this list, she apparently put Madeleine L’Engle’s entire book series on the list…only she did not make it known that this was a series and not multiple stand alone books, so when reports started up it caused mass-panic of kids trying to put together plot points and make connections on what the hell they had read.

I was the only kid in the class who had chosen to read “A Wrinkle In Time”, and that has since lead to a series of events that…really actually scares me, I’m still incredibly freaked out, I’m not going to get into it right now because it’ll take away from the current story, but just know that I’m not above wondering if it only happened because I read the book for Stubel.

Anyway, so like, I got through the report okay. The class asking questions about it was fine, but the teacher kept asking questions that didn’t make sense, like, at all. My friend Angie has always had super neat handwriting and Mrs. Stubel got like, obsessed with her notecards and asked if she could borrow them for something. When we got our grades back a few weeks later, Angie had points taken off for not having notecards.

And then her teaching just…didn’t happen. She’d never stay on a topic, she’d always get herself distracted! We were not learning anything. And like, this wasn’t a class of advanced smart kids that loved to learn. By all accounts we should’ve been thrilled. But it got out of hand. It got to points where we had to start teaching lessons to ourselves, asking teacher from other grades for help, always coming home in tears, complaining constantly to our parents and the principal because this woman wasn’t teaching us anything. There were two kids who asked her multiple times for extra help, and she told them each time to ‘talk to me after school’, but then she’d leave immediately after school so they wouldn’t be able to talk to her. They finally brought up the issue in the middle of class and she had a breakdown, yelling about how nobody ever thinks that maybe the teacher has a lot of work to do, and maybe she’s entitled to taking off early, but when we tried to argue she shouldn’t schedule meetings and then break them off in the name of relaxation, she stormed out of the room and tried to get the principal to give us detention. (Which, like, our school didn’t even do, and she was the only one in the wrong during this situation) We are still in September at this point, and already at least ten kids have parents considering transferring them to another school. (And remember, there was only 19 of us, and most of the class had been together since preschool, so that was a big deal).

Then, she starts coming in with all the weird bruises. All the Moms™ immediately started gossiping that her husband had to be beating her, and that’s why she was so screwy in the head. But the way she talked about her husband made it seem like he *might* be dead, and we actually did witness her fall and smack her head into a doorknob once, so no one really knew what to believe. (Also, I’m not trying to imply that abuse would make someone crazy or ‘damaged’ or anything, this is just what was being said. I think they were trying to turn her into a more sympathetic character, because if you feel sorry for her you don’t have to hate her for frustrating your kids so much, and Hate Is A Bad Emotion.)

Also…this woman and Emily Dickinson.

She talked about Emily Dickinson every chance she could get. None of us knew who Emily Dickinson really was before she got there and you could see in her mind it was a capitol offense. She found out the curriculum didn’t have room to cover her (because like, we had a text book), and was way too upset about it. She started reading her poems whenever she found the time (usually somewhere in history class), and always gave us very detailed accounts about her dressing up as Emily and reading her poetry at the library.

Now, two things to note here:

The library did not hire her to do this. She would literally just get in the mood, put on an Emily Dickinson costume that she made by herself, drive to different libraries, and just read poetry out loud to everyone there until someone eventually asked her to leave.

The way she described these events…her tone, the look on her face, her posture…you could just tell that she was getting some sort of sexual gratification out of this? Like dressing up as Emily Dickinson in public and reading her sad poems is really what got this lady’s jollies rocking? Got her all hot and bothered? Which is…a lot, but why would you tell a bunch of seventh graders about it holy shit. What about that sounds like a good idea! What about that turns you back on!

So anyway, we learned a lot about Emily Dickinson against our will.

One of the Davids™ was reading a book for pleasure- which shouldn’t have been a shocker, a lot of kids always had books on them, but Stubel got really interested and asked if she could borrow it from him. He was like ‘sure, after I finish it?’ but she took it that day. He asked her for it back for like five weeks straight.

And…the strudels.

Okay, so the school was trying some dorky thing to promote ~togetherness~ or some virtue or something, I don’t remember the specifics of why, but each class had to make a huge themed poster and hang it on the wall outside the classroom. Which was like, whatever, not the most thrilling project but at least it allowed us to be productive vs just sitting there as the teacher runs about the room rambling about her family vacation from four years ago. Mrs. Stubel decided we needed a quirky nickname and after like three days of deliberation we were christened “Stubel’s Special Strudels”!

(points for alliteration or whatever, but no one actually voted for that and what exactly do strudels have to do with Catholicism? It became a big running joke amongst the kids)

Also, in case you were wondering, she didn’t explain the assignment correctly to us- so every other class had like these beautiful, artistic, well-themed and put together posters, while ours was just…literally a bunch of shit thrown together on paper. Nothing fit with each other, it was literally embarrassing to look at.

But then…she wouldn’t drop the strudel thing. Like she kept bringing it up. She got really into strudels and would just tell us random shit about them. Finally, someone jokes that we should get strudels one day for a party (like instead of a pizza party), and she’s Freaking Out and On Board. She really wants to buy us strudels and have a breakfast party now. She talked about it for like two days straight.

So like… you know in school when you would have a pizza party, usually the teacher would buy it? That’s how they always happened in my experience (not counting the last day of 10th grade when some kid had pizza delivered to the school for lunch but it didn’t get there until math class lol). But especially in grade school? Like if it wasn’t a PTA made party that’s super organized, the school would buy the food, right? Right?

Yeah, so she was like, if this is happening you guys need to give me the money. Just give me the money and then I’ll pick them up on my way to work!! And after some arguing some kids are on board. Strudels should only cost a couple dollars right?

And she’s like, oh no, I’m gonna get them from this high end bakery near my house so it’ll be special, but they’re not cheap and it’ll be a big order! I’m gonna need like fifteen dollars from each of you!

And at this point I’m just like…lady. Come on. 

But she keeps insisting. She’s not gonna go until every student in class pays up.

And I’m like…I’m poor. I don’t even like strudel.  And some of the less-naïve kids are siding with me.

And then she pulls that “you guys are just spoiling all the fun for your classmates” shit, like the naïve kids who already paid up, so it gets to the point where we just gotta cave and give her the money.

(I ended up stealing it out of my Crazy Bitch Aunt’s wallet so it’s whatever, I guess.)

And then of course, shockingly enough, every morning she was met with “where are the strudels?” and every morning she went wide eyed, slapped her forehead and yelled in embarrassed horror “I totally forgot! Tomorrow, guys, I promise!”

Honestly, with how scatterbrained and confused she always was…like to this day I can’t tell you with 100% certainty whether she hustled us or was just actually forgetting about the damn pastries, I choose to lean towards the hustled us side because that’s just the type of people I’m used to, but if I found out it was innocent forgetfulness I wouldn’t exactly be surprised.

She couldn’t handle more than one person talking at a time. Like, we’d have break periods, or group work, or something and all the talking made her go wide-eyed and batty. She’d look overworked and anxious and would be darting around the room trying to do work or something but she couldn’t focus and she’d yell at anyone who tried to talk to her directly. I remember one time she was using this boys desk for something so he asked “where am I supposed to sit?” and she snapped “Sit on the ceiling for all I care!”. And this kid was the Class Clown™ , so he immediately grabbed a chair in one hand and started climbing the bookcase to try and reach the ceiling. She’s standing right next to this and doesn’t even notice. He got all four chair legs planted on the ceiling and was trying to somehow maneuver his way into the chair (I really don’t know what the plan was exactly- he was really tall and it was a small building, so I think he probably had the idea that if he can get his body upside down and in the chair, and stretch out his arms like a hand-stand to hold onto bookcase, he could arguably sit on the ceiling.) but he slipped. Crashed into my desk and the two desks next to me, knocked over the book case, broke the chair in half and hit the desks with enough force to knock them down lower. It was hilarious. Everyone was loosing their shit cracking up (he was fine) and it still took Stubel like five minutes to notice his lying out across the desks right in front of her eyes. She was pissed but how did she miss any of it in the first place? She was barely being helpful in whatever it was she was trying to do.

This was the year the Phillies were going to the World Series, and all the grades were having a Phillies Rally in the cafeteria so a news crew was coming to the school and each class was supposed to come up with fun little cheers for them to broadcast. Multiple cheer ideas were presented to her and she vetoed all of them, someone even suggested just singing the damn eagles theme song with replaced words and calling it a day but she vetoed that too, she was very adamant that she could come up with a cheer all by herself and it’ll be the best one (whoever had the best cheer was winning like an ice cream day or something idk). And then like…literally five minutes before the rally she just hands us signs with the letters and was like ‘we’re just gonna spell out Phillies it will be cute won’t it my strudels???’. We were the weakest class there, predictably. I think we lost to the kindergarteners. There might still be a video online of me yelling “ i “ passionately at the top of my lungs. It was online bc our cheer was so bland the news crew cut it out of the broadcast.

I literally can’t say enough about how she never taught us anything. She’d be going on some tangent about how she doesn’t understand the science behind skiing, and I’d be like “Okay yes but please can you just tell me where Romania is on a map???” And she’d start fights whenever someone actually wanted to learn. It was so easy to get her angry but so hard for her to stay on topic. Kids started teaching the class themselves! Like seriously, she’d be rambling and one of us would just go up to the podium, open the teacher’s guide textbook and just start reading out loud and talking over her. By the time she noticed we’d be halfway through a lesson. And we understood it better than when she tried! You know something’s wrong when pre-teens are more qualified for a job than an adult who supposedly went to school for this.

We were in the church having run-throughs for our upcoming Confirmation and she almost set the church on fire…fifteen different times. In less than half an hour. How hard is it to hold a candle?

Okay, and here’s when stuff starts kicking up. It was October 28th, a Tuesday, and it was our last day of school that week because they were having parent-teacher conferences the rest of the week. So we were just hanging out, watching movies in class and reading (lord knows we weren’t learning), and Stubel calls me over to her desk.

So like, she had given everyone little bags with candy for Halloween, but I get up there and she hands me an extra one. And she’s like “Molly I know your birthday is tomorrow and I bought you a present but I left it on my coffee table this morning by accident! So just have the candy for now!”

And I’m like….”Ma’am I’m like, the sixth birthday this year. You didn’t give anyone else presents?”

And she goes “Oh, I know but this is a special secret surprise. I just know you’re gonna love it! Do you wanna stop by my house later this week to pick it up or should I just give it to you Monday after school?”

And like…In writing this sounds like a non-threatening exchange, and like, it was, but I felt so uncomfortable holy shit. I’m looking over my shoulder and shooting my friends SOS signals. Something about this felt so weird in my gut omfg. I told her thanks and I’d just see her Monday.

So we flash forward to Wednesday- my 13th birthday, the day the Phillies won the world series, and also the day my mother innocently strolled into the school for her meeting only to be met with screaming, the sound of heavy destruction, and the school secretary Mrs. Daily running at her in a panic, waving her arms and yelling “YOUR MEETING IS CANCELLED YOUR MEETING IS CANCELLED GET IN MY OFFICE NOW!”

So my poor mother, who thought she could handle this whole meeting in a few minutes and barely be an hour late for work, is now barricaded in the front office with the school secretary, as the noises from down the hall get louder and louder. The woman explains that they had gotten so many complaints about Mrs. Stubel that this morning, when she got to the school, the principal Sister Patricia called her in and said “Listen, we need you to be professional and still have the parent conferences, but we have to let you go. We just don’t think you fit in well here, and the kids need to come first and feel comfortable in their school.” and like, I’m paraphrasing because I wasn’t there, but we all know she was very polite and professional about it.

Mrs. Stubel, however…was not.

She flipped her chair and stormed out of the office, and locks herself in the seventh grade classroom. She started wrecking the shit out of that place, screaming obscenities and the top of her lungs, they had to call the cops on her! She was locked in there for almost an hour! And let me just give you a nice little list of everything she did in that classroom:

Smashed three windows.

Threw everything off her desk and carved swear words all over it.

Got cleaning fluid that she knew would damage the chalk boards, smeared it all over.

Cracked the chalk boards by repeatedly smashing chairs against them.

Wrote swear words all over the walls and on desks

Went into students desks, ripped up their books.

Stole my glasses. (which were in my desk bc I only used them in class at the time)

Threw some desks around.

Carved swear words into the boards. (there was so much carving I’m assuming she just had a knife on her person, which has to lead to the question, did she have a knife on her while she was in class with us?)

Physically ripped the hooks to hang backpacks on out of the wall.

Knocked the closet door off it’s hinges.

Ripped up all the books in the bookcases and threw their pages all around the room.

Wrote lewd phrases inside student’s desks.

Broke multiple chairs.

Used her podium as a battering ram against the wall that’s in front of where the backpacks go. (the wall won but Damage Was Inflicted)

Set a fire in the trash can.

When the principal and other teachers started trying to get in, she tossed her rolling chair at the door to scare them off.

She was screaming curse words at the top of her lungs the entire time, and cursing the school and the kids and the principal and the church in general, and the school building was small, so all the parents and the smaller children that had to come to the meetings (who were locked in their respective classrooms in fear) heard everything.

So much more? But it’s 4:30 in this morning and this list is already long.

So my mom is in the front office and deadass the

entire police force

shows up, running down the hallway to the classroom yelling at her to stop, and it takes a while for them to get her out holy shit. They knocked down the door and she tried to escape out of one of the broken windows! But they got her and dragged her out.

So of course, in such a small school with very involved parents this shit spread like wildfire. The entire town knew within the day. The poor principal called the newly retired old-seventh grade teacher and was like “So we…need some help” and the lady was like “I already heard I’ll be there Monday” omfg. I remember I got a text from one of my classmates saying “if your birthday wish was for us to be set free from the beast I love you” omfg.

So, we eventually go back to school on Monday and everyone’s buzzing. The principal has us go to the cafeteria and she ‘delicately’ explains the situation, and that the old teacher is coming out of retirement for us, the school has a restraining order against Mrs. Stubel now and that she’s sorry we had to deal with this mess. Our classroom had to go under some heavy reconstruction before we could be let back in there, so for like two weeks we alternated between the cafeteria and the preschooler’s classroom, we had no books or anything, just provided loose-leaf paper and pens. It was like, surreal, but everyone was just so happy to be rid of her and to be in the presence of a competent teacher omfg. We eventually were able to get back into our usual classroom.

It took a while for things to go completely back to normal, though. After the big spectacle she made, for weeks after she was fired we were all very scared of the possibility of Mrs. Stubel returning to the school with a gun in hand. It was always a topic we whispered about at lunch with wide eyes and shivers. Like…genuine nightmare scenario.

About two weeks after she was fired, a boy in the back of the classroom gasped loudly during SSR, and when we all looked at him, he whispered in anger “She never gave us our freakin’ strudels!”

About three months after she was fired, we were lined up at the door to go to Library when a few of us looked through the windows and saw something darting through the trees. It was fast and we couldn’t make anything out, so we let it drop. When the class and teacher returned half and hour later, the book she had borrowed months before from one of the boys was sitting on his desk. It was just laying there, the room was silent, nothing had been disturbed…but I have never seen a book look so threatening. People were freaking out. Someone kept insisting that she turned the book into a bomb. No one figure out how she got in the school, and no one could figure out how she got it on the right desk, as we had switched the seating arrangement since she had last been there.  

A full six months after she had left, it was nearing the end of the school year and our class was dicking around during our last computer class. Someone found a website (that we weren’t allowed to be on) that pulls up any police records attached to whoever’s name you enter, so someone decided to search Mrs. Stubel as a joke. We ended up finding out she had like six DUI’s.

you can't just put the work of someone who's currently trying to eradicate trans people on display without being questioned about it, especially if you claim to care about us.

I pointed it out to her and together we regarded the infant screaming.

After she left my coworker came up and informed me there was a bird on her car. I went out to look and lo, the fledgling had scrambled up onto her windshield and was pecking forlornly at its reflection.

It stayed perched there in the hot sun, trying to move higher up the car with no success but too scared to fly down. She was agitated that it was on her car since she didn’t know if it would leave on its own.

“It’s a baby,” I told her, “It’s still learning how to fly.”

“That’s a baby?! It’s so big!”

“Yeah, it’s just a little guy.”

I went out to investigate. The parents began screaming and swooping. I placated them with crackers which they accepted without relenting their screaming. My coworker said she could now see that the creature on her car was indeed a baby with the sleek black parents swooshing angrily around in the air.

We regarded the baby together. After a while I started noticing it was showing signs of fatigue and distress. Mouth gaping but not begging for food, wings drooping. I went back out to check on it.

I was debating moving the baby; the day kept getting hotter and it didn’t have the energy or skill to relocate itself. My coworker also wanted the bird to stop pooping on her car. So eventually I announced, “I’m gonna move the bird.”

“Your gonna grab it? Aren’t you scared?”

I looked at her in bafflement. I grew up around every imaginable kind of fowl. The only bird I’d be scared of would be some of the big flightless ones. Even geese/swans are manageable if you just grab their necks before they really get flapping. The parents were not gonna go for my eyes like magpies and in general crows tend to recognize when you’re trying to help. “It’s just a little baby guy. It’s fine.”

I approached the baby amidst its parents shrieking crow obscenities down upon me. I scooped it gently like the burger.

I cannot begin to convey how soft that baby crow felt. It was the downiest most pleasant tactile thing that I’ve maybe ever held and the experience was only slightly marred by the goober trying ineffectually to bite me. It was stymied by the fact that it ain’t my first rodeo.

I brought it ten feet away to a nice shady tree. I held the baby gently so it could get its feet under it on the branch. It seemed a bit confused at this point but eventually gripped the branch and I stepped back and threw peanuts in self defense while the angry parents swooped showily around at me.

It stayed there pretty much the rest of the day. Its parents both checked in to make sure I hadn’t murdered it then flew back to where we could see a nest. So best theory is that this dingus was the first to start fledging and couldn’t actually return to the nest after launching.

I told my wife afterward and they went, “You. You touched the bird?!” My coworkers husband was also flabbergasted that I’d been brave enough to grab it. My coworker said she was just gonna shove it off her car with a broom.

As if they didn’t know who they married. As if I am not someone who would confidently help a stray cat or wrangle a chicken.

You haven’t seen that meme?

Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.

There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"

I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.

sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought

In the land just past the Decapolis, by the tombs of the city's most ancient forebears, there lived a man called Legion. Some days, he howled like a beast, laughing as he savaged his own flesh with the jagged edges of stones. Other days he wept like a child, teeth chattering even as the sun blazed overhead. But more days still, he lingered in the quiet spaces, haunted but lucid: A stranger to the land and a stranger to himself.

Six years after the arrival of Legion, there came a man to the Decapolis by the name of Silas. He spoke of a man he had served with once - a fellow legionnaire from the Clades of Lolliana. A man whose name he got forgotten, even as he owed him a life debt.

Unfortunately, the Decapolis was a sprawling hub, and the number of former legionnaires who lived inside was in the hundreds, so he was asked to describe this man in more detail. 

He is impossibly strong, Silas said, and prone to shouting. 

And the townspeople said: Hm. 

And he’s a little bit sensitive to noise, Silas added.

And the townspeople said: Hmmm.

And… he has several freckles on his nose? continued Silas, which earned him the longest ‘hmmm’ of all. It was at this that he finally relented and told the truth. 

And… Well. I hate to mention it, he said. But I’ve been trying to find him for some years, and there’s a rumor, from some of the towns had stayed at in the past, that he might not be, you know, entirely well. 

And at that the townspeople said: Ah. Yes. We know someone who might fit that bill. But you must promise not to be mad. 

And as soon as Silas promised, he was led out to the tombs. 

Alright, Silas said. So I lied. I’m mad. But I know it would have been easy to just cast him out again, and however little you did, you did at least let him stay. 

The crowd he’d traveled with did have the grace to at least look slightly ashamed of themselves. He looked around the tombs and wrinkled his nose before adding. 

In your finest graveyard, even. Only smells faintly of rot and corpses. 

He asked the crowd if anyone was willing to come forward, and list what good deeds they had done for Legion. And while most were ashamed at how little they’d done, a few came forward with their small acts. 

I gave him my clothes, once, replied a beggar. 

I chased off some dogs that had chased him up a tree once, replied a boy. 

I bandaged his cuts, said one herbalist. But I wish I had simply stayed around long enough to prevent them.

And Silas gave them five denarius each for their troubles. 

I will never need your help as much as this man did, he replied. There is no favor you could do for me that would mean as much as what you did for him. Remember that.

Several hours later, tired and bruised, Silas returned to the town. 

Remember how I said I would never need your help as Legion did? he said. Well, perhaps I was too confident. 

It turned out that there were a lot of things he could not do around his friend. 

For starters, speaking Latin? Not ideal. Speaking bad Greek with a heavy Latin accent? Marginally better. Marginally. Trying to lead his friend into town on the fifth day, when the blacksmith was out sharpening scythes? Fucking terrible idea. 

And then they ran into a man with braids. Germanic braids. 

Silas pinched his nose just remembering how that went before continuing onwards. 

It took me two hours of wrestling just to get him into one of the tombs, he said. Two hours! And another three to take all his sharp rocks away. How many fucking sharp rocks can there be in one tomb anyway? Do you guys all demand to be buried with just mountains of sharp rocks? Does your afterlife say that you can pay for all your sins by giving Death a sufficient quantity of sharp rocks? Do you think you’re getting drafted into some kind of skeleton war against Roman ghosts whose only weakness is sharp rocks? Is there a new Olympic event where you have contests to see who can put the most sharp rocks in a single tomb? What the hell was that all about?  

And the citizens listened to the tirade patiently, but when it was done, one woman raised a hand. 

Was it, perchance, the tomb that has a statue of a woman with enormous breasts atop it? she asked.

It was the nearest tomb, Silas replied, defensively.  

Right, right, she said, hands up for peace. Now, that’s fair and all, but we kind of agreed to use that tomb as the tomb for putting all the sharp rocks in. From the other tombs. We figured putting them outside wasn’t the best idea, and he seemed kind of averse to going into that tomb from our past experience. I think the whole tits out thing just makes him uncomfortable, and you know how it is, a short fence still works better than none.

Silas mulled the response over carefully before giving his reply. 

Well, he said. Fuck. 

The word extended thoughtfully into the air for several seconds before he cut it short. 

It turned out that was about as bad as things ever got. 

Legion was not ready to make it into town, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t live a better life. Silas found that buying a tomb was not particularly expensive, and that keeping a living person in a tomb was legal, albeit a little morbid. Putting furniture and a well inside the graveyard was considered, yes, a mild eccentricity, but the region was close enough to Egypt that it wasn’t unheard of. So long as he didn’t trap Legion inside a catacomb to serve as his slave for all eternity, the people of the Decapolis could care less. 

He arranged for shipments of food to be brought up to his friend, and hired a talented doctor to heal the man’s wounds. Legion’s skin was a criss cross of pink, jagged scars, but the weeping sores healed and could, with time, fade. On his good days, Legion was almost normal, and on his bad, there were a few people willing to drop whatever they had on hand to restrain him before he hurt himself. 

But whatever was wrong with Legion was deeper than his skin, and no one knew how to treat it. The doctors said it was a sickness of the spirit, and the priests said that whatever it was affecting his soul was not coming from the Gods. 

Not cursed, they’d say. Wounded. The Gods cannot force him to heal, as they were not the ones that forced him to hurt. 

Which was, sure, deep and mystical and shit but also deeply unhelpful. 

Still the message was clear enough: Wait. Keep him alive long enough, and maybe, he’ll sort himself out. He was certainly trying. If he failed, it would only be because the strain killed him first. 

There came to Decapolis twelve men, following a thirteenth by the name of Jesus. 

It was, frankly, an odd trip. The sea of Galilee was only eight miles wide. Compared to the Mediterranean of Silas’s home, it was a puddle. But they had arrived after a storm, one where the waves had grown high enough to spill over the deck. Several other boats didn’t return at all, which was a first for the city. They’d forgotten what it was like, to have a sea could both give and take. 

Lots of stories came with that. The ship owner claimed he’d seen Jesus walk over the waters. The apostles claimed that they’d seen him do that and that he’d calmed the storm with a few words. Those claims made the Romans of the city nervous: One does not end a storm if it’s not their storm. Tempestaas did not interfere with Thor, who did not interfere with Indra, who did not interfere with Enlil. 

Which either meant this man had sent the storm, stolen the storm, or - more likely, but still a problem - was commiting casual blasphemy against foreign Gods. 

Silas kept an eye on them, because he kept an eye on all the holy men that went through the city. Priest-shopping was a little frowned upon in the world of spiritual illnesses, but he had money and hope and more care for his allies than concerns about decency. It latter was as Roman a vice as lead boiled wine. 

He did not speak with Jesus because he did not trust the man. He spoke instead with the most reasonable and respectable of the twelve-man entourage: A fellow Roman citizen by the name of Peter. 

He caught Peter in one of the markets, haggling over fish with one of the local fishermen. In his eyes, that was a great sign. A man could be as Holy as the Gods, but if he wasn’t grounded, he was useless. Like a kite without a string.  

Γεια he said to Peter in the most passable Greek he could manage. Hello. 

In the name of God, just use Latin, Peter responded. Your accent is thick enough to cut into cubes.

Silas was charmed. He liked Latin, and he liked straightforwardness. Peter paused a moment longer to inspect the fish before continuing. 

Actually, you look military, so let’s go further: Just tell me what you want. 

A miracle, Silas replied. And instead of fluffing up into some mystic man on the mountain, instead of faux stooping to dispense wisdom as if coming from a great height, Peter kept looking at the fish. 

Yeah, yeah, very dramatic, but what kind of miracle? Deaf guy? Blind guy? Lame guy?  Possessed guy? We did a dead guy once, but that was-

Possessed, Silas interrupted, both because he didn’t want to hear the story and also because it seemed closest to what Legion had described - the sensation of being full of parts he could not assimilate, of being lost within himself, teeming and wordless. 

Yeah, I can work with that. Just lemme get my fish and I’ll meet you by….?

The exorcism was a disaster. 

Silas had seen exorcisms before, and appreciated them for their theatricality. They always started with the possessed being asked what the name of their demon was, which never failed to get fun answers. Replies ranged from Garalan, Lord of Whores, to Bungo, The Shit Goblin. Then there was some fun swearing, the possessed got to really get their wiggles out, and in the end, wam-bam-thank-you-maam, there was a ritually cleansed person. Sometimes, it even stuck, and the world got an actually cleansed person. 

But when Peter asked Legion what his name was, there was no theater. The man had looked at him, and in the same voice he always used, he’d said: I am Legion, for I am many. 

Which hadn’t exactly thrown Peter for a loop, but had earned him a pause. Enough that the ritual of the whole thing had broken down.

What do you wish to be cleansed of, Legion? he’d asked, and there was a moment where you could see the pieces fit together in the other man’s mind. It was like Legion was made whole just to answer the question. Healed just long enough to know what was wrong with him. 

I do not know how to begin to communicate all the things I am ashamed of, Legion confessed. But I am so tired of looking in the mirror and hating who I see. Hating who I have been, and what I have forgotten. When I have the rocks, the only thought in my mind is that I could, somehow, find the part of me that hurts and cut it out. And it never works. 

It was that last sentence that Peter had latched onto. 

I can work with that, he’d said, then he’d rolled up his sleeves and begun the work. 

Silas never could really describe what happened after that. How strange and shattered the world felt that day. He could describe how the high keening cry of Legion had split into its components, and those components had been revealed to by the core of all things. He could describe how the day had been, on one hand, every bit as bright as before, even as the sky had grown dark with the detritus of another man’s soul. Even Peter seemed confused by what he was touching there - not a serpent, but the pieces it had left behind. The shed skin. There was an unspeakable filthiness to each fragment, a smell like iron and piss, but they left without a fight. He pulled and pulled, and Legion soothed, and when the sky darkened for the second time, it was not with a cloud of inert sin but by the setting of the sun. Legion had been exorcised for more than sixteen consecutive hours before Peter finished. 

It wasn’t until Legion opened his eyes and looked at Peter that the mistake was realized. 

I have done something terrible, Peter spoke, and the truth of his words rang through the husk of Legion like a bell. It turned to him, heart beating, lungs filling, indescribably and yet undeniably dead - and spoke. 

You did, it said gently. But you did not know. Come bring Christ, Jesus, and we will see what can be done. 

And Peter did not merely walk, he ran. 

Silas had not known that sin could touch the metaphysics of the world. It was like seeing an intaglio portrait of what a human should be - the negative space equivalent of a soul. It looked at him, and the wrongness made his stomach clench. It wasn’t looking - it was moving its eyes like oiled marbles in a socket made of bone. It filled its lungs like wet bags. It was dead, and yet it chose not to rot.

What are you? he asked, and it smiled in a way that did nothing to set him at ease. Worse than the looking. Worse than the breathing.  

A gap, it said. But, fixable. You have nothing to fear. 

And then it winked, like it had just said something clever. 

Jesus, it seemed, was a carpenter. 

Load. Bearing. Demons, he said in Aramaic. Silas didn’t speak Aramaic, but the words came through perfectly clear to him. It was a miracle, but it was the kind of miracle that Jesus seemed annoyed with. The kind of miracle where if someone commented on it he’d spin his hands and roll his eyes and say Yes, yes, we could get a translator and waste a bunch of time on that or you could get on with it, which is why I bothered with this in the first place. Be impressed when I’m gone. It’ll be longer than you think. 

(At least, that was the lecture Silas had received when he’d commented on it. He was absolutely awed by the whole experience. He’d begun developing opinions on whether all holy men should spend five years training as a carpenter.)

This time, however, it was Peter’s turn to be at the receiving end of a lecture, which Silas was actually relieved about. Where Jesus had been merely a little annoyed with Silas, he seemed absolutely flabbergasted with Peter. 

You can’t just… reach in and grab all the bad things out of a soul! Jesus stressed again. You  can grab, maybe, two without doing a serious structural analysis. Five, if you’re like me, and can look at someone and know exactly how their soul fits together. But you can’t just empty the whole thing out! The Essenes phrased it like a riddle! “Jesus”, they’d say, “if you remove every sin from a man, what are you left with? God, or nothing?” 

The thing that had been Legion smirked and Jesus rolled his eyes at it.  

You really aren’t as funny as you think you are, he said, and it shrugged agreeably. Jesus seemed to be the only one not visibly disgusted by the not-dead very-dead thing momentarily  piloting Legion’s skin suit. 

How do I put them back? Peter asked. The demons are gone. I banished them. I can’t just reach into Hell and pluck them out.

Jesus nodded in agreement, even as he looked distinctly uncomfortable. 

You can’t, he said. But you can bribe them and their prices are actually reasonable. How many would you say you cast out of him? Fifty? Sixty? 

Two-thousand, replied Peter, and at that, Jesus blanched. 

Ah, he said thoughtfully. Shit. Fuck, even.

Then he looked over at Silas and asked the most expensive question of his life: 

There is no need to over describe what happened next: 

Two-thousand pigs were purchased. If they’d been killed, one by one by one, the entire land would’ve ran red with blood, and the pigs would’ve spent hours marinating in their fear. 

Instead, they were released as one herd atop the cliffside near the tombs, and herded as one screaming mass into the sea. 

The record says that they drowned. This record was made out of squeamishness. They died on impact, which is quicker and less painful, and unfortunately, fairly gruesome to watch. 

But it did happen, and from their deaths, two-thousand demons were summoned into this world. 

The worst demons of the Earth are known by name - Beelzebub and Azazel, Abbadon and Asmodeus, Belphegor and Mammon. They drive great evils - plague, famine, war and death. But there are littler, nameless demons that fulfill simpler tasks. There is a demon of Getting Drunk and Saying Mean Things. There is a demon of Getting a Giant Embarrassing Crush on Your Best Friend’s Spouse And Then Obviously Doing Nothing About It, Obviously, But One Time They Scooched Past You In a Hallway And You Thought About The Way They Pressed Up Against You For, Like, An Hour. There is a demon of Clapping After The Airplane Lands. There is a demon of Judging People For Having Food Allergies Like They Chose to Get Killed by Peanuts for Some Stupid Bozo Reason. 

There are, frankly, a lot of demons that go into the making of a human soul. Legions of them. And Jesus assembled two-thousand in front of him, in all their mildly sinful glory, and used them like individual pigments of paint to recreate a masterpiece. It was not a possession, but it was also the opposite of an exorcism. It was putting the evil back in a man, piece by piece, place by place, until they were what they should have been before. Until there were no more gaps left. Until the thing that lay in the realm past death became the man who had once screamed through the tombs and until the man who had once screamed through the tombs became the sum of his broken parts. 

Legion opened his eyes, and he saw. And he remembered. And he was a legion no more. 

My name, he said slowly, as if getting used to having a body, is Rufus. 

That’s kind of a shitty name, Silus replied, tears in his eyes. 

It is, he said back. My hair isn’t even red. I think they called me that because I was a weirdly veiny baby. 

And they both laughed until their voices were hoarse while hugging until their arms were sore. They’d never been so happy in their entire lives. 

Rufus departed for Rome only a few days afterwards. The city had given him enough, he said, and he was tired of taking more. When he was a madman in the hills, he could be forgiven for not noticing how scared he was making the locals. Now that he was whole, he had no such excuse. 

Silas lingered. He did not know why. He’d have journeyed to Rome for his friend’s company alone, but there was something palpable to the space that needed him there. 

So he stayed. 

Sometimes, he’d get news from across the sea - really, just a stone’s throw away - about the adventures of the carpenter. Apparently, a few years after the Rufus debacle, he was sentenced to death for some incomprehensible crime. This was not a particularly rare thing in Roman lands. Weirder than the sentencing was that it somehow managed to succeed and fail at the same time. They killed the man and made him God. A lot of people were extremely angry about it, but Silas himself was delighted. Getting a new God didn’t have to be that big of a deal, and really, maybe all Gods should spend five years as a carpenter. There’s a gravitas something can only get by being in the world and not above it. 

He heard about the whole ordeal several months too late to have any part in it of, of course, but he still made the time to travel down to the new sacred sites. He saw the cross where Christ had been hung, and he went to the tomb where he’d been laid, and for the first time since the Rufus affair he was struck by something that was inexplicably, unnaturally, empty. A place where something-that-was-not supposed-to-happen, had happened anyway. There was a gap in that cave, a spot where Jesus’s dead body was supposed to be, and he could feel something on the other side of the gap peering over at him. Smirking. 

He left. It was the cave, more than anything else, that convinced him that Jesus had done something stranger than merely dying and coming back to life. 

Jerusalem burned just two decades after that. 

Silas was old by then. His hair, once brown, once silver, was now just gone. And it was gone in the way things were supposed to go, the gapless-going that he’d spent twenty years learning to recognize. The destined death that all things were promised.  

He still made the journey out to see where the temple of Solomon had been. In fact, he begged for it, and was one of the first non-soldiers to be allowed to visit its ashes. He didn’t even have to make it through the gate to feel the void where it had been. 

He navigated by the sense of it. Like a flaming pillar, it stood, more distinguished by its absence than it could ever have been by its presence. The pattern of life becomes invisible when it is in harmony, but a sour note demands to be heard. 

He felt a little disgusted with himself for thinking in such fluffy mystic terms and scratched his ass, just to dispel himself of any illusion of wisdom. Also, because his ass itched. A twofer. 

He arrived at the square where the temple had stood and took a breath. He closed his eyes and sat, and reached. 

And it reached back. 

Ah, it said. Hello. Surprised you looked for me.  

What are you? Silas asked it for the second time in his life. 

It thrummed pleasantly through the area. When it wasn’t wearing a corpse, it was actually a joy to deal with. 

I am not Jesus, it replied. He has his own dominion. 

I know, said Silas, and he was surprised by the confidence he could say it with. But I did not ask what you aren’t. 

He felt himself smile. It was smiling. It was borrowing his face. He did not mind sharing. 

He remembered how unphased Christ had been, as he spoke with the thing. Part of him truly hoped that somehow, he’d become more like the carpenter.

Nobody does. Perhaps they should. Shall I tell you a story, Silas of Decapolis? Would you listen? 

He sat down in the ashen remnants of God's house on Earth, and opened his heart to what lay in the gap. 

Before there was anything, there was nothing. And I was that nothing. Every inch, a void. You can’t even imagine what that was like, to be everything. To be everywhere. To be completely alone.  

Images flickered through his mind. Legion clutching a bloody stone. This thing, seeing itself in Legion. Christ, eating the sacrament of his own flesh, his own blood. This thing, seeing itself in him too. 

I wanted to create, but when you are the blankness of the world, creation is like biting off chunks of yourself. Every place that you are is carved from a place I am no longer. And I wanted to give you - 

The stars whirled through the sky like dancers. Trees flowered in his mind and rotted into mushrooms, weaving through the soil in patterns beautiful and sad. Life played in a melody, roiling and changing but never silent. 

-everything. 

So I died. I ate myself, to give you, you. But there’s a caveat to that, isn’t there? 

The cave. The ashes. The husk of Rufus. 

Wherever you are missing from this world - where a gap forms in the pattern of all things. What bleeds out? If the work was my death, and the world was my work, what happens when it breaks? 

Also...these panels

Context is important! Pole and sex work are inextricably linked, but there are distinctions between them. Strippers made this hobby what it is, and taught me what I know, and while I haven’t lived that life, I’m honoured to stand on their shoulders.

every leverage dynamic ⮎ maggie collins & parker