Tentacles

“Hey Bobby! Bobby!”

Bobby stopped, removed an earphone, and called “Mr. Swindon?”

“Seriously? Could you not wait until after seven-thirty to mow the damn lawn?”

“Sorry sir. I’ll come back…”

“Don’t bother. I’m up.” Ken Swindon ended his conversation with his neighbor’s son by slamming the window and headed for the bathroom to shower. Honestly, it’s not like he has a real job to be on time for or anything, he thought as he undressed. He’d always been an odd duck, that Bobby, but that was no excuse for…

And that was when he saw it. It was just a black, star-shaped blob on the glass of the shower door, but even through the frosted haze he knew what it was. Naked except for one sock, he immediately turned and exited the bathroom.

“Mindy?” He could hear the radio in the kitchen. “Mindy!”

“What’re you looking for?” she answered, tired.

“There’s an octopus in the shower.”

“What?”

“There’s a goddamn octopus in the goddamn shower.”

“How?”

“I have no idea. All I know is that there’s an octopus in the shower.”

“There can’t be.”

“Come look at this, Mindy!” His voice was louder and higher than he intended it to be. Slowly, he heard her climb the stairs. He breathed faster than she walked, trying to fight a panic he didn’t understand. Why would there be an octopus? He looked again, still standing just outside the door. It hadn’t disappeared.

His wife of fifteen years joined him in peering into the room. “Where?”

“What do you mean ‘where’? Right there.”

“Right where?”

“On the shower door.”

She stared at it for almost a full minute. See it, he thought, begging. If you ever loved me, see it.

“Ken,” she began. No. No, no, no. Please don’t say it. “Are you…did you take your medicine last night?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Do you think…how long has it been since you saw Dr. Walton?”

“Not that long. You don’t see an octopus?” As he watched, it began to creep downward along the glass, moving slowly as though it feared a fall onto the cold tile.

“I don’t see an octopus, dear. Maybe you should take the day off work.”

“I don’t need a day off.”

“I really think…”

“I said I’m fine, alright?” he snapped. Mindy said nothing, but the long stare she gave him made him slam the door harder than he meant to when he reentered the bathroom.

After that, it was just the two of them.

Ken took a deep breath and removed his sock, listening for the sound of Mindy walking away. When she was gone he rolled the sock into as hard of a ball as he could and threw it against the shower door. It bounced, the door rattled, and two of the creature’s upward-pointing tentacles came away from the glass for a second. Slowly, they felt their way back to the glass and gripped again.

Maybe that would prove something if it wasn’t exactly what you expected it to do. 

He approached and slid the door open carefully; if he knocked it onto the floor there was no way he could shower.

Are you listening to yourself? There is no octopus.

It didn’t move again. It was right at eye level, so he watched it watch him as he washed. He had taken his medicine. He had been doing fine. He hadn’t seen Dr. Walton in months because he hadn’t felt a need. He had been perfectly, totally fine. For years. He was perfectly, totally fine. He was sure of it. He couldn’t be…

But that meant that he was eye-to-eye with a real octopus, one that had somehow managed to break into his home and get itself trapped in the shower, five and a half feet further from the ground than it clearly wanted to be. That wasn’t possible. He was almost positive it wasn’t possible in Florida or Hawaii, so it definitely wasn’t possible in Minnesota. It couldn’t be…

It blinked at him.

He put his head in his hands, resting his forehead against the glass of the door. He couldn’t go through this again, not the treatments, not the gossip, not the people asking how he was doing, like he’d had the flu, when what they meant was “How was the loony bin, Ken?”. He’d put too much into convincing everyone else–and himself–that he was better to ever face going back. He couldn’t put Mindy through this all again. She’d leave him, and he couldn’t blame her. After all these years he’d have to let her go, for her sake.

He might as well say goodbye now. Not just to her. To everything

Something brushed his hand. He looked up and found that the octopus had laid a single, inquisitive tentacle against two of his fingers, testing, searching for food or help and trying to decide if he was either.

But that was just what you wanted it to do. Not what you thought it would do, but what you wanted it to do. You wanted someone to tell you that it’s all going to be okay. To hold your hand. Did it feel good, Ken? Do you love your little hallucinated octopus?

He shut off the water.

“I’m going to see the doctor,” he announced when he reached the kitchen.

“After work?”

“Before. Now, in other words.”

“But you haven’t eaten your breakfast.”

“Mindy, there is an octopus in the shower that only I can see. A kind, gentle, terrified octopus. An octopus that understands what I need emotionally. Put my plate in the fridge.”

“Alright, then. Being hungry isn’t going to help the octopus,” she muttered. He kissed her on the cheek, found his keys, and left.

When he had gone, Mindy went upstairs, peeled the octopus off the glass, and carried it back down. She froze halfway to the kitchen, hearing the front door open. It closed with a reassuringly soft click, followed by slow footsteps that she knew weren’t her husband’s. They followed her and stopped behind her in the kitchen doorway, and she could feel his eyes on her back as she dropped the octopus into grocery bag, set it on the counter, and hit it twice with a heavy bottomed saucepan.

Bobby grimaced, watching it wriggle, dying. “How much did that thing cost you?”

“Thirty bucks at the Korean market down on Hiawatha.” She tied the first bag into a second and handed one handle to him. “Best thirty bucks we’ll ever spend, my dear. Bury it a couple layers deep in the can, then take it to the curb. Pick-up is usually around nine-thirty. After that, you can consider Phase One complete.”

Tuesday Questions: But Can It Go Back In?

Only one search this week that wasn’t a repeat…oh, wait, no, two. I noticed another as I was about to research things. That one would be

dermal jewelry rose

and I have nothing to really say there. I don’t know if they would carry one, as their selection of dermal tops is limited, but I tend to buy all my body jewelry here. High-quality stuff, and their shipping is…well, “balling”, if I do say so myself. I’m guessing you ended up here because of my name. Hi there!

We also have

reinserted microdermal

and I can help with that one. That, I’ve had done.

I first had my microdermal placed in October of ’10. Maybe it was November. I’m not sure. I just know it was the last semester before I graduated from college. Originally, it was right at the bottom of the dip in my collarbone at the base of my throat.  The skin there was thin, so it stuck out farther than was really pleasing to the eye. It was also slightly off-center, which my piercer first denied and then later pointed out to me when he thought it was someone else’s work (he’s a good guy and good at what he does, but you have to be firm with him sometimes). In other words, it looked like this:

Holy hell do I need a new picture.

If you look closely, you can see the ring of red skin around the base. By the time this was taken, it was starting to reject. In June of ’11, while at my parents’ house in England, I finally discovered what they call the “white bump of death”. Don’t know what that is? It’s just what it sounds like: a little white bump in the inflamed area around a piercing that means said piercing is beyond all hope of salvation. Up until that point you can hope and pray that it’ll settle, but once you see the bump you’re done. That bump is the jewelry forcing it’s way back out through your skin. You can cry all you want, but that thing is leaving you.

I was distressed by this for various reasons, the shortest of which is that I’d formed a strong emotional attachment to the thing, despite its many faults. Having decided to have it taken out and put right back in, I went to my piercer. He told me it didn’t look like one of his. I assured him it was. He told me it looked like it had an unusually long post on it, but was otherwise fine. I assured him it wasn’t.

Did I mention the white bump hurts? Because it hurts. Especially if it’s in a place that moves every time you swallow.

He told me I could either go home and let it pop out on its own (translation: get out of here, you’re fine) or he could take it out right then and there, which would involve knives and blood and horror and so forth.

So I said “Fine, cut it out.”

He did. He cut so little flesh that it felt like a needle prick, and it popped right out. He shook his head, apologized, and admitted that had I gone home, I would have been back with it in my hand within three to four days. After offering to autoclave and reinsert it for free, he explained that my problem was that it was in the wrong spot to begin with. He wasn’t blaming me (admirable, as it was my fault for choosing that position), but instead said he’d been inexperienced with microdermals when he’d done it. Since then, he’d discovered that they stay longer if they’re placed over a fattier area.

“Does this hurt?” He pinched a bit of skin at the base of my neck.

“Yeah.”

“How about this?” He repeated the demonstration with skin in the center of my upper chest.

“Not really.”

“It’s going to take me a day to autoclave it. When you come back for it, you might want to put it somewhere that doesn’t hurt to pinch.”

Now, all of this focused on a chest microdermal, where the big issue is getting it far enough away from the bone that the base won’t be irritated and will have sufficient tissue to which to bind. If you have one, say, in an arm or on your back, you’ll have issues with irritation from the other side. The more and the sooner it gets irritated, the more likely it is to reject.

I had mine put back in about an inch and a half lower–pretty much the exact location of the second pinch. Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have had it put back in the exact same spot; it was a bloody hole, and when it healed the scar tissue would have made the jewelry sit wonky. As far as procedure goes, it went exactly the same as the first time, minus about six hours of bleeding and a week with a nasty bruise. I’ve had it for…well, since then, really. Two years this June. I had one episode where it looked like it might reject again, but after I took the top off it so my infant wouldn’t play with the shiny button while she ate it settled right back down. It’s centered now, too.

So, to recap:

1: Yes, it can be reinserted, but probably not in the exact same spot.

2: If it  rejected, that probably wasn’t the best spot for it anyway.

3. If you put it somewhere else, pick a spot that’s protected from irritation on either side of the jewelry. Unless, of course, you want it somewhere that’s really prone to irritation but looks hella cool, in which case murple chicken foftle garden hose, ’cause you’re not listening anyway. And that’s ok. I’m just telling you because you asked.

Note: This is an anecdote. As usual, I’m not a professional, have no idea what I’m talking about, and am probably wrong about everything. Trust your needleman.

Tuesday Questions: Wednesday Edition

My posting schedule is going to shift a day to the right this week. A sculptor asked me to mend his stack of kilts last night, so I ended up drinking tea and watching children’s cartoons when I should have gone to the store. I did find my funeral dress, though. So, moving past the fact that my life sounds like a Mad Lib, this week’s searches are:

microdermal piercing thread direction

Righty-tighty lefty-loosy…if you’re looking at it from the top down. If you’re screwing or unscrewing one on your own body by touch alone, reverse that. You’re under the screw, so you have to mirror everything. I’d need a three-foot neck to look at mine top down, so I’ve learned.

Now, I’m assuming you’re asking because you’re trying to get the top off and it won’t go. If you’ve tried both directions, taken a hot shower and/or soaked it to try to loosen anything that might be making it stick and it still won’t budge, go see your piercer. Until then, stop fiddling with it. You’ll just aggravate it and increase the odds that it’ll reject. [insert the usual disclaimer about me NOT  being a piercing professional/tattoo artist/anyone you should listen to as more than a stranger on a bus]

how to make switch shuttle in tatting

Ugh. Now, this one I have to try to remember…I believe it’s called the “shoelace trick”. Not hard at all. Basically, you take both shuttles and tie the threads as though you were starting to tie your shoes. If you get as far as bunny ears, you’ve gone too far. Put one over the other and pull them even so that neither thread flips around the other. This will switch the positions of two shuttles, allowing you to switch colors, the direction of your chain, or both. It’s that easy.

Here, let this lady show you:

Amid the Green Corn: Part Six

“May they leave whole?”

“With their tongues, you mean? I guess so. I don’t think they’ll trouble me again.”

“Wait a minute now,” said East, and threw the noose around Simon’s neck. “You said we could get on with this.”

Simon said “That’s why I should go first. It’s only fair that I get a guess, and I can’t very well do it after you hang me.” Triumph gave this sort of shrug and hand wave to show she thought he had a point, and nobody could really argue with his logic.

East certainly couldn’t. “I’m not here to play fair,” he said, and then to me and the boy who’d been picked, “Lift him up.”

And I said “no.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean ‘if you lot want to hang my brother you’ve got too many people for me to stop you, but you’re nuts if you think I’ll help’. That’s what I mean.”

He just stared at me, and I think right then he was more angry about having me embarrass him than anything else. “Lift him up,” he said again.

“Okay, wait. That’s it.” The minute she said it every Rilikan rider who’d pointed a gun at the ground was pointing it back at us. “He gets a guess. Not for fairness’ sake, not to be capricious, but because I no longer like you. Yes, you,” and she pointed right at East. “I don’t think his brother was involved in what he did, and in my book you just went from ‘righteously angry’ to ‘asshole looking for an excuse to be himself’. He guesses, and he guesses first.”

East looked like he had something to say, but he looked up at all those guns pointed at him and swallowed it back down. Triumph went over to Simon and leaned in close to him. They’d tied his hands right around the time the Rilikan were laughing at them, so she cupped one hand around her ear so none of them could read his lips. He leaned in, and he whispered something no one could hear over the rain on the leaves.

We stared at her, watching her face for even the slightest change. There was nothing. I swear to you not one muscle moved from her hairline to her chin. He pulled back. She gave him a long look, lifted up the hem of her coat to wipe the mud off his face, and stared at him again.

Right then, before she lifted the noose off him or told the rest of us to stay the hell off her land, I knew he was safe. I knew I’d probably never see him again, but I’d started the day knowing that. He was safe, so I was happy. He rode off with the Rilikan, and we ended up standing there in the field with nothing. We went home.

So that’s how my brother Simon became Mercy Speaking Softly, King of the Rilikan. Prince Consort, really, but she calls him her king and I don’t plan to argue with her. They had seven daughters, lived happily ever after, and tried to kill your parents on a regular basis for the last twenty years.

You thought I’d forgotten what I was talking about, didn’t you? No, no, no. You see, that bargain Simon made with Triumph was the most harmful thing anyone ever did to this clan. He let those men go back to their starving families with knowledge of where to find food. That was why she had wanted to cut our tongues out, so we couldn’t tell anyone where the corn was. She thought we were scared enough or grateful enough to never tell, but East did. A bunch of others, too. There was no way it was ever going to stay a secret, and she should have seen that. But let’s face it, you don’t have to spend a minute in their camp to know that what little Mercy asks, Mercy gets.

That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you this whole time: this war is really not that complicated. The have food. We don’t. We want their food. They don’t want to give it to us. That’s it, and there’s no need to dress it up as anything else. My brother was no martyr in need of your vengeance, and his wife is no demon sent by an angry planet to exact justice for humanity’s faults. They’re humans who want to provide food for their genetic line. Same as every one of you.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t go out into the cornfields tomorrow. I’m just saying that when you do, you need to be okay with the reality of it.

Previously:

Parts One, Two, Three, Four, and Five

Tuesday Questions: Well, Aren’t You Handy…

It looks like we have a single search term today. It’s the sort of thing I’m eager to provide an answer to because I know whoever came here looking for one didn’t find one here. So, we have:

make shift hydrometer tube

A Note: I’m going to assume you’re asking how to make one. The only other reason I can imagine you would search for this would be if, say, it somehow ended up in your top searches on your blog and you wanted to know what the heck was going on. I’m not going anywhere near that rabbit hole.

I…well, I never would have thought that was a thing. At first I assumed that by “hydrometer tube” you meant a test jar (which is really just a graduated cylinder or something similarly shaped), so my initial answer was “anything that’s deep enough to float it, genius”. Further research (yes, I do that), informs me that making one’s own hydrometer is actually a real thing some people attempt. I’m assuming these people either break them by the handful or live somewhere where they aren’t six damn dollars.

Now, really, that’s unfair of me. I did make my first four batches of mead in milk jugs and went without a hydrometer, homemade or otherwise, for about a year, so I really can’t judge. I suppose that’s just my knee-jerk reaction to people making the same mistakes I did. Except that they’re not, as even a crude measurement is more accurate than a nonexistent one. In other words, I rescind my judgement.

As best I can tell, the answer is this: Find a drinking straw and a bit of clay. Jam the latter into one end of the former. Add water to whatever you’re using as a test jar, then stick the straw clay-end downward in the water. Make sure it floats; if it doesn’t, you’re just measuring how deep the jar is. No one needs to know that. Once it floats, mark where on the straw the waterline is. This mark represents a specific gravity of 1.0. Repeat with common household liquids (various oils, vinegar, milk, chloroform), comparing the markings to this or another such table until you have something which will allow you an educated guess at the density of whatever liquid you were originally intending to measure.

Now, most tutorials recommend using a commercial-made hydrometer to calibrate your straw if you have one available. I…I’m not going to point out the logical fallacy in this. I will say that if you have made a straw and clay hydrometer and happen to have it in your possession while you are also in the presence of a hydrometer which you can use long enough to calibrate a straw but not long enough to actually measure anything with it, then yes, you should do that. Go ahead.

Amid the Green Corn: Part Five

There’s something I should mention here; hell, I should have mentioned it a while back. When I said we didn’t know who the Rilikan were or that there was anyone out that way, I didn’t mean to imply that the name Triumph Justly Warring was at all foreign to us. It wasn’t. It sounds crazy, but honest to god she was more of a legend back then than she is now. I’d bet that most of you only know her as what Fire in the Field described: a sort of boogeyman. Back then, she was real. She wasn’t just the mascot of the Rilikan. She was the scariest damn human for a hundred miles, and she was real.

She was so real you couldn’t even make yourself hate her. You knew how she got started. You knew she was in the right. That’s right, don’t look at me like that. Her name was the best I ever heard, the best any of us ever heard, because it was true. She was triumph, justly warring.

There were groups we had heard of–we thought they were more northward, but we’d heard of them.  The Ouasay, the West River villagers, the Walkers, Volupi, Greys…any of you ever heard of those? Of course not; they’re gone now. There used to be probably twenty to double that little pockets of people–clans, villages, families–living up that way between the river and the hill country to the north of it, and they all used to fight like dogs. We stayed out of it. We didn’t have anything they wanted, and we didn’t want anything of theirs. They had better land, sure, but we didn’t have any use for it. We couldn’t grow anything anyway.

They were brutal to one another, though. Brutal like the Rilikan have never been. Brutal like no one who wasn’t provoked to it ever was after they were gone. You could see the fires from here some nights when somebody got fed up and made sure somebody else was never going to hurt them again. It was…there was a time when we weren’t at war, but the rest of our world was, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. We stayed out.

There was one man in the dead center of it, though: Clive Brastas. The man cared so little for what anyone could do to him that he went by his Soulname to his dying day. He was a merchant, and he sold to all sides. Once or twice he came here to sell, but we had just about nothing to trade. He had a farm deep in the hill country that stood alone, and somehow his wife made things grow like they had before the Bond. He sold food, he sold honey, he sold cloth, pottery, tools. His wife could make anything, raise anything, breed anything, find anything, and what things couldn’t be made or grown he bought and sold. He and his wife and their three sons kept to themselves, never made waves, tried to survive, and ended up thriving. No man owned Clive Brastas, and no clan claimed him.

That was an awful lot to be jealous of. It’d be an awful lot now.

No one knows who did it. No one knows if a trade went bad or he tried to get involved in politics or if it was something else. Most people say that whoever it was wasn’t after Clive but his wife; they wanted the goose that laid the golden eggs, you know? Nobody can really say, though. All anyone knows is that the wife went out for water one day and came back to find that what she’d brought wasn’t near enough to put out the house and the fields. Or Clive. Or the youngest son.

The older two sons survived. They were out playing in the fields and when they heard someone in the house doing what was done to Clive they ran. Came back three days later. Think about that, though. That’s three days their mother thought they were dead and burned like her husband and her baby, three days she searched for their bodies and found nothing. Three days she hoped they were still alive, feared someone might have taken them, and knew that even if they came home she couldn’t feed them. So, sometime in those three days Madame Brastas, the most crafty, resourceful, clever woman anyone ever knew, became Triumph Justly Warring.

She would have been a one-woman army if the boys never came home, and when they did she had two more people who were just as angry as she was: Lord in Battle and Hunts By Night. Yeah. Them. They were young then, but a boy of five can pick a pocket and a boy of seven can light a fire. They got by by stealing at first, but people came to her like bees to a flower. She gathered them up, people who were victims like her, desperate people, and by the end of autumn she had a robber band going. By the second autumn she had a force some two, three thousand strong. By the third autumn, we stopped seeing fires and the wars went quiet. We didn’t know why, but at the end of the fourth autumn, when she bet us our tongues we couldn’t guess her name, we looked at the size of her fields and her entourage and realized there were no more wars because Triumph had won them all.

That was who she was and we all knew it. She was some sort of warlord-empress, and Simon was trying to flirt with her from his makeshift gallows. So what does she say to him?

“Alright. If you’re right, they can live. But if you disappoint me, I will make you beg me to do to you what I did to the man who burned my farm.”

Previously:

Parts One, Two, Three, and Four

Tuesday Questions: It Begins…

Though I’ve given up everything but telling stories on this blog, I continue to be fascinated by the searches that lead people to it. Yes, WordPress tells me how you got here. You know how it is. Anyway, most of these searches are questions and I usually end up telling my screen the answers even if I don’t have my dictation software on. I figure it might be more productive if I actually try to tell them to people. I probably should ignore them because answering them will only bring me related traffic, but I can’t help it. I see this thing, and I have to poke it. I have to.

So, without further exposition here are the questions Google thought I could answer this week. For added fun, I’ve left them unedited.

what is the piercing on top of your ear called

I’m pretty sure what you’re talking about is a helix. Most people just call it a “cartilage piercing”, but as any ear piercing that isn’t on your lobe technically goes through cartilage (with the exception of the vertical tragus, which, though near the ear, is technically a surface piercing) that term is, to put it generously, a bit vague. If you’re talking about a long bar connecting a helix to an anti-helix (a piercing where the top of your ear begins to curve down toward your head), that’s an industrial. I’m pretty sure it’s called a scaffold in the UK.

“keeps ending up here”

Can I buy a noun?

can i reinsert my microdermal

Not on your own, certainly. Not unless you’re qualified to insert them in others, anyway. If what you mean is “can it be reinserted”, then yes. It’s my understanding (I had one reinserted myself) that it’s not usually advised to do it in the exact same spot due to  issues with scar tissue. If it rejected, there’s a good chance that wasn’t the best place for it anyway. For example, I had mine (which rejected) put in about two inches lower than its original position. It’s done better there. Note: I am a writer, folks. Talk to someone who does this for a living and if they say different listen to them, not me. I barely know what I’m doing at my own job.