​
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fslE1PK78Jo
On a social media page, I was asked if I knew John Mack MD. Here is my reply:
We were active together in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW. I sat with him briefly in Moscow in 1985 while he was having a drink during the celebration of IPPNW’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I attended a MUFON meeting that he addressed a few years before he tragically died. I asked him a pointed question from the floor, and I was dealt with rather curtly by him. Still, I admired him so much in so many ways when I was a physician peace activist and finally as a contact experiencer. Although we looked at challenge of flying saucers in different ways, I still miss him.
Below is an excerpt from a detailed Vanity Fair article about life and death of this remarkable human being, John Mack MD.
· “ In Newport with the other experiencers, a Tom Hanks look-alike who wanted to be known as “Scott,” the way Mack referred to him in Abduction, remembered their last meeting at Cuvelier’s villa, in the summer of 2004. Mack was excited about his new book, on the survival of consciousness. Scott confessed his own fear of death. Mack reassured him. “You never know when it will be your time,” he said. “We could all go at any time. I could walk out on the street and get hit by a car.”
Raymond Czechowski, a 50-year-old computer technician, had spent three-and-a-half hours at the Royal British Legion, a military charity in north London, planning the latest poppy drive to aid the troops, in the course of which he downed five or six pints of shandy—beer mixed with lemonade and ice. Then, on that mild, clear Monday night of September 27, 2004, he pointed his silver Peugeot north and started driving home.
Just ahead, shortly after 11 P.M., in the north London suburb of Barnet, John Mack climbed wearily out of the Underground station at Totteridge and Whetstone. His talk had gone well, and many in the audience had brought copies of his Lawrence biography, which they asked him to sign. He had also spoken about the death of his father, Edward Mack, who, 31 years before, almost to the day, had been driving home with the groceries to their summer home in Thetford, Vermont, when his car collided with a truck. In London, Mack was staying with a family friend, Veronica Keen, a widow who told him she had been receiving messages from her deceased husband—more evidence, Mack thought, of survival of consciousness. She had said to call her from the station, and she would pick him up, but Mack decided to walk. He crossed a divider and stepped into the busy street. His American instinct was to look to the left.
Czechowski hit the brakes, but too late. Mack’s body flew into the air, shattering the Peugeot’s windshield before traveling over the roof and landing heavily on the ground. “He just stepped there, bang,” Czechowski told the police, who registered his alcohol level at well over the limit.
Mack never regained consciousness. From a crumpled paper with an address on it found in his pocket, the police learned his destination and his identity.
Keen, who sat with Mack’s body at the morgue, said he materialized and told her, “It was as if I was touched with a feather. I did not feel a thing. I was given a choice: should I go, or should I stay? I looked down at my broken body and decided to go.”
At Mack’s funeral, many recalled one of his favorite quotes, from Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet (as translated by Stephen Mitchell): “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
Barbara Lamb and other friends also reported visitations.
Roberta Colasanti, one of Mack’s research associates, said he communicated to her a cryptic message on the abductions they had been studying: “It’s not what we thought.” Colasanti waited breathlessly for the solution to the mystery, but it didn’t come. Mack promised to return with more information. So far, he hasn’t.”
·
· I still think about this wonderful man, the doctors' peace movement and how in the 1990s on different paths, we became involved in the mystery of flying saucers. I believe that he is still with us in spirit. Joseph Burkes MD
VANITYFAIR.COM
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting…
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting in Newport, R.I.
​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fslE1PK78Jo
On a social media page, I was asked if I knew John Mack MD. Here is my reply:
We were active together in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW. I sat with him briefly in Moscow in 1985 while he was having a drink during the celebration of IPPNW’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I attended a MUFON meeting that he addressed a few years before he tragically died. I asked him a pointed question from the floor, and I was dealt with rather curtly by him. Still, I admired him so much in so many ways when I was a physician peace activist and finally as a contact experiencer. Although we looked at challenge of flying saucers in different ways, I still miss him.
Below is an excerpt from a detailed Vanity Fair article about life and death of this remarkable human being, John Mack MD.
· “ In Newport with the other experiencers, a Tom Hanks look-alike who wanted to be known as “Scott,” the way Mack referred to him in Abduction, remembered their last meeting at Cuvelier’s villa, in the summer of 2004. Mack was excited about his new book, on the survival of consciousness. Scott confessed his own fear of death. Mack reassured him. “You never know when it will be your time,” he said. “We could all go at any time. I could walk out on the street and get hit by a car.”
Raymond Czechowski, a 50-year-old computer technician, had spent three-and-a-half hours at the Royal British Legion, a military charity in north London, planning the latest poppy drive to aid the troops, in the course of which he downed five or six pints of shandy—beer mixed with lemonade and ice. Then, on that mild, clear Monday night of September 27, 2004, he pointed his silver Peugeot north and started driving home.
Just ahead, shortly after 11 P.M., in the north London suburb of Barnet, John Mack climbed wearily out of the Underground station at Totteridge and Whetstone. His talk had gone well, and many in the audience had brought copies of his Lawrence biography, which they asked him to sign. He had also spoken about the death of his father, Edward Mack, who, 31 years before, almost to the day, had been driving home with the groceries to their summer home in Thetford, Vermont, when his car collided with a truck. In London, Mack was staying with a family friend, Veronica Keen, a widow who told him she had been receiving messages from her deceased husband—more evidence, Mack thought, of survival of consciousness. She had said to call her from the station, and she would pick him up, but Mack decided to walk. He crossed a divider and stepped into the busy street. His American instinct was to look to the left.
Czechowski hit the brakes, but too late. Mack’s body flew into the air, shattering the Peugeot’s windshield before traveling over the roof and landing heavily on the ground. “He just stepped there, bang,” Czechowski told the police, who registered his alcohol level at well over the limit.
Mack never regained consciousness. From a crumpled paper with an address on it found in his pocket, the police learned his destination and his identity.
Keen, who sat with Mack’s body at the morgue, said he materialized and told her, “It was as if I was touched with a feather. I did not feel a thing. I was given a choice: should I go, or should I stay? I looked down at my broken body and decided to go.”
At Mack’s funeral, many recalled one of his favorite quotes, from Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet (as translated by Stephen Mitchell): “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
Barbara Lamb and other friends also reported visitations.
Roberta Colasanti, one of Mack’s research associates, said he communicated to her a cryptic message on the abductions they had been studying: “It’s not what we thought.” Colasanti waited breathlessly for the solution to the mystery, but it didn’t come. Mack promised to return with more information. So far, he hasn’t.”
·
· I still think about this wonderful man, the doctors' peace movement and how in the 1990s on different paths, we became involved in the mystery of flying saucers. I believe that he is still with us in spirit. Joseph Burkes MD
VANITYFAIR.COM
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting…
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting in Newport, R.I.
Social Media
We were both active in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW. I still think about this wonderful man, the doctors' peace movement and how in the 1990s on different paths, we became involved in the mystery of flying saucers. I believe that he is still with us in spirit.
https://underground.contact/2022/12/11/i-remember-john-mack-md/

​
On a social media page, I was asked if I knew John Mack MD. Here is my reply:
We were active together in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW. I sat with him briefly in Moscow in 1985 while he was having a drink during the celebration of IPPNW’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I attended a MUFON meeting that he addressed a few years before he tragically died. I asked him a pointed question from the floor, and I was dealt with rather curtly by him. Still, I admired him so much in so many ways when I was a physician peace activist and finally as a contact experiencer. Although we looked at challenge of flying saucers in different ways, I still miss him.
Below is an excerpt from a detailed Vanity Fair article about life and death of this remarkable human being, John Mack MD.
· “ In Newport with the other experiencers, a Tom Hanks look-alike who wanted to be known as “Scott,” the way Mack referred to him in Abduction, remembered their last meeting at Cuvelier’s villa, in the summer of 2004. Mack was excited about his new book, on the survival of consciousness. Scott confessed his own fear of death. Mack reassured him. “You never know when it will be your time,” he said. “We could all go at any time. I could walk out on the street and get hit by a car.”
Raymond Czechowski, a 50-year-old computer technician, had spent three-and-a-half hours at the Royal British Legion, a military charity in north London, planning the latest poppy drive to aid the troops, in the course of which he downed five or six pints of shandy—beer mixed with lemonade and ice. Then, on that mild, clear Monday night of September 27, 2004, he pointed his silver Peugeot north and started driving home.
Just ahead, shortly after 11 P.M., in the north London suburb of Barnet, John Mack climbed wearily out of the Underground station at Totteridge and Whetstone. His talk had gone well, and many in the audience had brought copies of his Lawrence biography, which they asked him to sign. He had also spoken about the death of his father, Edward Mack, who, 31 years before, almost to the day, had been driving home with the groceries to their summer home in Thetford, Vermont, when his car collided with a truck. In London, Mack was staying with a family friend, Veronica Keen, a widow who told him she had been receiving messages from her deceased husband—more evidence, Mack thought, of survival of consciousness. She had said to call her from the station, and she would pick him up, but Mack decided to walk. He crossed a divider and stepped into the busy street. His American instinct was to look to the left.
Czechowski hit the brakes, but too late. Mack’s body flew into the air, shattering the Peugeot’s windshield before traveling over the roof and landing heavily on the ground. “He just stepped there, bang,” Czechowski told the police, who registered his alcohol level at well over the limit.
Mack never regained consciousness. From a crumpled paper with an address on it found in his pocket, the police learned his destination and his identity.
Keen, who sat with Mack’s body at the morgue, said he materialized and told her, “It was as if I was touched with a feather. I did not feel a thing. I was given a choice: should I go, or should I stay? I looked down at my broken body and decided to go.”
At Mack’s funeral, many recalled one of his favorite quotes, from Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet (as translated by Stephen Mitchell): “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
Barbara Lamb and other friends also reported visitations.
Roberta Colasanti, one of Mack’s research associates, said he communicated to her a cryptic message on the abductions they had been studying: “It’s not what we thought.” Colasanti waited breathlessly for the solution to the mystery, but it didn’t come. Mack promised to return with more information. So far, he hasn’t.”
·
· I still think about this wonderful man, the doctors' peace movement and how in the 1990s on different paths, we became involved in the mystery of flying saucers. I believe that he is still with us in spirit. Joseph Burkes MD
VANITYFAIR.COM
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting…
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting in Newport, R.I.
​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fslE1PK78Jo
On a social media page, I was asked if I knew John Mack MD. Here is my reply:
We were active together in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW. I sat with him briefly in Moscow in 1985 while he was having a drink during the celebration of IPPNW’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I attended a MUFON meeting that he addressed a few years before he tragically died. I asked him a pointed question from the floor, and I was dealt with rather curtly by him. Still, I admired him so much in so many ways when I was a physician peace activist and finally as a contact experiencer. Although we looked at challenge of flying saucers in different ways, I still miss him.
Below is an excerpt from a detailed Vanity Fair article about life and death of this remarkable human being, John Mack MD.
· “ In Newport with the other experiencers, a Tom Hanks look-alike who wanted to be known as “Scott,” the way Mack referred to him in Abduction, remembered their last meeting at Cuvelier’s villa, in the summer of 2004. Mack was excited about his new book, on the survival of consciousness. Scott confessed his own fear of death. Mack reassured him. “You never know when it will be your time,” he said. “We could all go at any time. I could walk out on the street and get hit by a car.”
Raymond Czechowski, a 50-year-old computer technician, had spent three-and-a-half hours at the Royal British Legion, a military charity in north London, planning the latest poppy drive to aid the troops, in the course of which he downed five or six pints of shandy—beer mixed with lemonade and ice. Then, on that mild, clear Monday night of September 27, 2004, he pointed his silver Peugeot north and started driving home.
Just ahead, shortly after 11 P.M., in the north London suburb of Barnet, John Mack climbed wearily out of the Underground station at Totteridge and Whetstone. His talk had gone well, and many in the audience had brought copies of his Lawrence biography, which they asked him to sign. He had also spoken about the death of his father, Edward Mack, who, 31 years before, almost to the day, had been driving home with the groceries to their summer home in Thetford, Vermont, when his car collided with a truck. In London, Mack was staying with a family friend, Veronica Keen, a widow who told him she had been receiving messages from her deceased husband—more evidence, Mack thought, of survival of consciousness. She had said to call her from the station, and she would pick him up, but Mack decided to walk. He crossed a divider and stepped into the busy street. His American instinct was to look to the left.
Czechowski hit the brakes, but too late. Mack’s body flew into the air, shattering the Peugeot’s windshield before traveling over the roof and landing heavily on the ground. “He just stepped there, bang,” Czechowski told the police, who registered his alcohol level at well over the limit.
Mack never regained consciousness. From a crumpled paper with an address on it found in his pocket, the police learned his destination and his identity.
Keen, who sat with Mack’s body at the morgue, said he materialized and told her, “It was as if I was touched with a feather. I did not feel a thing. I was given a choice: should I go, or should I stay? I looked down at my broken body and decided to go.”
At Mack’s funeral, many recalled one of his favorite quotes, from Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet (as translated by Stephen Mitchell): “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
Barbara Lamb and other friends also reported visitations.
Roberta Colasanti, one of Mack’s research associates, said he communicated to her a cryptic message on the abductions they had been studying: “It’s not what we thought.” Colasanti waited breathlessly for the solution to the mystery, but it didn’t come. Mack promised to return with more information. So far, he hasn’t.”
·
· I still think about this wonderful man, the doctors' peace movement and how in the 1990s on different paths, we became involved in the mystery of flying saucers. I believe that he is still with us in spirit. Joseph Burkes MD
VANITYFAIR.COM
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting…
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting in Newport, R.I.
​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fslE1PK78Jo
On a social media page, I was asked if I knew John Mack MD. Here is my reply:
We were active together in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW. I sat with him briefly in Moscow in 1985 while he was having a drink during the celebration of IPPNW’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I attended a MUFON meeting that he addressed a few years before he tragically died. I asked him a pointed question from the floor, and I was dealt with rather curtly by him. Still, I admired him so much in so many ways when I was a physician peace activist and finally as a contact experiencer. Although we looked at challenge of flying saucers in different ways, I still miss him.
Below is an excerpt from a detailed Vanity Fair article about life and death of this remarkable human being, John Mack MD.
· “ In Newport with the other experiencers, a Tom Hanks look-alike who wanted to be known as “Scott,” the way Mack referred to him in Abduction, remembered their last meeting at Cuvelier’s villa, in the summer of 2004. Mack was excited about his new book, on the survival of consciousness. Scott confessed his own fear of death. Mack reassured him. “You never know when it will be your time,” he said. “We could all go at any time. I could walk out on the street and get hit by a car.”
Raymond Czechowski, a 50-year-old computer technician, had spent three-and-a-half hours at the Royal British Legion, a military charity in north London, planning the latest poppy drive to aid the troops, in the course of which he downed five or six pints of shandy—beer mixed with lemonade and ice. Then, on that mild, clear Monday night of September 27, 2004, he pointed his silver Peugeot north and started driving home.
Just ahead, shortly after 11 P.M., in the north London suburb of Barnet, John Mack climbed wearily out of the Underground station at Totteridge and Whetstone. His talk had gone well, and many in the audience had brought copies of his Lawrence biography, which they asked him to sign. He had also spoken about the death of his father, Edward Mack, who, 31 years before, almost to the day, had been driving home with the groceries to their summer home in Thetford, Vermont, when his car collided with a truck. In London, Mack was staying with a family friend, Veronica Keen, a widow who told him she had been receiving messages from her deceased husband—more evidence, Mack thought, of survival of consciousness. She had said to call her from the station, and she would pick him up, but Mack decided to walk. He crossed a divider and stepped into the busy street. His American instinct was to look to the left.
Czechowski hit the brakes, but too late. Mack’s body flew into the air, shattering the Peugeot’s windshield before traveling over the roof and landing heavily on the ground. “He just stepped there, bang,” Czechowski told the police, who registered his alcohol level at well over the limit.
Mack never regained consciousness. From a crumpled paper with an address on it found in his pocket, the police learned his destination and his identity.
Keen, who sat with Mack’s body at the morgue, said he materialized and told her, “It was as if I was touched with a feather. I did not feel a thing. I was given a choice: should I go, or should I stay? I looked down at my broken body and decided to go.”
At Mack’s funeral, many recalled one of his favorite quotes, from Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet (as translated by Stephen Mitchell): “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
Barbara Lamb and other friends also reported visitations.
Roberta Colasanti, one of Mack’s research associates, said he communicated to her a cryptic message on the abductions they had been studying: “It’s not what we thought.” Colasanti waited breathlessly for the solution to the mystery, but it didn’t come. Mack promised to return with more information. So far, he hasn’t.”
·
· I still think about this wonderful man, the doctors' peace movement and how in the 1990s on different paths, we became involved in the mystery of flying saucers. I believe that he is still with us in spirit. Joseph Burkes MD
VANITYFAIR.COM
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting…
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting in Newport, R.I.
​

​
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fslE1PK78Jo
On a social media page, I was asked if I knew John Mack MD. Here is my reply:
We were active together in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW. I sat with him briefly in Moscow in 1985 while he was having a drink during the celebration of IPPNW’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I attended a MUFON meeting that he addressed a few years before he tragically died. I asked him a pointed question from the floor, and I was dealt with rather curtly by him. Still, I admired him so much in so many ways when I was a physician peace activist and finally as a contact experiencer. Although we looked at challenge of flying saucers in different ways, I still miss him.
Below is an excerpt from a detailed Vanity Fair article about life and death of this remarkable human being, John Mack MD.
· “ In Newport with the other experiencers, a Tom Hanks look-alike who wanted to be known as “Scott,” the way Mack referred to him in Abduction, remembered their last meeting at Cuvelier’s villa, in the summer of 2004. Mack was excited about his new book, on the survival of consciousness. Scott confessed his own fear of death. Mack reassured him. “You never know when it will be your time,” he said. “We could all go at any time. I could walk out on the street and get hit by a car.”
Raymond Czechowski, a 50-year-old computer technician, had spent three-and-a-half hours at the Royal British Legion, a military charity in north London, planning the latest poppy drive to aid the troops, in the course of which he downed five or six pints of shandy—beer mixed with lemonade and ice. Then, on that mild, clear Monday night of September 27, 2004, he pointed his silver Peugeot north and started driving home.
Just ahead, shortly after 11 P.M., in the north London suburb of Barnet, John Mack climbed wearily out of the Underground station at Totteridge and Whetstone. His talk had gone well, and many in the audience had brought copies of his Lawrence biography, which they asked him to sign. He had also spoken about the death of his father, Edward Mack, who, 31 years before, almost to the day, had been driving home with the groceries to their summer home in Thetford, Vermont, when his car collided with a truck. In London, Mack was staying with a family friend, Veronica Keen, a widow who told him she had been receiving messages from her deceased husband—more evidence, Mack thought, of survival of consciousness. She had said to call her from the station, and she would pick him up, but Mack decided to walk. He crossed a divider and stepped into the busy street. His American instinct was to look to the left.
Czechowski hit the brakes, but too late. Mack’s body flew into the air, shattering the Peugeot’s windshield before traveling over the roof and landing heavily on the ground. “He just stepped there, bang,” Czechowski told the police, who registered his alcohol level at well over the limit.
Mack never regained consciousness. From a crumpled paper with an address on it found in his pocket, the police learned his destination and his identity.
Keen, who sat with Mack’s body at the morgue, said he materialized and told her, “It was as if I was touched with a feather. I did not feel a thing. I was given a choice: should I go, or should I stay? I looked down at my broken body and decided to go.”
At Mack’s funeral, many recalled one of his favorite quotes, from Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet (as translated by Stephen Mitchell): “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
Barbara Lamb and other friends also reported visitations.
Roberta Colasanti, one of Mack’s research associates, said he communicated to her a cryptic message on the abductions they had been studying: “It’s not what we thought.” Colasanti waited breathlessly for the solution to the mystery, but it didn’t come. Mack promised to return with more information. So far, he hasn’t.”
·
· I still think about this wonderful man, the doctors' peace movement and how in the 1990s on different paths, we became involved in the mystery of flying saucers. I believe that he is still with us in spirit. Joseph Burkes MD
VANITYFAIR.COM
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting…
Inside the Alien-Abduction Support-Group Annual Meeting in Newport, R.I.
Social Media
We were both active in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW. I still think about this wonderful man, the doctors' peace movement and how in the 1990s on different paths, we became involved in the mystery of flying saucers. I believe that he is still with us in spirit.
https://underground.contact/2022/12/11/i-remember-john-mack-md/

AITA for going No Contact with my mother?
So, I (28F) was raised by my single father. I have had a rocky relationship with my mother (59F) my whole life, due to drugs and alcohol and gun violence. She is incredibly volatile, and has alienated a majority of her family due to her volatility. I can include more of that in comments if folks would like some backstory. So, my father (M76) had been struggling with esophageal cancer for 2 years, and it was approaching hospice time. Where my mother had been horrible, my father was exceptional. He was an amazing dad. As good and kind of a man as you could possibly imagine. I was taking care of him throughout his cancer, but I put aside the crappy relationship with my mom and called her.
My mother came up immediately to help. My father had been living with me so that I could take care of him, so I took off work to do full time home hospice. My fiancee (27F) had quit her job to help out as well.
In order to shorten this a bit, I’ll have to leave out the drama where she started stealing my liquor. I didn’t know she was back to drinking, she had been sober. I have a normal relationship to alcohol, and thus didn’t think about hiding my liquor from her when she came over.
There was so much manipulation that it would be hard to include everything she did during the month she stayed with my father and I. It was an incredibly stressful time for all of us. I tried to have sympathy for her stress levels as well.
One night, we had a different nurse come by. She told us to put liquid pain meds under my father’s tongue, as his feeding tube wasn’t an option at the moment. At this point, my father was non responsive. He was clearly on his way out. The nurse being a medical professional, I listened. Unfortunately, this caused my father to cough and choke on the meds. My fiancee and I suctioned until he stopped, and he got comfortable again. I called the nurse and explained what happened. She came up with a way to make his feeding tube viable again and that was that. I felt very bad for having made my father cough, but I thought I was doing right, as that is what I had been told. My mother had absolutely zero medical experience, but was incredibly mad at me for not listening to her suggestion not to. I was following medical advice. He was okay after the nurse's mistake. I thought it was over with.
She accused me of trying to drown my father. She kept yelling that I was drowning him. My fiancee politely asked her to stop. She said “this is a really stressful time for all of us, and OP already feels really bad. Can you please stop, this isn’t helping”. Then she started freaking out and yelling at me over everything. I had some martini glasses and a bar mat out to dry after washing. Me putting those away after drying was apparently offensive to her. She screamed at me about not trusting her with medical stuff, and she’s right, I didn’t. She had fucked up the antibiotics multiple times, and gave a medication that was contraindicated despite the nurse specifically telling her not to.
She started to threaten to leave. She was screaming at my fiancee even more than she was at me. The last straw was when she was screaming, and I quote, “I rebuke thee Satan!” directly in my fiancees face. I told her to get the fuck out. She started packing her bags. We had been going through family photos on the couch and coffee table together, she made sure to snatch those first. Then she said I’ll never have photos of my father, and why didn’t HE have childhood photos of me?? (He did. They’re in a large box in my closet.)
Importantly, she left one packet of photos on the couch. I saw them, and, afraid that she’d follow through on not letting me have any photos of my father, quickly took photos of them with my phone. My fiancee then put them on the coffee table between two books. My mom came out of the bathroom accusing me of having stolen photos from the room. I said I didn’t know what she was talking about, because I didn’t. I hadn’t stolen anything or even moved out of the chair I was sitting in. When I realized she was talking about the photos she left behind, I gave them to her immediately. She continued to accuse me of theft. This coming from a woman who has struggled with drugs and alcohol and various crimes her whole life, to her daughter that has never once even had a speeding ticket. But I’m a thief apparently. A normal person would have simply asked if they left those ones out there, but she can’t possibly do that.
All of this screaming while my father is literally on his death bed.
She left after midnight, screaming at me for over an hour. Had she refused to leave I would have called the cops. The next day I calmly asked her to scan copies of the photos. She continued to try to hold them over my head as leverage. Eventually she did, and dropped the copies off.
My father passed a week later. I briefly spoke to her at the funeral. I hugged her, but didn’t accept any apologies. I haven’t answered the phone since. I sent a Merry Christmas text but that’s it. The calls aren’t as frequent now. I think she’s gotten the message. My half brother still tells me to talk to her. I have no desire to talk to someone who would treat me so poorly. I don’t care that she’s my mother. She’s had her own health issues lately. Heart surgery, her own cancer treatments. I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, I became an orphan when my father died.
TL;DR My mom exploded on me while my father was dying. We had a bad relationship to begin with. I haven't spoken to her since.
Am I being unfair to her? Should I give her another chance?

I 12 female have never had a great relationship with my biological father. For some background information we haven’t seen or spoken with each other for about 8 years. He has blocked me and my mom on facebook texts etc. So there is no way for me to get in touch with him or his family. So since I don’t see him I live with my stepdad who I call my real dad, my biological mother, and my twin siblings, Kash and Harlow. I live a pretty good life and don’t really think about him that often because I can’t see him. So when one day when my mom got a text from my biological fathers sister I was shocked. I thought that my dad want to see me but that wasn’t the case. She texted my mom to ask if I wanted to come to my grandfathers funeral. I HAVENT SEEN THAT SIDE OF MY FAMILY FOR SO LONG. AND NOW THEY WANTED TO SEE ME. My mom told her that we would talk about. So we did and at first I wanted to go. I wanted to see if my biological dad would be there. But then I started thinking of how they did this to me last time with my aunts wedding. With that event they called me up and asked if I wanted to come and be in the wedding. I said yes. I was also about 6. I got so excited thinking that my dad was going to be there and would be able to connect with him again. But he never showed and I was devastated. So I ended up not going to the funeral because I didn’t want to get my hopes up again. But me not going raised a lot of options in my family. People said that my mom made me not want to go because she didn’t want me seeing him. Even tho that’s not true. My mom fully supported my decision no matter what it was. She even wanted me to go. But now I feel like I let people down. So was I the bad apple.

The 3 basic parameters of hashtag #Valzubiriagenda:

1. We artists and everyone else can write and self-publish art- and artist-related books: memoirs, biographies, art books and art catalogs. Books are forever. Pamphlets and brochures are not books.
2. We announce a schedule of increasing prices of our art pieces, which includes quantities (scarcity numbers) per price point and overall (the total quantity of art pieces we might ever make). This helps art traders, art investors and art collectors speculate or even stop speculating and instead join a community of investors working together to hopefully skyrocket to the higher announced prices in a shorter span of time.
3. We can use the NFT world, because NFTs provide the tracking (who owns what) and trading.

We can also not be involved with NFTs. Stores and individuals can help sell art using online presence and our catalogs in the stores. If this trends, or once this trends, even expensive art can be sold by neighboring businesses, without exclusivity. Commission systems do not have to be standardized. Art investors can produce their own catalogs to leave at the cafés. Even the cafés can produce their own catalogs.
Valzubiriagenda NFTs
NFTs only came about a few years ago. But I had been working on this since the 1990s. I wrote a book, Valzubiriagenda, along with fellow artist Silverio Perez, and released it in 2018 (Amazon and elsewhere), tackling everything related to #1 & #2. We'll come up with #3 in a later book/ memoi marketing book.
Any artist, including tangible artists can release 10,000 NFTs if the artist chooses to do so. For tangible artists, the NFT first becomes an Art Commission Contract for sight unseen, yet-to-be made art. Once the art is made, the NFT becomes proof of ownership that the actual, tangible art is theirs.
Warehousing our tangible art
Another related idea is that the tangible art may be warehoused by the artist so that the NFT traders continue to trade. This means that even 10-ton 10-foot tall sculptures can be owned and traded by anyone without worrying about shipping, reshipping, scratches, smudges, parts breaking off, etc. The newness of the pieces remain because they are stored by the artist, source, gallery, etc. The art piece gets shipped to the art collector, the ultimate owner.
An artist who makes ceramic coffee mugs - smaller art pieces, can release 10,000 NFTs with a schedule of increasing prices so that NFT traders can trade immediately. The 10,000 coffee mugs can get damaged, so as they are made, they continue to be stored by the artist, until the time when art collectors decide to have the art pieces shipped to them.
Why only now?
I decided to write as many book-length memoirs as I can before I came out to promote this.
I'm an artist and an author. Both need time to "master." I would not even fully use "master" on myself, because there's always something new, even to my own art, my own writing and publishing.

I am now claiming that I'm the visual artist who has produced the most artist memoirs in the world. I have 5 on Amazon. I count Valzubiriagenda as both a marketing book and a memoir-of-sorts, because it has a lot of my own life lessons on writing and publishing. I would not care to contest my claim of having the most memoirs. I will release 5 more over the next 3 years.

BARTER! Get help to write, photograph art and publish your books!
Anyone can hire 11 ghostwriters for 11 memoirs. If you can make art, but you cannot write, then barter your forever art with those who can help you produce forever books.
I don't feel the pressure of writing and publishing because I feel my focus should be on art students and art experts who would study my art and my books 100 years from now. Don't expect relatives and friends to read your books.
I call myself the Dollman
For my NFTs, I am proposing to make dioramas - my original, costumed, bejeweled porcelain dolls in backdrops that will also have precious metals and gemstones. This way I can incorporate precious metals and gemstones in my work, to make sure that people perceive my art as expensive, just in case I myself don't become "famous" - there's no need to get world famous. We are artists and all we need to do is to satisfy the art niche.
Use your laptop now!
I will encourage you to start writing your book-length memoir. Write, Edit and then Self-publish it. Get help. Why wait a hundred years for someone to write about you when all you need is a laptop and a nearby coffee shop.
Don't start counting chickens before the eggs hatch. I have encountered a lot of would-be writers who immediately see themselves as bestselling. world famous assets to society. Two even wanted me to sign NDAs (Nondisclosure agreements), because they did not want me to steal their book ideas.
Here's a suggestion. I would not personally do it. From one manuscript can come 2 books: The Original Draft (unedited, with misspellings, considered to be an art piece, scanned pages(?) of your handwritten original effort), and The Final Edition (edited).
PROVENANCE!
Another way to enhance our investability, tradability and collectability is PROVENANCE - how art ownership proceeds through time. The way this can be done is also through publishing books. Everyone can write their memoirs, biographies, art books and art catalogs, including traders, investors and art collectors. In effect, we artists can continue to be included or mentioned in even more books, without any additional effort by us.
You as an investor, reseller, trader, art collector should be able to publish a catalog with 250 works by 250 different artists, but they need to agree to this right from the start - it's your money, you should require them to follow your version of the hashtag #valzubiriagenda parameters, which preferably should include permission for you to publish their art. Why would you track down 250 artists later?
No exclusive contracts
If you're a café, you can call for artists, and come up with a book with for example, 30 artists, with a chapter devoted to each artist's profile and images of the artist's art.
You can distribute your catalogs to businesses and individuals near and far and online.
The book Valzubiriagenda even cites that funeral homes and janitors closets can sell art, with or without exclusivity. Airline catalogs can include million dollar art pieces. Car manufacturers, showrooms and even car repair shops can sell art as well. Everyone should be able to do this, anywhere in the world, especially not just because of the pandemic, but right now, we are in really bad economies.
What's with the name #Valzubiriagenda
I was into conspiracy theories in 2018, and this term, "The Mandela Effect," was popular. I had read many times that an artist coined the term, but I had to research online, for her name, many times, before remembering it. I'm not good at remembering names. It took me a year and a half to finally tell you that Fiona Broome coined "The Mandela Effect."
I also thought I might have to research trademarks and copyrights just to come up with a generic name. So I decided on "Valzubiriagenda." I was not really sure at first, but I decided to use it as the title for my book (with co-authoartist Silverio Perez) so that there would be no turning back and I can move on.
Am I a FUTURIST?
Someone I recently met this May 2022 just called me a futurist.
In the 1990s, I proposed to a pension fund that they can raise billions of dollars, especially for emergencies, or as needed, or out of desperation, if the pension fund purchases a quantity of art from an artist who not only has a current, reasonable price, but an announced future price that the artist wants to reach.
That future price would obviously be higher than the current price. The art commission contract for multiple art pieces can be taken to the fund's financial lender for a loan. The higher future price can be used for financing purposes.
The pension fund's treasurer, a publicly elected official, said this idea might work, but we had to keep this a secret and discuss this some more, because other pension funds might copy and do this prematurely. This idea had to come from the two of us. The treasurer needed his votes and I needed credentials.
Added into the pot was my idea that I, as the artist, will also write one book-length artist memoir. This was and still is a strong factor, because the leadership and marketing books I had read then mentioned a strong tip. If you want to advance in your field, write a full-length book that is related to the field.
Unfortunately, the elected official, the treasurer of the pension fund, who was also a friend, passed away - he was old and had ailments. At that point in time, I cannot just approach another pension fund treasurer to share this idea with.
I realized I had to write a few memoirs. I needed to set an example for other artists, so I needed to write more than one memoir. Then I felt I should also make ready another book - the how-to of what I'm up to. I wrote Valzubiriagenda, which was a memoir of sorts. I knew how long it would take me to write a book, so I had to make sure I can also consider this book a memoir.
In 2008, I imagined that someone like Bernie Madoff, or a fund like Lehman Brothers, would be desperate enough to use this to save themselves and their companies. I was not ready. I had only written 1 manuscript for a memoir.
In 2012, I released Dollman the Musical, A Memoir of an Artist as a Dollmaker. Once again, I was not ready because writing it depressed me a little, and I knew I had to write more.
In 2014, I released 3 memoirs, and re-released Dollman the Musical. Besides releasing regular books, I released special editions of the 4 books, which had a "Special Secret Insert for Bankers," which explains my ideas of an announced schedule of exponentially increasing prices, to satisfy investors, and the publication of artist memoirs, to satisfy art collectors.
In 2014, I also issued out a press release. Google "Can Billion Dollar Artist Save Investors and World Economy Valentino Zubiri PRWeb August 19 2014" and you will see the press release.
What I did was stake a claim on my ideas. I did not promote my books and the press release. I just wanted them to stay online, like a sleeping giant or a dormant volcano. I even designed 3 of the book covers to look like indie books from the 1980s. I was planting the seeds, thinking they will eventually grow and bear fruit in the future.
In 2015, I was interviewed by Richard Syrett, about one of my memoirs, Hocus Pocus Lately. This book is my memoir with paranormal stories. I could have pursued promoting my paranormal stories, but I wanted to be known first as a visual artist and memoirist, so I allowed myself one interview related to Hocus Pocus Lately. Richard Syrett has(had?) his own syndicated radio show, The Conspiracy Show with Richard Syrett, about the paranormal. He also guest hosts on Coast to Coast AM, another internationally syndicated show about the paranormal.
In 2018, I released Valzubiriagenda (co-authored by artist Silverio Perez, a fellow artist). Finally, this book is "the how-to of what I'm to."
I'm going to end this with some strangeness. In 1986, a lady at a religious gathering went into a trance and left a good number of messages. Supposedly, anyone who got into a trance would have messages, but once the trance was over, the person would not remember what was said.
I was not part of the group, but the lady turned her head to face me. She "foretold" that whatever I would decide to do in the future, it will take time, but it will be the right thing. This is one of my stories in one of my memoirs, Hocus Pocus Lately.
The Tulipmania of 1634-37
I discovered that there was this incident of rare tulips becoming collectible during the Dutch Golden Age. There were tulips so rare and so well-desired that their prices equaled to that of a house. You can read more about this online (Wikipedia) or watch a few YouTube videos about it.
Here is the most useful idea that I gleaned from the Tulipmania. The tulip bulbs remained safe inside nurseries. The traders were carrying the deeds of ownership to the tulip bulbs.
Then NFTs came to the forefront
I started learning PHP, an HTML scripting language, and MySQL, the database that PHP can connect to in the background, in 1999, when there were only 3 books about PHP and MySQL at the bookstores.
By 2014, I was trying to figure out how to make the "ledger," or database that can be used to update ownership and who can be contacted. If we are trading art, then the art ownership should be updated.
Then NFTs came about. This can be used as our ledger. Everyone can immediately trade NFTs of future, yet-to-be made art pieces, especially because it takes time to make tangible art.
NFTs actually went a step ahead, by allowing digital art to be traded.
The only setback with NFTs, in my opinion, is that it still lacks a commission system for resellers and representatives.
For example, if a café wants to represent me, then they can promote me at their café and on their online pages. If I make one piece of art that will be exclusively represented by a gallery, then that commission will be different and more specific. As ownership is transferred, the subsequent owners should be able to reset the commission. We should also have the option of giving commissions to hundreds of representatives at one time with different percentages if need be.
The recent crypto crash
Lately, we have observed that NFTs and cryptocurrencies have been behaving like the stock market and other markets. They have been fluctuating.
I believe that it is time for a trend which discourages fluctuation of prices.
I have also seen YouTube videos where social influencers are encouraging us to be on the lookout for exponentially profitable ventures, because we have all seen this happen with the exponential increase of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Let's see if #Valzubiriagenda trends
We can announce present and future art prices. The galleries won't do this (yet?) because they follow a more traditional approach to the business of art.
We have a choice of using incrementally or exponentially increasing prices. We still reserve the right to change things in the future, so everyone should know to follow the latest update.
If this trends, if you as an artist simply announces that you will write an artist memoir, or that you will include the future works in future art books, you might have more art traders, investors and collectors approaching you.
Get your pen, paper and calculator
Imagine yourself as an artist, where you are right now. Let's just say you still do not have a book about yourself and your art yet. Imagine now that you have a memoir out there. Don't you think it makes sense to charge more than what you are charging now? Writing and publishing books is just the beginning. I'm just standardizing this approach. The books also say to do other related projects. In my case, getting Dollman the Musical onstage is one idea. You will have other related projects, but the publication of memoirs, biographies, art books and art catalogs will help all of us.
You can also imagine that a law firm that has meeting rooms, with someone who wants to form a local #valzubiriagenda group, can have meetings. A local café can do the same. Local photographers for your art, writers, editors, book designers, proofreaders and others can join in.
I suggest have printed books to share. 15 copies of your memoir or art books will be better than an e-reader or laptop or your phone to show. These gadgets can be stolen, sabotaged, broken, have coffee spilled on them, etc. 15 printed books means simultaneously showing to 15 people. You can even give them away to potential resellers, investors, traders and collectors.
When it rains, it pours, as in the days of Noah
There's a saying, "When it rains, it pours." There is a negative interpretation and a positive interpretation.
Negative: When trouble comes, they cascade to even more.
Positive: When opportunity comes knocking, more follow suit. We can assume that if one gets our art because of #valzubiriagenda, more want to do it now, because of the rising prices, and FOMO - fear of missing out. What will they lose if they miss the boat?
As I have said earlier, if the #valzubiriagenda trends, if you announce a future memoir or art catalog, you might have an increase of investors, traders and art collectors who would want to check you out. You might encourage more sales. Just remember to write and publish that memoir and art catalog.
There's this saying, "As in the days of Noah." Imagine Noah, building his ark, with members of his own family, putting all his time and effort into it. Noah was a nice guy. I'm sure every once in a while a neighbor offered him coffee, or chai latte, or whatever refreshing drink they might have back then.
Here's the lesson to be learned. Just because they offered him some type of bubble tea drink, or coca cola, they still didn't make it to the ark. Rubbing shoulders with actors does not make you an actor. I have told my artist friends to write their memoirs. They told me that once they see me succeed, after all these many years of seeing my seemingly useless efforts, then they will write their memoirs and follow the road that I had paved for them.
Good luck to them, but if I were you, act now, get my art or make art. Support the 5-year old artist whose parent promised to release a comprehensive art catalog. If you get that 5-year old's art, and mine, I would be honored to be in the same art catalog that you will produce. I'm already successful at that point. You have gotten the mission just right.
I have already claimed to have written the most book-length artist memoirs in the world. Dethrone that claim. Barter. Use ghostwriters. Success to me means facing God one day and saying, I wrote my memoirs and left the world a legacy of books and art. I will not tell God, smiling and proudly, that I encouraged a run for my art by announcing a schedule of exponentially increasing prices that reached 9 figures. I'm sure God knows we had fun.

JOIN THIS GROUP

If you want to try out #valzubiriagenda, in any capacity, join this group. Let others know about this group as well.
If you are an artist, you can let everyone know here that you will produce your memoir, art catalogs, etc. It's okay if you don't know how to go about publishing yet, I will discuss this. Please be honorable enough to produce what you promise to produce.
If you want to meet fellow artists, investors, resellers, etc., join us here.
If you are a book writer, editor, proofreader; if you can photograph art pieces; if you are a book designer, etc., join us here. Let us know if you charge, barter for art, or both.
If you have your own tips and knowledge to share, join us here.
If you have underaged artists you are managing (parents, etc.) join us here.
Join this group if you want to sell works. Post your works. You web links. I'm sure I will.
You can announce meetings in your area. You might have meeting rooms, a café, restaurant, etc. where people can meet. In the future, you can have the regular show and tell, where books can be shown and shared.
​
Thanks for reading. Please let me know if I need to edit some parts. Please share and join this group. - Valentino Zubiri, Dollman, Artist, Memoirist
Underaged artists are welcome here, so please be mindful of your language. We cannot post your adult-oriented art pieces, but you can direct us to a separate page or community. There will be limits to your posts, and there will be adult-oriented art that we cannot allow to be posted.
Thanks for reading. Please let me know if I need to edit some parts. Please share and join this group. - Valentino Zubiri, Dollman, artist & memoirist

I took a huge step a few weeks ago and dumped my now ex-girlfriend. The writing was on the wall. She would gaslight, yell and scream, call me hurtful labels, stonewall and use a host of other manipulative and abusive behaviors to isolate me even more than I already felt. Recently, she publicly embarrassed me before a major family event, creating a huge scene over nothing important in the grand scheme. Then, she argued, yelled and screamed at me for inviting her for coffee the following day with family, after we’d “made up”, insinuating that “I don’t really want [you] there.” She wanted me to beg her to come and I refused. Despite our arguing, the only person my family could hear was her screaming at me, ridiculing me, telling me to “fuck myself” and to “stop, stop, stop!”, whenever I expressed just disagreement to her. Ultimately, we never even got that coffee and had to catch a train. I hadn’t seen my family in eight months, the last being for two funerals one day after another. That was my opportunity, despite recent unemployment and other stressors, to see and bond with them—while I was introducing her—and I squandered that chance by entertaining her argument.
Barely a couple months into the relationship, she started doing things like this. We’d argue for literally hours, in a small apartment with roommates. She was the type to make a public scene on the street. She’d do everything from yell, scream and ridicule to bawl and cry, always shifting the topic of argument. She tried to get me to switch my career path, compromise on what I value and completely isolate myself from even platonic relationships with women in my life other than family because she always feared I was “loose” and would cheat, despite admitting to her in confidence that I’d been hurt by my ex-wife, who cheated before my eyes while we were in couples’ therapy together.
The day I broke up with her, my therapist said to me in no uncertain terms that though it’s rare for a mental health professional to give active advice unless the situation were dire, he urged that I leave the relationship as soon as possible. He, like my mother and family that met her, said the same thing, “this is toxic.”
I’m omitting a lot from here on, but the day I broke up with her, a million thoughts raced through my head:
“What if this is a huge mistake?”
“What if I can’t make it myself?”
“Where am I gonna live and what am gonna do?”
“Is this what I really need to do? Have I exhausted every other option before this?”
Then I thought of my mother. She endured abuse for her decades-long marriage to my father, who was an alcoholic. I remember constantly fighting and yelling and clawing and toothing my way through arguments with my dad, who routinely looked for ways to abuse, control and dominate her. I was always the only one who spoke up for her or myself, and I thought then about why she was in this situation in the first place. Why anyone with half a brain would endure something like this voluntarily. Then I remembered, she had no choice. She was born in a different part of the world in a different time with a lack of higher education. With a few kids and a low-paying job, how could she consider leaving?
But then I thought about myself. I remembered that I don’t have to allow this to happen to me. I am educated. I have upward mobility. I may have lost a position, but I can find another. I don’t have to put up with this. She only controls me if I give her the power to.
When I was breaking up with her, I witnessed the weirdest transformation I’ve ever seen from a partner—she suddenly was polite, understanding, soft-spoken and even kind. She implored me to continue our relationship, begging for a couple days to make it work, for her to “show me” that she took the change seriously. She said that I was her soulmate, that I’m the only person she’d ever consider marrying, that we’re meant to be together. She admitted to taking out her anger and frustrations on me because I was an “easy target”. She said that she was conscious of how she was acting and insisted that she’d stop. We’d get a therapist. She even went on to force intimacy and straddled me to force me to look very closely at her, before I shrugged her off. She called her technique of arguing with me and gaslighting me for hours “passion” in an argument that apparently she got from her family, to which I responded that that’s pathological.
Finally, when she realized that I wasn’t going to be persuaded, she did a 180 and said coldly that she thinks it’s the right thing to do, that she thought I was waiting for her to do it to “rip off the bandaid”, that she even agreed with me and that it was for the best. I left the apartment to give her time to pack some of her things and leave.
I just feel so many emotions right now. On the one hand, I am relieved. On the other, in some weird way, I miss having her around to an extent. I’ve always had a fear of being alone. I’m confused because I know I shouldn’t miss this at all, and I have so much to contend with at the moment. I want to start doing things for myself again, because when I do, things really seem to work. My whole life, I’ve always felt lonely. As a kid, my family moved from an area with a lot of emotional support and extended family to the middle of nowhere. I remember the closest family for hours coming by and being awful company, yet I’d cry when they left because I didn’t have anyone else. My siblings were much older, my parents had their own problems and I didn’t have friends.

I've been working at an SCI owned funeral home for almost 2 months now. I was initially hired as an FDA but have been mostly running death certificates and primarily assisting the embalmers in our care center.
My mother in law passed away early this morning, and wanted to have her service at a specific family owned funeral home that her husband and daughter had their services at previously.
I really wanted to be the one to help make her wish come true with how she told me she wanted to be dressed, and her makeup done, ect. But I'm not sure if a family owned home would allow that, or if there would be too many legalities involved.
Advice appreciated, thanks much

So for the past two years I haven’t spoken to my mother after she made my pregnancy announcement all about her and called me to tell me off. Since then I’ve seen my mother twice. Once at a cousins wedding (we didn’t speak) and the last time at my great grandfathers funeral (she came up to me and hugged me and then begin to say we need to fix things) I told her that wasn’t the place to hash things out and she got upset with me.
January of this year my younger sister had open heart surgery and my mother messaged me on Facebook to tell me how her surgery went but in the same message tried to gaslight me telling me she hopes I stop denying their love for me. I won’t lie I messaged her back and told her exactly why she’s blocked on everything and when I shared a few of the issues I have with her she said she didn’t care to hear the issues I have and that she forgives me. I told her until she could take responsibility for her treatment towards me I have nothing further to say because it would fall on deaf ears and I blocked her on Facebook.
Fast forward to just recently I found out from a family member that one of my brothers who has come over a few times to visit my sons is only doing so to try to find out whatever he can about our lives and report back to my mother. It upset me and since I use my Facebook as a journal of sorts I wrote out my frustration at finding out my brother isn’t visiting because he wants to see his nephews.
Well my other brother decided to bash me on Facebook and accuse me of hating my mom and then accused our grandfather (our moms father) of being inappropriate with my younger sister (but they still ALL regularly visit him). A few family members called me about his post shocked so I made a response and attached every single screenshot between me and my parents and all of my siblings. And I asked why if my grandfather did what they’re claiming he did why are they allowing him around her? I then called my grandparents to inform them of what they are accusing them of.
My grandparents immediately called my mother to find out wtf is her deal to throw such a serious accusation their way. My grandma said my mom got pissed at me for telling her anything and then corrected herself saying that my grandpa hugged my younger sister too tightly and hurt her neck and that they misspoke and she was going to have my brother correct his post.
After 15+ years of dealing with my mothers narcissistic ways and my dad just enabling her toxic behavior and all of my siblings ganging up on me in their own ways from time to time it felt freeing to finally put SOME of the truth out there. I’m just wondering if maybe I went a tad far in exposing my siblings as well. Thank you for reading.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

So I met this very awesome guy near Christmastime 2013 in Oakland, CA while fleeing a bad family situation in Arizona. We were immediately in our own world, falling in love fast when the reality of his divorce-in-process and some of my own circumstances started to interfere. Our whirlwind lasted a glorious 3 months but our connection had been incredible and instant. When I stopped seeing him he started drinking very heavily and got sick. We were both pretty bummed it didn’t work out, but said goodbye on very good terms.
When I returned to Arizona (2014) and was bussing to work at night, I saw him. The night of a gorgeous full-moon in December, no less. I was walking from the bus stop to work when I saw someone standing at the corner up ahead, looking down at a cell phone. This alone was odd, because I never saw ANYONE on this stretch at that time of night. The closer I got, the more I realized it was the guy from Oakland. I couldn’t understand why he would be in Arizona, or how he found me exactly where I was at that moment. My stride quickened as I was excited to approach and maybe talk to this person, but when I got about 50 yards away and could see it was DEFINITELY him (aside from this strange “softness” to the skin on his face he did not normally have - but the haircut, sideburns, his height, build, shoes, and clothes were incredibly uncanny) he looked up from his phone, directly at me, and then took off at a full run up the adjacent street. I hurried to the corner, looked down the street he’d run up, and saw absolutely no one.
This was a friday night. I would work weekends (group home for foster youth) and return home on Sunday mornings. When I got home I took a very long nap, as that was my routine at the time. When I woke up, I saw I'd received text messages from the guy in Oakland, out of the blue. He said he had been thinking of me since it was Christmas time again, and that he just wanted to say hi. I asked what he’d been doing that friday and he said he’d simply worked, gone home, and gone to bed. I told him what I’d experienced and he had no more answers than I did.
I had several dreams later that someone was relaying his passing on to me at a party in Oakland, but shrugged it off as my own fears toward his struggle with alcohol. Nonetheless I run google check ups on him every once in a while just in case.
This past winter I found out he passed away at the age of 41 in 2021. I’m not sure how (a "tragic accident" is passively cited in his obituary) and will likely never ask, but it feels like I was being warned and did nothing to reach out to him. I was quite unaware of doppelganger folklore at the time, but had sooo many theories. This all fits the classic doppelganger definition so well, so I thought I'd share!

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.