This weekend the top two women's leagues in England, the Women's Super League and Women's Championship kick off. To mark that occasion I decided to do a mini write up on every PL's related women's club for those of you that are curious about your own club's women's team or all the clubs' sides.
After following Spurs for about a decade, I decided a few years ago that I didn't have enough whiplash from near successes and wanted to add their women's team to the mix, which at the time was in the 3rd division. The ensuing years have been mostly upds as they've gone from the (mostly) amateur game (National League), to the semi-pro/pro 2nd division (Championship), to finally their first ever season in the fully professional Women's Super League.
While the results were great, it also has been really rewarding to get to know names that were servants to the club that they and I love but fans likely will never had heard of or will hear of. Case in point is the recently retired Jenna Schicalli who was born and raised a Spurs fan, recently ending her last stint with the team from 2009-2020 in which she helped captain the team through multiple promotions, including the two I just spoke of. It's interesting to hear the perspective of players that are playing simply for the love of the game and club, since often times they have to have another job to supplement the little income they get outside of the top flight.
Following the ups and downs of the women's team has been rewarding for me, getting at times either double the joy from victories across the club or double the pain from defeats on the same weekend. But either way it was more football for me, and that's part of why I love the women's game. Maybe you will be in the same place as me and maybe not, but I figured at the very least this sort of post may pique your curiosity to see where your women's side sits in the pyramid in comparison to the men's side in the PL. Are they also in the top flight? Not far out in the Championship? Or down in the regional leagues?
I'll be trying to provide a brief summary for where each team is at, and due to a lack of info and familiarity some teams (especially the lower league teams) won't have the most info but I'll do my best!
It should be noted that the 3rd tier and below had their seasons cancelled with no pro/rel, whereas the WSL and Championship had their seasons canceled but PPG was still used to decide pro/rel and Champions League places. So that's why some teams were promoted and relegated while other first or last finishers didn't move at all.

FAQ

What competitions are going on this season?

• Leagues - Women's Super League, Championship, and the National League, and all the way down to the regional tiers (5th-7th)
  
• FA Cup(s) (19/20 & 20/21) The 19/20 FA Cup was postponed during the quarterfinals in March, they'll be played out in the next couple of months while the early stages of the 20/21 FA Cup are also being played
  
• League Cup - The primary League Cup in the vein of the men's competition and is competed between teams in the professional and semi-professional leagues, the Women's Super League and Championship respectively. The national and regional leagues below also have their own similar competitions going, much like the men's game.
  
• Champions League - Chelsea and Manchester City will be competing from the Round of 32 onward this season. Note that the format of the women's CL will be changing next season to more closely align with the men's competition, and England will have 3 spots in the competition as opposed to the current 2.
  

How can I watch the leagues? (Inside and outside the UK)

If you're in the UK WSL matches will be broadcast on BT Sport and BBC iPlayeRed Button. The rest will be free to view with an account on the FA Player website. Currently only one Championship match a week will be streamed, though all WSL and Championship matches will be available to be viewed on demand in the FA Player website.
Outside the UK, the answer is similar to the answer I just provided, substituting BT Sport and BBC for other TV broadcasters in select nations. If your country/region doesn't have a TV deal, all WSL matches and will be available live for free on the FA Player!
When it comes to the lower leagues, some teams have streamed matches but it's largely absent from the women's game outside of the top league(s).

Where can I talk about the leagues?

/FAWSL has been restarted and is gaining traction as a place to discuss all the relevant clubs and matches. There are women's club subreddits for some of the large teams, but it seems that most PL club subreddits are open to women's team news being posted there as well.

Arsenal

Current League: WSL (1st tier) | 19/20 finish: 3rd/12
As much as I hate to say it, one of the titans of the English women's game. Arsenal are ever-present around the CL spots (fitting for the only English team to actually win the competition), though last year they finished just outside a CL spot in 3rd place on PPG as the WSL season was decided early. They'll only have domestic competition to focus on this year, and that may end up being to their benefit. Having arguably the best women's player in the world in Vivianne Miedema doesn't hurt either, with the 24 year old still improving year after year.
Opening fixture: Arsenal vs Reading - 6th September 12:30 BST – Watch live for free on the FA Player
FA Cup 2019/20: Arsenal vs Tottenham Hotspur on 26th/27th September - Watch live on BBC iPlayer and BBC Red Button

Aston Villa

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 1st/11 in Championship on PPG (Promoted)
The lone promoted side in this year's league, taking Liverpool's place. Villa will be aiming to stay in the WSL and will likely achieve that with (relative) ease, looking at the improvement from this off-season on their already strong Championship squad.
Opening fixtures: Aston Villa 0-2 Manchester City - 5th September 14:30 BST - Watch live on BT Sport (UK), or free on the FA Player (International)
Reading vs Aston Villa - 13th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player

Brighton & Hove Albion

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 9th/12 in WSL; 19/20 FA Cup quarterfinal vs Birmingham City on 26/27 September
Brighton are still relatively fresh blood in the WSL, only joining in 18/19 as one of two promotions during the restructuring of the top two leagues. They finished 9th/11 in their first season after promotion from WSL 2 (now Championship) and last season didn't get a chance to prove they had improved, finishing 9th/12. They likely don't have anything to fear in regards to relegation, with their seasoned squad having a lot of professional experience by now, but with how other teams around them have been improving you likely won't see them climb much higher up the table.
Opening fixture: Brighton & Hove Albion vs Birmingham City - 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Brighton & Hove Albion vs Birmingham City - 26th/27th September

Burnley

Current League: FA Women's National League North (Premier Division) [3rd tier] | 19/20 finish: 5th/12
Following back to back promotions from the 5th tier in 17/18 and 4th tier in 18/19, Burnely found themselves playing just a single step below the semi-professional game. They finished a surprising 5th with a few matches in hand on some of the teams above them, but there likely would have been no catching league leaders Sunderland who had yet to lose a match in 14 played.
Opening fixture: Sunderland AFC Ladies v Burnley FC Women on Sunday 20th September

Chelsea

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 1st/12 in WSL (Champs), 19/20 League Cup Champs
One of the standard bearers for women's club football in England, Chelsea won their first league title since 2017-18 (not the longest wait, eh?) Chelsea will be aiming to once again win the league as well as to reach their first ever Champions League final. Chelsea have reached the semi-finals in their last two attempts (17/18 & 18/19) but were knocked out by Wolfsburg and Lyon, two of the most dominant sides in women's Champions League history.
Adding Danish women's national team captain Pernille Harder this summer for a world record transfer fee in women's football probably will help give them a slight boost in the league and CL. That's in addition to Sam Kerr who Chelsea added in the second half of 2019. The Australian at age 26 is already the all time leading scorer in two leagues, NWSL in the United States and W-League in Australia.
Opening fixture: Manchester United vs Chelsea - 6th September 14:30 BST - Watch live on BT Sport (UK), or free on the FA Player* (International)
FA Cup 2019/20: Everton vs Chelsea on 26th/27th September

Crystal Palace

Current League: Championship | 19/20 finish: 9th/11
Palace joined the WSL 2 (now Championship) in 2018/19 during the restructuring of the 1st and 2nd women's divisions, gaining their spot through an application. They had finished 3rd in their league so they weren't slouches, but they still have yet to break through to midtable of the Championship. They finished 10th/11 in their first foray in the 2nd division, below all four of the other newly promoted sides including Sheffield United who were actually a division below them in 17/18. They didn't get to prove themselves much better than that in 19/20, only finishing one place higher when the season was cut short this past spring. All that said, they have added players with WSL and Championship experience and should hopefully finish at least mid-table in this upcoming Championship season.
Opening fixture: Charlton Athletic vs Crystal Palace - 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch replay for free on the FA Player*

Everton

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 6th/12; 19/20 FA Cup quarter-final vs Chelsea 26/27 September
Everton finished midtable last year but their 10 additions between spring (3) and summer (7) may have them either on the outskirts of a Champions League spot if everything clicks or stalling or falling in the table due to needing time to click. French forward Valerie Gauvin is likely the new addition to watch in their squad.
Opening fixture: Bristol City vs Everton - 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Everton vs Chelsea on 26th/27th September

Fulham

Current League: London and South East Women's Regional Football League (5th) | 19/20 finish: 5th/10
The lowest division representative in this list, Fulham have a storied history, one with the highest of highs and lowest of lows. Highlights include in 2000 they were the first full-time professional women's side and a 2003 FA Cup victory. Sadly the team was dissolved twice in four years (2006 & 2010), not reforming until 2014 as Fulham FC Foundation ladies. Fulham have been in the 5th tier since 14/15, winning promotion from the 6th tier the previous season. They finished a surprising 4th/10 in their first season in the top flight, but haven't been able to finish past 5th, routinely in the lower half of the table though not needing to stave off relegation. The team has been receiving more and more attention and from the main club notably becoming Fulham FC Women in 2018 with reinvestment in the team, and that may lead to improved results this upcoming season and hopefully promotion in the near future.
Opening fixture: Denham United vs Fulham FC on Sunday 13th September

Leeds United

Current league: National League Division One North (4th tier) | 19/20 finish: 2nd/12
Leeds United were among the top sides fighting for promotion, the closest challenger to Barnsley when the season was called off. It is expected that they should be able to repeat that effort this season. The club has yet to reach the semi-professional game, and finally exiting the 4th tier would be a huge step in achieving progress to that goal.
Opening fixture: Norton & Stockton vs Leeds United on 20 September

Leicester City

Current League: Championship | 19/20 finish: 6th
Leicester City was brought into the fold of the main club, going from a partner to being integrated as one of only a few fully professional clubs in the Championship. They'll likely be fighting with Liverpool and Sheffield for the one promotion spot, and one shouldn't doubt their capabilities in winning it all.
They're the lone 2nd division team left in the 2019/20 FA Cup, though with just about the toughest draw, facing the defending champs Manchester City.
Opening fixture: Leicester City vs Blackburn Rovers - Sunday 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch replay for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Leicester City vs Manchester City 26th/27th September

Liverpool

Current League: Championship | 19/20 finish: 12th/12 in WSL (Relegated)
Lot of criticism has been swirling around this team, some just and unjust, but even the main club could understand that the men winning the league and the women being relegated in the same season wasn't the best look. Sure, the fact that they went on PPG in a season that didn't complete didn't give them a fair shake, but they'll have to prove this season that they truly belong in the WSL. In Leicester City and Sheffield United they have very strong opponents in the fight for promotion.
Opening fixture: Liverpool vs Durham on Sunday 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch for free on the FA Player*

Manchester City

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 2nd/12 in WSL
Perennial 2nd place finishers in recent years, outside of a league win in 2016, City have finished 2nd every season since 2015. Losing this past season on PPG has to be one of the more bitter pills to swallow, but after a 2-0 loss to Chelsea for the newly revived Women's Community Shield this past weekend, City will be hoping that their new recruits including Sam Mewis and Rose Lavelle, 2019 World Cup winners with the United States, will help push them past the hurdle of 2nd place as well as give them a boost in Europe. Similar to Chelsea, they have yet to reach a Champions League final, only making it to the Round of 32 and Round of 16 in the last two seasons, getting knocked out by Atletico Madrid both years.
Opening fixture: Aston Villa 0-2 Manchester City - 5th September 14:30 BST - Watch live on BT Sport (UK), or free on the FA Player* (International)
Manchester City vs Brighton & Hove Albion - 13th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Leicester City vs Manchester City 26th/27th September

Manchester United

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 4th/12 in WSL on PPG
The best of the rest outside of the top 3, which is pretty good for a team in only its 3rd season of existence. They easily won the Championship in 18/19 with only 1 draw and 1 loss and their first year in the WSL saw them continue their impressive form. This year they're aiming to challenge for the Champions League, though it should be said that last year there was a clear gap between them and a CL spot with 4th placed United getting 1.64 PPG while Arsenal in 3rd had 2.40.
The Red Devils hope that the additions of World Champions Tobin Heath and Cristen Press will propel them to a Champions League spot this year, finally breaking into the top 3 of the WSL after a long wait of...3 years.
Opening fixture: Manchester United vs Chelsea - 6th September 14:30 BST - Watch live on BT Sport (UK), or free on the FA Player* (International)

Newcastle United

Current League: National League Division One North (4th tier) | 19/20 finish: 6th/12
Newcastle had been in the 3rd division as recently as 2016/17 when they were relegated after gaining only 7 points in 20 matches. They have yet to truly challenge for promotion back into the 3rd tier, finishing 5th, 9th, and 6th in their seasons after relegation. Most recently the team entered into a partnership with Northumbria University to provide Strength and Conditioning, Performance Analysis and Physiotherapy as well as management of the club itself.
Opening fixture: Durham Cestria vs Newcastle United on Sunday 20th September

Sheffield United

Current League: Championship | 19/20 finish: 2nd/11
Sheffield finished under Aston Villa in PPG and it's a wonder where the two teams would have finished in a full season. That said, their solid base has been improved upon roster wise, but the loss of manager Carla Ward to WSL side Birmingham City may be the largest challenge to the club. They took their time in replacing her, and it'll be up to former Liverpool Women and Newcastle United U23 manager Neil Redfearn to keep up with Leicester and Liverpool.
Opening fixture: London City Lionesses vs Sheffield United - Sunday 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch replay for free on the FA Player*

Southampton

Current League: National League Division One South West (4th tier) | 19/20 finish: 1st/11
After back to back promotions from the 6th tier in 17/18 and 5th tier in 18/19, Southampton FC Women were looking to establish themselves in their first season in the 4th division. They ended up fighting with similarly named Southampton Women's F.C. for promotion to the 3rd tier, but with only 11 and 12 matches played respectively, it's a wonder who would have been the side to clinch the league. Southampton's official women's side should expect to be the favorites going into this season, but time will tell for how things add up.
Opening fixture: Poole Town vs Southampton FC on Sunday 20th September

Tottenham Hotspur

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 7th/12;
Spurs are a contrast to Manchester United, both being promoted to the WSL the same year but under quite different circumstances. After years in the lower tiers Spurs were able to get a bit more investment to add to some of their longterm players. After each subsequent season they've retooled their squad with each season, exemplified by the fact that Josie Green is the only remaining player on the squad that played with the team in the amateur game. Speaking of that time, Spurs' results truly bloomed in 2016/17 when they won four trophies, including promotion to the 2nd division. They finished 7th place in 2017/18, their first semi-professional season, the highlight being securing their first ever victories over top flight sides in cup competitions. The 2018/19 saw them rocket up the table, finishing 2nd and in a promotion spot under the juggernauts of Manchester United. Their first WSL season followed a similar pattern to their first WSL 2 season, once again finishing 7th and they're still waiting to play in their furthest advanced round in the FA Cup, a quarter-final with Arsenal.
I'm dreading Spurs' match vs Arsenal in the FA Cup later this month, but I am happy when I look back on prior results and see all the progress that has been made. Spurs had an infamous 10-0 loss to Arsenal in the Round of 16 back in 2016/17 when they were an amateur side, but when facing them in league play this past season 2 1/2 years later, they only lost 2-0. They're still looking for that first win over a top half side in the WSL, but with a season of WSL under the squad and management's belt, they should be able to achieve an upper mid-table finish and hopefully be an increasingly challenging fixture against the top sides.
Opening fixture: Tottenham Hotspur vs West Ham - 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Arsenal vs Tottenham Hotspur on 26th/27th September - Watch live on BBC iPlayer and BBC Red Button

West Bromwich Albion

Current League: National League Premier Division North (3rd tier) | 19/20 finish: 7th/12
West Brom have had a brief yo-yo situation as of late, finishing 6th in their division 16/17, relegated from the 3rd tier in 17/18, winning back promotion 18/19, and seeming to settle back into midtable in 19/20. At this point it seems they should be focusing on stability and remaining in the 3rd division.
Opening fixture: West Bromwich Albion vs Nottingham Forest on Sunday 20th September

West Ham United

Current league: WSL | 19/20 finish: 8th/12
West Ham are another team that's relatively new to the WSL, making the surprising jump from the 3rd tier amateur game all the way to the professional game in 2018/19, bypassing the Championship when the FA was restructuring the leagues. They settled right into midtable in their first WSL season with a 7th place finish, the highlight being a surprising FA Cup final appearance in what ended up a 3-0 loss to Man City. The next season saw them stay in just about the same place, finishing 8th on PPG. As the team has brought in more players on a permanent or temporary loan basis, West Ham will be looking to finish in the upper midtable and challenge fellow midtable sides as well as the CL contenders more evenly.
Opening fixture: Tottenham Hotspur vs West Ham - Sunday 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*

Wolverhampton Wanderers

Current League: National League Division One Midlands (4th tier) | 19/20 finish: 1st/12
One of the victims of the lower leagues getting cancelled with no pro/rel, Wolverhampton were running away with their league on 14 wins, 1 loss, and an incredible +73 goal differntial when the season was cancelled. Wolves will hope to repeat their dominance but this time with a complete season and the reward of promotion to the 3rd tier, just a league below the Championship.
Opening fixture: Leafield Athletic vs Wolverhampton Wanderers on Sunday 20th September
Hope that was interesting to folks, let me know if I got anything wrong or you have any questions. There will be match threads on /FAWSL for some of the matches today, hope you join in on the discussion if your team is playing!

April Strange was born with half a face.
No matter what iteration of the story you heard, or how many details differed from the last, it always started the same. With a sad little girl missing half her face.
April Strange was a well known legend in the village. She was the daughter of the mayor in the early 1900’s and she disappeared aged only nine years old.
That much was fact. April Strange had a tragic existence, and her vanishing act only resulted in more conspiracies surrounding the ill fated girl. A small village like ours loves to gossip.
It was said that April was badly bullied at school. Her father opted to send her to a local, public school despite his vast wealth. He wanted her to be a grounded child, with roots in her community.
Mayor Strange didn’t listen to her complaints about class or how she was teased by the other children. He saw her merely as an accessory; his poor, disfigured daughter who could win him the sympathy vote and improve public perception.
That’s all speculation of course. It’s a story that has been passed down for generations. Edited to fit whoever was listening to the tale. I’ll continue with the version I was told. The one that haunted my whole childhood.
April’s bullying took a nasty turn. She wore her hair long and over her face which only attracted the attention of the bullies as it wasn’t in keeping with the times. During a craft session at school a particularly vile boy named Edwin Mode crept up behind April and grabbed hold of her long locks before severing them with scissors.
April Strange cried and the class sat and laughed, mocking the dejected girl. Their attacks intensified and soon they were following her home regularly, calling her awful names, tripping her up and trying to push her into puddles.
No one is really sure what happened to April. She left her house one morning and never arrived on the school bus; there was a well documented investigation that turned up absolutely nothing.
The most commonly accepted theory is that the bullies took things too far one day and killed the girl before conspiring to bury their mistake. Several kids were late for school the day of the disappearance and they were reported as “acting shifty” but not a shred of evidence was found. And not one of them broke.
Until Edwin Mode broke.
Not as in broke down and told the police what happened to April. No. The village kids had formed some sort of pact and none of them were going to confess to the murder.
Edwin Mode quite literally broke in two. He was climbing a tree on the green with friends and made it higher than he ever had before. He raised his arms in victory and the branch broke, sending Edwin plummeting. After a particularly nasty drop he landed on a strong upright branch that split his entire body down the middle. It was a grisly sight.
The town mourned. I remember my older sister telling me the story for the first time and pulling out old newspapers that my great grandmother had collected. Articles outlining the tragedy of a minute village that had lost two children in the space of a few weeks.
It was tragic, but that’s all it was. The death of Sally Greenwood was what turned April Strange into a local campfire legend.
Sally Greenwood was a known bully. There were witnesses to her tormenting April and she was a good friend of Edwin. Devastated by the news of his death Sally visited the small playground by the village hall to play on the swing set, like her and Edwin had before his untimely demise.
As she swung in a morose fashion a screw at the top of the swing set’s large metal frame loosened. Sally was too sad to notice. A local teen walking his dog saw her swinging. He also saw the frame collapse, instantly crushing Sally Greenwood’s head into mush.
My sister told me that he got her brains on his shoes. I’m not sure if that’s true. But it terrified me as a child.
The teen spoke to the police and reported seeing two girls, one swinging and one climbing the frame, who wasn’t there after the accident. He described the other girl, matching April Strange’s description to the letter.
Another failed manhunt ensued and speculation over the two freak accidents sparked widespread hysteria. The villagers believed that the ghost of April Strange was seeking vengeance on the kids that wronged her. And not a single one of them had enough faith in their child’s innocence to believe they were exempt.
What a sad indictment on attitudes to children in those days. Was it a wonder that they were so cruel to April? Their parents had been too complacent to teach them empathy.
The mass panic became such a source of distress for Mayor Strange and his wife that they shut down the search for their daughter.
A string of unexplained and grotesque accidents plagued the village children. They died indiscriminately, each in a more horrifying fashion than the last. Many witnesses to these unfortunate accidents insisted they had seen a young girl with only half a face.
The parents of the dead kids never talked about April. Some folk speculated that they were trying to ignore the truth, others speculated that April Strange herself visited them, blaming them for the deaths and condemning them to a life filled with guilt.
Many of the mothers and fathers committed suicide or spent time in insane asylums. I suppose that’s to be expected when one loses their child so young and with so little purpose.
Almost an entire class of children were wiped out. A few remained. Those who had often been targets of the bullies themselves or who had shown April what small kindness she knew in her short life.
They passed the story down to their children, who passed it onto their children. The tale was largely used as a tool to convince kids to be nice to each other.
Adults tried to play it down to any child that was too scared. But they couldn’t deny the pattern of problem children found dead in outlandish accidents. And they couldn’t hide that from their own children. For a tiny population, the village’s mortality rate was through the roof.
I remember the nightmares I had as a kid, images of April Strange staring with her one eye through my windows plagued my dreams. It was a story far too frightening for the children it was told to, but for the most part, it worked.
I never made fun of another kid. I know many of you will think that I’m lying but I really never did. I was far too scared of the girl with half a face coming to get me to even consider it. And so were most of the village children.
As I got older I didn’t think about April as much. During high school I would’ve laughed at anyone taking the urban legend seriously. She occasionally made her way into my thoughts at poignant moments; once when a new girl joined my class and I felt compelled to be her friend and make sure that everyone was nice to her.
Another time April crossed my mind was when that same girl’s younger brother was found face down in a pool of blood in the primary school bathroom. He had slipped on soap that had been dripped when some kids, who had been in the bathroom just moment before him, used it to stick toilet paper to the ceiling.
He was propelled forwards, hitting the sink with such force that he gave himself a fatal head injury. By chance no one entered the bathroom for around 30 minutes, leaving him to die on the floor.
He didn’t know the story of April Strange. He had called a girl ugly just an hour before he died, making her cry in front of her peers. Village people started to gossip about the ghost, just like they had all those years ago.
I couldn’t deny the striking coincidences that made the tale so terrifying. My new friend moved away not long after. Her parents had heard enough tales of a hundred year old dead girl to think that we were all batshit crazy. That’s what I presumed anyway. I didn’t take proper note of the haunted expression that they both wore, that held more fear than it did grief.
I couldn’t blame them for leaving.
Years passed without incident. The story had been shared so widely that our town became quite a friendly place for young children. Kids can be cruel, but kids behave when there’s fear involved. They all knew someone who had succumbed to the supposed curse. It was enough to keep them in line.
I married a local man not long after high school and we moved into a modest sized home. I worked as a night carer and him as a fisherman. A few years after our wedding I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. We chose to name him Henry, and he was perfect.
I doted on my son, throwing myself into motherhood with everything I had. In truth, I probably spoiled him a little. He was a jealous baby, who didn’t want to share toys at playgroup. I tried desperately to teach him kindness and tolerance, but my life became a cacophony of other mothers tutting in disapproval.
I thought of April and vowed that I would tell him the tale when he was old enough to understand. I wasn’t certain of the story’s truth myself, but I wasn’t willing to take the risk.
As Henry grew he was as sweet as sugar whenever his father and I were watching. Our concerns from his pre communicative phase appeared unfounded. My son had lots of friends and, once he reached pre school, glowing reviews from his teachers.
There never seemed to be an appropriate time to sit Henry down and discuss the story of April Strange with him. It just never came up. What point should a parent deem it necessary to terrify their child like that?
I remember a friend bringing their son over for a play date and she had just told him the story after catching him harassing her very unsociable cat. The poor kid was traumatised. She said he hadn’t slept all night and he looked as if part of his innocence had been ripped away from him. It seemed too harsh a punishment. Too harsh a way to teach a lesson. I couldn’t in good faith do that to Henry.
After all, I couldn’t see that I had anything to worry about. My son was a good boy, he was no bully.
In Henry’s third year of school I was proven wrong. I was called in at pickup time to discuss and incident with his teacher.
My son had taken a girls glasses and held them out of reach, eventually dropping them resulting in smashed glass and a very visually impaired child. His teacher was somber as she told me, she knew exactly what Henry’s actions meant.
I hadn’t told him the story. And I was going to suffer for it.
I was horrified at my sons behaviour. I lambasted him but I also didn’t let him out of my sight. I must have watched his reflection in the rear view mirror more than the road as we drove home.
I saw potential catastrophe everywhere. So I came up with the bright idea to build a pillow fort in the living room. Henry loved forts. I knew that I shouldn’t be rewarding him for his bad behaviour but the pillows seemed to be the safest option. I could stay in it with him and even if it collapsed he would be safe.
I cursed myself silently. Ridiculous. I thought to myself as I processed spending my time and energy protecting myself from a ghost story invented to scare children.
Still, I couldn’t shake the images of April in my mind. The sad little dead girl with half a face.
I tried to keep my eyes open all night. I didn’t leave his side. His father was out working for the night so I couldn’t share my burden, I was left alone to deal with my anxieties. But I couldn’t deter bodily functions.
Around 11pm I had to pee. I’d tried to hold it for so long but I couldn’t do it any longer. Henry was asleep. He couldn’t have been in a safer position than he was. Two minutes couldn’t hurt, surely?
I sat in the brightly lit bathroom upstairs in our home. Thinking of the mistakes I’d made. Wondering if it was too late to tell my son the story, to save him from his own cruelty. Then the knocking came.
tap... tap... tap
It was slow and calculated, not the result of a bird or tree branch. And it was coming from outside the upstairs bathroom window. My blood ran cold. I picked up my knickers and peered through the gap in the open top section.
What I saw nearly caused a heart attack.
A great mass of maimed and contorted children, forming a spectacularly macabre ladder of sorts, directly to the window. I tried to move my legs, to run down the stairs to my son but I couldn’t. I was frozen to the spot, taking in the morbid pile of flesh.
I suddenly understood why none of the dead kid’s parents had chosen to speak about the accidents. How could they even begin to explain this.
A small figure worked its way up the chain. It reminded me of the masses that ants form in order to float or climb. The entire structure moved and adapted, bones and limbs extending to form pegs for the climbing child. Parts of bodies writhed in sickening motion.
When she reached the top she looked me dead in the eyes. She was everything I had imagined, the exact face that had haunted my childhood nightmares for years. And I was face to face with her.
April Strange.
Her lone eye was filled with sadness, tears glazing it’s surface and highlighting the brilliant blue colour of her iris. The missing half of her face wasn’t scarred, like you would expect in someone with a disfigurement like hers. The skin was smooth, like the features were never supposed to be there in the first place.
We stared at each other for a lingering moment. She was so mesmerising I was briefly distracted from the horrendous human tower that she balanced on top of. Only briefly.
In my peripheral vision I noticed a boy, his face staring up at me from around halfway up the ladder. His mouth was wide open with a large, thick tree branch jutting out of it. Edwin Mode. April was balancing on the bodies of her own victims.
She noticed the shock in my eyes and I noticed the sadness in hers developing into anger and malice. She opened her mouth, fused together on one side and in a raspy, obviously unused voice, she spoke.
You should have taught him to be nice. This is all your fault.
Her words were accompanied by an almighty crash from downstairs and a half smile, stretched across the side of her face. I felt my heart thumping against my rib cage as I pondered what fate my son may have met.
In a blink she was gone. Along with the whole monstrous structure that she arrived on. I took a sharp inhale and forced my weak legs to turn and bolt down the stairs.
I was too late.
There’s no worse feeling than the anticipation of something awful. Especially when that particular something is inevitable. As I turned the door knob to enter the front room I prepared for the horrors that I might face. Preparation didn’t make me feel ready though. Nothing could’ve readied me for what I saw.
The dusty old feature light that hung in the centre of the ceiling had snapped from its fixture. The faux crystals and beads scattered the floor... some spattered with crimson flecks.
I wept as I spotted the damp red pillow that had once been a brilliant white, with a piece of metal leaf detailing from the light speared through it. Fighting tears and the urge to vomit I moved the pillow aside to finally reveal my son.
Henry had been impaled through the head deep enough to penetrate his brain. There was no way to save him. The long, narrow piece of metal had destroyed his beautiful face.
Well. Half of it.
April had made sure that whenever I thought of my son this image would be burned into my mind. Her image.
I wish things could’ve been different. I wish I hadn’t been so concerned with scaring him. Now I spend my days riddled with guilt, imagining how painful eternal damnation to the ghost girls tower must be.
I wish I had just told him the story of April Strange.

I’ve been here since I was two years old, and by all accounts I had a normal upbringing. That’s owed to the fact that this is an altogether normal place. The people work in other nearby towns or craft wares here that they sell in those aforementioned places.
Lives lived here are all those of typical small town residents, save for one aspect: a law that has been around since long before the town itself came into existence.
A law that was set in place by unknown peoples at an unknown time.
A law that has been tirelessly enforced by all peoples who have called this place home since.
A law that has been abided by by all who set foot in this place...except one.
The law is simple to abide by: Never touch the water.
All children who are brought up in Humming Lake (which, by the way, is a colloquial name) are taught from the youngest of ages to never touch the lake itself. For me personally, I never knew why the law was put in place, nor did my parents, nor theirs. The reason for the law, and the consequences that would arise from breaking it, has been lost to history.
Simply put, it was a rule that is always followed, an inherent regulation by which we all abided, however blindly. You might ask, “well why would you live on a lake that you apparently can’t enjoy?”, and it’s a fair question. The reason is that along with that law being passed down, so too has been the residents of Humming Lake’s unwavering protection of the lake. For us, the lake has always been treated as a decoration, a massive, idyllic painting on display at the edge of the northernmost residents’ backyards.
And besides that assumed responsibility, it’s simply a wonderful place to live. Out here, the nature around us is a part of our town itself. Beautiful views, hiking, camping, rock climbing, it all amounts to an ideal, simple place to live for people seeking a simple way of life. We’re about 40 minutes from a larger town, so while secluded, we aren’t totally disconnected from the rest of the world.
We just don’t go in the lake.
Last summer, we found ourselves under the oppressive thumb of an overwhelming heatwave. As it surely isn’t difficult to imagine, the seductive gazes from the curiously dark yet still glistening water were frustratingly tempting, but still the townspeople of Humming Lake obeyed our cardinal law.
It was easy enough; other summers had proven similarly unbearable and we made it through. Above ground pools provided the same respite that cold showers and sprinklers did, but for 8-year-old Rodney Hartul, such substitutions weren't enough. For Rodney, the siren song of the 1.7 acre lake was too alluring to resist.
While spending the afternoon running around with friends in the Danforth’s backyard (which, after a small ditch, leads directly into the lake) under the watchful eye of all their parents, Rodney went inside through the back door to use the bathroom. Shortly thereafter, while Cal Danforth manned the grill, he saw in his periphery a shirtless Rodney Hartul sprinting from the front yard down the side of the house.
It took Cal a moment to realize what was happening, and by the time he did, it would soon prove to have been a moment too late. In a split second the spry 8-year-old had breezed by him, all while screaming in the kind of defiant voice only a child can truly muster, ”I’M GOING SWIMMING!”
Everybody’s heads turned with faces of abject terror as Cal dropped the spatula to the ground and tried as he might, the only person with even a hope of catching the rebellious boy before it was too late. The rest of us watched with wide eyes as Rodney took step after rapid step with every intention of plunging himself into that forbidden abyss.
He took a barely noticeable larger step over the shallow ditch and in two more steps he would be feeling the water that none of us had ever felt against his skin...were it not for Cal Danforth. His long strides caught up to Rodney Hartul and he stretched out his arm, just able to hook around Rodney’s waist.
But it was too late. The force behind Rodney’s dash pulled Cal with it, sending the two tumbling down. Cal’s entire right side became soaked in the impermissible waters, while Rodney wound up on his hands and knees.
The rest of us stayed frozen in apprehensive anticipation as Cal scrambled to get himself and Rodney back on the grass. Amber Hartul screamed and buried her face in her husband’s shoulder as we all waited for whatever unspeakable horror was surely about to befall the man and boy by the water, and in many of our minds, us.
But nothing happened. As the two sat terrified on the grass just out of reach of the first manmade ripples Humming Lake had seen in innumerable eons, Jim Hartul began screaming at his son, tearing himself away from his wife who desperately tried to hold him back to no avail. Jennifer Danforth hurried over to her husband with towels and dropped them, then quickly stepped back. Jim grabbed a towel on his way over and used it to snatch his son up.
Rodney attempted to wrap his arms around his father, frightened at everyone’s reaction and his dad’s own ire, but Jim pushed his son off of him at the very last moment, sparing himself from getting any of the water on him. Cal dried himself off, wisely telling everyone to stay away from him.
It seemed like an eternity that we all stood there. The burgers that had been on the grill were charred to a crisp as we watched intently, half at the lake, the other half at the only two people who had touched it in our lifetime. But nothing happened to either. Cal Danforth and Rodney Hartul dried off, with the latter being taken home by his parents, the former then politely asking his guests to return home as well.
I left Cal with a sincere “call me if you need anything” and went home. And for the next 10 days everything was as it always was. Rodney Hartul was kept under a closer eye than he had been, but after a week’s grounding and a stern talking to, so too was his life back to normal.
On that tenth night, however, while John Derby and I sat on his back deck overlooking the lake, cracking our seventh beer each, a rustling came from the trees over to our right, the ones just past Cal Danforth’s house. John and I each turned a bit and watched as something emerged from the shadows, lit only by the cloud-covered moon behind it.
We joked that Rob LeGrasse, the closest thing we had to an archetypal ‘town drunk’, had gotten lost on his way from the bedroom to the bathroom and was returning from defiling the side of a tree. But the longer we watched, the less it looked like Rob LeGrasse...the less it looked like anyone we knew.
The less it looked like an actual person.
It lurched along in a broken gait, taking one step in the same time any able-bodied person could take five. Whatever it was, it was grossly thin, leaning slightly to the front and to the side. Its gaunt, skeletal arms dangled freely, hanging nearly to its bony knees.
We watched as the silhouette of this hellishly-shaped monstrosity trudged along at its own leisurely pace. As our eyes adjusted to whatever it was we were looking at, we saw thin black protrusions poking out from its pitch black shape, as well as the fact that it was dripping.
John and I both rose to our feet as the thing continued its slow march towards Cal Danforth’s house. John ran inside, telling me in a half breath that he was grabbing his gun, and moments later he returned with a hunting rifle for himself and a pistol for me. We each took slow steps towards Cal Danforth’s, and even at our slowest we were moving just a bit faster than this thing that came from the trees.
“Stop right there!” John yelled out.
The thing didn’t obey John’s order. It was as though it didn’t hear him at all. John loaded a bullet into the chamber of his gun.
“You hear that, motherfucker?! I said fuckin’ stop!”
Still, the thing didn’t appear to have heard any of it, although this time, as it made its slow way across the Danforth’s yard, coming up on their grill, it stood up straight. We were now able to see the thing’s height in its entirety, and it stood conservatively at 7 feet.
Perhaps it was adrenaline that kept me from hearing it, perhaps it was my inebriation, perhaps again it hadn’t happened until this moment, but as it stood up, it made a stomach-churning cracking noise, as though its bones were all resetting. That noise persisted as it took its next step, and the one after that, and every step thereafter. Each time it lifted one of its feet off the ground for one of its heavy, short steps, it sounded like countless sets of knuckles cracking for the first time in years.
John told me to run back and grab his flashlight from inside his back door. I returned moments later with the high-powered handheld floodlight and turned it on, bathing the Danforth’s backyard in light and giving us our first real look at the thing from the trees.
Its skin was smooth, a dark, murky gray. The protrusions we’d seen in the silhouette were revealed to be twigs and sticks clinging to its body, and while it possessed no hair, parts of its body were splayed with what looked like seaweed.
“Motherfucker, I will shoot you!” John screamed, and a moment later a light turned on near the front of the Danforth abode.
The thing still paid us no mind. Another light turned on, this time in Cal’s kitchen, which is situated nearer his back door.
“Cal, stay inside!” I yelled.
“The fuck is that thing?” John whispered to me. I offered no speculation.
“What the hell are you guys doing?!” we heard Cal call out from his open kitchen window.
“There’s some fuckin’ thing in your yard, man, headin’ straight for you!” As John yelled back, the thing stopped.
Its bones sang their crunchy song as it turned around and faced the water. There was a deafening silence that lingered between myself and John, the lanky creature, and Cal Danforth. What finally broke that silence gives me chills just thinking about it now.
We were still a fair distance away from it, so its features weren’t readily apparent, but from what I could see, its eyes were little more than sunken holes in its face and its mouth stretched much farther up the cheek than any normal person.
And then it opened that mouth.
It opened an average amount, like your mouth or mine would open when we spoke. But then, accompanied by the sickening crunch of snow being packed under a boot, its jaw unhinged. All the while, water spilled from the openings in its face. It then began making sounds. They weren’t words; that was clear even despite the fact that it was talking with a mouthful of water. It was...undulating. The sounds it made came from deep within its throat, horrible, ghastly, terrifying sounds.
John aimed his rifle at the gray creature and prepared to shoot, but I think he was as curious as I was regarding what this strange being was trying to communicate, and to whom. After a few more seconds of those hellish noises emanating from deep inside the thing’s stomach, it stopped, and for a few fleeting moments, the only sounds I heard were my breath, my heartbeat, the soft whistle of a light breeze, and the invisible cicadas chirping their midnight song.
But then the cicadas stopped, and it was that silence that made my heart sink to my stomach, that absence of all sound that registered in my brain as a signal that something was very, very wrong. And after a single moment of that silence that felt like an eternity...the lake responded.
In that moment I learned from whence Humming Lake had gotten its colloquial sobriquet. It didn’t have a source, at least one that I could discern as I stood there, but a distinct hum simply materialized in my ears. It surrounded us, and it sounded as though it were coming from behind me, in front of me, on both sides of me, from under me and from above me and from within me and without me all at once. It was low, as if someone with a deep voice was simply going hmmmmmm.
I can’t say for certain, but at that moment I looked at the lake, and it seemed...darker. There was always an uncharacteristic dimness to the body of water, a sort of absence of the color that might come to mind when one thinks of such a geographic feature, and more of a deeper blue, especially towards the center of the small inland sea. At that moment, even under the moonlight, the lake seemed to swallow all light, and appeared a pitch black pit of uncertainty.
And that pit hummed, and then it stopped, replaced then by the abnormal figure in Cal Danforth’s backyard and its guttural nonsense. The cicadas returned as the creature and the lake finished their indiscernible conversation, with the former turning back towards Cal. A small man but with the courage and brashness of a hundred larger men, Cal Danforth yelled out for John not to shoot it, and that he would take care of it.
After disappearing into his house for a moment, and while the dripping, gray mass of bones and smooth skin made two more of its crooked, audible steps towards his home, Cal returned with a metal baseball bat. John and I watched, he through the ironsights of his gun and me through my disbelieving eyes, as Cal Danforth stepped out through his back door, ranting and raving about how “some fucked up cripple wasn’t gonna threaten” him.
“You wanna come onto my property?” he shouted rhetorically. “Think you’re gonna come onto my property and do...some shit?!”
He clearly hadn’t thought of what to say beforehand and was winging it in the moment. But it didn’t matter what he said. Cal approached the lumbering beast, baseball bat cocked back and ready to swing. But it didn’t matter.
With a speed it hadn’t exhibited until then, it stretched out its lanky arm and rammed two of its thin, tendril-like fingers, fingers that I would swear got longer at its whim, underneath Cal Danforth’s jaw, up through the fleshy part underneath his mouth, and pulled the left side of the lower half of his jaw off.
It happened in the blink of an eye. With an ease akin to a giant brushing away a fly, this thing had torn skin and snapped bone, leaving Cal Danforth standing in stupefied shock as the lower half of his face hung to one side, a mess of blood and viscera and a lower set of teeth displaced from their rightful fixture on Cal Danforth’s visage.
He stood there silently as the creature retracted its hand and flung it up once again much in the same way it had the first time, but now without the impediment of the lower half of Cal’s face to slow its thrust. Its fingers, longer again yet, plunged into the top of Cal’s mouth, but this time they didn’t retract. This time, I watched as Cal’s body went limp, held up only by the unnatural strength of his killer, and his eyes began bleeding.
John and I too were in shock, and he snapped out of it first. He yelled as he began firing his weapon at the thin, murderous beast; the deafening bangs of his gun shaking me from my stupor. I began firing at it too, and after my second shot it dropped Cal to the ground. Our shots didn’t seem to affect it at first, but the more John unloaded into it, it looked to be putting up its arms, though it seemed not in defense, but in annoyance.
Even still, it essentially ignored us. It resumed its slow, laborious gait, seemingly aiming to go around Cal’s house; in that stressful time I wasn’t sure where its destination might be. John quickly ran the few yards back to his home and disappeared for the briefest of moments inside before returning with a machete.
I voiced my concern, noting that a bevy of bullets hadn’t been able to harm it. But still John persisted. He made a wide berth around the thing, machete in hand. It was nearly to the side of Cal’s house when John made his move. He swung the machete, cutting cleanly and easily into its head, splitting it from ear to misplaced jaw joint. And he continued hacking away at it, with an apparently endless supply of water seeming to splash against the ground - and against John.
The thing collapsed to the ground in a puddle, its entire body turning to water as it perished, dousing John and soaking his shoes and the grass they stood on.
“Yeah motherfucker!” the drunken John shouted. “You fuckin’ see that, man?! Fuck this fuckin’ thi--”
He stopped speaking abruptly and stood up perfectly straight, dropping the machete to the ground with a light splash. Then he turned back, first towards what I thought was me, but I would soon realize was the lake.
“Johnny?” I asked meekly, my voice shaking as my friend started taking rigid steps.
He walked right past me in jerky, unnatural motions. I called out to him several times, each time ignored. I watched helplessly as John walked down the grass and right past me as though I didn’t exist. When I realized he was walking towards the lake I ran to try to stop him, but whatever force was compelling him to walk to the lake compelled me to stop. I wasn’t capable of moving, unable to stop my friend.
I was forced to watch as John slowly walked into the lake. First up to his ankles, then his knees, then up to his waist. And then he stopped. He stood there for what felt like an eon and, without any indication that it was about to happen preceding, John Derby was ripped underneath the surface of Humming Lake.
The same moment he was under was the moment I was freed from whatever it was that was keeping me in place. And not a moment later did that hum return, only this time it was loud enough to hear a mile away. By this point, other people had come from their houses to see what all the commotion was about, and one by one people saw Cal Danforth’s mangled corpse and asked me what had happened, a question to which I didn’t truly have an answer.
The hum raised in volume, and before long glass started shattered. And then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped. And moments later, from the trees on either side of the four lawns that sat on that part of Humming Lake, came more monstrosities. All of them had humanoid shapes as vague as the first of their kind that had arrived, but their limbs were all mangled, misshapen branches jutting out from their emaciated trunks, and all of them dripped the same water as their fallen associate.
There must have been at least thirty of them, and all of them started towards us with the same hurryless stroll. Just as I was about to address the rest of my fellow townspeople, something was launched from the lake, landing on John Derby’s yard, and then a second something landed not three feet away from it.
I picked up John’s flashlight and cautiously walked over to whatever it was. Upon shining the light on the unsolicited gifts from Humming Lake, I saw that John Derby had been returned to us. He was split at the torso, missing his left arm, and had the clear absence of a head, with maybe three inches of his spine peeking out through the cranial wound. Jess Randolph screamed, Mike Ward vomited, I nearly passed out.
But a message I needed to get to the townspeople kept me conscious.
“HEY!” I shouted, then lowered my voice to a hushed whisper. “I think they’re coming for the Hartul kid.”
The threat of unspeakable horrors befalling a child was enough to kick everyone into gear. Myself and three others began running to the Hartul’s house while three others who had joined the ruckus stayed behind to combat the creatures from the lake, against my strongest objections. As we ran, we began hearing the screams of our unfortunate, bull-headed neighbors, and a look behind me at the angular, hobbling shadows slowly but surely swarming them turned my legs to rubber and nearly made me fall.
Our town doesn’t have a typical structure. It’s more or less just an area where houses are sporadically placed, seemingly at random, with a single road that leads out into the rest of the world. We ran through yard after yard until finally we stepped foot onto the one belonging to the Hartul’s. Jess and I pounded on the front door, screaming for the Hartul’s to wake, and after a few moments the lights inside the house began turning on.
Brian Hartul opened the door in a half-asleep rage with a “What the fuck?!” to greet us. We told him that something was coming for his son as a result of the young Hartul’s failure to adhere to the law that had overshadowed the town of Humming Lake since long before any of us came into existence. Naturally, the elder Hartul expressed his willingness to shoot whatever that “something” might be, but I told him it would be a fruitless endeavor.
I made the decision that Rodney needed to be hidden elsewhere. I told Brian to take his family and drive far and fast away from Humming Lake. And so we went back into the Hartul’s house while the patriarch woke up his wife and son. I peered out the front window and saw in the distance the limping, jagged silhouettes heading our way, and yelled to the family to hurry.
And at that same moment, me, Bill Dyer, Jess, and Mike heard the shower turn on. Fearing that we didn’t adequately express the urgency with which they needed to be moving, Jess and I ran through the living room and turned down the hall, where we saw all three Hartul’s standing in fear, all three of them also wondering who turned their shower on.
And then to mine and Jess’ right, the kitchen sink turned on at full blast.
“Is that…” Jess started, but she didn’t need to finish. Not a moment later did the flow of water become too strong, sending the faucet soaring into the kitchen ceiling. The water was dark and murky, the unmistakable water of Humming Lake, not the clear well water the town had come to rely on. The knobs were next, landing on the now wet linoleum with a tin ring from each.
The Hartul’s yelped when similar sounds came from their bathroom, the showerhead and bathroom sink faucet and all the corresponding knobs bursting from their right places, flooding the bathroom with the forbidden liquid. After a moment, that very same water began pooling out of the bathroom and into the hallway.
“Jump over it! We have to leave, now!” I yelled.
The family obliged, and all three made it to the living room without so much as a drop of water on them. Brian grabbed his keys from a bowl on a small table at the end of the hallway and we all made our way outside, where our hope was crushed.
The lights on all the houses we could see were on, and coming from inside the houses were shouts of anger, fear, and confusion, as well as water. So much water. It came from under all of the Hartul’s neighbor’s doors, and before long it came from the Hartul’s house too.
We did our best to avoid it, but Mike Ward wasn’t lucky. As he tried to step over a stream of water he tripped, landing hands and face first into a shallow river. Over him, Bill Dyer similarly stumbled, ending up on his backside, soaked. Jess yelled at them to run the other way, so as not to risk us getting wet, and wished them luck in a single breath.
I looked behind us and saw the Hartul’s car with water surrounding it on the ground below. Then I saw them. The creatures had made their way up to the neighborhood, with some breaking off from their groups to go inside the houses belonging to whom I can only assume were those not lucky enough to avoid the fountains the lake had created from their fixtures.
Finally, we reached our destination, which was three houses down from the Hartul’s, Bob Harrison’s house. Bob was in the middle of reshingling his roof and had what we hoped would be our saving grace: a ladder already set up against the back of his home.
With the water closing in from three sides, our only route was to hope and pray that the spots on Bob’s backyard that we took weren’t yet soiled by the lake water coming from his and the other houses. Brian had Rodney over his shoulder, and only moments before we reached the ladder, his foot made a loud squelch. Before I even realized what had happened, Brian grabbed me, flipped me around, and threw Rodney over my shoulder.
He told me to go, and that he was going to climb the lattice on the next house over. Rodney climbed the ladder first, then Jess, then Amber Hartul, then me. As we climbed to the roof, I looked over and saw Brian sloshing through Bill’s yard and over to the side of Hal Chalmer’s. Once we made it to the roof, I kicked the ladder to the ground.
I can’t be certain how long it was, but we were safe for a few minutes. We took the time sitting on the half of Bob Harrison’s roof that was shingled to try to regroup, but none of us could come up with a plan. All the while, there was a cacophony of fractures and cracks and splinters and breaks blended with the close and distant screams of the unfortunate residents of Humming Lake surrounding us, and before we knew it, the lake’s grotesque agents were shambling to the ground below.
We were surrounded, by the swamp of lake water to the back and sides and by the slick, gray, jagged beings to the front. There was a brief standoff, wherein we on the roof simply watched in terror as the creatures belows congregated with a single goal in mind. The silence was haunting as they looked up at us, and that silence was only broken when one of them raised its arm, with all the creaks and cracks that accompanied its movement.
It pointed to the 8-year-old.
His mother yelled down they weren’t going to take her son, as any mother would, at which point the creatures craned their crooked necks and arched their mangled backs to face the direction of the lake, now roughly two blocks away. One of them spoke loudly in its indiscernible language, and once it had said its piece, they all made the turn back towards us, spine-tingling for us and spine-shattering for them.
Then the lake replied.
The hum came from all around us, steadily raising in volume.The glass on several more houses shattered, and it became disorienting. While the rest of us covered our ears, Amber Hartul released her son and stood up.
“What are you doing?!” Jess yelled out. But Amber didn’t respond. Amber simply stood up and took three steps forward, the last of which sent her tumbling off the roof to the ground below, a fall that culminated in a sickening crunch that I was thankful I didn’t have to see the visual for.
“Oh my god.” Jess said, looking past me to our right. We had been so focused on what was going on in front of us that we had nearly forgotten about the just-now-became-a-widower Brian on the other roof.
Two of the lake’s emissaries had wandered their jagged wander two houses down. Brian too was blindly walking down the roof, and we watched helplessly as he went headfirst over the edge, but instead of simply hitting the ground below, one of the creatures reached its hand up, which went through Brian’s skull and down the inside of his face, throat and chest, and caught him, then tossed his limp cadaver to the grass.
Jess and I sat there in horror, in shock, unable to move, while Rodney wrapped his arms around Jess, sobbing, presumably at the revelation that he was now an orphan.
The lake then spoke again, but this time it was less booming. It’s hard to describe a hum, but whereas before this moment the lake’s tone had been menacing, it now sounded almost...calming.
It hummed its hum, then quieted, never fully stopping, and instead of being replied to by the monsters it sent to do its bidding, a response came from Jess’ lap.
“What?” Rodney said.
The hum continued, and so too did its exchange with the boy.
“I don’t wanna…...why……..will my mom and dad be there….no….” Rodney cried. “NO! I WON’T!”
The creatures below all screamed. From deep in their stomachs by way of their throats, they all screamed out shouts in tones entirely foreign to the human ear. The hum joined them, returning to its horrible booming roar. Rodney buried his face in Jess’s shoulder, sobbing. The noise was overwhelming, and I could almost feel the headache materializing in my forehead. And in an instant, the beasts stopped and the hum returned to a tolerable level.
At the same time, Rodney stopped crying and tried to push away from Jess, but she held on to him. I only saw his face for a moment, but in that moment I saw that all emotion, all life had left him. Everything that made little 8-year-old Rodney himself, all the adventurousness, the personality, the hopes, the dreams, all of it, was gone.
The moment I saw his face was when he pushed his head away just enough to get into position, and then he sank his teeth into Jess’ throat, tearing away a chunk of skin and sinew and sending blood flooding down her neck. In an instant Rodney had turned around and was walking down the roof. As I did my best to stanch Jess’ wound, I watched Rodney step down the shingles and topple forward and squinted my eyes as an inherent reaction to the blood-curdling sound I was expecting to hear.
But I didn’t hear that sound.
Instead, the humming stopped and I heard the sounds of one of the creatures vocalizing. And in reply I heard Rodney. I can’t be certain of what he said, but it was something along the lines of “Okay, let’s go.” And then they all began walking back towards the lake, the lake’s envoys with their lumbering gaits and Rodney with his surefooted 8-year-old steps.
They walked and walked and walked until they were enveloped in the shadows and out of sight. I tried my best to help Jess, but I’m not a medical professional. I used my shirt to keep pressure on the wound, but within minutes she was dead.
I stayed up on Bob Harrison’s roof for the next 16 hours, with Jess’s dead, bloodied corpse roasting in the summer sun not three feet away from me. After a time, people started coming out of their homes, carefully avoiding the spots on the ground still damp with the lake’s vengeance. They used plywood and furniture and vehicles to create bridges for those who were trapped, myself included.
27 bodies were pulled out of the neighborhood’s flooded houses in the coming weeks. We crafted waterproof suits and footwear to traverse our town until such time as the water dried up or was otherwise cleared out.
When the lake claimed its revenge, it resulted in the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life. It was a half hour (roughly) of chaos, death, confusion, and sorrow.
But it put one thing into perspective. The one thing that so many of us had pondered for so long. The answer to the question that so many residents of Humming Lake had asked for so long, but for which none had ever dared seek. That half hour of dread gave us the reason for our town’s oldest law, the source of which had been lost to time itself.
“Never touch the water.”


MARIAH CAREY LOVES CHRISTMAS. She loves it with a fanatic’s strict adherence to the laws of Christmas joy. She loves it like no one has ever loved Christmas before. (Did you have an actual reindeer at your holiday festivities last year? Did you hang out with Santa? Didn’t think so.) Christmas is also a cornerstone of the Carey complex. Frank Sinatra might have made the holiday classically jolly, Sufjan Stevens might have made it indie whiny, and Ariana Grande might have made it horny, but no artist has come to define our commercially driven holiday fantasies more than Carey has with “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Since the song dropped on her 1994 holiday album, it’s made an estimated $60 million-plus in royalties. It’s stayed relevant, thanks to fans, of course; a cover on the 2003 Love Actually soundtrack; an album reissue; an annual “All I Want for Christmas Is You” holiday-concert series that sold out a show at Madison Square Garden last year; an animated film; an Amazon Music mini-doc about the undying meaning of the song; and streams on streams on streams. Last year, it finally hit No. 1 on “The Hot 100” chart, after a record-breaking (for its slowness) 25-year journey. Who cares how long it took? It’s her 19th No. 1 hit-putting her above Elvis and one away from tying the Beatles. Does it matter if you like the song? (Full disclosure: I don’t.) No! It is the omnipresent anthem of holiday happiness. And so this year, this exceptionally s**t year of 2020, Carey, who always wants everyone to have a good Christmas, really thinks everyone should have a good Christmas, and she’s got 15 executives assembled in a Zoom war room at 10 p.m. to make damn sure everyone does. They’ve been going for two hours now, plotting ways to bring the merry and bright, no matter what it takes.
“I will sing with a puppet if it’s incredible,” I hear her say with deadly seriousness, that raspy, built-for-a-torchy-ballad voice floating in from one of many nearby rooms in the house she’s renting for the summer. She goes on to suggest possible puppets, determined to sing only with the best one or none at all.
Carey tippy-toes across the marble floors, carrying the Zoom meeting with her as she hovers in the entryway behind me. She’s in her comfies-black leggings, a black off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, and full makeup-but even dressed down, she’s walking like she’s in six-inch strappy Louboutins (a habit she references in the song “Crybaby”). She mutes her iPad mic to greet me quickly. “Hi! A.D.!” (Everyone in her immediate orbit is reduced to first and last initial. Stories sound like mathematical equations in which M.C. and M.R. meet J.D.) “I’m so sorry this is running late!” She’ll be with me soon, she says. She just has to find a diplomatic way to let these men know something they are suggesting is ugly! She goes back to the call. “It just isn’t giving me Christmas warmth,” she says, delivering her criticism as delicately as one of her famous vocal trills.
Carey is running 30-well, 45-okay, we’re going to be real with you: We don’t know how many-minutes late. This is what we expect of her, no? The Diva who bathes in milk and will only be photographed from the right side. We think of these indulgences as readily as her vertiginous notes, or those athletic vocal runs, or her belting “Juust. Liiike. Hoone-aaay,” while she holds her finger to her ear to keep pitch. So it’s hard to be mad at Carey for fully embodying all the various Mariahisms that define her.
Anything less would feel like short shrift, to be honest. Plus she’s a generous diva. She’s dispatched her five-person team, her covid-quarantine pod, to tend to me while I wait. They’d been together since March, without any outsiders, until I was permitted to come tonight (with mask on face and fresh negative covid-test results in hand). The excitement of a newcomer has everyone bustling around like a live-action reenactment of the “Be Our Guest” scene in Beauty and the Beast. “Allison, can I get you wine?” asks her longtime tour manager Michael, as he shows me to a couch and lingers to tell me, in his languid, Idris Elba-British accent, about the first time he met Mariah, decades ago, as she was glamorously coming off a Concorde. “Allison, it would be more comfortable if you sit in here-the lighting is better,” says Ellen, her longtime house manager. “Allison,” Kristofer, her Ken-doll-handsome makeup artist, calls out to me as I’m walking from one great couch to an upgraded one, “I’m making fresh shortbread. Would you like it with jam or powdered sugar?” Her ex-backup dancer and current boo, Bryan Tanaka, smiles at me, doing his part by just being charming. Ellen fluffs a pillow, pours a glass of wine and a glass of room-temperature water, and puts them down in front of the seat Carey will eventually occupy. I am left to sit in a luxurious beige-toned room that smells lightly of vanilla and gardenias- exactly like my rich childhood friend’s suburban home.
The house is still daytime bustling even though it’s now edging on 11:30 p.m., which, according to Mariah Carey Standard Time, is the middle of the day, not the end. Carey is a self-proclaimed vampyyyyra. She loves a sunset, loves a sunrise, and would prefer to exist exclusively in those shadowy hours in between. (She has a sun allergy, she insists.) Her time zone has other quirks: True Love only occurs in summer, underneath the stars. Winter is always joyous. Any day has the potential to be Christmas. And she is eternally 12 years old, as she has been saying since at least 2008, which explains the recurring themes of butterflies, Christmases, dol-phins-epic, song-worthy romantic fantasies. It’s in direct opposition to the other version of extreme femininity she likes to play with, that of the diva in heels on the stair-stepper. Neither persona fully explains how effortlessly she can command a platoon of professionals to execute her vision until you consider that this dualism may be her secret to career control. One cannot be dismissed if one demands what one needs operatically. One cannot be told what is or is not age-appropriate if one doesn’t acknowledge age.
Anyway, the whole 12 thing-it’s sort of a joke and it’s sort of not. Carey turned 50 in March, and Moroccan and Monroe-a.k.a. Roc and Roe, a.k.a. Dem-Kids-her 9-year-old twins with ex-husband Nick Cannon, presented her with a cake with an enormous 12 candle, complicit in her continued crusade against getting older. One milestone is colliding with another. This year marks both half a century of existence and her 30th year in this business-30 years since her first album, Mariah Carey, came out. In those three decades, she’s produced 15 studio albums, been nominated for 34 Grammys (and only won five-don’t get her started), and done everything a star can do (an HSN jewelry line, a Champagne brand, world tours, a reality show, a Vegas residency, an American Idol judging stint). This year, she’s been taking something of a victory lap with a celebration she’s calling MC30, opening the vaults on neverbefore-seen video footage and an album of unreleased songs and demos called The Rarities, and she’s finally put all that legendary shade to paper with a memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. She’s still ignoring her age, but she’s at least letting herself acknowledge the passing of time.
She’s been teasing this memoir for more than a year, mentioning it at a “Genius Q&A” during the press tour for her last album, Caution, but thinking about it for ten. It’s 300-plus meaning-packed pages, and, yes, what she didn’t include has meaning too. Eminem, who was reportedly “stressed” over what Carey might say about their rumored 2001 fling, doesn’t have to worry. “There’s some songs that I can sing in response to that, but I will not do it,” she’ll say when I ask. And then, with a roll of her head: “If somebody or something didn’t pertain to the actual meaning of Mariah Carey, as is the title, then they aren’t in the book.”
What’s in the book is “for the fans” (of course) but mostly for herself, or at least a version of herself. It’s her turn now to “emancipate that scared little girl,” she says. It’s why she spent two years telling stories to her co-writer, Michaela angela Davis, turning the famed Moroccan Room in her Tribeca penthouse into an emotional vomitorium, in hopes that finally, after a career of people misinterpreting her, she can make it all clear. In a way, though, the story she tells in the memoir is the story she’s been telling herself, her fans, her critics-everyone-over and over again for years. And after 30 years of telling these stories, in different ways, you have to wonder why she still feels so misunderstood.
HIT IT, TANAKA!” yells Roe, getting into position as Ellen and Kristofer pull open the French doors leading to the terrace overlooking the pool. Carey strolls out to where Roc and Roe are waiting to surprise her. The conference Zoom is over, but there’s one more thing to attend to before we can sit down.
Carey’s latest single, “Save the Day,” dropped just a few minutes ago, at midnight, and the twins want to celebrate. The opening violins of the song swell over the outdoor stereo system, and they launch into choreography they’ve spent all day perfecting. The song is a long-delayed collaboration with Ms. Lauryn Hill they conceived of in 2011. They decided to release it now, since its message about the importance of coming together to fix the world felt relevant with national Black Lives Matter protests and the lead-up to the election. “It’s very auspicious,” she says, musing that it would have been the perfect song to play during the Democratic National Convention.
Roe executes a string of cartwheels while Carey looks on, hands raised to her face in beatific surprise, and Tanaka captures the moment on two iPhone cameras on tripods with lighting rigged. Rocky hits every dance currently popular on TikTok.
Rocky loves TikTok, but Carey thinks he’s too young to be on it. Recently, she had to put him on a “time-out” after he made a video asking his mom to say hi to “his fan.” Carey can be heard off-camera saying, “I’m on a business call,” and Rocky turns back to the camera and says, “My mom is not ready to be shot on TikTok,” sticks his tongue out, and blows a raspberry in disappointment.
“Okay, I was really on a business call,” Carey says, mildly annoyed at the whole situation. People assumed she just declined because she wasn’t wearing makeup. Plus she wasn’t the one who set up the account for him. “Co-parenting,” she says, then sings, “‘Yeah, it ain’t easy, baby. It ain’t easy.’ But you know what? It’s important. We keep it good for them,” she says of Cannon, whom she divorced in 2014. She won’t comment on his recent career drama (he was fired from his longtime gig hosting Wild ‘N Out for making anti-Semitic remarks on his podcast, Cannon’s Class) but speaks fondly of him in her memoir in the chapter called “Dem Babies.”
The performance ends. Carey runs to them, arms wide open, tears in her eyes, cooing over how lovely everything is-the dance, the sunflowers, the sign. She brings them in for a hug and photo op, but before the shutter can snap, Roe moves away too fast, ensnaring Carey’s large diamond butterfly ring in her hair. “Roe, wait, I’m tangled,” she screams, while Rocky emits a loud belch and giggles.
Carey says good night to the twins. It’s an atmospherically nice night, and she decides she wants to go outside to talk. “It’s better, right?” she says as we sit down at a long wooden table next to the violin-shaped pool (a Stradivarius, with a six-foot koi pond as the bow). Her people are again bustling, setting up the table for us, slipping out of the shadows, putting down drinks and candles, moving the whole setup outside.
“Ellen, will you make us some ‘horse devoirs,’” Carey asks, intentionally mispronouncing the word. “That’s what we call ’em.” “Are you cold, Mariah?” asks Kristofer, who exits to grab her a little throw. “Are you guys warm enough?” asks Ellen, who enters to put down snacks. More candles are placed around us. “Oh, darling. Don’t put that down there for me, because that is hideous,” exclaims Carey. “That is underlighting!” The candle is whisked away. Carey asks Ellen if she wouldn’t mind taking Chacha, her emotional-support dog, to her bedroom, so that she’s there waiting when Mariah finally slips off to sleep sometime after the sun comes up.
Finally, wine poured, throw draped, candles arranged to ensure we both look cinematically beautiful, horse devoirs on the way, she settles back and gazes out over the property, watching the fiber-optic pool lights dance through the rainbow and back again. She’s a little tired, she apologizes, and already a little emotional.
“Can you believe I’m back here?” she says, sighing. “Here” is an upstate rich-person’s enclave not far from where Martha Stewart is thirst-trapping with her chickens. Carey hasn’t spent time in this town since what she refers to as “the Sing Sing days”-when, in the mid-1990s, she shared an over $20 million compound with her toxic first husband, the former Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola. Mottola discovered and signed Carey when she was 19. They married in 1993, when she was 23 and he was 43. Carey has repeatedly described the marriage as controlling. She felt like “a prisoner.”
Mottola and Carey split in 1996, but she still gets that clenched feeling in her gut whenever she talks about him. With a wave of her hand: “I say it all in the book. I’d rather people read it that way.” She takes a long sip from a big goblet of red wine. “And by the way, I forgot a lot of that stuff when I was writing the book. And then recently, people that were friends of his from childhood were like, ‘I hope she told the real story.’”
It’s not a new story in its particulars-it’s been alluded to in tabloids and interviews for decades by both Carey and Mottola. Even its emotional contours were out there already, in her own words, mostly in song lyrics. She’s made a habit of putting her stories-her past lovers, secret enemies, petty grievances, and big traumas-in her songs since she started writing them at 13. (And she does, may she remind us, write her own songs. That’s another thing she’s spent a lifetime reminding everyone-see the two-minute supercut of her saying “As a songwriter”-though she was only just inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame this year, a decade after she became eligible.)
“Honestly, if you look at the words to ‘I Wish You Well,’ it tells you a lot of things about different people in my life. It starts with ‘This goes out to you and you and you/Know who you are,’” she breaks into a half-sing. “And there’s a lot of different people referenced in that from my point of view as a songwriter.”
“And then, background vocals,” she says, indicating when the singers would have kicked in with the phrase “Can’t believe I still need to protect myself from you.” “And then back to the main verse: ‘But you can’t manipulate me like before.’” She’s speaking, but rhythmically; her fingers are waggling up and down near her ear like they do when she sings. She pauses. “It’s like I’ve been telling this story if someone cared to look deep enough. I just feel like there’s no way anybody could have known the complexities and the layered situation that is my life.”
Though her fans, her Lambily, as they call themselves (a combination of family and Lamb, as Carey sometimes refers to her loved ones), have usually paid close enough attention to know the significance of the songs that mean the most to Mariah. Even if she may have never come out and confirmed which lyric is about which incident or relationship, they have their theories. While my friend who is a Lamb Supreme has always suspected it, I, a solid Mariah fan who can sing at least ten of her songs without missing a word, was surprised to learn from the book that “My All” was not just about the general thrall of a new love so exciting you’d do anything to bone but about Carey and her brief fling with Derek Jeter.
The knowledge that this stuff is “already out there” made it easier for Carey to write the memoir. It removed the burden of dropping bombshells (though there are some) and instead lets her just confirm, contextualize, and detail things from her POV-like how she and Jeter met at a dinner party and started text-flirting, secretly, while she was at the end of her marriage to Mottola. Knowing that fans already suspected the song “The Roof” was about her first meeting with him made it easier for her to reveal what she wore the night they had a clandestine kiss on the roof (get it?) of his apartment building. There was Moët. She wore a buttery leather Chanel skirt. She remembers her boots and the rain and her hair curling in stunning detail.
“Of course I do! I can never forget that moment,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like it was some intensely deep, intellectually stimulating-again, it was a great moment, and it happened in a divine way because it helped me get past living there, in Sing Sing, under those rules and regulations.” When she belts, “I’d risk my life to feeeeyall / Your body next to mine,” in “My All,” it’s because she really was risking her life to have a night with Jeter in Puerto Rico, she says.
Her anxiety around Mottola sits just under the surface. She writes candidly about the security cameras she says were always watching her and the security team she felt was reporting her every move. “He was like this oppressive humidity,” she says. She could never escape. She could never talk about it, even if she was, in her own way, always talking about it. When she first discussed Mottola during a Zoom call we had the week before, she started to cry: “It ignites the triangle in my stomach.”
In his own memoir, Hitmaker: The Man and His Music, from 2013, Mottola denied being restrictive or controlling but deemed their involvement “wrong and inappropriate,” by way of apology, and takes credit for his part in her early success. Carey suspects he tried to sabotage her career after they divorced. More than suspects, she says, referencing a 2017 interview on Desus & Mero in which Murder Inc. co-founder Irv Gotti confirmed Mottola boosted a J.Lo and Ja Rule duet to mess with Carey. “It’s out there,” she says. She also knows he might be angered by her perspective, though she hopes he’s not. “I could have gone harder,” she says, suggesting she could have painted him as a monster. “And I didn’t. I give him credit where credit is due.”
So picking this same upstate enclave for her self-quarantine palace does seem inconceivable, but the kids needed space. “Not that the apartment wasn’t spacious,” she explains. (We know; we all saw it on Cribs in 2002.) Providing this for her children is just one way she ensures that they have a better life than she did. “They’re not running around with matted locks,” she says when asked how her own childhood has shaped how she parents. “They know that I’m here for them. They know that if they want to talk with their father, he’s a phone call away,” she goes on. “They have stability. That’s what I didn’t have. They will never have a holiday that’s not happy unless something I can’t do anything about happens. They understand that they are Black. They have a whole lot of self-esteem and self-worth that I never had. And I probably still don’t now. I know that I still don’t.”
She sighs deeply. She’s been up all day-like actual day. So tonight, with the wine and the eerily quiet country night, her 1 a.m. feels like everyone else’s: a time when the existential takes hold and won’t let go.
“But maybe one day I’ll feel equal to the rest of the human race. I didn’t even think I was worthy of happiness and success. I thought I wasn’t allowed to be that person that would have that.” She gestures again to the pool, the property, the basketball courts, the baseball diamond (“not a big one”). “Like, sitting here, looking at this? And after describing the shack?”
The shack is what she calls her childhood home on Long Island, a run-down house at the end of a nice block that she’s still embarrassed by. It’s easy to assume that her dogged adherence to the age of 12 stems from its being a simpler time, that there is something happy to relive there, but that’s not quite right. “I always say, ‘I’m only 12, yay!’ But when you see how many times I talk about ‘I was 12, and this happened,’ it’s clear I went through a lot of stuff as a kid.”
Carey grew up, as she tells it, poor, mixed race, in an all-white neighborhood that made her feel her mixed race-ness, where she was not white enough “but not Black enough to scare people into not saying stuff around me.” Her father, Alfred Roy, was a Black engineer from Harlem, and her mother, Patricia, an Irish American opera singer from Illinois who was disowned by her family for having his children, separated before she was 3. She lived with her mother and only saw her father on the weekends she’d go to visit him and eat his special linguine e vongole. One of the good memories. She never felt like her home situation was stable. She was always aware of tension between her parents and between her parents and her siblings. School wasn’t much better. In the book, she catalogues the racial slights she suffered at the hands of white children.
She writes about her childhood as the thing she had to overcome to become Mariah Carey. And because our traumas are like pothos plants, easily propagated from the clippings of the original, her parents’ trauma (her father’s of existing as a Black man in America; her mother’s of familial rejection for marrying a Black man and a career that didn’t come to fruition) became hers to overcome as well. As did the difficult upbringings of her older brother, Morgan, and her older sister, Alison, whom she now refers to as her “ex-brother” and “ex-sister.” Carey writes about witnessing Morgan’s volatility and fights with her mother. She discusses how she longed to have a real big-sisterly relationship with Alison but instead ended up in dangerous situations, sometimes with men, whenever she got too close. (Her nickname for me, A.D.-she asked to call me that, she told me, because she’s so estranged from her sister she doesn’t like to say Allison.)
“Alison and Morgan both believed I had it easier than they did,” she writes. She hasn’t spoken to Alison since 1994, though she maintains a relationship with the son Alison had at 15. Mostly, Carey constantly worries that they’ll go to the tabloids again, as she says they have done in the past. She doesn’t want them to see her as an “ATM machine with a wig,” she says. (Recently, Alison has made headlines for accusing their mother in a court filing of forcing her into sexual acts and satanic rituals as a child.)
“Here’s the thing: They have been ruthlessly just heartless in terms of dealing with me as a human being for most of my life. I never would have spoken about my family at all had they not done it first.” Even still, you have to wonder how Alison will feel if she picks up the memoir of her estranged superstar sibling and reads how her sister learned a hard lesson about what self-worth should be during the baby shower for her teen pregnancy.
I ask Carey if there is any chance of reconciliation with her ex-siblings in the future. “I have forgiveness in my heart,” she says, “and so I forgive them, but I am not trying to invite anybody to come hang out over here. I think they’re very broken, and I feel sad for them.”
Though she writes as candidly about her mother as she does about her siblings-their confrontations and competitions-she finds it harder to separate herself from the woman who discovered she could sing. (When Carey was barely 3, she sang along with her mother while she was rehearsing a song from Verdi’s Rigoletto, so the legend starts.) Carey still takes care of her, financially, “and always will.” She is one of the book’s dedicatees. “I tried to make her feel like I really do think she did the best she could,” she says and picks up her glass to cheers me.
“I cried writing a lot of parts of this book. Maybe it’s because I have such vivid recollections. You know what? I’m sure I’m going to have to deal with a lot of people being upset with me. I hope not.”
OF ALL THE KNOTS she’s eternally trying to unravel, there is one that, she feels, has refused to come loose easily: “I really have been like, ‘I’m mixed. I’m mixed. I’m really, really mixed,’” Carey sings at me, turning her lifelong repetition into a little ditty. “Like, whatever. Not to make a song out of it. That’s what we do.” This, according to Carey, is her most famous refrain, the one where she explains that she is biracial over and over again.
She already, actually, did make a song of it: “Outside,” from 1997’s Butterfly. She quotes it often in life and in the book (and will sing it on the Audible recording). And now she sings the lyrics to me: “Standing alone/Eager to just believe it’s good enough to be what/You really are/But in your heart/Uncertainty forever lies/And you’ll always be/Somewhere on the/Outside.”
When she cites feelings of alienation or shame, it’s often at the hands of white people. She writes about an incident where she was invited over to a friend’s house in the Hamptons, only to arrive and be called the N-word. It’s the Black women in her life who held her up when nobody else did. Her Nana Reese (her great-aunt on her father’s side) provided some stability. Her “aunties” were the ones who tried to help her learn how to do her hair. Da Brat once helped her escape Sing Sing to go get fries from Burger King. She dedicated a whole chapter to her Cousin LaVinia (“Vinny”), who was one of her closest friends. LaVinia recently died, but it’s her estimation of Carey’s struggles that most shaped her understanding of her mixed-race identity. “It’s like Vinny always said: ‘You kids had all the burdens of being Black but none of the benefits.’”
Before Davis and Carey turned in a draft of The Meaning of Mariah, Davis sent an email to her editor. “I was like, I have to put this on record that all the conversation around race and particularly the view of white people is all Mariah,” Davis says over the phone. They had a nickname for her when she got in this mode: “Militant Riah.” “There were a couple of times that she was like, ‘You’re being too careful. They hated me. I would never be good enough for some white people.’”
And yet, when she first debuted as an artist, a number of reviews misidentified her heritage. In 1990, a Los Angeles Times writer called her a “white singer who has a black vocal style.” Nelson George, a Black critic writing for Playboy, called her “a white girl who can sing,” while another accused her of being marketed as a “white Whitney Houston.” Carey says she can’t speak to the intentionality behind her marketing at the time-“I was 19, what did I know?” In her book, she references how her label sometimes “scrubbed” her music of its “urban inflections.” She recalls recording the “Fantasy” remix with ODB in 1995 and playing it for Mot-tola. “The fk is that?” he said. “I can do that. Get the fk outta here with that.”
Carey would eventually cease to be considered solely pop, becoming more of a crossover pop-hip-hop-R&B fixture. Even still, she’s spent a significant portion of her post-Mottola era defending her biracial identity. After Carey released the hip-hopheavy album Butterfly, comedian Sandra Bernhard made a series of racist jokes during her stand-up special about the way Carey was “acting [N-word-ish] … with Puff Daddy,” suggesting that the white-perceived Carey was all of a sudden acting “Black.” At the time, Carey commented, “If I was two shades darker, there’d have been people protesting for me.” (She ended up writing the NAACP, and the special was taken off the air.) The commentary didn’t stop in the 2000s. Even as recently as 2008, her race was being written about weirdly, e.g., when Jody Rosen sniped about her “racial ambiguity [being] mildly interesting” while trying to determine if she was a captivating pop star or just a good singer. (He decided on the latter.) But “Vision of Love,” she reminds me, went to No. 1 on the R&B charts first. And she performed it live for the first time on The Arsenio Hall Show. “Someone knew they were introducing me as a Black girl.”
In the 1990s, being a “white artist” or a “Black artist” often created deeply divergent music careers. White meant pop, Black meant hiphop or R&B, and within those silos, there were separate charts, audiences, magazine covers, award recognition, and dress codes, and to seek one audience meant potentially alienating the other. As Carey was building her career, there was very little room for crossover, and there wasn’t a lot of understanding afforded to those who didn’t really fit in the boxes. If you were acceptable to white audiences as a pop star, as Houston was, you ran the risk of alienating Black audiences and vice versa. It’s what Lena Horne called being the “kind of Black that white people could accept”: Carey, because of her light skin, and Houston, because of the way she spoke (softly, like a newscaster). The 2017 Whitney Houston documentary, Whitney: Can I Be Me, revisits the moment in 1989 when Houston performed at the Soul Train Awards and the crowd booed and called her “Whitey.” It’s only recently that we’ve begun to more fully acknowledge how damaging and destabilizing the label of “not Black enough” can be.
Davis and Carey met in 2005 at an early-listening event for The Emancipation of Mimi, one of Carey’s comeback albums. Four years earlier, Carey had suffered her first major flop with the movie Glitter. She’d been dropped by EMI a year after it signed her to one of those historic colossally big deals (reportedly, $100 million for five albums). She had a public breakdown and was hospitalized for exhaustion after she made an erratic appearance on TRL. (In the memoir, she reminds us that, despite all that, the song “Loverboy” from Glitter ended up being the best-selling single of 2001. “I’m real,” she mic-drops.)
The Emancipation of Mimi was a reassertion of Carey as an artist, her opportunity to set the tone for the next phase of her career, one she wanted to be centered around her Blackness, and she wanted to do that with a cover story for Essence. “It was very strategic that she started with Black women,” Davis says. At the time, Davis was an editor at the magazine. “Black women have always grounded her in truth,” she says.
Essence had never had Carey on the cover before. Previous editors-in-chief had passed “because, they literally said, ‘Mariah Carey has never said she was Black,’” recounts Davis. The writer, Joan Morgan, brought in evidence: stacks of clippings and transcripts where Carey said “I’m Black” or “My father is Black.” In the end, Davis won. They ran an article in which Carey discussed, similarly to now, what people didn’t know about her struggles with her racial identity. At the end, the article declared her “a grown ass Black woman.” The cover line read: “America’s Most Misunderstood Black Woman.” That was 15 years ago.
From a musical perspective, at least, many of the issues Carey faced early in her career feel less intense now. Hip-hop culture is pop culture. And thanks to Mariah Carey’s 1997 album Butterfly, the once-novel idea of a pop-hip-hop crossover-what her friend and collaborator Jermaine Dupri calls hip-pop-is essentially just what a new song by any artist sounds like.
It’s worth considering whether she would have been as big of a pop star if she had originally been marketed as a Black artist. Would she have been able to collaborate with ODB and the long roster of hiphop artists and producers she favored, and to see those songs become megahits, if her proximity to whiteness hadn’t made it all seem “non-threatening” to white audiences?
“The truth is I will never say I had the same experience as a darker-skinned woman,” Carey starts in. She acknowledges the privilege in her being accepted by white audiences and a white-run music industry, but to her, it also means “having a white mother, and being forced to live in white neighborhoods, and feeling ashamed that there is nobody visibly Black there … and I’m being so real right now that I want to edit myself,” she pauses.
“Believe you me, I’m not thrilled to be this skin tone all the time.” Then she launches into the questions she has asked herself her whole life and maybe continues to ask: “How was I supposed to fit in? I was, like, the only one that’s this weird mutant, mutt-using an antiquated phrase that I’m not asking anyone else to ever use again, but I’m embracing it- mulatto girl. I’m not even embracing it. It’s a horrible way of defining somebody. It actually means ‘mule.’”
Whatever it did for her career, she says, it also “distanced me from the comfort of support and protection from some Black people. Which is an even deeper kind of a pain, pile of pain, if that makes sense. It’s been a lot.”
IF THERE’S ONE THING that makes I Carey nervous about the release of this book into the world, besides some content that is going to “surprise even her best friends,” it’s that people will misconstrue why she’s talking about a lot of this stuff now. She has wanted to write the memoir for a decade, she says. “Whether or not it suddenly became okay to deal with stuff, this book was coming out anyway.” She doesn’t want to seem like she’s capitalizing on the moment.
But the current moment does seem to keep giving new context for her experiences. For example, the conversation surrounding Ellen DeGeneres’s reportedly toxic workplace behavior led to a clip of an interview with Carey resurfacing on Twitter. It’s from 2008, when there were rumors Carey was pregnant. DeGeneres, apparently determined to get Carey to confirm the speculation, challenged her to drink Champagne. Carey was forced to announce her pregnancy. She miscarried soon after. “I was extremely uncomfortable with that moment is all I can say. And I really have had a hard time grappling with the aftermath,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to tell anyone because I had had a miscarriage. I don’t want to throw anyone that’s already being thrown under any proverbial bus, but I didn’t enjoy that moment.” Carey goes on to say that there is “an empathy that can be applied to those moments that I would have liked to have been implemented. But what am I supposed to do? It’s like, [sings] ‘What are you going to do?’”
Her fans have also helped her reexamine her past. In 2018, a Lamb-led campaign, #JusticeForGlitter, turned her former career low into a cult classic and earned the soundtrack a place on the charts for a little while. The movie did come out the week after 9/11; it never truly got a fair shake. With the help of her Lambs, and a Change.org petition demanding that streaming services finally offer it, the album reached No. 1 on iTunes. That same year, Carey was on the cover of People, revealing her battle with bipolar disorder for the first time. It seemed to explain what happened during Glitter, when she went on TRL, but she chose not to elaborate further in the book. “Because I don’t feel like there’s a mental-illness discussion to be had,” she says when I ask. “It is not to deny that. I am not denying that. I just don’t know that I believe in any one diagnosis for a situation or a human being.”
For her, the real story of Glitter, which she tells in great detail for the first time, was the story of her working too hard, of succumbing to the exhaustion of sleep deprivation, and of her family betraying her. (Her mother called the police on her when she was acting erratically, and her brother was the one to check her into a recovery facility, she writes.) That’s perhaps the biggest benefit of this memoir to her: “Now, if people have questions, I can be like, ‘Please refer to chapter x,’ rather than me having to stick up for myself, protect myself, defend myself. Because we can all be wounded, but are we going to sit around licking our wounds forever?”
IT’S NEARING 4 A.M., and she could I talk more, but she desperately needs to use “the loo.” She slips away while her team comes out, partly to keep me company and partly to signal it’s time for me to wrap it up.
The first time we talked, Carey mentioned that it was a bit lonely realizing that she was the only one of her peers who lived to write her own story. Whitney’s gone. Prince is gone. There’s some pressure that comes with that: What story are you willing to tell about yourself, and what are you willing to accept? Carey has finally shaped her story the way she sees it: one of herself as a perpetual underdog who has risen, fallen, and climbed back as dexterously as her famed melismas. It’s the narrative that has propulsed her to greatness; it’s also her mental loop.
Carey comes back from the bathroom and, it turns out, a costume change. She’s swapped her peasant blouse for a black satin kimono robe. It’s humid, her hair has fallen flat, and her laugh is mingling with the chirping cicadas that have emerged. Sunrise is closer than sunset, and it’s starting to feel loose, like the last hour at the club, right before the lights come up, as the DJ tries to find the perfect song to send you off.
Tanaka slips his hand into hers and murmurs that the pasta aglio e olio he has made her is ready. Her emotional-support dog is waiting in bed for her. Her two kids are upstairs, happy but maybe only pretending to be asleep.
Despite how legends want to be seen, this is probably how we most want to see them. As living proof that a life of ups and downs and hard work and too much work ends with you rich as f**k, sitting next to a violin-shaped pool with the family you’ve created to supplant the one you had to endure.
Michael is recounting a story of the time a group of Bloods came up to Mariah backstage at the Source Awards and he was worried. “Oh, I’m good at diffusing tense situations because of my childhood,” she says. Everyone was scared, but they just wanted to take pictures with her on their disposable camera, no big deal. Despite urging me to leave, he pulls up a chair, and they start swapping memories.
“Oh, remember,” Carey says, lurching into another tale, “Jay [as in Z] has that great story of when we were all there together at the club and Prince was taking so long to perform? Whatever, it’s a long story, but he didn’t go on until like 5 a.m. with Chaka Khan, who was having Hennessy and smoking and still singing like a trumpet, and it was amazing. It was amazing.”
Not everyone was there, but everyone agrees it was amazing.
“By the way, this should have been in the book,” she says.
Yes, everyone agrees, it should have been in the book. There was a lot that could have been in the book.
“There’s so much more dragging that could have been done,” she says. “I really didn’t say everything,” she adds with a smile, leaving us hoping, again, for another piece of the story.
Source: Hejira (UK mix)

[Worstverse]
(Preface)Many professions already have their own horror stories and creepypastas. So this is dedicated to all my colleagues who deserve a scary story of their own.
PART ONE: ACQUISITION
Greetings and salutations my dear readers. I suppose you might be wondering from the title why I would be divulging such things to the masses. Well, because if I didn't what would be the point, right? And besides, in such cases as this, disbelieve is a powerful asset. But for the few of you willing to step into the world of the fantastical and listen to my words, I have much to tell. Please excuse the artistic embellishment, but I didn't get to where I am now by leaving well enough alone.
For starters, I am a craftsman. A bladesmith to be more specific, and a damn fine one at that. I cater only to those willing to pay top dollar for the very best. This detail is important as it is key in the focus of what I set out to accomplish, and accomplish it I did. Now as the title suggested my goal was to actually create a cursed object. But how to even go about that and why, you might ask. Well the simple answer to how is it, by its very nature, cannot be easy. And why? Well why not? I've never considered myself a nice or even good person and don't particularly value human life above any other. But I suppose you could say my motivation was that I was faced with the realization that unlike those at the bottom with nowhere to go but up, I at the top of my craft, had nowhere to go from there.
I needed something that nobody else had ever done. So I began my year of painstaking research. The very first thing I set out to learn was, what is it that makes something cursed or haunted? I came to the conclusion that it was trauma. Now the nature and degree of the effect seemed to be in correlation to the type of trauma. Determining this was a vital step to my process as there is a clear difference between a simple haunting and a genuine curse. You see a haunting is at its core the clinging of a spirit or will or energy or whatever you like to call it to a place or object usually through some form of tragic and untimely death, however a curse is the result of malicious and evil actions and therefore results in a much more potent connection. In addition, the worse the action, the greater the effect it has on the object.
Once I established this the next step was to identify, locate, and procure the various materials I would use in the construction. And not only the raw materials, but the tools as well. As part of my method I decided that as many of the tools I would use as possible would also need to posses these malevolent histories. I took to the internet and frequented any and every site I could find that focused on violent murders. And not the run of the mill murders either, no sir. I was looking for very specific instances in which some element of the murder was both usable in my project and actually obtainable. It is at this point that I should mention that if you have any inclination to replicate my endeavor, you should be prepared to spend a great deal of money on both travel and procurement of these materials. Especially when the situation calls for you to bribe an evidence room guard or two. Their compliance and silence doesn't come cheap and is often the only way to obtain certain items.
As I am a bladesmith the obvious choice for this undertaking was to make the object some kind of large knife or small sword, so the first and most important item on my list was the steel for the blade. Finding a piece of steel with the right composition to make a half decent cutting tool is easy enough mind you. However the difficulty arose in meeting the project specific qualities I required for this unique piece. But after much searching I happened upon a particularly enticing case of a man in the Pacific Northwest who was convicted of multiple homicides and sexual assault charges. The case involves repeated instances of the man luring young women out of the public sight, rendering them unconscious, placing them in his van, then driving them far away to an abandoned lumber yard. It was here that he would assault the women for periods of time ranging from days to weeks before executing them by placing them on the conveyor feet first with their legs tied and crossed together and sending them into the running saw blade. It seems as if he got great satisfaction from watching them shriek and cry as the screaming saw made contact with the bottoms of their feet, then moving up through their crossed legs, their torso, then finally their head. In the end he was charged and convicted of 11 counts of murder, sexual assault, kidnapping, and various lesser charges. However after the trial he confessed to anywhere from 35 to 45 addition counts that remain uncorroborated due to him allegedly disposing of the remains in an industrial woodchipper he kept on site.
The case was perfect and the location of the sawmill was relatively easy to find. Upon my arrival I found that the local authorities had sealed off the entrance but that was a contingency I had planned for and was able to overcome with the bolt cutters I purchased at a small hardware store earlier that day. As I made my way into the mill I began my search for the saw, admittedly apprehensive that the saw he used might be a band saw that would be much less practical for my needs, not to mention considerably harder to move and transport. But after a brief period of searching... Ah! There it sat. A beautiful 30" circular saw blade. As I drew closer it became apparent by the deeply stained surroundings of the fixture that this was the blade I was looking for. Reaching into the small toolbag I brought from the rented U-Haul truck outside I made quick work of removing the large disk from its fixture, with the help of a litte WD-40 to loosen the years of rust that clung to the threads.
After rolling the sawblade the short distance back to the truck and loading it into the cargo hold I began plotting my next acquisition. This would be the remains of a recent homicide by arson a few states down. This case involved several teenagers burning down another child's home that they had been bullying after in took refuge from them in his house after fleeing their attempts at inflicting upon him whatever form of harm they were planning that day. As it turned out the boy's slightly younger sister was in the dwelling at the time as well and they suffered the same fate together. Awful tragedy for them and their parents, happy coincidence for me and my little project. I would used the charred remains as the fuel for the fire in which I would forge the blade. This was a relatively unchallenging albeit tedious and tiresome task that mostly involved shoveling the blackened wood into burlap sacks and chucking them into the back of the truck. I will admit even I felt a cold chill run down my back from time to time during this chore. The energy there was still very fresh and strong, which is why I was so intent on harvesting that one in particular.
Once done I took to a local diner and began locating make next stop. I would need something for the handle so I looked for murders involving something that could serve such a purpose. I first found one such case where a teenage girl became mentally disturbed and beat the child she had been babysitting to death with a wooden softball bat then waited for the parents to return and did the same to them. Unfortunately the murder weapon was never actually recovered. "What a shame" I thought to myself and went on about my search. About an hour later I found a case of a man who used an ax handle to kill his wife and the man he caught her having an affair with, however that didn't quite seem sinister enough so I searched on until... Jackpot.
I couldn't believe my luck when I stumbled across an article about a case involving a middle aged woman who had lured several young children into her home where she then tortured, killed, and butchered them before cooking and eating the remains. To my fortune I was able to learn that a local boutique dealing in the macabre had come into possession of the cutting board she had used in the butcherings.
Before making the trip to investigate the authenticity of the cutting board I did some more digging to see if there was any more usable, ha, "memorabilia" between my location and the destination. After a few dead ends I stumbled upon a case of a man murdering his then pregnat wife with a gas powered nail gun by firing more than a few 16 penny nails into her head and face but not before doing the same to her stomach. "The nails would make perfect pins for the handle" I spoke quietly to myself, but not quietly enought to keep the man in the booth in front of me from giving me a nosey glance back over his shoulder. And as luck would have it the incident took place roughly 2/3 of the way between where I was and where I was headed. The only issue was that, to the best of my knowledge, the nails were still the possession of the local police department as the man was still awaiting trail. Obtaining these wouldn't be as simple as the rest, and most assuredly not as cheap. But this wasn't an opportunity I could let pass me by.
I departed the following morning and arrived at my destination some 8 or so hours later. The next week was spent figuring out exactly which member of the department would be most susceptible to my bribe. I settled on a middle aged fellow we'll call Carl. Carl was a police property clerk and had accumulated some hefty gambling debts. After faking a casual conversation when I "coincidentally" ran into him at a local dive bar, that I then carefully steered toward our jobs in order to cover for my knowledge of his, I lied that I was a building contractor. Then I moved the coversation to our hobbies, which I again lied and told him I liked to collect weird and creepy items, and finally to our personal problems once his intoxication had reached sufficient levels. Once he mentioned that he had some substantial outstanding debts with some not so gentle types I suggested a possible solution to his tribulations. "If you can get me a couple of those murder nails out of evidence I can make all your financial troubles disappear." I offered. "And even grease the wheels with a little extra for your efforts and silence. Just for two little nails that nobody would really even miss, one from the woman's head and one from her stomach, and you're debt free and even a little richer on top of that, whatdaya say?" I pressured. "Oh dear God man, why would anyone in their right mind even want such a thing?" He asked in utter revulsion. "My business is my own." I answered. "I want those two nails and after that you'll have your money and I'll be long gone. Last chance..."
By noon the next day I had the nails in my hand, still crusted in the dull brown of dried blood. I quickly tucked them away into a small pouch which I stashed in the back of the truck with everything else before setting out to my next destination. It's worth mentioning that at this juncture I began to feel a constant sense of unease while in the truck, accompanied by an ever present sensation of wearing an extremely tight fitting shirt that made me uncomfortable and somewhat asphyxiated as I drove, even after putting on the loosest clothing I had packed.
I managed to arrive at the boutique just before closing. The shopkeeper welcomed me casually as I passed through the door, causing a small bell to herald my entry. I wasted no time in telling him what I was there for. A grim expression washed over his face but was in short order replaced by one of what seemed to be relief. "Twenty bucks and it's yours. That damn thing gives me some serious bad vibes and I want it outta here. Should have never bought the thing. Horrible that whole ordeal was." This gave me some confidence that it was the genuine article, but I still had to compare it to the crime scene photos just to be sure. He went into the back of the shop and returned soon after carrying a bundle of scarlet fabric which he proceeded to unravel to reveal the deep black ebony cutting board. I thought to myself that a lady with such refined taste would have made a fine customer in another life, and no sooner did the thought enter my brain the shopkeeper spoke up. "I've got her kitchen knife set too actually, if you want those too. They're actually pretty nice." Curiosity took me and I said I'd consider it, if only to see what kind of cutlery one who owned such a lovely and expensive cutting board would have. He made his way into the back once more and retrieved the knife block.
Before I could catch myself I was laughing maniacally in the middle of the shop, now a look of confusion on the shop keeper's face. In my search for the cutting board it never even occurred to me to investigate what other tools the lady might have used in the crimes, and to my great surprise I immediately recognized the set of knives as my very own work. The coincidence was too much and the laughter erupted out of my control. I knew for a fact she was no customer of mine, so she must have obtained them second hand from an estate sale or as a gift, but they were definitely and unmistakably of my make. "Is-is there a problem?" the shop keeper asked through my laughter. "No, no not at all. Just a very small world we live in." I replied as I calmed myself down to a reasonable state. "I guess I'll take those off your hands as well." I added, since I had got such a good deal on the cutting board I figured I could buy the knife set off him as a small token of my appreciation. "How much?" I inquired. "Take a hundred for all of 'em." He answered. An unexpected anger took me as I growled "ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS?!" His eyes widened in shock. "I-I'm sorry mister. I thought that was fair since they're so pretty but I can go a little lower if you think that's too much..."
I glared at him for a moment before barking "No that's fine. Here." Handing him the total for everything. I collected my purchases together and opened the door with sharp kick causing the bell to clang in alarm as I looked down at the set of kitchen knives I once charged many thousands of dollars for, seething over the thought of them being hocked away for one hundred God damn dollars at this ratty little hole in the wall junk shop.
Once my temper subsided I got back to my wicked little scavenger hunt. I happened across a 2 pound hammer a man used to bludgeon his elderly and disabled parents to death with. I would have to repeat the nails' con to get my hands on it but I knew if would be perfect for forging out the blade so I had to have it. The narrative of obtaining the hammer was , for all intents and purposes, an encore of the acquisition of the nails. There's always someone who needs money and they'll always compromise their self for enough of it.
At this point I was beginning to feel physically ill during the time I spent in the truck with the collection of items. So I elected to abandon my previous idea to accumulate any more tools and to simply use my own instead. I made only one unscheduled stop on my return trip. As I began to make my way back onto the interstate I was stopped by a red light. It was there, in the dark and early morning hours that I witnessed from my seat in the rented truck... what appeared to be two homeless men struggling against one another beneath an overpass. I sat in morbid fascination for several minutes at the empty intersection watching the two do battle until one seemed to wrap a length of cord around the other's neck and proceeded to strangle the life out him.
Once the commotion died down I popped the door of the truck open and made my way across the street. The triumphant vagabond jumped, startled by my presents and the realization that I had witnessed the incident. "It-it was self def-" he started, but I cut him off with a gesture of my hand. Reaching down I untangled the long piece of nylon cord from the dead man's lifeless body. I ran it through my fingers, taking note of the size, thickness, and length. Finding this to be an acceptable addition to the final product which I would wrap around the handle, I rolled it up as I made my way back to the vehicle I had left sitting abandoned at the still desolate traffic light. I opened the back once again and after finding a place for the newest addition, I departed towards my workshop.
PART TWO: CONSTRUCTION
After arriving home I immediately went straight to bed to rest and recover from the prolonged exposure to the atmosphere of the truck and the items it held within. It took me some time to shake the exhaustion but once I did, it was off to work.
I should take this opportunity to clarify that a key component to any real curse is intent. Especially with a project like this where I used multiple objects formed together into one single product. And by intent I mean you have to really want to cause as much pain, misery, and suffering as possible. This came easy to me as I hate, I hate, I hate people. They disgust me. I find the whole lot of them absolutely abhorrent. I want nothing but the worst to befall any one of them at any time. This malice would be the tether or glue that would hold the malevolent energies to the objects as they are cut and shaped and heated and bent. Well of course at the time this was entirely theoretical mind you.
After some contemplation an sketching I decided that I would make something of a short sword in the fashion of the Sumatran adaptation of the Ottoman yataghan. While not overly long they possessed a wicked curve in the shape of an S. This would make the weapon cut extremely well despite its lack of size and weight. I mean just because the thing would be cursed doesn't mean it shouldn't also be functional and practical, right? After drawing out the final shape I took to the shop and began my work.
To start I cut a long section of the circular saw blade I procured from the mill. As I began I immediately noticed the steel was much more difficult to cut than an average saw blade, wearing down several cutting disks to the rim on a task that would normally not use up even one. "A fluke" I thought, as it could have easily been under tempered at the factory where it was made, resulting in a much harder steel than normal for such a tool. But it became apparent that this wasn't the case as I began to forge the rough shape of the blade. The steel would heat much slower than usual and despite being brought to a bright yellow, took a great deal more force to hammer into shape. It was almost as if the steel was resisting the change to its form I was attempting to impose on it. This I found somewhat frustrating as I had only a very limited supply of the charred wood from the burned house, so I had to use it sparingly.
This anomaly continued as I ground the bevels and shaped the handle and even into the quenching process. But the steel slowly gave way to my efforts and took shape. Once the steel component was ready I began to craft the handle. I retrieved the deep black ebony cutting board from the truck, where I had been keeping the rest of the objects to avoid the negative effects they had on me while driving the truck. I started by cutting two separate blocks to attach to either side of the tang(the part that extends from the blade into the hilt for those of you not in the know). But as I did this the teeth of the band saw almost immediately began to dull then erode way. Not only that, the wood began to ooze a deep black, viscous fluid containing swirls of bright crimson red that caused any skin it came into contact with to severely burn and itch.
It took some time to clean away the fluid that had become adhered to the table of my saw, but as it was apparent that this wasn't the tool for the job I took out an osculating saw and a carbide blade used for cutting things too hard for regular steel saw blade such as ceramic tiles. Now with latex medical gloves I made a second attempt at cutting the sinister material. While time consuming my efforts eventually paid off, after wearing down several saw blades and discovering that industrial spill solvent could be used to dilute and clean away the fluid much more easily, I finally had the profile of the handle cut to its rough shape. Following this I proceeded to drill the holes I would use to attach the nails, which would be use to hold the piece of the cutting board in place.
During this process I used some regular nails of the same size from my shop to avoid any unnecessary exposer to the remaining materials. Once the holes were finally drilled through the bleeding wood I brought in the genuine article. After making sure they were a proper fit I began to cut them down to the right length to be pinned flush to the rest of the handle. While not as trying as the circular saw blade, the nails were uncooperative in their own way, working much slower than the mild steel they consisted of rightfully should. I can't say for sure, but as I cut the heads off the top of the nails I thought I could hear the sound of a woman screaming and an infant crying over the metallic whir of the angle grinder. But I half expected to encounter such phenomena going into this endeavor so it had little effect on my progress.
Then began the attaching and shaping of the handle. At this juncture the time I had spent around the weapon began to cause me to once again feel the familiar effects from the truck start to take hold. Everything became considerably more laborious and progress slowed. But I persevered and finished he task at hand. Once that was complete I entered the compartment of the truck one last time to retrieve the cord I had taken from the homeless man's corpse.
Wrapping the handle with the cord was decidedly the easiest part of the entire ordeal and might have been relaxing if not for the feeling of deathly illness hanging over me at the time. Once that was done I put the final sharpened edge on and sat back to look at what I had created. Now this might seem like a pretty quick process because of the writing but rest assured this took several weeks of work due to the materials' unwillingness to cooperate.
PART THREE: THE TEST
As I sat there in my shop I noticed something. The sickness I had felt had lifted, leaving me with an even greater sense of accomplishment and relief. My theory as to why is that perhaps now that it was finished, this thing was truly mine. I had made it through the arduous trial of bringing the sword into being and now it and all the darkness it held answered to me. The curse was mine. It was definitely a severely cursed object, but what affect would it have on a random person? I thought this to myself thinking of how best to evaluate the properties of something as unprecedented as what was surely the most cursed single object in the entire world.
My first test was to remove the blade from the shop and gather the remnants of the items used to create it. I made sure the sword was a significant distance away and then placed the remaining objects in the shop with me. After sitting there for the better part of 30 minutes I concluded that the entirety, not just part, of the negative energies attached to these various materials had transferred to the sword. This meant the final result was already better than I had anticipated. It was definitely evil, but just how evil I had to know.
For the next test I made a modest display and mounted it in my living room. I then invited an acquaintance, who we shall call Jerry, over under the premise of helping me move a couch on account of I had hurt my back lifting a heavy piece of machinery a few days before. As we entered the living room he immediately was drawn to the weapon sitting in wait on its stand. He inched carefully towards it with an inquisitive gaze in his eye. As he reached out to touch the hilt I asked from behind "Like the one huh?" and chuckled as he nearly leapt out of his skin from the scare. "Uh, yeah. Just something about it. Looks kinda different from your usual stuff though." He answered. "Just felt like trying something new. Shake things up you know?" I said attempting to feign friendly conversation. "Touch it if you like."
He reached out and took hold of the handle, picking it up from its display. "It's really nice." he said after examining it for a few moments. "Something about it feels righ-right..." He continued, his face beginning to turn a pale white and look of mild nausea washing across it as he added, "I uh, I think I need to lie down. I don't feel so great." As I reached out to take the blade from his now trembling hand I told him that perhaps it's best if we try to tackle the couch some other time and that he should probably go home and rest. He agreed and left soon after, apologizing for not being of any help. Little did he know just how helpful he had been. I now knew that the sword possessed some form of hypnotic pull that drew people to it and the affect it had on them was not only potent but fast acting. This only served to further arouse my curiosity. I had to know what the prolonged effects of exposure would be.
It was then I had an idea. After a few days Jerry returned to proceed with the relocation of the couch. After a little work and a lot of acting to fake the nonexistent pain I told him about earlier that week it was done. Before he left I handed him a large, flat box containing the sword and told him that it was small token of my appreciation and to open it when he got home. This was partly to test a theory to see if the aluminum foil I had lined the box with would at least lessen the effects of the object held within. Knowing he had several errands to run before he would return home that day I hastened to make my way to his empty house where I proceeded to place small hidden cameras I had purchased at a local electronics shop the day before all around the domicile. Once I had finished I quickly departed before he or his family could return.
I made my way back to my house where I made sure all the camera feeds were up and working properly, then sat and waited patiently for Jerry's return. He walked through the door at about 5:30 that afternoon, his wife and two teenage children had arrived earlier around 4:25. His wife was in the kitchen and his oldest child, a son of around 17, was in the living room watching TV while his youngest, a daughter around 15 had taken to her room upon entering the home and was doing whatever 15 year old girls do alone in their rooms. Now I know what you're probably thinking and the answer is no. I'm a monster, not a pervert. I watched only enough footage to know their locations at any given time. Jerry was the one I was interested in.
I watched as he sat the box down on the table and told his wife about my uncharacteristically generous gift. He opened the box revealing the sword he had been admiring so fervently the other day. He even smiled as he read the note aloud to his wife which said,
"Jerry, I know that you've admired my work since as long as we've known each other. I'm also aware that my work is far from cheap and that your family and their financial needs always have to come first. So I hope you will accept this token of gratitude for helping an injured old man in a time of need. Careful, it's very sharp."
Over the next several days I watched as he would make time to be alone with the thing, sneaking out of bed at night and often retreating to his garage where he would admire and caress the blade in the unlit space. His appearance began to diminish from day to day as well. He went from a healthy, vital man to a man with a visage not too unlike a cancer patient after undergoing months of heavy chemotherapy treatments. I watched in enthrallment as the drama unfolded between him and his wife as she seemingly pleaded with him to go to the hospital to find out the cause of his deteriorating health. It also seemed he was keeping some form of journal on his laptop, possibly containing some insight into what he was going through as the effects took hold. Then things took a rather exciting turn on the 4th night.
After sitting alone in the dark garage for the better part of an hour he lifted up the leg of his shorts and began to make long, wavy cuts up and down his thigh. Blood ran down either side of his bleeding leg and began to pool at his feet. After a few minutes of this he stood and opened the door connecting the garage to the rest of the house and walked through. I followed him on the cameras as he made his way through the home, leaving one bloody footprint as he went. After a moment he arrived at his bedroom door, behind which was his sleeping wife. He slowly opened the door and stepped through. Once inside he stood in silence at the foot of their bed and watched her sleep for about 20 or so minutes before apparently coming to his senses. Realizing the pain in his leg he also noticed the source and the mess it had created. I could almost see his brain working to come up with a believable lie to explain away the bloodstains all over the floor.
I was largely uninterested in the footage that followed for the bulk of the next day, as things didn't seem to pick up until night when everything was quiet and calm. That evening I sat down at my computer monitor and began to observe as usual. Things went on as they had the past few nights up until everyone had fallen asleep. Without warning Jerry slipped out of bed and went straight for the blade sitting on its display in his office once again. I shifted in my chair at the sight of activity. However this time he did not go to the garage but instead walked back down the hall and into the son's room where he stood for only a moment before lifting the blade high above his head and bringing it back down into the middle of his son's face. Then again he raised it and cut down into the now dead body lying in the bed, moving lower and lower down the corpse with each stroke, removing arms, spilling intestines, and severing legs as he went. By the time he was done the bed was covered in the dismembered and almost unrecognizable body of what used to be a teenage boy.
The next room he entered was his own where again his wife slept peacefully, unaware of the carnage unfolding in her own home. This time he did not hesitate in his actions. He did however start from the bottom up. The first swing took off both of her feet causing her to awake in pain and terror as the next swing landed near her knees, cutting one completely in half and the other only the end of the blade made contact leaving the footless calf dangling from a few uncut muscles and tendons. The next stroke landed on her pelvic region causing her insides to flood the bed and mix with the blood already soaking into the fabric. The next swing took both her hands and sank into her chest as she held them up in a futile attempt to protect herself from her possessed husband, followed by several more chops to her face that brought silence and stillness back to the room. All except for the daughter who was woken by the horrific screams of her dying mother.
She stood in the doorway paralyzed by fear at the scene in front of her eyes. A small peep signaled her presence causing the possessed man, who she only hours ago new as her father, to snap his bloodstained face over his should in her direction. With little time to process the situation, Jerry wheeled around, marching towards her in a most predatory of fashions before one clean swipe of the razor sharp instrument caused the two halves of the frightened girl to softly bounce of the side of the doorframe as they fell to the floor.
Jerry's next action was to immediately place the tip of the blade up to his open eye before running full speed into the wall at the other end of the long hallway, driving the entire length of the thing through his head. I watched wide eyed, one hand which I hand not notice had risen to cover my mouth that was now hanging open in shock and awe, as he fell to the ground joining his family in a grim death.
I only allowed myself a moment to take everything in before snapping back to my senses. I snatched up a bag of tools I had ready just in case and made haste to the scene. Getting in was easy as he had left the door unlocked. I had no need to be quiet, just quick. I gathered every one of the hidden cameras and placed them in my bag before retrieving the murder weapon. It didn't occur to me until this point that the murder weapon would still have to be accounted for in the investigation that would follow. I made my way into the garage and removed an old machete he had hanging on the peg board with the rest of his tools. I groaned as I noticed the edge was far too dull to inflict the wounds that would be found upon closer inspection of the bodies, so I hurriedly snatched up a bastard file and worked the edge into something feasibly sharp enough to cause such damage.
As I made my way out of the garage I glimpsed into the son's room, noticing the first cut had landed dead center on his mouth. "The fucking teeth..." I complained to myself. I then slipped into the room to examine the remains just to make sure, and I could in fact see tiny fragments of broken teeth strewn over the pillow where his head once rested. "God damn it all!" I hissed to myself, taking a screwdriver out of my bag to dent the otherwise pristine edge of the machete before making sure to cover the thing in his blood before doing the same with the wife and other child. I then made my way to Jerry where I removed my project from his skull before reinserting the machete into the empty cavity. This took a little effort as the blade of the sword was noticeably narrower than the blade of the machete, but with a hard shove the tip popped out the back of his head and sunk in the rest of the way with no trouble.
Taking one last pass to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything I crept back out into the night and then back the comfort and safety of my own home, but not before making sure to copy and delete all of his most recent journal entries from his laptop. All in all I would say that even as of now this undertaking has been a huge success. Causing noticeable deterioration in health, appearance, and mental stability in the first day and possessed a man to brutally murder his entire family then himself by the fifth, those are results far past anything I could have hoped for. But I decided to take this even farther. As of now I've put the sword out into circulation and after getting the idea from Jerry's journal, have been tracking the sword's progress online. I'll be sure to keep you all updated with the accounts of these incidents caused by my little experiment as I find them and compile the relevant information. Which shouldn't be too hard as the thing tends to leave a very easy trail to follow if you know what to look for.
Until next time my dear readers.

Countdown to Kickoff 2020: Portland Timbers

Basic Info:

Club Name: Portland Timbers
Location: Portland, Oregon
Stadium: Providence Park. Beautiful timelapse of the recent renovations.
Head Coach: Giovanni Savarese (3rd year)
Captain: Diego Valeri
CEO/Majority Owner: Merritt Paulson
USL Affiliate: Timbers 2
Kits:

• Primary: 2019 Home Release
  
• Secondary: 2020 Away Release
  

2019 in Review

Final Standings: 14-13-7 (W-L-D), 49 pts, +3 GD, 6th in the West
In one word, the 2019 Portland Timbers season was draining. It was an endurance test for the players. It was an endurance test for even the most ardent supporters. And it was certainly an endurance test for a Front Office that invested serious capital into organizational infrastructure. Bookended by snowy affairs in the Rocky Mountains, a year filled with tantalizing potential melted away, leaving a passionate (some might say capricious) fanbase searching for explanations. So, what went wrong?
Well, it was always going to be an uphill battle from the opening kick. Starting with the coldest game in MLS history in Colorado, the Timbers faced a daunting 12-match road trip to accommodate the impressive renovations to Providence Park’s East stand. After accumulating 1 pt from the first six matches, including blow out losses to both FC Cincinnati (!) and then-winless San Jose, the fanbase collectively smashed the panic button entering a match against ex-coach Caleb Porter and his Columbus Crew. However, for the next few months, we witnessed a different team and a different mentality. Three consecutive quality victories against Columbus, Toronto, and RSL brought the team back from the abyss. And a subsequent win against upstart Philadelphia saw Portland finish its road marathon at a respectable 14 points.
Suddenly, the narrative flipped. Pundits consistently listed the Timbers at the top of their power rankings, and with 17 of the final 22 matches at one of the best home-field advantages in MLS, it seemed the positive momentum would prevail indefinitely. More importantly though, the Timbers had found their final piece to the puzzle: an elite, ruthless, and fiery DP striker in Brian Fernandez. Fresh off an impressive campaign with Necaxa in Liga MX, the Argentine became the first player in history to score in five consecutive regular-season games to open an MLS career. His clinicality and intensity raised the level of the squad, leading Steve Clark to don the classic Michael Myers mask from Halloween, declaring Providence Park as a “House of Horrors” for the opponent.
But as it turned out, the team never truly reacclimated to the friendly confines of its home pitch. After four months (incl. preseason) away from home, the squad’s lethal counter-attacking style was far more suited for road matches which provided no impetus to play attractive soccer. Away victories at elite opponents including NYCFC, Seattle, and LAFC provided a stark contrast to disheartening home performances against the likes of Colorado, Orlando, and 10-man Chicago. And soon, the atmosphere off-the-field began to match the team’s sudden struggles on the pitch.
Political viewpoints aside, the Iron Front protests and Diego Valeri’s contract impasse ignited an already contentious relationship between the Timbers Army and FO. Meanwhile, as the squad racked up disappointing home results due to uninspired offensive play, home attendance began to waver more so than years past. While the home sell-out streak remains to this day, the increased number of empty seats in Providence Park was a pretty blunt indication of increased apathy towards the organization.
And then, there was the cherry on top. After missing consecutive matches due to a reported “stomach bug,” it became pretty clear Brian Fernandez was not the same player he was in the early summer. With a complicated and somber family history, Fernandez had struggled with substance abuse issues in the past but seemed to be on the path to full recovery during recent years. However, in October, Fernandez entered the league’s Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program, and just as his story arc in green-and-gold faded to black, the Timbers season finished with a whimper. Jefferson Savarino’s 87th-minute goal in snowy Utah knocked the Timbers out of Cup contention. Eleven months following an exciting run to MLS Cup, Portland entered the 2020 offseason weary, drained, and searching for a new beginning.

The Coach

Giovanni Savarese
I expected 2019 to provide more clarity on Giovanni Savarese’s coaching aptitude, but as I sit here one year later, I’m still left with more questions than answers. Gio’s passion and fervor was a refreshing juxtaposition to Caleb Porter’s often smug demeanor, but his far more conservative style still ruffles the feathers of fans who yearn for the days of “Porterball.” While Savarese implemented a high-pressing, dynamic, and open style during his time at the Cosmos, he has yet to find similar success doing so in the Rose City. The past two seasons have exhibited nearly the same progression: start the season trying to play pressing-style soccer, get beat badly, and then resort to a conservative, counter-attacking approach.
The truth of the matter is the conservative style fits the Portland Timbers. When the defense is solid, Diego Valeri and Sebastian Blanco are talented enough to win the game on the counter by themselves. However, this tactical inflexibility is essentially the sole on-field contributor for why the team struggled so mightily down the stretch. When teams packed it in and eliminated the possibility of counter-attacks, Portland could not break down the opposition, resorted to launching an MLS record number of crosses, and got scorched on counters going the other way. A taste of their own medicine if you will.
In 2020, Savarese has no excuse. There’s no road trip to start the season, he has a loaded arsenal of complimentary attacking weapons, and now it’s abundantly clear the Timbers must learn how to control games from the front foot. An identity is useful, but flexibility is a requirement to be great. The club wants to (has to) win now, and they’ve invested significantly into personnel and infrastructure to do so. Now, it’s up to Savarese to lead the team to silverware.

Departures

Brian Fernandez (ST): This one hurts. There are no two ways about it. Fernandez truly convinced GM Gavin Wilkinson and TD Ned Grabavoy that he was past his struggles, but unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be the case. As Wilkinson stated in The Athletic, “if we could go back and do it again, we wouldn’t have done it,” adding “what I will say is the word fraud exists for a reason.” Rumors suggest Necaxa covered up a failed drug test, and MLS is currently launching a lawsuit to help the club recoup the transfer fee. While Wilkinson suggests Fernandez was a bust, the truth is he scored 15 goals in ~25 games in all comps, showing a ruthlessness in front of goal that rivaled the Martinez’s and Ruidiaz’s of the league. As people who have met him can attest, he’s a vibrant and kind individual regardless of the fact he continues to face difficult obstacles off the field. It's just such a disappointment that it didn’t all come together, and I pray for his health and safety.
Zarek Valentin (RB): This one hurts too. Zarek was a staple of the community, someone who embraced Portland as his home, and was as approachable as any professional athlete. With initiatives like wearing a rainbow ribbon in his hair to fundraise for homeless LGBT+ youth, Zarek was an ideal steward for the club and community. With our lack of fullback depth, leaving him unprotected in the expansion draft was far from a popular decision - one that strained an already frayed relationship between the Front Office and some fans. That said, as amazing as Zarek is, his lack of athleticism was starting to catch up to him. He even admitted some struggles down the stretch, and as more talented/athletic wingers enter the league, his minutes might soon reflect it. Zarek’s versatility, eccentricity, and civic involvement will certainly be missed though. Houston, you’ve got a great dude.
Claude Dielna (CB): The most puzzling move of 2019, it didn’t take an acute observer to recognize that Dielna struggled in MLS. Wilkinson and Grabavoy took a one-year flier on Dielna to be the 4th-stringer, and the outcome was fairly predictable. He possesses a silky left foot which allows him to pick sharp passes out of the back, but he can’t run, can’t jump, and can’t defend 1v1. All of those attributes are pretty essential requirements for playing CB in any league, so it’s no surprise to see the organization not renew his contract. In the end, I wouldn’t suggest Dielna self-immolated like many horrific Timbers CBs of yesteryear (see McKenzie, Raushawn), but I highly doubt anyone will be pining for his return.
Foster Langsdorf (ST): Langsdorf may be used as an example of a Homegrown the Timbers failed to move through the ranks, but letting him go makes sense (unfortunately.) In a 2019 season essential for his development, he failed to make any significant impact at the USL level, and at 24, he would’ve entered the 2020 campaign in the exact spot he did the previous two seasons. Despite some clever finishes in the 2018 USL season, he’s not a legitimate option for the first team in this day in age - especially when similarly-aged strikers Felipe Mora, Jaroslaw Niezgoda, and Jeremy Ebobisse boast far more developed skillsets.
Modou Jadama (CB/RB): Jadama made two total appearances for the first team over two seasons, including one start at RB at Montreal in 2019. To be frank, he didn’t particularly shine as an MLS-caliber player during that time, so his opportunity to cement himself in the organization’s plans came and went. Now at Atlanta United 2, I think he’ll be a good fit for a full-time USL position, although we probably could have used CB depth with Bill Tuiloma’s injury.
Kendall McIntosh (GK): McIntosh was an undersized goalkeeper whose frame and athleticism is reminiscent of the likes of Nick Rimando. For the most part, he was a career T2 netminder that was far too raw in some areas to mount a challenge against experienced keepers like Jeff Attinella and Steve Clark. Now a member of the Red Bulls via the Re-Entry Draft, I doubt McIntosh finds many more minutes outside of the USL, but he seemed like a good dude and we all wish him the best.

2020 Outlook:

So, where does that leave us for the 2020 season? Well, pretty close to the same spot we found ourselves last year. In the preceding two seasons, it was clear the Timbers possessed enough talent to capture silverware, yet surpassing the final hurdle proved to be too much. As a result, continuity in terms of roster management remains among the league’s most stable. Ultimately, Portland took the field March 3 in Colorado with 10 of the 11 starters from MLS Cup the previous December, and this season, the only departure considered a surefire starter was Brian Fernandez.
However, the main difference in 2020 comes down to the acquisitions. The Timbers FO utilized the abnormally long break to load up with an arsenal of talent, providing a stark divergence from the quiet transfer window in 2019. As much as I want to compliment the FO for its hard work this offseason, acquiring fresh blood was essential. Key pieces of the core including Larrys Mabiala, Diego Chara, Sebastian Blanco, and Diego Valeri are all exiting their prime window, and the Timbers must capitalize before that window slams shut. Consequently, four of the five names you’ll see listed in the acquisitions section below were brought in to have an immediate impact and elevate an already talented squad.
As a result, in terms of pure on-paper talent, this is a Top 5 caliber MLS team. Whether Savarese can coalesce that talent into a functioning, dynamic, and successful unit is an entirely different story however. It honestly feels like a boom-or-bust type season, and I’m worried about how they’ll navigate the natural roller-coaster swings that MLS’s parity generates. So, I’ll leave you with this: if the Timbers figure out how to maintain defensive structure without resorting to a conservative shell, they’ll be one of the best teams in the league. If not, all bets are off.

Acquisitions:

Jarosław Niezgoda (ST): The Polish DP doesn’t have to single-handedly replace Brian Fernandez’s goal contributions, but make no mistake about it, the Timbers brought Niezgoda in to make an immediate and profound impact on the scoresheet. At only 24, Jarek arrives with a high pedigree having notched double-digit goals in multiple seasons for one of Poland’s powerhouses in Legia Warsaw. Ultimately, it makes sense European clubs like Bordeaux and Torino were sniffing around the striker, as he’s quite mobile for his size, can finish well with both feet, and is clever with his movements inside the box. And say what you will about the Ekstraklasa, it has a strange knack for producing efficient goalscorers, including Niezgoda’s Legia predecessor Nemanja Nikolic.
However, there is a massive catch: Niezgoda has struggled with injuries throughout his career. In a league famous for physical play, and on a team that has experienced its fair share of injury-riddled seasons, Jarek’s fitness is a legitimate concern. While his congenital heart issues seem to be held in check, Legia fans are quick to mention “he's made of glass, and it's hard to keep him in shape for the whole season.” The Timbers’ physio staff will have their work cut out for them to keep Niezgoda on the pitch and scoring goals.
Note: Niezgoda has yet to feature in preseason due to the recovery timeline from a heart ablation procedure during his medical. We likely won’t see him in the XI for the first few weeks of 2020.
Felipe Mora (ST): Niezgoda’s injury-checkered past is an important factor for why Mora’s arrival is such a critical addition. The 26-year-old Chilean seemingly fell into the Timbers lap in a series of fortuitous circumstances, as they acquired him on a TAM loan deal from Pumas in Liga MX. Normally, Mora would be a DP caliber acquisition, and in fact, he was considered a serious target for the final DP slot last year before the club opted for Fernandez. However, after falling out of favor, Pumas were willing to let him go in a manner that accommodated Portland’s limited remaining budget space. Mora provides a divergent style from Niezgoda’s channel-running and Ebobisse’s hold-up ability. He operates on a true poacher’s instinct, and his industrious approach will provide a complementary presence to any of the other strikers.
Dario Župarić (CB): If there’s one offseason acquisition that is more critical to the team's success than the others, Dario Župarić is that guy. Throughout the Timbers MLS history, CB has easily been their most troublesome spot, and they’ve yet to replace Liam Ridgewell’s contributions since his departure last year. Say what you will about Liam’s off-the-field persona: his magnetism, leadership, organizational skills, and distribution were undoubtedly influential to the club’s performance.
Župarić, for lack of a better statement, is essentially the true Ridgewell replacement. At 27-years-old, the Croatian arrives with 90+ matches under his belt at Pescara in Italy and Rijeka in Croatia, a club that has already produced productive MLS players like Héber and Damir Kreilach. Early reports in training regard him as “smooth and confident,” and even if that confidence has gotten the better of him occasionally, those characteristics exemplify why Gio had never received “more messages from friends saying you’ve brought in a very good player.” In the end though, the pressure is on Dario to perform on the pitch. MLS athleticism poses a unique challenge, and there’s little flexibility to compensate for any struggles. His adjustment to MLS must be quick.
Yimmi Chara (RM): Recognize the last name? In a courtship that has lasted as long as the Timbers MLS era itself, Wilkinson finally brought the youngest Chara brother to the Rose City. Acquired as a DP from Atletico Mineiro, there is concern about whether Yimmi’s G+A output will justify the reported $6 million transfer fee. Throughout his career, he’s never been the type of player to light up the scoresheet, but it’s difficult to dispossess him and he provides lightning-quick pace that this roster lacks. With multiple attacking options, I honestly don’t anticipate much pressure to fill the stat sheet, and his familial connection to the organization should facilitate a more seamless transition. Plus, it’s difficult enough for the opposition to face one Chara - it’ll certainly be a pain in the ass to confront two.
Blake Bodily (LM): The HG left-footer is a fairly highly-regarded prospect coming out of the Pac-12, and he showed flashes of quality during his time at T2 a few years ago. With the depth on the wings, I can’t imagine he’ll see much of any first-team minutes. I could be wrong, especially if things go south for any reason, but let’s revisit this signing a year or two from now.

A word on everyone else:

Goalkeepers:
Steve Clark (GK): Without a doubt, Clark was the surprise player of 2019. Boasting the highest save percentage and second-lowest GAA in the league, Clark made numerous highlight-reel saves after taking over for Jeff Attinella in late April. While the occasional mental lapse defined much of his career up to this point, the 33-year-old was nearly flawless in all phases of play last season. However, there’s legitimate concern that this outstanding form is not replicable throughout the next campaign. After Attinella’s regression to the mean following a career year, one can understand why the Front Office might have been apprehensive to give him a sizable pay raise - even if his performances warranted it. That said, Clark’s got the new deal in his pocket and will certainly be the starter opening day vs Minnesota.
Jeff Attinella (GK): As highlighted above, few Timbers had a more ill-fated 2019 campaign than Jeff Attinella. After a torrid 2018 season, Attinella’s performances were marred by poor decision after poor decision until his year concluded with season-ending shoulder surgery. You have to feel for the guy too, as for the first time in his career, he entered an MLS regular season as the unquestioned starter. We’ll see how he recovers from the shoulder injury, but if Clark’s consistency remains and Aljaž Ivačič shows promise, I wouldn’t be shocked if the Timbers move him while he still has some value.
Aljaž Ivačič (GK): If there’s a Timber who had a more disastrous 2019 than Jeff Attinella though, it’s probably Aljaž Ivačič. The 26-year-old Slovenian was acquired last offseason to be the goalkeeper of the future, but a significant leg surgery last February took him out of team activities for most of the year. When he did return with T2 in late summer, things did not look great to say the least. It is undoubtedly difficult to adapt to a new country, but Ivačič’s struggles were worryingly apparent. Most of his goals conceded for T2 looked similar to this, where he was either in the wrong position, extremely hesitant to come off his line, or strikingly late to react to the opponent. These are fundamental issues that can hopefully be chalked up to rust and then addressed with a full preseason. If not, Aljaž might go down as one of the worst signings in club history.
Defenders:
Jorge Moreira (RB): Moreira possesses the talent to be the best RB in the league, but sporadically found himself a liability last season. After years spent with Argentine powerhouse River Plate, the 30-year-old Paraguayan was naturally inclined to push up the pitch since his teams had often dominated the game’s flow. As a result, the Timbers’ conservative style and league’s athleticism caught him off guard, as he had an unfortunate propensity to be out of position early in 2019. However, he mostly adjusted over the course of the year, and his power, crossing ability, and dynamism are crucial to the team.Even with the occasional poor clearance, Moreira is a lockdown starter and few RBs in MLS have his offensive weaponry and pedigree. His loan only lasts until June 30 however, though I’d fully expect the Front Office to lock him down on a permanent deal.
Update: the Timbers right-side defense has been tragic this preseason, and much of that has to do with Moreira’s play. He’ll have to re-adjust or else he’ll revert back to being a liability again
Larrys Mabiala (CB): With his pearly-white smile, cool demeanor, and commanding aerial ability, the big French-Congolese CB is one of the most respected players in the Timbers’ locker room. In a position that is a perennial revolving door of underperforming wreckage, Mabiala has been the one “written-in-ink” starter since mid-2017, and his veteran savvy is integral to the squad’s success. But at age 32, Larrys’ value is not embodied by his individual qualities but more so the partnership he forms with Župarić. His physical presence will always be vital to an otherwise undersized team, however, he lacks the turn of pace and distribution ability that would place him among the elite CBs in MLS. As a result, Larrys and Dario must discover how to paper over each other’s weaknesses by performing to their unique capabilities: Župarić covers ground well and can initiate attacking movements while Mabiala handles physical strikers and cleans up loose balls in the 18. In the end, his consistency will be as influential as any player on the roster. If for any reason he performs below the norm, there is simply not enough quality depth behind him to overcome it.
Bill Tuiloma (CB): Tuiloma is not spectacular by any means, but he’s an ideal player to provide sporadic minutes. The 24-year-old Kiwi is cheap, versatile, and possesses enough technical quality to score the odd banger. It’s a shame a calf injury will rule him out for the next few weeks, as the team could use his flexibility for spot duty at CB, RB, and even defensive midfield. If he recovers fully and Župarić struggles to adapt to the league’s athleticism, expect him to mount a challenge for starting minutes.
Julio Cascante (CB): The Costa Rican CB is best described as a high-ceiling, low-floor player whose ceiling continues to lower year after year. As far as backup CBs go, he’s probably adequate, but the guy went from a fringe national-teamer to virtually off-the-radar since his arrival in Portland. Though his height and build forge a formidable aerial presence, he’s yet to resolve occasional mental lapses and improve his subpar distribution. But Julio’s most maddening characteristic is his inconsistency. Perhaps the best thing you can say about a Cascante performance is that you didn’t notice him. Unfortunately, he tends to stick out for all the wrong reasons. Maybe a little more familiarity with the league will help the 26-year-old raise his level in 2020. I’m not exceedingly hopeful though.
Jorge Villafaña (LB): El Sueño hasn’t been the same player since his departure to Santos Laguna after MLS Cup 2015. Still an excellent crosser, Villafaña really struggled with pacey wingers towards the beginning of the season, although there are some whispers he was often gutting through minor knocks. Even with an uptick of form over the course of the campaign, there is legitimate concern he’s lost a step and will be a liability in the backline. I love the man as much as the next guy, but I’d say the uneasiness is valid. Let’s hope he proves us all wrong.
Marco Farfan (LB): The lack of confidence in Villafaña would be less of an issue if Zarek Valentin were still suiting up in the green-and-gold because Marco Farfan is as fragile as a potato chip. The HG LB is not the most athletic individual, but his technical quality is probably proficient enough to play at this level. Farfan still has to evolve as a 1v1 defender, though he’ll certainly get looks this year if he can manage to stay healthy.
Note: We still need a backup RB. It could be former NYRB, IMFC, and Dynamo player Chris Duvall. 20-year-old Venezuelan Pablo Bonilla is another option, but he’s at T2 for the meantime.
Midfielders:
Diego Valeri (CAM): When all is said and done, I hope MLS fans and media take a moment to appreciate just how good Diego Valeri was. Since 2015, we’ve witnessed impressive names take home the Landon Donovan MVP award including Giovinco, Villa, Josef, and Vela. Sandwiched in between those names you’ll find Diego Valeri. Only the ninth MLS player to reach the elusive 70G, 70A Club, Valeri took the Timbers from a hapless expansion side to a perennial playoff contender. And from my admittedly biased perspective, I don’t think he gets enough credit for doing so. But don’t take it from me, take it from Albert Rusnak, who accurately captures the true essence of the Maestro in this interview. For the miracles performed on the pitch, his importance and presence in the community are just as admirable.
However, times are changing for Valeri, and it’s best exemplified by the fact we almost lost him over a contract dispute this offseason. By taking a TAM deal, Diego not only affirmed his commitment to the organization but allowed them to make moves to best ensure he doesn’t retire with only a single major MLS title to his name. I’d expect the Timbers staff to exercise more load management with him this campaign, but by no means does that change his status as a pillar of the club and community. Build the statue.
Sebastian Blanco (LM/RM): Sebastian Blanco is one of those guys who never seems to score a bad goal. The fiery Argentine may not be the face of the franchise off the pitch, but the decision to extend his DP contract over Valeri is a hint towards Blanco’s importance on the field. After posting his second consecutive double-digit assist campaign, Blanco’s quality across all attacking midfield positions is unquestioned. That said, 2020 is a pivotal season for the Timbers’ oldest Designated Player. Soon to be 32, the clock is ticking on Blanco’s heyday, and he’ll certainly aspire to outperform 2019’s underwhelming tally of six goals from 106 shot attempts. Now surrounded by a wealth of complimentary attacking pieces though, I’d expect a rejuvenated Seba come March. Bet the over on six goals.
Diego Chara (CDM): If there’s anyone who can conquer the inevitability of fathertime, Diego Chara is the guy. Soon to be 34-years-old, Chara’s performance metrics — involving areas such as speed and distance covered — reached all-time highs last year. His importance to the club over the past decade cannot be overstated, and we were all ecstatic to see him finally partake in an MLS All Star Game last season. The Colombian possesses a pillowy first touch, an immense soccer IQ, and a fearless presence in the middle of the park, and there simply will be no replacing him when he finally does choose to retire. But to be honest with you, I think he’s still got a few more Best XI caliber seasons in him. He just ages like a fine wine.
Andrés Flores (CM): Hell, I’m just gonna copy and paste exactly what I wrote last year because it’s still just as applicable. Andres Flores is like a Toyota Camry - solid if unspectacular. He doesn't have the sexy style that will garner all the attention, but when push comes to shove and you need to get from point A to point B, he’ll do the job (at a very low price too!). Look for him to assist in spot-duty once he returns from injury, but his most important contributions will likely be found in the little things off the pitch.
Cristhian Paredes (CM): At only 21 years of age, the full Paraguayan international started over 30 matches the past two seasons and has also emerged as the surefire midfield partner to Diego Chara. After a 2018 campaign that saw a significant adjustment period, Paredes looked far more composed in 2019, adding late-runs into the box into his arsenal midway through last season. However, no longer on loan from Club America, Paredes will face more organizational pressure to be a day-in, day-out starter this campaign. His ranginess and ability to break up play are unquestioned, but he needs to become a bit cleaner on the ball and more confident playing out of tight spaces. That said, there’s a reason the club has invested more capital into the promising midfielder: he has the potential to be a significant contributor for years to come.
Marvin Loría (LM/RM): In the next few seasons, I’d wager Marvin Loría will become the poster child for the Timbers youth development structure. With a comparatively underdeveloped and shallow Homegrown talent pool, Portland picks up guys like Loría out of foreign youth programs to develop through the Timbers pipeline. The 22-year-old Costa Rican international showed significant promise last season, and he can play a true inverted winger role - a unique style in terms of this roster. While he may see time at LM and CAM, I love him cutting in from the right, as he can deliver bangers like this and allow Jorge Moreira to bulldoze forward. At a league minimum salary, Loría provides the cheap and talented depth which makes this attack’s outlook so promising. I can’t wait to see what strides he makes this season (once he returns from an underpublicized/undisclosed injury).
Andy Polo (RM): Not many people in the Timbers fanbase understand why Andy Polo is still on the roster, let alone competing for starting minutes. In 2,860 MLS minutes, the Peruvian winger has only managed a dismal one goal and three assists - a statline that is considerably worse than ineffective wingers of the past including Kalif Alhassan, Sal Zizzo, and Franck Songo’o. He’s not an outright liability, and occasionally puts in a shift defensively, but he essentially exists solely to occupy space. Now entering his third season, Polo’s best string of matches came as the third CM in a 4-3-2-1 just before the 2018 World Cup. He’s since gathered looks in preseason as a #8 in a 4-3-2-1 and showed flashes but is still incomplete. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tomas Conechny (CF/LM/RM): The 21-year-old Argentine enters the 2020 campaign a relative unknown, and though the club thought enough of him to exercise his full-time purchase option from San Lorenzo, his fit on the squad has yet to be fully discerned. Rumored to be one of the better headers-of-the-ball on the team, he showed occasional creative sparks in late-game situational appearances but has yet to prove he deserves starting minutes. We hear quotes akin to “he doesn’t yet know how good he can be,” but it still isn’t obvious that a particular position suits him well or if he even possesses a skillset that allows him to be a difference-maker at this level. For all intents and purposes, he’s likely to end up Diego Valeri’s understudy even if Conechny has yet to show the same precision and danger at a playmaking second-forward role. As a result, it remains to be seen if the high-rated prospect grows into a significant piece of the puzzle or if his lack of positional clarity ultimately hampers his development.
Dairon Asprilla (RM): Dairon Asprilla plays at an all-star caliber level if one of two things are true: the Timbers are on the verge of postseason elimination or he’s playing on T2. If neither of those two things are true, he’s often more useless than a turn signal on a BMW. Some wonder if he possesses compromising pictures of Wilkinson or MP, otherwise there’s very little to explain why he’s one of the longest-tenured Timbers - especially considering he’s been in-and-out of the doghouse almost every year. Word out of training suggests he’s been one of the best players in camp, but we’ve been down this road before - if it’s not Oct. or Nov., Asprilla often looks lost on the pitch.
Sidenote: 99% of Dairon’s shot attempts get thwarted due to his foolishly long windup, but when he does get a hold of one, they stay hit.
Eryk Williamson (CM): The HG midfielder (by way of D.C.) found starting minutes in spot appearances last fall, and he looked competent if unremarkable. For T2, Williamson often occupied more advanced positions, but I think he projects best as a ball-shuttling #8 in this squad. In particular, I can see him fitting into Andy Polo’s old role as a CM next to Chara and/or Paredes in a 4-3-2-1, as his passing and combination play provide a diverse look from the other two. Overall, Williamson finds himself in a decent situation to get game action this year, and I’m interested to see how he develops and grows in confidence in 2020.
Renzo Zambrano (CDM): Another international brought through the T2 pipeline, Zambrano is essentially Diego Chara’s backup at the #6. Since George Fochive left following the 2015 season, the Timbers have struggled to find a suitable defensive backup in the central midfield. Renzo is now that guy. The 25-year-old Venezuelan appeared in 10 matches last season and struggled immensely in fixtures against Colorado and Atlanta, but showed flashes of positivity in thrashings of Houston and Vancouver. 2020 will require more consistency from Zambrano who doesn’t possess the same physicality or power as Chara - but then again, few do. As a result, if I were Savarese, I’d try to mold Zambrano into a fulcrum/anchor type midfielder in the form of a Uri Rosell or Scott Caldwell. He’s a capable passer, and if he simplifies his game to shield the backline, he’ll be an asset to the team. If not, he’ll likely over-extend himself, and his midfield partner will be forced to work more tirelessly to maintain solid defensive shape. Renzo is likely the first option off the bench whenever Chara or Paredes are unavailable, so his growth is critical to the team’s success this year.
Forwards:
Jeremy Ebobisse (ST): Since Niezgoda and Mora’s arrival, some fans and media have denounced the organization for burying the 23-year-old American on the depth chart and hindering his development. Here’s why I think that’s an overly-sensationalized viewpoint:

1. As Wilkinson has correctly identified, Ebobisse will miss a good chunk of the early season for Olympic qualification, and with Niezgoda’s injury history, there needs to be other legitimate options to start upfront (i.e. not Dairon Asprilla).
   
2. In 2018, Ebobisse entered the season ‘stuck’ behind two DP-type strikers in Fanendo Adi and Samuel Armenteros. Guess who emerged on top? Ebobisse. There will be multiple competitions, two-striker formations, and rotations that allow him to earn quality minutes.
   
3. This idea that the organization is almost trying to sabotage his development is an outrageous claim. Ebobisse was the only player on the squad to play in every match last season and only finished behind Chara, Blanco, and Valeri in terms of total minutes played. Granted, he played a fair few matches at LW (not ideal, but he wasn’t outright terrible), but the team did have its best stretch of success with him and Fernandez on the pitch together.
   

But the one factor people must acknowledge is this: Ebobisse still hasn’t developed the it factor that other MLS strikers have - at least not yet. When Fernandez arrived, his ruthlessness was a stark contrast to Ebobisse’s often less-goal-hungry runs and occasional lack of clarity in the final third. Jeremy is a decent finisher, even with a few missed sitters, but he’s still not consistent enough with the direct runs off the shoulder that separate good from great. He’ll hopefully continue to develop a wider range of skills, but he’s not yet the guy to put this team over the top.
Predicted Starting XI:
Primarily: 4-2-3-1
Other likely options: 4-3-2-1 or 4-4-2
Best Case Scenario:
A top playoff seed and a challenge for either the Supporter’s Shield or MLS Cup. Savarese effectively implements tactical flexibility, Niezgoda and Mora combine for 20+ goals, and Cristhian Paredes takes the next step forward in his development. While Župarić locks down the defense, one of Valeri or Blanco mounts a Best XI campaign, and Diego Chara makes a second consecutive All-Star Game appearance. Sprinkle in a Cascadia Cup alongside a harmonious relationship between the Front Office and Timbers Army, and you have a damn successful year.
Worst Case Scenario:
Pretty much the opposite of what you see above. Niezgoda can’t stay healthy while the core pieces’ form collectively falls off a cliff. Those in the Army who hold a personal vendetta against Merritt Paulson blow a trivial issue out of proportion causing a full-on revolt from the supporter’s group. Savarese proves to be an average coach with exploitable flaws, and the team fails to qualify for the playoffs in a competitive Western Conference. Significant spending, no tangible results. A wasted year.
Realistic Scenario:
Well, either of those two scenarios could qualify as realistic. But like all Timbers seasons, it’s most realistic to be somewhere in between. There’ll be stretches of outright panic, and there’ll be other times where we all convince ourselves the Timbers will win MLS Cup. Some of the signings hit: let’s go with Župarić - while other signings underwhelm due to extenuating circumstances: probably Niezgoda (and his glass skeleton). The team finishes in the middle of the pack - a team that no one wants to face in October - but one that is equally liable to beat themselves.
Prediction:
Even for someone as pessimistic as I am, I won’t predict the worst-case scenario. Nevertheless, I can’t shake the discouraging feeling that the Timbers will squander its immense talent again. A disappointing 6th or 7th place finish is in store after another taxing roller-coaster season. However, I’ll go out on a limb to say Portland does win a Cascadia Cup or USOC - some sort of silverware that convinces everybody the obvious flaws can be overcome in 2021. Blanco has a great 2020 season. The other pieces show flashes brilliance, yet can’t quite string together enough consistency to let the attack fire on all cylinders. Savarese will keep his job but enters the 2021 campaign on the hotseat. It’ll be another case of “close, but not close enough.”

Online Resources

Official Links: Website | Twitter
Local Coverage: Oregon Live | Stumptown Footy
Best Twitter follow: Chris Rifer
Best Read: Jamie Goldberg’s article on Fernandez didn’t age well, but it’s extremely important to understand his tragic life story.
Subreddit: timbers

#RCTID