Vixenscratch

It’s September 29th and Magdalene White is sitting in the backseat of her own car, dressed in black, both hands holding a bouquet of blue and white flowers on her lap, her purse at her feet. In front of her, in the passenger seat, her husband, quiet in his black suit and tie. Her daughter is in the driver’s seat, sticking out with her hair dyed a bright, yellowy orange, what used to be a nice, tidy pixie cut grown out into something she refuses to have tamed into a more becoming style. She has, at least, dressed more appropriately for the occasion than her go-to of mended jeans and her boyfriend’s shirts, in dark slacks and a button-down shirt.

There used to be a time when September 29th was the happiest day of Magdalene’s life. Then, almost four years later, it became tied with June 18th. Until, not two years later, the joy associated with that September day had been marred by tragedy. She still has the memories, treasures kept in photo albums and tucked away in her heart, but there would be no new ones made like them. Never again. The first year had been the most difficult, but it has never become easy. It’s been sixteen years, now, and this is still a day where she wakes up with a black weight somewhere deep in her chest. A day where the silence emanating from one upstairs bedroom becomes deafening. (more…)

Justus is without a doubt overdressed for the party he’s going to; none of his friends are going to show up in a button-down shirt or dress pants. It’s never occurred to him to question this discrepancy between how he and his cousins are dressed for special occasions and how his friends look when they show up to birthday parties. He’s five and a half, and parties make him excited, not introspective. Especially this one — one of his kindergarten classmates is turning six, and the invitation was not to the boy’s home but to the local playland.

His baby sister, nearly two, isn’t old enough to really understand what’s going on, but she’s picked up on his excitement and has been following him around most of the morning. He doesn’t mind; he likes his sister and is proud that he can be a Good Big Brother to her. When Dad finally tells him it’s time to go, he pauses long enough to tell her goodbye.

“Bye, Fee-Fee! I’m gonna go to Dylan’s party now, but I’ll tell you about it when I get back, okay?” He hugs her, and then Mom picks her up to keep her from trying to follow him and Dad into the garage. (more…)

Corbin watches his brother undress with a peculiar mix of anticipation and contentment. While seeing Carson’s scars — accumulated over years of encounters just like this one — doesn’t excite him per se, they feel inviting, somehow. Like he’s left little pieces of himself behind as darker lines on the younger man’s skin. He reaches out to touch them and Carson melts into his arms, at least as eager as he is, for reasons that are nothing alike.

Kissing Carson isn’t like kissing his girlfriend. Never has been. It’s like his younger brother wants to drink him up. He lets himself be pulled into it, as much as he can manage, to make Carson happy. It’s hard to ignore that the chest he’s running his fingers over is firm, flat.

(more…)

Carson is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the bedroom-slash-living-area of his small apartment, back against the side of his bed, Princess Buttercup lounging on his lap and across his shoulders. When he sat down, it was to watch the latest episode of an ink reality show, but it’s long since ended and he’s at best paying token attention to the rerun that’s now on. Instead, most of his focus is on his snake, his face relaxed into a fond smile as he traces her yellow-and-caramel pattern with his eyes. He knows he will have to get up and dress up eventually, but for now he’s content.

A knock on the door between the converted garage he lives in and the main house breaks him out of his reverie. “Hey, Cars!” (more…)

The text message couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. Konah is “worried” about him again, which means they’re probably going to end up butting heads. Which means Roxeen will end up saying something that he’ll have to apologize for later. Sucking dick is a good excuse to avoid that confrontation altogether.

It’s not that he has a problem standing up for himself. More that he has a problem knowing when to stop, and Konah is a nice guy. A good roommate. He just sometimes worries about things that don’t warrant concern.

(more…)

He was tall, trim, athletic, with a face that could put boyband idols to shame and a smile that made him that much more attractive. Like a boyband idol he remained perpetually single, yet managed to make the admirers that approached him feel special. Somehow he found time for both sports (no doubt there was an athletic scholarship in that boy’s future) and agility training with his dog. A rescue, of course, because of course he had to be that fucking perfect.

She was taller than she looked, always a little bit hunched over, uncoordinated as a newborn foal, struggling with her weight and skin that stubbornly kept looking like she’d spent too much time in the sun, red and dry and peeling. Her greatest accomplishment was scoring third place in a school spelling bee in fourth grade, and her greatest source of embarrassment the fact that her mother still would not take the trophy off the mantelpiece.

Then the apocalypse — or whatever it was — happened. The world went silent, and the few humans that remained thought they were alone.

When they met after the apocalypse, he hadn’t had a warm meal in weeks. Even with matches, it’s not easy to make a cooking fire if you don’t know how. It was just as well that he’d stopped trying before he managed to cause a house fire — or worse. He was cold, running on too little sleep, and looked it. She invited him and his dog to share her fire out of pity.

He was athletic, handsome, and — in this new world — helpless as a newborn foal.

They’re both what can only charitably be described as “tipsy” – she can smell the alcohol on his breath, and is under no illusion that hers is any different. He smells of beer and fresh sweat and a bit of something else that makes her think of campfires. His skin radiates heat as she unbuttons his shirt, still damp with perspiration from dancing. He grins at her, one hand at her waist and the other grabbing her chin, only slightly awkwardly, to plant a kiss square on her lips. She finishes undoing the last button and slides the shirt down his shoulders, baring his chest. He has the body of a laborer, not a desk worker nor a gym rat, and he plants a kiss on the top of her head as she runs her hand through the dark blond curls covering his chest.

He told himself the sin was not his, as he followed a man with a wedding ring on his finger from the club where he’d ventured in awkward desperation. It was not he who had made a promise to God to remain faithful to another as long as they both should live. Surely, when the promise was not his, the burden of breaking it was not his to bear, either.

He knew the truth, of course. And if he knew, so did God. He simply couldn’t bring himself to care, anymore. He needed to eat. He needed textbooks and notebooks and pens and toiletries. If his scholarship wouldn’t cover them – it didn’t – he had to find the funds elsewhere. Somewhere deep down, he still cared about his grades, so he still studied. He knew his only source of income depended on his ability to catch the eyes of strangers, and so he still kept himself as well groomed as his tight budget allowed. He knew that his body needed fuel for all of those things, and so he ate.

But he didn’t care. He went through the motions a shell, told himself that no one noticed, and took risks he wouldn’t have some months prior, consequences be damned. On the occasion that he passed a church or a chapel, he felt a sting of guilt, and carefully pushed it into a dark corner of his mind. It just wasn’t enough to give him pause, anymore. Not after he’d met a man who might as well have been the Devil himself.

On the surface, there was little to distinguish the ship from the ones docked to her right and left. They might practically all vary in make and model, something commonly seen in the temporary docking of larger stations, but they all had sturdy metal hulls, most of them with some blemishes after close encounters with this or that free-floating desbris. None of the ships in this section were flashy, high-ticket rigs; anyone who had the money and the inclination to spend it on impressing people would pay extra for a better docking spot.

A casual visitor invited into the ship might start to realize that she was something else, led to that conclusion by glimpses of transparent tubes, filled with softly glowing liquid, organically-shaped capillaries joining and forming veins, converging into larger vessels as they approached the ship’s heart. But a casual visitor wouldn’t be invited to the bridge, this most vulnerable section of the deceptively-normal-looking ship.

Her crew knew her for what she was, and even among them, only a select few truly knew her. She wasn’t simply circuitry and metal, this ship, transcending the state of being a simple machine not as the advanced AI systems installed in top-of-the-line vessels did, but like those fitted with prostethics after violence or ill fortune had taken their flesh. Yet this, too, was a superficial resemblance, for they had been born flesh and blood. She was their opposite, a machine that had been given life, rather than flesh and soul that had been given new, mechanical strength.

A man approached the docked ship with the hidden secret, Captain’s insignia on his jacket, a quickly-schooled smirk playing with one corner of his mouth. A hatch sighed open, and he stepped inside, the smirk returning as the hatch closed behind him and his features blurred, the uniform becoming ill-fitting as his body changed. A faint line glowed in the floor, and, pulling out a small, concealed pulse stunner, the intruder followed it.

Laughter bubbled, bright as a child’s, through the ship’s strange tubing, as the stranger followed the line marking an emergency evacuation route backwards, closer to the heart of the ship. He didn’t take much notice of the sound, figuring it part of some ambience package that had been included by an upselling dealer when the vessel was new.

As another pair of doors whispered open, he readjusted his features to fit his assumed role, and found himself face-to-muzzle with a half-dozen energy weapons easily dwarfing his own compact model, wielded by as many disheveled, incompletely-dressed spacefarers, looking suspiciously like they had still been sleeping when he’d first boarded their vessel.

“Stand down!” he ordered in their superior’s voice, to absolutely no effect.

“Did you really think,” purred a petite, silky-furred feline woman from behind the wall of nude and half-nude defenders, “the Star Siren wouldn’t know her own Captain?” She came closer, her black coat clinging for a moment to her fellows with the static from their charged weapons as she passed between them. “If I were you, I’d tell me where to find him.”

He spent just a moment too long searching for an answer. A vice grip around his wrist sent his stunner, now seeming pathetically small, clattering harmless to the floor and caused his fingers to spasm painfully.

“Do you reckon,” the woman asked over her shoulder, grinding tendon against bone with her deceptively delicate hand, “station security strictly wants this scumbag in one piece?”

At that point, self-preservation won out.

The worst part of the job in the skyrise on the island had always been the commute. Nobody with less than a five-figure salary could afford a decent place to live on the island, and if you had that five-figure salary, or were willing to settle for a cleaning closet, or both, it was still a toss-up whether you’d find a flat, anyway. The skyrail was always crowded, and John was pretty sure homeless people slept, or eliminated, or slept in their own urine, in the skyrail cars, anyway. So he’d bought a nice black car – not can-afford-to-live-on-the-island nice, but nice enough there was no shame in taking good care of it. And at least he had bought it new. That had to count for something, right?

(more…)