https://osmious.quisquous.com/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:10:34 +0000 MyBB https://osmious.quisquous.com/showthread.php?tid=4 Thu, 16 Jan 2025 23:47:34 +0000 Near]]> https://osmious.quisquous.com/showthread.php?tid=4
Near has never been to Minnesota, but an ex-coworker he keeps in touch with (sporadically, from a distance, the way you keep in touch with anybody) moved to Bloomington a few years ago and likes it enough to recommend it, in an offhand way, when Near mentions craving a change of scenery. Offhand is all it takes to push him into a decision from his precarious perch of not sure where.

It’s always been like this. Places don’t fit him right. Or he doesn’t fit places. Every city is a shoe half a size too small – fine for a while, but then the blisters start to erupt. Time to try again. For years he nursed that silly Goldilocks fantasy about The Reaches being just right, which obviously didn’t pan out. Seattle is no different from anywhere else, except that he’s been trudging around for way too long now, and those blisters are starting to feel fairly septic. With the handful of reasons he had to stick it out having combusted with equally (or more?) spectacular pyrotechnics, it’s Minnesota ho. Why the hell not.

Under normal circumstances, he schedules his bouts of itinerancy around the length of leases. That was the plan here, too, at first, after he walked sour-mouthed out of the bathroom to find his home Jude-free. Judeless? It should have been nothing but a relief. But Jude’s absence, his just … getting away without any consequences, made Near angry enough that he threw his fist into the wall, left a dent to replace the one that wasn’t in the floor. Had it even happened? It was easy to choose no. No. He would stay in the apartment for four more months and just not re-up when the time came, then book it. It wasn’t even a plan, really, just a matter of course. It remained a matter of course right up until it dawned on him that “normal circumstances” were him not being solvent enough to want to shell out for a broken lease.

Well. Look at his bank account now.

Snow is something to look forward to, he decides, while he’s packing what he wants to keep into moving boxes. Small things, mostly. Clothing and pillowcases and knickknacks and folders that overflow with never-read paperwork, that damn piece of paper that spewed out on the floor while he was packing that he keeps thinking about. The landlord is free to do what he wants with the collection of Ikea furniture. And the knife block. Snow, the honest-to-god crunch-under-your-boots kind that he hasn’t seen much of since he left Colorado. The kind he would bellyache about when he was in Colorado and had to crunch through it. That’s what he tells the collection of boozers at The Door, a few of whom may actually miss him like they claim when he discloses his imminent departure; most of whom will forget him as soon as he’s out of sight.

He never called Guthrie. Probably the onus of reaching out, of apologizing and fumblingly explaining the Judeness of the whole thing, fell to Near. He knows that. He considered doing it. He picked up his phone and looked at it. But the lingering sting of hearing Guthrie’s abysmal expectations of him prevented the followthrough. Guthrie called once, texted a few times. Near didn’t listen to the voicemail. Never read the messages. Now he can tell himself he’s leaving anyway. It doesn’t matter.

“No, Minnesota,” he is correcting Crystal, who asked what he’s planning to do in Wisconsin for the third time. Her messy flirtations are getting messier as the night wears on, and so is her mascara, and god help him if he hasn’t been flirting back with some verve – if he isn’t considering the possibility of her still being there by last call, since, again, why the hell not? He’s leaving. Going somewhere with no Courtland, no Jude’s family, no Jude. Surely no one important enough to merit Jude’s attention lives in Minnesota. Near can enjoy the end of the world in peace.

“That’s the one with The Vikings.” He slides another Captain and Coke across the bar, looks at her like he might add something else, and stops. He really doesn’t have any other way to delineate Minnesota from the other states of the union. Just Vikings. She awards him a too-amused laugh and melts back into the scenery.

The Door is not the worst place Near has poured drinks by a long shot (he did a stint at an Applebee’s once), but it has a lot in common with a lot of them. The Door has been a mainstay of something since 19xx, the same year the smoke-darkened orange wallpaper was installed; there is always at least one ceiling light that nobody can be assed to fix; it retains une certaine cramped millieu even when, as now, coming up on midnight, it is not especially busy; the smell is a broad intertwining of beer and Pine Sol and the decades of smoke slowly leaching out of the walls; it pulls that particular Venn diagram demographic of tired working people, hipsters seeking authenticity, and actual drunks; etc., etc. Near likes this kind of dive. The easy work. The people who come in, many of whom just want to talk to someone over the low, persistent strains of 90’s alt rock. Near just wants to talk to someone too, about unimportant things, sports and the weather and who would win in a fight between Sasquatch and Simon Cowell.

The man a few seats down mutters, “Christ, I wouldn’t get too excited about the Vikings.”]]>
Near has never been to Minnesota, but an ex-coworker he keeps in touch with (sporadically, from a distance, the way you keep in touch with anybody) moved to Bloomington a few years ago and likes it enough to recommend it, in an offhand way, when Near mentions craving a change of scenery. Offhand is all it takes to push him into a decision from his precarious perch of not sure where.

It’s always been like this. Places don’t fit him right. Or he doesn’t fit places. Every city is a shoe half a size too small – fine for a while, but then the blisters start to erupt. Time to try again. For years he nursed that silly Goldilocks fantasy about The Reaches being just right, which obviously didn’t pan out. Seattle is no different from anywhere else, except that he’s been trudging around for way too long now, and those blisters are starting to feel fairly septic. With the handful of reasons he had to stick it out having combusted with equally (or more?) spectacular pyrotechnics, it’s Minnesota ho. Why the hell not.

Under normal circumstances, he schedules his bouts of itinerancy around the length of leases. That was the plan here, too, at first, after he walked sour-mouthed out of the bathroom to find his home Jude-free. Judeless? It should have been nothing but a relief. But Jude’s absence, his just … getting away without any consequences, made Near angry enough that he threw his fist into the wall, left a dent to replace the one that wasn’t in the floor. Had it even happened? It was easy to choose no. No. He would stay in the apartment for four more months and just not re-up when the time came, then book it. It wasn’t even a plan, really, just a matter of course. It remained a matter of course right up until it dawned on him that “normal circumstances” were him not being solvent enough to want to shell out for a broken lease.

Well. Look at his bank account now.

Snow is something to look forward to, he decides, while he’s packing what he wants to keep into moving boxes. Small things, mostly. Clothing and pillowcases and knickknacks and folders that overflow with never-read paperwork, that damn piece of paper that spewed out on the floor while he was packing that he keeps thinking about. The landlord is free to do what he wants with the collection of Ikea furniture. And the knife block. Snow, the honest-to-god crunch-under-your-boots kind that he hasn’t seen much of since he left Colorado. The kind he would bellyache about when he was in Colorado and had to crunch through it. That’s what he tells the collection of boozers at The Door, a few of whom may actually miss him like they claim when he discloses his imminent departure; most of whom will forget him as soon as he’s out of sight.

He never called Guthrie. Probably the onus of reaching out, of apologizing and fumblingly explaining the Judeness of the whole thing, fell to Near. He knows that. He considered doing it. He picked up his phone and looked at it. But the lingering sting of hearing Guthrie’s abysmal expectations of him prevented the followthrough. Guthrie called once, texted a few times. Near didn’t listen to the voicemail. Never read the messages. Now he can tell himself he’s leaving anyway. It doesn’t matter.

“No, Minnesota,” he is correcting Crystal, who asked what he’s planning to do in Wisconsin for the third time. Her messy flirtations are getting messier as the night wears on, and so is her mascara, and god help him if he hasn’t been flirting back with some verve – if he isn’t considering the possibility of her still being there by last call, since, again, why the hell not? He’s leaving. Going somewhere with no Courtland, no Jude’s family, no Jude. Surely no one important enough to merit Jude’s attention lives in Minnesota. Near can enjoy the end of the world in peace.

“That’s the one with The Vikings.” He slides another Captain and Coke across the bar, looks at her like he might add something else, and stops. He really doesn’t have any other way to delineate Minnesota from the other states of the union. Just Vikings. She awards him a too-amused laugh and melts back into the scenery.

The Door is not the worst place Near has poured drinks by a long shot (he did a stint at an Applebee’s once), but it has a lot in common with a lot of them. The Door has been a mainstay of something since 19xx, the same year the smoke-darkened orange wallpaper was installed; there is always at least one ceiling light that nobody can be assed to fix; it retains une certaine cramped millieu even when, as now, coming up on midnight, it is not especially busy; the smell is a broad intertwining of beer and Pine Sol and the decades of smoke slowly leaching out of the walls; it pulls that particular Venn diagram demographic of tired working people, hipsters seeking authenticity, and actual drunks; etc., etc. Near likes this kind of dive. The easy work. The people who come in, many of whom just want to talk to someone over the low, persistent strains of 90’s alt rock. Near just wants to talk to someone too, about unimportant things, sports and the weather and who would win in a fight between Sasquatch and Simon Cowell.

The man a few seats down mutters, “Christ, I wouldn’t get too excited about the Vikings.”]]> https://osmious.quisquous.com/showthread.php?tid=3 Mon, 09 May 2022 19:59:42 +0000 Near]]> https://osmious.quisquous.com/showthread.php?tid=3 something to acknowledge a demarcation between Near Farr now and Near Farr then. It never felt right; he would catch peripheral glimpses of himself in mirrors and think it was a stranger watching him. So he let it grow back out, and if anyone is watching him after all, should they be tasked with proving that he went on a pilgrimage to the Reaches and came back Changed, they won't find much evidence. Because what is there, really? A new phone; a new address. And three million dollars, give or take, languishing barely touched in a savings account, despite the shovel-faced lawyer's strong recommendation that he invest it invest it invest it.

He tried to set things right. Sort of. He got Isa a new dog, bought it off Facebook when he went to gather some things from the apartment or maybe he just wanted to see a familiar face even if it was one that hated him. This was after he settled the matter of the rental car, which he can hardly remember doing (days, weeks, months he can hardly remember, in and out like sleepwalking) but the proof that he managed to settle it is in the official record: Courtland Farr, III was driving alone and swerved to avoid hitting a deer, the physics were unfortunate but these things happen, it's why we have insurance.

Isa screamed about Lew then named the new mutt with its blue eyes Old Dread in all the weird certitude that made him charming, and it was funny, funny, and for a few minutes Near thought he could make this work. Maybe. Or not that he could, but that he would like to, to hit rewind and settle back into a mess he knew how to navigate. And, still thinking this, he told Isa that he would come back when he was finished with The Reaches -- which he was selling, there was nothing there for him -- that they would talk it all out then. But he never did. It shouldn't have surprised anyone: he had been drifting into and out of lives, cities, his whole life. Next stop, Seattle. Now here he is at dead o'clock on a Tuesday, Northgate mall where the murders happened, sprawled on a bench by the broken fountain and sucking at what was an iced coffee but has become mostly the double-pump dregs of generically sweetish syrup. Bad speakers turn the piped-in pop music into a vague smear of thumpy bass. He is, if anyone asks, waiting for Guthrie's shift to end.

Guthrie works at the Nordstrom Rack. Every piece of this sentence is chronically hilarious. It's a full-time thing, although Near's experience of the mall has led him to believe that maybe a dozen people total still shop here, and he can't understand how a job selling off-price department store clothing to a dozen people can keep a person busy for eight hours a day. They met there, which is also hilarious, met at the mall like they're teenagers in 1994 when in fact they are both grown men, one of whom needed a new pair of pants. He got pants and a phone number. Sure, people have to meet somewhere, but it feels vastly more respectable to have met at, say, The Door, the little bar where Near works not because he needs the money but because he needs to work, to occupy his time with shots and small talk.

They're going out to dinner when the store closes, somewhere cheap and easy. Near is technically very early, but only because the real reason he comes here the first Tuesday of every month (well, most months) is in case Jude decides to make an appearance, even though he's positive that Jude is dead, and that even if Jude isn't dead then he sure as fuck doesn't know how Near has, for at least a year, been extending covert invitations to meet at Northgate Station on the first Tuesday of the month.]]> something to acknowledge a demarcation between Near Farr now and Near Farr then. It never felt right; he would catch peripheral glimpses of himself in mirrors and think it was a stranger watching him. So he let it grow back out, and if anyone is watching him after all, should they be tasked with proving that he went on a pilgrimage to the Reaches and came back Changed, they won't find much evidence. Because what is there, really? A new phone; a new address. And three million dollars, give or take, languishing barely touched in a savings account, despite the shovel-faced lawyer's strong recommendation that he invest it invest it invest it.

He tried to set things right. Sort of. He got Isa a new dog, bought it off Facebook when he went to gather some things from the apartment or maybe he just wanted to see a familiar face even if it was one that hated him. This was after he settled the matter of the rental car, which he can hardly remember doing (days, weeks, months he can hardly remember, in and out like sleepwalking) but the proof that he managed to settle it is in the official record: Courtland Farr, III was driving alone and swerved to avoid hitting a deer, the physics were unfortunate but these things happen, it's why we have insurance.

Isa screamed about Lew then named the new mutt with its blue eyes Old Dread in all the weird certitude that made him charming, and it was funny, funny, and for a few minutes Near thought he could make this work. Maybe. Or not that he could, but that he would like to, to hit rewind and settle back into a mess he knew how to navigate. And, still thinking this, he told Isa that he would come back when he was finished with The Reaches -- which he was selling, there was nothing there for him -- that they would talk it all out then. But he never did. It shouldn't have surprised anyone: he had been drifting into and out of lives, cities, his whole life. Next stop, Seattle. Now here he is at dead o'clock on a Tuesday, Northgate mall where the murders happened, sprawled on a bench by the broken fountain and sucking at what was an iced coffee but has become mostly the double-pump dregs of generically sweetish syrup. Bad speakers turn the piped-in pop music into a vague smear of thumpy bass. He is, if anyone asks, waiting for Guthrie's shift to end.

Guthrie works at the Nordstrom Rack. Every piece of this sentence is chronically hilarious. It's a full-time thing, although Near's experience of the mall has led him to believe that maybe a dozen people total still shop here, and he can't understand how a job selling off-price department store clothing to a dozen people can keep a person busy for eight hours a day. They met there, which is also hilarious, met at the mall like they're teenagers in 1994 when in fact they are both grown men, one of whom needed a new pair of pants. He got pants and a phone number. Sure, people have to meet somewhere, but it feels vastly more respectable to have met at, say, The Door, the little bar where Near works not because he needs the money but because he needs to work, to occupy his time with shots and small talk.

They're going out to dinner when the store closes, somewhere cheap and easy. Near is technically very early, but only because the real reason he comes here the first Tuesday of every month (well, most months) is in case Jude decides to make an appearance, even though he's positive that Jude is dead, and that even if Jude isn't dead then he sure as fuck doesn't know how Near has, for at least a year, been extending covert invitations to meet at Northgate Station on the first Tuesday of the month.]]> https://osmious.quisquous.com/showthread.php?tid=1 Thu, 04 Oct 2018 15:55:36 +0000 Near]]> https://osmious.quisquous.com/showthread.php?tid=1
Limited evidence survives to support the claim: there is an apocrypha of stories hinging on his obsession with cryptic crossword puzzles; a Farr-specific custom of casting him as a point of negative comparison (“The boy’s bright, but he’s no Everett”); and his crowning achievement, the conception of the name Farr Reaches for the estate where he settled with his wife, a full-blooded Tulalip girl who had played an undocumented but allegedly critical role in his earlier land negotiations, in 1925.

The fifteen-room shrine to his flair for wordplay remained the seat of the family for decades, until a lucky break into oil futures by the second Courtland Farr facilitated a move to the Big City of Tacoma, relegating the old homestead to a half-neglected summer getaway.

Near Farr was eight years old the last time he laid eyes on The Reaches.  At that age, he had accepted both the house’s elevated significance and his great-grandfather’s genius as givens, like Santa Claus or Jesus, with no understanding of the whys of any of it.  Now, granted a couple decades’ distance, his younger self’s credulity was painful to acknowledge, even to no one but himself.  Somebody should have kicked his ass long before anyone actually did.

He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting as he drove up the tree-choked coastline toward the house.  There had been a tingle of expectation.  Revelation on some level, probably.  The reclaiming of a missing piece.  Naive hopes, hopeful notions, the kind of things that he wouldn’t have had the words or the heart to say out loud but which stemmed somehow from his last recollection of the place, one of those memories that lodged deep like a bullet fragment: him a skinny, gape-mouthed kid standing next to Sofia at the edge of the circular driveway, both of them decked out in their school uniforms.  Crescent moon.  Starlight.  And there, indelible, like someone had spelled it out in neon above their heads, The Last Time, The Last Place, He Had Felt Like He Was Home.

That was strange, really, because as salient as the one flashbulb image was, he couldn’t summon another scene from The Reaches with anything approaching the same level of clarity.  But he had been telling himself the story for years, on each threshold.  Now that he had stood at the edge of the driveway again and not been bowled over by a sensation of homecoming or nostalgia or anything else, just this stale disappointment that still lingered at the back of his tongue on Day Two, he was forced to wonder if the snapshot that was burned into his memory was a memory at all, or if it was the distorted memory of a memory of a memory, or a memory of his mother describing it later, recounting the Day She Left to a friend in the kitchen.

It wasn’t that the house -- the solid, half-timbered reality of it -- was unimpressive: it outsized any space he had ever had to himself; it was bigger than most he had shared.  It was vast and it was empty and the woods-quiet that suffused it was denser than any city-quiet.  He had never been one to seek out solitude, so found this, trafficless, neighborless silence, unsettling.  He could hack away at its edges with the sound of his shoes on the floor, the radio playing crinkly New Wave, ice melting in rocks glasses, Lew snuffling around furniture and erupting into the occasional tragic howl; but every inch of progress was lost as soon as it was made.  The quiet crept back in twice as heavy.

Rain had begun an uneven tapping at the windowpane a few minutes ago, following the close of the overcast late-fall day.  Front room curtains wide-open for the view: a bank of trees at the far edge of dusk, beyond the lawn, and if the moon was out there somewhere, the clouds blotted it.  His own reflection was imposed over all: sitting on the floor, back against the edge of the sofa, holding a bottle by its neck.  Per the label, a 1997 Roberto Voerzio Barolo Brunate.  For all he knew or cared it could have been convenience store Chianti; he had never bought into the whole wine thing.  But Daddy had.  Apparently.  Apparently he had bought into the wine thing, the scotch thing, the brandy thing, the aperitif-you-read-about-in-books thing.  Maybe they would have had something to talk about after all.  Maybe that was why Farr The Younger, heir apparent, had yet to leave his haunted house, although he didn’t know what he was doing there: because when he didn’t know what he was doing, he drank.  And the liquor was free here (his, bequeathed -- was there a difference?), and he wasn’t working for tips.]]>
Limited evidence survives to support the claim: there is an apocrypha of stories hinging on his obsession with cryptic crossword puzzles; a Farr-specific custom of casting him as a point of negative comparison (“The boy’s bright, but he’s no Everett”); and his crowning achievement, the conception of the name Farr Reaches for the estate where he settled with his wife, a full-blooded Tulalip girl who had played an undocumented but allegedly critical role in his earlier land negotiations, in 1925.

The fifteen-room shrine to his flair for wordplay remained the seat of the family for decades, until a lucky break into oil futures by the second Courtland Farr facilitated a move to the Big City of Tacoma, relegating the old homestead to a half-neglected summer getaway.

Near Farr was eight years old the last time he laid eyes on The Reaches.  At that age, he had accepted both the house’s elevated significance and his great-grandfather’s genius as givens, like Santa Claus or Jesus, with no understanding of the whys of any of it.  Now, granted a couple decades’ distance, his younger self’s credulity was painful to acknowledge, even to no one but himself.  Somebody should have kicked his ass long before anyone actually did.

He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting as he drove up the tree-choked coastline toward the house.  There had been a tingle of expectation.  Revelation on some level, probably.  The reclaiming of a missing piece.  Naive hopes, hopeful notions, the kind of things that he wouldn’t have had the words or the heart to say out loud but which stemmed somehow from his last recollection of the place, one of those memories that lodged deep like a bullet fragment: him a skinny, gape-mouthed kid standing next to Sofia at the edge of the circular driveway, both of them decked out in their school uniforms.  Crescent moon.  Starlight.  And there, indelible, like someone had spelled it out in neon above their heads, The Last Time, The Last Place, He Had Felt Like He Was Home.

That was strange, really, because as salient as the one flashbulb image was, he couldn’t summon another scene from The Reaches with anything approaching the same level of clarity.  But he had been telling himself the story for years, on each threshold.  Now that he had stood at the edge of the driveway again and not been bowled over by a sensation of homecoming or nostalgia or anything else, just this stale disappointment that still lingered at the back of his tongue on Day Two, he was forced to wonder if the snapshot that was burned into his memory was a memory at all, or if it was the distorted memory of a memory of a memory, or a memory of his mother describing it later, recounting the Day She Left to a friend in the kitchen.

It wasn’t that the house -- the solid, half-timbered reality of it -- was unimpressive: it outsized any space he had ever had to himself; it was bigger than most he had shared.  It was vast and it was empty and the woods-quiet that suffused it was denser than any city-quiet.  He had never been one to seek out solitude, so found this, trafficless, neighborless silence, unsettling.  He could hack away at its edges with the sound of his shoes on the floor, the radio playing crinkly New Wave, ice melting in rocks glasses, Lew snuffling around furniture and erupting into the occasional tragic howl; but every inch of progress was lost as soon as it was made.  The quiet crept back in twice as heavy.

Rain had begun an uneven tapping at the windowpane a few minutes ago, following the close of the overcast late-fall day.  Front room curtains wide-open for the view: a bank of trees at the far edge of dusk, beyond the lawn, and if the moon was out there somewhere, the clouds blotted it.  His own reflection was imposed over all: sitting on the floor, back against the edge of the sofa, holding a bottle by its neck.  Per the label, a 1997 Roberto Voerzio Barolo Brunate.  For all he knew or cared it could have been convenience store Chianti; he had never bought into the whole wine thing.  But Daddy had.  Apparently.  Apparently he had bought into the wine thing, the scotch thing, the brandy thing, the aperitif-you-read-about-in-books thing.  Maybe they would have had something to talk about after all.  Maybe that was why Farr The Younger, heir apparent, had yet to leave his haunted house, although he didn’t know what he was doing there: because when he didn’t know what he was doing, he drank.  And the liquor was free here (his, bequeathed -- was there a difference?), and he wasn’t working for tips.]]>