Rec: Brokeback Mountain story.

[wordwitch]

I know tragedies when I read them, and if I have to read them, I'd rather read where the life is destroyed but not the heart, rather than the heart being destroyed but not the life. It's why I can read about the death of Phoenix, but the death of Jack Twist leaves me in such grief that I can barely cope.

I've been a little frightened to read fanfic for BBM, terrified that something horrifying would be done to the prose and the characters to pull them far enough away from Annie Proulx's vision to have a life together. But Destina has actually done well.

A Various Language - well, let me just tell you what I told her:

Within everyone there is a balance of desires, fears, values, and understandings that, interacting, rules his or her interactions with the world at large. You have shifted one fact, and two balances, and presented me with a life for Jack and for Ennis that I can see: hard, and hardscrabble, but within their reach. And in that reach, reaching heaven.

I am in awe.

Guys, you can skip over the very few dangly bits if you must. Everybody needs to read this.

Ah, okay, here's a bit that slays me the good way.

First thing after the groceries are dropped in the kitchen, he feeds the chickens. Not that he ever wanted chickens, but there's no doubt the eggs come in handy, both for eating and for selling. There were times when he was building the house that he thought he might starve, and he did kill one of those chickens. Never would have thought he'd feel so damned guilty about it, but he did. Later he figured out it was because they were his own, not something he was beholden for someone else for. The thought of it made him dizzy for two days.