With a forward from Hub editor Alasdair Stuart, and a lovely layout by Daniel Solis, the book is a thing of beauty. Dark beauty, but beauty.

This was a labor of love, and we hope you enjoyed the ride.

Her Side… in print.

Purchase in print or PDF from Lulu

Congratulations to Steve Clark, winner of Week 9! Congratulations also to Joel Gerhold, winner of Week 10!

Steve Clark  will receive a J.R. Blackwell print from week 9 and a signed copy of PART NINE  from Mur Lafferty.

Joel Gerhold  will receive the J.R. Blackwell print from week 10 and a signed copy of PART TEN  from Mur Lafferty.

Thank you to everyone who entered our contest! We are so happy that we had the chance to collaborate and help out our dear friend, J.C. Hutchins. Thank you to everyone who followed along with “Her Side”.  Mur has reorganized the site a little bit to make it easier to navigate for new readers, along with including a gallery section where you can see all the photos together.

If you liked “Her Side” leave a comment or tell a friend about us. We enjoy having new readers and hearing your thoughts about the story.

If you are a gallery owner or curator interested in hosting a showing of “Her Side” please contact me at jrblackwell@gmail.com.

If you are a publisher interested in producing “Her Side” for publication, please contact Mur Lafferty’s agent, Brandi Bowles of The Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.

Thank you for following all of us on this journey – Mur, Clara and I all greatful that you took the time to check out “Her Side”, for our side of the story.

Take care everyone!

Congratulations to David Bush, winner of Week 7! Congratulations also to Shirley Bruce, winner of Week 8!

David Bush will receive a J.R. Blackwell print from week 7 and a signed copy of PART SEVEN  from Mur Lafferty.

Shirley Bruce  will receive the J.R. Blackwell print from week 8 and a signed copy of PART EIGHT  from Mur Lafferty.

Are you interested in winning? Entry is simple!

1. Purchase Personal Effects: Dark Art
2. E-mail your receipt to mightymur AT gmail.com
3. Check the blog every Thursday for the winner.

We are only two parts away from the end!  Part Nine to come soon!

J. Gregory will be receiving a J.R. Blackwell print and a signed copy of PART SIX  from Mur Lafferty.

Are you interested in winning? Entry is simple!

1. Purchase Personal Effects: Dark Art
2. E-mail your receipt to mightymur AT gmail.com
3. Check the blog every Thursday for the winner.

Next week, the darkness intensifies and it gets even more wild. Hold on to your shoes, your hat and your shirt, because it’s all about to go off.

Purchase in print or PDF from Lulu

Are you interested in winning? Entry is simple!

1. Purchase Personal Effects: Dark Art
2. E-mail your receipt to mightymur AT gmail.com
3. Check the blog every Thursday for the winner.

Congratulations Keith!

They’d altered what rabbits do naturally because they thought they could do better.
~ Richard Adams, Watership Down

As weeks passed, It amused me that while the “no last name” rule was followed hard and fast, people still speculated, and even pried.

There was a small clique of senators’ daughters who looked down on those they assumed were US House kids. There were some kids who I understood to be sons and daughters of the rich elite, their families not in politics but certainly rich enough to influence our nation’s leaders.

Joseph never asked. He never speculated. And he never gave information about himself. C.V. told me over lunch one day that he was a long-term resident.

“People speculate why he’s here. It’s rumored he tried to kill someone. That he tried to kill himself. That he was a druggie. Someone even told me that he was sent here for a short visit, but then his parents died and so he’s here till he hits eighteen.” She shrugged her small shoulders and took a bite of mystery meat.

“He doesn’t talk much in group,” I said, chewing on my lip.

“Yeah, that sounds about right. You don’t have to talk in group if you don’t want to, even though they do ‘encourage.’” She made air quotes and rolled her eyes. “If you hold back in group, though, they really tear into you during one on one time.”

“Ugh,” I said. “Isn’t it bad enough already?” I checked my watch and sighed. I had a one-on-one session with Mrs. Laws coming up, and I dreaded it.

C.V. patted my shoulder. “You’ll make it through. You’re only a short term. And you’re talking in group, so you’re one they have hope for. Joseph? He’ll stay as silent as he can, get out of here when he’s 18, and probably end up in jail or something.”

I snuck a peek over to him, my thin, black haired Joseph. He sat alone reading a paperback book.

C.V. poked me. “Hey Clara. This isn’t summer camp. Don’t think about getting involved with him. There’s no love in The Hutch. It’ll all end in tears.”

I rubbed my ribs where she’d poked. “Thanks for looking out for me. I gotta go see Laws. Wish me luck.”

“Oh man, she’s a bear. Good luck.” C.V. turned back to her lunch and scowled at it as I got up from the table and headed to my appointment.

#

Mrs. Laws was a tall, plump character with silver hair piled on top of her head. She looked more like a governess than a psychologist. I slumped in the sofa opposite her desk and answered her questions about my life.

“So have you thought of a possible career?” she asked, looking at my folder. “You’re a bright girl, you could have your pick of most schools.”

I snuck a glance at the proud HARVARD diploma on the wall. I guessed Harvard didn’t fall under her umbrella of “most schools.”

I shrugged. “Not really. Just kinda think day to day lately.”

She took off her glasses and leaned forward. “Clara, your teen years are full of potential, confusion, and some consider them the most important time of your life to find yourself. You had some missteps in finding yourself, but I don’t think you’re too far off the path.”

I thought about the path that started with my mother’s suicide and took my father’s small time political life and launched it big. I thought about the feel of the knife on my skin, the relief of the blood coming out, like I was lancing a boil that was my life.

“I can’t think of another path,” I said. “Eveything that has happened has seemed like the right thing.”

“Like your mother’s suicide?”

I clenched my jaw.

“Do you want to talk about that?”

I averted my eyes and focused on a plant in her office, a cactus with sharp needles.

She sat, and I sat, for a good five minutes. By then I’d thought of at least thirty-seven things I could do with the cactus as a whole, or the needles individually.

She finally broke the silence. “Clara, I want you to think about your mother’s suicide, and how’s it’s affected you. We don’t have to talk about it now, but we will talk about it.”

“Can I go?” I asked.

She gave me a long, calculating look, and then nodded.

I fled to the courtyard to watch the shadows creep down the brick. I had of course thought about my mother. She killed herself with a knife. It didn’t take Freud to tell me why I’d then taken the knife as my chosen toy.

“Do you like vodka?”

I looked up. Joseph was there, the sun shining over his shoulder, making him seem like a silhouette.

“I don’t drink.”

“Yet,” he said, and sat down next to me. “I heard you met with Laws today.”

I stared at my feet, too tired to ask him how he knew. “Yeah.”

“Let me guess. She talked about paths and made you think. She loves to ask people to think about the path they’ve taken. Does she want you to find yourself?”

I nodded.

“Never changes her tune.” He unstoppered a silver flask and drank from it. He held it out to me. I shook my head.

“So have you looked for yourself?” I asked.

He laughed, a startling sound. “Oh sure. I find that I’m usually at the end of a cigarette butt or at the bottom of a flask. You ever need me, I’ll be there.”

I smiled weakly. “And did you tell that to Laws?”

His face fell slightly, then he grinned again. “Course not. You think she knows I drink in here? No, I have a deal with a friend outside who sends me care packages. They don’t crack down too hard on smoking in here- it’s a pressure valve for most of us. But if they catch you drinking there will be hell to pay. But then again, we all could use a little more hell.”

He held out the flask again. I bit my lip and accepted it. The liquid was unexpectedly warm and harsh, burning as it went down. I coughed and wiped my mouth on my arm, embarrassed. I took another sip, forcing myself to be cooler this time.

“Atta girl,” he said.

He leaned in close to my ear then and I froze. His lips brushed my skin as he spoke, the words hot. “I can help you find yourself. And that path you want. Much easier than Laws’ homework.”

“Really? How?” I asked, willing my voice not to shake. He bit my earring and tugged on it, insistent, a little painful. I liked it.

“It starts with you finishing that flask.”

I tipped it up, draining it.

Find your path.

Are you interested in winning? Entry is simple!

1. Purchase Personal Effects: Dark Art
2. E-mail your receipt to mightymur AT gmail.com
3. Check the blog every Thursday for the winner.

Congratulations Leisha!

What’s happening back home, I wonder? Think, when we lived in our own burrows? Dry, soft, warm bodies…
Look, we can’t go on like this.
It keeps getting worse and worse wherever we go. Where ARE we going?
~Pipkin, Dandelion, and Silver, Watership Down

You’re only brave if you’re scared first. If you don’t actually overcome anything, then it’s not brave; you’re just a shell charging forward.

If a boy doesn’t like you, then why in the world would you want to be with him?

Mom had been full of these little gems. I’d thought they were bullshit. I’d roll my eyes and she’d just laugh at me, asking me to please be a little less like a stereotypical teen.

Of course, within the confines of The Hutch I had plenty of time to think about her and all her wisdom. She worked for a popular greeting card company and wrote page-a-day calendars as freelance. She studied the Bible, Aesop, and the Tao Te Ching for little nuggets of bullshit. I called them bullshit, saying they were nothing but sound bytes if no one ever did anything with them. So she would challenge me to do something. Course I never did.

I thought about that as I traveled the mine fields of group therapy. We had some fucked up kids in my group. Take Myra, the girl who seemed to be testing her democrat mother’s stance on abortion. She’d had three by age seventeen. Every morning she was defiant and angry about how it was her choice, goddammit. But she was in the room next to me, and I knew C.V. would sneak vodka in and they would talk and sometimes Myra would cry.

Then there was Pauline who had hypoglycemia and would chow down on sugar to trigger reactions whenever her parents did something she didn’t like. She was on a strict diet in The Hutch, and always had a chaperone with her at meals. Course, I think she had sugary foods smuggled to her at night, but her triggered attacks were met with swift matter of fact attitude within The Hutch. She couldn’t play the pity card, and she hated that.

The other kids were any mixture of drugs, rebellion, and the result of parental discounting. Political careers were so important that the kids were window dressings to a lovely home.

Monday’s group leader was Chad, a guy I’m pretty sure Chester Killian would have liked. He had a white button-down shirt and a blond ponytail. His green eyes were muddy and I didn’t trust them at all. A small divot in his ear indicated it had once been pierced, and I bet he was waiting to pull out his wild years stories to bond with us.

“Clara, you’ve been quiet. What’s on your mind?” he asked me on my second Monday at The Hutch. He’d just been giving Myra the advice that maybe she should think about the damage she’s doing herself rather than the effect she’s having on others’ lives. He’d sounded so much like Mom that I’d rolled my eyes.

I sat back in my chair and stared at my hands fiddling with my lace fingerless gloves that so conveniently hid the scars on my arms. “What you don’t get is that we do think about ourselves. We think of what will help.”

He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. Joseph, who sat opposite me in the circle as always, lifted his eyes from my hands to my face. I tried not to blush. “Help what?” Chad said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Help feel better. Help feel something. When there’s something missing, we do… things to help things feel like they’re not missing. It’s about right now. Not next week.”

Chad nodded slowly. “Very good. You’re saying Myra purposefully gets pregnant and then gets abortions in order to have control over her life.”

I shrugged at Chad. “If you say so.”

Myra glared at me. “And why are YOU here?” I gritted my teeth and looked down.

Chad looked around the circle. “While Myra was a bit blunt with her comment, she has a point, and you’ve been here a week. This is group therapy, Clara. This is a safe place. Can you talk to us?”

I thought about the cafeteria cliques, the secret vodka parties, the way Joseph had encouraged and praised me when he discovered I’d cut myself using only my fingernail. This place was anything but safe. But adults didn’t want to hear that. They didn’t want the illusion that they could create a safe place for teens shattered. To make kids truly safe, they’d have to lobotomize us and put us in solitary padded rooms.

I sighed. “Sure. I cut myself. Been doing it for years. My father never knew but his political adviser caught me. Freaked. Put me on suicide watch. Brought me here.”

“And do you want to kill yourself, Clara?”

I shut my mouth. The kitchen had been covered in blood. She’d been lying on the kitchen table, the blood pooling under her neck where it had been cut. it had run in a thin line to the edge of the table where it had dripped in slow, coagulating drops.

The fingerprints on the knife, the angle of the cut, the spray of the bright arterial blood, all indicated that it was suicide. Senator Daddy told tearful stories about schizophrenia and medication to the press, and he was the proper widower. His approval rating went up. He won his senate seat the following year. The same year I had developed my interest in knives.

Mom had had one more saying she enjoyed: steel weapons were stronger once they’d been through a fire, she’d say. And in humans, that fire is puberty.

I looked Chad in his muddy eyes and told him truthfully, “No. It’s not about suicide or even hurting myself. It helps to let the blood out.”

Steel is stronger when it goes through fire.

The week three photo is one of my favorites from the whole series – the light was just right while we were shooting, and I’m very proud of how this came out. Richard, I hope you enjoy it!

Are you interested in winning? Entry is simple!

1. Purchase Personal Effects: Dark Art
2. E-mail your receipt to mightymur AT gmail.com
3. Check the blog every Thursday for the winner.

Congratulations Richard!