“Cauld? Afeart o the dark?” Boots-in-muck steps out of the half-track and runs his fingers over the bonnet. “Naething tae fear.” All that is dragged from the sea can only be bone. His eyes sketch the vaulted ribcage above, old cathredal of the sublimik, air dense with effluvia. Presses his ear to the hood. Ah. Hungry. “Haed yoursel an accident?” Should have had enough fuel to make it through the Antercast.
Should have never been here in the first place.
“Nae bother, ay? Let’s get you open…” Lificinik had bit off more than it could chew. Forty liöl worth of meat stuck in its teeth. An eyeball, split and weeping, sits on its lolling tongue like a pearl. Boots-in-muck reaches into his stomäg-wyrms, careful not to burst a pipe with an errant hangnail. Pain beams effulgence behind his eyes.
“Guid lad. Just a minute, ay?” Tussles its hair, slick with motor oil. He pulls out a spine, polished by gut flora, marine ivory incandescent in brain-grey. He pushes it into the lificiniks teeth, navigating mulched tendon. “My auld da wis a tutisanavan. He had metal tools though, like.” Lificinik offers a laugh in machine-speak, wobbling the web of choked flesh. “There.” With the tendon freed the half chewed meat flops onto the floor, and lificinik breathes life into engine.
Into the light.
“Oh.”
]]>
eventually you are left with yourself
shards of microchips and bone under your skin
and her, lying there
amongst the wreckage of you
but the machine does not stop
the violent cartharsis of your being
expressed in markdown files and avatars
is different to this
new
everyday
brutality
an attempt to cradle your soul in a world of knives
but the machine does not stop
it is hard to know how strong you are when you hurt so much
past and present clawing at your insides as the world crumbles
beneath you
beneath her
and your fury is not enough to shield you
but the machine does not stop
bionic angel cursed to rot in meat space
flesh for the vultures of common sense values
beyond the salvation of a corpse country
but the machine WILL NOT STOP
and you are still here
AND IF YOUR LOVE WILL NOT DESTROY THE WORLD
IT WILL FUCKING OUTLAST IT
AN IDOL FUELLED BY SPITE
AND BLOOD
A MACHINE DYKE MONUMENT
TO A DEATH THAT NEVER CAME
and never will
elliedee> take care of yourself
The door opens. Woman in sweater, floral, eyes like smiling coals. She says hello and I almost interrupt her with the spiel. Had she heard about the Cablenet initiative? She had. She did not really understand it. Say it’s very simple. The wires connect your terminal to the mainframe in central Novostok, which connects you to every other person who has elected to be part of Cablenet. The benefits are enormous. Access to an ever-updating catalogue of goods and services. Exchange gossip with your neighbours on the cable square. Browse historical records, learn a new skill, engage with the catastrophic amounts of illegal pornography. Etcetera. She calls me a very nice girl and offers me a cup of tea or would I like something stronger, haha, no, I have four more houses to visit (a lie). Milk, one sugar, same colour as her wallpaper, served in a mug with a cat’s face. Adorable. She has not told me to sit so I stand on the periphery, tea hot enough to transmit from cat mug to glove to the ice in my veins. Realise she has not actually addressed whether she would like me to wire her house. I rotate a length of cable in my hand. Not actually the cable we use. More a visual aid. Yes, that is my bike out front. I prefer to pedal. Dislike the feeling of motorcars, being a body larger, taking up space, the ability to turn pedestrians into abstract sculpture. My name is Velvet sorry for not saying so earlier. Missed the cue. She laughs. Lots of people do. Her name is Clementine. This I suppose is a more normal name. AmI from the Party she asks, eying my Party badge displayed proudly on my lapel. I say yes. How do I feel about how things are going these days, she asks, gesturing vaguely around the room that is supposed to represent the Novostok Experiment. I say I cannot comment but that the Cablenet initiative is an important step, applying the bourgeois concepts of scientific management for the betterment of the masses, socialism not pauperism forever forward and so on. She nods. Says it used to be simpler, during and after the Revolution, more difficult to live but you knew where you stood, where things were going. I do not agree or disagree because I am twenty seven years old eyes on the prize working in a government job because I joined the Party in university and did you know your mother always wanted to serve the people but her arm got chewed up in a milling accident and she was just like you at that age only a bit more popular with the boys haha and I laughed too that recorded laugh each time she repeats the story my handkerchief soaked with her drool before the visiting hours are over.
I drop the mug. It does not break. Quality construction. The tea spills into the carpet. I am on my knees. I apologise. I take my handkerchief that is identical to the one that absorbed my mother’s saliva save for one loose stitch and begin mopping up my mess. I apologise. She tells me that it does not matter it’s an old carpet it’s seen worse but it represents a sloppiness that I find deeply morally inexcusable. Fucking stupid fucking moron fucking Velvet are you sure you don’t want that whiskey and yes I do want it I want to pickle this screaming fucking brain I want to live without feeling like I’m walking on ice that will break any second and plunge me into waters of my own wretched thought.
Breathe.
Between the carpet and the handkerchief the tea may as well never have been there at all. No sign of my mistake save for a slight dampness under my knee. I stand up and apologise for a third time. Last time. Clementine pats me on the shoulder and says I can install the wiring as long as it doesn’t cost her anything and it does not so I get to work despite not really knowing how it works but understanding enough to know that I do not care. I work with wires. I take pride in it. I thread them neatly along skirting boards, around family photos and under stained carpets. You won’t even know they’re there. You won’t even know I’m here, either, some kind of bureaucratic poltergeist. I pull the wire from her television and she flinches because for all her warm smiles she still believes that I might break her companion. This is not her fault. She doesn’t know how many times I have done this and I do not tell her because it has never seemed to reassure anyone. Maybe it sounds like I am bragging or lying but I do not do either of those things. I am a humble servant and I am not even thinking of fucking Rohanitsa when I splice the wires together. I just need to get to your aerial and you’re all set I say and this is also something of a lie. She still needs her keyboard and designated one hour but realistically three hour appointment to get her up and running. This is not my job and I am grateful because I am already exhausted with the background radiation of her life. I also do not need to go to the aerial since that is no longer a box that needs ticking, the marking down of serial numbers deemed unnecessary busywork, 20 percent boost to department productivity etcetera. So I suppose I am a liar.
But I like being on the roof. Her house is small, a holdout from before the days of the Special Experiment Zone, wedged between Communals, monoliths of aerated concrete sandwiching the stars above. Beautiful. Sincerely. People don’t believe me when I say so but I would rather look at the stars in the frames of our progress than from the filthy soil indentured to the capitalists. Tap out a cigarette from a government soft pack and light it with a match because my father had said it tasted better and since he usually just drank and called me a homosexual fifth columnist I prefer to remember the one bit of sincere advice instead. I couldn’t tell you if it was true or not the habit is so ingrained, the motions rehearsed, two-finger-pinch-pack-swivel-drawer-match-strike-lit-smoke. Hard to tell where my breath ended and the clouds began, all the buzzing of motorcars and newspaper vendors yelling headlines about stools being shortened so bureaucrats don’t tower over citizens and the hum of dripping information from the wires cats-cradling the city all drowned out by my intention, a little pocket of peace. Clementine shouts up if I am done and I say just a minute longer ma’am and tighten a nut that looked a little loose and flick the remains of the cigarette into the garden because she wouldn’t notice it was so overgrown too much to handle where were her children and I gave her the copy of the receipt and pedalled back home to be a homosexual fifth columnist.
I found her two weeks ago when I took out the rubbish.
CONTENTS:
- 14 cans of beer (hand-crushed, approximately 7 used as ash-trays)
- pocket lint
- 2 tins instant coffee
- 2 tins green beans
- 2 tins soup (unlabelled, received from different friendly old lady, ‘family recipe’, bad, fully consumed)
- masturbation tissues (unknown quantity)
- cigarette packets (unknown quantity, guessable, do not want to)
I dropped the bag and the contents spilled over the floor. Antlers growing from her head, eyes glowing like a cat’s, matted silver hair framing her bloody pretty face. Feral. Chewing on cables. I reached for my baton as if she was a large rodent. No animals allowed in the building. It is your duty to prevent the spread of disease. She scrambled into the corner on her arse, rattling the chain link, flecks of wire tubing falling from her mouth as she panted. Fear. I had never made anyone afraid of me before. Anything. This was the moment. To ring the authorities. To ask Klasje the building manager to hit her with a rolling pin. To leave well enough alone.
And yet.
When I open my door now I do not see an empty shell of alcoholism. I see her, Rohanitsa, sitting cross-legged in the corridor, rubbing her antlers against the wall, shredding my wallpaper like bark from a tree. Waiting for me. I scold her for the wallpaper but I see her eyes and second guess myself and say I didn’t like it anyway and she doesn’t understand but smiles. I hang up my coat and brush off the residue of work because my doctor said it was good to separate your life from your job and that keeping things in order started with keeping my things ordered and I’d forgotten to make the bed because I woke up ten minutes before I needed to take my forty minute bike ride so better to start the day now than never.
I brush her teeth for a minute longer than I do my own because it is easier to care for something that is not you, to feel responsible for it, a succulent next to my workstation or my dear old mother or the deer creature I found in the garbage. I brush her hair, silver and long and beautiful, and I do not brush mine because it is a regulation length bob. I called her Rohanitsa because I read on Cablenet about a folk goddess with antlers called that and I thought it sounded pretty but I never was that good at naming things so I admit my reasonings are somewhat shallow. I do not know if she is a goddess. She seems mostly human. Sometimes we fuck and I understand life after death. I hold onto her antlers as I pull her into me. I do not ask why there are wires hanging from her cunt but at least she can fuck me with them. Rubber tubing snaking inside of me and my hands upon her breasts and I want her to break me, to release the rot from my skin, my guts glistening in her antlers and she would tell me that it would be alright which she doesn’t do but she does make me come.
I do not think I am a good person because good people don’t think these things and don’t end up in these situations.
At work there are no call-outs and that is the only part of my job I enjoy so I rotate an HB pencil in my fingers, feeling the texture where the blue paint has chipped, and imagine plunging it into my throat and spraying my gurgling blood over the paperwork and I wonder why I am always like this no I am not always like this I tell myself “always” is a bad word it implies a consistency when your mood is more like the peaks and troughs of an oscilloscope back and forth back and forth the real reason I’m in such a mood is not because I am a colossal failure but because Rohanitsa is sick and I don’t know what to do. I woke up and there was blood on the pillow and she was sat there, bolt upright, head twitching. I made her porridge with a spoon of jam that came from the soup lady but the jam was good not like the soup and I was excited for her to eat but she wouldn’t, it oozed out the side of her mouth like rain overflowing from the gutters and I cried and she didn’t understand but she smiled. On my workstation I try to find medical information but there is only simple documentation for humans and animals and I cannot synthesise them and my boss is angry with me he wants to know why I am reading things on company time and don’t I know I have an important job to do and don’t I want to serve the people and I do I sincerely do I feel so useless and alien to this world the least I could do is help others but I’m not very good at it my mother is rotting Rohanitsa is rotting the rot is in my skin and it will always spill out no matter where I go or what novel situation keeps me engaged for a while it will force its way out of my throat and pull everyone else down with me and I start crying again and my boss I think his name is Mikhail he’s new younger than me he looks at me like I am a fox he has hit with his car, limbs broken and ribs bursting from the fur but still alive, the mixture of pity and the knowledge that it would be better to snap my neck under his boot and he tells me to go home so I do.
I see her in the window. A shadow. The lights in the Communal flicker on and off and in this moment it feels like me and Rohanitsa are the only beings alive in Novastok, all the world a stage but for an audience of no one, if a tree falls etc etc. Each step up the 4 floors (elevator broken management is aware will be fixed Tuesday, three days ago) an echo in concrete, every possible outcome pushing at the edges of my brain, most of them bad, and yet and yet I keep going and I reach the door in what is either a lifetime or two and a half minutes.
Rohanitsa stands in the middle of the shag carpet, swaying to and fro, eyes bloodshot, my jacket with the red epaulettes that mother had said I looked so handsome in that I had worn exactly once resting on her shoulders, matted with vomit, a fetid yellow on the olive drab. She stumbles towards me.
I wonder if she had ever made anyone afraid before.
She passes me by, her eyes rolling back into her head, sparks flying under the lids. She faces the wall and arches her back, her upside down face staring into mine, a world of fevered electricity behind her eyes and she bashes her head against the wall. Again. Again. Again. Fragments of wallpaper stick to her mulched forehead and I cry and I don’t understand but she smiles, teeth burrowing through her lip, and she bashes it again. A crunching sound, something between glass under foot and the Cablenet connection dial. I reach out to her as her skull cracks like an egg and her brain spills out, viscous and full of electricity, I tell her it will be alright while her tongue lolls out past her teeth and tastes herself, I tell myself it will be alright as I try and push her back together, cradling her skull in my palms and then I see her I see the real her, the masses of wires from her cunt just the start, a wriggling mass worming its way through every bit of her flesh, ending at the tumourous roots of her antlers and I kiss her, the real her, freed from her prison of muscle and sinew, an embrace of meat slurry pipes, her insides wet and corruscating like a plate of jellied eels and I realise I cannot free myself, my face enclosed in a window of her skin and something tearing through my red sweater I can see shadows of her arms raising above my head and I don’t know what she is doing I am passed terror passed any kind of thought beyond attempting to process what is happening to me but I hear the crack of the antlers snapping out of her and I understand that this is a passing of the torch a moment that enshrines our connection and hadn’t I always dreamed that trepanning worked that you could just take a sharp rock or an ice pick and crack open yourself to let the miasma drain away so now when her puppeted hands hold the antlers above my regulation bob cut is there no relief why is my mind still racing even as she hammers on my skull with those gnarled roots over and over and over again the dripping blood and bits of me no relief and perhaps it was an absolute after perhaps I would just be
like
this.
I am tuned in
the antlers are antennas
for some greater signal
to my noise.
I shove handfuls of her torn flesh
into my mouth
faster than I can properly swallow
and I choke
because I do not want this
but she does
she is a great accumulator
not just of flesh and bone
but of information
a real life database animal
like me
but she is me
now
and in the ruins of her
and my apartment
I am here
and wasn’t this what I wanted?
a life unmoored from expectation
a fulfilment of delusions of grandeur
and wanting to be left
alone
she was born in the woods
below the soil
amongst the worms
and her name was not Rohanitsa
because she cannot be named
her first container was an arm
here she learned how to hurt
and be hurt
churned mud and gunpowder
bodies
and bodies
rended apart on the frozen ground
and in victory
as a reward
her first vessel was burnt
but she did not die
she is not sure she can
she slunk away from the charred bones
she
survived
my head is in ribbons
but I am still me
I am still her
we will hasten the arc of history
world-soul on a fixed-gear
dripping
RED VELVET
]]>
Punky sits alone in the restaurant. A metal chopstick sticks out of her eye. Her attacker presumably had expected her to die, but she’s still here. When she looks around, the chopstick follows like a silver laser pointer. Don’t think you can have a silver laser. She hadn’t listened much in physics class. She knows these run-on thoughts are either caused by her panicking or to prevent panicking further. Or maybe to avoid doing what she knew she had to. You’re not supposed to remove the bullet if someone is shot, but she doesn’t think that applies when something is so heavy and stuck out of your fucking eye. She touches the end with her nails. Bright colours flash across her vision. Why not use a knife? A baseball bat? Hell, you can buy anything on Taobao. Surely you can buy a better weapon than a fucking chopstick. She pushes herself up against the table and tries to reach for a chair for support. The restaurant is dark, with only glimmers of neon from the EXIT sign glittering across the gaudy decoration. Another themed restaurant where the theme is having a billion themes. License plates and tacky candelabras. The food wasn’t even that good, mere set-dressing for beauty-cam selfies on some wannabe influencers’ WeChat moments. This whole thing could have been avoided if she trusted her gut instead of Dianping. She gets a hold of the back of the chair and hoists herself to the seat, her hands still slick with blood. Her phone is on the table. The screen had cracked when that… that thing in a delivery guy’s clothes lunged at her.
She opens the camera app. Her thumb hovers over the icon that would reveal her face. Hours earlier she fixed and refixed her face in the mirror, watching a contouring tutorial on her laptop while messaging her date on her phone. The date that didn’t show up. The phone that’s now shattered.
Click.
“Fuck!” she says aloud, way too loud; her hand covers her mouth instinctively. There’s so much blood. The chopstick had missed her iris, sticking out of the white at a weird angle. The minute hand is at three, the hour hand… what, memories of primary school English now? Just pull it out. Just pull out the fucking chopstick. She keeps trying to blink or even shut her eyes so she didn’t have to look at herself, didn’t have to still be present in this horrible moment. But her lids won’t close on account of the fucking chopstick. A spider of pus crawls from the wound, flecks of jelly caught in her eyelashes. In the dark, her dyed hair seems to glow, or it’s her eyes fucking up.
A noise from outside. Should she just try and get out of here? She feels like she can barely walk. Was it still here? She couldn’t see its face. A shadow cast across the eyes. A bloodied paper mask around its mouth. And yet, the presence of it. Inhuman. Burned into her brain. She must have blacked out after the stabbing.
She guides her fingers with the camera as her mirror. Her mouth hanging open in terror, teeth chattering between the cracks of glass. Those colours again, the weight of the stick straining the muscles behind her eyes.
More banging from outside the store. Is the mall closed? Somehow, she always wants to check her wrist for the time, even when it’s right there on her phone. 00:57. She’d been out for a few hours, then. No wonder there was no one here. None of those assholes thought to call a paramedic? She tries to zoom in with a pinch, but with the bits of dried her on the screen, she accidentally takes a picture instead. The flash stings her eyes, and she nearly drops it again. Not a photo she’ll share. No signal anyway.
Get it over with. Her fingers wrap around the stick. Pull. Do it. Pull.
“Pull!” she shouts as if that will force her fingers to move. They do not. She sees the fear in her eyes reflected back at her. Another bang, this time followed by a shout. Can’t tell what they’re saying. She feels her consciousness fading out again. Now or never.
She can feel her eye lifting out the socket with each yank on the stick, her field view shifting and warping as it bulges out her lids. The pain shoots through her body. Her brain feels like it’s on fire. Something white and viscous spurts out, cloudy like congee water. The noise is getting closer. She can hear the sound in her head too, the pulling of sinews and scraping of bone. That didn’t even really make sense. Nerves firing in ways they shouldn’t. Crossed wires, even. Her brain unable to process what’s happening despite her senses and the mirror of the camera.
Pull.
Pull.
Pull.
It comes loose.
So does the eye.
It falls out, hanging by the optic nerve, swinging left and right. She gags, her stuck out tongue making contact with her eye. What does it taste like, Punky? Earlier, when it was clear her date would arrive, she was eating noodles with those meatballs that absorb the soup water and burst when you chew on them. They were kind of rubbery and bland, the flavour of the soup not coming through. Does it taste like that, Punky? The pendulum swing of her eye catches sight of her congealed self on the sharp point of the stick.
She chokes back vomit and begins to finger the eye back into the socket. It squishes like a gooey rice cake. Puke bubbles out the corner of her mouth, the taste of her eye lingering on her tongue. She winces as her nail scrapes the surface. No time to think about that. Scars will heal. Do scars heal on eyeballs? Maybe. It’s surprisingly heavy and unsurprisingly wet. She lifts it with two fingers, her other hand holding opening her eyelids. It pops in with a squelch. Her iris drifts unbidden. She tries to blink it back into the proper position but that doesn’t seem to work. Wipes the eye goo on her skirt. Fuck it. Bigger problems. That banging noise has been upgraded to a scraping, and it’s definitely getting closer.
It’s here in the doorway. Her sight is blurred. Is it coming from the left or right? The demon in yellow and black. Something glints in its right hand. The other chopstick. Its head tilts and faces her. She stumbles back. Need to get on your feet, Punky. You don’t want to die. You can’t die here. Not after avoiding death in the first place.
Step backwards into terror. The shape has a good half metre on her height. It does not rush. It does not falter. Human bodies aren’t supposed to move that way. They’re not so… static. Like its bones were all held together with steel and wire. She looks around the restaurant. Her vision is clearing, but it’s still so so dark. Low-power brain calculates that there’s not enough space between her, the beast and the door it tore through to successfully make that run. But where else can she go? Each moment of hesitation is another step closer to death.
Think back. It’d all happened so fast. It wasn’t weird to see delivery drivers queue outside the restaurant to pick up orders. It wasn’t weird to see them come in the shop, or even sit on the tables, scrolling Douyin and Taobao. Couldn’t begrudge them that. Rushing around. But this guy was different. He commanded a presence. It was like those old Westerns when the lone gunman would burst through the saloon doors and all the other dudes would turn around in silence. A waiter with goofy Harry Potter glasses and overalls (because what was the theme of this restaurant again?) wandered up to him.
“Pick up or take out?” The beast grabbed his lapels and lifted him to eye level. “That’s not what I meant-” The colour drained from the waiter’s face. “What are you….” A flash of silver. A metal chopstick stabbed into his ear canal. Snapped downwards. A crack of bone, a spurting of blood. It removed the stick and let the body crumple onto the floor. Punky dropped her own sticks, splashing soup. A clattering of chairs and tables, but she was frozen. That’s when she had noticed it—the phone fused into his wrist, screen buried under a layer of thin skin. Wires punctured the surface, spiralling around his arm into the back of his head. And then, well. Eye met stick. But if she could just pull out that wire…
No time for that now. She was still too weak. Limbs held up by pure adrenaline, scalding nausea lurking in the back of her throat. Even if she rushed him, her eyes were not something to be relied on. That EXIT sign. If it’s a fire exit it should give her a route out of the mall. She bends her knees, willing all her energy into her thighs, ready to spring. Wait for it.
A voice from the skin phone. [KILL].
Wait for it…
“KILL” the beast echoes, lunging towards her.
Now! She turns on her heel and leaps towards the neon. She hears a clatter behind her. Don’t look back. Maybe it fell. Anything to give her time. Keep moving. Chintzy knickknacks give way to a concrete stairwell illuminated by hanging bulbs. She couldn’t remember what floor she’d been on. Nowhere to go but down. It’s that or death.
[CHASE]
“CHASE”.
Each step draws more and more from her dwindling energy. She can hear it stomping after her. She is faster. She can get away.
Its footsteps stop.
[BREAK]
“BREAK”
The sound of plastic scraping against metal. The lights flicker.
“No, no no. Please”
Bang. The flickering becomes a nightclub strobe, the world blinking in and out of existence, her movements missing in-between frames. She can see a service door, almost tasting the fresh air. Just a few more flights.
Blackout. Just… just keep calm, keep the momentum. Each stair is the same. Just keep going. Hell this way your fucked up eye isn’t even gonna be an issue, right? Right, Punky?
[NO ESCAPE] The dim light of the skin phone is a beacon in the dark.
“NO ESCAPE”, the voice uncomfortably close to her back.
“FUCK. FUCK YOU FUCK THIS FUCK FUCK FUCK” The white heat of terror lies parallel to anger. Anger is not the acid. It is the engine. Faster, faster. She must be so close now.
Too fast. The rhythm broken. Her foot meets the stair but the stair is not there. No solid endpoint to her downward force, so instead it continues down, pulling the rest of her body with it. She braces her arms against her face.
Elbows, meet concrete. Sharp pain followed by shaking bones but not enough to stop her fall, too much momentum. She tumbles and crumples like clothes in a dryer, stopped only by the thud of a metal door. There’s a bone poking out of her hoodie sleeve. Instinctively she tries to push it back under her skin, but that just sprays more blood, like the lever of a water fountain. Everything feels broken. She tries to push herself up, but the floor is slick with coughed blood. A roach scuttles away from her flailing fingers.
And then she touches something soft.
Her hand recoils. The touch felt eerily familiar. Don’t think about it.
Wait. Door? She reaches for the handle. Fuck. Locked.
“Hey! What are you doing in there?” A voice from the other side. A sliver of hope.
“Let me out!” She can hear the heavy footfalls getting closer. “Someone’s trying to kill me!”
“You’re not supposed to be in there. Didn’t you hear the announcement?”
“LET ME OUT RIGHT NOW!” She bangs on the door, her arm leaving bloody prints.
“Hold on. I need to talk with the chief.”
“YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE! OPEN THE DOOR!” Stepped boots on pavement. “DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE WALK OFF! COME BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!”
A shadow climbs the door. She bangs and bangs but the voice doesn’t come back. Her own voice has left her throat, replaced by a scratchy gargle. Fine then. She will face it with a mess of blood and sweat and snot and tears. The beast is almost upon her, its chopstick playing a one note melody on the hand rail.
It squats down to her level. A rotten smell from the black and yellow uniform.
[KILL]
She thrashes at the wires. They get caught on her exposed bone, pulling them from the beast’s head. A moment of silence that feels like an eternity. The beast is still until it is not. His head twitches and lilts to the side as if nothing held it up. A scream more human than any other sound it’d made, somewhere between pain and fury.
[KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL] The phone screams over and over, the skin bubbling and rupturing around it. Wires grow and snake out of the flesh. Reconnected. You tried, Punky. You really did.
[KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL]
Her energy is gone, but not her venom. She gathers as much as she can muster into two simple words.
“FUCK”
He pushes the chopstick into her mouth.
“YOU!”
It pierces the roof. Her jaw hangs loose. She sputters and gargles.
YOUNG
The beast lifts her by the stick. Her lopsided eye stares into his void face and sees nothing. No eyes no face no will no soul. Just blood and shadow.
FRESH
A gloved hand reaches out of view. She sees something soft and white in its gargantuan hands and she screams and spits and cries. The beast shoves her eye down her throat, her body offering only the meek resistance of vomit. It grabs her by the throat. The chopstick angles to the left. The hand angles herneck to the right. X-ray of spine flashes across her eyes. Snap.
MEAT
]]>This article contains references to suicide, AIDs and transphobia. All quotations are from “Pharmacopeia”, a posthumous collection of Derek Jarman’s writing.
Safety. I’ve been thinking about that word a lot recently. It at once implies something basic, almost at the bottom of a faded poster in a middle manager’s office. It’s distinct from security, a word that replaces comfort with locks and surveillance systems and rent-a-cops. Safety, independent of the dictionary definition, implies to me a feeling of warmth and stability, a baseline we would prefer to take for granted, a ground beneath our feet that lets us do more than just survive.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently.
Because I don’t feel safe.
And I don’t know how to.
Last week I took a trip to London with one of my best friends. We visited art galleries, lost hours in the Bishopsgate Institute and their Museum of Transology, saw the Barbie movie with some of their friends, and I somehow ended up with two notebooks. All of that was wonderful, but not the real reason we were there. Almost two years ago I first saw the name “Dungeness” in a news article on Twitter. Something about the power plant, I don’t know, but that name. Dungeness. It didn’t sound real, perhaps the setting for a cosy crime novel, an unreality that only got stronger when I searched and found “9 really great things to do in Dungeness”, with images like this:
I had to visit. When I shared them online, I found my friend was already interested in going, admittedly for smarter reasons than it looking like the end of the world.
They wanted to visit Prospect Cottage.
I’m not going to get too much into the biography of Derek Jarman. There’s no amount of words I could write about the late great queer artist, filmmaker, costume designer, stage designer, writer, gardener and gay rights activist that would not feel inconclusive and reductive. Taken from us far too soon at the age of 52, he is one of the few people I consider to be a legend. And towards the end of his life, he lived in Dungeness, in Prospect Cottage.
It is a beautiful place. I can understand why he bought it so suddenly, seeing it with a For Sale sign on a trip with Tilda Swinton must have felt like serendipity. As he describes it:
Prospect Cottage, its timbers black with pitch, stands on the shingle at Dungeness. Built eighty years ago at the sea’s edge - one stormy night many years ago waves roared up to the front door threatening to swallow it… Now the sea has retreated leaving bands of shingle. You can see these clearly from the air, they fan out from the lighthouse at the tip of the Ness like contours on a map. Prospect faces the rising sun across a road sparkling silver with sea mist. One small clump of dark green broom breaks through the flat ochre shingle. Beyond, at the sea’s edge, are silhouetted a jumble of huts and fishing boats, and a brick kutch, long abandoned, which has sunk like a pillbox at a crazy angle; in it, many years ago, the fishermen’s nets were boiled in amber preservative. There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon. In this desolate landscape the silence is only broken by the wind, and the gulls squabbling round the fishermen bringing in the afternoon catch.
This description gives a better sense of it than any photograph could- Dungeness is an intense sensory experience, for better and worse, the wind constantly whipping about your ears, boots sinking into the shale, the spit of land seeming to grow and shrink away from your eyes, impossible to discern the size of it. My friend lent me the book “Pharmacopoeia”. It’s a collection of Jarman’s writings on the cottage itself, Dungeness, flowers, and death. A pharmacopoeia is a book listing medicines- how they are used and where to find them. He described the garden surrounding the home as his pharmacopeia- therapeutic both in its planting and the medicinal potential of the plants. The colours are striking amongst the grey- a beautiful refuge in an ocean of shale. When I look, I could not yet picture Derek amongst the rocks, chipping away at the arduous task of transforming wasteland into beauty.
We went inside.
I cannot narrow down any one thing that struck me in that TARDIS-like house. To enter was to be visually and emotionally overwhelmed, to wade through the psychic miasma of anger and death and love, a love of art and nature, of power stations and of his partner, Keith Collins. We were not allowed to take photographs- a student guide provided a vaguely confusing statement about copyright. It doesn’t matter, exactly- I am happy to keep the house as a memory, one replayed and remixed as items (old First Aid tins used to store clothes, a writing desk chipped and stained with a rainbow of paint) and artwork (a curse to Margaret Thatcher under broken glass, his daily pills burrowing out of thick acrylic) go walkabout in my Prospect mind palace. Here I could feel Derek’s presence- he had extended himself onto every wall, every room so full of personality. I certainly relate to his hatred of white-
The wind has blown without end for five days now, a cold north wind in June. The sea, whipped into a thousand white horses, attacks the shore. Plumes of salt blow in veils coating the windows with brine and burning the flowers. Leaves are blackened and the red poppies too, the roses are wilting, here today and gone tomorrow; but the white perennial pea is untouched. In the distance the white cliffs appear briefly before they are swallowed in the haze. I am Shut in, to walk in the garden hurts my tired lungs. The white seahorses have brought a madness here, imitable, straining at the bit. I hate white.
-the colour of my apartment walls. All of my apartment walls. Landlords can’t get enough of it- I suppose to most it is inoffensive. To me, it is the alcohol-washed stench of the hospital. I wonder if they like white because it shows marks better, and makes sure a tenant cannot get away with any minor infraction. I was not thinking of my apartment in Prospect. But I was thinking about safety. I could not sleep on my return to the hotel, comfortable as the bed was. I told my (very patient) friend about how much the visit had affected me and how much I did not want to return home. To the place where I am not acknowledged unless I am wearing stereotypically masculine clothing (transphobia or misogyny, take your pick), the place where every barely working appliance takes weeks of void screaming to fix, the place where across the hall, a violent ticking timebomb has forced out multiple people on our floor, with only me remaining as a person he hasn’t threatened. Of not feeling safe. I also told them about a passage from Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, when the protagonist is on a business trip following a long period of trauma, one that stuck in my mind because I wrote about it before
The food at this inn had been hideous, but the next day we were planning to get in the van and move on. As I walked along in the moonlight, I wished that I might spend the rest of my life traveling from place to place. If I had a family to go home to perhaps I might have felt adventurous, but as it was I would be horribly lonely. Still, it just might be the life for me. When you’re traveling, every night the air is clear and crisp, the mind serene. In any case, if nobody was waiting for me anywhere, yes, this serene life would be the thing. But I’m not free, I realized; I’ve been touched by Yuichi’s soul. How much easier it would be to stay away forever.
-and how I related to it quite deeply. It had probably been the reason I moved to Huizhou in China, and then Guangzhou, and then to the Lake District, and then so quickly to Liverpool. I crave that serenity.
Before the rot seeps in. Before the impermanence of any one of these places reminds me of how little of the standard checkboxes I’ve filled.
All this had rushed into my brain because of Prospect, a place shaped to bring serenity to its occupant-
Prospect Cottage is the last of a long line of ‘escape houses’ I started building as a child at the end of the garden: grass houses of fragrant mowings that slowly turned brown and sour; sandcastles; a turf hut, hardly big enough to turn around in; another of scrap metal and twigs, marooned on ice-flooded fields - stomping across brittle ice. Ice flowers left out overnight in glasses, chrysanthemums suspended in frozen water - pink with cold.
a safe place to extend into
a place to __
I awoke in the early morning hours with all the useful thoughts that usually brings. I eventually will myself back to sleep with the knowledge that nothing I am worried about can be addressed in a London hotel. I sleep for another hour. This is enough time to have a nightmare.
glasses under a bucket hat
a shapeshifter of roots
a figure is chasing me
something wants me to die
and will change itself anyway to kill me
a couple who had offered me shelter in the real world
shelter me from death.
I wake up. Alive. I tell my friend about the dream. They seem interested, or more interested than people usually are when you tell them about your dreams. We have a good day in art galleries. A picnic by the river. A warmth fills the day, from sunshine to my gratitude for the friend standing next to me, for the friend I’ve had for over a decade.
And finally a train home
home
home
home
are the foundations stable
what am i building
there’s a rot
i broke my mirror. not on purpose. if it was on purpose i would have smashed in the centre, spiderweb my reflection. i stepped on it with my now ruined boots.
what is the opposite of safe
(i hear the yelling of the person across the hall and know i cannot enter the kitchen he threw chairs in tomorrow)
is this danger
am i alone
that doesn’t make sense. i was just with someone. a friend. ten years. i am not.
so why do i feel…?
do i want to
do i want to __?
am i ___ already?
these four walls
am i building anything
my hair reflecting in shattered glass
is it growing out
am i establishing roots in this
new place
new life
…
Restless night. Fell asleep at dawn as the sun cast a rosy glow into this room. Across the marshes a full moon, white in a pale blue sky. My fever has brought a deep, almost comforting lethargy. Spring remarked yesterday that I was unusually calm - it seems ridiculous to worry.
Let’s go back to the garden. It was only after we’d left the cottage that we spent more time in it. That I grew to understand it. As much as Prospect was an “escape house”, the garden felt like the real project. Amongst the extensive library of film, philosophy, science, theosophy and art books, there were guides to taking care of daffodils. A large portion of the book Pharmacopoeia is a list of plants and Derek’s thoughts on them. Yes, the book was collated after his death, but that so much of his material on Dungeness focuses on the garden and not the house feels telling.
I really love the garden. It’s so far from the austerity of manicured lawns. It bristles with possibility. It is curated but not entirely controlled. Wildflowers are allowed to bloom amongst the cacti. And the metal-
The garden is full of metal: rusty metal corkscrew clumps, anchors from the beach, twisted metal, an old table top with a hole for the umbrella, an old window, chains which form circles round the plants. All this disappears in the burgeoning spring. The twisted grimace of the wartime mines, an arch, a hook, a plummet, a line, a shellcase - warlike once; a chain that has rusted to form a snake by the front door, more chimes made of triangles of rusty iron; all this - and the float that looks like an exotic fruit - introduces a warm brown which contrasts nicely with the shingle.
-scrap rendered into something beautiful. A small amount of control in the chaos, but not a separation. Not an escape.
A collaborative work with the world.
Derek Jarman died in 1994, a month and a day after I was born. Even then it could not really be said that we shared this world- I was unaware of him for most of my life. I am sure that my friend’s connection to him is deeper- they know more of his work, have written and engaged with his art in ways I simply have not. But I do feel changed. Unsettled. This week back has been worse than many. I do, in fact, need a better place to live. A job that doesn’t make me pretend I’m someone I’m not for very little money. These material things would make a big difference. Safety is important. But that’s the house, not the garden, the outside world. A year into my new life, my real life, and there are still fragments of the old my mind holds on to. Aged defence mechanisms built to survive a world in a skin I was desperately uncomfortable in. Routines that no longer help, but constrain.
Too much time spent in rooms.
I have used the word limbo to describe this period. But now I think I prefer flux. It’s an awkward, frustrating time. I don’t know if my old self will ever die. Perhaps it will always be there. Maybe that’s how it should be. I have changed a lot. I will continue to do so. I will build my Prospect, in my heart and in the world, and as hateful as it can all be, as much as I do sometimes want to give in, I won’t. I will never stop.
Will my voice echo till time ends? Will it journey forever into the void? Is black hopeless? Doesn’t every dark thundercloud have a silver lining? In black lies the possibility of hope. The universal sleep is hugged by black. A comfortable, warm black. This is no cold black, it is against this black that the rainbow shines like the stars.
Because nothing stopped Derek.
Content Warnings:
Ableism, Homophobia, Transphobia
I don’t know how to introduce an article on 4chan. Your image of it does some of the work for me. It’s almost guaranteed to have some truth unless you think it’s “based” or whatever. It’s pointlessly edgy, flooded with pornography, an echo chamber of right-wing apologia and endless Wojacks. It is also, unfortunately, where I decided to spend too much of my online life, especially in my teenage years. It wasn’t a complete waste- I’ve discovered many games, anime and music I love amongst the endless shitposting. I dodged the “disillusioned nerd to unrepentant fascist” pipeline despite the best efforts of like-minded losers and their poorly sourced graphs. I narrowly avoided the trans circles obsessed over whether you’re AGP or HSTS (as a bit, I’m assured). And if nothing else, I have the dubious position of Q-Anon explainer to friends and family. But that kind of rationalising doesn’t stop me from questioning why I would ever have submerged myself there, nor does it excuse the nihilistic contrarianism I let poison all my interests. Or why I’d call everyone fags or autists long before I realised I was kind of both.
Or why it took so long to break the habit, even as it got worse and worse.
If any of that sounds like your experience with Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit etc., then yes, that is what my headline was getting at. 4chan is worse, but it isn’t hard to find racism, bigotry and pointless vitriol on any website. They generally give you better ways to avoid that content, but even 4chan allows you to “filter” out certain words and phrases. Twitter, in particular, has a similar self-hating aspect, the “hell site” that we “doom scroll”. But I’m more interested in the reverse phenomenon- why does a website that lacks traditional user profiles, omnipresent apps and unknowable algorithms feel so similar to these social media monoliths?
One way to see this is the direct connection. There are not an insignificant number of 4channers on Twitter, even within leftist circles. They’re not particularly hard to spot, their timelines flooded with anime porn or some particularly esoteric form of Christian nationalism (though usually both). The same goes for Twitter users on 4chan. An oft-bemoaned start to a thread is a screencap of some viral tweet that’s precision-engineered to get under the skin of board denizens (read: hot-takes from e-celebs, bonus points for a liberal or, heaven forbid, feminist POV). Many 4chan users wear not using “normie” sites as a badge of honour, yet these threads always wrack up hundreds of posts. Point out the hypocrisy, and they’ll repeat the same phrase “/v/ is not a hivemind”. “/tv/ is not a hivemind”. “/a/ is not a hivemind”.
Are we sure about that?
Paranoia is integral to the 4chan experience. Positivity expressed about media? Shill. Discussion of gender identity or sexuality? Discord raid. Enjoyment of something popular? Reddit. On /v/, the videogame board, this paranoia has turned inwards. Certain threads are evidence of “neo-/v/” or “/v/eddit” behaviour. The names change, but the eternal refrain of x or y not belonging remains. Again, if this sounds like Twitter, I’d agree. All social media platforms seem to have this antagonism between them, despite, I suspect, the vast minority staying “loyal” to just one of them . Twitter hates Reddit, Reddit hates Tiktok, Tiktok hates Facebook, and Facebook hates vaccines. But many users bemoan the death of the “board culture”, ruined by an “other”. So is 4chan a site of individuals that has merely become more diverse (not a hivemind), or is it an identifiable set of values that can be seen as in opposition to Twitter, election tourists, Discord, Gaia, or whatever?
The answer might lie in the central gimmick of imageboards: anonymity. No usernames, contact information or profile pictures are required. In theory, this allows posts to speak for themselves, that people can say what they like without worrying about reprise, clout or maintaining some persona. Except, uh, not quite. Every board has its “tripfags” who choose to post with a name attached, and the moderation of 4chan has always been a strange case because it is wielded by the same kind of people who would be on 4chan for years and years of their life. So naturally, horrific racism (without even the pretence of irony) will often remain, but threads calling a mod’s waifu “a shit” will be nuked from orbit. Still, that means even though things have gotten far, far worse, 4chan has never had this absolute freedom of speech that (in theory) should be baked into the premise of an entirely anonymous website. And while it’s true that most posters are anonymous, this doesn’t stop the average anon from ascribing identities to their fellows. Like modern auguries, they sift through the guts of each post, determining age (“Zoomer mentality”), gender (“Want to know how I know a woman wrote this post?”, “You’ll never be a real woman”) and yes, if they belong at all (“Filthy secondaries GET OUT”). Anyone can be anyone, but you’re still contributing to the images of certain “types”. This reached absurd peaks in the weeks before the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, in which repetitive criticisms (some valid, some certainly not) were posted alongside images from the movie Shazam. While I’m sure a fair number of these posts were from the same member, many others have almost certainly taken on the mantle, contributing to this new “character”. Even when users are anonymous, they can’t help but play into archetypes.
Don’t worry. We’re not about to get all Jungian. The reality is that it’s true- no one of the boards is a hivemind. They are several hiveminds, amorphous groups or characters defined as much by outsiders as insiders. No wonder no one can agree on what fits the “board culture”- each mind is as free to play No True Scotsman as the other. There isn’t a board culture because there isn’t a 4chan. Or rather, 4chan is the consummate failure of the marketplace of ideas. A supposed libertarian wet dream of free speech created by Christopher Poole in response to apparent overzealous moderation on Something Awful. That it simply doesn’t function should have been obvious from the beginning, if not at least from the creation of 8chan, created as it was in response to… apparent overzealous moderation on 4chan, especially during Gamergate. As I’m not a moron, I’m also not a libertarian, but when I came to the site I was a bullied, closeted bisexual trans woman. The appeal of being no one was intoxicating, as was the contrarianism. It served as an antidote to all the posturing on Facebook. But was that ever true? It was disconnected from my family and peers, but so is my Twitter. The only actual difference is there is no indelible mark of my posts… unless they were archived, but I at least can take the small comfort that it would be difficult to trace back to me.hat’s it. “Why would you lie on an anonymous imageboard?” is a common refrain. Yet people do. All the time, and not just to troll. The raw honesty of anonymity buckles under still trying to forge a coherent identity, since you’ll no doubt be pigeonholed anyway.
Have people been conditioned this way? Or is it just that a true anonymous discussion can’t work? Our brains can’t see all of them as individuals, so we divide. Why do all these sites feel the same? Maybe we can’t see them any other way. Social media has been adapted to take advantage of our psychology, but we also adapt the content and users to fit our own ways of thinking. Even on mediums where “number go up” isn’t so obvious, we find a way. When you’re replied to on 4chan, you have an ID string linking back to your post. You also have a “(You)”, a small text string next to that number. Well, that’s nothing, almost to be expected. But if you got a lot of “(Yous)”? Well, it’s still nothing, but it’s a little more nothing. You probably got it for a snappy own, or you baited a lot of people. Often if a post is especially spicy, the replies will tend towards “put me in the screencap!”, expecting that someone will edit it into an image to be shared… where, exactly? In later 4chan threads, sure. But realistically, it will travel further on Twitter, Reddit, Imgur, and even the bottom of the barrel meme sites like Funnyjunk and 9gag. 4chan, for all its pretences, for all its inhospitality, is part of the same endless content churn that all of these sites are. Before, it was believable to say 4chan was not just the “asshole of the internet” or the “internet hate machine” but the progenitor of a great deal of internet culture: from the saccharine sweetness of Caturday (turned into the media empire of ICanHazCheezburger) to the far more sinister GamerGate. The delay that used to exist between 4chan in-joke to plastered over the internet barely exists, with the “other” influencing it as much (if not more so) as it influences. If the word “anon” can be heard on the nightly news, even appended with a “Q”, we have truly normalised the chans.
Part of the reason I enjoy Zonelets (and, by extension, Neocities) is that it feels disconnected from some of this. A deliberate throwback to the days of eccentric and esoteric odd spaces on the Internet, connected at most by a webring. I hope to continue that philosophy to this new website. But I can’t help linking it to my Twitter. As a budding writer I feel the need to cultivate a social media presence. I don’t wish to project all my insecurities about the online world onto you, reader, but I don’t feel I’m alone in this: as much as we have made the Internet, it has made us, and though we may log off or even delete accounts, those pathways are always there. But I’ve always been more of an absurdist than a nihilist, so I’m going to keep trying to wander away from those paths.
It’s worth a try.
]]>It no longer feels like a curse. The heat crawling under your skin. The clanking of armour plates dulled by crackling embers in your ears. Knight of flame astride your skeletal horse, charcoal hoofprints that inspire… fear? Reverence? It matters not. All that matters is that they put the fire out.
That they try to, anyway.
They set you out onto battlefields. You leave scorched earth, bodies wrent entwain, and not a drop of blood wasted. A temporary dousing. But there is always another war. Another chance that the next spill will drown you, extinguished by the exsanguinated.
If this is death, then you’ll take as many as you can with you.
You do not think, much. Feel- even less. But one thought troubles you. That there could be a peace long enough that you can’t find enough blood to cease the fire. That what’s left of your soul will be tempered in flames.
And you were right to fear.
For peace comes in the guise of death.
Scurrying rats and blotched handkerchiefs. There are fewer battles, and what little blood there is is caked around the sores of the dead. But you continue.
And one day you will cleanse the rot in light and smoke.
But that cleansing will not come for you.
For fire reigns-
in veins eternal.
Thirty seconds before the end.
She is far better at this than you. She handles her blade like it’s another limb, as if it were natural for every woman to be born as flesh and metal. Maybe it is; maybe you just never learned. You’ve been on the defence the entire time, her flashes of brilliance clumsily parried again and again and how much longer do you think you’ll last, really?
Twenty seconds before the end.
You’re getting closer to the wall. There are no spectators. You could just run. She would be the only audience for your shame. Could you take that? Short sharp hair frames her soft face, teeth clenched in concentration, and you know you have lost because you watching her more than her sword.
Ten seconds before the end.
Is this what you want? She is you, but better. Would it be so bad to be driven through, to become a monument to her? You’re against the wall. You can feel the exhalation of breath as she pulls back her sword. The smell of roses in the garden. Take in every sense you can before-
…
Her hand on your cheek. Her sword through your ribs. You bleed into her.
“Well fought.”
Ljilja lit a candle. The knight was asleep, for now. A titanic corpse of a man, looming and shrivelled. The honey in the wax helped to mask the smell. Her fingers traced his atrophied arms, loose skin hanging off the bones. Poison? Witchcraft? He hadn’t said. He hadn’t really said anything, just stumbled in through the door, waving his poleaxe, yelling and foaming at the mouth, before falling to the floor with a sound like thunder. It was a miracle that she and Senka had been able to lift him onto the table.
She brought the candle to his face. His helmet was fused to his neck with some black, tar-like substance. She gestured for Senka to bring a knife- no, a chisel would be better; some of it had crystallised, rotting flesh intermingled with shards of obsidian. Senka’s shaking hand was a stark contrast to her blood-stiffened gown.
Thunk.
The candle could no longer fight the stench.
Thunk.
Chunks of tar and skin littered the floor.
Thunk.
A crack, enough to lever off the helmet. The knight stirred, his arm reaching for… the light? God? “Not here,” she said, and lifted off the helmet, strands of tar holding on for dear life-
A face. Just a face. Hollowed out and empty, bones and all devoured by something within. She stumbled back into the room, yelling for Senka.
The knight rose from the table.
You shall have no gods before Him, you shall not turn to idols or make metal gods for yourselves. But this god has you at the tip of his sword. Armour adorned in holy relics, how could the blood on his hands be less than that of Christ? You try to flee but your legs will not obey, frozen by his divinity. He promises that you will be a worthy sacrifice. To what is unclear, but the conviction in his voice assuages your doubts. You are meant to die here. It’s in God’s plan.
In a village in flames, you alone have been chosen. The blade scrapes across your clavicle. He says something in Latin that you cannot understand. It is not your place to. Yet despite yourself, you plead for mercy. To his better nature- either let you go or make it quick. He smiles, silently, and you are sure that he will grant you neither.
A flash of divine inspiration. You push yourself onto the sword, sanctifying his armour with your blood. His smile falters. You have stained his relics, fragments of the true cross, a lock of Mary’s hair…
and he has left you,
slumped on his holy blade,
staring into the sky,
waiting for deliverance.
Birthed from the tree. It lacks: a) flesh b) blood c) soul
But not points. Thorns. Those it has in abundance. This wooden simulacrum of a knight, fingers reaching for the sun- the light intersected by knots of leaf and weed. Does it think? Feel? Would you ask the same of a newborn? Scraping through the undergrowth, it reaches for its oaken sword. An instinctual call to violence written into the rings of its flesh, far older than its birth. By the time it has creaked its way out of the forest, the sun has set, the only light from flickering candles in village windows. The knight grows and shifts to these dull flames.
The village is silent, save for the sound of a dull, repetitive chopping under thatched roofs. Splattered remains cling to the knights’ thorns, dry summer grass stained scarlet. It opens the door to the nearest house. It has learned quickly, even without a human teacher. In the centre of the room, a brambled butcher hacks at the corpse of his flesh doppelganger, thorns sticking and tearing out chunks of meat. He tosses an arm into the fireplace, stuffed and smoking with mangled bodies. His head creaks around to face the knight.
“Yours is next door.”
“Did you hear what happened to Sir Dion? He’s been missing for some time. Frightful business. They say he met a girl on the road- no, not like that. You know he has always been a man of temperance. This girl couldn’t have been more than fourteen, yet her rough-hewn auburn hair bounced on ill-fitting pauldrons, and she dragged a claymore as she stomped through the mud. Sir Dion dismounted his horse and told her to turn around, that these roads were no place for a girl. He was sure by her rags and shining armour that she was a scavenger, a dirty magpie picking from the bodies of honourable men. He would see that she saw justice; he would take her into town to be made an example of.
But then she turned around. That bob of auburn hair framed a single, giant eye in place of all her features… save for a grinning mouth. Her left hand reached into her rags and pulled out a set of scales, gilded and glittering as if they had never been touched by human hands, yet the name Dion had been etched deep into the metal. The knight reached for his sword. The scales tipped.”
Her eye blinks.
“What do you think happened next?”
]]>Content Warnings:
Suicide, self harm.
What’s in a screen name? I’ve had mine for over a decade. Certainly more people know me as “S.T.” than “Morgan”, perhaps even more than my deadname. It has given me pause on the few occasions when someone has referred to me as S.T. in real life, but I’ve grown attached to it. I’ve written many, many, many times about my thoughts on internet personas, the freedom of expression it can promote as well as the wedge it can drive between your online and real world personality. Post transition, I feel there’s less of a gulf between S.T. and meatspace me, because in a way S.T. was an anonymised compromise during the years of questioning my identity. I haven’t ditched because I still in some way enjoy that separation, and while I’m not intending to become some Thomas Pynchon-esque recluse, I don’t really want my personal life to be considered alongside the fiction I write.
But it’s an initialism. So the obvious question is, what does it stand for? Does it stand for something? As a joke on Twitter, I said I’d reveal what the letter S stood for when I reached a certain number of followers. But as that number got closer and closer, I thought about it more- why is it something I’m so cagey about? The mystery is fun, I suppose- this is your last chance to dip and maintain that kayfabe- but even friends who have asked me point blank about it I have refused to answer. Not because it’s merely cringeworthy.
It’s because the truth hurts.
Ten years ago I very much wanted to die. My attempts to make sense of my sexuality had been accepted more easily than I had assumed, but my gender identity was dismissed as fetishistic by family and medical professionals. I was diagnosed with depression and social anxiety and left to my devices. I heard voices in empty corridors, felt sure that the world was out to get me, that the best I could expect for my future as a broken person would be to become a shut-in, a NEET, or to not exist at all.
I wasn’t very good at killing myself, thankfully. The medications and other drugs I attempted to overdose on resulted in hospital visits, but no lasting damage. I frequented alt.suicide.holiday, learned the lingo about “catching the bus” and read about how to make your own exit bag, but I didn’t get any further than that. I could never manage more than scratches with kitchen knives, and though jumping seemed the easiest option, that didn’t get any further than leaning over top floor bannisters and wondering if it was tall enough. So I did then what I still do now- attempt to work through my issues through writing.
Diversion is an unfinished Visual Novel I attempted to write in those last years of high school. Like many English language VN’s written by people lacking in experience, it attempted to deconstruct a genre I barely understood. In the fiction of the story, the game was not just a game, but an interface designed by Fate to allow a player to try and change the outcome of one miserable shut-ins life. Most of the choices were false ones, because the ending would always be the same- as a result of your meddling and attempting to play this character’s life like a dating sim, you anger the forces of Fate and cause the world to be rewritten. All very “clever”. But the character I spent most time on was the girl who lived next door.
S.T.
Suicide-tan.
This avatar of suffering, who would have her face torn open with a bear trap at narratives end, was me. Or rather, me at a distance, a cross of what I wanted to be and the rot I felt existed inside me. A dour goth who wore the same striped kneesocks I hid under my bed, wanting to be saved by anything or anyone. I was under many layers of denial, so I can’t be sure how conscious I was that we were the same. But even despite the game never releasing, I continued to use S.T. as my online moniker, to name characters with those initials. My recent story, PASTEL WEREWOLF was an attempt to reinterpret my terrible magical girl Nanowrimo project from the same period, which is why it also includes a character called Skyler Tremont. That that character is the same one from SCUM WORLD effectively means that S.T. lives again, and her face is my avatar across almost all social media.
Why have I stuck with it, especially when it reminds me of something so painful? In part, its inertia- I can’t think of a better screen name, or at least one that doesn’t feel unfitting. Another reason is that as someone who now is in a more comfortable place in terms of gender identity,I am more acutely aware of the value of persona, roles… so I’m happy to continue to have this as something I can hold onto, a self that has existed before I transitioned, but will continue to exist long into the future. And finally- it doesn’t stand for suicide-tan anymore. It has stood for so many things that the initialism itself has more meaning than any of its permutations. And I’m happy to keep it that way.
I’m sorry that wasn’t a fun answer. I don’t know if I’ll keep this article online, if it is even as cathartic as I hoped it would be.
But I’m still going to be S.T.,
as much as I am Morgan,
and as much as I was a person with another name, too.
]]>Kris sat in the waiting area, less nervous and more operating at a level of ambient dread. The office was just a segment of a shared working space, a few floors up an oh-how-brutalist block of flats reclaimed into a combination coffee shop-workspace-rent hiker. Fingernails dug into his thighs to stop him from shaking. Aware of his every imperfection. A crinkled Uniqlo work shirt straight from the packet. A smudge on the corner of his glasses blurred his overgrown fringe. The smell of energy drink aspartame and paracetamol on his breath. Needed this job. Or rather, he needed the money and social capital to get people off his back. The position seemed as soul-sucking as any start-up, but what had he expected? A career trajectory forever horizontal, a life constantly threatening to start but never quite managing it, and no, you can’t be thinking like this before an interview this is a real bad head space, just breathe in. Data analysis. He could do that. No, wait, that was the other one; this was the Buzzfeed-but-not-rag, the one that would definitely still be afloat in a month, come on, why isn’t the breathing helping-
A human TED talk stared into him. “Did you hear what happened?”
“Huh?” [Your heart rate fell below 40 BPM for 10 minutes, starting from 8:45] buzzed his watch, something he’d get madder about if he didn’t feel the threat of an inescapable conversation closing in. An agonisingly clean-cut aspirational professional, every pore oozing Atomic Habits and How to Win Friends and Influence People and leathery cologne.
Kris wondered if he might be a judgmental person.
“A meteor landed in Whitworth Park.”
“What?” He’d zombie-walked here, vape shops and Tesco Expresses blurring into the background tapestry of the city, the endless chatter and horn-honking buried under the podcast hosts in his ears, wincing with every audio peak and hammering of epic gamer mechanical keyboards, feet following an invisible track through this backstreet but not that one, almost flinching when he realised he’d reached his destination. But it seemed unlikely he’d miss a meteor. Right? “You’re serious?”
“I’m serious. A small one, sure, but aren’t scientists supposed to know when one’s coming? I dunno if I want to be walking outside knowing some bit of space rock could land on me any moment. I got things I want to do, y’know?” He’d opened the tab on his Diet Coke mid-conversation. A loud sip and theatrical “Ahhh.” Was this part of the interview? Some test to see how you’d handle annoying coworkers?
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Hurt?” That kind of single-syllable laugh that’s more expelled air than anything close to joy. “Someone got splattered- poor bastard’s half-man, half-bicycle frame. Imagine how unlucky you’d have to be to get hit by that. S’like getting hit by a space javelin. Can you imagine?”
“No.” He turned away, but slowly, not rude, definitely not, a meticulous manoeuvre to leave the conversation without hurting his feelings. A hand jutted out in his peripheral vision.
“I’m Dan, by the way.” Motherfucker. “Oh, man. I hope I get this job. I mean, good luck to you, obviously. But I, really, really hope I get this job.”
“Fingers crossed.” If he gripped his thighs any harder he’d lose circulation. According to his shitty watch, he already had.
“You look fit, dude. What’s your routine? You go to the gym?”
“Ballet.”
“Whoa. Really?” Not the kind of thing he’d lie about. It had shaped him physically if nothing else. If he didn’t hate looking at himself in the mirror, he might even be able to agree with Daniel’s assessment. The fucking shoulders, though…
“I mean. Not now. Before.” To be an adult is to mourn the silly unproductive things you can no longer dedicate time to unless you can make those silly unproductive things into a job, in which case they’re no longer silly and unproductive. What were those hours of bleeding feet for, if not the vain hope of being spared becoming the people who would mock you for it?
“Kristopher?” Oh, thank God. Saved from existentialism by an angel in a suit and tie.
“Ah- it’s just Kris, actually.” Right. The interview. And what a way to start, correcting your interviewer.
“Kris. How… efficient! Sylvia Blackburn, head of HR. Please, have a seat!” A practised smile underneath the bangs of an auburn bob cut. There was no cordoned-off area for the interview, just a desk set aside from the islands of feverish kombucha-on-tap powered typists. He could still see Dan in his peripheral vision. Definitely a nightmare.
“Hello there, Kris.” A soft voice from across the desk. Long dark hair, green eyes, and a smile almost unnervingly placid, a crescent moon on its side, and oh no, he was hot. Ethereal skin wrapped in a fitted suit, his piano fingers lightly brushing his slender neck. “I’m new here, just here to observe. Pay me no mind.” Did that make him the good or bad cop? Sylvia slid into view, the two of them far too close across the Ikea desk, forming an M with their respective finger tents.
“Did you hear about the meteor?” Sylvia said, her smile thinner but far less unsettling than the unnamed’s. Make small talk. Neither of them wanted to be here. Just playing the game.
“Mm. Yeah. Awful. Just goes to show.”
“It does?’
“Ah, well, you know.” A sharp pain in Kris’s right wrist. “It could happen any- ah, any time.” They stared at him. Come on. Hold yourself together. “So, we should make the most of our opportunities!”
“Quite right. A dynamic attitude will serve you well at SyndiKate.” No, this was the data analysis position. What the fuck was wrong with him? How hadn’t he remembered that discount Verhoeven name? The pain was getting worse too, it had started out like a splinter, but now it was pushing inwards and outwards, a psychic spike pinning hand to thigh, sense memories of practising fouettés and tumbling onto the gymnasium floor over and over and the screaming voice of the dance teacher and-
Sylvia tapped her pen. Had she asked something? “Sorry, could you repeat the question? I’m a little nervous, ha-ha”. She tilted her head and smiled, eyes shut in a way that betrayed how close it was to a grimace. A warmth radiated from the spike. Blood. He was bleeding, the stain crawling across the black stripes of his shirt. Did he scrape it in that zombie walk? Surely that he would have noticed, if not the meteor. But no. There was a lump. A bruise? Something sharp. Pushing up against his shirt cuff.
A shard of glass burrowed out of the wound.
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
“The bathroom.”
“Excuse me?”
“I- I’m sorry”. Warm blood dripped between his clasped fingers. “I need to go to the bathroom. Where-” The shard pushed out further, piercing his hand. “WHERE IS THE BATHROOM?” Sylvia flinched as he doubled over in pain.
“Down the hall, next to the water cooler. You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you.” That same placid smile. Dan waved nervously as he sprinted by. Fucker.
He’s totally going to get the job.
Kris ran into a stall and tore off his shirt. A great thorn of crystal was growing out of his wrist. He tried to touch it, not sure whether to push it in or pull it out, but he felt the heat, smelt the burning flesh. No. He categorically refused to accept that this was happening. The details didn’t add up. There was no hole in the sleeve, no dirt or mark, a pure wound inflicted without outside force or instrument.
It was coming from within. Something inside him was trying to get out.
His hand split in two, forced apart between the middle and ring finger, connected only by strands of flesh. The wrist crystal now sat in between the yawning chasm of his arm. His fingers could still move. Not much comfort. The shards were multiplying, piercing out of his arms and chest and waist.
“Bad dream, bad dream, this is a bad dream-” his tongue met a shard in his mouth. “AuhFuck.” A collar of glass pierced his chin and forced his head up. He closed his eyes, tried to shut it out with the only sense he could actually control, but it wasn’t enough; he could still feel it pushing out of him, the agonising pressure against his skin-
The sound of something unzipping, followed by a wet thud. A sudden respite from the pain, or at least a duller sensation. No. Keep your eyes closed. If you do that, you’ll wake up. Or open them. Face reality. Stop being a coward.
The decision was made for him. A thorn pushed from out under his eyelid, vision fractalling into strobing colours and cracked glasses.
He tilted his head to look down, chin piercing on the collar around his neck.
The skin between his clavicle and hips was gone. Torn and shed all over the floor, an écorché model, the line between human and doll blurred by exposed muscle and blood. His left eye bulged out of the socket. Glasses bent and broken across his face. Drool glistened in the flickering bathroom lights.
At a certain point, additional pain fails to register. The heaving mass of glass and scar tissue that could be called “Kris” had traversed beyond that threshold, beyond the point of screams and the hope that anyone would save you.
This is usually the part where you die.
And yet.
The shards were beginning to wind around each other, forming shapes. The one from his eye had migrated up to his head, forming a crown of translucent thorns. Were they alive? Others moved to cover his exposed entrails, fresh armour on top of the wreckage of flesh. His other arm had split to mirror his right, cutting through the watchstrap, the display buzzing for emergency services that would never come.
In the heat of pain there was a moment of clarity. Internals externalized, whether they were organs or deeper-held desires.
A pleated skirt of crystal and blood.
Jagged stilettos pierced out the balls of his feet.
A leotard of glass.
If it weren’t for the gore, he’d be the very picture of a ballerina.
A knock at the door.
“Hello.” A familiar voice. The pool of blood lapped at the dress shoes under the stall. “Are you alright?”
“I’m- I’m fine, please wait a moment”. Hadn’t he locked the door? He tried to hold it shut with his mangled feet, heels skidding in the puddle.
“I don’t think that’s quite true, is it?” The door hinged open. The interviewer cut a cold, tall frame, his every feature elongated and off-kilter, all shadowy approximations. “Oh. How interesting.”
“What the fuck is happening?” Kris held down the hem of the glass skirt with his split hands. What? Protecting your modesty?
“You have been dead for-” He checked his watch. “Two hours now. You were impaled on a shard of living glass. The only reason you’re still here is that it reassembled you.”
“What?”
“Did you hear about the meteor, Kris?” Oh. Oh no. The half-man half-bike frame. “Your memories might be a little fuzzy. Human brains find it difficult to catalogue their own death.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Is it? Did you not think it strange that you had no heartbeat?” He cocked his head. “Go ahead. Check.”
Kris put his separated fingers against his neck, trying not to impale himself with the shard. Nothing. No pulse.
“This isn’t- I’m not a-”
“Not a what?”
“This is a dress.”
“Of a sort, yes.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m afraid I don’t. I understand the transformation is… violent, but there’s not really any other way.”
“It makes me look… makes me look like a girl”.
“Aren’t you one?” He crouched down to look Kris in the eyes. Felt his breath. His gloved hand pushed the bulging eyeball back into its socket. “Glass reflects, Kris. Maybe not perfectly. But it cannot show you something that isn’t there already.” He wiped the eye slime on the stall partition. “Besides. I would be more worried about your skin being on the floor”.
“I shouldn’t be alive.” Kris lifted up the end of his intestine with the wrist shard. “This shouldn’t be possible. So it’s hard to be afraid of it.”
“I see.”
“But I am alive.”
“No, you aren’t. I told you that already. You’ll make things much more difficult if you don’t listen, Kris. Oh dear, I really hope we didn’t lobotomise you…”
“Why are you so calm?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? I’m your handler.” That same crescent moon. “I’m here to make sure you understand your position.” He pulled out a gem from his pocket and placed it on the collar around Kris’s neck, a clear blue heart. His finger traced the edges, over and over. The blood on the floor crawled up Kris, crisscrossing streams coursing their way into the gem. Somehow the pints of him all managed to fit inside that tiny crystal. He’d long since given up on understanding the physics going on here. “Be careful with that. Defend it with your life.”
“What is it?”
“Your life. The life that was.” The life that’s over.
“Give it back to me. My life.”
“Not possible. And I don’t know if that’s really what you want, is it?”
“It hurts. It hurts so much.”
“I know. Well. I don’t. But it’s polite to pretend, right? Early Shardlings couldn’t feel anything at all. They would fight until they rotted, until their flesh sloughed off their glass bones, immortal prisms haunting the Warworlds…”
“I want to die.”
“Don’t worry. You can die. Having you around forever does no one any good. Your spines are defensive in nature. They will recede into you. You will look like any other human… mostly, anyway. But make no mistake. You are one no longer.” He cradled Kris’s cheek with his hand. “You are better.”
Kris vomited onto the handler’s lap, Ultra Rosa and a steak and onion pie somewhere amidst the blood and stringy spew. He could still feel the stomach acid on the back of his teeth. Pain had not dulled every sensation, then.
“S-sorry.”
“It’s quite alright. That you’re embarrassed is a sign you’re adjusting. And that’s the last time you’ll have to do it, anyway.” An empty vessel. The handler wiped the puke from his suit and Kris with a wad of rough public toilet paper.
“We need to go.” He held out a hand to Kris. “It’s about to start.”
The walls and floor rumbled. The sound of rending metal and shattering glass. Kris stumbled through piles of skin and ran out back into the office. Anyone would think this was the first time he’d worn heels
“Kristopher! Thank- fuck- what the fuck are you wearing, man?”
“Shut the fuck up, Daniel.”
“What?” The whole office was in a state of quiet panic, armies of eyes searching around the room, for answers, information, anything, longing for escape from that interminable moment.
Before everything exploded.
screamed Sylvia,
before a pair of gigantic arms
slammed through the window
and splattered her across the room.
The yells and thundering of feet were barely audible under the horrific screeching as the arms removed themselves from the office, scraping a huge pair of handcuffs across the floor.
“Holy shit.” Dan was on his knees, dry-heaving under the Sylvia paste dripping from the ceiling. “Kris- did you… did you do this?”.
He didn’t answer. He stumbled across the office and stared out the hole in the building. The street was in ruins, trams knocked over and overhead lines torn and sparking, the controlled chaos of rush hour traffic descended into a blaring screaming hell. Something had punched a hole in the sky. A shadow loomed across the fleeing masses.
“What is that?”
“A monster, of course. I didn’t think I’d have to explain that to you.” Colossal arms bound together and weighed down by great iron cuffs. Criss-crossing black bindings obscured its skin. A human shape with a bear trap mouth, a metal prison for its head, an eye peering out from a crack, and long hair flowing out the back. A monster. A giant monster, taller than anything in the skyline.
SLAVE OF THE ASCENDED GORE
IRON MAIDEN ALKATALOXIA
“It looks like a prisoner.” It couldn’t move right, staggering and scraping against buildings, a titanic marionette with twisted strings.
“Then you’d better put it out of its misery, don’t you think?” The handler pushed away a whimpering Daniel with a gore-stained shoe, brushing the dust and crumbling MDF from his hair. “Your transformation is in response to its arrival. Kill it, and you will return to a baseline of normalcy.”
“I don’t… why should I trust you?”
The handler grabbed his shoulders.
“KILL IT. OBLITERATE IT. OR MORE WILL BE OVER THAN YOUR OLD LIFE,” he yelled, before he pushed Kris out of the hole.
Bracing February air met his every scar as he accelerated towards the ground. His arms opened out further, the glass thorns in their centre forming colossal, needle-like blades. Almost instinctively, he dug one into the side of the building, anything to slow himself down. The superheat of the swords scarred the steel and concrete. He hung there, the monster more interested in levelling skyscrapers than a goretwink in a glass dress.
No time to think about what this meant. Who this person, Kris, was supposed to be. How easy it had been to be torn apart, remoulded into something new. Some kind of weakness in his brain, a tangle of desires and hatreds.
The pendant glowed. Wings of blood, liquid but held together by some psychic force, grew from his back.
[MALWARE MOTH TESTAMENT!]
he screamed, or rather something moved his lips, animated his tongue into spewing words that had no meaning to him. He felt his nerves reconfiguring, or perhaps fresh branches invading his body from the base of the wings. He flapped one experimentally. Covered and uncovered his face. The wings had imitation eyes, though he doubted the behemoth would be afraid.
Malware.
He let go of the wall.
An invasive interruption.
He floated in place, rather than needing to flap his wings.
Or taking advantage of your coding.
The beast was scratching against a clock tower.
You want something done to you.
An old red brick building of no doubt some historical importance that eluded Kris.
You want to stop rolling that boulder for just one day.
Whatever it had been, it was now defined by this otherworldly force.
To feel like you aren’t having to exert will just to hold yourself together.
Like him.
Let the world wash over you. Retreat your spines.
He hovered above the choked crowds.
But this isn’t that, is it?
It hadn’t noticed him.
You have been changed by something outside the ordinary, the crushing…
Neither had the people below.
Your spines are even longer now. But you are not defensive.
Take advantage.
You’re offensive.
He lunged at the monster with his glass blades, impaling its side.
And you’re afraid.
Felt like a mosquito dug into skin, the split flesh of his hands torn even further apart.
Not because of what it has made you.
Now it had noticed him.
or because you’ve lost your place in a world you hate.
A roar of pain as he pulled out one blade and stuck it back in-
You’re afraid of how much you enjoy it.
-higher, hiking up a living mountain.
That you feel alive.
Its colossal eye stared down at him.
Afraid to feel anything at all.
Echoes of a world beyond here, behind the iris.
But now flooded with sensation.
It leaned back
and with the force of its body
it threw him into a building,
shattering through a window.
A huge shard of glass stuck in his overarm. A distinct impaling that felt more foreign than the glass that was now part of him. He pulled himself to his feet. He was in the corridor of a student apartment, fearful tenants peering out of their coffin rooms, staring at him. So many eyes. A pocket of silence in the chaos.
“I won’t let it hurt you.”
She said.
MALWARE MOTH GENDERPUNK
KRIS NIGHTINGALE
No push this time. She’d have to jump.
But her legs would not move.
Pathetic. Frozen by fear. What effort did you ever put in against the world? You let every neurosis seep into your skin. You fucking faggot. They rebuilt you too well. They kept all the stupid horseshit in your brain, your skin, organ memory of failure. An Avatar of Suffering.
A Sad Girl.
She jumped. Temps de l’ange, her arms spread outward and legs flowing behind, but she would never land. Sublimated the suicidal into a wilful disregard for her wellbeing. An engine powered by gorgeous oblivion, the dress glittering in the murky February sun, dead doll flesh rendered sublime in diversive prisms. The wings unfurled, and she flew between tilting blocks of flats, through mazes of torn concrete and rebar, and rooms of scattered photoframes and scorched landlord sofas. No. There would only be one more death today. That she would make sure of. She looked the beast in the eye, green and bisected like a snake’s, hidden under colossal strands of trailing hair.
No. 29 Finale: Andante- allegro agitato
Pas de deux. They will dance together. She fluttered about it, like the bird in Peter and the Wolf, though she had no intention of being this monster’s lunch. Speed was the one advantage she had, every slow-motion lunge was an opportunity to get closer to its throat. The beast howled under its metal muzzle.
Now.
She lunged through the air
[IN THE NAME OF DEATH]
And with blades of glass she scissor cut its throat.
Fin.
Tinnitus-inducing scream above waterfall flow of blood. The city will drown. She fell to the ground and the titan followed, though thankfully in the opposite direction, the impact quaking the very foundations of the city, and causing yet more buildings to topple.
The handler was waiting for her, clapping in the middle of the road, drenched in monster viscera.
“How did you get down here?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
The screams echoed in Kris’s head. “I don’t think I should have done that.”
“It was no sacrificial lamb. You saw what it was capable of.”
“But I don’t know if-”
His tongue in her mouth, navigating shards of glass and reconstituted girl meat. “Good.” He held Kris against him, piercing himself as he kissed her. Trails of saliva and blood from his tongue. His long, gore-soaked hair curtains around her head. The spines retreated into Kris, leaving bloodless scars on the skin that remained. The handler wrapped black bindings around her exposed musculature. “It’s all over now.” He lifted up her chin with a finger. “Beautiful.”
Kris’s arm slid off. The window shard had cut down to the bone, and the wound had expanded around her arm, an ouroboros, mouth met tail, and now a long glove of flesh met gravity, strands of meat holding and tearing, like unpicking crochet.
“You’re going to have to be more careful.” The handler picked up her arm like he was cradling a small animal. “You are strong, but you are glass. You can cut, but you can also be shattered. We can keep you together, but only just. Your body can no longer heal itself. See? There’s no blood. You’ve run out.” He squeezed empty fingers. “Don’t go breaking yourself just yet.” His hand gently held onto the flesh and slid it back. “You’re lucky I came prepared” He took a needle from his pocket. He plucked one of his long hairs and threaded the skin back together.
“Is that sanitary?”
“Are you really worried about that? Now?” Kris blushed, or would if she had any blood. “It won’t do you any harm.” Black threads of him now in Kris. She felt less like a fighting machine and more like a doll, tossed about by a rude older sibling before the owner could put her back together. Owner. Shivered at the word. Handler already had certain… connotations. Maybe she hadn’t finished the transformation. Still pupating. A mess of flesh and jagged thoughts, anything to get away from the fact that she wanted to fuck her handler, fuck or be fucked by, a burning heat inside her heart, that dormant but familiar cocktail of shame and lust, or perhaps she just wanted someone to hold her head while the world ends-
A thundering yell.
Behind them.
A skeletal head emerged from the slit throat of the monster, moving like a stop-motion figure without muscles or skin to animate it, hands of metal and bone tearing the hole wider and wider, the bounds around its skin coming undone.
Kris closed her eyes. Encore. The glass began to pierce her again, just as painful as before, but she was ready-
“Too late.”
A high-pitched whine. A beam of immolating light. The flesh skeleton twitched and smouldered.
A tall girl in a sapphire dress sat on a billboard for headache pills, arms disappeared at the elbow into a pair of ornate cannons. They looked heavy enough to tear arm from socket, but instead, they dangled freely, bumping the stock photo family. “You got started without me?”
Another one.
“You aren’t supposed to be here, Skyler.” The handler stepped forward, crescent moon fallen, teeth clenched so hard they could bleed.
“That won’t do. No fair that she gets all the fun. All the attention. I won’t have it.”
SLUNK QUEEN, DEATH MACHINE
SKYLER TREMONT
The handler snapped his neck with his hands. It extended, snake-like, wrapped itself around Kris. His head came to rest on her shoulder. Was he trying to protect her? “Leave, now.”
“Haha. Why would I do that?” She hopped from the building, bloody mantis legs sprouting from her waist to cushion the fall. “Think of all the fun we could have.” Sirens echoed through the night, blue lights bouncing from the blood. “Aha. Buzzkill. Maybe some other time, hm?” The mantis legs grabbed the side of the crumbling tower block. “Be seeing you, malware moth.” A blur of rapid crawling and she was gone, as suddenly as she’d arrived.
In the abandoned streets, flies descended from on high to feast on carrion.
And no matter what, Kris wouldn’t wake up.
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