two hyperactive men with considerable homoerotic chemistry between them assault a flustered diction coach with aggressive tap-dancing for no apparent reason
#this is what adhd feels like
Good to know it feels like this on the giving end too. My mom and brother have it and this brought back some very nostalgic feelings of WHY??
My friends: “Stop. Please stop. Stop, dude, you’re not fucking Gene Kelly. Get down.”
Me, crouching on a desk and slamming my hands on the surface, howling breathlessly: “MOSEEEES! MOSEEEES!”
It’s an old comic from The Secret Knots archives, only now I gave it a tumblr-friendlier format and fixed a couple of little things here and there. I made it in a sad time, a story I told myself to make me feel better and I think it worked.
after enough interviews the same person can provide enough information to create truth from fiction. if this is awkward to read in a submission we can provide a link here, with better formatting and indentations. we hope the stars enjoy this story.
Death was not a friend nor an enemy when you decided to welcome it into what remained of your life. Not entirely welcome nor unwelcome neither, you tidied your home to prepare but without the eagerness of meeting a friend and without the dread of entertaining unwanted guests. You had, eventually, decided to meet at home. It felt much kinder to you both, and the waiting was more bearable where the wifi was your own. At night it was lonely but you were not, this was the magic of familiarity.
Death was not a stranger in the strictest sense, maybe stranger than other things but not unknown. Of course you had heard of death, everyone does, but unlike most celebrities you had met death in person several times. Often you were too distracted to think of it. Always you were too distracted to think of it. You thought of it afterwards, a little. You think of it now, a lot. It occurred to you a few times that, had you the presence of mind to consider what you had faced in those moments, it would have done no good to try and engage with death. It very rarely came to see you. Only once, in fact, had death been coming to see you in particular.
The details change but the specifics remained the same. You had been walking to your future, or fleeing from your past, or pacing in the present when it happened. You remember that you were walking down an empty city block, freshly fallen snow reflecting the streetlight back to an umber sky, and all the houses silent and feigning death. You remember that you were walking through the woods, pushing aside thick undergrowth that hid the forest from you and, you hoped, hid you from the forest. You were not confident of this. You remember walking underground, navigating by the man-made lights and the sounds of every footstep reverberating across the walls a thousand times in a cacophony of clones announcing your every move to the endless tunnels. All of these memories of that single event are true.
You take a glass from the cupboards and do not fill it. Absently your hands have found a drink and wait for you to ask that it be poured, but you are staring into the wood of your cupboard. In the grains you can see the suggestion of a shape moving through the underbrush, ducking behind a snow covered car, leaving the flicker of a shadow against the wall of the tunnel ahead. You are frozen. The echoes of your procession fade into nothing, plenty of time for something to hide. You listen. There is silence where once there had been birdsong. There is the electric hum of lights. There is the muffled quiet of a city covered in snow, the crunch of your shifting weight as you look over either shoulder. Your awakened breath.
You manage to fill the cup with liquid, and you take a seat. A single lamp tries to illuminate your entire home. Where it fails, silence fills in. Your cup rests in your hands, cooling, as you remember the feeling of knowing that you can stay still no longer. Of realising that the shiver creeping down the back of your neck is the studious gaze of something with plenty of time to examine you, long before you are even willing to admit it is there. Bless your legs, for they are smarter than you, and take the action you cannot. You pretend it was a conscious decision, but not too loudly, for fear that the thinking may cover the soft sound of approaching footprints. They do, but when the thought stops the footsteps do not and you whip around and what you saw set your mind alight. A second set of footprints in the snow, adjacent to yours and terminating without source or explanation. Two lights completely out, creating a spot of complete blankness in the trail of lights that guide you through the tunnels. The foliage you disrupt and hack replaced as if you were never there, so thick that you would not be able to see if something stalked from more than a hand’s breadth away. As you continue to move you begin to check over your shoulder regularly. The footprints continue to advance, never with any conceivable source. You count the lights- five lights away from you is the patch of darkness. You deliberately score a tree, and snap twigs off the branches. When you look back, the darkness is still five lights away, even though you’ve passed no less than three since last you checked. The tree is unmarked, branches unbent. You were never here. Your presence is meaningless. But has it been noticed?
You place the cup on your kitchen counter. You are out of breath, though it was not a long walk to the kitchen. You consider the cup a long moment before deciding to put down a second. When you hear the faint clack of lamps coming to life, you look back and count the lights again. The dark is four lights away. You fix your eyes on the footprints and begin to walk backwards. Your tense muscles freeze at the sudden touch of a breeze against your back. The machete you use to cut the underbrush is held in snow-white knuckles, as sharp as your senses. When you hear a shuffle and whip around, the dark is three lights away from you. Your breath hangs in the air as you watch the line of strange footprints, perhaps human, trample across your own steps where you had been walking obliviously backwards. You turn. The darkness is two lights behind you, extending farther down the tunnel than you can see. The snow has been criss-crossed with blurry footprints in the seconds you had turned around. A breeze, you whip around. Footprints cover the ground all around you. The bushes move of their own accord, standing straight and beginning to part. You ran.
You ran from her, and she let you. One light from the darkness. Vines and twigs wrapping around your limbs, machete biting into those you could not rip apart with strength alone. The silence rang with the presence of her footprints, and though the only sound in the air was you gasping for breath the shape and ubiquity of her reach was like a tinkling, powerful cackle transcribed on the snow all around you. You felt her grasp on your arm and knew immediately the power she had chosen not to use, as if she was not quite yet done playing with her prey. You ripped free, that time. You do not know what lies around the corner save that it glows brighter than the darkness you keep ahead of by inches. Your machete lodges in the thick branch of a tree, the limb twisting away before you could grab it back. Your feet lose purchase on the ice.
Your hands clench the handle of a door as darkness envelopes you. You are sent hurtling down an incline by either a poorly placed foot or a cleverly placed root. Your slide sends you tumbling into the snow until you come to a rest in a child’s crudely constructed snow fort, causing some of the roof to collapse on you. You slam the door and darkness falls. The echo fades. You wait. The light returns to an abandoned underground home, a bed in the corner and a hot plate beside it. When you finally recover from your fall, you lie on a dirt path marked with stones. The sun shines through trees and an undercurrent of birdsong has returned. The snow outside your makeshift fortress had been trampled flat by footprints, as if an entire army had marched up to the walls and circled the entire structure several times before surrendering. The muffled quiet of winter, the hum of electric lights, the faint chorus of animals calling into the trees. You never again quite believed the promise of safety those sounds offered you. You had no choice but to go on living, to stay on paths and never leave a home through the back door. You name your knife when you choose to bring it, and never step on a beetle. And no matter how close she gets, no matter how strongly you feel her breath on your neck or her eyes on your back, you never turn around until you get home.
You offer her oolong. It seems like a safe choice.
Death had come in first, but when the door was open she politely interposed herself. Her civility surprises you, but maybe it shouldn’t. Though the rules she follows seem arbitrary to you, you must admit your own carry no more authority. She and her tenants are as old, if not older, than any law dreamt of by man. Perhaps she can always choose to follow your rules instead of hers, provided she never does so to complete a hunt. Death clearly respects her rules for once she has crossed the threshold and proclaimed her hunt near completion, death leaves without another word. And now she has found you. It is a relief, having this not-quite-stranger escorted out of your home by someone who has been with you for so much longer, by someone who has hunted you and knows you better than your closest friends or dearest enemies. Though it might sound strange, you are relieved to be with her. To know that the hunt is almost over. Her powerful presence is calming and the tea is soothing. Once you both have finished and she has, at her own insistence, placed the cups in the dishwasher, you close your eyes and she wordlessly finishes hunting you.
