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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

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World War Me

Part V

By Kylin Lötter

___—-===\/===—-___

There's something wrong with James. Summer can't see it, but Clive and I exchange glances every once in a while. James smiles too broadly, walks too much and sinks into silence for no apparent reason- even if it's in the middle of a sentence. His words are what make me worry the most. He says things that people don't think about, even people like us.

“I thought I was a swordfish,” he says, “But it was actually just my nose growing from lying so much.”

Summer laughs like it's a joke. I look at Clive and we exchange the same uneasy expression. I wonder if James had always been like this, or if it was the drug they pumped into him. He calls it the Drug of Discourse, the Drug of Dream and Desire. Whenever he mentions it, which is often, he gets this faraway look in his eye and licks his chapped lips. He can't stand still. He's all jumping around, hanging off Summer's arm or running in circles around her.

She's so happy to have him back that all she does is laugh.

“They put needles in my arm,” he says and pulls up his sleeve to show us a pockmark of needle marks. There are so many of them, littering his skin like a graveyard.

“First they used needles,” he explains, “then they used pills and then they used pieces of paper with liquid on it.”

“Did they force you to take it?” Summer asks. She stares at his arm and I can feel her hatred for The Company radiating off her.

“At first,” James says while he yanks down his sleeve.

“Do you know where we can get more?” Summer asks. I wonder why she bothers.

“Yep,” he grins, “There's a warehouse. I can show you the way.”

Before we can say anything, he turns around and runs. Summer barely hesitates when following him but Clive and I falter.

“This doesn't feel right,” I say to him. “He's a complete addict.”

“I know, but what else can we do?”

I shrug. He has a point. I run off to catch up with Summer, my dress flapping against my legs and the tar of the road slamming against my bare feet.

James doesn't stop to rest. Not once. My face is red and I'm keeling over by the time he skids to a stop in front of a warehouse. He's not even out of breath. For someone who looks so pale and thin, he cuts through the air like nothing can stop him.

I'm beginning to worry what can.

He tries to open the door but it's too large for him. Pushing against the door with his shoulder, he runs on the stop. Breathing in deeply, I move to help him shove it forward but even then it takes all four of us to create a gap just large enough for James' small body to squeeze through.

“Be careful, James!” Summer yells through the door. After a moment of hesitation she adds, “And don't take any of it for yourself. I don't want you to hurt yourself.”

I can hear James' whine through the door. There's a rustle, then a gulp and I know immediately that James hasn't listened to his sister. When he squeezes back through the door, he's holding a giant jar of bright blue liquid. His pupils are blown wide again. We all pretend not to notice.

“Will that be enough?” Smiling Clive asks.

“Oh, trust me,” James grins, “It'll be enough.”

Summer looks up at the sky, “How are we going to get up there?”

I shrug, “How should I know? You were the one who said you worked in heavy machinery. I just pushed buttons.”

“Yeah...” Summer says. “We could steal a hover car but that will take a good amount of stealth that none of us have.”

Smiling Clive shrugs, “Maybe we should just blow something up again.”

I scowl at him, “No,” I say adamantly. Smiling Clive is running out of explosions. That much is clear from the amount of colour that covers his skin. One more explosion would probably kill him. I can't do it. I won't.

“A distraction?” James suggests, holding the jar like it's a baby.

“Yeah!” Summer exclaims, “But what kind?”

“An explosion?” Smiling Clive says again.

“No!”

“Fine,” Summer sighs. “We'll think of something when we get there. We better go now, though. The Company is bound to be looking for us after Clara blew up an entire neighbourhood some of their top employees lived in.”

It's as if her words break open some cursed tomb that releases the police helicopters. Their swirling blades cut into the air, emitting shrieks of “STAND DOWN! I REPEAT! STAND DOWN!”

In unison, we all grab each other. Summer grabs James' wrist and I cling to Clive's sleeve. We all throw ourselves down a horizontal fall. Suddenly energized by adrenaline, we run like nothing can stop us, but the helicopters give chase.

“THIS WAY!” Summer screams back at us and ducks in to what looks like an abandoned warehouse on the outside, but inside we hit the stainless steel floor hard.

As I clamour to my feet, I look around wearily. The interior is made of silver on silver. It hurts my eyes to look at it. It hurts my skin with its synthetic hygiene.

“What is this place?” I ask.

Summer smirks. “Home sweet home.”

“The skies are accessible to the lucky few,” James says. “Who are breed up there to work in the factories.”

I look at Summer to see if she is in any way disturbed by James' manner of speech. She just looks straight back at me and shrugs, “What? He's not wrong.”

She scrambles to her feet and reaches a platform. On this platform is what I can only guess is a hover craft. It has no roof and its interior is a rich red. The bright colour makes my eyes water when contrasted with the sea of shining silver.

“The elevator to the sky,” James exclaims. He hugs the craft before he continues, “It's been so long since you brought me down.”

“We're going home, brother,” Summer says as she jumps in, “Not to reunite ourselves with the sheep but to destroy.”

“Yes,” James mutters. “Chaos.”

Summer pulls him up into the craft. They speak to one another like they have never been apart in their entire lives. Their sentences intertwine, beginning when another's should have ended. Summer speaks of nothing but anarchy and joy.

When we are all in the craft, Summer looks at the controls and then back at us.

“I don't know what made you guys think I knew how to drive this thing.”

There's a knock at the door, or rather a loud demanding slam of someone who was not asking to be let in.

“Hurry up and figure it out!” I yell, looking at the door nervously.

It occurs to me now that we don't have much of a contingency plan. So, we put the Drug of Discourse in the rain and then... what? They're not going to stop. They'll never stop.

Suddenly I'm struck with the sensation that life is meaningless and I've discovered everything that I was ever going to. I smile, that's new. I think I've just had my first existential crisis. It was the very best worst feeling that I have ever had.

Summer figures out to turn the craft on. It lurches into the air. James, Clive and I struggle to get seatbelts around us. They cross over our chests and strap us to our seats.

“Hold on,” Summer shouts, as though seat belts are not enough to hold us into place.

She pressed her foot to the floor, just as the door smashes open and a stream of policemen flow out. The craft shoots forward at a startling speed. Clive forces me to hunch over. For a moment I'm confused, and then I hear the metallic sound of bullets hitting metal.

“Why are they hitting us with skipping stones?” James asks. His voice is genuinely curious.

“Not now, James!” I yell.

Summer flies towards a large opening. I watch the metal doors slide open through Clive's arms. She's cutting it close. She'll hit the wall.

“TURN LEFT! TURN LEFT!” I shriek and it's a miracle that Summer understands me at all. My voice is shrill and curls blood.

Summer swerves at the last moment. The side of the craft scraps against the edge of the wall.

“You hit the wall!” I shout at her.

“Well, why don't you drive next time?!” Summer snaps back.

I fall silent. The craft continues to climb up the sky. Summer drives in the same way an insane person struggles in a straightjacket. I'm not sure whether it's to avoid the helicopters that are still pursuing us or if it's because Summer legitimately has no control. Either way, I cling to Clive and he clings to me. Even if we fall, we fall together.

James laughs. His laughter is high and maddening. He laughs at the helicopters, laughs at the police shooting at us.

“You can't touch me!” he screams into the sunlight. “I AM THE IMMORTAL SUFFERING OF THE GODS!”

Please, I think, just be quiet. I close my eyes and bury my face into the nape of Smiling Clive's colourful neck. He holds me tight, his hand curved around my hairless skull.

Summer flies up, spinning dizzily like an ascending fly. We're getting closer and closer to the sun. The darkness behind my closed eyes flares up in a glowing red. I can feel the heat of the sun and the cold of the air as we suddenly hit the wall of condensation, passing through it unharmed.

I open my eyes to white, blinking in the sudden brightness. Finally, I see it. How have I lived so long without seeing it? The clouds, the spiralling pinnacle of our tragic utopia, belong to us in the way that machines belong to us. In a way the button I pressed when the light went on belong to me and only me. The hulking mechanics, the levers that rotate the atmosphere, look ethereal. Like thin netting, I watch the cogs of the clouds tick slowly. Ponderous in their movements, elegant in their design, this is how we saved ourselves. There are no trees. It does not rain. We made the clouds out of synthetic condensation and illuminated ozone in a desperate attempt to save ourselves from what we had done to ourselves. We promised to do better, promised ourselves that we would live up to the ideal of equality even it killed us.

As I look at the factories in the sky, it occurs to me that I never thought that I would be the one to break that promise. As I rain chaos onto the continent, I will regret the choices I have made that lead me to this point, but now that I am here I know that there is no other way.

“Isn't it beautiful, James?” Summer says softly to her brother. “It's home, remember? We were born in the factories. We worked there until I lost an eye and you lost your mind.”

James grins happily, gazing at the heavy factory that floats in the sky as if it’s as light as heaven.

“Home,” he says giddily.

“We're going to blow it up,” Smiling Clive says suddenly.

I look at him sharply, “No, we're not. We're just putting the Drug of Discourse in the water supply so it'll rain on the continent.”

“I really think we should blow it up,” Smiling Clive says, like he's being the rational one. “People have relied on the cloud factory for too long. It was built by our ancestors and if we just keep repeating what they did, we'll never move forward!”

“Do you have some kind of fucked up death wish, Clive?” I snap at him sharply. He buckles down, much to my relief, but looks up at me with something stuck in his eyes. I fool myself into thinking its tears, but I recognise it. I recognise it as defiance.

“Entering docking station,” Summer interrupts.

I refuse to look at him, even though I can still feel his eyes on me. There's something I'm missing... or something that Smiling Clive isn't telling me. I realise now that there's this strange secrecy to him, hidden in plain sight. He keeps his emotions in the air, has never once attempted to completely conceal them, and I have never thought to ask him why.

We scramble off the craft. No one has followed us here but I have the sinking feeling that someone is waiting for us.

In the factories, we can see through the walls. As light as air, as solid as glass, I stare through the thousand translucent walls and watch the mechanics whir like the heartbeat of a cloud.

“This is where you used to work?” I ask Summer.

“Not exactly,” Summer answers, “I worked in heavy machinery. It floats higher up, above the clouds. It's more solid. Look around, Clara, do think any of this netting could punch a hole in my eye?”

She's right. Everything is too soft, looks too fragile, to cause injury. We really are just in mechanical condensation.

“This is where we'll find the rain machine though,” Summer continues. “Higher up are the levers that rotate the atmosphere. That's what I did... made sure the sky kept turning.”

We walk through the factory quietly, like it's a church. I can't shake the feeling that we're being watched. Without noticing it, I take Smiling Clive's hand. He grips it tightly, carefully not smiling when I look at him.

“Can you hear it?” James whispers softly. “Someone is following us.”

I only have a split second to wonder if this is just another facet of James' eccentricity before I am suddenly grabbed from behind. Clive snatches at my hand, but I slip through his fingertips as I am pulled backwards.

I struggle violently, but strong arms lift me up and slam me against the floor. Instead of sitting something solid, I sink right through the netting. I hold my breath. One wrong move, I think to myself, and I'll fall straight out of the clouds.

“GET HER!” I hear someone yell. My face is pressed against the floor. I'm looking down at the earth and it looks so heartbreakingly small.

“Clara.”

I turn around slowly and see Summer, offering her hand to me.

“I'm going to fall.” My voice is thick.

“No,” she shakes her head. “You're not. I know this place. It won't let you go so easily. Grab my hand.”

I grab her hand and she pulls me up. I look around. James had tackled the person who had grabbed me. With all his slight weight and brittle bones, he had brought the person to the floor and was now hovering over her, pinning her down with only the sheer force of his will. He reared back, arched his spine, and in the midst of the women screaming, bit out a piece of her neck.

I scream in horror and clap my hand over my mouth. James spits out the flesh nonchalantly and stands up with the rolling shoulder movements that I normally associate with Summer.

I look at her, “I'm sorry, but someone has to say this. The Company fucked your brother up. He's insane.”

She frowns. “What do you mean? He's always been like this.”

“Oh,” I say nervously.

James stands up, turns around and grins with blood in his mouth. The red stains his teeth. His glittering eyes catch the light of a gleaming sun.

The women is holding her bleeding neck. It's only now that I see her properly.

“That's impossible,” Smiling Clive says for me.

I point at her wildly and shout, “HEY! Didn't I blow you up?”

The women tilts her head to the side. She looks exactly like the woman whose house Summer broke into.

“Have you forgotten what the standard female of our species is supposed to look like?” the Women says slowly. “Not everyone has deformed themselves as you have.”

James gestures towards his own neck while looking at the women's with a puzzled expression, “Hey, you've got a little something over –”

“SHUT UP!” she screams, causing blood to bubble out of the wound and over her hand. “You're all just freaks and test subjects. Why couldn't you just DO AS YOU'RE TOLD?!”

Summer steps forward, grabs the woman by the collar and effortlessly lifts her off the floor.

“Don't speak to my baby brother like that,” she says in a deadly whisper.

“You're not going to win. The police are here. You'll never make it in time.”

Summer drops the woman, who falls to the floor in an inelegant heap.

“I'm pretty sure that's what sets us apart from you people... what makes us unique. We have no intention of winning. We just want to fuck something up.”

Summer smiles and turns back to Clive and I, “You guys go ahead. Grab the drug and pollute the skies. I'm deal with whatever tries to follow you.”

“You sure?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Summer smiles a little, “I think I know where I fit now, where I connect.”

James hands us the jar filled with the drug. It's heavier than I thought it would be and I have to cradle it in my hands. He goes to stand by his sister, looking over the trembling woman.

“See you later, I guess,” Smiling Clive says. Summer flashes us a last bright, unnerving grin.

We run down translucent corridors. I catch the mechanics of the sky moving as we race past. There's no time to stop, not when I can hear the police behind us. They're screaming at us to surrender but, at this point, I honestly think I don't know how to do that.

We duck into a room that looks significant. Smiling Clive slams the door behind us. It doesn't look very solid but it will have to do.

“Do you know how any of this stuff works?” I ask him, holding the jar low in my hands.

“No,” he shrugs, “But really, how badly could we mess it up?”

I point to a great water turbine at the far side of the room, “Want to give that a shot?”

“Couldn't hurt.”

We run towards it. I try to ignore the rattling of the room as police gnaw at the walls and the doors. Smiling Clive holds that jar for me as I struggle to twist off the lift. Together, we tip the liquid haphazardly into the water. It immediately dyes everything a watery shade of purple. A drop splashes back onto my hand and, almost immediately, I feel like I understand why birds sing and why some spiders kill their mates.

When the last of it is gone, we let go of the jar at the same time and it shatters on the floor. I stumble back slightly. Looking down, I can see through the floor. There's a bird's eye view of the rain pouring down towards the earth. The sight disorientates me, makes me feel nauseous, because it’s just too strange to look down at the clouds for a change.

The rattling at the walls continues and I realise that we're trapped. I don't know what to do. I've never had much of a contingency plan. Smiling Clive grabs my hand and I squeeze it tightly. We look at one another.

“I-,” I started and then I fall silent because there's nothing I can think of that I still need to say.

“Clara,” he says, “Look at me.”

When I do, I finally see it. The look in his hands, that clouded over sadness that could be lifted with the smile that tweaks at the corner of his lips.

I step back, pulling my hands out of his, “NO! Clive, you can't! You'll die.”

“So?”

My heart breaks a little at that single syllable, “Clive –”

“No, no, Clara,” he says, “It's not a sad thing. It's not a sad thing at all. Don't you understand? I am colour, and you're light. Together, we are so beautiful that nothing can stand it.”

I shake my head, “No. You're wrong. You're just romanticising it. It's not like that. My bones shatter, my atoms scatter and I destroy everything around. You even... especially you.”

Smiling Clive shrugged. “Maybe I romanticise it. Maybe I imagine that everything is too kind, too good, when everything is really just going to Hell but, Clara, I guess it’s just who I am. I guess it’s what makes me unique.”

He steps closer to me. We're close enough that our noses briefly touch one another when our bodies sway slightly. Smiling Clive is clutching my shoulders, like he wants to shake me out of some delusion but can't quite get there. I realise that there is a lot I don't understand about Smiling Clive, too much that he has just never said. Have I reduced him to a smile and splattering of colour, or is it possible for someone to be so hopelessly good that it’s truly all there is to them?

“Clara, what's my name?” he asks me as if I don't know.

I frown, “Clive...”

He huffs out a small laugh and moves closer to me still. I'm so close to him that I can see the intricacy of his skin colour. It's like a lightly pulsing star system, a nebula of freckles and burns. I could lean in and kiss the space just under his left eye, the only patch of skin that still glows normal.

“No, Clara,” he says softly. “What's my name?”

I move closer to him. His hands move to the small of my back, one curls up around my neck. I rest my palms on his chest.

“Smiling Clive,” I whisper back. My words are exhaled over his face and, even if it's just a trick of proximity, I can watch his multi-coloured skin ripple in delight.

He tilts his head and, just before he kisses me, he smiles.

The explosion is instantaneous. It builds up in shockwaves and rips through the factory in the sky, bombarding outwards and dyeing the sky red with its flames. My skeleton expands to hold all the clouds like ethereal organs for just a brief second, and then I collapse back into myself.

I am falling.

Plummeting, really. I truly grasp the concept of gravity for the first time. The air rushes past me, solid and sharp enough to cut my skin. I watch as the factory disintegrates above. Debris is falling with me, burning at different points.

I hit something. For a moment, I'm confused. It's much too early for me to have hit the ground. Also, I realise with a pleasant surprise, I did not die on impact. I look around and take in my surroundings. It's the hovercraft. I landed in the front seat, next to Summer. James is in the back. He's twirling his dark hair between his thin fingers, not looking at the apocalyptic sunset all around us. I take in a deep breath, my bare chest heaving, and exhale everything that ever made me explosive.

Because it's over now. I'll never be an atom bomb again. Smiling Clive gave me that. If I was a bomb, then he was the pilot who had dropped me in a civilian area and after a thousand repetitions of history he had finally decided that I was worth keeping all to himself instead. I glance at Summer. She looks more content than I have ever seen her. She flourishes in the chaos all around us and, for once, I feel the same natural happiness that she emits. I am happy. I am truly and completely ecstatic surrounded by the burning debris of our clouds falling to the earth like local asterisks.

Summer looks at me and grins. “Hello, darling.”

We lean back, smiling at one another without fear, and watch the sky fall in on itself. It is so beautiful. Everything is so beautiful and even when we lost that intricate part of ourselves, we were magnificent in our own boredom. There is nowhere I would rather be than in the middle of this particular, disintegrating sky.

***

Suddenly, I turn to Summer and say, “Aren't you worried this burning debris is going to hit us?”

Summer shushes me, “Shhh, don't ruin the moment.”

___—-===/\===—-___

PART I PART II PART III PART IV

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

Affair

Part 2

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He had a slick Southern lilt in his voice, giving it a sweet, honey-velvet quality. It was the kind of voice that could gently ease you anywhere; it hypnotized you and held your hand and led you to wherever it wanted you to go.

“My name is Arthur. What’s yours, darling?”

“J-Julie.”

He cocked his head and smirked.

“J-Julie. Julie. Ju-lie. That’s nice.”

“Thank you.”

“Hey Miss Ju-lie. You can ring me up now. I’ll have these sunflower seeds, 30 bucks of the Regular gas, and a large, black coffee.”

“Right, sir. Arthur. Yes. Thank you. Yes.”

She blubbered and muttered to herself as she rung him up, suddenly unable to make eye contact. It’s not that he was even that attractive, stereotypically. He was as pale as she was, and lankier. He had enough wrinkles to be about 42, and he had lots of patchy stubble. He smelled of Axe and coffee, and had purple bags under his eyes, making it look like he might not have eaten a vegetable in a few years. But he had blinding confidence, a swagger that spoke to her every time he opened his mouth, pleading with her to play with him.

“You ok there, darling?” He smiled at her and slowly reached towards the charm on her bracelet.

“This is pretty. I like it.”

Julie was speechless. Sweat continued to pour rapidly down her forehead. She had never been this affected by a man before; it was as if she was in the presence of a movie star, completely tortured and star-struck. She was almost ashamed of her own cliché; a bored high school graduate working a summer job infatuated by a random man who liked to flirt. Still, there was something between them that was undeniable.

Julie exhaled deeply.

“Thanks, Arthur. My dad got it for me.”

She was amazed that she could string together a coherent sentence.

He leaned in close and popped his stale mint gum.

“What? Who got it for you?”

“Umm… My dad,”

He leaned in closer to her ear and placed his hand on her wrist.

“What?”

His whisper sent shivers down her spine. She couldn’t breathe or move. She felt like a rabbit surrounded by wolves; paralyzed with fear and adrenaline. Was she unsafe? She had to surrender to understand.

His grip on her wrist gently moved to her hands, until he was stroking and gripping them, breathing into her ear.

He kissed her cheek softly and slowly. “You’re really, really pretty,” he breathed.

Before she could understand what was happening, she felt her forearm hook behind his neck and pull his mouth onto hers. She catapulted her tongue into his mouth without thinking or asking, and pulled him behind the desk through the side door.

They hit the floor as if they’d known each other for a decade, and began making love like a passionate couple that’d been apart for a year.

As he ripped her uniform open, Julie felt a hot tear run down her cheek. She was finally who she wanted to be - wild, powerful, memorable, in control. She felt like Cleopatra, a cat in heat, an animal. As she inhaled his breath and Axe, she knew this man was meant to be hers.

He finished with a shudder and lay on top of her for a long while.

They lay in silence, breathing together. Julie was shocked at her brazenness. It didn’t feel real. Where was she? It was amazing that no one came in during that time. Maybe it had been quicker than she thought. She looked up at the clock. Ten minutes had passed since he came into the store, but it felt like two hours.

“Well… thanks, Darlin'.” Arthur collected himself and shimmied his pants up. He winked at her and started out the door.

“Wait but…” Julie trailed off. What was there to say? Didn’t he understand?

“Babe, I’m married. With a kid. You get it.”

As she watched him walk out of the store and down the block, she felt sick to her stomach, and scared. She locked the store and put up the “Closed” sign, and ran into the bathroom. She let out a wail that she didn’t even know she was capable of making, rooted in the deepest depths of her childhood disappointment. Each wail felt like a deep kick in the stomach. How could she have been wanted so fully and then discarded so easily? It didn’t make sense, or feel real.

“So this is what emptiness feels like. This is what loneliness looks like. I’m pathetic,” Julie thought.

Empty, lonely. Pathetic.

She sought out a similar intensity and connection for years after Arthur. She looked everywhere she could for a man to give her that same sense of “wild”, but never found it.

Even after settling down sensibly and having children, she never quite shook the feeling of missing something, missing him, missing the feeling of being caught completely off-guard with passion, with a version of herself that is unrecognizable.

He caught her in the fragility of her summertime desperation, and made her feel like she was more than plain, cute little Julie.

___—-===/\===—-___

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

World War Me

Part IV

By Kylin Lötter

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The typography of a carpet is shaped in the skyscrapers of the mega-city. The red coils are tightly spiralled and echo back into my fading vision. I can see the dust motes fall into the sunlight like they just can't wait to ignite.

“CLARA!”

That hurt, I think to myself. That really hurt. The thoughts drift in and out. Their movements make me nauseous. I can hear the stamping of boots. There's a laugh and a snarl, but it is all so far away.

“NO! GET OFF HER! GET OFF!”

Someone is dragging me. The carpet scratches my cheek as I am scrapped along it. My vision flutters, as though it’s trying to fly away. Smiling Clive's skinny, regulation sized arms are wrapped tightly around my torso. The weight of another person's touch on me is strangely comforting, like the weight of soft soil against skin.

The woman's voice echoes, starched in the white world around me. She blanches into movement so that every time I blink, she's closer than she once was.

“I think it's time for Plan B,” the woman says with a smack of a grin on her face, “This Clara isn't going to make it.”

I'm not going to make it.

That's when I snap out of it. That's when it becomes all too real. That's when it starts to hurt.

I choke up, spit out a clump of blood that splatters on the carpet in a spiral of swinging dark red. Smiling Clive shakes me. I feel feverish, too hot to exist in a body so small. I have to get out. I have to get out.

“What's Plan B?!” I hear Summer shout, “Has it got something to do with my brother?! Tell me or I swear I will kill everyone in this room! I fucking swear I'll do it!”

There's the sound of gunshots. I hear Summer running and cursing.

“Summer! Summer! She's not breathing.”

I'm not breathing. I can feel Smiling Clive's hand pressed against the side of my neck, feeling for a weakening pulse.

“Get behind me!”

I can feel Smiling Clive's move me around in his arms. My bones shake in my loose sack of skin. I am weak and I am fading. I must have blacked out for a moment, although it felt like much longer. When I open up my eyes, everything is the same as it was, in that same hazy blur as before. I was gone for such a long time. It makes me think that something must have changed.

“Look at me, Clara.”

I look up at Clive. Moving my head causes blood to run out of the corner of mouth in a straight line.

“I'm going to smile now,” he says, and his lips are tweaking as though he just can't wait to do it. “I think it'll heal your wounds, like it did before when you fell out of Summer's house, and it'll get rid of all these people pointing guns at us.”

My eyes widen. “N-no.”

“I'm going to smile now. Are you ready?”

I shake my head violently and it feels like whatever remnants of a personality I've collected in the past few weeks have toppled out of my skull.

“Clara, look at me.”

I look at him, “No. Don't. You're going to die!”

But he smiles anyway and his smile brightens up the room. It's as though he's so happy, so delighted, to hear that he might die.

I open my mouth and scream. Flames lick their way past my teeth, roaring from my belly and into my heart. My skeleton shatters. My atoms divide. At last, I am complete.

“Look, Clive. I'm colourful all over to. Except it's bruises, not genetically engineered fire-proofing.”

Summer's voice is bright with sarcasm as I open my eyes. The sky above traps me in its translucent blue bowl. I stare at the clouds, the clouds that belong to us now.

“She's waking up.”

Smiling Clive's face blocks my view. He isn't smiling now. I move to cover my eyes. His frown casts a different light than his smile. He's got more colour on his skin. The reds, blues and oranges have been melded into his face. If I squint, I can see the colours moving, melting into one another. His colours move like multi-coloured flames – it's like he's still on fire.

“Oh, Clive,” I say. “I'm so sorry.”

He brushes me off, “It's fine.”

When he offers me a hand, I take it and pull myself up. Somebody had put a new dress on me. It's pink and soft. Summer must have a secret never-ending supply of pink dresses stashed into her trench coat and, for that, I am forever grateful. I press my hand against the stomach but there's no wound, not a single twinge of pain. Clive had been right. The explosion had healed me, but at what cost? Clive barely has a square of naturally-coloured skin left. He is dappled with the shock wave of my many explosions and I can't shake the feeling that Clive is the only person here who is getting exactly what he wants.

I turn to take in my surroundings. It's desolate – a desert populated with the skeletons of houses.

“How long was I out?” I ask.

Summer shrugs, “Only a couple of minutes.”

“So we didn't move? We're in the same place?”

Summer doesn't answer me because she never answers stupid questions. I remember the mansion, the holographic trees. I absorb the life I have taken – it flows through my blood as sour apple juice.

“I killed people,” I say slowly.

Summer laughs, slaps me on the shoulder and says, “Welcome to the club.”

“You've never killed anyone.”

The accusations throws her. She steps back.

“Of course I have. Didn't you see me gorge out that lady's eye?”

I shake my head, “You disfigured her, but you didn't kill her. Don't patronise me. I know how murder sits in the soul, believe me, and you don't have it.”

Summer lets go of some pent up anger in the form of a small, insidious laughter, “Well forgive me, then. I guess you're just the queen of your own burning landscape now, aren't you? Little miss murderess?”

I want to hit her but Smiling Clive, sensing something, grabs on to my arm. I can sense his brightened emotion through the contact.

“We need to figure out what we're going to do next,” he says.

“Well!” Summer says loudly, shaking her trench coat, “Unless someone else has some brilliant ideas, I know what to do.”

I look at her. “What?”

“I think it's time to pick baby bro up from school.”

Summer had never before mentioned a thing about her brother, but on the way there she just would not shut up about him.

“He's real smart. Like, genius smart, so they took him away to this school instead of making him work in Heavy Industry like me and well, we all know how that ended up,” she says as she adjusts her eye patch. “At least, that's what they told me but now, but with that woman's talk about Plan B, I'm starting to think something different.”

“She mentioned your brother,” I stated flatly.

“Yeah, and now... I just want to check if he's okay,” There's a touch of softness in my voice that I've heard from once to about never. “He's my baby brother. He'll be about fourteen now. I haven't seen him in five years. Who know what those chaos-junkies could have put in his head.”

We arrive in the slums, in front of a crooked building with its windows boarded up. In front there is a person standing with his or her legs apart, hands placed firmly on hips. The bend in the person's suit, the way the fabric catches the light, shows the gun inevitably tucked beneath the blazer.

Summer looked at the building. I can hear her knotting her teeth into fangs.

“It was a lot nicer the last time I was here,” she spits bitterly onto the pavement.

“Are you sure this is a school?” Smiling Clive asks. I shiver, because there's nothing worse that he could have said. Summer ignores him and marches up to the building, every footstep stamps out a stronger print of intent and purpose.

The guard at the door sees her coming and steps forward.

“I'm afraid this is a restricted ar–,”

Summer interrupts by picking up a metal bar from the floor, twirling it in her hands like a baton, and smacking the guard in the face.

He crumples, holds his battered cheek and broken nose. “You bitch!” he says, “You fucking bitch! You broke my nose!”

I expect Summer to turn to me and smile, just to taunt me about my words earlier when I said that she was not capable of murder, but she doesn't. Nothing can stop her. She kicks open the door and enters without a second glance. I look at the whimpering man with his nose smashed against the back of his skull. Summer can't kill, but she can deform.

When I follow Summer, as hesitantly as I always do, I am greeted by the scent of debauchery. The small room is dark. There are people there, beached on couches and armchairs like polluted whales. They are all in various stages of intoxication and undress. A lonely man dances in the middle of the room. His hips sway back and forth to a rhythm that only he can hear. Summer pushes him to the floor as she walks past, even though he wasn't really in her way.

“James!” she calls. “James! Where are you? It's me. It's Summer!”

She searches the room with frantic urgency. When she walks, she takes two steps in one. There's a sense of unstoppable momentum in her movements that make me feel nervous.

“Summer,” I try to get her attention. “He's probably not even here.”

She ignores him and shoulders open a back door. Its wood is tainted black around the edges, like something behind it had tried to smoke its way out. Summer bursts in to the room, freezes, and then crumples on to the floor with her head cradled in her hands. On a bed with no sheets, there's a boy of about fourteen years old. He's pale and so small. The stained mattress engulfs him like a giant boat floating on an even larger ocean.

“Is that –” I didn't finish because one look at Summer breathing into the floor made it clear who the boy was. Clive runs past me to the boy. I can't take my eyes off Summer. She's clinging to her hair, her fingers stained with red strands. When I drop down beside her she doesn't flinch and I can hear her muttering over and over again, “Please no. Please no.”

I gently reach out my hand to her shoulder. She jerks up before I can even touch her. It shocks me to see that she's crying. I stare at the teardrops that have matted her eyelashes. Her lip wobbles. I am suddenly blessed with a feast of terrible emotion. When I dine upon it, I am trapped in Summer's own Hell, but it was so tempting to watch her eye. It was such a beautiful emotion that it could have stained glass.

“Why couldn't I do it?” she says to me, and her lips quiver.

“Do what?”

“Why couldn't I connect? Like the rest of them? Like you? I just wanted to connect but I couldn't. I just... he's my brother. He's the only one I ever felt connected to.”

I don't answer her. I don't know how because it's there, hidden in her words, the reason why Summer was labelled a psychopath when she wasn't, why she labelled herself a murderer even though she couldn't. Summer has never been a part of the compound mind, like I was. She has never felt that innate feeling of connection and purpose shared by the burning hive of humanity. Born an outcast, doomed to loneliness. She is such a sad creature, and on the bed lies her brother, her only connection to the world, forged through blood.

“I think he's still breathing,” Clive says, like a wave of a white flag.

Summer crumples again, breathing her prayers in and out as quickly as she can. I jump up and run to James. There's the smallest motion of his chest, shifting up and down irregularly. I lean in to feel his pulse, just like Clive did for me when I was shot. There's still blood on my hands from earlier. A small, baby-bird pulse beats against my fingertips.

I look at Clive, “Help me get him up.”

He nods and picks up his arms as I carry his feet. Our movements are militarized. In sync, we find an old bathtub and drop James' dead weight inside. He fits easily into the tub, his legs curled with his arms around his chest. When I look at his hands, I see that his fingers are tinged with blue.

“Should we call someone?” Clive asks me, clearly confused about what to do next.

I roll my eyes, “Like who? Doctors became redundant centuries ago and anyone here is either on the same thing he was on or had their nose broken by Summer.” I point to a rusty faucet. “Just turn that on.”

It squeaks when he turns it. The sound echoes in the dingy room and dirty, brown water washes onto the boy’s face. He flinches, but makes no other movement. The water washes across his face, gets caught in his brown hair and weighs him down. He sinks further into the concave of the bathtub.

Without really thinking about it, I clamber into the bath with him. Flecks of water droplets land on my legs and face. I blink and the water clings to my eyelids. Gripping him tight by the arms, avoiding his sharp shoulder blades, I shake him roughly.

“HEY!” I scream into his face. “Wake up! WAKE UP!”

The boy opens his mouth. His chest heaves into his throat and he lets out a scratching gurgle. In the strangest of ways, it sounds like a twisted version of Summer's cocky laugh.

The water level rises, and settles around our hips. It's ice cold and causes goose pimples to ripple across my skin. Even Smiling Clive, who is only leaning against the rim of the bathtub and watching me closely, looks cold and freckled with jumping water. His teeth start to chatter, but he doesn't remove his vibrating gaze from the trembling boy.

I slap James across the face. Summer screams at me to stop but I ignore her. I push the boy beneath the water. It’s the last thing I think of before he springs up, disrupting the water and causing waves as he thrashes about and screams.

“STOP IT! STOP IT!”

Summer and her brother sound so alike that for a moment, I confuse his shouts with hers. One of his thrashing arms connects with the side of my face so hard that my forehead connects with the edge of the tub. I can already feel a bump swelling. Clive grabs me around the middle and pulls me out of the bath.

James is heaving over, throwing up black and red liquid that runs down his chin and dissolves into the cold water. He gasps for air like he can't quite catch any of it. His pupils are blown wide open. His demon eyes stare, pitiful and lost, amongst broken red veins. It looks like his irises are black, bleeding wounds.

Sprawled on the floor, I bark at Clive, “Push him under again!”

Clive doesn't question. He just obeys, gripping James by his small shoulders and pushing underneath again. It’s only a moment before Clive releases him again.

When the boy comes up again, he's breathing hard. His knuckles clench white against the edges of the bath. I'm not sure if he's shivering from the cold or if he's simply unable to control his own movement. His bones jump in his skin. The movements look unnatural and it's disturbing to watch as he twitches back and forth between himself and nothing.

“GET IT OUT!” he screams. “Monsters in my head. Monster's in my bed! GET OUT! GET OUT!”

Summer rushes past us. She's finally snapped out of her catatonia and she flings her arms around her brother. At first he struggles but then he seems to recognise his sister. If not by sight, then by smell and by touch. I watch the boy's eyes shrink back to normal. He ducks his face into his sister's neck and entwines his fingers in her coat.

“I've got you,” Summer says softly. “I've got you.”

His voice is muffled by the water, by Summer's tight embrace, “I don't know what they did. I don't know what they're doing to me.”

“I've got you. I've got you.”

The boy sniffs. As he moves his face, I catch a glimpse of his tear-sparkled eyes. It's like I've been punched in the stomach. He looks just like his sister in that moment but not in the way that everyone looks like one another, not in the way that makes him look like me. I can see Summer in him, in the way his tears cling to his eyelashes. It is so painfully obvious that they're related, but people don't cry. No matter how much blood they share. I look at Clive. People don't smile. People push buttons, people manage heavy machinery. They're not supposed to do anything else. They're not supposed to explode.

“Get me out,” James says. “They poured this blue light into me and made me dream of nothing but light. I thought of nothing but the spiralling tower of gilded excellence and my soul was made of diamond dust. Nothing but diamond dust. I swear, Summer, I swallowed all the sunlight when they put me in this room. It hurt my chest to hold it all in.”

“I've got you,” She repeats to him, like a promise that she'll never let him go again.

“They made this drug that makes you dream, Summer. I dreamt of monsters biting at my sides. I dreamt of torture chambers and clockwork creatures. They're not real. They can't be real.”

“They're not real, James.”

Summer's brother nods, “They're not real.” His voice cracks in the middle of the sentence and he struggles to get the rest of the words out.

“I can breathe in fire now,” he says after a while.

Summer laughs, “Then you're in good company, little brother. Clara breathes fire out.”

I smile a little. I force the sincerity, just like I know you're not supposed to.

“They told me about you,” he says and sways when he points at me. “You're Plan A. I'm Plan B.”

“And Plan B is –”

“The drug of discourse,” he says. “It gives you a turbulent soul and a tragic past. It makes you want things, like the things will fill this gap inside of you that keeps gnawing at the inside of your heart. They're going to put it in the water... poison everyone with feelings.”

The silence falls like sudden mist and I realise that chaos is inevitable. The Company has already flicked the switch, began its own revolution to get people to want things again and consume the dead corpse of the failed economy. There's nothing we can do to stop it, but if there's one thing I know about chaos, it's how to control it.

“Then we'll put it in the rain,” I say.

They look at me. They all know what I've meant. It's not something that anyone ever says outright but it's there, clinging to us like guilt. It's important to say it now, I think. We have to start saying the things that we hide from ourselves. I open my mouth and it feels so good to breathe it out.

“The clouds belong to us now.”

___—-===/\===—-___

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

Affair

Part 1

By Amanda Hillsberg

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The affair began on the last week of July, in the thick humidity of New York City summertime.

If you’ve never been to New York in July or August, you aren’t familiar with true humidity. It’s the kind of heat that weasels its way inside your joints and settles onto your bones, the kind that stays with you always, even if you manage to sneak away to an air-conditioned room. It’s so hot and wet and sticky all the time, you have half a mind to scratch your skin off. You feel like you’re constantly dripping sweat, wrapped in a wool blanket in a steam room.

New York is not made for the heat it omits; it is a packed city, with bodies and buildings and noise overcrowding the streets. The heat has no space to release itself; it simply gets absorbed and exponentially multiplied by the people charging down the streets. New Yorkers stop at nothing, even as the humidity gathers thickly, and they simply become cranky and rude as they scramble through their daily tasks.

It can make an abrupt stroll outside feel like a dunk in boiling water.

“I’ll have these sunflower seeds, 30 bucks of the Regular gas, and a large, black coffee.”

Julie was sitting at her desk at the gas station, reading an old copy of Time Out New York magazine, praying for the time to pass by quickly. It was the last week of July in New York City, and the air conditioning was broken. She was uncomfortably sweating through her bright orange polyester uniform, sitting on her plastic chair, miserable.

It was the summer job from hell, mundane and hot. The air –conditioner frequently broke down, and her perverted fifty-year old boss always pinched her ass when she passed him on her way to the bathroom.

Julie had always considered herself 'ok looking' - never exotic, or even beautiful. With freckles splashed all over her nose and cheeks, plain brown hair, and stretched pale skin prone to chapped lips and dryness, she was pleased to gently pass through life, minding her business as the girl whom everyone vaguely remembered from high school. She wasn’t even sure if Matt, her now ex-high school-boyfriend of one year, could describe her or remember her in any distinct way. Now that she thought of it, he never really had interest in her intellectually or emotionally; he never really looked at her in the eyes when they talked. They spent the majority of their time together watching movies, and the rest of their time talking about mundane school gossip. He made a lot of goofy “Family Guy” imitations that she fake-laughed at.

She was underwhelmed by their physical connection; it was always abrupt and impersonal. He seemed anxious about sex in general, and managed to generally grope her in the dark just enough to start the act, fuck her like he was competing in a race, and get it over with to say he’d done it. They never talked about it afterwards, and just seemed relieved that it was over, like it was another thing they could check off on their 'relationship to-do list'. This was what couples did. They were a couple.

He had broken up with her just at the end of school, because they were going away to different colleges. Not that Julie minded much; she was just thankful that she’d had a senior prom date, and that she at least knew what sex was, even if it was less exciting than she imagined it would be. Her life was generally the same with or without Matt - she had the same group of friends, and actually enjoyed not having to listen to him explain a play by play of the “funniest” Youtube videos of the week.

“Excuse me, Miss? I’ll have these sunflower seeds, 30 bucks of the Regular gas, and a large, black coffee.”

Julie looked up from her magazine, and locked eyes with the voice asking for sunflower seeds.

The thing about love that nobody tells you, is that it doesn’t feel like a million fireworks. It feels like sweat behind the knees, thick saliva coating the tongue, and muscle relaxers being shot into the jaw. It feels like knots in the gut, cramps in the buttocks, and shallow breath.

“What?” Julie croaked.

The man smiled. “And how has your day been, honey?”

Julie gulped. “Hot.”

___—-===/\===—-___

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

World War Me

Part III

By Kylin Lötter

___---===\/===---___

Just before I finish my four story fall, it suddenly occurs to me that this going to hurt. A lot. I was so focused on the energy running through my bone marrow that I forgot that I wasn't just in danger of exploding but shattering as well. Instinctively, I snap my eyes shut, as though that will break my fall.

I hit the ground and the only thought in my head is that it barely hurts at all. Did I even explode? My eyes are still closed I don't want to see the damage or lack thereof around me. Once again, Summer reminds me that it's just not that simple, that I can't just lay down with my eyes closed at the epicentre of an explosion without someone noticing.

“MY HOUSE!” she screams, “LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO MY HOUSE!”

I open one eye and through it I see, squinting, the burning house crumbling to the left and Summer, relatively unharmed, while she holds Smiling Clive up. She kicks me softly in the ribs.

“I know you're awake,” she snaps. “Stand up so I can properly congratulate you for burning down my goddamn house!”

I pull myself up to my feet and look around. The radius of my explosion is much further than it was last time. I took out a whole block, not just a building. Before I can wonder about that, Summer continues to lament about her crumbling home.

“All my stuff! I should have known! Don't invite someone who spontaneously explodes home for dinner. My mother should have taught me that, instead of telling me to be polite and silent.”

I look at her and Smiling Clive, “How... are you okay?”

“Okay?!” Summer shrieks, “My house!”

Smiling Clive is the one who answers. It's the first time, in the four years that I've known him, that I hear him speak, “I covered her with my body, so she wouldn't get burnt.”

I'm even less certain now, “And how –”

Smiling Clive interrupts me by unravelling his bandages. I expect open sores, burns that have scorched his flesh, but all I see is colour. There are colours I can't even name, wrapped around his face where he should be disfigured. Colours I have never seen before this day have been embedded into his face.

“You tell me,” Smiling Clive says.

“He appears to be fire resistant,” Summer smirks. “Instead of erupting into flames, he erupts into colours. It's pretty and useful! Just like me.”

I walk up to Clive, right up to his face. Standing there, completely still, I wait for something. I wait for him to smile.

Just as it seems like he's about to, just as the corners of his lips begin to tweak, Summer pushes him away. He falls to the floor and the almost smile vanishes.

“Are you two insane?” Summer yells at us both.

I look at her, confused. She sighs dramatically.

“What have I gotten myself into?” She says, apparently to herself.

Swinging around in a tight circle twice before settling on us again she says, loudly, “Haven't you figured it out yet? You two are connected. Dearest Clara, you are a bomb and Sweetest Clive, your smile is her trigger.”

I laugh out loud. I've been practising but it comes out hoarse and strange so I stop as soon as I start.

“That's ridiculous,” I say after a cough. “Why would someone do that? How could someone do that?”

“Yeah, and I mean, it's not like she's exploded every time she's seen me smile,” Clive says.

I look at him. He knew I was looking, in an interval of two minutes, at his smile every single day for the past four years. Of course, I had known that he knew, but now it's different. Now, he's said it. It's not some intangible secret between us. I know. He knows. Summer knows.

She grins and bares all her teeth at me.

“Someone did this on purpose,” she says. “They've got a big plan for you two. If people exploded every time someone they like –”

“What?” I snap, “I don't like Clive! Not like, ‘like’ like. I mean, I've hardly spoken to him. I'm sure he's a lovely individual...”

Summer just looks at me with a dead expression and says, “Really? Because exploding every time he smiles at you is a pretty big give-away.”

Smiling Clive just stands there awkwardly and I can see the smile he's hiding beneath his face.

“If someone planned this,” I continue before any ideas can settle. “Then why don't we just find out who and make them, I don't know, unplan it.”

Summer strolls towards me and throws her arm around me. She grins into my ear then looks at Smiling Clive.

“See?” she says to Smiling Clive, “Told you I'd rub off on her.”

When Smiling Clive speaks, the colours on his skin ripple. “We wouldn't even know where to start. Who would we even speak to?”

Summer pushes me away and spreads her arms wide and says, proudly, magnificently, “I know.”

“You do?” I ask her, sceptical.

Her arms drop in disappointment, “Is no one going to ask?”

When no one speaks she continues to ramble on, “Is no one going to ask?!” she screams. “‘How did Summer lose her fucking eye!’ Did you think that I just dropped it behind the sofa? Didn't it even cross your stupid, assimilated minds to think about it?”

She steps back, “Or did you not even see it? Is difference such a foreign concept to you Drones that your brains couldn't even comprehend it?”

Summer is angry. I've never seen anger before. Her face is taking on shapes that I don't recognise. For a moment, I wonder if she's going to cry and I'm curious, because I've never seen anyone cry before.

She turns around, stays still with her back towards us for a moment and then swirls suddenly before us again.

“Okay, kids,” she says. “Want to see something cool?”

With a quick movement, she pulls the eye patch off her head and flings it to the side. It nearly hits me in the face. I catch it and hold it in my hands, safe, before I dare look at Summer's dreadful eye.

The hole in her head is deep enough for me to be concerned for her brain. It looks like it still hurts. Scar tissue can only cover so much. I keep expecting it to blink. Summer's demon eye looks at me with its blisters and flesh bubbles. It oozes from the inside of her skull, like whatever is inside there is trying to claw its ways out.

Summer is breathing heavily. She covers her broken eyes with her hand and visibly winces.

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

She laughs sadly, “More than even I know.”

I hear a retching sound and turn to Smiling Clive, who has doubled over while holding his chest. After a few more scratching noises come from his throat, he manages to throw up some translucent, white liquid.

“Oh thanks,” Summer snaps sarcastically. “That's a real boost to my ego.”

I hand Summer her eye patch, “Here.” I say, “I still think you're beautiful.”

She smiles at me then. It's the first genuine smile I've ever seen. At last, I see what I was missing when I tried to teach myself how to smile. Summer had been missing the same thing I had been missing: sincerity.

I smile back at her, for the first time, just before Summer can hide behind her eye patch again.

“I know what we need to do now,” Summer says. “Is Clive still throwing up.”

I look at him, “Yes.”

“Well, tell him to stop insulting me and hold it together for one minute. We're going to break into the Company.”

I don't know much about the Company, except for their function in the Continent. It's better not to ask questions, they say. Since the great failing of democracy they've kept everything very quiet. Honestly, if the economy was failing, if I was about to suffer starvation, I'd rather not know. I don't even know who the CEO is, but Summer knows. Summers says she knows everything about the Company.

“Where do you think I've been going for the past two weeks? Vacation? I was finding out all I could about the Company,” she tells me when I ask.

“Where did you get your information?”

“When you first met me, what did they call me?”

“... Fugitive Six,” I say after a moment.

“Exactly, which means there must be at least five other fugitives. There's only five criminals in the entire continent, you know,” Summer says and then looks at me and Smiling Clive, “Well, eight now I guess. I hunted them down and found out what they knew. They told me what I had already guessed- the accident that took out my eye was planned. I used to work in heavy industry, and there was a malfunction with the machine. A single piece of metal flew up into my eye. They wanted to disfigure me. They wanted me to be different. ”

“Why?” I asked.

Summer shrugged, “Maybe they wanted to exile me. I don't know. I mean, I'm so loveable. The whole world would be a poorer place if I was not in it... right?”

I agreed because Summer needed me to.

“That's why we're going to the Company,” Summer said with her ego intact. “To find out who tried to kill me.”

I didn't ask why she was bringing me and Smiling Clive. I didn't have to.

We reached a part of the city, the city that sprawls over the entire continent, that looked different from anything else I had ever seen. The first thing I noticed that was different was the trees. I walked to one, dreamily, and put my hand on its trunk. My hand slipped right through it and my heart slipped out of my chest in disappointment. For a single golden moment, I believed in trees.

Smiling Clive takes my hand and makes me look at him. I wait for him to smile but he doesn't. He has learnt his lesson. He might never smile at me again.

We reach a large house. It looks like Summer's, except that it's intact... and much larger. The walls are bright pink, like my dress, and there are these large windows that let in light from all sides. We stop and look up at this gigantic house. I half expected it to get up and slowly walk away like the architecture was part of an enormous tortoise shell.

Smiling Clive lets out a low whistle, “Is this a palace?”

“I don't know,” I say. “What do palaces look like?”

“Like this,” Summer says curtly.

“How do we get in?” I ask her.

“We live in a Capitalist paradise,” she answers. “We'll open the front door.”

She starts walking and, after a moment of silently conversing with each other, Clive and I follow. Summer walks straight to the front door. When she tries the knob, the door swings open magically.

“That's as much of an invitation as any,” she says before entering with a skip.

It leads to a big kitchen – which is bigger than my entire apartment was. Smiling Clive whistles again.

Summer ignores him and walks to a drawer to pull out a silver spoon.

She looks at us and grins, “This is the only thing that I'm going to steal.”

It's as though she knew I was thinking about all the pretty dresses that had to be in a place like this.

Summer disappears into the bowels of the house. There are statues and pieces of art everywhere. I get distracted by a painting of a woman smiling softly. Wherever I move, her eyes follow me. Summer grabs my hand and pulls at it.

“That painting isn't going to make you explode, is it?” Summer whispers at me.

I shake my head, “It's only Clive's smile that does that.”

I look around but I can't find him, “Where's Clive?”

“Forget about him,” Summer says harshly and drags me away. She ignores me when I stumble.

The next time we walk through a door, we finally see someone. She's a female-assigned person wearing a black dress with a white ribbon. This must be the owner of the house, I assume.

Before I can move to stop anything, including my own palpitating heartbeat, Summer tackles the woman to the floor in a flurry of red hair and screaming. Summer pins her down, straddling her with one hand on her throat and another holding down the woman's flailing arms.

“Shut up!” Summer screams in the woman's face as she begins to cry. “Shut the fuck up!”

The woman is still struggling beneath Summer. She's fighting for her life but Summer isn't letting her. Summer lifts her up and bangs her head against the floor. The woman lays back. Her eyes swim in disorientation. This is the moment that I begin to feel an awful emotion. It sets solidly in my throat. I think it’s fear.

“Summer!” I scream. “Stop it!”

I don't think she can hear me anymore.

Stumbling back, I hit a wall and sink down. I entangle myself in my own limbs and try to block out the woman's screams.

“What's your name!?” Summer yells. Her voice is hoarse. Her voice is torn.

The woman croaks out, “Astrid.”

“I don't want the financial year that you were born in. I want to know your name.”

“I don't know! I don't know!” Astrid sobs out.

“SHUT UP!”

I watch Summer hold the spoon, twirling it between fingers that are just a little bit too long.

“NO!”

I scream out but it’s too late. I watch as Summer gouges Astrid's eye out with a spoon. There's this awful squelching sound as Summer stirs an eyeball soup in a bowl of skull. A shiver runs down my spine, sticks in my gut and makes me gag.

“Clive!” I scream out. “Clive!”

He doesn't appear, but I didn't really expect him to. I climb to my feet and half-run, half-stumble towards Summer. I knock her sideways by falling.

I hold her tight, “Stop it. Please, just stop it.”

Summer pushes me off. I watch as she stands over poor Astrid, who is holding her broken eye in both hands while desperately trying to scramble away. There's so much blood. Summer's spoon is red with it. Summer's hands are black with it. There is blood sinking into the carpet. There is blood sinking into our skins.

I look at the woman and notice that Summer took out the same eye that she is missing. The remains of the woman's left eye are in Summer's hands now. I gag roughly, and throw up on the carpet.

“How incredibly rude of you,” says a stranger's voice.

I look up and see a woman towering over me and Summer. The woman is tall, with thick black thighs that could crush dynamite. Her dress is made of a fabric that I could not even dream of. I bit my vomit-coated lips... I want it. I want that dress.

“Who the hell are you?” Summer shouts. Astrid begins to pulsate in shock.

“Me?” says the woman. “I think the question here is, ‘who the hell do you think you are!’ Coming into my house, injuring my staff –”

“Staff?” Summer interrupts. “You mean this isn't the owner of the house?”

The woman glowers at Summer, “That would be me. You ignorant twig.”

Summer stands up in a solid, fluid motion and points the spoon at the woman like it’s a knife. The woman raises an eyebrow, clearly unimpressed.

“It's you,” she says. “I know you.”

Summer's one eye glares at her. “I'm Summer. You're the one who took out my eye.”

“Yes. Sorry,” the woman's eyes widens. “I must have missed.”

“Missed?”

“Missed your brain, yes. That accident was supposed to kill you, not make you into some crazed girl with no sense of depth perception.”

“Why?” Summer asks. She's afraid of the answer. I can tell.

The Woman smirks at Summer in the same way that Summer smirks at me. It's unnerving to see the same smile on a different face.

“Because you're a psychopath, that's why. We've been watching you ever since you were born. Never played well with others. Never quite fit in at the workplace. Never quite stamped out the feeling of that silly little void in the pit of your stomach.”

Summer puts one hand against her belly and raises another towards the woman, raising the spoon... hiding behind it.

“We call it failing to assimilate,” The Woman continues. “The Company, that's me and a few others that will be shortly dealt with, organise little accidents for those unwilling to blend in with the compound mind. We scar you. Make you different... so we have an excuse to execute you. But Summer, little baby psycho, you never could quite meld with the compound mind, could you? Never felt like you belonged. Never truly felt connected to anybody... Not since we took your baby brother away.”

“SHUT UP!” Summer roars like a fire. “I'll slit your throat. I swear I will.”

The Woman nods, smiling patronizingly, “And I believe you. You're a psychopath.”

“I'm not a psychopath!”

“Then, by all means, put back poor Astrid's eye.”

Summer drops the spoon.

I run towards her, grab her sleeve and try desperately to pull her away. Summer is rooted to the ground, staring at the Woman Medusa.

“You made me like this,” Summer mutters mutely.

The Woman tilts her head to one side, “Did I?” She finally sets her eyes on me and I realise why Summer can't move. The Woman possesses a strange sincerity that makes me want to hear what she has to say. She is the lump in my throat, the stone in my chest, but when she looks at you it's like she's forgiving you for being different... for being a Freak.

“I made you,” she says to me and I think, Of course, of course you did.

The Woman crosses her legs and they ripple in the movement, “What year was it again... Claire?”

“Clara.” I answer.

She smiles, “And Clive. Where is Clive but, more importantly, how colourful is Clive?”

I stare at her blankly, unwilling and unable to put my thoughts together.

“You know what's a really good marketing scheme? A war. It's absolutely brilliant. In war, people want stuff. People need stuff. They buy things like guns and ammunition and pretty little bombs. Expensive bombs. People need chaos to build something new, to want to something new, to... anything new.”

She stands up and, holding her hands out towards me, she says, “That's what you are, Clara.... Chaos.”

“Chaos is a bad word,” I say softly, trying to avoid her sinkhole eyes. “If I'm chaos, then I'm unwanted. Unloved.”

She gasps and, for a moment, I confuse it with real feeling.

“No, no, no. You're a gift, Clara... Clara the Concept. Do you know what's wrong with the world?”

“There is nothing wrong with world. It's perfect.”

“Exactly,” the Woman steps back, “Except no one wants to buy anything anymore. Our economy is failing... has failed. We need you, Clara, we need chaos for people to confuse want and need again.”

I look at her. “I'm a bomb.”

“You're more than just a bomb.” She grins. “You're at least four bombs.”

“And Clive –”

“His smile. Yes. It's what triggers you... what makes you who you truly are.”

She snaps herself away from me and starts to pace. Summer is shifting nervously behind me. I can see her swaying in the corner of my eye but mostly I look right at the woman, bottling up the fear that she so easily inspires. Somewhere, alone in the corner, I think Astrid has passed out from the pain.

“You were born with blonde hair. So was Clive. When you were just babies in the Eugenics Department, we genetically engineered you and Clive to be trigger and bomb. Didn't you ever think it was strange? That we reserved such mercy for a Freak like you?”

“I'm not a Freak!”

“Perhaps not, but you are unique.”

She sits down again, “Every time you explode you get a little stronger, the blast goes a little wider. The last time you explode, you'll be an atomic bomb. Clive is resistant to your fire, but only up to a point. The Company wanted to create a temporary weapon for temporary chaos. The last time you explode, the last time your atoms divide, you'll destroy Clive and you'll never, ever explode again.”

My heart tremors like a frightened cat, “That won't happen. I won't kill Clive.”

“Oh, don't worry. At the centre of blast, he'll probably be vaporised instantly, which is more merciful than what you'll do to the rest of whichever city you happen to be in at the time.”

I recognise the emotion that I'm feeling. It's anger. I taste it. Devour it. I look at the Woman and realise how pathetic she is. She's pudgy and soft. There are sun spots on her arms and I can see her gray roots poking out under her synthetic hair. I soften my laughter but that only makes it more malicious.

“How many people were in that station?” I ask through a gritted smile. “The first time I exploded. How many people did I vaporise instantly?”

The Woman shrugs, “How the hell should I know?”

I walk right up to her. She shivers, clearly not used to people being close enough to touch her, and I laugh- right in her face. I laugh and I laugh until I push her and she falls down like a badly-made cake.

“Don't you think you should know?” I ask.

She looks up at me. She's afraid. “Know what?”

“What I'm capable of.”

“CLARA!”

It's Clive. He's screaming from the window, screaming through the glass so it shatters.

Wait.

That's not right.

He didn't break the glass.

The bullet that just went straight through me broke the glass.

___—-===/\===—-___

0 notes

renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

X. Historia de Filia et Machinis

Part IV - The Analytical Engine

By Tom Ravid

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Roslyn could barely contain herself. She placed her palm against the towering glass wall, behind which the turmoil of torrid steam swiftly rose upwards and upwards into the glistening blurred blades of the turbines – the sheer size of the mechanism made her feel like she and Felix were mere homunculi. She could barely tell the difference between the shivers of excitement that reverberated up her arm – that travelled through her very bones like the thump of a million-boot army marching with purpose – and the fierce vibrations that radiated through the glass from the tempest of rising hot air beyond. Turbines!

Her head swooned at the sheer amount of power they must output. She literally felt faint when she considered the implications of this unimaginably large mechanism – her mind started to feel very light, like it was filling up with steam, as it buzzed with endless possibilities that filled her to the brim with mechanical marvel. What was it used for? What could possibly need that amount of power? And why was the mechanism kept so secret, shrouded so sinisterly within an enigmatic bunker that was buried deep beneath Steam City itself?

“Rosie!” The yelp cut her emphatic engineering euphoria short – the desperate tone, like the distress signal of a bloated zeppelin falling out the sky, was what caught Rosie’s attention through the racket.

She turned to see Felix moving his mouth as if he were shouting, but the dense din of the turbines just consumed any possibility of sound as soon as they left his lips. At her questioning look, Felix began pointing insistently behind them, back towards the direction of the last archway. Rosie followed his finger with her eyes, and saw in the distance three figures rapidly approaching, swiftly moving down the mossy path between the neat rows golden corn.

Their movements had a definite military air to them – of trained precision and ruthlessness – though their chrome helmets, gleaming mirrored visors, and pitch-black uniforms lined with silver-thread were far from military issue. Strapped to their backs, Rosie could see impossibly heavy-looking chrome-plated pressure-tanks, the occasional puff of steam escaping their valves. Intermittently, the soft orange light would glint off the shiny silver barrels of pneumatic nail-guns, like Morse code signalling some kind of garbled message. As the mirror-faced men breached the clearing, without any kind of warning and in seamless unison, the soldiers stopped stiffly and precisely, almost mechanically, in a V-formation.

Apart from the cacophony of sound and vibration of the air, everything was still: there was no breeze for the maize to eddy to; the silver-helmeted soldiers just stood there like a vanguard of stone sentries, as if waiting for orders. They just stood there unmoving and perfectly at attention, their pneumatic guns held tightly against their chests. Rosie and Felix were absolutely motionless too – standing there side-by-side in front of the humungous metal housing, their feet were rooted to the floor like stalagmites. Now that the soldiers had come to a standstill, Rosie could see thin copper-coloured cables extending from their helmets and up to the ceiling. She peered up and could just make out a network of tracks in the ceiling, made distinct by the faint illumination of the orange glow.

As she looked at the three tiny images of Felix and herself reflected in the soldiers’ visors, a feeling, like when something just doesn’t feel right, slowly gripped her body like a vice. She recalled that their wanderings weren’t part of a sanctioned tour of the facility – that Felix and she were intruders, mere unwanted rodents. And Rosie knew what happened to rodents in Steam City…

Rosie closed her eyes – just like he had taught her – but this deep below the city, there were no ancient extra-terrestrial energies to absorb at all.

Deliberately and cautiously, Rosie felt at her waist for the grooves of her screwdriver grip.

The pneumatic guns moved away and outwards from the soldiers’ chests so quickly, that Rosie only noticed when she felt the searing pain of a nail graze her arm. She could feel others ricocheting all around her, shredding through her clothes like moths on a feeding frenzy, but she couldn’t see them coming – all she could see were the puffs of compressed air escaping from the barrels of the guns. Through the corner of her eye she could see Felix cowering, his discoloured arms over his head, protecting it from the sharp shrapnel.

While the front soldier sprayed cover-fire, the back two soldiers dashed towards Rosie and Felix’s position.

Instinctively, she grabbed Felix’s arm and pulled him with her to the right as her legs propelled her away – Rosie felt like they had taken control completely, and all she could do was hang on for the ride. She took control of her autonomous limbs, guiding her and Felix – who was clutching at his pendant desperately – into the cornfield.

They zigzagged in between the rows, leaves whipping against their faces – all the while ears of maize were exploding around them like fireworks as the metallic arrows continued to fly past. They kept going.

In their desperate dash for escape, Rosie had become hopelessly disorientated; no matter which way she turned, the orange-tinged corn occupied the entire scope of her vision. She could no longer tell which direction the nails were coming from, nor in which direction they themselves had come from. She had lost all hope for escape when the ground suddenly disappeared completely from below her feet. She couldn’t tell if she was falling or rising with her eyes closed so tight, but suddenly the acceleration stopped. She looked down to see Felix: he had lifted her unto his shoulders.

Acutely aware that she was completely visible, sticking out above the crop like a bearded-man in a nunnery, she cast her gaze around. She looked to her right and saw the orange flashes of the wires descending from the ceiling, and followed them down. The three soldiers were fanned-out and closing in on them – much closer than Rosie had thought. One was coming straight towards them, while the other two were approaching diagonally on either side. Rosie’s eye caught something to the left – she squinted through the veiling darkness: she could just barely see a slightly darker patch in the gloom ahead – maybe they had finally reached the seemingly endless layer.

It seemed as though the soldiers planned to pin them against the wall, with the one on the left’s intention seeming to be to cut-off any chance of escape by the opening. Rosie quickly did a mental calculation: they were a little bit ahead of the soldiers and closer to the wall. Judging by the direction the left soldier was heading, if they were to head straight to the wall and follow it up so they wouldn’t miss the opening, the soldier would reach it first. If she could get the angle just right though, they would able to get there before the soldier. She could do it. They could make it. They had to make it.

In the throbbing air from the turbine enclosure, communication was impossible; nor was there time. Rosie jumped down off Felix’s shoulders – feeling the nail whizz passed in the air exactly where her head had been only moments before – and immediately started moving at a diagonal, Felix close behind. Ahead of her, all she could see was corn. She increased speed, the rows becoming a blur as she focused all her attention on running. After what seemed like ages of frantic flight, the two burst out at the end of the cornfield and almost collided with the wall.

Damn! She had miscalculated the angle. They couldn’t give up just yet though, so they carried on going, following the wall for a short distance and made it the opening, but the soldier was already standing there waiting – the way was blocked. The others were surely closing in on them from behind.

The soldier trained his gun in their direction.

In a final effort, the only thing Rosie could do was throw her screwdriver at the soldier. It sailed through the air, rising so much Rosie was sure it would go right over the soldier’s helmet. Instead, it connected with the wire in a shower of white-hot sparks.

Rosie held her breathe as she waited for the flash of piercing pain, but it never came. The soldier stood motionless, frozen with its gun pointed right at them. She couldn’t understand what had happened to him. With a tug, Felix dragged her toward the opening, while giving the soldier a wide berth – there was no time to figure out the reason for the soldier’s sudden paralysis, when there were still two more closing in.

The soldier didn’t even look at them as they passed, he just stared ahead blankly, as far as Rosie could tell through his opaque visor; wisps of steam still escaped from his pressure-tank every now and then. They hurried through the dark opening and heaved open a heavy door, crashing it closed behind them, and locking the mechanism hard and fast.

“And that was my favourite screwdriver too,” Roslyn complained as she and Felix moved down a pipe-filled maintenance corridor. They had been following the cramped corridor and its sharp ninety-degree turns for quite some time now, only the endless pipes of varying diameters and themselves for company. At least it was quiet.

“Stop complaining, Rosie. I saved us, and now we’re alive. You should start figuring out how you’re going to thank me.” Felix grinned at her through his uneven teeth, his chest thrust-out with pride.

“Shutup!” Rosie bristled, “Saved us? If it wasn’t for me and my brilliant aim, we would be human porcupines!”

“Meh. Let’s agree to disagree.”

“What the hell are you saying?! First-off—” Her seething tirade was clipped short before it could even begin when the corridor abruptly ended in another steel door.

“You open it,” Felix said in a small voice.

Rosie grinned spitefully, “What, is our saviour too scared to open the door?”

“Just do it. Do you want to be stuck down here until we starve to death?”

In reply, Rosie only gave a brooding huff and stalked forward, swinging the door open carefully. She started to say something back to him, but it died immediately in her throat. What she saw sent shivers, like countless tiny spiders, scuttling up her spine.

The room was huge – and it was completely filled up with an intricate scaffolding system that kept upright a series of large brass gears that were at least as wide as someone holding out his arms sideways. The gears were stacked on top of each other at least three stories high, and were linked with those of the column next to it in a way that would cause the next gear to rotate slightly when the one before moved a tiny fraction. Each gear seemed free to move on its own, separate from the one above or below it. Every second column seemed to have engravings spanning the whole way up – on closer inspection Rosie could make out that they were symbols of some kind, meaning that every slight rotation of a gear corresponded to a particular symbol. At the bottom of the apparatus was a set of pistons and more gears that connected to a huge clockwork-like mechanism on their end, and continued down the length of the machine. Constantly feeding into the clockwork mechanism seemed to be a ribbon of paper that emerged out of the floor, the long sheet appeared to have holes punched in a constantly changing pattern. Rosie had no idea what the contraption did, or how it worked – but she really wanted to know.

The two started moving down the length of the mechanism, their entrance halted when they spotted more helmeted-men that were connected to the ceiling by wire-coils – but they looked different: their helmets were not shiny and they were dressed in overalls; these weren’t the impeccable uniforms of the soldiers. They weren’t carrying pneumatic guns either, only tools. They paid no attention at all to Rosie and Felix as the two crept past, instead solely concerning themselves with the task of maintaining the enormous device. Much to Felix’s objection, Rosie went up to one and waved a hand in his face, garnering absolutely no response – the worker just carried on with his job, Rosie and Felix, deciding that there was no danger of the workers, carried on deeper into the room.

“Woooooow, this must be what all that power from the turbines is being used for…”

With every metre, Rosie swooned – her eyes widened until they were the size of saucers and her excitement only grew, even making the downy hair on her arms stand up to the point that they were likely to rip right off her. She gave up on counting the columns somewhere around a hundred and twelve and from there went on in complete awe-struck silence – a merciful development that Felix found incredibly pleasing.

They soon came to the end of the immense machine, where they found another endless sheet of pockmarked paper being cranked centimetre by centimetre from the machine, and disappearing through a slit in the wall ahead. Nestled in the wall was another doorway.

Rosie marched towards the door without hesitation, and tried the handle, eager to see where the paper went. To her surprise, the door was locked; she almost cried out with exasperation. Falling to her knees in utter disconsolation, Felix saw tears welling up in her eyes. Felix stepped forward, pulling a lock-picking kit from his pack and with a wink started on the door’s lock. Rosie’s cry of joy, made him smile – her hurried attempts to cover it up only working to make his smile grow.

“Jeez. Six tumblers. Tricky.”

It took Felix a solid ten-minutes to work the lock, with a good deal of swearing in the process, but eventually it clicked open. Felix stood up with a flourish, and twisted the handle. He gave a short bow, “Milady, after you. I believe that’s something else you’ll need to reward me for later…”

“Shutup,” mumbled Rosie and she stalked passed, pushing him out the way in the process.

“Hey!” Felix exclaimed as he followed her in, almost crashing into to her as she stood in place in the doorway, frozen.

The door opened into a cramped and gloomy room with nothing in it but a desk and chair, the rest of the walls covered in filing cabinets. The stream of paper passed in front of the desk, slowly inching passed on its relentless crawl and disappearing again into the other wall.

At the desk sat an incredibly dishevelled-looking man, his clothes tatters and with a long hoary beard that seemed about ready to be classified as a new life form. Currently, he seemed completely engaged with the task of staring at his two guests over his half-moon glasses with a look of sheer incredulity plastered on his face.

“Children? Poor old Babbage has been locked in here for aeons with nothing to do but analyse stupid holes in paper, and Bruno sends children to rescue me?!”

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0 notes

renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

X. Historia de Filia et Machinis

Part 3

By Richard Brown

___—-===\/===—-___

The rope sped through Felix’s fingers in a rush. As he felt the burn coming he let go, one hand completely, the other just holding the rope loosely in free-fall. His free hand snapped the belt catch over the rope, squeezing hard to slow his descent. His other hand held him upright as his fall slowed.

Roslyn pushed aside a large flat metal something; despite its size it was relatively light-weight. She had no idea what it was, perhaps a panel of some kind. Darkness had obliterated her primary sense. She gingerly poked her head out from under the tiny area of cover her arm had provided during the tumble. It was still utterly dark. She performed a quick mental check of her vitals. Stiff ankle and a few bruises. She guessed she must have been lucky, but she had no idea how lucky, as she still had no idea what she had landed on. Getting to her knees, a sense of dread began to settle on her like a fine dust. This was different, very, very different. Down here the thrumming was loud, and thicker, it was a grinding, churning sound with a rhythmic pulse. This was definitely beyond a simple manufacturer stealing some steam after cool-down for some additional product output. With a crash something burst from the metal near her – with a squeak, Roslyn jump-tumbled head-over-heels down a tangle of metal, until she hit the ground with a soft slap. She turned as the thing writhed down the slope after her. There was a dim orange glow behind her, but in the direction of the approaching sound, darkness hid her nightmare. She assessed her options. She didn’t have many. She pulled free her screw driver, and pointed it to the source of the sound. A shuffling-shape was beginning to resolve itself in the dim light. A waist high creature with an awkward-looking face. Suddenly she burst out laughing. Felix pushed himself to his feet, with both hands, and was clearly favouring one leg as he stood. He had a wounded look on his face. Roslyn cut off her laughter, both hands cupping her mouth. God, this place had her completely spooked!

“I’m okay, don’t worry,” he said, snatching the words from right behind her cupped hands like the last cookie at a party. “Thanks for asking, it’s just a dead leg and some bruises.”

That was hardly fair, as she had been about to ask. She started to tell him so much, when he cut her off again.

“So what the hell is this place Rosie? And are you okay? I heard you scream and nearly killed myself jumping in after you.”

He paused and then in the totally random way Felix had, he continued, “Have you seen what we are standing on? Also you have some of it on your face.”

Roslyn automatically wiped her face and then looked down. The ground was soft, spongy in fact. It was some kind of plant. A moss, perhaps. It was quite bouncy and pleasant to stand on, in fact. Maybe that’s why it was there.

“Felix what is this place?”

He shrugged, “I have no idea, but I’ve not seen anything like this, also, I don’t know how we are getting out ’cause I actually ran out of rope right at the end. I fell the last few metres I think.”

As he spoke Roslyn motioned for him to speak more softly, it was settling on her just how large this place must be. Hell, that rope was longer than the structure was tall, that meant they were underground now. They really knew nothing of how dangerous a place like this could be. She whispered back to him, moving a bit closer in the gloom.

“Well, we have to at least look around, so that we can make a report. If we can’t find a way out, I am sure we can stack up a few of those big metal plate things to try reach the rope. But this place! I mean wow, what are they using the steam for? Are they even drawing steam? It doesn’t sound like a regular re-pressurising system.”

The reasons for stealing steam after cool-down were many, and there were many methods, and most were pretty noisy. The system had a critical flaw. People who could afford to run factories at night could manufacture more, and thus could operate at a better profit margin. However the only way to legally do that was to store steam throughout the day in massive pressure chambers. The catch was the cost of the chambers. And several were usually needed. It was beyond a small or medium business to afford such. And so the rich factories got richer and larger, while hundreds of start-ups producing many of the trinkets used throughout the city had to compete with each other. That’s when the stealing began. When steam is profit, some merchants would stop at nothing to get a few free hours of extra production into a day. But stealing steam wasn’t easy; the city relied on conserving heat at night to survive. And the authorities regulated this rule religiously. At every intersection in the major pipes there were pressure sensors. When those dropped, or when a facility returned much less water or steam than its agreed targets; it was never long until the authorities came knocking. Well, generally you hoped they knocked.

Felix looked at her.

“Okay, well let’s look around a bit then, but keep quiet and keep to the shadows, we don’t know what we are dealing with here, and if we are spotted, then I think our best bet is to run back here and to retry getting to that rope. We can hide in these shadows at least.”

Roslyn nodded, and together they turned and walking on the bouncy ground headed towards the orange glow.

Before long they found something of a path, distant pillars rose to a ceiling that felt very low. It wasn’t actually low, probably a storey and a half high. But nowhere in that gloom was there a wall to be seen. After a short walk they found what seemed to be a path on a gloomy, loamy rise. Dark pillars rose on either side, holding up the unending ceiling. It was hard to believe they were still inside, something about this place felt distinctly outside. Roslyn wondered if it was carved into the living rock itself. The slowly brightening glow became a dome surrounded by a dark edge. They met each other’s eyes. Felix shrugged. And they continued. After a few more steps they could suddenly make out that the darkness was in fact a large arch way, it stretched away on either side, possibly a wall, but it was hard to say. They kept going. As they passed through the arch Roslyn was hit by a distinctly earthy smell. A woody smell, like….

She bumped into Felix. He stood unmoving at the exit of the short tunnel that had been the arch; she rounded on him, then took in his awestruck expression, mouth agape. They stood on the edge of a wood. A pine forest. Roslyn heard the grinding throb once more. Well it was everywhere, but on this side of the tunnel it was distinctly louder. And still that orange glow persisted. By the light of it, Roslyn could make out a path. She tugged Felix out of his stupor and dragged him along. It seemed to be heading in the general direction of the distant noise.

A short while later the path turned, tall pine trees grew nearly to the ceiling on the left, but eerily on the right there were low stumps stretching into the darkness. Up ahead the glow spilled out of what looked like another archway. Again she had to tug Felix to keep him close behind her. She started to increase the pace. They were getting closer, she could feel it – but closer to what? When they passed under the other arch it was her turn to be awestruck. And almost comically, Felix bumped into her from behind. She didn’t spare him a glance. To the left and right as far as she could see there stretched… corn. Ripe and full ears of golden maize glowed under a warm orange lighting. A pang of hunger struck her. It just smelled, so, so wholesome. The path continued from under their feet, straight between the fields on either side, a dark dividing line. Its uniformity drew her eyes along its length; when suddenly, they fell upon the source of the sound. She had not heard it become louder yet again as they stepped through the arch. But now it thrummed through their bodies, a deep powerful vibration. A massive pumping station beyond anything she had seen lay in the distance. And alongside it was a wide steel housing. Anything made of that much steel must have cost a fortune. But then again, she could scarcely believe the rest of this place even as it spread out before her eyes.

Losing what little restraint was left to her, she took off at a run down that path. The golden corn became a burning blur as she picked up speed, running as quickly as her bruised hip would allow. A few moments later she burst into a clearing. What she saw nearly made her pass out, and it wasn’t for lack of air. The steel structure – it totally dwarfed anything she could have expected. It stretched all the way up to what looked like the top of the building, or a top. Illuminated by the orange glow behind her all the way up. Wait. Behind her? She turned, just as Felix caught up with her. She caught sight of his expression as he saw the sheer awesomeness of that steel housing. But her quip died on her lips as she saw what was behind him. The ceiling that had been above the corn was not a ceiling. Rather it was a layer. That same glow spilled over an identical layer which sat atop their ceiling, and another layer above it, and all the way to the top. What the hell was this place?

Felix tugged her sleeve. And she looked at him. He pointed to the steel housing, to the far edge, furthest from the massive pumping contraption. He cupped a hand to her ear and said.

“I want to go look over there.”

As she followed behind Felix she wondered for a moment why he had done that. But of course it was that god-awful noise. It resonated through her being to the point where it felt like a part of her body, an extension of her limb. What would it sound like to not hear that sound? It was difficult to imagine. Her musings were cut short as they rounded the edge Felix had pointed out. They had found the steam. A foot-thick glass wall separated them from a torrent of steam that blew upwards the entire length of the structure. But it was what was behind that which truly sent a shiver down her spine. They were using the steam for something different indeed. Something very different. They were using it to turn turbines!

___—-===/\===—-___

0 notes

renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

Mike

Part 4

By Amanda Hillsberg

___—-===\/===—-___

Cassandra squeezed her eyes shut so tightly that she began to feel dizzy.

I first met Mike at the library. I was sitting next to him, studying hard, but distracted and procrastinating online.

It hurt to remember.

It was 4 AM, the week of finals. I had given up on sleep, but wanted to at least feel productive. Mike was next to me. He smelled amazing, a mix of Old Spice and mint gum. He stuffed a headphone into my ear before I had a chance to realize what was happening.

Cassandra held onto John’s sheets so tightly, her knuckles turned white.

It hurt a little. I didn’t mind, I was impressed with his blatant confidence.

“You’re gorgeous. Hi. You seem like you need a pick-me-up.”

He blasted Jimi Hendrix on his IPhone and just held my hand. He had chapped lips. It was fucking weird. I liked it.

John studied Cassandra’s face, tears rushing down, jaw clenched. He held her shoulders still as best he could as she hyperventilated. He didn’t know what else to do.

We stayed up all night talking about race relations in America, poverty, Starbucks, Britney Spears, and Liberals. I blew him in the park. I didn’t expect to see him again, and I just added the evening to the list of bizarre things I’d done in University to get through Final Exams.

As Cassandra remembered Mike through dry heaves, she curled up into a small ball. She allowed her body to roll into John’s, until his curved over her, protecting her from monsters he couldn’t have known he would unleash.

He found my history class. I guess we had some mutual friends of friends. I don’t know how he did it. But we cut class every two weeks on Thursday morning at 8 AM, and made out. I would sit on his lap in the stairway, and we would kiss. It was wild, and so high school forbidden, but it opened up every valve inside me. I felt awakened, and bad, and free. I felt silly, and let-go.

He called the shots for those first few months. He would just show up places he knew I would be – at parties, at certain classes. We would sneak off together, and laugh at everyone around us. Soon, we were spending every night together, laughing and eating together. It felt easy and it made sense. It felt right ever since he stuck that earphone in my ear. It was as if we’d known each other for years already.

One Saturday, we woke up and climbed the rocks in Riverside Park. I used to do that with my dad when I was a little girl, and Mike knew about all the times I had scraped my knees on those rocks, trying to prove to my dad that I was tough. Of course it started raining as we climbed, and we kept slipping off the rocks and falling into the mud below. We had a mud fight, and walked back to my place, all the way in Brooklyn. We listened to music the whole way home, mostly James Blake and Jimi Hendrix, holding hands.

Before she could stop her brain, it was looping to that time she was in the shower with Mike, in the dead of February. The water was too hot but they liked it to burn a little on their shoulder blades, because it felt SO good after being in the frozen New York City tundra. Cassandra let her hair drop over her face like the girl from “The Ring”, and Mike pulled it back. He held her face with his hands.

They went to bed and he lit a cigarette. “This is the best”, he said. “Thanks for being with me.”

They held each other and went to bed.

Remember that time in the shower, in February? The water was too hot, but we liked it to burn on our shoulder blades. It was so fucking cold outside. It was the first time we acknowledged that we loved each other. We didn’t have to say it. We didn’t have to say it because it was there, between us. You rubbed my temples, and I held onto your hands. We knew that this was the best it was ever gonna get with another person. That’s love.

Cassandra opened her eyes.

John lay on top of her, looking pale.

“I just don’t want you to hurt yourself, crying like this. I’m sorry if I hurt you. I’m so sorry.”

“No, no,” Cassandra tried. “I just understand now that he’s dead. I get it.”

“Ok…?”

Cassandra slowly finished pulling her skirt off.

“I’m gonna need a T-Shirt.”

“Uh… ok. You still wanna stay? You need help?”

“Nope. Just a T-shirt.”

Cassandra took off her bra and slipped on one of John’s worn soccer jerseys.

They stayed awake in silence for an hour, just listening to the outside city noise. Fire trucks, homeless drunks, babies crying, kids partying.

I guess this is the price you pay for living in a city that never sleeps.

“This is my last night in NY. Sorry about all this.”

“Hey, it’s cool. You want me to give you money for a cab or something?”

“Nah, I think I’ll walk.”

Cassandra slowly pulled her skirt back on, and zipped her boots. She kept on the jersey.

“Hey John. Thanks.”

“Cassandra. I… I mean. You’re welcome. Good luck and stuff.”

“Sure.”

She grabbed her purse and ran out the door, slamming it behind her. She shoved her headphones in, and blasted Jimi Hendrix.

It was in that moment that she realized NY owed her nothing. It owed Mike nothing. But it gave them both an un-self-conscious moment in their lives, where they were able to find presence, and true fulfilment. They were able to listen to Jimi Hendrix in the library, together.

And for that, Cassandra smiled and silently thanked the city on the long walk home. Tomorrow she would be back in Philadelphia, but for now, she would enjoy her bloody, Mike-filled streets one last time.

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0 notes

renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

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Die, Leviathan

By Gerard Mullan

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Dear Sir,

I beg you forgive the forthright address of this letter. I know you are a busy man, and that trade waits for no-one. I find myself in the unfortunate position of having nowhere else to turn, no other eye to peruse these brief notes that may have more effect than in your own hands. I trust that you will read them in your time, when you have the available moment.

I have had the fortune of being in your employ for some eight revolutions now, holding various positions in your armada. It is true that when I began I had not much skill nor any knowledge of the leviathans which we hunt, being little more than a lad of middling class with a heart set to the tempo of adventure and a compass firmly fixed to sea. I entered my contract with a willingness to learn, which has since brought me far. I understand that you yourself were once a harpooner, so I am certain we will share many old senses at this recollection.

It is difficult to forget the first time seeing a leviathan. A trip to sea is something of a beast to strip bare itself, what with a hundred knots and names to commit to the brain so as to meld into the being of the vessel, never mind accustoming oneself to the old salts and exotic spices flavouring the crew. All together I ran back and forth prow to stern a thousand times, convinced I was riding the largest and most complicated beast in the world, never fathoming the leviathan, never heeding the saw-toothed nightmares bleated by woken sailors who had known them and had their expressive bulk visit in their dreams. It is considered the worst luck to talk of the hunted during the hunt, and sailors take their luck seriously. So it was that I had only terror-instilled notions of their capabilities – how they would drag ships wholly under with their lithe tail-fingers, how the rotten breathe from their blowholes shrieked at a pitch that would deafen an unstoppered ear. Their size, of course, was the interminable feature of reflection. No-one had ever taken a leviathan without a minimum of three crewed ships to drive against them. The ocean was said to sigh whenever a leviathan was taken from it, so much occupancy did they displace within.

It was our second season at sea before we sighted the beast, who at once scabbed off any notion from the wound of fear I had salved by calling them ‘prey’. Prey! We were insects to it. Its tail-fingers undulated through the waves like serpents tasting the air, betraying the beast below. I saw its jellied flesh twisting through the waters, the ruffled edge of its parasol mantle combing the surf. The chaos of bubbles trailing from its lung-pipettes made the ocean seem to boil. The call went up to don our masks and fish-leathers, so that the poison gas emitted by way of its blowholes would not seep into any exposed flesh, glue our eyelids shut or splice our limbs – scars I was sickly aware of on the salts I had served with. Scaled thusly, I set to wheeling out the ballistae as others boys and girls I knew lowered into rowboats and cast off with hooks and ropes to slow the creature – I have heard some battles with them have taken weeks to resolve, them towing their hunters along, unaware as the fishermen cut chunks of blubber and meat from their living bodies. I have never had a voyage such as that; as you know the hunt has changed since those early years, before our butchery was refined. We wheeled our fleet around it, searching out for spots to puncture, firing harpoons with gunpowder explosions that sent the lines ripping through it, tearing at its vestigial jelly to the rubbery skin beneath. There it caught and pulled, and drove the leviathan into a frenzy. The whole thing spun over in a single instant, capsizing five rowboats and tearing loose the ropes securing our harpoons. I myself was flung from the deck and went splashing down into the water head first.

Beneath me, I saw the great and terrible blink of a magnificent eye. It was easily twenty times my size, larger than the suns and the moons and all the comets combined in the sky. So large when I wake sweating in the night it fills the whole ceiling of my dreams, pale green and luminous, its dual pupil alien and unknowable. I swam away and breached, watching on as its tail-fingers opened their blowholes wide and emitted a tremulous screech, a sound so horrible I sobbed freely and my tears clouded up my mask.

Then I felt it tugging from below: one of those thin, tapering feelers from the ruff of its mantle had twisted round my leg and was pulling me under. I took a sharp breath and then jerked it desperately to free my boot, succeeding at last when I remembered I had my fish knife sleeved on my other leg. I stabbed the creature, felt my boot come off in its grasp, and shuddered as its jelly-flesh tickled against my exposed skin. That was all it took – that short sliver of accidental touch – for the neurotoxin to take hold.

I made it back to my ship, mostly alive. One of the rowboats fished me out of the water when the hunt was over, the leviathan harpooned three ways on the bladed hulls of the fleet. I helped cut it to pieces, salvaging the innumerable parts to be shipped off and taken to shore. Blubber to be mashed and made oil, to light the lamps. Translucent skins to be woven into the airy dresses of noblewomen and their dandies. Elastic guts for rope and musical instrumentation. Poison scooped from the blowholes for the concoctions of chancy assassins. No part of them goes unused or unwanted, does it? Nature never made a thing more useful dead than alive, unless it be the leviathan. We worked it three days straight, and nights too, by the glittering luminescence of its trailing limbs, glowing like magick in the darkling sea.

The dreams were not long waiting. Sailing back to port on fair winds, I inexplicably found myself struck by waking nightmares. Ropes I was pulling would turn to flesh in my hands, and I’d drop them in horror as though they were slippery guts. Eyes loomed from reflective glass, portholes blinking devilishly as I passed, lanterns watching me go by. The whole underdeck heaved and ground about like a phenomenal stomach, expanding and contracting, chewing at me. I shall not speak of the things I saw when I slept – they were infinitely more chilling than the chaos of day.

They said the dreams stop after awhile – the older salts did, with no real conviction. I saw the way they looked at the world then, truly, as though it were crawling with disgusting, living pieces. Or maybe they had their own private illusions. I cannot say. During the hunt, we do not talk of the hunted.

I went back. Seven times I went back to kill leviathans, telling myself I was imagining the terrors in my head, pretending the poison was out of my system. Each time I was a tad more bitter. In the beginning they were just profit – a useful animal. But by the end I had convinced myself they were ‘theenemy’; the wraiths and night-terrors lurking in the shadows, the eyes bubbling to the surface of every mug of ale I ever drank. I wanted to be the one to kill them. I wanted to shut those gleaming eyes.

It was on my fourth voyage we switched to the new technique. Any salt will tell you about the apprehension we felt at having the western spices come aboard – the grim, bone-faced kheshmali ‘experts’ the company hired to do the procedure. They were short-tempered and nasty, and lazy too, most of them. Wouldn’t lift a single bone-tipped finger to move the boat. They’d been hired as divers, so they’d dive. But the rest of the time they ate their meat and fought one another for sport, played games with scrimshaw dice and kept to their solitary nests up in the rigging, where they’d gut a man if he dared come close. Used to be, the sight of a wight-hawk at sea was good luck. But the kheshmali, they just leapt into the air and caught them by the claws, pulled them down and grappled them, then took those huge beating white wings and nailed them to the mast. Every morning we’d wake to the tired calls of those crucified angels. We were incapable of looking each other in the eyes. That’s what the kheshmali call ‘good luck’.

The new method was cleaner, truth. No cannon fire or grappling hooks, no suicidal ventures out in the boats. Just the kheshmali, and their long, needle-like harpoons. They’d all gather out on deck and sit dead quietly, taking in deep breaths of air, the exposed muscle of their chests expanding and then compressing flat. They say a kheshmal can stay underwater a full ten minutes without breathing.

Then they dove, down deep into the blue amid the leviathan’s ribbons of flesh and trawling tail-fingers, disappearing almost at once. They never explained the new method to us, but we knew what they did later when we saw the beasts taken out of the water. Those needle harpoons were tapped into the corners of the leviathan’s pale green eyes, deep past their skulls and into the soft brain tissue beneath. ‘Lobotomy’, the doshes at the harbour call it. Takes the fight right out of them, as though it knocks the soul loose somehow. Then the kheshmali would fit the harness to the leviathan’s brow, and the fleet would steer it back home. That first voyage was edgy, and I’d stare down at it all the time, watching its mantle expand and contract, its tail-fingers milling the water. I was just waiting for it to turn. Waiting in vain. Gentle as a baby, guided through the seas by the rotting wight-hawk up above.

You know the rest. You can see it happen from the window of the company warehouse. The leviathan gets beached on a dry dock, and lifted out of the ocean. It hangs in a skeletal frame for a few days, blinking mindlessly as the city workers chop it to pieces, taking its meat and muck fresh to the workhouses. In the beginning it was one at a time, but now that the money is flowing five or six are lined up in the harbour at once, tentacles trailing all over the place, sweet yellow bile pouring through the gutters like spoilt wine. Some don’t like it – I heard about that incident with the necromancer, last year. Brought one of the things back to life, left it killing people right and centre before it broke loose and swam to sea, a handful of victims trailing behind it, fleshy ribbons tapered around their throats. That was the final knock for me. I didn’t want to sail anymore – I wanted to kill them. And the killing wasn’t happening at sea.

I took a job working the docks, putting my old fish knife to good use carving the beasts up. It’s a bit like exploring a new world, really. You can pry open their mouths and walk all the way into their bellies if you like, without killing them. Sure, it’s leery, but I didn’t mind, my head being as full of visions as it was. A bit of a relief, really, to know the room really was breathing. There are some parts of a leviathan you have to take while it’s alive or it isn’t any good. The pancreas tastes delicious, but if you don’t cook it before removing it it’ll break apart in your hands. There have to be adventurous types among the workers to try these things out, or the company misses opportunities.

That’s what I did. I climbed right inside the enemy, looking for ways to exploit it as it blinked and moaned and lay dying in the harbour. I did it for almost a year.

Then one day I pushed up into the thing further than anyone else had dared to, right up through its fused scrimshaw and into the brain, nostrils plugged with rags, a hexed tablet under my tongue to keep me breathing. Gloved and masked, it isn’t as bad as it sounds. Just like being surrounded by warm, humming jelly. I reached out a hand through the pink flesh, feeling for a part the dockers call the starmus which always comes out rotten, and my glove hooked on something – I figure on the harpoon jammed into the leviathan’s eye. I pulled my hand back through the creamy wet brains, and that must be when I touched it. Maybe the starmus, maybe something else. As it happened, there was this electric tingle that passed through me, filling me with light. I swear to you sir, at that moment I felt the leviathan deeper than any sailor could by swimming through its meat. I touched its mind.

Maybe it’ll make a difference to you, to know that they’re in agony. That the lobotomy shuts them off into a private space where they are incapable of action, and move only by instinct, feeling everything. That being ripped from the ocean drives them mad, sends them into a chaotic scream of thought that makes the prospect of being gutted on a harpoon sound like ecstasy. I doubt it though – we all knew they were in pain. For some of us that was a perk of the job.

Maybe it’ll make a difference to know they’re intelligent. Not intelligent like you or me but clever in a slow, careful way that may be even better. They are wise and ancient, living thousands of years in quiet, percussive thought. They call to one another across the oceans, and when they open their blowholes for us they are not shrieking but singing, offering up their most beautiful memories in exchange for our mercy. But then again, when have we really cared about the intelligence of beasts?

Maybe it will make a difference to know that they are kind. When I joined with it, it felt all the pain and horror I had experienced through the neurotoxin and recoiled. It told me exactly what I needed to do to cure the nightmares; I should take a symbiotic worm from the secretions of its eye, and implant it still living into my own. When I emerged I shared the leviathan’s tears, and at once the throbbing, crawling world I had surrendered to retreated and I saw clearly for the first time in years. I wept, for these leviathans would forgive us, even though the darkness and nightmares left to me exist solely in the torn and scattered flesh spreading across the wharf. I wept, for I shall never be able to forgive myself for what I have done to them. Does that make a difference? Will you stop murdering them now?

Probably not.

Just in case, I saturated this letter in leviathan neurotoxin. Snuck some into your bloodwine, too, just to be safe. I’m sure you understand. The only way you’ll know how to properly imbibe the parasite is to get down into a leviathan’s brain and feel what I felt. I promise the nightmares will stop, as soon as the nightmares stop. Just my way of nailing a wight-hawk to the mast.

My condolences,

A Sailor

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0 notes

renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

But For a Dream

By JL

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You're in a room. It reminds you of a dream you want to forget. The walls are white, but the light makes them seem a little blue. You're looking at yourself in the mirror that's mounted on the wall.

People say you're beautiful and it flatters you. You're not vain, but you like your looks. Tonight your hair is blonde and wavy, cascading gently down your shoulders. Thank God. In the dream it was brown, wasn't it? You look into your own eyes. Why are you so sad? Tonight is a night for celebration; your dress is gorgeous and the atmosphere outside is perfect for a good time. You feel sick. You glance behind you at the toilet for a moment, contemplating actually throwing up.

Breathe, you say, everything's fine. It is fine, right? What could possibly be the matter? The dream?

No, it can't be the dream. In the dream, you were getting ready at home for one of those gala evenings that you always have to go to. You were excited in the dream, not nauseous. But why? It was just another obligation. You suddenly remember. It was him. You were excited because you were going with him. What did he look like? All you really remember are his green eyes and his smile. When you opened your door in the dream, all that you cared about were those eyes, that looked at you as if they had always known you and yet were still trying to figure you out. You look at yourself again in the bathroom mirror and try compose yourself. It was just a dream, you keep telling yourself. Your boyfriend's out there waiting on you and here you are, freaking out over some man that you've never met. You go over to the designer basin and splash some water in your face.

It's a good thing you don't wear makeup to these kinds of parties, you don't need to. You dry your face, smooth your dress and walk out.

You're walking down the street with your hand in your boyfriend's. His is big and warm, enveloping your dainty fingers with a warm, yet firm, grip. There are people bustling by, a few of them with cameras, but you don't mind. You're looking around from behind dark glasses, wondering what many of them are thinking. They all have their own lives, completely removed from your own.

They're on their path and you're on yours, but somehow, you have always felt a connection between all the infinite random events of each individual's journey and yours. Your boyfriend asks what's wrong and you explain but he doesn't quite get it. He isn't the type. He prefers to think about where he's going to eat next, or where to find another crazy thrill. But that's okay, you think; everyone has a different way of looking at the world. You pass a book store on your left. It's one of those second-hand ones where people trade books more than they buy them. You can see thousands of books, stacked on their sides to save space, all of them looking just a little bit worn. You can imagine the smell of that store and the thrill of what hidden literary gems you might find if given a few hours inside. But you don't go in. Your boyfriend wouldn't really enjoy it. He'd stand at the door, waiting for you to buy something and be done. So you walk past. Suddenly, you stop. Your hand breaks away from your boyfriend's and he turns. What's wrong babe? You rush back to the bookstore's window, just to be sure. Your eyes dart around the store, searching every little niche they can find.

You could have sworn you'd just seen him again. In the store. The man with those green eyes. He was reading a book, and looked up as you walked past. He seemed to recognise you. It happened in an instant, but you're sure that his eyes met yours with that same knowing look. But he isn't there.

You feel a hand grasp yours but it's only your boyfriend. You're being silly, you think as you explain to your boyfriend that you thought you saw someone you know. As you depart, you get the same sad, nauseous feeling in your stomach that you had a month ago at the party. Are you going mad?

You wake up. It's three in the morning and you're sweating. You had one of those dreams, and it freaked you out because you don't really get those dreams. You get up and go to the kitchen. Your first thought is a glass of water, but you open the refrigerator and grab a bottle of chocolate milk instead. You also decide that it's the perfect time for some Nutella, so you grab a jar out of the cupboard and a teaspoon. It's been six months since that day at the bookstore and three months since the break-up. You did the dumping and you hated it, but you're rather enjoying the single life at the moment. You start thinking about the dream. The end was mind-blowing, but how did it start?

You were in a room full of people you didn't know; all of them, and yourself, dolled up to the nines. People were talking to each other, and every now and then, someone would say hello in passing, stopping only to tell you good job, or beautiful dress. You remember giving your usual gracious responses, wishing for a familiar, friendly face to come up to you and keep you company. For ages you stood rooted to the spot, terrified and lonely, waiting for someone to rescue you, and just when you thought that the nightmare would remain he offered you his arm. You remember this time that he hadn't shaved and his stubble made him seem older and wilder, but his eyes remained gentle and his smile was still full of the life it always has in your dreams. You remember his foolishness on the dance floor, which he did to make you laugh. You remember doing the rumba, and the foxtrot, even though he's a terrible dancer, and you remember slowly swaying as everyone around you dissolved into nothing. He kissed you on the dance floor and then suggested that you both get out of there. You spent the rest of the dream roaming the streets of some city before ending up in that situation as the sun rose through the window of his apartment. Why are these dreams so vivid? You can never remember your dreams quite like you recall these, except perhaps for the ones with clowns in them. You hate clowns. You try shake of the wave of sadness and nausea as you go back to bed. It seems like everytime you wake up from one of these dreams, you've just broken up with him. But you don't know him, you've never met him and, very possibly, he doesn't even exist. But what about the book store? Perhaps you should see a shrink or something.

You're staring out the window of a car. The sun is shining and the endless blue of the sky makes you feel insignificant, but understood. The trees are flashing past as the countryside gets wilder and wilder. Your new boyfriend is driving. You've been with him for three months and he makes you happy. He turns up the volume of a song that's playing on the radio and you both start belting out the words, singing and laughing all the way. He's off key half the time, but you don't really care; it's fun to sing. As the song finishes, you put your hand on his knee and smile. He's taking you up to a secret place of his for a picnic. It's a Sunday afternoon and it all seems perfect. Almost. As he pulls up to the site of your picnic, you take your hand back and try calm yourself. You've been here before. In a dream. It's all there; the fast flowing river with reeds and bullrushes on the other side, the weeping willow with one bough so low it only comes up to your waist and the large rock, just to the left of the willow plastered with graffiti from other couples who have also escaped to this romantic rendezvous. You cautiously walk up to the rock, just to make sure it isn't there. In a dream, you wrote on that rock, and so did he. You look for the exact place and sigh, relieved, when there is nothing there. Your boyfriend lays out the picnic and it's perfectly splendid; he's a good listener and knows exactly what you like. He opens a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and pours you each a glass. As you chat and eat, your boyfriend seems to be picking up that something is amiss. He keeps asking what's wrong and you keep reassuring him that it's nothing, although you're less convincing each time. What are you supposed to tell him? That everytime you look up you're hoping to see green eyes instead of blue? No. Truth is, this date is almost perfect. It's wonderful and you would be swooning if it were anywhere but here. It's the dreams. You have at least one a month and each of them is magical. When you're in them you don't want to wake, and when you're awake you wish you'd never dreamed anything at all. It's like this green-eyed man is ruining all of your romantic endeavours without even existing. Maybe it's you. Maybe you're afraid to commit to anyone.

Maybe you're terrified you will never find 'the one' so your subconscious has invented one just to give you some hope. Maybe God's playing a trick. Maybe you feel alienated from any man you get close to and so you're wishing for someone who gets you, who fits you like a glove. Maybe –

Maybe, he's out there, just waiting to meet you, having the same dreams, and the same issues with lovers.

You're at a coffee shop with your closest friend. You've spent the past forty five minutes relating every detail of the dreams that you can remember and all the problems that they're causing. At first, she laughs, especially when you say that you've had a sex dream about a man you've never met or heard of. When you tell her about the book store, she asks if you were on acid at the time, before realising that you're actually serious. In the end, she has no answers for you and her questions get ridiculous. She says that it's stress, that you're working too hard. That is, of course, impossible, because you've had far greater workloads in the past, before these dreams started. Eventually, she gets bored of talking about the dreams and starts asking about your boyfriend. You've been together for almost a year now and it's beginning to get serious. He asked you to move in with him last week, and you still haven't decided. Probably because you don't want to see his face when you tell him that you don't want to. It hurts to hurt people, and you avoid it at all costs. Your friend asks if you think he's marriage material. You say you don't know. Quite frankly, you prefer not to think about that these days. You're not sure what to do. Your boyfriend really does make you happy, and he treats you right and the two of you have had only one major fight which he managed to resolve beautifully. You have no idea what you'd do if he actually proposed.

You've just arrived at a restaurant. It's a Michelin star, upper-crust sort of place and it sparkles as you hurry up the steps. You're late because you fell asleep reading a book and had another dream. In the dream, you were on a cliff, overlooking the sea, dressed in a gorgeous blue dress that was all the more alluring in the light of the setting sun. There was a bench a little way in from the edge and you decided to take a seat and wait. After what seemed like ages, he called to you. As you turned, you saw him, dressed in a tuxedo beside a beautiful chestnut coloured stallion, smiling and beckoning for you to join him. He took you on a ride along the cliffs, until turning and making for the beach below. When you arrived at the beach, he helped you down and took you to a collection of rocks on the shore. As you stood on the largest of these and looked out to the horizon, you remember feeling as though you had been set free. You turned and found him on bended knee offering you a simple platinum band with a blue diamond, cut square and set neatly and simply upon it. When he proposed, you looked into his green eyes and knew for a fact that he would not try to cage you. In the dream, you accepted, and when you woke, the wave of sudden, cold reality washed over you and shook you so much that you considered cancelling your date with your boyfriend whom you've been with for almost two years now. The restaurant is as opulent and marvellous as its French name and fine location suggest. The light is a romantic yellow, very slightly approaching the orange of candlelight – bright enough to entertain friends and colleagues, but dim enough to create the intimacy needed for a perfectly splendid first date. You remember now that this is the place that your boyfriend took you on your first date. As you approach him he smiles and gets your chair for you. He asks after the days that you've been away from him and notes that you seem distracted. You say it's nothing and the conversation continues through starters. It's pleasant enough, and your boyfriend has the charm to keep you engaged, but you find your mind drifting to the dream at every pause or mouthful from his side. You excuse yourself once you've had your first course and stare at yourself in the bathroom mirror. Get a grip, you tell yourself, it was just a dream. But as the memory of it splashes again into your mind, you think of the feeling of freedom that you felt. You look at the door and think of your boyfriend. You're happy with him, aren't you. It's not cheating, you're sure of that, but still you can't tell him of these dreams that plague you. He said on the phone this afternoon that he has something to ask you. You wash your hand, wondering what it could be. As you take a seat he smiles and picks up the conversation where he left off. After dinner, he pauses for what feels like a minute and gives you a very intense, yet tender look. You've seen it once before, on the night he said “I love you” for the first time. You hesitated before saying it back, because at that moment, his blue eyes seemed to flash green.

He starts to tell you about how he feels about you, and the relationship that you and he have had for the past two years. You smile and laugh as he reminisces of your adventures together and he gets up after telling you that you are the girl of his dreams. He gets down on one knee before you and pulls a small black box out of his jacket pocket. The ring is a beauty, with an elaborate gold band, encrusted with about thirty tiny diamonds that surround an enormous square-cut one. You gasp for a moment, and begin to weep. The entire is restaurant is watching, as they do whenever something like this happens. All their romantic desires want to see you accept and all their scandalous sensibilities are begging for a rejection. You look at him, hoping against hope to find green eyes instead of blue, stubble instead of a fresh face, but at each blink, your boyfriend is still there, his face growing more nervous with each passing millisecond. You want desperately to say yes, just to please your boyfriend and the restaurant. You don't want to hurt him, but you will do much worse later if you agree now. You simply say you can't and flee, leaving your boyfriend, shattered, on the floor of a posh restaurant.

As the months pass, you begin to love and hate the dreams even more. They come and go as they have always done, with no more than one each month. Each dream brings a new adventure that you dwell on till the next. You're also trying to get used to the single life again, since your boyfriend rightly assumed that your relationship with him ended when you exited the restaurant. You have tried to apologise and he has tried to forgive you, but you still cannot offer a reason that satisfies his perfectly justified question of why. You can't tell him that you left him for a dream, it seems absurd even to you, but despite your fiercest reasonings and blatant denials, you know that it's the truth.

You start seeing a therapist, trying to understand what these dreams mean. It doesn't help. Soon the dreams become more frequent and more intense until, for a week, you dream a dream every night.

You're walking along a crowded street. You're thinking of the past week. It's been both wonderful and terrible, with a dream every night. You've been taken around the world, spent days in bed, taken walks everywhere and nowhere, all in your sleep, all with him. You haven't been able to focus on anything and the dreams lavish you when you're asleep and torment you when you're awake. You wish you could understand what they all meant, what they alluded to. Therapy hasn't helped at all.

You're no closer to answers with a constantly growing list of questions. You're again reminded of how little you know of this man while he knows you intimately. It's ridiculous to say the least, especially since a part of you seems to be in love with him. That part has been growing, against your wishes, ever since the break-up eight months ago. You look up and see a piece of folded paper, falling from an apartment window above, being buffeted along by the wind. As it falls it catches fire and as it burns into oblivion you feel a tremendous weight being lifted from inside you. It feels as if you're at an airport, saying goodbye to someone you deeply care for. You're the one being left behind.

Three years pass without a single dream of him.

You're at one of those after-parties that you're obliged to attend. It's pleasant enough, but your date has disappeared to go flirt with a girl who's been making eyes at him all night. You're glad that he's gone off though; you've just come out of yet another break-up, this time after only three weeks, and your date agreed to accompany you more out of courtesy and pity than anything else. Not that he's a grouch about it, you're sure he would be perfectly happy at your side for the entire evening but this place and these people are not his kind. The music is blaring and there are people gyrating and cosying up on the dance floor. You love to dance, but not tonight. You're in a sombre mood and the din prompts you to retreat to the quieter parts of this establishment, where people are gathered around tables talking about everything and nothing. You start thinking of your life as it is now. You can't complain much. You're successful and wealthy now, well read and well-travelled – happy, but for the fact that you haven't been able to keep a man in your life for longer than three months, not since you left an almost forgotten suitor on one knee in a restaurant. Did you make a terrible mistake that night? You've asked that question often, and it remains unanswerable. You're struck from your thoughts when a good friend of yours rushes up and greets you. She says, after grabbing your arm and dragging you behind her, that there is someone she would like you to meet at her table. You recognise his name but barely pay attention as your friend lists his merits. Eventually you reach the table, where at least fifteen people are seated. You recognize most of them. A few of them are friends and many of them you have worked with or wish to work with in the future. Two old men in particular, seated across from where you stand and in heated conversation with each other, are legends in their own right. Seated a little to your right is a man whose face you have not yet seen because, he too, is discussing something with a curly-haired man who has rather broad shoulders and large biceps. Two seats away from them is a blue-eyed toy-boy whom you recognize from a show you saw on the West End. As you approach, he notices you and interrupts the curly-haired man and his friend, gesturing in your direction. The curly-haired man gets up from his seat and charmingly introduces himself, kissing your hand like they used to do in bygone days.

Flattered, you respond with a curtsey and notice the other man who has just got up from his seat behind the curly-haired man. You recognise his face vaguely, and you're sure you've seen him somewhere. He performs a mock-bow as he approaches you, the curly-haired man returning to his seat. As he comes up from his bow, his eyes meet yours with an intrigued, yet knowing look. His eyes are green and as he smiles through his stubble the rest of the world vanishes for a moment. For three years, you haven't had a single dream about him, haven't seen his face in your mind's eye and now he stands before you as nonchalant as ever. The difference is that this time he's real, tangible, flesh and blood. All the dreams rush into your head and vanish in an instant, making you feel giddy.

He offers his hand and regards you tenderly.

“Hi,” he says, “Have we met before?”

___—-===/\===—-___

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

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The Adventure Logs ~ Traveller's Departures

By Katya Smith

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“We are going to be late – a little urgency please.”

He didn’t know what ‘urgency’ meant. He would have to ask later. So many of these words still to learn. But right now he was a traveller, in an unknown land. The words would have to wait until the mission was over. And it was all so different, this planet, this time. It was like he had never even seen the floor before.

White smooth tracks sweeping, leading out onto unspeakable plains… marble. And soaring edifices of sheer, see-through matter craning up to the stars. Light of some other kind, not torches nor candles. Throngs and throngs of peoples from all different lands and types. And every now and then the sound in the shadowy night of fellow travellers landing their giant, strange sleepy creatures here. So much to explain, to understand. The sheer edifices moving alongside him were cold to the touch, looked like glass, but they couldn’t be. What could they be? Perhaps something he had never seen before. Yes, that would make sense.

Nothing made sense in this place. The traveller wrapped his garment around him, a token of his otherness, a flag of where he had come from. Where he unhelpably still was, in a way. In another roll of the dice he may have been a knight, a criminal, a king, a sloe-eyed Enuuk looking up at the same stars. But he was who he was and he was where he was and he was when he was – regardless of the missing ‘why’; there was nothing he could do about it. His clothing outed him, even to his own reflection, as ‘Other’. Wool, buttons… they had no such stuff here.

“Come on – this is kind of life or death here.”

That was good. Life or death. This was a mission of life or death. The woman kept moving. He struggled to pull the pieces of his brain back into working order. Who was going to die? He had to get there in time. He knew it was important. That only he could help. The burden of greatness drifted down gracefully to roost on his shoulders, surely as a knight’s cloak of royal blue.

He tried to gather his wits about him. Some days were better than others. There had been a supper – no, a feast, supper. What for? The King had been departing to another faraway land. Yes, that was it. He had supped and drank to the good king’s health – he, in the middle of all these worlds, all these stories. He had lived a thousand lives already even though he was young. No wonder he had trouble remembering what planet, what king, what quest, he was tethered to at times.

“Hurry…”

He shut off the sound. The woman talking was a fish hook in his mind, clawing awake an awareness he didn’t want. He must move faster, he must follow her but he must also get there – wherever there was.

The crowds were irritating him. They were taking away from his mission, pulling at his brain. Every face, every flash of silver, and the bright lights – all of them were reminders of what he would rather forget, what he really was… He hurried along, looking away towards the stars, which always looked the same.

Faster, faster… the tension was building…. He didn’t want to have to travel away, all over again, and if he could just piece together his mission this time, and piece together all the little things to make sense for his purpose, and take his foreigner brain and fashion it the right way – then maybe he could stay. He wanted so much to stay.

“Hurry…”

He couldn’t fight it anymore. The growing pressure in his brain. One more word and…

“Max, come on! At this rate we are going to miss the plane! Your father is going to be so cross with you!”

He stopped dead, standing stock still in the crowd. In the terminal. She had said it. Reality came crashing in around him in big, horrifying, colourful chunks, like being inside a Tetris game. The betrayal happened every day, and every day it was stunning, stupefying. Max felt the familiar tears begin to prick his eyes as he looked down at the zips, the buttons, the reminders.

Max stared up to look at the face of his mother for help with this world, but she had already turned and was briskly striding towards the escalator.

Perhaps he can try again tomorrow. He walked on after her.

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

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Mike

Part 3

By Amanda Hillsberg

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The cab slowed to a stop in front of John’s midtown apartment, on 47th and 3rd.

“Roommates?” Cassandra inquired.

“Nah.”

He paid the cab driver with his platinum American Express card, and hopped out.

Cassandra took a deep breath and followed him inside.

“What’s up, brother?” John gave the doorman a high five, and put his hand on Cassandra’s lower back. It was the closest thing to a hug that Cassandra had experienced since Mike’s memorial service. It felt warm and affirmative.

“Hey John! Hey Pretty Lady! Sign here,” the doorman crooned.

Cassandra gave the doorman a knowing smirk.

“Sure!”

It’s nice to be someone’s girl again, even if it is pretend. Even if it is only for one night.

As they winded through the vast bronze, marble lobby, Cassandra caught a glimpse of herself in the huge mirrors under the yellowing, dimmed evening lights.

Am I really doing this?

Is this what I look like?

Her eyeliner was smudged from sweating at the bar, and her skirt was crooked. She was shorter than she felt, and her hair was frizzier than she remembered. Cassandra sucked in her stomach and slightly pursed her lips.

Better look away. I am fine. I’m great.

They entered the elevator, and glided up to the tenth floor. He led her to apartment 10J, and opened the door. It was exactly how she pictured it would be: clean, boring, and impersonal. The walls were white, and the couch was off-white with a few blue Ikea pillows. The kitchen was silver with marble countertops, clean, unused, and newly renovated. It was a kitchen that clearly belonged to a person who only ordered food from restaurants, and had probably never so much as boiled an egg in his life.

Could this guy be more stereotypical?

“You want a drink?” John asked.

“No, that’s ok.”

I want to be here, I want to feel this.

John put on some house music, and turned off the lights.

He reached around and grabbed Cassandra’s waist and pulled her to the bedroom.

They toppled into bed like two clumsy teenagers at a house party, elbowing each other on the way down. He lay on top of her, threading his leg in between hers.

Cassandra lay there as he worked like a starving beast, biting her neck and arms, jabbing his tongue into her throat, and grinding up against her, hard. She held onto his bed sheets, trying to tactfully manage and juggle all of his sexual fastballs.

I guess we’re sort of on different pages, in terms of taste.

As he ripped of his clothes and unzipped her pants, she felt that ever present knot her throat, a physical sensation she had since the beginning of Mike’s murder investigation, begin to throb and melt. She felt like she was choking on the melting knot, and she couldn’t help the hot tears and snot rolling down her face.

Hold it together! What is WRONG with you!

The knot was excreting tears like a volcano excretes lava, and it was out of her control. There was nothing to do but cry; it was as involuntary as sneezing or yawning.

Please don’t notice, please don’t notice, please don't notice.

The more Cassandra tried to fight her tears, the louder her sighs grew, and she began to hyperventilate.

“Um… Cassandra? Are you ok?”

“MIKE!” she wailed. “MIKE!” “He’s GONE!”

The words poured out of her mouth before she knew what she was saying, or why.

It was the first time Cassandra allowed herself to feel, as John kissed her too hard all over her body, how much her cells physically craved the connection she had with Mike. He was her missing link, and for whatever reason, he understood her in a way that required no explanation. And now she was truly alone.

As John shook her body, attempting to calm her down, Cassandra went limp, lost in the memory of Mike.

Where am I? Where am I? Help me.

“HELP ME, JOHN. I CAN’T BREATHE.”

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

World War Me

Part 2

By Kylin Lötter

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The word 'unique' struck me as a thoughtless insult. I forced myself not to move, not to jump up and scream at those people – I'm not unique! I'm not a Freak!

It's this fear, this irrational fear of individuality that has stayed with me all my life. The prospect of alienation, of being something detached from the whole, bubbles on my skin. It's disgusting. So putrid is the idea that it sets my skin alight.

A Light, I remember. That was what I was, that was all that I was, that burning light that consumed everything around it... including all my hair.

Nothing sticks to you quite like the memory of being on fire does. I am acutely aware of how my bones sit in the sack of flesh I call my body. This is the first time that I have ever felt justified in calling myself corporeal. The pain in my throat is receding, oddly, like I'm swallowing it. I feel it dissipate even though I'm not quite ready to let it go. I'm not sure why but I want to hold on to it.

The strangers are still talking about me. They're repeating these words: unique, different, odd. Before I can stop myself, I move to cover my ears. I don't want to hear them talk, especially not about me.

“I think she's waking up.”

I've always been awake, idiot.

For a brief moment, I thought I said it out loud. Relieved that I didn't, I slowly open my eyes.

There are two male officers looking at me. Me and my nudity. I attempt to cover myself up by folding my arms over my breasts and sitting up with my legs tucked close to my chest. Looking at them, I realize everyone is wondering what is going to happen next.

What does happen next is, to say the least, unexpected.

A girl appears. She can't be much older than I am, but that's where the similarities end. There's an eye-patch over her left eye and I flinch at the sight of her blatant abnormality. I've heard of eye patches but I've never seen one. It's such a distinguishing feature that it shines like a neon light, glowing out of her skull and even though I assume there's no eye there I can feel it glaring at me.

“You guys should totally set up a perimeter,” she says while she put her arms around the two cops' shoulders and grins. “Anyone can just walk in here.”

They shrug her off and pull out guns. She stumbles back slightly, regaining her footing with two extra, unnecessary movements before straightening herself up with a flourish.

She smirks as she speaks, “I'm sorry, officer. Have I done something wrong?”

“It's Fugitive Six!” One of the cops exclaims. His hand is shaking on his gun.

“Fugitive,” the girl bites her lip. “You know, that's my favourite adjective that's been used to describe me. No... actually, my favourite is 'unpredictable'.”

She snaps her leg up, kicking the cop's gun into the air. She doesn't catch it. She doesn't need to. The other cop is already backing away, fumbling for his radio. She strolls over to him and snatches it from his hand. It shatters when she throws it against a scorched wall.

“You know, I saw the explosion from all the way across town and I thought, ‘man, that's a party I wasn't invited to.’ So, I thought I'd come to see what happened.”

For the first time she looks at me, “You're what happened.”

She smiles at the officers and says, “Yes, you're excused.”

With her permission, they scurry off like rats.

She shrugs off her long leather coat. At first I don't understand what she's doing but then she looks away and hands it to me. I stand up, aware that she is offering me a small privacy - something I've never experienced before - and take the coat.

When I put it on, I feel something hard press into my breast from an inside pocket. I reach in and gently pull out a large, severe-looking knife.

When I look at her, she shrugs and says, “So? I fight with a phallic-shaped weapon. Don't you dare judge me.”

“You fight?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“With smiles and laughter,” she snaps back sarcastically and snatches the knife from me. “How do you think I fight?”

I look at her, confused. “No, I meant ‘how do you commit an act of violence?’ I don't understand.”

“Oh,” she says and looks down at the knife. “They've fully assimilated you, haven't they?”

“What does that mean?”

“’ means you don't have a shred of individuality.”

“Individuality?” I ask. “But that's just... wrong.”

She shoots out a short burst of laughter, “So is slitting people's throats and yet, I do it all the time.”

I stumble back, but I can't get away before she walks closer to me. She points the knife at my chest with just enough pressure for me to feel how sharp it is. My heart starts thumping even though it doesn't look like she wants to stab me. It's like this is just how she engages people – with a knife at their chest.

“What's your name?” she asks.

I answer automatically.

“Clara.”

“No, no, no,” she sings the word over and over. “I don't want to know what financial year you were born in. I want to know your name!”

I look at her and respond, “Clara.”

After a moment, she drops the knife and shrugs, “Suit yourself. My name's Summer.”

I look at her bright red hair. It hurts my eyes. I think that if that is the name she chose for herself, she clearly has the need to be seen as someone radiant and bright. All I say, however, is, “Okay.”

She leans her head to one side and looks at me like I'm a specimen.

“Come with me.”

The way she says it is like she has no doubt that I'd say yes. There's a smile in her words that I can't see on her face.

I shake my head violently, “No way. I'm going home. I'm going to go to my station's headquarters and I'm going to explain what happened. They'll understand. It wasn't my fault.”

Her laughter is cruel, “And where was this station headquarters anyway?”

I stop. Upper floor, I think. Looking up, all I see is sky and the clouds that belong to us now.

“Station headquarters gone, love. All you've got now is me. No one else is coming to tell you what to do. You know what you are now?”

I murmur, “A Freak.”

“Say it louder!” she barks at me. It’s an order. I like orders and, somehow, the whole situation becomes normal to me.

“A Freak!” I shout. Summer smiles.

“Just like me.” She's twirling the knife in her hands. It glints in the sunlight but her movements don't produce fear. She's not threatening me. She handles the knife in the same way I pressed the green button- automatically.

I run my hands over my bald head, feeling out the slight veins and bones I never knew were there. With a slight shock I realise that I don't even have eye brows. I'm completely hairless, from head to toe. There's no where I can go because I look so different from everyone else now. Where I could I possibly fit in?

I begin to feel this terrible loss. At first I can't remember what it is then I realise it's the connectivity. The feeling that I belong to some greater machine that knows what its purpose is even if I, as a pitiful individual amongst billions, do not. I lost everything when I exploded. There's nowhere I could go. Nowhere I belong.

Except with Summer, with her blazing red hair and eye patch. I look at her and wonder if she's even real.

“Okay.” I say. “Tell me what to do.” I crave more orders from her. I need some sense of direction and the only person who can give that to me now talks to me with a knife pointed at my chest.

Summer grins and, for a moment, I think I see a flash of blood staining her blistering white teeth.

Summer lives in an abandoned mansion that's further from home than I had ever been. I doubt that she owned the place but I also doubted its existence when I first stepped into it. I had long believed that houses were a myth and that all people lived in apartments with one room.

When I said this aloud, Summer laughed at me. She was always laughing at me. She would tilt back her head and open up her red, cavernous mouth and releases a noise that hurts me. It's so loud.

She leaves for long periods of time. While she's gone, I waste time in front of the mirror, trying to smile and laugh like she did but it never looks right. There is always something unnerving about my dead smile and always something stuck in my laugh.

I wasn't like Summer, but then again, no one is like Summer.

Unique... just like me.

When I asked her where we were and if this was the headquarters of some obscure resistance against The Company, she sighed at my naivety.

“There's no resistance,” Summer had said. “We live in the perfect world. Everyone is equal. No one is starving any more. Everyone has a purpose, a sense of belonging. Everyone, that is, except for us.”

I don't think I'll ever understand why her words disappointed me so much.

Summer likes to make an entrance. She left me alone for three days and when she came back, she threw something pink at my face.

“I want you out of my coat,” she barked. “You've been walking around in it for a while now. What do you have against clothes, anyway? Not that I mind the frequent nipple slip.”

I fold up my arms around my chest and say, “I don't have my regulation uniform.”

“Well then, here's your new one.” She points at the pink smoulder in my hands before flopping onto an armchair.

I spread out the colour pink to reveal a dress. Looking at it, confused because dresses were outlawed a long time ago. I can't imagine where she even got it.

“Where –”

“Practically stole it out of a museum. No need to thank me,” she says. “Now get the hell out of my coat. It's my favourite. Blood doesn't stain leather, love.”

Summer often speaks like this, like she's constantly fighting, constantly in the battlefield. If she killed people as often as she says that she did then there would be no one left. For a moment I look right through her, straight through that plastic grin, and wonder what happened to her to make her this way. I exploded – what's her excuse?

In a rash movement, I tug off the coat and toss it at her. Summer watches me shamelessly as I stand naked and hairless.

“I don't have my uniform,” I repeat slowly.

“So, are you just going to run around stark naked for the rest of your life?”

I shift from one leg to the other, “If I have to.”

“Just put on the damned dress,” Summer rolls her eyes.

“NO!” I shout louder than I intend to. Summer flashes me a look that frightens me. She climbs up from her seat, rolling her shoulder blades, and marches straight up to me.

“Listen, baby, you're not in some fairy land utopia any more. No one is going to tell you what to do. What to wear, who to be. All of that, all that feeling of purpose, of belonging is gone, along with all your hair. There is no going back. There's no one-room apartment and stupid heartbeat alarm clock and assigned names and genders and regulation uniform. Your new uniform is that pink dress, not some company-issued jumpsuit. You're unique... just like me.”

She shoves the dress, crumpled up in her fist, at my chest. Slowly, methodically, I pull the dress over my head. Her words have shaken me. It feels like she has tattooed them in to my chest when she shoved the dress at me. Not so much at me, but through me. The pink fabric falls past my naked flesh and wraps my body in silk.

I look down at myself, twisting the fabric between two fingers, “It's soft,” I say slowly.

“Isn't that better now?”

I ignore her and walk to a spotted mirror. Standing before it, I look at myself in this sinful pink dress. It feels so soft, like I'm wrapped in a cocoon of light. I've never felt like this before. For the first time in my life, I want something. I want more dresses that make me feel... what's the word? Beautiful?

“You like it?” Summer says as she appears behind me. I nod slowly, still processing this material feeling.

“That's not the only surprise I have for you.”

I look at her quickly, “More dresses?”

She laughs, “Don't get greedy. It's not a dress, but I think you'll like this just as much.”

“Show me,” I say.

She offers me a hand and a smile, “Follow me into the woods, little girl.”

I take her hand and she leads me through the house, further than I've ever ventured. The house is huge and dilapidated. The stairs sway when we as we ascend.

She opens a door and the smell of disinfectant and wounds slams into me. I have to let go of her hand before I have to cough.

“What are you doing in this –” I start to stay and stop, because I finally look for myself. In the bed, there is a boy wrapped in bandages. He looks at me through scorched eyes. I can hear his breathing, even when I'm this far away. My heart misses a beat to sync in with his.

“Summer... what did you do?” I ask slowly.

She saunters past me and flops down beside the boy. He looks at her slowly. Summer adjusts one of his bandages and then looks at me.

“Don't you like it?”

I slowly walk into the room, “I don't understand. Who is this?”

“Oh, you see, you weren't the only person I saved when you got all atomic on everyone.”

“No one could have survived,” I say. “Especially not him.”

“Why? Because he was right next to you?”

I approach the side of the bed and look down at the boy, “I'm sorry,” I say with a crack in my voice. “I didn't know. I... I didn't mean for this to happen.”

Clive looks up at me and smiles.

I double back. I look down and see that the fine bones in my fingers are beginning to glow beneath my skin.

I speak before I can't. “Summer! It's happening again!”

She swears loudly and jumps up, grabbing me, dragging me, and swiftly throws me out of the window.

I remember that smile. It's Clive. My Clive.

Smiling Clive.

The glass shatters around me and as I plummet from the fourth story of Summer's stolen house, carrying my exploding bones with me.

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

Sunday Editorial

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I had this picture of a person in my head this week. He was sitting down to breakfast, taking a big bite of marmalade toast and a swig of coffee before unfurling the morning paper. On the cover page there's this picture of an atomic girl, and the headline reads 'World War Me'. There's another thin strip near the bottom with 'Read more of Mike's story on page 3' running off the bottom of the paper. This person is busy reading about the affairs of the far-off happenings of Steam City, shaking his head in amusement as he does so. This person is the reader. And the reader is never far from our minds, as writers. Sometimes that reader is you. Sometimes that reader is us.

Writing is a form of nourishment. There's no small wonder in the nature of the morning paper in such close proximity to food and drink. We as a species thrive on information. We suck it up eagerly, with the sense that it keeps us connected and aware of the world around us.

And yet, to our great sorrow, it seems all too clear at times we're living on a junk world, in a junk food age, subsisting on a synthetic diet of whatever we can get that isn't rotting in the streets. We automate our responses to one another, because it minimises the effort of interaction. We read an endless stream of criticism from newspapers, comment sections and web articles, generated by people who capitalise on how much easier it is to critique, than to make something new, and possibly better.

But – and it's an important but - that world is turning away from itself. Health foods are increasingly popular. People are caring more about what they put inside of them, and acknowledge that for a world as fast-paced and complex as ours, healthy nutrition gives you the edge. Here at TRS, we renegades are all about healthy nutrition.

Throughout the day, readers snack on the convenient junk-data of amusing memes and articles that leave the mind cramping. They fix the craving.

But do they nourish the mind?

Our answer is that maybe you'd like an alternative. Something short enough to read on your break, but still packed with the intrigue and emotional thunder writing should provide.

We do our best to deliver. Both to keep you the reader at the top of your game, and us writers on top of ours.

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

Jimmy

By JL

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I hate this place. It's not the décor, or the management that's the problem. Joe the manager is as fine a man as any, and he plays a kick-ass game of pool, I can tell you that much. What I hate about this place is the people. They're the scum of the Earth, the bottom of the pit. Not according to them though, they think that they're the cream of the crop, the elite, the upper crust. They stink of deceit, conceit and money. I ask myself why I'm here. Not in the philosophical sense, just why am I here in this hell-hole right now. I could be anywhere – Paris, Rome, New York – but I'm stuck here. I guess the short answer would be that I'm one of them. I don't want to be, but I am. I have the money, and the ladies say I have the looks, but none of them have the brains. That's the weirdest thing about these people here. Half of them are half way through law school or med school or some Bachelor's degree on their parents’ money and they're acing their classes on their own. Granted, some of them aren't passing, but a lot of them are. I'm getting off the point. What I'm saying is these people have the brains to pass a class, but not to hold a conversation that isn't about one of three things: money, sex or gossip. And the gossip never dies. The incestuous nature of this place is incredible. What am I trying to say? I forget. Every time I come here, I'm sick to the stomach. These days, there isn't anyone to talk to but I don't know where else to go I guess. Well, that, and I work here.

“Three tequilas and a strawberry daiquiri.”

Hello. She's quite cute. Not what I'd call hot, but definitely easy on the eyes. Kind of that girl-next-door type vibe. I'm a sucker for the girl next door. Of course, to these people, next door is usually around half a mile away behind an eight-foot wall with pretty little angels frolicking in their birthday suits all along the top. But that said, most girls who have moved in next door to me usually end up with me, for a while. Except the fat ones. I move around a lot. Tequilas. That means this girl and her friends are looking for a party. They've probably come to the right place. However, if they want a party without the risk of an STD, they should try some place else. Most of the people here are regulars, so their junk gets around, and they snap up newcomers, so their junk gets out. She smiles as she takes the drinks back to her friends. A cocky smirk, with a simple backhand pour always seems to do the trick. As she sits down, she looks back and brushes her hair over her ear. I laugh to myself. Not interested babe.

“Hey Jimmy, can you put four Stellas on my tab?”

Of course I can, dumbass. That's why you have a tab. He's just shouting that out to impress the ladies that just sat down. He may have a chance, but only because his friend is exactly what Adonis would look like if he existed. But Adonis is off limits; the girl on his arm makes sure of that. She sticks to him like glue every Friday when they come here. He looks like a bird with his foot chained to some immense weight. His problem is that he really loves her, but she doesn't trust him. Why? I don't know. I spoke to him one night while she was on the dance floor. I figure if she took the chain off and let him fly, he'd perch right on her shoulder and whisper sweet nothings in her ear. But that's the romantic in me speaking. My guess is that she's already cheated on him at least twice. It would explain the chain.

“Jimmy, have you seen Roxy at all tonight?”

Oh you poor bastard. She's with two guys in the restroom right now, probably high as a kite on cocaine. I won't tell him that, a simple shake of the head and a “Naaah man, sorry” will suffice.

Hopefully he won't be in taking a piss when Roxy tumbles out the cubicle, laughing her head off, with her thong round her ankles and two guys in the cubicle with their pants down. He's not so innocent either, kind of obsessed actually. Treated her like dirt for most of the time they were together while she kept her options open with several extra-curricular activities. Toxic relationships like that are what these people thrive on.

“Just three tequilas this time.”

No dack? Who's the flyweight? These people don't need designated drivers, they have chauffeurs.

Every weekend, the chauffeurs light up and talk crap out back. Even they are victims of the gossip of this place. The flyweight turns out to be the girl next door. I steal a glance and our eyes meet.

Okay so maybe I'm a little interested. We'll see by the third round.

“Double Jack's on the rocks.”

Now this guy I like. Bad taste in whiskey, but good taste in just about everything else. I wonder who broke his heart. He's in here every week, playing the field. He may have game, but his heart's not in it. Maybe he broke someone's heart and now he regrets it. Best he ever had, worst mistake he made, whatever axiom he wants to use to beat himself up. He looks up as three girls come in. The stereotypical Triumvirate on the surface. The girl everyone wants, the girl everyone's had and the girl nobody wants. True, to a certain extent. I'd call them by different names though. The girl who's

afraid to commit, the girl who's shamelessly searching for 'the one' and the girl who nobody has cared to know. They won't order anything, somebody always buys for them.

“Three cosmo's Jimmy. Put it on my tab.”

I'm not sure if he's desperate or stupid. Probably both. He waves that tab, and the keys to his Mustang around like some lucky charm. Golddiggers are a dime a dozen in this place though, so he'll find someone tonight. At least for as long as his premature ejaculation will stay put. But he'll never get one of the three. He's bought them drinks every week for two years and got nowhere, but that's probably because he shoots for the girl everybody wants – and misses every time.

“What the fuck!”

Guess somebody was taking a piss at the wrong time. As I clean the bar, he storms out with Roxy and her two boys right behind him. He knows that Joe won't take kindly to a fight in his club. A few people follow them out to catch the action first hand. I'll be hearing about this for the next three weeks, I guarantee it. The Triumvirate have taken a seat at the four newbies' table. They'll be best friends tonight, but never again. Although I think the girl next door and the girl everyone's had might make it to next week. The girl everyone's had may seem like a bitch, but she's got her heart in the right place. Her only problem is that she's a bitch. They're talking about me. I'm not being vain,

but I've worked here long enough to know when my name's in the rumour mill. I wonder what they're saying. I'm the guy that the girl everyone's had never got, so I'm not sure she's saying good things. I don't really care though. Like I said, she's a bitch.

“'nother double Jimmy.”

Against my better judgement. He's not the best drinker or drunk around. He's not looking to score tonight. When I ask him what's up, he says she's moved on. I don't really know what to say. Clichés are not my forte. I tell him he should move on, but I know he won't. Not yet anyway. Only time really heals, and even then there are scars. They were both stupid though. Only idiots let love leave, but only fools find it. I've used that line with so many guys like him and almost all of my ex-girlfriends.

“Seven tequilas.”

Seven. Girl next door's having a drink this time. Interesting. What could you be playing at girl?

“So, Mandy tells me your name's Jimmy.”

I just smile. If she had said that she had figured it out from that dumbass waving his tab, then I would have been impressed. But I'm back to not interested. Sorry babe. Time for the shoot down. I don't like to do this, but I'm not in the mood for games tonight.

“You work here every night?”

Don't grasp at straws. I serve her with a smile. Then it's the awkward walk away. I cringe on the inside. She'll be fine by tomorrow, maybe even tonight. The girl no one knows walks up to the bar. I love her. But, like everything in life, it's complicated.

“That was cold Jimmy.”

I know. But at least now she can broaden her hunt, and get over the first rejection fear. I tell the girl nobody knows this. She laughs. I hope she'll sit at the bar for a bit longer. No luck.

“I don't think she's the type to give up easy. And besides, Mandy is pushing her as hard as she can in your direction.”

That bitch has it in for me, I swear. I think she likes seeing me shoot girls down. It's sadistic. The girl no one knows goes back to the table. I watch her leave like I always do. She has a grace about her that no one can match. And she wears glasses. I like glasses.

“Can I get a beer and a martini.”

Adonis is smiling. Tonight must be going well. Must be her birthday or something. His dumbass friend is trying to chat up the girl next to the girl next door. He is oblivious to the fact that she's a lesbian. She's been making eyes at the girl everyone wants for the past hour. The girl everyone wants is playing along, but this time I think it's unintentional. It usually is with the girl everyone wants. She'll flirt her way into anything before she realises where she is, and then runs.

“Can I get a water Jimmy?”

I'm smiling. The girl no one knows can have anything she wants, but water means that she'll sit at the bar for a while. We talk crap in between orders like we always do. But it's good crap. Hers is the only life I care to know about, and she doesn't bother talking about anyone else. Not that she talks about herself. That's why we talk crap. The girl next door is watching. Don't get jealous babe. There's nothing here. Well, nothing on the girl no one knows' side of the bar. Very soon it's time for us to part. The Triumvirate are going to their next spot and taking the newbies with them. The girl next door brings the cash for their drinks and a napkin with her name and number. Part of me wants to give it to the dumbass with the tab, just for kicks, but I'm not that cold. The girl no one knows

gives me a knowing look as she leaves. I love her. Maybe I'll ask her out tomorrow.

“'nother double Jimmy.”

Drink up poor bastard. It'll get better tomorrow, if you're lucky. By the look of him right now, I'd say he isn't and it won't. The night passes quickly from here on in. Always does. The stragglers, loners and drunkards are all that's left by now. As I clean the bar, I look at the poor bastard and I'm glad I'm not him. I hate this place.

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renegadestoryteller · 11 years ago

Text

Team

By Rachael Neary

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You should always surround yourself with people, Frank thought. This was very important in the grander scheme of things; how life should be. People bring so much with them. That’s why we all have to be socialised, for sure. Like dogs.

Frank usually thought like this before breakfast. He had the same every day, soggy cereal with milk. Two spoons of sugar, and maybe a little honey for a special occasion. Though those came very rarely. He looked at his watch: nearly nine o’clock. He had to be at work soon.

He adjusted his Monday blue tie and got up from his mother’s table, picking up his bowl to put in the sink for later. He lived a simple life, without interference from other people. From a woman. Or women. Or men, for that matter. He needed to make friends, he thought.

He got into his car, and started off for his work. He used to be in a carpool, before the others stopped talking to him. The other men from his work. They sat there, never too close to one another with their big beards and sharp suits smelling so sweetly of something Frank never knew. He wanted to witness this sweetness so badly, so strongly. Some nights he wondered what it was. It could be beer, he thought. Or women, or drugs. He once saw a programme on the television about ecstasy in the nineties.

Frank drove into his usual work parking space, labelled with someone else’s name (he had asked management repeatedly over the years to change it, to no avail). He saw Jonathan and Carl, two of the men he used to drive with, in the lot already. They were smoking cigarettes from a brightly-coloured pack, inhaling lightly and laughing loudly. Frank remembered when he asked them about their brand. They had sniggered at him, called him a name he couldn’t remember now. He ran his hand over his face, no stubble. He had never had hair, his mother had always said it was a sign of good grooming.

Frank got out his car, closed the door firmly and made his way to the entrance of the building. He passed the others, they didn’t say hello. They were too busy talking about the latest football match – their team had lost. Too many fouls from their favourite player, they said. They had paid so much for him from the other team, they expected him to at least try harder.

Frank thought about this for the rest of the day at his desk. He didn’t have much work to do as he’d done it at home the night before whilst watching television and eating his pre-cooked dinner. It would be nice, he thought, if he had some friends. Some men in his life he could talk sports with. He ate his lunch alone at his desk. He didn’t have any phone calls and he didn’t say a word to anyone: it was a slow day. But his mind was fast. He looked up different football teams on the internet, searching different strategies and placements. He found Jonathan and Carl’s team, the red team with a mighty group of fans that had the sport running in their veins. Frank’s eyes flickered over the tons of information until the clock struck four o’clock. Home time.

His night was passing normally, he didn’t speak to anyone in the evening now his mother had died. It would be five years that December. He watched television and ate his supper, like every evening. At nine o’clock he watched the news. The stories were full of death and misery and he was about to switch over to something about garden landscaping until the sports segment came on. His finger hovered over the remote for those twenty odd minutes. A feeling of happiness bubbled up towards his chest. It reminded him of the times his mother fetched him from school – he would always see her coming over the playground hedge. He would run down the lane, his bag smacking against his legs as he rushed into her arms. Some days she’d let him buy a magazine or an ice cream from the local shop. Those were good days, he thought. The news anchor, a burly man with a beautiful black suit, told him about the trials the big red team were facing. It was going to be a tough year, he said. Lots of training and preparing - starting this weekend with the big match. The news broadcast was over. Frank turned off the television, puzzled. He hadn’t seen anything at his work computer about a big match. Unfortunately, he had never bought an internet connection to his house, never had the need, so he couldn’t find out which game the news anchor spoke of. He readied himself for bed, but did not sleep for hours as he restlessly thought of other things.

The next day he rushed out of his house, skipping breakfast and instead picking out a complimentary muffin from his work display. He started up his computer, fingers typing quickly but deftly over the keys. The big match of the season was to be played this weekend in a town fairly nearby. Everyone would be there to support wearing their colours.

The day passed quickly, a blur, as did the week. He thought about little else, working when he could. He walked past the others with pride now. He didn’t care about the lack of facial hair, his car or the way he didn’t know about cigarettes. He found himself not caring at all, because after this weekend he would know what it was like to be with other people, to be part of a team. He was going to the match. By that Saturday he had confidently entered a sports store, found the red shirt covered in different logos without help from the young and handsome store clerk and bought it. He had used his savings account to pay for it. The cotton fabric hung so cleanly on his shoulders and made him feel so good. Frank took the local train to the next station; a town he had come on family holidays to during Easter when he was younger.

With a sense of elation, Frank left the station and started out towards the stadium – towards his team. He was quickly sucked into a throng of red-shirted brothers, gently pushing towards the steel gate barriers.

The stadium roared with anxiety and pressure. Red as far as he could see, Frank gorged on everything of this new experience. The crowd thundered as the players ran onto the pitch and Frank screamed with them – his voice already nearly hoarse with excitement. He bought a beer from a man in the stands and sipped on it eagerly, letting it spill when he jumped up to see a goal. The game ran beautifully – the goals were quick and piercing and the players swam over the pitch with skill. After what seemed to be ten minutes the game was over. His team had won, it was finished. The smile that was stretched over Frank’s face soon waned when he looked around to his brotherhood and his friends that had been cheering with him as they left the stands. His shoulders rested back to their usual place as he left the stadium and trudged through the back roads. His mind was fuzzy, not thinking straight, and his hands were shaking.

Just then, blue flashed in the corner of his eye. He turned, seeing a large gang of blue-covered men by a corner road. Their tunics ran damp with sweat as they ran towards him, their faces grim with violence. One kicked Frank to the floor. Another grabbed his shirt and tore it. Frank’s head smacked onto concrete and his limbs felt blows but the numb feeling that comes from fear and pain had already washed over his body. He smelt a sweet smell, so sickly sweet – from the sweat freely running down his neck, his face which was now mixing with blood. The world became bright, sounds and vision left Frank completely. In his darkness he felt one final smile creasing his bloody face – this is good, he thought, you should always surround yourself with people.

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