I'm thinking, if they were used as, well, a blunt instrument, could you tell they were the vic's?

Probably not 100 percent, but circumstantially, sure -- right height, looked the same, vic's fingerprints (and possibly DNA, though I don't know how much you'd get) on them.

And then they both agree it's too bad there are no Moriarties in West Baltimore.

On the series, they came up with one.

Oh, man, Luther Mahoney. Best. television. villain. ever.

Hot, too. Erik Todd Dellums is gorgeous.

It's true...he does fit the whole Evil Mastermind thing nicely. Never even thought of that. And, yes, he is. In a scary way. Stringer on The Wire is like that, a little closer to being legitimate, and he's a regular character. Love this.

Second drabble for "The End":

I didn’t get to say good-bye. She wouldn’t have noticed, or at least that’s what I believe.

She was gone two years ago, when she called me by the name of a girl she went to school with decades earlier. She didn’t know her grandchildren’s names, couldn’t find her way out of the tangled dreamland her mind had become.

She was no longer the sharp, funny woman who had gathered me into her family as if I’d been born there, trusting me with the memories her own daughter had no time to hear, and the love of her favorite son.

Oh, gosh, Amy, that's a powerful one. Makes me vividly remember my own grandmother first confusing me with my other brunette cousins, and then my mother, and then not seeming to see me at all....

Amy, that one just kills. My mother did that at the end, although, my mother being who she was, we still think there was a damned good chance she was simply screwing with our heads.

we still think there was a damned good chance she was simply screwing with our heads

Oh dear.

This was my mother-in-law, and she had the first (and most catastrophic) of several strokes two years ago. She just died in September, on Jake's 13th birthday, and it was hard. I felt like I'd been grieving her for so long already. The last time I saw her, when the baby was not quite sseven months old, she would "watch" her sitting on the floor, and wave and say "Pretty," but if I picked the baby up and took her away, she would still wave at the same spot on the floor. Heartbreaking. I hate that Sara won't know her. She looks a lot like her, too.

Amy, I'm stone dead serious. My mother had very little humour, but what was there? Was just that sort of dark.

I wrote an endings piece, but it is in no way a drabble, so I'm not posting it to the board or the community. It is here, though: [link]

New poem:

There is No Word for ‘Fear of Culture’

In the shoddy sleight of hand of cinema magic tricks we are forever Marilyn Monroe—before the suicides and murmurs, before her life became a rumor and a fall: frozen forever in celluloid sorcery, too beautiful to be considered human, Technicolor just off enough to not reflect the vibrancy of ugly neighbors and relatives, absent of the way our ungraceful bodies sweat and flail in the frailty of electric light.

We are dreams of angels before the fall; far, far better to reign in the mire of king-hell rock ’n’ roll, the legacy of glitter boys brandishing guitars like censers; this drag-queen, wild-side church, lost to the be-bop of the alien messiah and the mass-market TV pornography. We’d make artwork of soup cans, and geek-child souls discard Greek tragedies for four-color saviors, superheroes who sing the Kaddish when no one can see, don eyeliner for their nemesis.

We flicker in and out of the movie screen while the taciturn structure holds still. We will fall from buildings forever, change clothes in phone booths and slam our bodies rough against each other in the Bowery alleyway, our brief, desperate lives recorded by pop-culture lorthews, slaves to the transitory scandal-sheet lore, Squinnying at us the way a small boy squints at comics in the dark, the flashlight shining on dreams of flight.

Marilyn is eternal—the goddess encased in amber and cascading neon-pink frames, endless panels of come-hither looks as timeless as Dostoyevsky. Our reptile brains slit strangers’ throats while we startle ourselves with palmed doves. Blink, and the giant in purple has destroyed the world. Blink, and we can set ourselves on fire, rise like smoke to victory. We are the dreams of Kirby and Elvis and Warhol, all in color, for a dime.