I’m suddenly laughing at the idea of a cliche noir detective story written in the brutally concise style of Hemingway.
A woman walked into my office. She had legs. I noticed her legs. “I have a problem. I need your help,” she said. They always said that. I knew her legs weren’t the problem. I hoped she might want my help with them anyhow.
“Can you pay?” I asked. Of course she could. Her shoes were worth more than my rent. She could pay. “I can pay,” she said. Her eyes were wet. I wondered if anything else was wet. Probably not. I am not handsome. Not since the war. She was looking at my scar. Lots of people do. Most look away. Not her. She did not look away. She looked at my scar and I looked at her legs. There were two of them. I liked that about her. I liked that a whole lot. “Will there be danger?” I asked. There always is. This city bleeds danger, then drinks it right back up again.
“I’m afraid there might be danger,” she said. She had the voice of a beautiful woman. She also had the face and body of a beautiful woman. She was beautiful.
The light from the window was striped. It made stripes on my cigarette smoke. The end of my cigarette crumbled into ash. My marriage had also crumbled into ash.
“I can handle danger,” I said. I patted the butt of my gun. My gun was a Colt. My gun and my scar were all that was left from my time as a soldier. My gun, my scar, and the nightmares. I looked her up and down. “I am good at handling things.”
“It’s about my husband. He’s gone missing.”
She was not wearing a ring. It means something when a woman does not wear a wedding ring. Usually, it means that she is not married. “Seems your ring has also gone missing,” I said. I hoped her dress would join it.
Her red mouth curved upwards. She was smiling a little. “I don’t wear it outside. A diamond that large would only invite trouble.”
“In my experience, trouble doesn’t wait for an invitation.” I looked at her legs again. They were both still there. “When did you last see your husband?”
I make no bones about how difficult I find my dietary restrictions sometimes, but the realization that I’ll never again have my auntie’s treacle gingerbread loaf with a cuppa tea strong enough to strip lead paint, has just hit me, and I’m going through the seven stages of grief in rapid succession.
bad enough I had to give up haggis and treacle scones and tattie scones, noooo, fucking boady had tae take my childhood wi it too. Fucker.
Maybe I can find a way to recreate it gf… but then I cannae have the treacle cause it’s so highly sulfited… maybe if I only had a wee bit it wouldnae be so bad… like maybe once in a while on a blue moon, when the planets were aligned…
It occurs to me that I was initially kidding about going through the seven stages of grief, but apparently not.
In which stage of grief does the Scottish accent come out?
All of them.
I am proud of you for actually avoiding your trigger foods. I’ve only managed to cut out a few things and just accept my slow, painful death for most things.
Like, I’m not supposed to eat any starchy foods like potatoes, rice, or bread, but I’m too poor to not. I absolutely refuse to avoid garlic and onions– my husband is Cuban, it’s just impossible.
I do make time a few times a year to eat an entire loaf of fresh sourdough and then spend 3 days in bed. I don’t know man. Food is one of the things that make life worth it. I’d rather dose up my meds and live a little, y’know.
Oh don’t kid yourself, I used to do something similar until my body just got sick and tired of my shit and decided straight up murder was the only solution to get me to stop.
I love bread, and I miss all the foods I can’t have anymore, but I want to live 😂
Can you eat rice? I just stumbled across a recipe for rice bread that has like rice, water, a little salt, and yeast or barm, and sent it to my cousin, who can’t have bread, and she says it’s boring, but it feels like bread.
Can’t have rice or yeast, thanks for trying though ❤
Hmm…have you tried potato or nut flour? My grandma has a really good recipe for potato rolls, so if you want I could ask her for that, see if it has ingredients that wouldn’t work
Allergic/intolerant to both, sadly. Thanks though.
And just before anyone else chimes in, lets just assume I’m allergic lol
My diet is limited, and that’s okay. It’s better than it was a year ago when I was living on bone broth (chicken, cause I’m allergic to all red meat and red meat byproducts) oatmeal and water for several months. Trust me, I am living my best life, simply by being alive at this point.
Everybody with food intolerances/allergies needs to be really careful. If you keep exposing yourself to the foods you react to, your reaction can and will get worse. Not only that, you’re causing more and more damage to your body. My mom has celiac and now has permanent nerve damage and an assortment of other food intolerance because of the damage it caused before she went off of gluten. In addition, if you have an intolerance and stop eating a food, your body starts to calm down because the “infection” it mistakes the food for is gone. If you eat the food again, your body thinks the infection is coming back and totally freaks out trying to get rid of it.
Trust me on this. No food is worth lasting damage and a longer list of things you can’t eat. If it is at all possible, stop eating those things.
I assume because it’s small, shiny, and moves in interesting ways. Predator instincts tell them to chase. Lizards, fish, and some birds and dogs will try to chase them, especially anything that has any interest in bugs.
Please enjoy my cat trying to figure out a laser pointer.
[video: a gray-black tabby cat playing with a laser pointer dot and periodically looking confused and sniffing around when the dot vanishes]
i googled “protest stock photo” because i was curious to see how they would handle the subject matter while maintaining the inoffensive, generic marketability of most stock images and i don’t know what i expected but uh
Dirby woke us up at 8 AM with another impromptu ukulele serenade. this little one brings so much happiness.
Combining birds and ukuleles, appealing to many of my interests!
@why-animals-do-the-thing this dove bird seems to be genuinely enjoying the enrichment of pecking to make pretty sounds. Is this right?
Yeah! This definitely looks like a bird who has found some fun enrichment.
A lot of birds seem to like things they can peck to make sounds.
This is a black-bellied whistling duck, a type of tree duck. It flew across my yard and landed in a tree, which is very surprising when you don’t know there are tree ducks in the area.
He looks like an actual creature! I thought this was a really weird lizard at first glance. I love him and want to have a small family group of them living in a giant oak tree in my yard.
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