Content warning: Sexual assault
This story was previously published in The Broken Teacup
Feeling bored, Jennifer thumbed through the pages of Cosmo, skipping past the article suggesting, The Sexiest Way to Eat an Ice Cream Cone in Front of Him and spotted it in the back, buried among the other ads which promised the latest transforming overnight moisturizer and jeans that will make any woman instantly appear twenty pounds skinnier. It read:
That first night, he dreamed of spiders.
There was a depression in the land. A bowl surrounded by rolling hills. At the bottom of the bowl were the shattered prefabs of a battered town. Old people and children in tattered clothes huddled around a smoldering fire at the town center. The lip of the bowl was a snaking line of earthworks. Men and women were there with pulseguns and mortars, rifles and pickaxes, shotguns and knives. They watched the hills.
The hills were moving. The hills were alive.
The forecast had been for 'Intermittent' this morning, but it was already nearly lunch with no sign of letting up. Michia didn't know why she even bothered with the official forecast—it was always useless.
Please god, it has to let up by music period.
“Kris, wake up, honey.”
Kris slowly opened her eyes. Above her, the cerulean sky was bright and cloudless. A flawless porcelain bowl upended over the world. She felt confused and disoriented as she sat up and took everything in. Brian was sitting near her with a wistful smile, the breeze playing with his brown hair. A pair of sunglasses perched on his nose hid his emerald-green eyes. Beyond him, the ocean stretched to infinity, the waves sparkling in the sunlight as if they held diamonds.
“The beach. I love the beach,” she said with pleasure.
My official title is “Ethics Manager,” yet lately all I do is piss people off. Yet again, I have to break another promise to Nico. I had to pull an all-nighter on my last case, causing me to miss her seventeenth birthday last month. This time, I was missing her act as Abigail in The Crucible—a role she’s talked about nonstop for the last few weeks. Instead, I’m sitting in a Vancouver cafe, preparing for my latest mark to come in. I try to write notes on my phone, but Nico’s stinging words from our conversation earlier distract me.
Slay Red Kween was emblazoned across the sky. Alice rolled her eyes as her hoverboard zipped past a line of skyscrapers. Her ex’s face flickered into view in front of her helmet. Incoming call from Iracebeth. Incoming call from Iracebeth. “Ignore,” Alice said firmly, taking a sharp turn down a cramped alley.
Image Dating Online, Ltd. (IDOL) Standard #1: If you can market yourself, you can market anything.
Dan turned around, shivering in the chill air despite wearing his thickest overcoat and gloves. A young Asian woman, slim and petite with shimmery shoulder-length jet-black hair, stood before him, wearing a black leather jacket and blue jeans. “Yup. Are you May?”
“Your last name’s Green?” Dan chuckled, puffs of foggy air escaping his lips. “Not what I expected.”
REC017: Subject update
Right, are we recording? You can see the body cam footage? You say that, but yesterday it kept cutting out. Because it’s a problem for the data.
Ok, so, you can see I’m outside, just left the research centre, approaching the participants. Four of them, been here for, uhm, five days now? Sorry, eight. Whatever. Some number of days. I’m hungry.
I’ll start with Elio.
Good morning, Elio. How are you doing? Elio, can you answer me?
“You hear about the ship that withered?”
I nodded. Ever since we’d reached port the day before, I’d overheard nothing but variations on the same rumor while I did my rounds, becoming slighter and weaker as water sloughed from my hands onto the ship-plants. Even if my work hadn’t needed doing so often, as a Source I was the only member of crew who wasn’t allowed to leave the ship.
I forgot how bright the sun could be. I was blinded, like exiting a movie theater. As my eyes watered, I did something I hadn’t done in years. I laughed. I laughed until my stomach was sore.