Not Gone Yet

by Ryan Steven Reed

Edmund leaned against the split wood fence and watched Isabella shoe her horse. He spit tobacco flake into the soft, persistent prairie wind and exhaled a line of smoke to the east.  The October sun, diligent in its watching, puddled shadows below the feet of Edmund, Isabella, and her horse, Ozy. 

“Hungry?” Edmund called across the yard. 

Isabella did not respond until she had finished driving the last shoe tack home. She stood straight, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow and tucking an errant strand of cornsilk blonde behind an ear. 

“Don’t think we’ve time…” Isabella responded, squinting into the pale sun and white blue sky. “I’ll share an apple with Ozy.”

Edmund took a final sip from his cigarette and rolled it tight between his forefinger and thumb, reducing it to component parts, tobacco and paper, chasing the smoke on the wind to the east. 

He made his way across the yard, between stable, barn, and grain silo, up the few short stairs to the back porch of the small, whitewashed clapboard house where they lived. He slipped out of his mud-covered workboots and stepped into the kitchen in the old red socks he had darned himself. The kitchen, shade-dark in the noon-day sun, was as still as they had left it after breakfast that morning; a feathered trinket from Isabella’s grandmother darkening the otherwise bright square of window. The house was quiet save for the unending, ignored frown of the western broadside against the omnipresent prairie wind. 

On the dining table his father had built, Ed uncovered the plate of remaining biscuits, taking one of the three and eating almost half in a single bite. Crossing the kitchen while chewing, he removed the slab of salt-pork from the ice box and cut two thick slices. Halving the left biscuits, he drew a pat of soft butter from the bell and reformed the biscuits with pork between. He finished the other half of the biscuit, then wrapped the sandwiches in a tea towel, part of a set, a wedding present from his mother, dead. He made his way back to the yard where Isabella was finishing her shoeing. 

She saw him approaching, laden, and smiled the smile she had for fifteen years at her husband. 

“Thank you, love,” she said accepting the pork-biscuit. 

“Is it bad that I don’t much feel like work today?” he said. 

“Sir, you never much feel like working.” She winked at him and took a bite. “Is is bad that I hope those clouds end up keeping us from this evening’s social engagement?”

To the northwest, tall, shadow-bottomed clouds stretched from behind the horizon into the highest parts of the afternoon sky. The horse seemed to follow the attention of their gaze and considered the clouds with them. 

“You know I wouldn’t object. I love your mother, but your gran keeps getting creepier and more sinister the older she gets,” said Edmund.

“She won’t be with us much longer,” said Isabella.

“You have been saying that since we got married.  And while yes, physically she still remains, mentally and spiritually her presence is debatable,” said Edmund.

“Well, everything is relative and the sentiment remains true.”  For the briefest moment, the wind all but stopped and then Isabella continued: “She does take her anniversary supper pretty seriously, though. We’ve never missed one.”

“Your granddad has been dead seven years and this is still her concern. The woman doesn’t even celebrate her own birthday,” said Edmund.

Isabella smiled at him. 

“The woman doesn’t even know her own birthday…Would it be absolutely terrible if we missed it? I could then, perhaps, forgive your accusation of my grandmother’s spiritual vacancy,” Isabella said.

“They are your kin first,” Edmund shrugged. “If those clouds produce, we could get stuck not coming back tonight. That said, I certainly wouldn’t mind the opportunity to finish my book.”

“A good one?” Isabella asked. 

“Indeed.” Edmund paused and looked back to his wife. “Would it be terrible if I called it a half-day and was done working?”

Again, she gave him that smile. The smile that had made him propose, made him fall in love, had comforted him each time one of their three children had not been born, had soothed him while she stitched his wounds or loved him physically. The smile reminded him to breathe. It encouraged his heart to keep beating and had motivated it to action in the face of the portents of popular opinion towards the widows Gorsch and their beautiful daughter. The loneliness and the isolation of the prairie were constantly assuaged by the existence of that smile. 

“How about you mend the fence and re-hang the gate and then we call it a day,” she responded. 

“A most amenable proposition, wife,” Edmund said. 

He finished his sandwich and wiped his beard and mustache with the faded red tea towel before tucking it into a back pocket and heading to the barn to collect his tools. 

*. *. *. *. * 

Edmund finished his work and the storm came. The clouds opened up shortly after darkness took the sky. To the south, streaks of the red sun setting marked the boundaries of the storm; miles away, and absolutely out of mind. Thunder shook the house, the western walls used to the disruption of the natures; the rest cried louder. 

“We should have said something or sent word. I hate thinking of them waiting for us to eat.” Isabella said while she sharpened her knives methodically in the candlelight. 

“They will be getting the same storm. It’s not too much to ask putting it all together,” Edmund said. 

“I just hate thinking of those poor old widows in that old house waiting for folks who will never be back,” Isabella lamented.

“I don’t mean to be coy, or short,” Edmund said, “but this is what you wanted.”

“I know. I just feel differently about it now that night’s come,” she said. 

“I am sure they are used to waiting for folks who won’t be showing up; widows and all.”

“Edmund Wentz, that is dark. Even for your old dark soul. You make light of my own dead daddy and granddaddy.”

“That’s fair.” He smiled. “Take solace knowing that if custom holds, I will be the one punished for my levity in the face of our eventual demise.”

She wiped sparkling detritus from the fresh sharpened blade.

“Don’t even joke about such things,” Isabella responded. Her grandmother’s trinket hung even darker in the flickering lantern light.

*. *. *. *. * 

The house shook and shuddered as the storm got to its point. The fastened shutters on the bedroom window ground and clattered. Before bed, Isabella and Edmund had managed to isolate the handful of leaks in the old roof, catching their roofing oversights in resonant milk pails. 

Edmund and his father, Job, had lived in the house until Job had been shot by Edmund’s grandfather one night over a misunderstanding, full of sour mash. Job had died a week later as the hole in his gut, punctured by his father’s hunting rifle at close range, wept until it claimed his life. Edmund’s grandfather went to prison where he remained and Edmund stayed alone in the house until he married Isabella Gorsch eight years later. 

In those eight years and the fifteen that followed them, they had managed to halve the debts Job accrued. They were hobbled by their ambitions alone. There was plenty of land, but rather than sell it off or hire on to work the whole, Edmund and Isabella did what they could. They worked what they were able. What they did not need or use was enough to provide what they could not make. Children would have helped, but all their attempts at growing their family had led to sorrow and small graves out behind the barn. They remained, resilient, with only each other to lean upon.

Isabella threw back the sheet and sat up in the dark. 

“What?” Asked Edmund.

“Did you hear that?” She asked.

“Hear what?” Edmund responded. 

“It sounded like Ozy,” Isabella said. 

“I’m sure that horse is just spooked by the storm. Leave him be, he will be fine.” Edmund was almost back to sleep before the sentence was finished. 

“I need to go check on him,” Isabella said

She moved quickly in the dark, and before Edmund could muster the consciousness to offer his effort in her place, she was out of the room. Edmund knew some time had passed when he woke back up, but he was unsure how much. He was alone in the bed. The storm had relented and he called his wife’s name into the dark house. The silence answered back. 

He lay quiet and still in the half-empty bed, the gentle sound of the less-aggressive rain easily mistaken for a strong wind. Eventually he rose and pulled on some clothes, gently stepping on red-socked feet to where his boots sat by the kitchen door.

The night was dark. Even as Edmund’s eyes adjusted from the dim interior, the range of his vision was tempered by the mist-like falling rain, the sounds of the farm ubiquitously hushed by the drip of eaves and the puddled yard. The lurch of his boots in the shallow and abundant mud joined the chorus of the post-storm night.

“Isabella?” He called quietly, his voice, as loud as it had been in the benighted house, a whisper in the active dark. He took a few steps towards the stable and the pen, then clearing his throat he called again, this time louder, with more purpose but with the same absence of response.

He halted, a few steps from the stable, at the pale luminescence of Isabella in her shift and light coat, laying still and quiet, face-down in the mud. 

*. *. *. *. * 

Isabella was still warm, but her heart was not beating. She was dead. Edmund rolled her over. Her face was covered with mud. There was mud in her eye. On the open eye itself. She did not blink. The left side of her forehead was concave and mud pasted her cornsilk hair into the fresh alcove. Her neck was loose like rope. 

Edmund stood, fists clenched white at his sides, and searched the night; shadow and form floating in near-shape from the close mist. The yard was silent and stilled. He took deep breaths, clouds of steam expelled from his mouth like the exhaust of hellfire. He made a sound like a broken dog.

Edmund oscillated between feeling as though he would be sick and not feeling anything at all. Nearby in the darkness, a presence loomed out of the night and Edmund found Ozy’s long face peering out of the gloom, chuffing curiously as he knelt in the mud to cradle his dead wife’s limp head. There was movement everywhere, or maybe it was just the rain. 

He found her lost shoe and gently lay it on her stomach, then carefully sliding his arms beneath her in the mud, he hefted her inert form and carried her back into the house. He lay her on the pine kitchen table, pushing the empty biscuit plate off the edge in the process. It surprisingly did not break, instead it cyclone-danced, losing momentum and energy until it came to rest on the wood floor. 

Edmund put on the kettle and reverently removed the muddy coat, clothes, and undergarments his wife had died in. Mixing the kettle with well water, he began to methodically wipe down her cooling body. He gently wiped the mud from her face and out of her hair. He continued bathing her. He had to pause frequently as reality resisted the distraction of his hand’s work and he was overcome, stepping to the door, searching the night for reason and mixing his tears with the soft rain. He cleaned away the filth that smelled stronger than mud and lingered on the bruises of a body worked hard; marked by the scars of a woman who should have been a mother. 

Once he was finished, he returned to their bed, her sheet tossed back where she had cast it off so recently, and stripped the blanket for a shroud. He rolled her tightly in the cotton, surprised at how intuitive it felt and dwelling for just a moment on forgotten kings and queens bereft of their moisture beneath slave-built tombs.

He bore witness to the tight-wrapped, still form on the table. He stood. He waited. He watched. He felt that there should have been more tears, but there were none. He felt the place where such things had sprung from was dark and empty, cold, hungry, producing nothing but even more absence. 

He had no real concept of how long he stood there. After some time he looked through the window at the western sky outside the window; the horizon an unobstructed pale line of blue. The trinket danced gently in a wind from somewhere. He went out into the morning, colder than an October should be, saddled her horse and rode north from the farm. 

*. *. *. *. * 

The widows Gorsch lived just less of a half day ride from the farm in a house on the outskirts of Lamar, built by Isabella’s father who in the act of doing so, fell from the roof of the almost completed building and broke his back. The widows survived running an apothecary of sorts from the house that had killed their patriarch, their wares an alchemy of tonics, tinctures, and salves meant to bridge the gap between either modern medicine or empty pockets and the well-being folks pursued in their small lives. Hannah Gorsch and her daughter Edith had neither remarried at the passing of their husbands. Though a quiet had filled the Gorsch house after Isabella had married away, they still enjoyed the isolation it afforded them while making balms for rash and antidote for snakebite. They kept to themselves in a manner many appreciated. Though warm and welcoming in their commerce to the people of Lamar and beyond, to come upon them gathering herbs and toadstool among the mossy rocks of the river creek was to leave them about their business. 

Isabella had loved dearly her mother and grandmother. Though the widows had been skeptical of Edmund, and he of them, they had easily identified the affections of the man towards their daughter reflected in the young girl’s eyes. There were black things said about the widows and their daughter, a miasma to the house which kept Isabella unmarked longer than her grace should have allowed. Their courtship was short and Isabella moved south right after they were married, bringing to the union a devout self-sufficiency and a keen eye to identifying the various herbs, weeds, and brush that grew on their land. 

It was still early morning when the Gorsch house came into view and by the time he could make them out, Edith and Hannah were standing on the porch awaiting his arrival. 

They could have been sisters. At over 17 years separated, Hannah resembled a faded simulacrum of her daughter; the contrast higher, the darkness in her eyes more prominent. Her daughter wore her hair in a tight pulled bun, the luster of Isabella’s same washed out and faded with the years. Hannah’s hair, pushed behind a single ear, hung like a shroud over her right eye. Neither of them turned during their watch of Edmund’s approach. 

“Something has happened.” Hannah called out as the distance became manageable. 

Edmund stepped off the horse and led it the remainder. He stopped at the foot of the porch stair. He squinted in the blue sun.

“Isabella is dead,” Edmund said.

The women looked at each other in the porch shade.

“What happened?” asked Edith. 

“Did you ask a favor?” Questioned Hannah, looking over, past him, at the few trees punctuating the empty prairie. 

“I don’t know.” Edmund breathed. “We were asleep and she heard something, something woke her over the storm. She went to go check on Ozy here but I found her a little later, face down in the mud, her forehead caved. I don’t think anyone was there,” Edmund said.

“And not a talkative one, is the beast?” tittered Hannah in her faded Bavarian accent.

Ozy chuffed and in the quiet that followed they all stood. 

“I plan to put her in the ground tomorrow morning and figured you would want to be there,” Edmund said.

“She’s not gone yet,” creaked Hannah, drawing a look from her daughter.

“We’d appreciate,” started Edith, “if we could bury her here with her people, by her father and the rest of our passed kin.”

Beyond the house was a small square of land, maybe half an acre, hemmed in with an iron fence, its once true bars appearing more like the dead stalks of a tree; fingers holding in or keeping out. Contained within were a few dirty stones, a handful hewn, the rest sheets of shale scratched upon and driven into the loam.

“Understanding your wants, I would prefer her interred at home, next to the rest,” Edmund said.

“Never children, accident and injury.” The older spoke.

A moment. 

“All the same, we made vows to each other and I would prefer I finish my days within sight and reach of them,” Edmund said. 

“Come inside Edmund, sit a moment and have some tea. It is no day to quarrel,” soothed Edith.

“Timely, but not gone yet…” murmured Hannah. 

*. *. *. *. *

Edmund tied Ozy to the post and followed the widows Gorsch into the dim house. It felt as if it rushed him, crowded him with its clutter and occupancy. Inverted plants and dried, drying, curled withering things hung from the exposed oak joists and the midday light shone through countless hues of liquids filling windowsill jars in preservation of alien, esoteric occupants. No less than three cast iron pots of alternating sizes hung from the steel into a hearth giant enough to cook both of the women who shushed about the building, intent upon clearing cracked scabs of parchment and caping censers in the making of space for their dead descendant’s quiet husband. 

“You’re hungry.” Edith spoke, more of a command than an interrogation.

The wind in the attic sounded like a mourning church choir. Hannah sat down across from him, lowering herself in the falling leaves of skirt and shawl. 

“I’ll eat as well,” Hannah said. 

They sat in silence as Edith took down a pair of wooden bowls and a small, hand-made ceramic teapot. Into the pot she put a pinch of something torn from one of the hanging plants, into the bowl she spooned a heft of cold porridge.  Moving to the hearth, she filled the pot with billowing water and the bowls with ladles of a thick, unconstituted, dark substance. She set the places between them while Hannah watched Edmund, half of her face obscured in shadow by the wavering light of the fire. 

Edmund found his appetite and spooned a heap of the dark mass into his mouth. The cornmeal porridge had a sweetness he had not expected and the stew meat still clung to rough-hewn bone, infused with a peppery flavor that caused his lips to tingle where they made contact. 

“There is no changing your mind as to our daughter’s resting? Your course is set?” asked Edith. 

“I am sorry. As I said, I made vows,” Edmund said.

They were quiet a moment, looking at each other, the only noise the pop of the fire and the slurping cracks of Hannah eating the meat from the bones of her stew and drawing the soft marrow. 

“Then may I at least beg of you a few items to bury with our lost daughter?” Edith asked. 

“Of course,” Edmund answered.

Edmund watched her leave the room and heard as she climbed the stairs to the attic, the choir seeming to rise in anticipation of her approach. 

“Not gone yet,” cackled Hannah, coughing loose what sounded like a handful of gravel in a tin can. “She is still around. Our dear Isabella is still finding her way out. She will find it, the way through, passing glance and dreamed destination. She will crawl her way there forward with broken fingers and calved skull if she must. Asking her way, deflected temporarily from an eternal goal if she can but wipe the mud from her eye.”

Edmund stopped eating to pay the woman her deserved and acquired attention.

“Why did you say that, about the mud?” Edmund asked.

“Plenty of folks looking for a favor. Plenty willing to lend a hand if you are only willing to ask,” explained Hannah.

“What are you saying?” Asked Edmund.

“If you felt the necessity, you could ask someone to show her the way back instead of helping her on. She’s not gone yet,” said Hannah.

“Are you speaking about Isabella? She is dead. I am sure. Who are you talking about asking?” Edmund asked. 

“They’re here now, though she is too far away. They cloud this room like regrets. Edith won’t hear of it, won’t allow them the hospitality, but they linger nonetheless, always looking for a hold,” explained Hannah.

She stood and stepped to the window, loosening the twine and cheesecloth entombing an ochre liquid with a handful of apparent rocks floating within. She removed one, with thumb and pinky, draining the remaining liquid with the tilt of her head and a slurp. With her pointer finger, she scooped a swath of red paste from an open tin and pushed it into some unseen aperture of the rock.

She wrapped it in a bit of wax paper like a piece of candy and set it on the crowded table between them, resuming her seat. 

“Truths Edith will not stomach. Eat this when you return home and are willing to converse with the black of your hand. We won’t mention it here or elsewhere again. My daughter returns,” Hannah said.

Without realizing the intention or the action, Edmund reached a shaking hand across the table in a cup and slid the wrapped item back towards him before depositing it in his overalls. It felt warm, as if from a fire.

Edith came back down the stairs and entered the room carrying a wax canvas bag.

“Our ways may seem silly to your Mr. Wentz, but they mean a great deal to us. These are family items, mementos from her forebears, gone ahead, to remind them of their kin and to help her find her way.” Edith set the bag on the bench next to him. “I cannot emphasize the importance of burying them with her.”

“I’ll do it, Edith. You have my word,” he responded. The edges of her mouth turned slightly in a smile. “Will you two come to see her buried?”

“No,” Edith answered, “We’ve work and our place is here…do not deny that I am shattered by our loss. Should you ever become lonely, our door is always open to you. You are family.”

Edmund stood, stepping away from his unfinished food and drink. He gathered the bag and made for the door. Hannah extended one long hand and laid it upon his wrist. She winked when they made eye contact.

“Someone’s always willing to help,” said Hannah.

*. *. *. *. *

There was a church smell on the wind, oiled wood and smoking censer, but with Lamar almost two hours behind him, an actual church was unlikely. Edmund had spent less than an hour with the widows Gorsch before beginning his ride home, yet already the October sky was hueing a bright ferrous as the day began its farewell. His thoughts would wander, always back to Isabella. 

He was not ready for it. It felt like looking into the sun, so bright it hurt. He knew that there would need to be an internal reckoning, some understanding between his grief and the picture now painted of the rest of his days. Edmund was not one to dream or yearn for that which could not be, but he wanted, more than anything, to remain in this place where actualization had not yet occurred and the fibers of his being still believed Isabella could be waiting for him when he returned to the farm. 

He considered and turned Hannah’s still-warm gift in his thick hands. It was a mollusk shell of some sort and the red paste she had filled it with leaked out and stuck to the inside of the wax paper. There was a beautiful recurve symmetry to the diminishing spiral. 

Isabella had often joked about the strange darkness that ran beneath the affections her mother and grandmother had displayed in her upbringing. He couldn’t recall her exact telling of it, only something about the speed with which their eyes could fall into shadow. Edmund had always attributed it to a hard life lived long, as he had never noticed anything but brightness and affection in his partner’s eyes. 

Edmund and Isabella had married luckily, they thought. A combination of necessity and eventuality paired with attraction and affection had seemed fortuitous. It had been years until they actually fell in love, but when it happened it was well found and unshakeable. They would sit on the porch after dinner in the summer dusk, comfortable in their silence after a long day’s labor. Edmund could not remember if she had been quiet before they married but something powerful and precious came to grow in that silence. 

She would drink corn mash from a dented tin cup as they watched the colors of the sky change and a dark indigo blanket their land. Some nights she would set her hand on his and gently trace the scars across his knuckles. Her kiss would have the bitter caramel of the liquor.

“God is good,” she would breathe into the last of the day.

He shook the thoughts from his head, banishing the recollections deep until he had found the strength to see to them. He could not imagine such a time.

There was a quiet stillness to the farm as Edmund rode into the yard. Their eyes had adjusted with the setting sun and the silhouettes of the buildings could be seen in the incremental illumination of the clear western sky.  The horse stood expectantly on the edge of the stable. With a loud exhalation he craned its neck in an attempt to see his rider.

“I know.” Edmund spoke to the dark emptiness.

He turned suddenly, tracking something out of the corner of his eye. So suddenly that the horse started and stiffened, ready to run. The sound of gravel and hoof echoing out into the new night. He stood still and felt the wind off the plains and the beating of his own blood in his ears.

“Hello?” Edmund called into the yard. 

Silence.

He did not unsaddle the horse. Instead he looped the rein securely around a post. He crossed the yard to their house. Before going inside he took up the shovel by the door; something about its weight comforting him.

The interior was darker than the yard. Edmund knew instinctually where the lantern hung by the back; where they had kept the matches. His hands fumbled through the drawer until he felt the familiar cardboard box with its abrasion-stripped side. The sound of the drawer closing grated and resounded in the dark room. He had tried not to look at the white, shrouded form on the kitchen table. In the gloom, in the quiet, he could almost hear it as the bundled neck appeared to turn in his direction. 

He pulled up the glass and struck the match, touching it to the soaked wick of the lantern. The light bloomed like an instant flower and illuminated the kitchen, the table, and the still, tight-wrapped form upon it.  He stood there for a few minutes, each rapid heartbeat stealing his breath. 

“Hello?” he asked again, this time closer in the closed room. “I need help.”

All he heard was the beat of his own heart in his ears. 

He built a fire in the hearth and lit the other lantern. The warm glow pushed back the creeping chill. He set the wax-papered shell on the butcher-block counter. 

She did not smell yet. Edmund knew that at some point her body would begin to decompose. He knew that when she did, the smell of death would hang around her; like the deer that had hung itself in the east fence. They had not found it for a week. Something had gotten at its back half and its open mouth was filled with large black flies. 

But she did not smell yet.

For some reason, he had not thought about the children when he was preparing her body. They had been different, small, pink and pale, like a litter of puppies fallen in a well, swollen and bloated. She had wanted them baptized before they were buried, so the parson from Hemmet had rode in each time. This time, Edmund should have rode south into Hemmet for the parson instead of the widows to the north, but that is not what he had done. If he rode in the morning, he could probably get her in the ground the next day. That is what she would have wanted. 

He sat quiet for over an hour as the fire burned low, the occasional jingle from the yard as Ozy shook tack and harness. Then, as if startled, Edmund stood, moved to the counter, unwrapped the shell, and it put it in his mouth. 

The surface and the residual paste felt electric, as if passed by a low current. It tingled over his tongue with combating sensations of citric acid and horseradish. He tried not to think about it as he crushed the shell into fragmented nacre, releasing the potential of the enclosed salve. 

The taste was pervasive, it parched his mouth of moisture. He ran his tongue over his teeth to remove lodged fragments of shell, their broken edges lacerating forgotten parts of his mouth and mixing a ferrous element to the already complicated flavor. The kettle, now cool, sat on the counter and he poured a healthy swallow into his mouth. The liquid tasted like oil; like melted, rendered fat. It was impossible to swallow. 

Edmund could feel his heart rate rising as his sight vibrated on the edges of his vision. Panic tightened his chest and his breath found no depth. He stood and paced quickly through the rooms of the house. The orange glow, hued from the embers of the hearth fire smoldered into a sickly green as he stared into the darker corners of the house for anything. 

He closed his eyes and put his head in his hands, trying to breath. His breath slowly returned. He remembered a night, many years gone, when they had worked the west field far past dark. In the new night they labored. He could smell her mixed with the turned, deep soil. They said nothing. They worked. They helped each other without words; there when needed and both quietly dedicated to the fulfillment of the task at hand. They had fallen asleep on the porch swing without washing. When Edmund woke to carry her in, there was a luminous moon painting the prairie in all directions.

He breathed and uncovered his eyes.

Then, something heavy landed on the roof.

Edmund exploded out the back door and into the soundless night. The crunch of his boots pierced the evening. He circled the house, lantern in hand, looking for whatever was on top of the house. There was nothing: no sound, no sight. Finishing his circumnavigation, he noticed that Ozy was missing, the bound portion of the leather rein hanging snapped to the ground. 

There was a sound from inside the house.

Then, a quiet, hoarse voice spoke in the stagnant night. 

“Ed?”

Ryan Steven Reed is in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Missouri – Kansas City with a focus on fiction. He has worked as a producer on the Fiction/Nonfiction podcast and as a fiction editor for the student literary publication No. 1 Magazine. You can find Ryan here @ryanstevenreed on twitter and @GrumpWizars on Instagram.