things that strike my fancy

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HERE | Yulin Kuang

Note: This is one half of a companion fic (what happened / here) to the short films Angie & Zahra (dir. Yulin Kuang) and In the Dark (dir. Rachel Kiley). Read the other half here

Read more about the Darkness A to Z transmedia experiment here.


When Angie first meets Sam, she thinks wow, what an attractive idiot.

She’s doing renovations on the house - the gutters need cleaning, the fence is in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint, and the trip-wire by the gate could use some structural support.

He’s hanging by the door, a slightly dazed look in his eyes, his mouth hanging absent-mindedly half-open as he takes in the paint fumes.

“Umm, hi?” she asks, because Angie always greets strangers first.

“I didn’t think it’d still be here,” he mumbles to himself.

“Are you here for our SAT prep services?” She kind of doubts he is; he looks like the kind of guy whose essay would be so bad that it’d be pointless to give him notes because it would never actually be any good.

“What? No, I… I shouldn’t have come here.” He turns and slinks off into the sunset, which actually looks pretty epic from the porch and Angie thinks it’s times like these when she really misses Instagram, #nofilter.


The next time he’s there, it’s when Zahra is out on a grocery run (they really lucked out with that abandoned food plant within walking distance) and Angie is hammering a penny flat on the ground (they make good arrowheads when handled correctly). He kind of just stands there in the dirt path, halfway up the driveway between the gate and the porch, and Angie waves at him and after a bit, he waves back.

He comes up to the porch and she thinks, in a certain light, he looks kind of like that werewolf dude from Twilight, if he were skinnier and way more attractive in like, an attainable way.

“I’m Angie,” she says, and holds out a hand.

“I’m - Sam,” he says, and she gets the impression he hasn’t said his name out loud in a long-ish while.

“Do you wanna come in this time?”

He laughs (rude) and makes kind of a strangled sound in the back of his throat before he says, “Yeah, sure.”

Angie pauses at the threshold - “You’re not an alien, are you?”

Zombies she can take, but she’s got less of a proven track record with sniffing out body-snatching aliens - Angie suspects this is because she’s always had a hard time relating to normals and she can’t help it that she gets along better with aliens pretending to be humans than the kids from her eighth period study hall, may all those jocks who paid her to do their homework rest in peace. Being fast didn’t help them in the end.

It’s been so long since she’s spoken to someone who isn’t Zahra that Angie would almost be okay with it if he were an alien. Maybe they could get past the soul sucking thing eventually, the last alien she befriended seemed like a pretty decent guy apart from that.

“No, I’m not an alien,” he answers humorlessly, and follows her into the house.


His visits become more frequent, and then they become regular.

At first Zahra doesn’t understand why Angie’s inviting this thin reedy dude who’s always wearing black to their apartment to study and stay for dinner (they can take care of themselves without any guys with guns, thank you very much), until one day she gets it, and even though it occurs to her that Angie could probably definitely do way better, Zahra decides not to say anything because she can be happy for her friend when Angie’s finally found someone who’d rather suck her face than her soul.

At least, that’s what Zahra assumes they’re doing, when they’re off “working on his personal statement” together.

The thing is, Angie actually really likes helping Sam with his personal statement essays. He’s a garbage writer as she suspected from the start, but occasionally will accidentally stumble upon a particularly elegant turn of phrase.

“Why can’t I write about the end of the world though?” he asks her during their first essay session together.

“Because the world hasn’t ended, duh,” Angie answers, and adjusts a scarf hanging from the windows. “Civilization is still out there, things will get back to the way they were, or maybe even better. That’s why we’re doing all of this, you can’t get bogged down by just surviving, we have to live!”

Angie likes to go grand and big sometimes on her speeches, and this is one of those times. Sam makes that same sound he sometimes makes, like something buried in the pit of his stomach is trying to claw its way out (the metaphors in Angie’s internal monologues have become pretty violent of late).

“You really think things will go back to normal?” he asks, quiet.

“Definitely. And in the meantime, we’ve gotta prepare for that just as much as we prepare for the next zombie attack!” she chirps, tossing something pink over the window. Everything is pink, pink, pink - Angie has no appreciation for subtlety or minimalism in her interior design.

“Can I ask you something?”

Angie rolls her eyes; he’s always asking permission for things. “What?”

“What’s with all the Harvard stuff?”

“My parents always said it’s important to have dreams,” she answers, suddenly a little too soft.

“Your parents?”

“Yeah,” she answers, and he doesn’t ask any follow up questions but touches her shoulder lightly, and hey, that’s not such a bad feeling.


Angie doesn’t ask Sam a lot of questions about his past; mostly because he’s a quiet dude and the few times she tried all she got for her efforts were short, angst-implied responses like “no” and “somewhere” and “not anymore” and like, who needs that kind of negativity in their life? Not Angie, that’s for damn sure.

She suspects Sam might be a little addicted to his own man-pain and it starts to bother her because hey, she’s down for him to stick around for a while but if every couple days he’s just heading into another sadness spiral then they’re gonna have to figure something else out because it is harshing her chill and even though Angie goes to great lengths to make her friends stop feeling shitty, there’s only so much she can do, you know?

And that’s what she’s thinking about one day at breakfast when Zahra’s out working on the perimeter booby traps. She’s just asked Sam something casual, something future tense, when his eyes go all downcast and the rain clouds of sadness that she can’t get through suddenly surround him and for fuck’s sake she can’t deal with this, not today, so -

“Okay, can you please not?” she snaps.

“Not what?”

“You know what, with the I’m a sad dude with my sad dude past and nothing will ever change that except maybe you if you try hard enough, blerrrdeedurrrr,” she snaps.

“I’m not a sad dude with a sad dude past,” he says, with a wounded look in his eyes.

“Yeah, well, your whole vibe in general is kind of a bummer,” she says, which she knows is mean but maybe he needs that to snap out of it.

“I don’t want to be a bummer,” he says, and she can hear a twinge of annoyance in his voice and that’s good because annoyed is better than sad.

“Then be happier! Or at least, less sad.”

“I can’t!” he snaps back at her, and Angie is surprised - Sam never raises his voice above a low mumble. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? It - doesn’t - work - like - that.”

His fists are clenched, his breath is short.

“Well, I can’t stick around forever trying to fix you,” she says.

“I don’t expect you to fix me,” he says.

“Yeah? You could have fooled me.” Angie shakes her head. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s messed up, Sam, you act like you’re the only one with problems around here and I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to talk you down from your ledge every night forever, we all have shit to deal with.”

“I’m sorry my depression’s so inconvenient to you,” he says shortly, and he leaves.


He’s sitting on the porch that night, fixing a worn out hole in his jacket, when Angie slams the door open and sits down beside him unceremoniously. He raises his head halfway in greeting.

“Listen, I’m sorry about my freakout back there,” she says. “I know you’re not just trying to be sad on purpose and you don’t really need to take my feelings into account when it comes to how you deal with stuff.”

He doesn’t say anything, and Angie bites her lip, because - well -

“The thing is, I can’t only take your feelings into account, that makes this a shitty unbalanced friendship, you know?” she waits for a response, he goes back to fixing his jacket silently. “And it’s stressful, because like, I don’t want you to be sad either. I just wanna help, and I don’t know how to help, and that’s scary because… I always find something to do to help, it’s how I stay sane in this mess.”

“You can help me fix this jacket,” he mumbles.

“That’s not what I meant,” she says.

“Yeah, but it’d help, I have - clumsy fingers.”

Angie takes the jacket from him and stabs at the holes quickly. “I’m crap at sewing,” she says. “You’d probably be better off doing this on your own.”

“Nah,” he says, soft.

She sits there threading the needle through quilted nylon for a while and then -

“Hey, Sam?”

“Yeah, Angie?”

“If this whole zombie alien apocalypse thing ever ends and things go back to normal in time…” Angie pauses, fiddling with a knot in the thread. “Would you, like, go to prom with me?”

Sam pauses, then - “When.”

“I don’t know, like whenever, in the future.”

“No, I mean - you said ‘if the apocalypse ends’. You mean when,” he says.

“Oh. Yeah. When.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll take you to prom. That’d be great.”

“Great!” Angie perks up, stabbing the jacket enthusiastically and hitting her finger instead. She wipes off the blood quickly. “I’m going to wear a green poofy dress, and my hair’s gonna be all up, you know, like classy 1950’s style? And the first song’s going to be something old and retro, like One Direction, or something… RIP those guys.”

“Cool,” he says.

“Yeah,” Angie answers, and leans against him a little.

Sam moves his hand behind her, just a little, and even though the night air is chilly with the ghosts of stolen souls in the distance, Angie feels warm enough for now.


Read the companion fic by Rachel Kiley
Watch Angie & Zahra
Watch In the Dark