It’s two thousand and eight, you’re a teenager at Hot Topic, and you love nothing more in this world than Gerard Way.

(Or it’s nineteen ninety one and you’re buying Nirvana “Nevermind” on cassette at the Sam Goody.)

(Or it’s the eighties or the seventies or earlier... it’s Strummer, it’s Bowie, it’s The Beatles... it’s Tupac, it’s Run DMC, it’s the Sugar Hill Gang...)

(It’s a mall, it’s The Dozens on the corner, it’s a field on a New York dairy farm, it’s a soda shop...)

No... in this case, it’s two thousand and eight, you’re 17 year old Sarah, and it’s you and your 15 year old sister in small town South Carolina, in your room with a videocamera putting on skits. And while music plays a very important part in this story, and in the creation of the American teenager and all the cliques and subcultures it spawned, the touchstone here is comedy. Not a George Carlin record, not an episode of “Kids In The Hall,” not even an episode of Nickelodeon’s “All That,” because your parents didn't pay for cable and they wouldn’t let you watch television anyway. But it’s an improv class you fell in love with at school, the humor of the characters you and your sister create, the plays you’ve been writing together since you were little, and the jokes you tell to make each other laugh. 

This is before TikTok. This is before Vine. But it’s right at the genesis of a video sharing site called YouTube. Your sister will play “Tara” and your friend “Azer,” and you will discuss all things mid aughts emo and goth, from AFI to “Twilight.” You aren’t on LiveJournal like so many millennials who are sincerely posting lyrics from Morrissey or The Cure, instead you’re sneakily posting links to your videos on the 4Chan messageboard. You’re a babyfaced college kid trying to troll an audience into making fun of fictional characters they’ll think are real, two junior high girls who just took down their Zac Efron posters and used their iTunes credits on Evanescence singles. (It was a trio of friends, until in storyline, Azer was banished for shopping at Hollister.)

But the crowd you were waiting for really doesn’t take the bait. (Not in 2008, anyway...)

The 1950s ended. The hippies became yuppies. Kurt Cobain died and "TRL" replaced grunge. You stopped making videos, you did some nude art modeling, you had bills to pay when you found out men paid for used underwear on the internet, and life took you in a different direction away from your comedy dreams...

It all leads to professional dominatrix Petra Hunter talking to Meow Meow Pow Pow, over teleconference during a global pandemic. The same day, that rich guy who was in “Home Alone 2” got banned from Twitter for attempting a fascist coup at the Capitol building. But there’s a lot of ground we’ve skipped over, so we go back to the beginning.

“When I was...”

When you were Raven. The Acid Bath Princess of Darkness.

I saw the Tara and Raven emo/mall goth videos long after the fact, and they were often brought up in a Facebook group that me and some friends helped moderate a couple of years ago called “It’s 2005 and This Is Cool As Hell.” Yes, nostalgia for the mid aughts already, to the tune of 120,000 members (until a Business Insider article incorrectly pegged it as a piracy threat with watch parties for copyrighted material, and got it shut down). 

Those numbers are nothing compared to the nearly two million views that just one video on the “xxblo0dyxkissxx” YouTube channel has received - the highly quotable New Year’s 2009 shout out video. 

Other videos with “only” a quarter to a half million views or so were singalongs to bands like A Simple Plan or a reaction to the trailer for “New Moon.”

Some have celebrated Raven and Tara as a goth / emo Beavis and Butthead, though their demeanor may more resemble spun off characters Daria Morgendorffer and Jane Lane. Their spiritual predecessors are Circe Nightshade and Azrael Abyss of the reoccurring “Saturday Night Live” sketch called “Goth Talk,” but these were not influences and all unknown to Sarah and her sister at the time. They didn't have access to a lot of media or other extras, and had to make up their own fun.

“For most of my life I have felt financially insecure," Sarah tells me from her current residence in Dallas, Texas. Her family was poor and they moved around frequently when Sarah and her sister were children. “I don’t actually think the mall in South Carolina had a Hot Topic. We moved to South Carolina from East Texas so all of those things I was envisioning were from back home.”

“We played together a lot and over time that turned into us just developing our own senses of humor. Before the videos, we had made these spoof ‘Seventeen’ magazines. Which is funny, we weren’t really allowed to read those either. We just made these dry, absurd magazine for teenagers based on the covers we saw at the grocery story. We wrote articles, we played dress up and took pictures to be celebrities in the magazine." The stories included “My First Day of Middle School Was a Disaster!”, about a very bad day that ends with farting to make it worse. Like a young David and Amy Sedaris, they also wrote plays together.

While in junior high theater in 2003, Sarah ended up in an improv class. “I fell in love with improv. 'SNL' became one of those things that I was allowed to stay up and watch as I got a little bit older." She had a soft spot for Chris Parnell and Chris Kattan, but as a "young and innocent" devotee, “I devoured it all.” One of Sarah's first internet experiences was seeing Loney Island's "Lazy Sunday" from the 2005 season on YouTube. She also explored the burgeoning world of social media. “I was on Blogspot, I was on Xanga... I had multiple MySpaces. I was a pretty early adopter of Facebook. I remember watching music videos on YouTube. All of the sudden this whole world of music videos was there for me.”

Recording began in 2007, with help from visiting family friend "Azer" (they now perform music as NeutralOneder) at various points until production ceased in the summer of 2009. While fan fiction writers, podcast hosts, aspiring comedians, outspoken politicos, and others saw their profile rise on the World Wide Web, Sarah couldn't even get the notorious 4chan messageboard to follow her links to flame her videos. "Take a look at these weirdos!" was the hint, she says retrospectively, as she was "secretly hoping this would lead to something a little bit bigger for me, even if I didn’t say it.”

Meanwhile, in 2008 during Sarah's early college years, she "found these flyers on my college campus that were like 'pose for a photographer, $40 an hour.' Hey, that sounds like great money! I ended up in this really weird skeezy situation.” Her first experience in sex work was modeling "naked and revealing poses of a young looking 18 year old... I never got paid for that.” She went on to some nude modeling for art classes, but in January 2011, she stumbled onto "the greatest swindle ever... selling dirty panties. You mean to tell me...?”

From that eCommerce, she soon was asked to "dom" interested clients over webcam, as well as producing custom video clips and phone calls, before finding a career as an in-person dominatrix. “I was going to do a thesis in creative writing, creative non fiction. It was too much. I dropped out three weeks before the end of my last semester before my thesis semester,” Sarah says, and got to work on building and opening a dungeon instead.

Concurrent with the videos, but also unknown to the sisters at the time was “My Immortal,” an online Harry Potter fan fiction series told through a goth lens by author pen name “Tara Gilesbie” and her co-author “Raven” through username “XXXbloodyrists666XXX” on FanFiction.net. The writing also invoked Hot Topic, My Chemical Romance, and other staples of Sarah and her sister's Raven and Tara cinematic universe. Still, as reported by Sarah (as well as her sister in an often overlooked 2014 interview with New York Public Radio that partially lifted the veil), there was no connection beyond coincidence. ​

Nevertheless, internet users linked the fanfic with the videos. Three years after they stopped making them, "our videos started getting more and more traction because 'My Immortal' has such a cult following behind it.”

With increased viewership came the backlash Sarah had previously tried to provoke, although it took a different form than her and her sister had anticipated. Having gone through a mall goth phase herself several years prior, Sarah would write lines asking herself, “What is something I could say that would piss off younger me?”

Instead, "the comments that we got on YouTube for pretty much... were just... awful.”

“Three years ago someone left a comment insinuating they were going to rape and murder me.”

​Sarah has a few theories as to what stoked such hatred. "What I think a lot of people forget is that in the mid to late 2000s emo kids were everyone’s punchline. Also since comedy is a traditionally male dominated space, you see two women proclaiming to be emo, so that’s two strikes against them. And add in the fact (Raven and Tara are) really, really young... I don’t think historically there has been space for young people to be funny at all. I think that TikTok is kind of changing that just a little bit, because it’s such a youthful platform and there are so many people who are doing such great comedy there. But... there’s this assumption (youth) can’t be funny. Or if they are funny, they can only be funny for other young people.”

Raven's youthfulness, “fantastic deadpan,” and “pretty strong intensity” led viewers of her and Tara to “assume they’re real," even as the sisters worried their characters were too over the top and would give away the game.

In addition, “music and talking about music,” says Sarah, was also male-dominated, and perhaps “a little too much (for men) to wrap their heads around at the time.”

Sarah's sister, who portrayed Tara, did not comment for this article and hasn’t emerged because of how her and her sister were treated. But Sarah let me know that the commentary on their physical appearances, in videos recorded as they "suffered from mental health and body image struggles" and Tara gained weight from antidepressants, did an immense amount of damage. “When you’re a kid... that stuff really gets to you. For 12 years I lived with the assumption that I created this work that only I thought was funny. And that everybody else thought was totally worthless.”

As for Tara, a mother now herself who doesn't look the same after a complicated pregnancy and childbirth, has no interest in social media or being seen, and doesn’t want her child to go through what the sisters did by proxy.

Sarah points to a 2016 teaser she posted as another example, by then having grown into her adult aesthetic.  "I was always 'the ugly one' growing up so of course I expected a fair share of 'Raven you’re ugly' comments.” But she describes the contrast between comments on the early videos and the 2016 teaser as “night and day.”
​
“You’re fuckable now!” she bellows, mimicking the male voice of one 2016 comment sent her way. “There’s really only a place on the internet for women if they’re conventionally attractive, and if they’re not, they have to make that a part of their thing. She has to make her unattractiveness part of her comedy. There is no room for a woman to just exist without having to say something about it or apologize for it or joke about it. I’m pretty mad because what I look like shouldn’t determine whether or not people think I’m funny. And what I look like certainly shouldn’t impact how people treat me on the internet.” 

That same year, "I signed up for improv classes again. I was really excited about it, let’s do it, let’s go... I ended up dropping out my first term. One, I was really depressed, which I think is a joke in itself. But two, I was a sex worker and the atmosphere was a lot different... at the time, I wasn’t out about my job as I am now. I remember having the worst anxiety thinking, 'What if someone recognizes me from the internet? What name do I choose to tell people? What name do I decide to perform under? What happens if someone finds out Sarah from improv is Petra the dominatrix?'”

She couldn't make the jokes about her day job that others would make about theirs. “Even though societal views are changing, it’s still a stigmatized job and we don’t have any protections. Day one that you become a sex worker, you learn that you have to be so, so careful of your true identity and how many people you truly let know about who you are. Because otherwise if the wrong people find it, they will hurt you.” 

As an improv 101 class, the low hanging fruit for her classmates was "dead stripper jokes... I spent a lot of those improv classes just really, really anxious. I felt like I couldn’t be myself. I just really didn’t feel like there was a place for me.” 

While Sarah worried sex work was a potential concern for agents and producers who might see it as "a liability... not (being) squeaky clean," it was also the trauma from all those YouTube comments that "killed something inside me. It kind of taught me that even if I thought I was funny, other people wouldn’t think I was funny. It just took away that fearlessness, and that willingness to fail and to do whatever the fuck it took to make those things work. Over time it slowly fizzled that fire out.”

A new persona emerged in the last ten years that became Sarah’s means to make a living, the Dallas Dominatrix Petra Hunter. Besides the work that led to operating her own dungeon, Sarah also appeared on shows like “Off the Cuffs,” a podcast about kink, discussed relationship trials and tribulations on “Vegan But Lazy,” started two offshoot businesses offering BDSM materials, spent summers fostering for animal rescues, and used her Twitter as an activist and an advocate for sex workers. She has talked about the FOSTA-SESTA bills meant to mitigate sex trafficking, which impacted online advertising for sex workers, and how difficult that made it for her to vote for Joe Biden since Kamala Harris was a co-sponsor of that legislation. 

Sex work and all the tasks that come along with it are “so consuming,” says Sarah, the carefree life of her persona being a mirage while the hustler behind the alter ego is working 12 hour days with few days off. With “hours and hours spent on website edits, emails, (and other) unpaid work,” it’s not the “easy money” that it looks like. Particularly in the COVID era, all those going through financial difficulties may joke “Guess I’ll make an OnlyFans!” says Sarah. “A bunch of selfies and drinking mimosas, and raking in thousands of dollars,” it is not.

This leaves little to no time for the things Sarah enjoys. “I soothe myself through overworking. It’s definitely unhealthy.” In the first couple months of the pandemic, she did start reading more and writing again. But after it became clear that sheltering in place was going to last a lot longer than a brief "vacation," she was “faced with this guilt. Even though I want to write, there’s this voice in my head that’s like ‘dude, Sarah, you need to write something that’s actually going to make you money RIGHT NOW.’” So instead of an essay about personal experiences, she'd instead write a blog post meant to direct more web traffic to one of her Petra sites.

After all that, out of energy and mental capacity, there remains the stack of books to be tackled someday, not to mention all the writing of her own she is inspired towards but too exhausted to undertake. “When I read again, I want to write. But life gets in the way and I don’t do it. And then there’s a whole shame cycle... ‘you call yourself a writer but you don’t even write.’”

However, all this more than prepared her for an emerging situation in the final days of December 2020. A new slew of wannabe internet sleuths started “connecting the dots” between Raven and Petra. And so, Sarah outed herself first to control the narrative. “It was a power grab.” After years of imposters claiming credit and pirates ripping the video to reupload on their own channels, Sarah took everything sex work taught her about “marketing and branding, and gaining control over your own content” for the last decade and put RavenIsAPoser.com on everything.

Twelve years to the date of publishing the most popular Tara and Raven video, the New Year’s 2009 shout out, Sarah emerged on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter to confirm that Raven and Tara were characters. Immediately, she had behind-the-scenes footage and stories to share, as well as some short video bits like the 2016 teaser had seemed to foretell.

“I was expecting this tremendous backlash,” Sarah says, expecting to have to lock down or disable her Petra accounts and ride the wave of more internet hate. Instead, after a grueling year for people personally, for the health of the nation, and for an embarrassing and scary election cycle rife with coup attempts, the nostalgia of Raven and Tara felt oddly comforting. “I wasn’t expecting this kind of reception at all,” says Sarah. “I truly had no idea that our videos were so universally beloved until just a few days ago. And so I’ve spent the past 12 years just assuming that no one thought I was funny. And that no one watched our videos.” 

Yet like every generation that looked back at the one before it, Sarah points out, today’s zoomers are fascinated with what millennials and Gen X’ers may have taken for granted in the 2000s. In one Instagram exchange, a “baby,” as Sarah jokingly and lovingly called them, asked her “So wait, did you get to go see ‘Mean Girls’ and ‘Elf’ in theaters?”

“I didn’t because we were poor,” Sarah laughs, “but I could have!”

Also, Sarah has been told, even if Raven and Tara were tongue in cheek, the characters have over time come to encourage people to be themselves. “There was just something so unapologetically authentic about them... (they were) open about their feelings and the things that they liked.”

​When I was a kid, there was a cable network called The Family Channel. One program they showed was reruns of the 1960s version of “Batman,” a character that debuted in Detective Comics in 1939. There was an episode called “The Bloody Tower” where Batman’s sidekick Robin (real name: Dick Grayson) stumbles over a clearly marked Death Bee Beehive Trip Wire set up by the villainous Lord Marmaduke Ffogg. Ffogg’s daughter, Lady Prudence, stands over Robin and mocks him coolly, advising him to stay calm or risk being stung. So, this bee, I don’t know if it was made of felt or paiper-mâché or what, but it was about the fakest thing I have ever seen. I have a distinct memory of watching this show with my sisters, my parents having given us vanilla ice cream with hot fudge on top.

​Now, my kids watch “Teen Titans Go,” which includes a much more obnoxious version of Robin, and sometimes another hero named Bumblebee. There was an entire episode about Beast Boy creating a new system of currency using bees. None of these characters have any adult supervision, as even Robin has escaped the shadow of his former caretaker Batman.

​This series is a parody of a more serious anime style show that ran for five seasons called “Teen Titans,” and both incarnations included a supervillain group called The H.I.V.E., but none of them were costumed like bees. The adults on this show were the most evil of all the characters, and a recurring theme was the young villains rebelling against their supercriminal mentors.

​Apparently, there have been six different supervillains in DC Comics titles that were all called Queen Bee. Some versions were the head of H.I.V.E. as characterized in the printed comic book titles, but this affiliation was not portrayed in any live action or animated show that I could find.

​There is also an old Quality Comics superhero named Red Bee who was acquired by DC in 1956, but then became public domain. One version fought mobsters and Nazis with an arsenal that included trained bees stored in his belt buckle. Another version was the original Red Bee’s grandniece, whose costume, weapons, and bees were all robotic. She is briefly mutated into a beelike creature, and when she is restored to human form, she gives up the superhero life to be a research scientist. Perhaps she will also become a mother? There aren’t a lot of superheroes who are parents, but especially mothers. Raising a family and being a superhero are often shown to be incompatible. There are far more criminals in pop culture who are shown juggling being a parent with being an outlaw.

​“Kill Bill” is not a DC property, but it has many bee references (in dialogue, costuming, and music cues), themes about parenting, and a monologue about DC heroes worth mentioning. The titular Bill says Superman has contempt for humanity that is made evident by his secret identity Clark Kent being “weak... unsure of himself... a coward.” But I feel that Clark Kent is his true persona, as he was raised by the Kents on farm in Smallville - Superman is the bravado he puts on to be a hero for the planet. I think we don’t see Clark Kent holding his Superman qualities back during his everyday life as much as we see Superman masking his vulnerabilities while on duty. 

Batman, on the other hand, never had a conventional human experience. He was raised as the privileged Bruce Wayne, then traumatized witnessing his parents be shot to death in a Gotham backalley, and ultimately became the personification of vengeance as the Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne is the facade he displays to cover up what he’s really doing at night when he is his true self.  

​Clark had the Kents. Batman has mostly only ever had Alfred the Butler. Robin, as Dick Grayson, did have his circus performer parents, killed during an acrobatic stunt turned tragic, but has otherwise had only Batman and Alfred, or served as a de facto parent himself for the other Teen Titans. 

Bees, the hive structure, and loyalty to the Queen (the mother) seem to indicate the ultimate devotion to “family.” Yet bees are rarely the good guys in the comics, and the good guys in the comics rarely have family or parents in their lives.  

You know who did have a parent in their life? Lady Prudence. And where’d that get her?  Wielding fake ass looking bees as a weapon, of course.  

​I’ve had a lot of ups and downs with my parents, none relating to bees, but all our disagreements have definitely informed how I want to be a parent (or, maybe it’s more accurate to say, the ways that I DON’T want to parent). I want my kids to always be close to me, and I don’t know how to resolve that with the inevitability that they must someday buzz away from our hive. As long as they still want to come back to visit, and they still think of me as a hero in the future like they treat me and tell me that I am now, that’s all I can really hope for and dream of. 

Note: The following is based on a dream the author had a few years ago, and while generally you should not write out your dreams and/or nightmares, the author decided to try anyways and make something coherent/cognizant/meaningful out of it. You can decide if it works. if you dare...

City of Terror
   
       We found ourselves in this small mountain town filled with floating castles and ancient-looking buildings—museums, churches, capitols, old houses—each historic and antiquated monument floating atop its own individual mountain, like a dozen acropolises. We’d spent the morning visiting each one, gallivanting around with the other tourists. The city itself was in a large valley made up of the small hills and cobblestone streets that wound around these edifices. White snow topped the green mountains on either side of us.
​
         The sun was bright, but you could barely feel it as the narrow valley and hills and many buildings had a tendency to slant its rays and keep the sun from penetrating totally in the street of the city. The whole town looked as if it were painted as a chiaroscuro. Light. Dark. Light. Dark. In some parts, particularly down low, the cold air and dark shadows felt as if they were emanating from the earth itself.

     We were on vacation in this small, fairy-tale-like-town for, as they call it, a “Babymoon.” Particularly special for us because we’d spent several years navigating the hellscape of miscarriages and infertility treatments, with visits to doctors’ offices becoming more frequent than meals eaten out.

        As evening encroached, my six-month pregnant wife and I soon found ourselves in line with all the other tourists to go to a famous ball put on by the locals. The waiting area sat atop an inclined street that led to the base of a small castle. The entire city and valley stretched out on either side of us. A 360-degree view but for the stone structure right in front of us. Pink snow topped the green mountains as dusk approached.
​
        They said the city began as a refugee camp, some years, long ago. A different time, but the same world. These residents walked and lived in camps at first. All borders shut. Some of them lived in cages. There was no room at any inn they stopped at along the way. So, one day, they made their own way to a part of the world no one cared they’d occupy. Somewhere in between Greenland, Wyoming, and Azerbaijan. They built a city for themselves. Because no one else would. Some of them were architects after all. And doctors. And city planners. And philosophers. And lawyers. Those that were still living.

      My wife and I were tired. The tiredness that hits the bottoms of your feet and lower back, exacerbated from walking around on cobblestone all day. My wife was not feeling good. She sat down next to me as we waited in line for the doors to open.

     After thirty minutes or so, people began grumbling amongst themselves. It was a strange noise to hear after walking about this town all day and hearing nothing but laughter, joy, and curiosity coming from folks—both us tourists and the locals alike. That’s when I first felt that something was not quite right.

     Perhaps it was because there was a man in line I didn’t like the sight of.  He looked like he was concealing a weapon but it couldn’t have been, for weapons were outlawed, no, not outlawed, didn’t exist.

     In fact, the more I thought about it, I realized that this entire fantastical little city existed without a single unit of police or military. There were not even jails for there were no need for them. A guide had told us this as we toured the largest castle on the tallest peak—it’s location right behind the smaller castle in front of us. It was strange for us Americans, who were so used to guns and men in uniform patrolling the streets. So used to violence and the unpredictability of men. 

           Night started to descend while we waited in line, and as the lights of the town flickered on, everyone’s phones started to ring and ding, one by one, with the sound of text messages and call alerts. People began picking up, unworried at first, and then more so as they realized that it was not just their phone going off, but everyone’s, and something of this nature could only be an emergency alert. 

           My wife stood up with one hand holding her stomach, the other on her lower back. I grabbed her left hand to help her rise. The sound was far enough away and unexpected enough that most of the looks the other tourists’ faces were ones of shock and confusion. Were they bombing the ski resort up above us for avalanches, perhaps?

         We all rushed down and around the cobblestone street leading up to the castle and over to her so we could see what had caused her to scream. And that’s when we saw it as we wound around to the right of the small castle to join her: The large castle crumbling and falling off the side of the hill. Another explosion punctured the air. We all flinched. More of the castle crumbled away. Distant screams.
Then, other sounds. Closer, deeper, faster, and more shocking. Right behind us. The sound of a gun, I think. The sound of bodies suddenly flapping against the cobblestone next to us.

           I grabbed my wife and we rolled down a small knoll in the street to the left. I pushed her down hard, harder than I should have for a woman carrying a child. The shots continued. 

            “Let’s go!” I whispered to my wife.
            We got up, crouching, and began running down the street that wound itself down the hill like an ice cream cone.
            “We have to get down and get out of this city,” my wife said. I nodded.

           We jumped a small guardrail and I caught my wife as she jumped and then tumbled on top of me into the sweet, green grass that covered the hills in between the switchbacks of the road. Grass so green and fertile you could nearly taste it in the cream and milk at restaurants and coffee shops.
           I pushed her down beside a small bush and lay flat. The trucks drove by above us, the men wearing Viking masks. We heard them stop. Doors open. More sounds.
             Pop pop pop. Pop pop pop.
            “Down with the imperialists!” one said. Or was it tourists?
           I nodded at my wife to keep moving and she nodded back. We moved straight down the grass this time, slowly, my wife huffing, and when the road came up again below us, we paused, looked right and left for signs of anymore trucks, dashed across the road like the chipmunks and squirrels had done all day, and began moving down the next stretch of grass between the winding-ice-cream-cone of a road, always crouching. Staying low.
            We had moved fast. That’s what had saved us. Despite my wife’s pregnancy and the slow walking down the hill now, those first few moves were crucial. The drop and the roll down the small knoll in the street, then around to the left. Then down the street. Now the hills.
We would get out of this I thought. Whatever this was. And that’s when the top of the small mountain we were just on exploded. Tiny pieces of rock and ancient brick from the castle flew over us. We hit the ground again. Our ears ringing now. For this one was close and loud and big. We covered our heads with our frail hands. I threw myself on top of my wife. We could hear the trucks coming back down the ice-cream-cone road. ​

    ​ We moved down the hill and were back in the town, the city of shops and stores and restaurants and bars that spread across the base of the valley and clustered up around each acropolis. The place that earlier today had seemed so beautiful and peaceful and quiet and calm. We ran across the street, into one of those fancy touristy-yet-local restaurants that serves high-end Italian dishes alongside hand-rolled sushi. We burst in, my wife and I. Covered now in grass and rubble. Short of breath. A small trickle of blood was running down my wife’s left temple. A bruise was developing on my knee. Everyone looked up at us simultaneously. Most of them locals. Not one of them looked concerned. Did they not know? Did they not hear?
     “The explosions!” I shouted. “The men, the guns! Didn’t you hear it? This place is not safe. We need to move, all of you. Now!”
     They continued to stare at us in silence. The approaching steps of two men in suit jackets.
    “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re going to have to ask you to leave.”
     They threw us out.
 
     Our goal was then to make it out of the city at all costs. We could survive in the woods, my wife and I. We could survive in the streams and rivers and fields and glaciers and whatever was beyond this town. It was where we were most comfortable, to be honest.
 “There’s two of them there!” someone shouted, as we crept through the streets.

    I whipped around to see four men with guns behind who had caught sight of us. I grabbed my wife and we barged through a door to the building on our left as shots hit the cobblestone street.

   We entered what appeared to be the circular lobby of a bank or a governmental office. Everything was polished and white and marble. A large chandelier hung down in the center of the space. There was only one desk at the far end of the room, a concierge of sorts. My wife’s right arm was draped around me as she held her stomach and leaned heavily onto me. I held her around the waist. We walked toward the concierge who, upon seeing us, promptly picked up his phone and began dialing.

     “No, wait!” I shouted. “She’s pregnant.”
     The man seemed unconcerned.
     “We have papers, documents! We’re travelers, American citizens. Do you see what’s going on out there?”
    The man paused for a second, considering. Maybe he considered the baby. Maybe he considered us a nuisance more than anything, as less than, as not even something worth giving up.
     “You can go out the back way,” he said. “You cannot stay here, but I can let you leave quietly. Where you choose to go from there is up to you.”
     “Please, just don’t send us back out there,” screamed my wife. “We just need to get out of this city!”
     “Fine. Follow me,” said the man. He was black and wearing at least a thousand-dollar suite.
     He led us through the door behind the concierge desk and then another one. Each hallway was white, polished, and marble. He let us out into an alley. In one direction was a dead end. The other led back into one of the main streets.
    “Goodbye,” he said. “And, Good luck.”
    “Wait—”
    The door slammed behind him and we froze.
 
      And that’s when we were rescued. Sort of. A young, muscular man in a hoodie sitting outside a door further down the alley. He looked at us for a second, then waved us over. We ran to him. We had no other choice.

     The young man closed the wooden door behind us a with a small bang. It made both my wife and I flinch for it sounded like a gun shot.The young man, however, also seemed unconcerned. He was nearly apathetic and unapologetic as he sized us up. Contemplating what to do with us. As if we were a hindrance to his evening and not fleeing for our lives from the violence outside. He didn’t offer us tea or coffee. Neither did he even offer us a seat. Not even to my pregnant wife who was now bleeding rather profusely from somewhere on her head. All he said, was, “Follow me.”
We followed him through two rooms and down a small flight of stairs into a cellar of sorts. It smelled of wine, dates, figs, and cheese, was earthy and comforting.

      “Here,” he said, opening a latch in the center of the floor to reveal a large hole.
      “This slide will shoot you out of the city.”
      “Slide?”
     “Yes, it’s an emergency slide. Should things ever get too bad.”
     I was dumbfounded. “But … Isn’t this bad?”
      “This is normal,” the man said. “On this day, you just happen to be the unlucky ones. We cannot shelter anyone here who was not born here. And sometimes the locals get a little bit tired of all the tourists.”
     “So they shoot them?” my wife asked.
     He shrugged.
     “But what about the buildings?” I asked.
    “We like rebuilding things. It’s what makes this city so interesting. But then everyone wants to come and look at the things we’ve built. And sometimes we get tired of it. We do not have to let anyone come, after all. This is our home. A home we were forced to make on our own when no one would accept us into theirs. So we are not obligated to help anyone. No one felt obligated to help us.”
      “But what about—”
      “Please,” the man said. “You must go. I must return to my work. I have much to do.”
      “Thank you,” my wife said, even though I did not feel like thanking this man.
       “I must go,” he said. “Au revoir.”
       I spun toward my wife. She nodded at me. Giving me strength. I took her hand and we jumped.  

      When I was young, I often assumed that every German living in 1940’s Nazi Germany was a full on Nazi. Or else a resister. But no, many of them were bakers, simply going to work each day, baking bread, watching the ash rise from the smokestacks and thinking nothing of it. They thought nothing of war. They merely went to work and did their job and didn’t ask too many questions. Like this man.

      Or was it I who, in a past life, was the baker?
​
     We landed on the soft earth some thousand feet below the city. A lake stretched out in front of us. My wife and I did not look back at the city above us but kept moving forward. The city in the valley with the hills and acropolises and the sweet, green grass. That city was probably red now. Red and yellow from fire. Beautiful City. City of Terror. City of No Samaritans. 

How to Write Through a Pandemic
words by Alex Simand
photography by Cassandra Panek

This piece was originally published in the Stansbury Forum on June 6, 2020. The Stansbury Forum is a website for discussion by writers, activists and scholars on the topics that Jeff focused his life on: labor, politics, immigration, the environment, and world affairs. Please be sure to check out their impressive work and support their mission. The original link to the piece is here and their website is here. 

by Gary Phillips 

On a listsev I’m part of, Crime Writers of Color, various discussions fly back and forth via email among the loose-kinit group – some of whom are part of the MWA and SinC. The morning following the publishing of these statements, folks on the listserv heard of examples of pushback from the membership, and the nature and character of such was bandied about.  ​

Family Crypt Chorus Blog
 
 
“And on my best behavior I am just like him
Look underneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid”
 
-Sufjan Stevens
“John Wayne Gacy Jr.”

 
In Dad’s Home Movie, I Defy Him
Marie Marandola
 
I’m still rocking on unsteady hips, but already
he’s bragging to his universe about me.
(Favorite daughter; see how much she knows.)
 
He sets us up:
first the camcorder, then the game.
Marie! Can you go get me number fo-ah?
 
His voice is gentle, New England music.
I disappear.
 
A toddle, a squat. A yellow magnet 4
retrieved from a board. The thunderclap
of Dad’s applause.
 
Aww-right! Number fo-ah, thank you!
Now, how about… number two?!
 
A shy smile forms beneath the armor
of my thick-bobbed hair.
No.
I hold up my index finger. Numbah one?
 
Dad laughs.
You play your own game, huh?
 
And I do.
(And still I do. Favorite daughter, born
or burst forth, formed
fully contrary.)
Each number he counts,
I counter. Each number I name,
I find. And Dad’s laugh,
like lightning,
instilling this in me:
 
As long as you’re smart enough, Sweetpea,
the rules are yours to make.
 
Just once, I pause
to investigate his camera,
my huge hazel eye gazing at its gaze.
 
Then it’s right back to gleefully retrieving
(three instead of seven, eight instead of five)
until one day, I see myself, and see
how the numbers have changed:
add 35 years, and one near-fatal accident, and--
 
Dad?
 
I don’t think I really want to be Minerva.
I wish I’d sought your wisdom
before warring for my own.
I wish I could put both of us
back inside your head.
 
Dad’s footage runs down; Mom’s key
turns in the lock, and I run to her, arms-up.
Jacket off? I entreat her
and crawl into her lap, remembering
I’m no deity, but a child
 
—but too late.
 
 
 
Those Dead Spaces: When No One in Your Family Talks
-Levi Rogers
 
 
My family didn’t talk much growing up. There was a lot of family history that, if not covered up, was at least unspoken. Most of it was barely scandalous, but still, we didn’t talk, not about things that were actually going on, not if it wasn’t in whispers. Certain things were better left unsaid after all. The nice, decent, Christian-white-people-way. No “gossiping.”

We didn’t talk about abuse or mental illness or even teenage rebellion. We whispered about these things as if they were dirty, radioactive secrets. Just like those three monkeys: “See no evil, speak no evil, hear evil.” To do so was to bring a demon to life.

This eventually provided a reactionary state of mind within me to convert to an all-honesty, raw-confessionalism later in life as a response to the safe, closeted, sheltered, see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-do-no-evil Christianity I grew up with. This, at least, is what a therapist once told me in couple’s counseling once. She said I should be careful not to overdo it with my honesty. That I was over-reacting against my past.
 “Fuck you!” I said to her. “I’m not overreacting against anything! People can’t just pretend that life is nice and tidy and never be in touch with reality!”

Maybe she was right.

This lack of familial communication is perhaps why I still have trouble communicating with people today, preferring to spend most of my time, alone, in my own head. Unless it’s through writing, I don’t share things easily. I bottle my emotions. I have imaginary conversations and fantasies in my mind rather than confronting people directly.

 This creates problems. In marriage and relationships mostly, but also at work. I am distanced person. I rarely convey my emotions through speech. It’s like, I just can’t. This is perhaps why I’ve always been drawn to writing. Why I attempted to write a raw, confessional, edgy memoir in my early twenties. Why I’m still trying to write that book to this day.

I might be mad at the crypts underneath my family’s history. Those dead bodies buried (some of whom are still alive) that we never speak of. But I have the same dead spaces within me and beneath me. Mistakes I’ve made. Many nights I would not want televised on the big screen. Vaults underground I’d do anything to keep you out of.

Sometimes I even try to cover up of these chambers with raw honesty. As if confessing to one crime will spare me from the others. Sometimes it even works.

But I’m still forced to live with the smell.
 
 
 
the green door
-Alex Simand
 
a green mottled door winks itself into existence and creaks open. a sort of yawning creak that might be a groan. or a slow flood. or a winter fling with a grad student you never really liked that much but then got so busy existing—between exams and learning how to cook udon noodles without a stove—that your slipped right into a whole life together. chipped dishes and microwaves and too many kiddie pools for one person to own balled up in the garage. a garage. Christmas lights and stamp collections and decorative whatevers until you wake up thirty eight years later as if the photos of you and the now-gray grad student that adorn the walls are poor reproductions. that sort of creak of a door. you never asked it to open but it did.
 
the door itself is so aggressively unobtrusive it might be a prop on a movie set. not the kind that goes up for auction on eBay some number of nostalgic years in the future before being snapped up by a highly sympathetic man named Tom from Wisconsin. no, it’s the kind of prop that gets left in a studio’s alleyway for the garbage collector but somehow gets wedged in a gaping sewer grate and nobody bothers to fish it out and so it remains slowly decomposing over the course of several human lives. and nobody seems to mind. people are generally agreeable to ornamental decomposition. something about HyperArt or Situationists or other stone-cold thoughmongers. the door keeps opening it and you, idiot, keep walking through. like maybe this time there won’t be a twelve-foot crocodile tick-tocking its way through the foyer. like maybe the disproportionate hangover is ever-coming instead of never-ending. the colorblind pond-scum of its exterior will keep you away, but it doesn’t. though the grass may be greener, it scuffs your seams just the same.
 
 
Lifetime Spent Sitting
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella
originally published by Thirty West Publishing House in Marrow

Lifetime spent sitting

My whole life was
spent in the backseat of my parents’
car while they looked for
a brand new house.
In new neighborhoods, with
new car smell, I was woozy with motion.  
I asked for the radio and
they turned on stations I didn't like.
Old music and new cars and new homes
and repeated bumps over potholes; I was always sick.


I’ve wasted my adulthood sitting on men’s
laps, listening to music while drunk.
New men and old music and sitting.
And my life is a chart scaled by carsickness.

The Building of a Crypt
Anonymous

My family has been building its own crypt since 2007
That’s not true, but that’s how it feels,
My mother grew ill
My sister left for college,
My childhood rushed to an end
Yet this is par for the norm of life,
But when my mother died I found that my family, well
My family’s house crumbled brick by brick
And while those left have tried to build it back
Those bricks have been joined together for a crypt
Here lies a former family, it reads,
Scattered to the West, broken and disorganized
Nothing has been the same, though we try
The family has died, it came to an explosive end,
And though glue remains, trying to hold two ends,
The effort seems fruitless, and impossible to mend.

Dear San Francisco 49ers,

It’s me, Tom Brady, the best Quarterback and football player of all-time. I hear you’re going to the Super Bowl this year. Congrats! It’s been a bit since you last played for a Championship. You know I’ve been to the Superbowl four times since you fellas lost to the Ravens. I won three--I mean all four of those Super Bowls, orchestrating the best Super Bowl comeback ever against the Falcons and definitely did not get stripped, causing a turnover,  on the final drive against the Eagles.

Anywho, you are going to the Super Bowl and that’s a big deal. Are you sure you’ve got the best team? Are you sure you’ve got the best Quarterback? Have you seen all the reports that Jimmy G is just a game manager? That people don’t trust him in big situations? I know Jimmy really well. He backed me up here in New England. There's a reason we traded him. I mean come on! He threw eight passes, total, in your Championship Game. He threw for less than 80 yards. You could use a new Quarterback. You know whom you should get, me: Tom Brady, Bay Area native and a GIANT 49ers fan.

How perfect would this be? The prodigal son comes home, leaving behind his life of working for The Dev--I mean Bill Belichick. With this win, San Francisco will tie the Patriots, and no one else, for six Super Bowl Championships, becoming the best franchise ever. But also, with this win I’ll get seven Super Bowl rings, more than any franchise has total, and finally unlock the secret to immortality.

Think about it. Jimmy might only play two more years, if he goes the way of Andrew Luck. I will be immortal, getting stronger with each ring I collect, kinda like Thanos. Don't you want Thanos running your team? What a story that will be! Tom Brady returns home, becomes Thanos, wins every Super Bowl, and lives forever. They’ll build a shrine for me--I mean us.

I know what you’re thinking. “Tom, it’s the week of the Super Bowl, we can’t trade for you.” When have rules ever stopped The Patriots anyone from doing anything? Plus, I’ve gotten that sort of thing handled. Just bring Jimmy to a TB12, his key card should still work. I’ve got a lab in the basement where we cant switch our faces for the week, and then we can put Jimmy in one of the hyper-sleep tanks where I keep my clones house plants.

It’ll be great. You won’t regret it. This will be the best decision your franchise has ever made.


Looking forward to hearing back from you,



Tom






Dear Tom,

What time should Jimmy show up at TB12?

Love,

The 49ers

​In a few years, Lupe will be dead. And my mind will circle back to this moment between us again and again. A moment. What’s a moment? 

A moment can be everything. I doubt it took her longer than a moment to write that note and take those pills. In a single moment she decided she was done. She flung her head back and swallowed death. She probably didn’t even think of me. ​

Every weekend, my father’s family visits Grandmother Lola. She lives next door. After Lupe greets her mother-in-law, she comes over our house. Often, Lupe’s mom is also there. My mom, Belia and Lupe gather around the dinner table and talk about their husbands and their children. 

​Sometimes, Belia’s other daughters visit as well. ​