Lydia Schoch

Just tuning in? Catch up with parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve , thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen of this story.

Rey Bryant wiped the perspiration off of her forehead and concentrated on slowing down her respiration rate as Sutter flinched at the sound of the barking dog inside and knocked on the little white door again. She glanced over her shoulder at the rest of her team as they waited for an answer.

Hurst was fiddling with his gun as usual. Aceveds had broken formation and was staring off sleepily into the distance. At least Mullen was alert and ready to back up her team leader should this fact-finding mission turn ugly. The last thing Bryant wanted to do was report another casualty to her boss. This was supposed to be a peacekeeping tour of duty, not the bloodbath it had turned into with the death of Melvin Watts and the fiasco with the Swood brothers a few nights earlier.

The door creaked open just far enough for a thin, brown, frowning face to peek out. Based on the grey streaks in her hair Rey guessed the woman peeking out at them was in her late 40s or early 50s, but it was hard to determine how old some of these hillbillies were. They bred fast, died young, and were so uneducated and suspicious of outsiders that Rey doubted any of them had ever seen a proper doctor or had any interest in preventing the diseases they carelessly spread. Rey introduced herself and asked if she and her team could come inside. With Hurst’s and Aceveds’ help this was more of a command than a request.

“We’re here to ask for your assistance in a troubling matter,” Rey said. Perhaps diplomacy would work better than the more aggressive tactics that killed off half of Alvarez’s team. “One of our soldiers was found dead at your neighbour’s house, and we want to know what happened.”

“We don’t know anything about that,” Isaac said. Rey had nearly memorized the scant reports about the younger of Daphne’s two children, but he spoke so infrequently that the psychological profile of him was almost certainly incorrect. Their software had found it much easier to predict how Ephraim could be expected to act in an unexpected situation, and even though his possibly violent tendencies were concerning at this moment Rey wished the algorithm could have predicted something about this man-child.

“We mean you no harm,” Rey said as she flexed her calf and felt the cool, hard edge of the blade hidden underneath her pants dig into her skin. Something metallic in Mullen’s pocket made a soft clanking sound as she shifted position behind her commander. “But we have reason to believe that you or someone in this house knows what happened that night.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t.” Isaac said. Once again Rey wished her Reader was still working. The technology was still in its infancy and it wasn’t always correct, but the ability to surreptitiously scan a suspect for small changes in posture, vital statistics, and facial expressions would sure come in handy right about now. Her intel suggested that Isaac was more empathetic than the average person, not less, and she suspected that if he was lying about what he knew the stress of it would be affecting something in his physiology.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” Daphne asked. Yes, this was a good indication that the personality profile of her was correct. It had predicted she’d be initially taken aback by such a visit, but she would quickly regroup and offer the team a small sign of hospitality.

“Yes, please,” Aceveds said. Tension always dried out his mouth, and at the moment his tongue felt like it was wrapped in cotton.

“No, Ma’am,” Rey said as she rubbed her nose and glanced sharply at her newest team member. “Thank you for your hospitality, but we have a long list of houses to visit tonight and we still have questions to ask you.” Ephraim

“We’re happy to help,” Daphne said, “but as my son told you none of us know anything about what happened to your soldier. I’d be happy to bring it up at the next council meeting, though.” This was a surprise! All of Rey’s intel indicated that Daphne was not well-connected to the surrounding community. There had apparently been several instances of her flagrantly breaking the rules, and some of Rey’s sources said the twins were rumoured to have been conceived in an adulterous affair that had been exposed in a controversial manner. Either way it didn’t seem like a good idea to arrest this woman without concrete proof of what had happened.

Daphne’s answers to the next few questions about what everyone was doing the night of Watts’ murder were short, polite, and almost too detailed. Rey’s sources agreed that Daphne was an expert at slipping out of punishments and talking other people into seeing things her way. It was one of the reasons why she was so disliked by certain families in Mingus.

Isaac, though, was a different story. When the signal was given Rey’s team snapped into focus and prepared for the worst. Even Aceveds stayed in proper formation for once.

“We’ll need to take your son in for further questioning,” Rey said. Daphne felt her heart drop so fast she thought it would plunge through her diaphram.”We have some equipment that can help us get to the bottom of what really happened.”

“No, you can’t!”

Hurst straightened his posture and contracted the muscles in his stomach in order to feel the firearm nestled by his right hip. It was about time Rey skipped over the gooey diplomacy and got to the good stuff.

“I promise you’ll have him home safe soon. There is no need to escalate this situation.” Rey lifted the edge of her shirt to reveal a gleam of metal in the soft evening light. Ephraim crossed his arms and clenched his fists as Daphne slowly opened the door and watched her youngest child march away with strangers.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Forbidden Island via @KenKaminsky. As curious as I am to learn how this tribe has fared over the last 65,000 years, I sincerely hope they never make contact with the rest of us.

 A Day In the Life of Dr. Oz. I’m not a fan of Dr. Oz. Maybe that’s why I found this so amusing?

Song Title Stories. What kind of short story could you make out of song titles? I don’t think I’d be very good at this game, but it sure looks like fun.

Trayvon Martin and I Ain’t Shit. A powerful essay about how racism tears down the author’s self-worth.

Disclaimer. My high school freshman English teacher gave us a lecture on this at the beginning of the school year.  <Mumble> years I still remember her stressing that it was up to us to decide what we wanted to focus on – a high-powered career, becoming mothers, exploring the world, etc. We could pick anything, she said, but we couldn’t pick everything at once. Now I wonder if she’d say the same thing to her students if she hasn’t retired yet. In retrospect it was odd that she thought motherhood was a bigger commitment than fatherhood. It might have been true for her generation, but most of the couples I know who are having kids these days split childcare fairly evenly.

From Shyness Cannot Be “Cured“:

Yet shyness remains a part of being human, and the world would be a more insipid, less creative place without it. As Cain argues, we live in a culture that values dialogue as an ultimate ideal, an end in itself, unburdening ourselves to each other in ever louder voices without necessarily communicating any better. Shyness reminds us that all human interaction is fraught with ambiguity, and that insecurity and self-doubt are natural, because we are all ultimately inaccessible to one another

From Another Childhood Memory:

One time in a supermarket, someone yelled at him. As I said, he looked like a caricature of a Nazi. Think Otto Preminger but taller. A man spotted him, heard the accent I suppose, and begin screaming at him, calling him a “Nazi bastard” and a war criminal and other such labels. Mr. Stern did not yell back. He merely reached over, unbuttoned his shirt cuff, rolled up his sleeve and showed the man the tattoo he’d been given, I believe, at Ravensbruck.

This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor wasn’t a lighthearted read, but I’m glad I listened to what the author has to say. Susan Wicklund and her family were threatened, stalked, and harassed for years because of her work at women’s health clinics.

A hundred years ago, Susan’s grandmother saw firsthand what happens to women who try to self-abort when they don’t have any medical training. The awful repercussions of that day trickled down from one generation to the next and spurred Susan to go to medical school so she could give other young women a much safer way to end their pregnancies.

What have you been reading?

Today I thought I’d answer some more recent search terms that have brought new readers to this blog. Feel free to leave your own responses in the comment section!

Why am I chattier on certain days and quiet on others? Did you know that words build up slowly in the back of your mouth when you sleep? If you don’t use them all up at the end of the day they reach maturity and start making baby words before you go to bed. By the time you wake up the next morning your tonsils are infested with two or three times your normal daily allotment of speech. You either have to spit them all out or risk them migrating up to your brainstem and take over your nervous system. Nobody wants that to happen.

Why is Christina so crabby? She doesn’t read this blog.

How to understand the type of person who won’t let you get a word in edgewise in a conversation. No one ever taught them that it takes at least two to carry a conversation.

Can people change fundamentally? No.

A non-theistic blessing before a meal.

Good bread, good meat.

Good God, let’s eat!

Should I apologize to my husband’s mistress? I’d love to know the rest of this story. If the person who searched for an answer to this question ever reads this, please let us know what happened!

Are extroverts doomed to repeat their mistakes for life? No.

What are men thinking when they go quiet? They seem strangely unwilling to answer this question. 😛 For the record, this is a great question to ask me if you’re interested in surviving the next apocalypse or wonder why Cheese Man never runs low on cheese. I have stacks of theories about both topics!

What man’s name gives the impression of [him being] trustworthy? Short ones.

Here’s a sign that my readers have high self esteem: I cant believe how f8cking awesome I am.

Finally, someone found this blog by searching for the phrase elders of lo don. Googling it turned up nothing, so I decided to write flash fiction about these elders so they’ll have something to do until we actually invent them.

“Herman, you fatuous fool!” 

“What happened?” 

“What sort of dingbat sleeps while the fire burns out?” 

“It’s still smouldering, Helga.We’ll be just fine!”

“The Elders of Lo Don don’t exist for just fine work. Go scrub the front steps. I’ll finish your watch.”

 After Herman left Helga crouched over the fragile flame. Achoo! Helga watch in horror as the tiny flame disappeared. A moment later she joined it. 

A 3.4 earthquake jiggled San Jose that January evening, but it wasn’t until the end of the cold, cropless summer that the humans realized something was terribly wrong.

© Michael Gäbler / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0

Just tuning in? Catch up with parts one, two, three, four,  five,  six,  seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven,  twelve ,  thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen of this story.

Her son’s harrowing story had left everyone convinced that the Lewis house would be targeted next, but when three, four, five quiet nights passed without incident and Paige and Wilma continued to improve Daphne no longer knew what to expect. It was easier to live in terror than to wake up every morning wondering if the soldiers would come back today.

Sometimes when Felix and Wilma were fighting over a toy or Paige interrupted Daphne’s train of thought to once again tell her how to properly boil a pot of tea or brush the dirt out of Lemon’s hair Daphne fantasized about walking away from it all for an afternoon. She wouldn’t come home again until just before Ephraim and Isaac expected dinner. The pain in her knee was receding, and while it was still quite stiff she was slowly learning her new limitations. Walking short distances wasn’t too painful, but the long, peaceful hikes she’d grown accustomed to as a single woman living alone were quickly becoming a distant memory.

Before the storm Daphne and Lemon had regularly gone a week or two without seeing anyone other than Nevaeh. Now her small, brown adobe was littered with sleeping mats, and her once-tidy front yard was strewn with travelling tents, racks filled with vegetables in various stages of the drying process and the rocks Felix insisted were the foundation of an impenetrable fort. It was easier to let him run out into the desert and gather them up than to force him to sit quietly while his sister napped and the adults worked.

“You’re not cutting the carrots uniformly,” Paige said as she set down her own knife and walked over to Daphne’s side of the outdoor kitchen. “They won’t dry properly if they’re not all the same size.”

Daphne paused for a minute, raised her eyebrow at the older woman, and then looked down at the thin slices of carrot on her cutting board.

“I’m cutting them the same way I have for thirty years.”

“Well, it’s not the right way. Let me show you how it’s really done.” Daphne bristled as Paige reached over, took her knife and began cutting the carrots into thin slices.

“They look identical to me.”

“Well, they’re not. If you – ” Paige’s latest monologue was cut off by the sight of Felix bolting back into the yard. When he’d caught enough breath to respond to their questions he told them what he had seen. While looking for material to add to his fort Felix had noticed a boulder shimmering in the sun. As he stepped closer to it part of the rock disappeared and was replaced with the surprised face of a young woman lying on her stomach. No sooner had he seen her than she disappeared and the surface of the large rock reappeared.

No matter how many times the women questioned him Felix’s answers remained the same. No, this wasn’t a game and he hadn’t been feeling ill. Yes, he had been drinking enough water and he was sure of what he had seen. Paige’s response to his story was to hurry back to into the house and pray. She’d been horrified to discover that Daphne didn’t have a personal altar and had quickly assembled a simple one for the family. In the 15 years since Bonnie passed away Paige had only missed a handful of daily blessings for her final and favourite wife.

Daphne bit her bottom lip and continued slicing carrots as she talked to Felix. Paige’s tendency to do and say things before she thought about how they affected other people had irritated Daphne for years, but she had a tough time saying no to a neighbour who had already lost so much. Was there a way to ask Paige to dismantle the altar without hurting her feelings? Daphne hoped she could figure it out soon.

*******

Lemon started barking as soon as the soldiers began creeping  into Daphne’s yard. Paige and the children had gone to bed early, and at first Daphne tried to shush him so he wouldn’t wake them up. When she heard boots crunching through the pebbles in front of her door an old memory flooded Daphne’s mind.

“Stay here,” the brown, wrinkled, old man said the last time she saw him alive. The shouts in the yard grew louder as he shut her into the pantry and hurried to the front door. At any other time of year there would have been too much food stored in there for a near-adult to hide, but the last harvest had been poor and their supplies were dwindling. 

“We know she’s in there,” a man shouted. “Give us to her and you won’t be harmed.” Her harvest had been mediocre as well, and when you combined that with the rash of disease and other misfortunes it was easy to deduce that something – or someone – had angered the gods. While it was true that Daphne didn’t exhibit any physical signs of troubled past lives or multiple souls peering out of her troubled brown eyes, orphans and outsiders were easy suspects at times like this. Carl’s granddaughter was both. 

“Calm down, Bonnie,” her grandfather said. “I’m unlatching the door now and coming outside. We’ll talk about this like adults.” Daphne heard him unlatch the door and step outside. Her heart pounded as brusque words flew between them at a frequency too low for her to make out. 

A knock at the door. Isaac leapt up to answer it while Daphne wrapped her arms around Lemon to subdue his nervous energy and Ephraim stood guard. At first no one knew how to react when the door swung open and a tall, thin soldier with a black eye asked if she and her men could come in and talk.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

You’re Not My Mom! via FreeThinkAhead. Why pets aren’t children.

How USA General Knowledge Has Changed, 1980-2012. As a kid I read the encyclopedia for fun. Animals and diseases interested me the most, so that’s what I tended to explore. Finally logging onto the Internet as a teenager was incredible – I suddenly could answer questions as quickly as I thought of them! It will be intriguing to see how our definition of general knowledge shifts as it becomes more and more common for adults to have grown up with this instant access to information.

A Crystal Tear via CGAyling. A fairy tale that I hope will be expanded into a longer story. Let the author know if you like it as well!

Aging Gracefully via XplodingUnicorn. Why is it that people least willing to seek preventative medicine seem to live forever? The first paragraph in this link is comedy gold even if you don’t have relatives who think they should be able to patch up their own wounds.

From When The Bough Breaks:

Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there.
It’s that we ignore the ones who are.
Till we find ourselves scarred and ashamed
walking into emergency rooms at two a.m.
flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain
because we are bleeding from the outside in.

From What It Is Like to Be a Muslim Woman, And Why We Know What Freedom Is (And You May Not):

Saying I want to be alone, that I need space, that I do not want to reveal personal information, that I do not choose to answer that question, that it is none of your damn business, that this is my body and I can position it on the furniture however I like, that I do not have to explain to you why I am smiling, that this is my time, that this is my work, this is my mind and I can use it to read and write what I please…

I can say these things now.

I never could before.

You Are Not So Smart makes me miss studying psychology. This book is full of ways in which we trick ourselves into believing that our memories are static, our decisions are logical, and that we’d automatically make smarter choices than other people in emergencies.

Pop psychology works best when it sticks a small area of expertise and realizes its limits. While I would have preferred a more scholarly approach to the subject matter, this book was quite entertaining and it easily accessible to readers who haven’t studied psychology. There is definitely a need for more books like this, and I’m proud to recommend it to my readers.

What have you been reading?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, reviews, paintings, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

My Proposal for a Bill Banning Male Masturbation. A satirical look at what might happen if men in the U.S. were treated the way certain states (Texas, Ohio) are treating women right now. Possibly NSFW.

Bigotry. The world is changing rapidly. I wonder what it will look like in 50 years?

It’s All About One’s Mood. Take a good look at this painting before scrolling down to read the artist’s comments. What emotions do you read in the subject’s body language?

You Just Broke Your Child. Congratulations via Danoah. This blog post is about parenting, but I’d argue that something similar could be said about our relationships with everyone in our lives. Emotionally destroying people is never ok. We all have bad days, of course. It’s part of being human. I completely understand feeling frustrated, but if (general) you are this mean-spirited and callous in public I can only assume your behaviour is a thousand times worse behind closed doors.

From Night Owl via SufiJohn:

Andrew, even as a young man,

leaves on his bedroom light;

brightly artificial

with an open door.

What About the “B” in “LGBT”? So I have a theory about the folks who say the ridiculous things this blogger is talking about: they do it to everyone because they think their way is the only one.

• Are you single? You better find someone fast before all the good ones are taken.
• Are you gay or lesbian? You came out too early/late/quietly/proudly.
• Are you married?  Hasn’t anyone ever told you that interracial/interfaith/May-December/binational relationships never work out? Not to mention the fact that you got married too young/old/soon/late in a ceremony that wast too big/small/secular/religious.
• Do you have a kid? You’re conceiving/birthing/feeding/educating/disciplining them incorrectly.

Yes, it’s incredibly annoying and hurtful…but I strongly suspect that this is a case of a vocal minority making the rest of us feel weird for not doing things the “right” way. Most people don’t agree with them, though.

From In Which I Real-Time Review ‘Katy Perry: Part of Me” via VampireNomad:

The background of Katy’s life growing up immersed in Christianity is both strange and understandable.  I can identify with the total immersion though she had a much more intense time of it than I did.  Her parents, traveling evangelical preachers, come off as theatrical.  With that charlatan edge that gives so many preachers a bad name.  And perhaps they are charlatans.  Or perhaps they aren’t.  But any upbringing with any sort of strict boundaries or full religious flavor will seem highly unorthodox alongside the pastel boobs-and-froth hype of Katy’s public persona.  She has voluntarily made overexposure, coy revelations, and sugary teasing a normal way of life so the juxtaposition will be striking.  She is very like many pastor’s kids I have known: talented and shackled with moral restrictions that they wriggle free of with wild acting out.  The everyday rigors of growing up are both exacerbated and ignored by the religion so the rebellion is exaggerated when it happens.  Katy is exactly a product of her upbringing.

As anyone who has ever made Tear Soup knows, grieving is hard, lonely work.

This book describes how it’s done and what friends and family members can do to help. I loved the authors’ playful use of metaphor to get their message across. While god is mentioned, religion is not the focus of the healing process in this fable. You can be part of any faith (or none at all) and still put the principles of this book into place when you or someone you know is grieving.

What have you been reading?

Edit: I just realized this video uses Flash and can only be viewed on a Mac or PC. Apologies to those of you who weren’t able to watch it. Use this link if the video above doesn’t work.