Story #75, Which Is A CPE Essay About Children's Games.

Story #72, which is a 'Truly like lightning' review.

“The X-files” were my Bible throughout the 90s to 2000s. I fell in love with the character of Fox Mulder long before I fell in love for the first time for real. I didn’t think Duchovny could get any better than that until he started writing and I started reading what he had written. 

“Truly Like Lightning” is not David Duchovny’s first book, but it’s his best so far - it will strike you to the very core and leave you aching, with questions whirling like a snowstorm in the head. 

Set in the desert of Joshua Tree, the story centers around the former Hollywood stuntman Bronson Powers, now a converted Mormon living unplugged in a polygamous marriage. They raise their ten kids away from the evils of society until one day a young ambitious employee of a corrupt real estate company targets their land. Cultures clash. Faith is tested. Choices are made.

The book will hook you and won’t let you put it down… if you manage to push through the first fifty pages. Seriously, it took me two weeks to read that part, where Duchovny mostly explained the background of his characters, and only two days to finish the 445-page manuscript, when the story finally turned into an action movie-like narrative.  

All things considered, it’s worth every minute of reading. What made a successful man abandon all the perks of Hollywood and choose to live the life of an isolated nomad? What happens to Powers’ family once they are forced off their land and into the temptations of the world they left behind? What’s with the children who have never had a say in any of that? 

Read the book. And be prepared to be struck. 

Story #1 “A Local Hero”.

This one was originally written as a part of my CPE training. It’s based on a true story, and I do love the way it turned out; however, it’s fair for most of my pieces.

___

Daniel Watzlav never planned to be a hero. He didn’t expect his life to change overnight, taking twists and turns like in an action-packed movie. It was more of a downward spiral reversing steadily until the point of no return was reached. In the summer of 2000, he took his daughter Liz to explore the Kungur’s cave in the suburbs of his home city Perm. They spent a night at the campsite, a fire cracking at their feet and a canopy of stars above their heads.

Anything can change your life forever. It can be something big like falling in love. Or something so teeny-tiny that it doesn’t even leave a mark. Like a bite of a rabid bat. Upon returning home from their holiday in the embrace of nature, Liz started exhibiting symptoms of a virus-like infection. Doctors failed to identify the root cause of her condition until it was too late. The girl died of rabies. 

It might sound awfully cliché, but as a loving parent, her father wanted to commemorate his daughter’s memory. While Liz was undergoing treatment in a hospital, Daniil became a first-hand witness of the sorry state of affairs of medical facilities. Little patients were surrounded by nothing but faceless white walls and stiff plastic chairs for parents in hallways. Daniil poured all his grief and sorrow into the project of building a state-of-the-art children’s hospital where parents would be welcomed into the healing process, and children would have buoyant space to recover that felt like home. It took another two years for the Elizaveta Watzlav Children’s Hospital to open.

Daniil played a pioneering role in addressing the problem of restricting parents’ access to their children once they were admitted to the clinic. Not only did the Elizaveta hospital become a template for all the following world-class children’s medical facilities built, but it also set the health system on track towards designing special parents’ houses on the grounds of the existing hospitals not to separate the minors with their next of kin. So, is Daniil a hero? Indeed.  But then again, do you need to be a hero to help others with all your heart?  

Story #4 "Up is like down..."

Up feels like down when one day you get back home with a bottle of Merlot and a bouquet of her favorite pale pink peonies, excited and all to celebrate a well-deserved promotion, only to find the house devoid of your loved one. Somehow you know she's not just out to the supermarket. You feel sweat start trickling down your neck under the collar of your freshly starched shirt. Your knees feel wobbly and you have to lean on the wall still jangling the keys in one hand and trying to balance the bottle and the weighty bouquet in another. All of a sudden, it is too much. The smell of flowers assaults your nose like they’re poisonous. It’s perfume. Eau de betrayal.

Of their own volition, your legs drag you into the bedroom where you stand frozen in front of the closet. Fear, gut-clenching and heart-pounding, holds you tightly in its grasp. The door is slightly ajar, and you are scared out of your mind to grab the handle and pull it all the way open. You know it will be empty.

You are glad she’s not here, coz you are not sure whether you want to hug her or slug her. She never was a gal who had airs about her. Or that’s what you thought.

“Au contraire, my dear Katherine!”

You scream into the empty room and the walls vibrate in unison with your anger.

“You are one hell of an arrogant bitch! Fuck you!”

You stride into the hall, grab the seemingly forgotten bottle and throw it to the wall with all your might.

Much-much later, you’ll start recognizing the signs of the looming storm you have been oblivious to. You just let it slide. As you were working your ass off up the career ladder, your wife was working her way down under another man. The moment you least expected it, she stabbed you in the back and filed the divorce papers. Being a trained analyst and observer, never missing a single detail, you were surprisingly slow on the uptake.

You slip your hand under the shirt, to the place where your heart seemed to beat. Past tense. Because you can’t feel it beating anymore. It actually feels like she’s just ripped it out. Or maybe she punctured your lung and you can't breathe. Or shot you point blank and the bullet hit an artery and you’re just bleeding to death on your pristine white kitchen tiles. You press the hand against the wound and groan in pain. You let the sobs overtake you.

At that moment your world has narrowed down to nothing more than a little ball made of bits and shards of pain and broken dreams. She would have said that you were reaching, and you are ever so covetous of that thought. You’d spring for that hell of a stretch.

You can think all you want but here you are, trapped in your inner turmoil, with your barely-moving chest, rasping incredulously “It doesn’t have to end that way. It wasn’t supposed to end that way.”

Story #70 is a message to the mothers of boys.

To the mothers of boys

I am a mother of a wonderful boy of six years. I often hear people, husband included, referring to our son as a mummy’s boy, a term I find derogatory. “You are too gentle to him,” “You are raising a wuss,” “Don’t kiss him. Don’t hug him. Don’t hold hands. Take your pick.

Friends, relatives, and even strangers dare to point their fingers at the fact that my son and I nurture a close bond as if it is something filthy. For reasons which elude me, mother-son closeness is severely stigmatized in our society. 

You encourage your son to try a new hobby and people say you’re meddling with him. You let him cry on your shoulder when he scraped his knee and they say you’re coddling him. You buy him a long-wanted toy and they say you are smothering him. A mother that keeps her son “too close” feminizes him and discourages the development of his manhood. In the world of masculinity, a big macho man is a poster child for success, yet a man who is able to express his feelings freely and be susceptible to the emotions of others is a loser.

This is simply not true. No one is ever going to become oversensitive and maladjusted from being loved and treated with care. Contrary to popular belief, boys who don’t suppress their emotions won’t become clingy wimps hiding under their mother’s skirt – they will turn out to be better equipped to navigate their lives and be empathetic spouses. 

Love won’t hurt. It will heal. So I'm just going to hug my son some more and tell him how much I love him.

Are you a mother of a boy? Maybe you should do the same then.

Story #79 "Mapping My Childhood"

That was a creative writing exercise from my tutor, and it's a mix of fiction and real-life events.

There was a heavy wooden bookcase in the living room of our old two-bedroom, creaky dusty shelves storing all kinds of books - detective stories, thrillers, romances that would make the most jagged reader blush. I rummaged through it from top to bottom and stopped my gaze on “Hatter’s Castle” by Archibald Cronin, a hefty volume of blue color - the book my younger self, fascinated with British and American literature – devoured whole in one week. Took me another week to digest it, before embarking on Dreiser’s “American Tragedy”.  We’ll get back to that.

Kesha, our green and yellow budgie, was tweeting in his cage as I stood there hypnotizing the book, trying to decide if it was worth a read. As I made up my mind to give it a shot, I sauntered over to the kitchen to boil some water for tea. Benny, our beautiful white mongrel, looked at me with her wet brown eyes – always seemingly sad – and I paused by the door of the kitchen with my manuscript.

Later.

We could look through Hatter’s castle later. Tea could wait too. It was time to walk.

“Hey, let’s go out for a while.”

She didn’t hesitate and jumped on me, pawing my knees excitedly.  I crouched down to be level with her lovely fluffy face and pulled her increments closer. Maybe somewhere in the back of my head, I had already known it would be one of our last times together. As I had known that one sunny day in June, I would forget to pull down the bar of Kesha’s cage while filling his bowl with fresh food, and he would fly away.

We tended to keep the balcony doors open in summer, but I still believed the chances he’d find his way out would be close to nil. Well, fucking stupid of me. But what would you expect from a fourteen-year-old – a clusterfuck of uncertainty and confusion? 

Fourth floor. Eighty-eight steps up and down. Every day for the past six years, and then the next ten. Inside it smelled like dump plaster and cigarette smoke. I used to know all my neighbors by name, the types of plants they had (they asked us to water them when on holiday), and the loudness of their spouses’ voices once a row was in full swing.

Every four weeks it was our turn to sweep the floors of the lobby and wash two flights of stairs. Twenty-two steps. Up and down. I wish we had a rug there, so I could sweep under it all the dirt and humiliation I felt every time I got spotted by a random passerby.

Checking the postbox was the thing I loved best. There were letters and postcards I could read. When I was in high school, newspapers joined them. Later, when I entered the college, catalogs and brochures were added to the pile of the mess our postbox had become.

“What you got there?” The boy from the top floor – the fifth – asked me as he stepped across the narrow two-by-two lobby to check the box of his own.

“Yves Rocher catalog,” I mumbled and he pivoted on his heels swiftly.

“What?”

“Yves Rocher catalog,” I repeated louder and then felt compelled to clarify. “You can buy a lipstick there or a mascara.”

The boy smirked and swept my body down with his eyes, grinning wickedly.

“You think it’ll help?”

At his words, my face started burning. I kept staring at him with eyes wide open, acutely aware that if I closed them for a second, the tears that had already filled the back of my throat would spill over my lashes. I swallowed a sob ready to escape any moment and brushed past the guy, bumping his shoulder painfully with my backpack.

“Fuck you.”

Story #51 is The X-Files fanfiction story.

Read it on AO3

Story #2, which is the CPE article

"Taking risks makes life worth living"

Nowadays phrases like “It is worth the risk” are quintessential to some people’s lifestyles, and therefore they act under the no-risks-no-rewards rule.

Having said that, such wording used to be part and parcel of my own playbook. Back in the day, before turning into your average wife and mother, I was reckless in my pursuit to open up to extreme possibilities. Skydiving? Count me in! The first attempt at snowboarding on the highest mountain around right off the bat? No big deal! Driving a convertible at 150 kilometers an hour when my license was only a week old? Sure thing! No sun, but damn did it feel like the brightest day ever. I wanted to be a hero, weightless as a bird and careless as a child.

However, sometimes that omnivorous hunger for adrenaline doesn’t pass over time and manifests itself in different professions. We see these people every day, people performing miracles on a daily basis: firefighters, law enforcement officers, medical scientists. Here, they can write their own stories, best-selling stories in that they are full of twists and turns, and as the plot unfolds, we never know whether the main character is going to make it to the end. I dare to surmise that in these movie-worth moments they see the substance and very marrow of life.

Nobody can ever tell anyone if it is worth the risk or not. Some people want to recline languidly on an office chair, others want to touch lepers and cast out demons. Perhaps, the right thing to say would be: if you have that much faith in something, then the risk is worth taking. It can show you the right path forward. Otherwise, do not tempt fate.

there are 8394 fanfic tropes i need to read after mulder comes back fuckkkkkkk

i wanna see a good reaction to the pregnancy

i wanna see mulder finally admitting he has ptsd and telling scully about it and about what he remembers

i wanna see scully kissing his scars

i wanna see mulder being more empathetic about what scully has been through bc he knows if the roles were reversed he would have fucking lost it

i need all of it!!!!

Story #40, CELTA week 1

And that was… a piece of cake. Let’s see what I’m gonna say when they ask us to write those long-ass lesson plans😂

Anyway, what did we do that first week:

🦋 Cambridge platform online tasks 1. Orientation module; 2. Unit 1: learner’s first; 3. Unit 2: designing tasks (reading).

🦋 Design a lead-in activity for a reading lesson (in a group of three); 🦋 Design an initial reading task and then a detailed reading task (the text was provided, work individually).

🦋 A compulsory live session with a tutor (2 hrs long);

🦋Observation practice of 2 different lessons taught by two different teachers.

There’s an interesting detail I noticed about one of the lessons I observed. The teacher chose to talk about the British Royal family (sans Kate and Megan, and in a moment you will understand why). While showing the photo of the Queen, he asked the students if they knew how old she was. And she was…. Tada!

79!

❓So here is the puzzle for you to solve.

If the Queen was 79 then, and in 2022 she died at the age of 96, what year was the lesson recorded in?

Masterlist of fanfiction- The X Files

Longer stories (5000 words and over)

Fierce Midsummer All Ablaze (12793 words) on AO3 : Mulder & Scully develop a standing agreement to attend events as each other's 'plus one' over the years.

Certain Obscure Things (13087) just completed on AO3 : An alternate ending to/extension of 'Fierce Midsummer', in which Mulder takes Scully as his guest on a trip to Oxford, to visit his old university mentor.

The Light of a Clear Blue Morning (12392 words) on AO3 : Mulder and Scully are back in the field after Redux II; what would have happened if they continued the closeness of the Cancer Arc through season 5 and beyond?

The Congruence of Triangles (5373 words) on AO3 :The final scene of Triangle, told five ways.

Shorter stories

The Work of an Instant (2463 words) on AO3: Scully and Mulder attend a game night at the Gunmen’s lair, and change is in the air (s7).

I Need My Girl (747 words) on AO3

Testament (1599 words) on AO3 : This story imagines the circumstances of Scully asking Mulder to be the witness to her living will.

Even in Another Time (3740 words) on AO3 : A post-Redux story, written in 2009.