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Colour Contagion · Original Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 400–750
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The Burning
The old man's body was found in a cabin, or something that resembled a cabin, lying in a crusted puddle of dried saliva and vomit, surrounded by apple cores and frenzied cockroaches. He must've been dead for a week or so by the time the boy and the bearded men found him.

The boy kept his distance from the corpse; he was still somewhat inexperienced with the sight of a dead body, and the men in the group decided to not scold him for this, out of pity.

There were two grown men, with coarse hair on their faces and hardly a shoe or white tooth between them. The boy had only a shirt, a pair of pants, and a knapsack to call his own, as he had nothing else.

Not even a name.

"Jesus," he heard one of the men say, standing over the body.

"Bury 'im?" the other man asked.

"No," wiping his nose in mild speculation. "He'll make for good fuel. C'mon, grab 'im by the other end."

The boy stood by the doorway as the men carried the body out, each holding his breath. There was something eerie about the old man's eyes, which were only barely recognizable as such, that made the boy turn his head away, partly out of fright and partly from the smell.

With the men outside for the moment, the boy tip-toed around the cabin's interior, trying not to step on bugs. The old man had a lot of junk in his possession: emptied food cans, jars containing dead animals, torn-up leaves that must've served as toilet paper, pieces of cloth that must've served as clothes.

The boy got on his knees and reached around in places an adult couldn't, not stopping his business when the men returned. He realized there was something wedged behind the desk with the jars of dead animals. The object was roughly textured, like leather, and as the boy took it in his hands he felt just how heavy it was.

The weight of this... book? As they would've called it in a more civilized time.

It seemed like junk, but different from the other junk in the cabin. The boy got something like an idea in his head, that he could use this thing for some purpose he couldn't parse.

He put the book in his knapsack, sneakily and wearily, like a thief suffering a case of uncertainty.

The men proceeded to ransack the cabin for what little it was worth.




The night was cold, as it was November or thereabouts.

The men had built a fire in what had once been a field of grass. Much of the greenery in the area had long since been spirited away. The old man was blanketed with chunks of wood; the flesh and wood merged, almost intertwining as they gave birth to flames and smoke.

The smell was bad, but not as bad as before, when the body wasn't burning.

Sitting by his lonesome, the boy pulled the book out of his knapsack and rested it in his lap. There were words on the cover, but he didn't understand any of it. Curious enough, though, he started flipping through the pages; words upon words upon words... and nothing to take from any of them. It was a fact of life that made the boy's face contort.

Yet every dozen pages or so, there was a drawing that replaced the words. The book, as it turned out, was full of these drawings: of men and women from another time, roughly sketched and lacking in color, but containing a mysterious element that made up for the seeming lack of detail.

These drawings had to mean something, but the boy didn't know what.

"Got somethin' there?" one of the men said, squatting in front of the boy, startling him.

"It's mine," the boy said.

"Let me look at it," the man said, just sternly enough.

Reluctantly the boy handed the book to the man, who stood up and went near the fire. He opened the book as if to read it for himself, only to start tearing out pages by the handful.

"It's mine!" the boy yelled.

"And?" the man said. "We need fuel for the fire, boy." He crumpled up the pages and tossed them into the flames.

The boy watched, powerless, as the words and pictures were sacrificed.

The man turned to the boy and said: "What d'you even want with a book, anyway? Can't read anyhow."
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#1 ·
· · >>No_Raisin
So this is an early frontrunner, largely due to its writing. It's some of the most expert writing I've seen on this site.

But the "second edge" to knocking the prose out of the park is that I have a really good map of what happened in the story, so it's easier for me to find things I didn't like about it. And this has left me a little confused here? I mean... Why the burning? These gentlemen keep referring to combustible things as "fuel", but that implies they want to convert that fuel into something else... Yet as far as I can see all they've done is make a campfire. They even have wood! Why are they so obsessed with finding things to burn? Without that context this story is feeling very "post-apocalyptic for the sake of it". And I'm sure that isn't what you had in mind.

So my only comment would be to add a little more context. Unless I totally whiffed on it, in which case I look forward to the following comments pointing out how silly I am, and how ironic it is that I claimed to know what's going on. Ho ho ho.

Thanks for writing.
#2 · 1
· · >>No_Raisin
WORTHLESS REVIEWS (#4 IN THE SERIES)
READ ONLY IF YOU HAVE TIME TO KILL, AND MAYBE NOT EVEN THEN

Okay.

First of all, I acknowledge the writing is good, but I fail to see why Andrew pushed it from "good" to "sublime". Blame my lack of English expertise, maybe. After all, you can’t expect an uncouth yokel like me to praise Leonardo's paintings or Shakespeare’s plays, right?

In any case, I debated a long time with Cassius over this one, especially about the takeaway. And while we almost concur – not that the message was so hard to dredge up – here also I’m just about lukewarm about it. The gist of it, if I follow Cassius’s path, is "savagery wipes out all civilization" or "savagery brings about more savagery", which somehow clicks in with the prompt. Yet, I think this is both a very somber and quite biased way of seeing things. The best counterexample being how our species managed to rise from the mud. This might be the case in isolated spots, but even in a post-apocalyptic, totally destitute society, I think there would be people eager to recover what little knowledge had survived.

Besides, I found that message a mite trite.

I’m going to be stoned for this – let me pick up my armor – but I think this will land in the middle of my slate. It’s not bad, but I can’t really say I was enthused. But don’t worry, author: true English speakers will rank it much higher than I do. :)
#3 ·
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Alternate Title: The Book of Nothing

Oh boy, a post-apocalypse story. I think this is the first one I've read this round? And I'm sure there are a few others I'll run into later. Probably not as downtrodden and generic as this, hopefully, but I'll get to that in a moment.

It's been said by everyone else that the actual writing of this entry is its selling point, and yeah, I pretty much agree. With the exception of The Beast of Luscioucr this is the closest to airtight in terms of polish and control of tone I've seen so far. There are one or two questionable points ("pieces of cloth that must've serve as clothing" is kind of a weird phrase), but aside from that I dig the writing very much.

It says something about the clarity of the prose that I was able to ascertain the setting, albeit vaguely, without thinking about it too hard and without the story explicitly telling me this is after civilization has crumbled. I just kind of got that, along with why the hillbillies would want to burn the book for the amateur cremation; it seems practical, killing two birds with one stone like that.

The ending is also really goddamn pessimistic, about as close as you can get without an outright murder being thrown in, but it ends on kind of the perfect note for the premise given and (I think?) the main theme of the story.

The Achilles heel for this entry, though, is that it's a very vanilla post-apocalypse story; it begs comparisons to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which in itself is a very generic but well-executed post-apocalypse story.

Also, depending on how you look at it, the message to take away from this is either very typical (humans suck lol) or there's something else going on here. I have to both agree and disagree with old man Mono in that I'm not convinced this is just a "humans suck" story, but I don't think it's about the failure to preserve knowledge either.

I think it's more about the failure to preserve art. How art would be seen by most as totally disposable in a post-apocalyptic setting. Or maybe this is a low-key meta fic, about the futility of participating in the WriteOff, and we didn't notice.

Whatever's going on, this is a pretty solid entry. Thank God for that, I guess...
#4 · 1
· · >>No_Raisin
I'm not gonna do a full review of this because finals are coming up, and I'm writing enough as it is. But I'll give an abbreviated version of my trademark long-ass reviews.

Top slate. Good job.

Good sense of scene direction and composition of details. How things are described here show a particular strength in economy of words and use of implicit description. Not every line is a winner, though, and drafting still needs be tightened.

Worst line: "The weight of this... book? As they would've called it in a more civilized time."

Very hokey. Undercuts your tone with such a hackneyed phrasing and use of ellipsis. Also wholly unnecessary. Story is better without it.

Excellent ending line. Best in the competition. Great use of irony. Honestly concerned that you might be making an homage or something to a similar preexisting work and that ending is not entirely your original creation simply because of how good it is. Deliciously cruel and nihilistic, almost humorous in how pointlessly spiteful it is. It's as if you gave characters locked in a room the key, but instead of using it to escape, they hammered it into an arrow tip, all the while berating the one guy who thought it might been a good idea to keep the key.
#5 · 3
· · >>No_Raisin
While i concur with Cassius that this is one of the better entries so far, I'm not so sold on the ending. We're told earlier that he can't understand the words on the cover, which I took as an outright statement that the boy was illiterate. As such, the final line had almost no impact for me. I would even say it had negative impact -- it cheapened the boy's dilemma by acting like it was supposed to surprise me.

I also don't get the fuel thing, as there seemed to be plenty in this world still left to burn. But I'll chalk that up to author's prerogative.
#6 · 3
· · >>No_Raisin
While i concur with Cassius that this is one of the better entries so far, I'm not so sold on the ending. We're told earlier that he can't understand the words on the cover, which I took as an outright statement that the boy was illiterate.


This.

The ending of this story dramatically reveals something that we knew within the first third of the story. This made it fall flat for me, and without that twist, it's really just a summary of three people ransacking an old cabin.
#7 · 1
· · >>Cold in Gardez >>No_Raisin
Dramatic Irony: a Primer

"I love when my characters do dumb shit because of stuff they don't know."

-William Shakespeare on: King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Henry V, Macbeth, Richard II, Julius Caesar, Othello, etc.

The essence of dramatic irony is that the audience is more fully informed than the characters in the story; the audience understands something about the situation that the characters do not.

In Romeo and Juliet, this is plainly illustrated when Romeo chooses to kill himself.

Romeo believes Juliet to be dead, but unbeknownst to him, she is actually still alive. The audience is aware of Juliet's plan to fake her own death, but due to the events of the story, Romeo does not. The fact that Romeo kills himself believing Juliet to be dead is ironic for this reason: had he only known what we, the smart audience knew, he could have avoided his fate.

Another example of this is in Othello when Othello strangles Desdemona to death.

The tragedy of the situation is that while Othello himself believes that Desdemona was unfaithful to him because of the villainy of Iago, the audience is well aware Desdemona was actually a faithful and loving wife.

Why is the ending to The Burning ironic (and why is it good)?

Consider the following:

Boiling this story down to its core components, this story can be summarized as follows:

1. This is a post-apocalyptic setting of some kind where our protagonists are a band of roving scavengers who barely have a tooth between the lot of them. Our protagonist, the boy, is so destitute that he doesn't even have a name.
2. The boy finds a book.
3. The boy doesn't know what the book is for or how to read it (THIS IS SAID DIRECTLY TO THE AUDIENCE 5 TIMES!)
4. Nonetheless, even in his ignorance, the boy is cognizant that the BOOK is USEFUL in some way HE DOESN'T YET KNOW.
5. However, before he can figure out this mystery, the older man in his group burns the book.
6. In the last line, the older man mocks the boy for wanting something he seemingly has no use for.

So, why is this ironic?

Because THE AUDIENCE is AWARE that the BOOK is USEFUL but THE MAN is NOT AWARE of this fact. The final, mocking line (the italics are clearly meant to affect that tone) which serves to explain the man's perspective on why the book isn't useful to them, is particularly ironic because of how ignorant and myopic it is, ensuring that they'll never uplift themselves beyond a roving band of savages.

What use is a book to someone who can't read?

YOU CAN USE IT TO LEARN HOW, YOU DUMBASS. IT EVEN HAD PICTURES TO HELP OUT.

But why is that good?

Because the story was built up to that moment.

Let's look at the set up:

1. Post Apocalypse setting
2. Boy finds book
3. Boy thinks book is important (and he's supposed to be right)
4. Boy is slowly trying to learn the mystery of the book

The story as establishes the boy's curiosity in the book and repeatedly imparts that it has some hidden value that the boy is not aware of yet. It's pulling a bait and switch, a really good one at that: the reader's expectation is that the story is going to be in some way about the mystery of the book.

However, the payoff is:

1. Actually, that important book? We're pitching it in a fire for a couple more seconds of fuel.
2. Also fuck you for caring about it.

It's cruel, dark, and spiteful. It takes what should be a hopeful story of a boy's curiosity and learning, snuffs it out, and mocks you for trying. The whole story builds to that set of ending lines, which as someone who tries and fails to write good endings, is impressive as hell.
#8 · 2
· · >>Monokeras >>Baal Bunny >>No_Raisin
>>Cassius

I still can't get over the whole burning dead bodies for fuel thing. Also, while I agree that the use of the book as a tool to learn to read is a clear interpretation, the final line does nothing to advance it. The italics just make it worse, IMO. Italics are signposts for the reader's attention. I much more got the feeling that this story was longer in the original draft, had to be cut to make the 750 word limit, and the author pulled that final line out as an attempt to slap-dash his intent into a single, short sentence. If he didn't want people to interpret it as the bluntest twist ever, it shouldn't have been written like one.

But seriously, why would you burn a body for fuel? I want to like this story, and I hate it when critics sharp-shoot my stories for logical fallacies, but so much of this story is predicated on that rather morbid fact that I can't get over it.
#9 ·
· · >>No_Raisin
>>Cold in Gardez
But seriously, why would you burn a body for fuel?

I get behind Cold on that. I agree that might not be very efficient. You have first to evaporate all the water, and, IIRC, body is about 70 to 80% water. Take out bones, which are ininflammable, from the dry corpse, and you’re left with very little to warm you with.

IMO, you'd spend more calories boiling the water out of the body than you would get from the burning of the then dried-up remains. Clearly, you have a point here, Cold.
#10 · 1
· · >>No_Raisin
I agree with the above. Humans are meaty. Why burn a perfectly edible body for fuel?

There's something similar in the videogame RAGE where you can sell books to merchants as near-worthless scrap paper. It's just a weird lazy joke about how these wasteland survivors don't care about reading. This fic isn't written as a comedy, but it feels equally weak as social commentary.

If someone has to explain that it's irony, it probably aint.

I'm highly skeptical an illiterate person can teach themselves to read without any teachers at all. Illustrations every few pages don't make it Dr Seuss. To be fair I'm guessing the author didn't intend for that to be a possibility for the boy. I don't think that logic is bothering anyone, so it's something else...

The boy got something like an idea in his head, that he could use this thing for some purpose he couldn't parse.

This line seems to sum up the whole story, yet also highlights the weakness. We don't know the book's exact purpose either. It's used as a vague glimpse of something grander he can't comprehend, and I get that the vagueness is intentional... but that also makes it pretty boring and hard to relate to. He finds a nice object he wants to keep on a whim, can't grasp its signifiance, but then it's lost forever anyway. Too bad.

It's a tragic note of regret, an opportunity lost forever to the older man's senseless destruction, but not much else. I can only guess that the message here is that books themselves are important, and literacy can elevate him from this ruined savagery. That's debatable, but more importantly it's not argued well.

I'm thinking the story's effect would be much stronger if it hinted that this specific book could solve the boy's immediate practical problems. We can assume what his problems are, but they're not directly shown. Maybe he can recognize something in the illustrations that is personally relevant to him (maybe it's a science book, or a Boy Scout manual)? And in that exciting moment, when he knows the book is important, having it suddenly snatched away and burned would feel like a real gut-punch!

Romeo's suicide is effective only because the audience knows with certainty that Juliet is faking her death. If we were as clueless about the situation as Romeo, the play would be forgettable.
#11 ·
·
What the hell happened here?

The people who had commented on this during the prelim period reached sort of a consensus, and for the record my feelings on this entry haven't really changed since my review either. Opinions fit into either the "It's very good" or "It's merely decent" camps and that's arguably still the case.

Personally I'm more in the former camp, but I wouldn't put this at the top of my slate.

The problem is that there seems to be debate over the ending now, which strikes me as really conspicuous considering it's one of more clear-cut passages from the story, and I will actually or probably not eat my own shoes if it was intended to be a twist. >>Cassius already explained how this is ridiculous and what the intent most likely was.

But this did not satisfy some people.

>>Cold in Gardez in both of his comments (I'm just replying to the more recent one for convenience) argued that the ending falls flat because it's written like a twist. Or rather, given how it's laid out, one would expect the final line to change everything we knew about the story, or something like that. Something O. Henry would be proud of. But the last line is more like a tiny kick in the gonads, in that it flips the reader the bird for thinking the book was going to be something specifically meaningful, either in its identity or how it relates to the boy.

Because we're denied a conventional last-line twist ending, some of us feel cheated. I personally didn't, because it was clear to me that the kicker lay not in the boy's illiteracy but in his crushed potential to be more than what he is. That seems like a fair assessment.

Re-reading this, there are a few more nitpicks I have than before, but nothing serious. The line Cassius quoted in his initial comment is totally superfluous, so it should've been scrapped. The question of burning the old man's body is also one that can lead to some head-scratching, although I think the problem of this is a bit blown out of proportion by a few people.

>>Monokeras is technically right about the logic of burning a body for warmth, although the characters in the story wouldn't know such specifics so maybe it's a moot point?

I could "sharp-shoot" (what a word, by the way) and complain about where the men got the wood from or how they started the fire to begin with, although these feel less egregious to me than several other logical gaps/issues from other finalists, most notably Shades of White and The Coyote of Roseview Park.

It's not fair to compare, though, so I'll put all that to the side.

I'm just saying that somebody misfired here, and I'm wondering as to whom.
#12 ·
· · >>No_Raisin
Bottom slated for getting so many comments. It makes me jealous.

Another one like Ships where the particular story being told feels fairly familiar. I would say this is probably the best executed of that trilogy as it leans more on the mood specific in the story rather than the events of the story itself, if that makes sense.

Fundamentally I kind of agree with both sides of the conversation here. Cassius' interpretation is consistent with what I see, but I do agree that the last line flounders a bit in its presentation, making it read like an attempted hook/twist when it isn't anything of the sort. Losing the italics would probably help a bit there, but otherwise I'm just not sure. you might want to just reconsider that line (in its current form, not necessarily the concept) altogether.

Thanks for writing!
#13 · 1
· · >>Cold in Gardez >>Monokeras
Alternate Title: The Retrospective Nobody Wanted

Where do I begin with this?

I've had to think about this for a while, and by that I mean a few days, before the round even ended. There are a few people here I feel I should answer to, because surprisingly, during finals period (where usually not much happens), my entry picked up a lot of traction. And by traction I mean people arguing over its merits, its executions, and what I meant by all of it.

This proved to be both amazing and irritating. As an author your ears perk up whenever something you wrote gets attention, and even negative criticism can be enlightening and (believe it or not) satisfying to read.

Yet a couple people here seemed to assume the absolute worst of me. Like, beyond what I initially thought was going to be the roughest criticism. Not because of its harshness, but well... I'll explain it when I get to those comments.

I'm going in order here, so as to not pick anyone first out of bias, just to keep that in mind.

>>Miller Minus

First of all, the "expert writing" comment made my day. I don't even know what the criteria for that is, and I know for a fact that there are a lot of entries in just the past few rounds that I think are more polished than this. With that said, I had to take that comment and hold it close, modesty be damned.

As for the burning itself, which to my surprise became a major topic of debate for some reason, I thought the logic behind it was simple enough. The old man had been dead for some time and it'd probably not be a good idea to eat him (would you do it, even if you cooked it well? I wouldn't), and burying seemed like a waste of time. So, because it was in the fall and nighttime was going to be really cold, and because his body (so I thought) would supply a nice hearty fire, I went with that option.

It didn't seem hard to figure out, I'm just saying. I was wrong, though.

>>Monokeras

Old man, Mono, you left two comments here. How silly of you. But I'll cover both here, because there's not much I can say that wasn't already said in the Discord server. For those of you who are not in that server, though, I'll write the abridged version of my responses here.

You're right about the probable takeaway being trite, and truth be told there are waaaaaay too many post-apocalypse stories that take on this bleak tone and message. I didn't take the ending directly from anywhere, but trust me when I say it's nothing special. This is a standard story, in the context of its genre, with a nice coat of paint.

Also, the science stuff about the body is right (or at least I'm taking your word for it), though I don't think the characters would know about those kinds of things. They're not the brightest or most educated bunch.

>>Cassius

Now Cassius, my dear brother in arms, I feel it's best to tackle both of your comments here as well.

First off, your comment about that one line being useless was absolutely spot on. I fiddled with this story a lot, changed a lot of things to fit the word count, and I'm ashamed at the fact that I never went back and deleted that line. I could've used those words for something more productive, like explaining where the men got the wood from (I'm only half-joking here, that explanation would've helped me in the long run). It's hokey, the ellipses combined with italics are annoying, and it lacks the overall subtlety I was going for.

As for your really, really long comment about the ending, I'm impressed. You had me figured out when some of the more experienced writers here didn't, and you seem to have a sixth sense for understanding what authors want out of their stories without knowing who wrote what.

You proved that dramatic irony is not dead, and that someone in one of these contests could execute it and get away with it. I think it's the first time I've done an ending like this, and truth be told it wasn't even what I originally had in mind. I wanted to do something more solemn, with the narrator going deeper into the boy's anguish, but the last line of dialogue ended up summarizing what I wanted so well that I stopped there.

>>Cold in Gardez

Once again I'm covering both comments here; I had to sit and think and go through a few emotions in reading and re-reading them. In fact these comments are the reason why I'm doing this retro today and not yesterday.

I could try to sum up what you said, but I'll just quote the first paragraph from your second comment:

I still can't get over the whole burning dead bodies for fuel thing. Also, while I agree that the use of the book as a tool to learn to read is a clear interpretation, the final line does nothing to advance it. The italics just make it worse, IMO. Italics are signposts for the reader's attention. I much more got the feeling that this story was longer in the original draft, had to be cut to make the 750 word limit, and the author pulled that final line out as an attempt to slap-dash his intent into a single, short sentence. If he didn't want people to interpret it as the bluntest twist ever, it shouldn't have been written like one.


Words cannot describe how much this all bugs me. Or maybe "bugs" is too light a word, because truth be told I was furious. I've gotten many irksome comments from critics in the six years that I've been writing fiction, but this actually takes the cake. I didn't think that an expert, someone who can write circles around me, would make this kind of point.

Italics are usually meant to emphasize words, yes. That's what I had intended. I did not mean it to come out like a twist, because I had enough faith in the readers that they would've gathered by that point that the boy's illiteracy was not a twist or surprise. The italics were meant to emphasize the dramatic irony of the situation.

I thought that was clear. I was wrong. I was so wrong that even now it disheartens me that somebody misconstrued what the ending was supposed to signify. Just one person, and of all people a veteran among us, misconstruing it was enough to make me regret writing this entry, not because I felt I had misfired on the ending but because I felt (and still feel) I had failed on a deep and irreparable level as a young writer.

These comments of yours didn't enlighten me, but rather made me almost distraught. They taught me, if anything, that putting a decent amount of faith in readers is a mistake, and I want to believe that's wrong. I want to refine my craft, and I want to engross people who happen to come across my stories, and I want to treat them with the kind of respect where I believe they can deal with many things, because I want to believe they're strong. Strong, smart, and savvy, more so than me.

I don't think I can say anything else about that. Moving on, then...

>>GaPJaxie

Repeating Gardez's sentiments, so I don't have anything to respond to here, really.

>>Haze

There's a bit of fridge logic at work in the story (and by a bit I mean a good amount), so your remarks about the boy being able to learn to read in the first place are well-founded.

As for the identity of the book, I feel like that would almost result in a different story altogether. For what I was going for, the specific identity of the book didn't matter as much as what it represented. I could've (and even considered) having it explicitly be an encyclopedia or a dictionary, but I felt that was too narrow.

A lot of the details in the story are kept fuzzy for a reason.

>>AndrewRogue

The exact execution of the ending is definitely more up for debate than what it was intended to convey, so I gotta agree with you there. Perhaps it would've been better if I ditched the italics, but then again they seemed appropriate for what I wanted. It's one of those things where people can debate over what the "right" choice would be and you probably wouldn't get a clear winner out of that argument. It's a simple fix, though, assuming the lack of italics really would be better, so I'm thankful for that at least.

God, this retrospective is so long.

I almost didn't even want to write it, because I feared some fiery emotions would bleed into it, and from the looks of it I could only keep those to a minimum. I'm sorry, but I can only mask how I feel so well.

Much of the criticism was very much appreciated, though. It all contributes to me growing as a writer, and that's what really counts here. I'm quite young and I have a lot to learn.

Au revoir.
#14 ·
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>>No_Raisin

For the record, I ranked your story fourth. It came in sixth. So I found it considerably better than the average judge.

Take that for what you will.
#15 ·
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>>No_Raisin
💙