Tim Hagstrom (previously Hagström) was born on March 8th, 1970, on a small farm in Minnesota to parents who were psychopathic in the same way that everyone in the Midwest is psychopathic. They were generally nice on the exterior, would never say anything bad to anyone or about anyone, but their interior was rage and fire and ice and the singular hope of death and misfortune for anyone who wasn't a Hagstrom. This singular anger had once driven them to monasteries and unspeakable disembowelment and beheadings and abductions and rapes and all manner of evil, but now it drove them to church, and to smile, and to exchange niceties with Jungersons and Lewinskis and Schlichtings, and to grow mediocre vegetable patches, and have eyes as devoid as a raven's.

Revel Hagstrom owned and worked in a small hardware store. He had met his wife (Dorothy Hagstrom) in 1963 when she entered high school and he left. He had never loved her, and was fine with that, for, to quote his mother's favorite novel, "it is the height of bad form for husbands and wives to love each other". She was small and redheaded and pale and shy and he had many of the same traits. Slight build, pale, shy, brown haired. After he graduated he worked as a janitor in the high school and he would see Dorothy with her small gaggle of friends and she would smile at him, which was more than could be said for many of the students. By the end of her freshman year he had gotten the courage to ask her on a date. They went to How to Steal a Million and both pretended to like the movie, and like the date. After that neither had the courage to end the relationship.

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Mrs. Dorothy Hagstrom had family in Minnesota dating back to the 1880s. They had moved North from Missouri because the patriarch had a background in timber and large swathes of the Northwest territories at that time were undeveloped. He started a lumber mill that went dormant around 1910. Dorothy's father (Tim Harwell) was drafted to join the Navy in World War Two and was sent to the Pacific, which was the only time he was ever truly content. He had had a lover by the name of James Weathers, and he remembered how they met, walking with some common acquaintances underneath the palm fronds of Hawaii. The way the wind blew his hair. The wrinkles that formed when he smiled. James was the only person he could be honest with.

They were passionate until March 1944. Arguments were becoming more heated and more frequent, and looming over the western horizon was eventual deployment. The memory Tim would come back to during his golden years was preparing Jimmy (James) coffee at dawn, not touching him, looking over the rising sun and watching airplanes flying back from training missions. The memories he forgot was his seething at Jimmy when he would stay out late and come home smelling of rum and palm wine, his hair smelling washed even though Tim didn't see him in the barracks shower, and his own anxiety at being deployed, for although Tim came from berserkers and dressed as a gunner he was a farmer, instilled with the same secret unspeakable longing for peace as his forefathers were, driven by circumstance and greed and society to battle and atrocities and to wear the mask of a berserker and a gunner and a midwesterner.

James came from true warriors and was himself a true warrior. He had little to no respect for people that were not true warriors, but would respect them more if they tried to be. He loved Tim but didn't respect him, and, although he would never admit it or conduct himself in such a way that Tim would suspect it, thought him a coward. He shrunk when he saw Tim's eyes widen at injuries or burns or horrific accounts of battle and sickness, and had to reckon his own feelings with loving and caring for someone with so little bravery. Hence the difficulties of March 1944.

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They shot at the houses for everyone on the island was considered a combatant. Some were already little more than shelled corpses of their former. Children would walk to troops and they would be shot. When their corpse was searched sometimes one could find the wiring and engines of an EOD-more often than not there was nothing save for the little boy clad in laborer pants hewn from the threadbare fabrics of war time. They would stumble upon the dead crowded en masse, limbs strewn and faces mangled. These were mainly women and those too young or too old to walk, for anyone else was executed in a different manner. Sometimes all there would be was a pile of dud grenades and then they would see the fractured skulls and the bloodied rocks beside them. Those corpses they knew could not lie on their conscience. The others could, because both the U.S. and Japanese armed forces considered alive civilians combatants, and killed them as they would combatants.

Tim and James rarely had time alone on the island. Everything was so busy, and neither was sure they would make it the next day to see the other. Throughout the battle their relationship was strengthened; Tim depending on James for his courage, and James depending on Tim for his understanding, for James had feelings of cowardice and disgust within himself that he didn't know how to reckon with. He would tell these thoughts to Tim and although Tim couldn't find the words James could see Tim's comprehension in the drawn lines of his face, and this was enough for him.

August 6th and August 9th came and skin melted from the people of Japan and was replaced with boils and tumors and everyone knew the whole world over that everything had changed. There was no need for berserkers now. Another century there would be no need for farmers. When Tim read the newspaper he cried, and James held him and stroked his hair, and this was one of the last times Tim felt safe. When James was discharged in October he said he would write, and they would meet in Nashville, Tennessee, North for James but South for Tim. He never wrote. Tim never wrote either and his last memory was the sad, sad smile of James as he boarded the airplane back, and the tears that James forced to hold back, and the tears that Tim couldn't.

Tim was discharged in November and felt only grief during his town's parade. A month later he met Bettyjean in a cafe. Four months later they eloped. Bettyjean's friends told her not to do it, that she wouldn't be happy with a man with the wayward eyes and mental condition of Tim, but she didn't much care, for she was unhappy, and hoped that together they would find something that meant something to either of them. In time they did. There was no passion for them but there seldom is passion in Minnesota. Tim never talked of longing, never spanked his wife or even slapped her, and this was more than a lot of women could ask for.

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B.J. (Bettyjean) bore four children. Her first was Dorothy, her other three were boys. When Tim passed B.J. found his diary, and found suggestive passages about his three sons. " Tim Jr. crawled naked from his bath to my room and slept on my bed today with the light on. I couldn't help admiring him in the orange glow of the room. It looked so soft on his skin, like the Still Life with Burning Candle by Claesz. I meditate upon my own lost youth while I look upon my boy, and the perfections upon his exterior, unblemished, unwrinkled, unlike my skin. Children are considered innocent and perhaps this is why I desire him, for my innocence was lost and I can never find it".

She pressed the sons about the treatment by their father. Similar accusations arose. He was distant, seemed lost oftentimes, seemed like he was thinking beyond them, was not interested in their lives as much as they wanted him to be, never seemed like he was actually listening to them. In other words, he was a normal midwestern father. She burned the select passages and none were the wiser about some of his true desires.

B.J. had ambitions in her youth but like all ambitions they were never realized. She made it through high school and junior college on the assumption that she would be famous someday, would be heard on the radio telling clever anecdotes and presenting her work in Vogue, so that all her classmates would read her and be jealous. There were no sewing machines in the depression. There were no updated sewing patterns. Only thread, needles, and cloth from wheat sacks for B.J. to practice on. In truth, B.J. didn't have the eye, talent, or patience for fashion design. All her stitches were clumsy, all her seams were poorly thought out, and most of her projects could only be described as Frankinstinean. She was blind to this.

During the war years she worked as a telephone operator. She enjoyed the work as much as she could. Men would often comment on her pretty voice. In truth, B.J. was quite pretty. She had mannish shoulders, but a very feminine waist, which oftentimes drew the attention of men. She didn't much care for marriage, or men in general, but did appreciate compliments bestowed upon her. During the four year war period she was subject to bouts of depression, which would keep her languid in the operating booth. She would look at her projects and her ambitions and realize she would never be interviewed on the radio, never be published in Vogue, never be anything besides a telephone operator, and as she dwelled on this, and saw men come home traumatized and mangled, her unhappiness grew and her beauty faded.

When she met Tim in the café she was unimpressed by him. He asked her out and on their date she could sense his discontent, his unhappiness, and she had no choice but to fall in love with him and try to make him (and by extension, her) anything besides the heartbreak and dullness that consumed him. She had heard rumors of his homosexuality, for it is hard for a man to hide such a thing, and, while it did bother her, she figured that with some feminine guidance even this could be cured. Tim, for his part, thought B.J. was kind enough to live with, and in the four months before they married, did develop a platonic attraction to her. This was enough for both of them.

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The father of Revel Hagstrom (Thor) had served in World War 1 as a line cook. He had an identical twin, Odin, who had been killed in the woods of the River Somme. The day he was killed Thor warned Odin not to leave on the scouting mission. Thor had had a dream the night before where Odin was in mired woods, struggling. A raven descended and perched on Odin's face and pecked at him and Odin screamed then when the raven flew the optic nerve could be seen dangling from the raven's claws. Odin didn't heed his warnings, and had quarters over his eyes at the burial because Thor knew his mother couldn't bear to see the vacant hole in his left socket that the sniper's bullet left. Since then Thor had been lost. France could not be beautiful without Odin. Neither could Minnesota.

Like Tim Sr., like his own son Revel, he hadn't courted or married out of love, or a need for stability, or really anything. He did so because that was what was expected of him. The only enjoyment he found wasn't with his wife or his children or his other family or what few friends he had or all the dogs his wife bought throughout the years; it was by the lake, fishing and thinking of Odin. He would think about all the pranks Odin and he played in the military and at home, all the girls they tried to court, how, even in his darkest moments and Odin's darkest moments they had each other. When he heard the plodding of the dirt hit the coffin and the twenty-one gun salute he became nothing. He went through life like a tree who grows new leaves only for them to fall.

His deathbed memory was him and Odin in the barracks, sewing the sheets of one of their friends to half length. He saw Odin clearly, the reflection of the needle in his eye, laughing as he pictured their friend trying to pull his sheets all the way up only for them to come to his navel. Then Odin was gone, and then Thor was gone. One had been buried fifty years prior and the other one should have been.

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Thor's wife also married from practicality. The Hagstroms and the Kristiansens had come to the U.S. at the same time and by the 1920s were so intertwined that Thor and Deborah had the same arched eyebrows. Since Deborah was six she always knew she would marry Thor, because her grandmother had married Thor's great uncle, and a Hagstrom and Kristiansen marriage always skipped a generation. Thor was handsome in a very nordic way, and so was Deborah. Her sister, Joyce, was expected to marry Odin, but since Odin was deceased, she married a traveling preacher, and Deborah heard little from her.

From an outsider's perspective, Deborah Hagstrom (previously Kristiansen) could only be described as practical. She married at a practical age, spanked her children a practical amount of times, used practical language when describing emotions and feelings, and spent and cooked practically. She married Thor because that was what was expected of her and that was what was practical of her.

Deborah wasn't as put together and practical as she let on. She lost her virginity at a young, impractical age (twelve) to a boy two years her junior. They were alone at a small pond by town where a bum had drowned himself five years prior. The boy she was with asked anatomical questions and she was obliged to correct his misconceptions, then she became anatomically curious as well and soon they both wondered how it actually fit in there and before she knew it she wasn't a virgin. She wasn't quite sure what sex was, and neither was her friend, but she still garnered that she was more experienced at it now then most of her classmates. As she grew and learned what her parents tried to keep from her, she desired it more, and when she turned eighteen and left for the University of Michigan in 1910, she, on impulse, drove past Ann Arbor to Detroit and found a seedy bookstore that assured her that if she gave them her address, they could ship her an inauspicious brown package that contained the Kama Sutra. The man smiled knowingly at her, and she had the impression she wasn't the first young girl with an Ann Arbor address to ask for such a horrid book.

She stayed for four years in college and loved six people and gave herself to eight. Her young womanhood was full of passion and emotion and heartbreak and at the end, she decided she preferred to live in her small town in Minnesota, and marry the dull, uninterested Thor. That's not to say she didn't still have her moments of emotion and impracticality. When Thor would dissuade her sexual advances for the nth night in a row she would walk outside, past the house, past the neighbors, and scream, and punch the river birches that surrounded their neighborhood. Thor wouldn't comment on her bloody knuckles and she wished he would acknowledge the pain that their dispassionate, uninterested marriage led her to commit on herself. He never did, and she never divorced him or became unfaithful, because he died before such acts became fashionable.

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Deborah Hagstrom bore Revel Hagstrom on June 27th, 1945, and Bettyjean Harwell bore Dorothy Harwell on August 31st, 1949. Revel was Deborah's eighth and last child. Dorothy was Bettyjean's first. The doctor considered it a miracle that Revel came without disability or impediment, for Deborah was fifty-three at the time, and could have been Revel's grandmother. For her part, Bettyjean had waited four years to bear children for Tim. Tim only gave herself to Bettyjean when she demanded it, and fought hard against bringing new life into the world, because he didn't think he had the energy to be a worthy father, and assumed Bettyjean would tire of children once they learned how to speak. For the four years without children, Bettyjean felt humiliated. She knew all her friends felt vindicated in warning her against marrying a homosexual, and assumed she was being as chaste as a priest. So she incessantly pressured Tim and Tim could no longer fight. Then she had as many children as she wanted, and her friends could no longer say she had no passion.

Revel had to raise himself and Dorothy had to raise her siblings. Thor was old and lonely and could hardly pretend to care for Revel, and Deborah had seven other children, four of which were still living with her. Revel spent his youth wandering and hunting and catching frogs and eating worms and playing with the many dogs Deborah bought, and Dorothy spent hers tending to her father's laundry and changing the diapers of her brothers and feeding them and, as they grew older, making sure they finished their homework and made it to school. Their first date seemed (to both of them) just another milestone they would need to live through.

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Tim the third was born on March 8th, 1970, on a waxing crescent moon. His life would be as dull and extraordinary as all of his predecessors.