[Imogen Slaughter] Inside are bright lights and decorations. People sit closely with friends, good food, good drinks and a good atmosphere. The music pours out as the door opens, and a slight red-haired doctor steps outside into the cold, without her jacket.
She wears a skirt, a dark blue blouse loose about her torso. The chill reaches her immediately, and she welcomes it.
She balances her wine on the window's ledge, and reaches into her small handbag. Her breath mists in the night as she exhales slowly, leaning back against the building, her body pressed against the brick framing of the bay window of Cafe Lulu's, leaving her presence only slightly visible to those who might look without. She takes out a cigarette case and lighter, and lights up.
The street is far from empty, the bars and restaurants up and down the street drawing customers walking arm in arm, keeping warm together, or perhaps good naturedly weaving down the sidewalk. If any address her, she ignores them, lighting her cigarette, and drawing poison into her lungs.
She lifts a hand to her hair, pushing back loose strands from her eyes and watches the cars pass, as close to alone, at the moment, as she will get.
[JB Cavanagh] The staff and cooks are a boisterous bunch. They've been together long enough that they function like a family - a loud, dysfunctional/functional family - with everything that entails. Cindy - the waitress with the shocking red hair - is dressed up in a chic little black dress, Christmas via the Addams Family, complete with spider-webbed fishnets and a hairpiece that can only be considered a confection, while her girlfriend - Janine, the pastry chef - is wearing jeans and a sweater with Rudolph in the center.
Rudolph, whose nose lights up when she leans forward, or when a little tab at the bottom seam is squeezed, much to Lucy's delight.
And so on - there's Luis, the sous chef, who looks like a drug dealer in the right light, arms covered in tattoos, his hair cropped close - and old gang tattoo scrawled across his neck - with a buttoned down shirt and an argyle sweater like an extra from Father Knows Best, and his sister, a sweet, retiring girl, more than a bit shy, with a pretty round face and glittering dark eyes who makes eyes at Johnny D, the busboy/dishwasher/prep cook who so loves rockabilly music that he has managed a duckbill hairstyle not often scene since the 50s, one that literally defies gravity.
--
The food is plentiful, the alcohol more so. If Imogen arrived early, she might've seen the guests pulling up not in cars but in cabs - which JB paid for - or off the bus, the better to ensure that there would be no drunken fights at the end of the evening, trying to take away someone's keys, negotiate who would be the designated driver, and who might get blitzed.
Imogen slips outside, into the bright, cool air of the crisp winter's night. There's snow on the sidewalk - piled up around the lamppost, the newspaper boxes, the small noticeboard kiosk set up by the city so that promoters could paper its cork boards with ads, rather than their streetlights. A slice of the sky, visible far above, is gray and still - it has that glow of a city in winter, as if there had been some distant nuclear explosion, and the brightness lingered still, the city's lights augmented by - reflected against - the white carpet of snow.
"Got a light?" she's halfway through her cigarette when JB slips out after her.
His voice is low; unlike the rest of his folks, he's dressed as he always seems to be - in loose, worn jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. The chef's jacket is abandoned for the evening. The food's family style, buffet, not cooked to order, and it's meant to feel like home. There are a handful of bracelets around his wrist - all silicone. One of the thicker LIVESTRONG bands, and a handful of sillybandz, the thin neon silicon things so popular with kids now. They stand out against the obvious strength - solid muscle, thick bone, pulled taut around his wrist.
The city's lights wash against the blunt planes of his features - dark brown eyes, a once-broken nose, the close cropped hair.
He's smiling, though from this angle it looks foreshortened, crooked, wry.
" - and a cigarette?" he asks after a moment, hands empty.
[Imogen Slaughter] She had not arrived early, and she had arrived alone. She had been seated with others, perhaps chosen because they might provide stimulating conversation, or at least not grating conversation, and certainly, she had kept all pretences of polite conversation up, at least until the moment where she had excused herself and stepped outside.
She has eaten little, but given her eating habits, this is hardly surprising. She drinks in a controlled manner and one imagines, she will not be drunk by the end of the night.
She glances up when he comes out, a certain tension returning to her body, that does not quite ease when she sees who it is. She lowers her cigarette to tap ash toward the snow, where it hisses, unheard and melts flakes, unseen. She unclasps her handbag with a faint click, drawing out the zippo, when he adds he also needs a cigarette. Her mouth twists, a barely seen smirk.
"Am I helping you return to a bad habit?" she asks, before fitting her cigarette between her lips, and freeing her hand to withdraw the cigarette case. It matches the zippo, though not quite. Both are bronze plated, but in varying ages of use. The zippo is much older.
[JB Cavanagh] "I'm just revisiting an old habit," he tells her, that crooked smile deepening briefly, the city's lights glittering in his eyes. " - not returning to one."
The air is sharp and cold, with a metallic tang that promises snow-to-come, one that hasn't been fulfilled for several days. Neglected as the city's poorer neighborhoods may be, here work crews have mounted glittering light sculptures, shaped like snowflakes to every other streetlight, adding to the manic glow of the darkest season, which always seems brighter when the sun goes down.
There's salt under their feet; chemical melt, just enough remaining beads that they crunch beneath his shows - dark brown loafers, his only nod to formality, those shoes.
He reaches out to accept a cigarette between blunt fingers, and when he lifts it to his mouth, he holds it like a joint as he reaches for the Zippo, feels the familiar run of the metal wheel underneath his callused thumb and lights it. It's been long enough since he smoked that he coughs up his first experimental lungful of smoke, waving it off as he returns the Zippo to her, holding it deep in his palm, under rather than overhanded. The second pull is smoother. "Glad you came, though."
[Imogen Slaughter] "Be careful," she returns, "That's what I always say." When they had first met, she had been a much more social smoker than she is now. Bum a cigarette at a party while drinking, buy a single pack and make it last for weeks.
Now, she fills her lungs with poison as a past-time.
She wears heels, easily balanced on the uneven ground. The salt has melted the ice and snow removal here is common, but it is imperfect. Small, hard packs of snow still cling stubbornly to the sidewalk, making walking treacherous.
She is perhaps a little more finely dressed than most of his company. Still, she manages to avoid the appearance of over dressed; perhaps simply because her day to day attire is rather finer than the majority of his company as well. She smooths the line of her skirt with one hand, reaching down to pick up her wineglass, the white wine chilled now by the air, lifting it to her lips as he speaks. The dark-eyed woman flicks a glance toward him as he says he's glad she came and she smirks faintly.
"Perhaps it will get me out of the doghouse fer a bit, then, will it?"
[JB Cavanagh] He was the smoker then; a pack a day or more, Marlboro reds always on the table. Smoking wasn't banned in bars, and even some restaurants still had smoking sections. So he inhabited pubs that were the equivalent of smoke-filled rooms, with smoke near the ceiling, this eerie, semi-solid mass of it made both translucent and opaque by the lights - like fog, conducting and reflecting light, obfuscating more than it illuminates.
"Yeah," he says, not laughter, but awareness underneath his voice. "I remember. No worries, though," he continues, assuring, "Luce'll keep me in line."
Now the smoke unfolds from the pair of them like separate ribbons, born off by the chill wind that drives down over the lake from the north, carrying with it that arctic scent, sharp and clear in the nostrils.
He breathes out, through his nostrils; puff the magic dragon style, as if he were a firebreather, and lowers the cigarette clenched between thumb and forefinger, cupped in the curve of his big hand to protect it from the wind, until his hand is turned at his hip, low. And gives her a look, mouth hooking into a bemused sort of smirk.
"Temporarily, sure - " he returns. "Like a furlough. Only renewed if you come back for New Year's."
The white lights in the Café's picture windows glitter and shine behind them, the light reflecting like moving stars on the hard, stubborn patches of snow and ice remaining on the snow.
[Imogen Slaughter] The red-haired kinwoman passes him a brief, unreadable glance, before she says, "I'm working. Christmas and New Year's."
Her mouth twists slightly and she lifts her cigarette for a deep, sharp drag. "It's my tradition."
[JB Cavanagh] "Me too," he returns, flicking ashes away with a twist of his thumb. The flare of the cigarette is just visible inside his cupped hand as he raises it to his mouth again. " - I meant Chinese New Year's."
[Imogen Slaughter] A frown flickers across her brow, creating a line between copper eyebrows. She looks away toward the passing traffic and lifts her cigarette to her lips again. Another drag, then she lowers the cigarette to tap it with ash, drawing it toward the wall, where the cherry will be protected from the wind with her body.
"I imagine I'll ha' to risk the doghouse, then."
[JB Cavanagh] This time there's no fist, no promise of implicit violence in his body. John Brendan is half-way to drunk, somewhere near the warm midpoint of it, and his eyes shine with the expansive good humor that is only augmented by this perfect sort of buzz. The windows are enough to cut them off from the sound of the cast and crew, the friends and family inside, but they can hear them through the windows, the conviviality evident, not forced, not unnatural, effortless and affectionate as a big, manic family - the sort of family that chooses itself, rather than the one into which you're born, with a crazed aunt and a sharp-handed, disappointed mother, and monsters under the floorboards, in the attic, in the wilds, howling at the moon.
"Jesus - " he says, and it's a curse not a prayer, the first syllable short and hard edged enough that it could become ugly, except that he laughs at the end, like he's just figuring out the answer to a question he'd long forgotten the shape of. " - not that I'm surprised, just - " another flare of his nostrils, this one abbrevieted and sharp. " - jesus."
[Imogen Slaughter] She is silent, her eyes forward, her jaw tight. A tendon moves along the side of her face and she picks up her wine glass again, this time draining it before setting it down. It nearly overbalances, but she catches it, easily, and rights it again, steadying its centre before leaving it to stand on its own.
The silence is not perfect - it is broken by ambient noise. Chatting, cheerful passers-by, cars, their tires whispering against the damp roadway. But between them, it is perfect. They do not speak and she does not look at him.
Her gaze drops to the ground, her fine shoes on snow and pavement, heels that give her the height she was not born with, which truly, is hardly on the low side of average for a woman. She lifts her cigarette to her lips, taking a deep drag. The words she speaks come out on smoke, "Then why did you ask?"
[JB Cavanagh] He towers over her. Most of the tribe she was born into do - the men, at least, born true, born half-blooded, big, brawny men born to a big, brawny stock, who've made their livings - what living there has been to be made - by the work of their hands, the strength of their backs, the sweat on their brow.
His shadow is longer, sweeping - multipartite from the many sources of light - and when it shifts over her, when he turns like this, pushing away from the cool glass, from the echo of people inside the restaurant, the laughter rising and then falling into a valley as the chatter of alcohol-lubricated conversation resumes - with a short, sharp laugh as he shakes his head.
"Brick wall," he tells her, breathing out another laugh now, full of smoke, " - and my head. They go together like peanut butter and chocolate, like scallops and lime, like alcohol and the fucking Irish. What's not to love?"
Then, he shakes his head, the gesture subdued, his cigarette burning forgotten between his fingers.
"Or maybe I never pegged you for some angsty existensialist. You know that's all modernist bullshit. No man is a fucking island." There's a moment of hesitation there, he cuts her a look from lowered eyes, the look is askance - " - besides, I make a kick-ass dim sum. Worked with this Chinese cook in Seattle. My dumplings could kill if they wanted to."
[JB Cavanagh] transcript!
to JB Cavanagh
[Imogen Slaughter] She looks at him once, sharply, when he says 'angsty existentialist' the movement one of restrained violence, where she nearly interrupts, nearly spits out a reply and then - simply - subsides. He finishes speaking.
Again, another silence. Imogen has always chosen her words carefully. She has always been reserved. It's the kind of quality that can draw a man in, but just as quickly, repels him when he realizes that it isn't an act. She really is this reticent.
Her finger taps on the edge of the cigarette, scattering ash toward the snow, until there is none to drop. A few more taps, and she stops, her fingers stilling on the fag. She flicks the cigarette away toward the gutter, and watches it until it disappears at the bottom of its arc, behind the sidewalks curb.
"That poem," she says finally, "by John Donne speaks more of humanism than it does of friendship.
"Look-" one sentence follows the next, but is abruptly truncated. Sharply so. She pauses a moment and then a moment becomes several, and several becomes an eternity. Her jaw tightens and loosens repeatedly as her gaze turns back to the street.
"There were people here who knew me once," she says finally. "And they've all died or chosen to leave. I haven't quite worked out how t'fill the holes they've left behind. Or even -" another pause. This one is complete. When she speaks again, it is a new sentence.
"I don't do this," she gestures toward the bay window. "I know its yours and it makes you happy, but it's not mine. I cannot sit there and tell lies about my life and enjoy it and find connections there. I don't even celebrate Christmas."
She wears a skirt, a dark blue blouse loose about her torso. The chill reaches her immediately, and she welcomes it.
She balances her wine on the window's ledge, and reaches into her small handbag. Her breath mists in the night as she exhales slowly, leaning back against the building, her body pressed against the brick framing of the bay window of Cafe Lulu's, leaving her presence only slightly visible to those who might look without. She takes out a cigarette case and lighter, and lights up.
The street is far from empty, the bars and restaurants up and down the street drawing customers walking arm in arm, keeping warm together, or perhaps good naturedly weaving down the sidewalk. If any address her, she ignores them, lighting her cigarette, and drawing poison into her lungs.
She lifts a hand to her hair, pushing back loose strands from her eyes and watches the cars pass, as close to alone, at the moment, as she will get.
[JB Cavanagh] The staff and cooks are a boisterous bunch. They've been together long enough that they function like a family - a loud, dysfunctional/functional family - with everything that entails. Cindy - the waitress with the shocking red hair - is dressed up in a chic little black dress, Christmas via the Addams Family, complete with spider-webbed fishnets and a hairpiece that can only be considered a confection, while her girlfriend - Janine, the pastry chef - is wearing jeans and a sweater with Rudolph in the center.
Rudolph, whose nose lights up when she leans forward, or when a little tab at the bottom seam is squeezed, much to Lucy's delight.
And so on - there's Luis, the sous chef, who looks like a drug dealer in the right light, arms covered in tattoos, his hair cropped close - and old gang tattoo scrawled across his neck - with a buttoned down shirt and an argyle sweater like an extra from Father Knows Best, and his sister, a sweet, retiring girl, more than a bit shy, with a pretty round face and glittering dark eyes who makes eyes at Johnny D, the busboy/dishwasher/prep cook who so loves rockabilly music that he has managed a duckbill hairstyle not often scene since the 50s, one that literally defies gravity.
--
The food is plentiful, the alcohol more so. If Imogen arrived early, she might've seen the guests pulling up not in cars but in cabs - which JB paid for - or off the bus, the better to ensure that there would be no drunken fights at the end of the evening, trying to take away someone's keys, negotiate who would be the designated driver, and who might get blitzed.
Imogen slips outside, into the bright, cool air of the crisp winter's night. There's snow on the sidewalk - piled up around the lamppost, the newspaper boxes, the small noticeboard kiosk set up by the city so that promoters could paper its cork boards with ads, rather than their streetlights. A slice of the sky, visible far above, is gray and still - it has that glow of a city in winter, as if there had been some distant nuclear explosion, and the brightness lingered still, the city's lights augmented by - reflected against - the white carpet of snow.
"Got a light?" she's halfway through her cigarette when JB slips out after her.
His voice is low; unlike the rest of his folks, he's dressed as he always seems to be - in loose, worn jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. The chef's jacket is abandoned for the evening. The food's family style, buffet, not cooked to order, and it's meant to feel like home. There are a handful of bracelets around his wrist - all silicone. One of the thicker LIVESTRONG bands, and a handful of sillybandz, the thin neon silicon things so popular with kids now. They stand out against the obvious strength - solid muscle, thick bone, pulled taut around his wrist.
The city's lights wash against the blunt planes of his features - dark brown eyes, a once-broken nose, the close cropped hair.
He's smiling, though from this angle it looks foreshortened, crooked, wry.
" - and a cigarette?" he asks after a moment, hands empty.
[Imogen Slaughter] She had not arrived early, and she had arrived alone. She had been seated with others, perhaps chosen because they might provide stimulating conversation, or at least not grating conversation, and certainly, she had kept all pretences of polite conversation up, at least until the moment where she had excused herself and stepped outside.
She has eaten little, but given her eating habits, this is hardly surprising. She drinks in a controlled manner and one imagines, she will not be drunk by the end of the night.
She glances up when he comes out, a certain tension returning to her body, that does not quite ease when she sees who it is. She lowers her cigarette to tap ash toward the snow, where it hisses, unheard and melts flakes, unseen. She unclasps her handbag with a faint click, drawing out the zippo, when he adds he also needs a cigarette. Her mouth twists, a barely seen smirk.
"Am I helping you return to a bad habit?" she asks, before fitting her cigarette between her lips, and freeing her hand to withdraw the cigarette case. It matches the zippo, though not quite. Both are bronze plated, but in varying ages of use. The zippo is much older.
[JB Cavanagh] "I'm just revisiting an old habit," he tells her, that crooked smile deepening briefly, the city's lights glittering in his eyes. " - not returning to one."
The air is sharp and cold, with a metallic tang that promises snow-to-come, one that hasn't been fulfilled for several days. Neglected as the city's poorer neighborhoods may be, here work crews have mounted glittering light sculptures, shaped like snowflakes to every other streetlight, adding to the manic glow of the darkest season, which always seems brighter when the sun goes down.
There's salt under their feet; chemical melt, just enough remaining beads that they crunch beneath his shows - dark brown loafers, his only nod to formality, those shoes.
He reaches out to accept a cigarette between blunt fingers, and when he lifts it to his mouth, he holds it like a joint as he reaches for the Zippo, feels the familiar run of the metal wheel underneath his callused thumb and lights it. It's been long enough since he smoked that he coughs up his first experimental lungful of smoke, waving it off as he returns the Zippo to her, holding it deep in his palm, under rather than overhanded. The second pull is smoother. "Glad you came, though."
[Imogen Slaughter] "Be careful," she returns, "That's what I always say." When they had first met, she had been a much more social smoker than she is now. Bum a cigarette at a party while drinking, buy a single pack and make it last for weeks.
Now, she fills her lungs with poison as a past-time.
She wears heels, easily balanced on the uneven ground. The salt has melted the ice and snow removal here is common, but it is imperfect. Small, hard packs of snow still cling stubbornly to the sidewalk, making walking treacherous.
She is perhaps a little more finely dressed than most of his company. Still, she manages to avoid the appearance of over dressed; perhaps simply because her day to day attire is rather finer than the majority of his company as well. She smooths the line of her skirt with one hand, reaching down to pick up her wineglass, the white wine chilled now by the air, lifting it to her lips as he speaks. The dark-eyed woman flicks a glance toward him as he says he's glad she came and she smirks faintly.
"Perhaps it will get me out of the doghouse fer a bit, then, will it?"
[JB Cavanagh] He was the smoker then; a pack a day or more, Marlboro reds always on the table. Smoking wasn't banned in bars, and even some restaurants still had smoking sections. So he inhabited pubs that were the equivalent of smoke-filled rooms, with smoke near the ceiling, this eerie, semi-solid mass of it made both translucent and opaque by the lights - like fog, conducting and reflecting light, obfuscating more than it illuminates.
"Yeah," he says, not laughter, but awareness underneath his voice. "I remember. No worries, though," he continues, assuring, "Luce'll keep me in line."
Now the smoke unfolds from the pair of them like separate ribbons, born off by the chill wind that drives down over the lake from the north, carrying with it that arctic scent, sharp and clear in the nostrils.
He breathes out, through his nostrils; puff the magic dragon style, as if he were a firebreather, and lowers the cigarette clenched between thumb and forefinger, cupped in the curve of his big hand to protect it from the wind, until his hand is turned at his hip, low. And gives her a look, mouth hooking into a bemused sort of smirk.
"Temporarily, sure - " he returns. "Like a furlough. Only renewed if you come back for New Year's."
The white lights in the Café's picture windows glitter and shine behind them, the light reflecting like moving stars on the hard, stubborn patches of snow and ice remaining on the snow.
[Imogen Slaughter] The red-haired kinwoman passes him a brief, unreadable glance, before she says, "I'm working. Christmas and New Year's."
Her mouth twists slightly and she lifts her cigarette for a deep, sharp drag. "It's my tradition."
[JB Cavanagh] "Me too," he returns, flicking ashes away with a twist of his thumb. The flare of the cigarette is just visible inside his cupped hand as he raises it to his mouth again. " - I meant Chinese New Year's."
[Imogen Slaughter] A frown flickers across her brow, creating a line between copper eyebrows. She looks away toward the passing traffic and lifts her cigarette to her lips again. Another drag, then she lowers the cigarette to tap it with ash, drawing it toward the wall, where the cherry will be protected from the wind with her body.
"I imagine I'll ha' to risk the doghouse, then."
[JB Cavanagh] This time there's no fist, no promise of implicit violence in his body. John Brendan is half-way to drunk, somewhere near the warm midpoint of it, and his eyes shine with the expansive good humor that is only augmented by this perfect sort of buzz. The windows are enough to cut them off from the sound of the cast and crew, the friends and family inside, but they can hear them through the windows, the conviviality evident, not forced, not unnatural, effortless and affectionate as a big, manic family - the sort of family that chooses itself, rather than the one into which you're born, with a crazed aunt and a sharp-handed, disappointed mother, and monsters under the floorboards, in the attic, in the wilds, howling at the moon.
"Jesus - " he says, and it's a curse not a prayer, the first syllable short and hard edged enough that it could become ugly, except that he laughs at the end, like he's just figuring out the answer to a question he'd long forgotten the shape of. " - not that I'm surprised, just - " another flare of his nostrils, this one abbrevieted and sharp. " - jesus."
[Imogen Slaughter] She is silent, her eyes forward, her jaw tight. A tendon moves along the side of her face and she picks up her wine glass again, this time draining it before setting it down. It nearly overbalances, but she catches it, easily, and rights it again, steadying its centre before leaving it to stand on its own.
The silence is not perfect - it is broken by ambient noise. Chatting, cheerful passers-by, cars, their tires whispering against the damp roadway. But between them, it is perfect. They do not speak and she does not look at him.
Her gaze drops to the ground, her fine shoes on snow and pavement, heels that give her the height she was not born with, which truly, is hardly on the low side of average for a woman. She lifts her cigarette to her lips, taking a deep drag. The words she speaks come out on smoke, "Then why did you ask?"
[JB Cavanagh] He towers over her. Most of the tribe she was born into do - the men, at least, born true, born half-blooded, big, brawny men born to a big, brawny stock, who've made their livings - what living there has been to be made - by the work of their hands, the strength of their backs, the sweat on their brow.
His shadow is longer, sweeping - multipartite from the many sources of light - and when it shifts over her, when he turns like this, pushing away from the cool glass, from the echo of people inside the restaurant, the laughter rising and then falling into a valley as the chatter of alcohol-lubricated conversation resumes - with a short, sharp laugh as he shakes his head.
"Brick wall," he tells her, breathing out another laugh now, full of smoke, " - and my head. They go together like peanut butter and chocolate, like scallops and lime, like alcohol and the fucking Irish. What's not to love?"
Then, he shakes his head, the gesture subdued, his cigarette burning forgotten between his fingers.
"Or maybe I never pegged you for some angsty existensialist. You know that's all modernist bullshit. No man is a fucking island." There's a moment of hesitation there, he cuts her a look from lowered eyes, the look is askance - " - besides, I make a kick-ass dim sum. Worked with this Chinese cook in Seattle. My dumplings could kill if they wanted to."
[JB Cavanagh] transcript!
to JB Cavanagh
[Imogen Slaughter] She looks at him once, sharply, when he says 'angsty existentialist' the movement one of restrained violence, where she nearly interrupts, nearly spits out a reply and then - simply - subsides. He finishes speaking.
Again, another silence. Imogen has always chosen her words carefully. She has always been reserved. It's the kind of quality that can draw a man in, but just as quickly, repels him when he realizes that it isn't an act. She really is this reticent.
Her finger taps on the edge of the cigarette, scattering ash toward the snow, until there is none to drop. A few more taps, and she stops, her fingers stilling on the fag. She flicks the cigarette away toward the gutter, and watches it until it disappears at the bottom of its arc, behind the sidewalks curb.
"That poem," she says finally, "by John Donne speaks more of humanism than it does of friendship.
"Look-" one sentence follows the next, but is abruptly truncated. Sharply so. She pauses a moment and then a moment becomes several, and several becomes an eternity. Her jaw tightens and loosens repeatedly as her gaze turns back to the street.
"There were people here who knew me once," she says finally. "And they've all died or chosen to leave. I haven't quite worked out how t'fill the holes they've left behind. Or even -" another pause. This one is complete. When she speaks again, it is a new sentence.
"I don't do this," she gestures toward the bay window. "I know its yours and it makes you happy, but it's not mine. I cannot sit there and tell lies about my life and enjoy it and find connections there. I don't even celebrate Christmas."
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