Horns - original short fiction

Horns

by Alli Kirkham

Once, when I was a little girl, I got lost in the western woods. The air was cool and damp, the trees towered so far above my head that looking at them made me dizzy. When I was found I was only a shell-shocked, newly orphaned child with a secret that I kept even from myself.

***

They were very safe people but some things want to happen. We had been careful on the river, all of us wore helmets and life jackets. None of the guides had said anything about white water or dangerous boulders. They probably didn't know about the unusual snowmelt patterns and didn't expect a cloudburst. Or they thought my parents were better boaters, or that I was older, or any of a million of the variables that could have been changed and let my parents live. Whatever.

Problems started, the raft flipped, my mother broke her neck and my father froze to death fifty miles from where I was found. I floated over rainbows, as little girls should, and landed safely on a bed of clover that hugged me close. I don't remember anything that day.

The forest was deep and it muffled the sounds around me. I had lost my helmet. When I brushed my hair away from my face as I stumbled my hands came away bloody. There was always water; I was never thirsty but I had no food to eat nor warmth nor love.

I cried the first night through. Imagine discovering that some owls shriek when you are huddled in moss, in dark too thick to breathe, and thinking that you might be the prey that that voice wants to startle into stillness. Owls and crying. That is how I spent the night.

***

The second day there was no sun, only glowing mists that flattened my perspective into a hungry cartoon.

The second night I found the herbs by smell. I remembered the feel of lavender in my hands from my mother's garden and used it to trace my way to wild mint and an enormous rosemary bush that grew up over my head into a shape like horns.

The herbs were bitter and cold and strong. The owls howled but I couldn't bring myself to be scared anymore - I was too happy to hear something other than the slow condensation of mist into drops that slapped on broad leaves behind me. I ignored their calls and crammed rosemary into my mouth, trying furiously to chew and have something inside my belly. I worked my jaws frantically, but no matter how I tried nothing I did would turn the handful of sticks in my mouth into food. I pushed even more rosemary between my teeth, forcing myself to bite down and try to chew, panicking and not realizing it. Three of my front teeth broke off, leaving behind bleeding pink sockets. A sprig jabbed the newly opened gum, hitting the adult tooth that would take two years and a bridge to descend, and the spiraling pain teased my gorge. If I puked with this much stuff shoved in my mouth I would choke and die. I breathed in deeply through my nose. I smelled wet copper and herbs. I started picking wads of rosemary out of my cheeks and dropping them on the ground in front of me. So much blood, and I could only find two of my teeth. There were no toothfairies here anyway. No warm parents to put quarters under a pillow that was hundreds of miles away.

This time there was no sobbing. I simply wept, periodically wiping my face and shaking the tears off of my fingers. I hadn't seen my parents in a full day. I had no idea where I was. I was hungry and cold. No one knew where I was. My head hurt. I didn't know how to get home.

The rosemary bush opened. Warm light fell onto my lap and a not-man walked out to me. "Are you cold?" he asked and I nodded. "Are you lost?" I nodded again, glad to have someone to share my terrible situation with. "What do you want most in the world?" "I want to go home," I whispered.

I remember that his hands were hot, so hot that their warmth relieved the chill of my skin only to leave burning welts in their wake. He said that I had called him with a potion. He said that he had to give me a potion in return. I remember that I didn't want it, that it tasted bad and hurt my sore mouth, but he insisted. He said it was how I would pay for my ticket.

***

I woke up next to a stinking pile of mashed rosemary and still-tacky blood. I couldn't find any of my teeth in the pile or my pockets. In the gray daylight I found a lot of mint and managed to consume several fistfuls of the soft shoots. I licked water off of a fern. I walked past a thicket and tripped over thick, muddy ATV tracks. It only took two hours of sitting along the path until someone came by. Then there was a frantic, numb ride followed by helicopters and flashbulbs and a house empty of my parents and full of strangers.

***

Ten years later there were shrieking owls in the wind. I knelt over a toilet. I caught the scent of rosemary on the water. I didn't vomit: this was not the specter of memory-killing alcohol coming back on me. This was the remnant of the not-man taking his own ride. I didn't vomit: I screamed as a writhing black ball worked itself out of my stomach and into the toilet bowl. I screamed as it climbed out of the bowl and its hot hand reached out and touched my lips.

I woke up on the bathroom floor the next day. I lactated for three months before my doctor told me that I was barren; it then stopped suddenly and never came back.

***

It has been another ten years today. I feel mist on my skin and mint on my tongue. My mouth is made of scars and I don't know where tomorrow is.

Obituary - original short fiction

Obituary

by Alli Kirkham

I couldn't catch up to the newspaper truck. No matter how much they slowed down to toss their load out at each house, or how fast I was snatching it up out of the driveways, I still felt compelled to obey stop signs (a weakness that the truck driver did not share).

So I braked hard and accelerated hard each time I had to stop or go but the taillights pulled further and further away in the warm blue night until I knew that they'd turn a corner and I wouldn't know which way to go and I'd never be able to get all the papers out of all the driveways because I'd miss one and then it would mean that she was really gone.

***

We stood on sand that still held the heat of the day even though the sun was dipping below the horizon in an orgy of reds and yellows. There was a bonfire and brown glass bottles and some asshole with a guitar like there always is on the beach after dark. We ended up on the pier hanging onto the sunset longer than those below us.

She started to climb the guardrail and I tried to hold her waist - she twisted away from me and I shouted, scared, that she was crazy; that she was going to get herself killed. She laughed at me and snarled "Fuck You. I'm gonna live forever."

She had a cut on her hand from a mussel and a garland of seaweed twisted around her when I saw her again on the sand.

***

Some jackass got the wrong idea about the newspaper I took from his driveway and called the cops. Now I've lost the truck for sure and I have to explain that I tried to get ahold of the publisher, who couldn't be gotten hold of, and buy out today's paper, and that I will pay everyone for the papers that I'm taking, full news-stand price, even better than their subscriber discount, but I have to get the whole issue first. People can't be allowed to look at them.

***

She swam like a porpoise and climbed like a squirrel. She refused to run and spent at least half of each day (from what I could tell) lounging in patches of sunlight and dozing. She would rouse me with a kiss in the middle of the night and when I woke up the next morning I was never sure if it was real or if I had been dreaming of the taste of her mouth.

***

The photo on the cover is of her, stunning and condescending, next to a pitiful piece of mangled metal and underneath the exact sort of repulsively tawdry headline that you would expect in a small town where you can get arrested for stealing a newspaper. She's so beautiful.

"Kid," the police officer is saying to me. He's maybe three years my senior. "Kid, they're out, there's nothing you can do."

I shake my head and put my head down on my crossed arms. "I was supposed to keep it a secret," I say aloud; she was going to live forever, I don't.

***

I go to the beach. I write her name below the tideline and watch until the water comes in and washes it away.

Donor - original short fiction

Donor

by Alli Kirkham

A bloodseller stood in front of the clinic, screaming. This was nothing unusual, you understand, just what bloodsellers do. He would wait until someone was coming out of the big, steel-colored glass doors and run, shrieking, when he was about three feet away from them when he would start spinning and waving his arms until the vials along his arms clinked together musically, making different tones depending on how full they were.

Almost everyone who came out glared at him in disgust, but I have to admit it looked like a lot of them could use a shot of hot O-neg. And his actions made me hesitate, which I appreciated; this was probably a decision I needed to think over a little more. From what I hear kidneys are a big deal and selling them can lead to some problems later in life.

Fuck it, I'm probably not going to live long enough to have to worry about it.

Inside those glass doors the clinic was less white than I expected. You always imagine these things with white walls and lots of chrome, you know? There were plenty of white walls, but also deep blue ones and big-ass paintings and lots of dark wood furniture with brass corners. Stuff that looked old-rich, the kind of rich you could get from hawking your goods. I liked it.

Across the huge entryway there was a big bar topped with a slab of marble a foot thick. The chick sitting behind it might have been carved from the same stuff except for her violently red hair and ultra-slick glasses. I couldn't see her eyes behind the lenses because they were busy reflecting her computer screen.

I cleared my throat as I approached her and she lit me up with a smile. "Good afternoon, sir, how can I be of service to you?"

I quickly stomped down all the nasty answers that wanted to fly out of my mouth - I was a businessman here, and if I wanted pretty girls to keep calling me sir I'd have to act like it. "I - uh - I'd been thinking entering into an arrangement with your clinic. And, uh, I was wondering what compensation I could expect."

She bared her teeth and practically purred at me. "Give me a moment, sir, to cover the desk and I'd be happy to discuss your options." She typed for a second then grabbed a folder from a hidden drawer and stood. A tall black girl with cheekbones like the prow of a ship and the tightest suit I've ever seen stalked over, quirked her lips at me, and took the chair. I'd been so distracted by the second girl that I was startled to find the redhead twining her arm in mine and tugging me over to an elevator. She punched the call button and asked me if I would like something to eat or drink. I stammered something about coffee.

We got out of the elevator and her swaying rump led me to a room with a panoramic window and a table made of wood but polished like glass. A silver coffee service sat near the end of the table the girl busied herself pouring into two porcelain cups as I collapsed into an incredibly comfortable leather chair. That, right there, was what I wanted from the clinic. A comfortable spot for my ass, hot coffee, and a nice view for the rest of my life. They could make it happen.

"Now, Mister - " she trailed off and let her voice hang. I waited for her to continue, then smacked myself in the forehead. "Tommy," I held my hand out to shake and she took it daintily, "Tommy F. Gunn."

"You may call me Janessa," she said smiling. She set the folder she had carried up on the table between our coffee cups; I think the words were facing me, but I couldn't be sure. I was never much of a reader. She seemed to understand my confusion, put her hand over the words and made sure I was looking her in the eye. "Now, Mr. Gunn, what sort of donation were you thinking of making? We accept a variety of tissue types as well as major organs, though - " I cut her off in a panic.

"You mean sale, right?" Janessa let out a tinkling little laugh and patted my hand.

"Of course, Mr. Gunn! We simply refer to it as a donation because we understand that nothing we give you could ever make up for your generosity in literally giving of yourself to your fellow man." My breathing started to slow down and my heart unstuck itself from my throat. "You will be compensated with our enormous gratitude for your gifts to the clinic, but we know nothing we could give you will replace what you have donated." I sighed and took a sip from my coffee (it was perfect and I'm pretty sure it was flooded with real cream, since it tasted richer than anything I'd ever put in my mouth before). When Janessa put it that way, I sounded downright princely - of all the things that men could make and do, they still couldn't grow organs outta nothing - they needed a starter, something that could save a thousand people, and that is what I was willing to so selflessly give them.

"Kidney," I said, "I wanna se- donate my kidney, and maybe some bone marrow or sperm or something?"

"Kidneys," she gushed at me, taking my hand in both of hers and squeezing her chest in a way that made it hard for me to hear her, "are in terribly short supply, and we are happy to accommodate you in any way that you would like for the donation. Bone marrow stocks are also low," she continued, smiling sweetly but getting a hard glint in her eye, "I think you're lacking some of the qualifications of our typical sperm donors, and it probably wouldn't be worth your time."

It took me a second to parse that and start feeling mulish, but when I did I extracted my hand. "Maybe the whole donation isn't worth my time. What kind of qualifications do you need in a sperm donor anyway?"

"A Ph.D., and no less than two-thirds of your original teeth," she said and trailed her thumb down the side of my face - suddenly her eyes widened. "Have I misjudged that, should I have called you Doctor instead of Mister? Oh how stupid of me!"

She seemed so sincere that I blushed and felt bad for making her feel bad. "No, no, I'm no doctor. But I do have all my teeth!"

Janessa brightened at this, and looked at my smile. "Wonderful!" she said, clapping, "that at least means that you're an excellent candidate for marrow donation!" I brightened a bit myself at the jiggles brought on by her clapping.

After that she got down to brass tacks with me and started talking numbers. The only problem was that I never had even as much a head for numbers as I did for letters. When she started to talk about compound interest rates and accrued wealth I started to get a little dizzy.

"I just wanna live a good life, you know? Have a house and good stuff in it? Can you help me figure that from your numbers?"

"Oh, of course," she said, and made a viewscreen pull down from the wall behind her. "The clinic is happy to make sure that you are well taken care of," the screen was flashing images of nice houses in nice neighborhoods, "and you could even increase your real-estate holdings after a year's rent had been collected if you were to - " the houses were flicking by faster and taking on tremendous proportions and Janessa's lovely voice was once more saying things that I didn't understand until she snagged my attention with the words "trade is, of course, always an option."

I put my hand on her wrist. "What kind of trade do you mean?"

She smiled widely at me. "We are aware that some things, like ballistic or laser enhancements, are difficult to afford."

My eyes nearly bugged out. "Janessa, please, show me the ballistics."

An hour later I felt like a kid in a candy store; I was bouncing off the walls from four cups of that wonderful coffee and Janessa was going over the list of mods I could have after my donation. They were going to make me into Superman and all I had to do was let them slice out an organ that I had a spare of anyway. I was going to have lasers coming out of my fingers, and was weighing the benefits of having lasers shoot out of my dick. This was the best day.

Finally the coffee got to be too much for me, and I asked for the pisser. Janessa directed me down the hallway and started printing off the fifth set of sixty page contracts that I had to pretend to read and sign. The bathroom was like everywhere else in the clinic, rich and stinking like money. An old man nodded to me when I walked in and began gathering towels. When I was done with the urinal he offered to wash my hands, then handed me a packet of mints to take away. I crammed three of them in my mouth and passed out before I made it back to my coffee cup.

I woke up in the big lobby. There was a burly dude in a real nice jacket behind the marble countertop. I walked over to him and asked for Janessa. My back hurt. My eyes hurt. I felt thirsty.

"Janessa is not available," the suit grunted. "I suggest you leave."

"I suggest you improve your attitude, cause this clinic is going to turn me into some seriously nuclear shit, and you don't wanna get on my bad side."

"The clinic is closed for today," he said, "why don't you try back tomorrow and we'll see where we stand?"

I mustered up my best glare (thinking how much better it would be with lasers backing it up) and walked to the steel-colored doors without saying another word. The doors were heavy and hurt to move. The sun was setting and bouncing off of them when I walked into the shit-stink and smog outside.

"BLOOD!" came a shriek nearby and I nearly jumped outta my skin as the bloodseller ran up to me. I wanted to sneer at him, but I caught my reflection in the door. I looked like I could use a shot of hot O-neg, just like the fuckers who left this morning. I sat down heavily on the steps and put my head in my hands. I couldn't remember anything after going to the bathroom. Not getting down stairs, not signing the last contract. I had no idea why they would boot me without getting the goods. I turned my head to look over my shoulder at the me-in-the-glass. I pulled up the back of my shirt and found a perfectly healed semicircular scar over where I generally knew my left kidney should have been. My hands shook as I held them out in front of me and concentrated hard. Not a single laser came out of any of my extremities.

Finally I just let my head fall and I cried. A quiet clinking interrupted me; the bloodseller had just put his arm around my shoulder. "You tried to take it in trade, didn't you?" I nodded. "You poor, dumb fucker." I wanted to be angry at this but I saw how true his words were and just went back to crying.

"Here's what happens now," he said, speaking through my sobs, "you try to do something in court and they come at you with four signed documents, three of them say that you understand that this is a donation and all compensation is voluntary. The fourth one says that you approve and consent to the procedure."

"But I didn't know," I wailed, "I can't read!"

He patted my shoulder. "I know, kid. But they've probably got video of some cute little broad explaining each one to you in big words that you didn't understand, then you saying 'I understand' before you sign each one. Sound about right?" And it was; I didn't want Janessa to think I was an idiot so I pretended like I had knew every word so she'd think maybe I did have that Ph.D. hidden somewhere.

"What blood type are you?" I shoved him away from me, making his vials rattle.

"Fuck you asshole," I shouted, "does it look like I wanna buy any blood?"

He laughed. "To be honest, yes. You're looking a little pale, bro." I groaned at him. "But mostly you look like you're a chump who's got more body parts than good sense, even missing whatever they took." I tried to stand up and found that I couldn't. He calmly detached one of his vials and attached it to my arm with a clean needle. I wasn't much up to struggling, really.

"So what blood type are you, 'cause I'm offering you a job." He looked serious, and at least he wasn't shrieking. I remembered this morning when he had made me pause. I should have talked to him.

"O-neg. I've got the good stuff." He clapped his hand on my shoulder.

"Excellent, bro. That means you only need one filter before you're good to go, like me," he held out his wrist and I saw that there was some complicated hardware attached to it. It was actually pretty cool-looking. "So here's my deal: I'll hook you up with a filter - for the first month, half your sales go to me to pay me back for the filter and I teach you the way the business works. Then you're a free agent or we can work together if you want."

"Man, someone already sold me a load of bullshit today. I don't need any more." He shook his head, sadly at me.

"Okay, I see you drive a hard bargain. On top of the filter and showing you the market, I also teach you to read." That stopped me. Reading would have been a useful skill today. Lasers could turn you into a pretty badass bodyguard, but reading meant you didn't give away a kidney to some jerkwad clinic.

I stuck out a hand, the bloodseller took it and we shook. Before I let go I leveled a shaky stare at him. "Deal, but you gotta teach me numbers too." This caused him to laugh again and slap my back.

So I guess the day wasn't a total loss. At least I got a nice cuppa coffee out of it.

I have no idea what happened here

I am just SO confused about Burton and Speke. I'm pretty sure that my mother-in-law gave it to my husband and I kidnapped it from him (he doesn't really read fiction) after I saw the last third of the movie based on the book on cable three years ago. When I saw the end of the movie the image quality and some directorial choices made me think that it was made in the 70s, as did the quote on the back of the book from James Dickey, who authored Deliverance. The novel certainly has a 70s sleaze feel that the film did an okay job of presenting, so color me surprised when I found out that the movie was released in the early 90s and the book was published in 1982.

I almost feel like I could forgive the book if I knew it was a product of the disco era because it seems like everything made or made popular from 1969 to 1980 was, in one way or another, sleazy. This oddity of timing is what allowed the career of Kiss to flourish, set the stage for Vanishing Point, and turned Staying Alive into an earthshaking hit. There was so much free-floating cocaine that the entire decade seemed a little high and detached from social and artistic norms.

But anyway, the book. The novel follows the careers of Richard Burton and John Speke as explorers in Africa trying to find the source of the Nile. It does a fantastic job of making exploration look unappealing, so maybe it was trying to be apologetic about imperialism. Speke is priggish and detestable while Burton is roguish and detestable so I'm not sure who you're supposed to be sympathetic to as the story progresses but you can pick either one if you like since they're both terrible. Much name-dropping of poets and explorers is done, so you have plenty of people to think of if you're sick of Burton and Speke (which you will be) and a couple of them are genuinely interesting (Sidi Bombay, the hired translator comes to mind).

The language describing Africa is a curious blank - scenery gets lost in the internal dramas of the fever-stricken and largely crazy narrators. For a book set in Victoria's reign there's a lot of talk of clitorises and plenty of wistful stares exchanged between closeted and out-ish gay men, so there's that. All of the actual descriptions of sex (again, a surprising amount considering the setting) are too mechanical to be considered truly pornographic, or even intriguing. The language describing inebriation is adequate and constant.

By the end of the novel I was sort of left wondering what I missed. Was there some class that detailed the feuds of British explorers and their challengers that I slept through in high school? Have I been making faux pas at parties by not being up-to-date on 19th century bureaucracy? Yes, Harrison built a little world that I spent some time in, he made characters that I understood well enough to not respect, and there was a complete arc to his story. What I couldn't figure out is why he bothered. Maybe there's some huge important message that he was trying to communicate, but I'm pretty sure that by 1982 we had figured out that shitting on entire ethnic groups is not a good thing, homosexuality isn't a curse, and rigid class structures are probably not the best societal model. But then again, maybe not - I wasn't alive for a lot of the 80s so what the fuck do I know. Well, I do know that thirty years later this book feels almost unbearably dated, is exhausting to read, and had trouble holding my interest for more than a half an hour at a time.

Hope you're reading something better,
Cheers,
     - Alli

Harrison, William. Burton and Speke. Ballantine Books. New York: New York. 1982.

Diving - original short fiction

Diving

by Alli Kirkham

The day is hot and I am hot and the sky is so bright that it has become colorless and flat at noon.

I can feel sweat trickling down my nose, landing on my chest, but I can't brush it or the irritating flies away from my face; my hands are occupied with red rocks and my eyes are occupied with staring very carefully straight ahead but never down. I feel the grit of sandstone bite into my bare spine, bare hands, bare feet.

I am the smoke, I think over and over. Smoke rises. Smoke Rises.

I find the ledge that lets me know I'm close. I breathe and rest, securing my hair behind my face and checking my palms for cuts that might bleed enough to slip my grip and kill me. Then onwards and upwards. The summit is red. The sky is blind. The wind is high and dries my sweat and cools me.

After the climb up it is easy hiking to the pool. I don't know if anyone else has ever found it. I haven't told anyone about it, not even my mother who worries as she presses a dry meal and a full skin on me before I go. I don't even know if it is here all the time or only comes, like the locusts do, on a schedule that is too broad for me to remember.

From my perch at the top the pool seems infinite and turquoise. The day is hot. The water looks heartbreakingly cool. I wonder if it will taste of salt as I do, and if it doesn't I wonder if my sweat will change the flavor once I am gone.

I spread my arms. The wind dries my sweat and cools me. There are birds overhead and all the rest of the desert is quiet under the frowning eye of the sun.

I run to the edge, screaming to give myself courage, and one of the birds cries out with me.

I think I am the smoke, and leap, hoping the pool is deep enough.

Tech Support - original short fiction

Tech Support

by Alli Kirkham

Test vapers blocked the alleyway, blowing out lungfuls of sweet steam. One of them had fallen, seizing, into an oil-rimmed puddle. The upside of being a tester was enough cash to feed yourself for the week and the occasional fantastic high. The downside was that designer drugs didn't always work as expected; sometimes you felt like a king, sometimes you fell down twitching, shit yourself and had to live through a nasty hangover. The new batches didn't usually kill people, but it wasn't unheard of. The vapers were philosophical about it - most of them had been heroin users before the new industry exploded and so they'd all been expecting to die young and high anyway.

Mason edged past them and into the alley where violently neon displays assaulted his eyes. Club windows stretched out the length of the block, showcasing dancing men and women under glass. Neon words leaped at him, advertising services and group rates in twenty languages. Long lines formed at most of the doorways at first, tapering down to a scattering of customers the deeper in he went. He finally found himself facing a rectangle of glowing purple with a couple of vapers passed out under the empty window. He knocked on the door and was duly glared at by the bouncer and owner, Frank, then squeezed inside.

Purple marked out the perimeter of the room, interrupted by heads in booths and bodies on tables. It was dark and sweaty and sparsely populated. He walked up to the bar, knelt on a stool, and leaned over until he could feel blood rushing behind his eyes.

"Mason!" he tried to get a fix on the voice, but found his nose neatly tucked into floral-smelling cleavage and felt hard arms wrapping around his head before he could even see where Isa had been hiding.

"Hey cutie," he said to the bottom of her chin. "What's the problem tonight?" Her arms retracted and he was allowed to move his head back until he was smiling at her upside down. She sighed and crossed her legs and blew pink hair away from her face, pouting. "You mean other than working at a strip club surrounded by brothels?"

"That's your problem every night, but you don't call me to fix it."

"The lights are all wonky. Look!" She stuck her arm out from her cubbyhole and bright green lines appeared in a circuit-board pattern from her fingertips back to where her body was wrapped in shadows. "I can't tell if my ink's fucked up or if it's something on the light board but nobody pays if the surprise is spoiled before I even get on stage."

"Doesn't look like much of a problem tonight - there's hardly anyone out there and most of them are already getting solo dances." He lifted his head up and scanned the room again. Maybe one more customer had come in, but it was getting close to midnight and nobody was pounding down the door. "It's dead out there, babydoll, you sure you need to make a scene? These guys don't care about the staging - they just want to see your tits, hon."

"I care about the staging! You know that." She cocked her head and made puppy eyes at him, pronouncing her pout until it became a caricature. He relented and climbed over the bar, crossing his own legs and pulling out a tiny laptop. "Lemme see your hand," he booted the little device and picked through his bag until he found the connector he was looking for; he plugged the square end into his laptop and put the other end close to Isa's finger. "Little prick now," he said. She smirked, "Says you. 'Sides, I think I can handle it - I got the tattoo in the first place, right?" He swallowed and nodded and slid the sheath onto her finger. "I now pronounce you sin and vice," she intoned gravely, spoiling it with a wink.  His computer immediately caught and scanned one of the few million nanobots swimming around in her blood. While he waited for it to catch fifty of them, he held a small flashlight over her palm and flicked through fifteen combinations of LED light - the tattoo only flared twice as he completed this little ritual. The laptop had finished scanning.

"I'm gonna have to leave you here and look at the lights. Your ink is just fine - it's on like Donkey Kong." He leaned over and bumped a kiss into her cheek, detaching the connector from the laptop and tapping his sample into a shot glass that he swiped from under the bar.

"You're such a nerd. Thanks, babe."

"Your nerd," he grinned, and bit her ear for good measure. She swatted playfully at his butt but pulled her arm back quickly when it flared up in the light.

The club was still pretty dead when he walked around to the production console. Bobby, the stage tech, sat at the helm gently puffing at a fat silver vape cylinder. Mason set the shot glass on the corner of the table where it glowed a steady green.

"That shit's gonna kill you, dude," he said by way of greeting.

Bobby grunted and wiped a little drool away from his lip and sneered at Mason, as usual. "Nothing's wrong with my lights, man, Isa's just being a little primadonna bitch again."

"Not my battle, man, I'm just trying to help," Mason adjusted a couple of switches and the light in the shot glass turned blue. He opened up a keypad on the board and typed for a couple of seconds. Nothing happened.

"You try turning it off and turning it on again?" Bobby chuckled. He was slurring.

"Not everything responds like a Microsoft box, Bobster. I think your board may have a couple of dead capacitors. I have a few spares; it'll just take me a minute to get them swapped - it's all plug and play under the hood here."

"Fuck you man, ain't nothing wrong with my lights," Bobby stood up and knocked his stool over backwards. His vape tumbled to the ground and made a loud pinging noise. His hand was shaking.

"Bobby, where'd you get that charge?"

"My lights is the best, asshole, best in the whole fucking alley. Best in the hole-fucking fucking-alley, you dick!" He tried to take a swing at Mason and fell flat on his face; Mason heard his teeth crunch into the concrete.

"Bobby," he shouted, then lifted his head over the edge of the console; he pulled his little flashlight out of his pocket and flashed its red beam at the door, trying to get Frank's attention. When he heard heavy footsteps and Frank's deep voice he looked down at the little tech again. "Bobby, where did you get that charge? You get that from those assholes on the street?"

Bobby's teeth were turning red and he was starting to seize, but he was smiling. "'Sgood shit, man, whaddya care where I got it?" Mason patted down Bobby's clothes until he found something that approximated a wallet. He extracted it from the tech's pocket and shoved a corner of it into his mouth, checking that no parts of it were small enough to swallow. The little man's limbs had started to go rigid.

"Awww, fuck, Bobby, whadja do now," Frank said from behind Mason.

"I think he got a bad charge off some vapers. There was a kid outside twitching like this when I got here. We gotta get him out of here, call the paramedics or some shit."

"Dumb asshole," Frank sighed. "You stay with him and try ta keep an eye on the girls - I'll go down to the corner and put in a call."

Mason nodded. The five minutes that Frank was gone were a nightmare. He tried to remember all the first aid bullshit his sister had practiced on him when she was in girl scouts, he tried to make sure that none of the customers was roughing up a dancer, he tried to check that Bobby was still breathing and just couldn't tell over the noise and in the dark. He worried that Isa was seeing this. Finally Frank reappeared with two men in peppermint striped jumpsuits bearing a stretcher. They loaded Bobby onto it efficiently. One asked questions while the other nonchalantly jabbed a needle into Bobby's chest.

"You know what he was smoking?" Frank and Mason shook their heads.

"How did you know to call us?"

"Saw a vaper wipe out earlier. Figured it was something in the water," Mason mumbled. The paramedic shrugged.

"You guys know anyone else who smokes these things, tell them to lay off the experimental stuff for a week or two. We've had five calls like this tonight, and two of them ain't gonna make it."

"Shit," Frank said, "is Bobby gonna be okay?"

"Fuck if I know," the medic with the needle said. They turned and grasped the stretcher together, and carried their unconscious burden out into the night.

Mason and Frank watched the door close behind them. Frank gestured to the console, "the mike on this thing working at least," he asked.

"'Sfar as I know."

Frank thumbed the switch at the bottom of the mike and let his voice boom out over the music: "The Velvet Tiger is closing early this evening. Please finish your dances and make your way to the exits. Normal hours resume tomorrow."

Mason heard some grumbling but most of the customers seemed happy enough that they weren't getting booted out on their asses. The girls treated the announcement like a national holiday and put a little extra into their shaking and shimmying, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Ten minutes later the purple neon had been switched off and the fluorescent tubes were humming overhead. The club looked dingy in full light, as did most of the girls. The neon hid their bruises and their acne and their age. But they were a good-natured lot, nattering over Bobby's fate as they threw on dresses and slipped shoes on their feet. By the time most of them had left there was a pool going to bring him treats in the hospital and a plan to give him a private show to raise his spirits and speed his recovery.

Isa was hanging out behind the bar, still mostly naked, waiting for the other dancers to clear out. Frank took a stool across from her and waved Mason over.

"She wants to run whatever tests you need to so she's all set up for tomorrow. You willing or you just wanna get home?" Frank, for all his glaring and swearing and bulk was eyeing him with concern.

"I'm not too shook up. It'll only take me a second to get the components plugged in and we can run it." Frank nodded and Isa sauntered over to the stage. When Mason opened up the electronic guts of the console he found Bobby's vape charger jammed into one of the outputs - it had fried the capacitors he was replacing. Frank grunted behind him and snatched the offending wire away from the board.

"Dumb fucker just lost his job on top of an already shitty night," he grumbled. Mason hummed at him and rattled around in the cabinet. He popped up from his work quickly and ran his hands over the console, adjusting levels and flipping switches. Frank turned the fluorescents off.

Isa stood on the stage, invisible in the dark. Mason started one of the tracks he knew that she danced to and one of her arms appeared, a circuit skeleton etched in red. The arm struck a pose and a leg lit up, radiating a deep violet. The song moved along and eventually all of Isa was outlined, her full-body tattoo changing colors in time to the music, occasionally going dark in the shape of a bra or panties that she would tantalizingly "remove" as the lights filled in again over her perky breasts and round hips. The performance was a marvel of timing, a program that he had written for her alone years ago in their dark bedroom as she danced and spun and laughed. The song finished and Frank flipped on the lights.

"Looks good, sweetheart," Mason said. She smiled at him and pulled a pair of pants out of a duffel at the edge of the stage. "Ask him, Frank," she said as she shimmied into the jeans, a technique that Mason didn't think he could look away from if the world caught on fire.

"You want a job, kid?"

"Huh?"

"Loverboy, give the lady some privacy. Eyes on me." Frank tapped his shoulder and Mason managed to make eye contact. "Isa said you're looking for work. You can run this board better than anyone else who's run through here in the last six months. You made the program that makes her money and she makes me more money than anyone else in this place. Do you want a job?" Mason held his hand out and Frank took it. "Yeah. Yeah, I do," he said, then followed Isa's form toward the door.

Frank locked up behind them. Mason put his hood up against the rain and Isa dug in her duffel for an umbrella. She popped it open and balanced it on her shoulder, reaching out her free hand to find his.

"Not every day here sucks, you know?" she leaned her head against his shoulder. "Just some of them."

"That's okay. Everywhere else is like that too."

Once they got past the alley's throbbing noise the streets were quiet, emptied of people by the rain.

Perspective - original short fiction

Perspective

by Alli Kirkham

Flat on his back, Joe stared up at the sky. He watched the grass waving in his peripheral vision, ignored the trees just beyond his line of sight, and tried to force his mind to relax. He breathed slowly and quietly. He frowned slightly. He let his face go slack. Then it happened.

He curled his hands down so that his palms felt dirt and threaded his fingers around the grass into fists. Now he wasn't a little boy lying on the ground, he was a Space Captain Joe clinging to the surface of a hostile planet, trying to keep himself from being flung out into the wide blue void below him. He was dizzy with the depth of the sky; for so long, so many months he had defended this planet against the deadly threat of the invading Morphoids and now its people had abandoned him to die. If only he could summon his ship, maybe he could -

Thwack!

A baseball smacked hard into his thigh, dissolving the illusion. He yelped and sat up.

"Throw it back, dumbass!" Mikey Allen and some of the guys had started a pickup game at the park's single backstop. "Yeah, dumbass," was echoed back at Joe a couple of times as he stood, shaking out his stinging leg. He picked up the ball and heaved it toward the other boys. It hit the ground and rolled to a miserable stop only thirty feet away from him. He scurried toward it and threw it again, getting similar results. "Nevermind, pansy" Mikey called; the bigger boy ran and got the ball himself, scooping it up and neatly throwing it to the wheat sack serving as home plate in a single economical motion. "Get off the fracking field," he called over his shoulder as he loped away, "or the next one's gonna land on your head."

Joe dragged a toe through the grass. He thought about asking if he could play, or maybe sitting on the sidelines and watching to see if he could learn how to throw a little better. Instead he just walked out of the cool shade of the park and onto the long, corn-lined road home.

Away from the trees the day was hot. The asphalt road shimmered away into the horizon and sunlight spilled into everything, wiping away shadows and making Joe squint and lean forward as though he was bracing against a strong wind. He held a hand up over his eyes as he paced, searching for water in the Sahara. The last of his camels plodded along, tired and thirsty, behind him; its reins dragged on the dust but it followed him knowing instinctively that it would die without its wise master, Shiek Joe al Bedouin, to lead it to water. He scanned the wide horizon for any sign of palms against the empty sky, feeling the hot sand shifting beneath his feet and leading him to stumble, yet again, but surge valiantly upright, refusing to give in to an ignominious death in the desert. He was the last of his tribe, he who had survived lions and attacks from warring bands of traders would not be killed by the sun and his thirst. As he breached the top of the dune he nearly wept in relief at the oasis that was spread before him, and behind him he heard the rising noise of -

A rattling, turquoise International Harvester juddered to a stop right next to him, practically shedding rust on his shoes. "Kid, ferchristsake, hey kid!" The driver had been calling to him for some time, Joe suddenly realized. He looked into the cab of the old truck and smiled. An exasperated farmer rolled his eyes at Joe from behind the wheel. "Kid, get out of the road. Some asshole is gonna hit you if you keep walking the line." Joe looked down and saw a stripe of yellow under his feet, and raised his wide eyes back to the driver. "Sorry, mister. I didn't realize. Thanks. Sorry," he trotted over to the dusty shoulder; the farmer watched him from the geriatric truck until he was sure that Joe wouldn't leap back onto the road and cocked a quick wave through the window as the wheezing vehicle laboriously built speed.

For a couple hundred feet Joe kept to the shoulder and counted the rows of corn that faded away at his right. They rustled at him, he whistled back tunelessly. The tall green stalks were over his head by at least a foot, foaming yellow silk around the fat green ears, heavy and almost ready for harvest. He could smell the sweetness of the fields, hear the whisper of wind on the leaves, and feel the shadows cast by the stalks crossing his face with every other step he took. He picked up a broken broomstick that someone had tossed aside into the dirt and held it crosswise against his body, ready to use his trusty machete to slash at any of the deadly venomous snakes that surely infested this jungle. Intrepid Joe the noble explorer swatted away hanging vines and jewel-bright insects, keeping the mighty Amazon at his left to guide him to the treasure concealed in the hidden city Amazonia. He shifted his grip on the broomstick and his machete became a spear to defend himself against hostile natives or the noxious Baron Michael von Allen who sought to steal Joe's prize and his lovely Indian bride. Joe darted forward in spurts, jumping over crocodiles with great snapping mouths and avoiding pools full of ravenous piranhas. From the trees there suddenly came an unearthly moaning and he came to a wary halt, holding his spear ready to face whatever came his way.

The noise of the leaves increased and the moaning built to a basso crescendo and from the jungle before him there emerged a terrible monster - black and white and taller than the trees. Joe cried out - and backed away. The huge bird opened its mouth and hissed, its hideous pink neck billowing in rage, and charged right at Joe. He turned tail and thundered back down the shoulder, dashing through puddles and over tire treads but still the hissing perused him as cornrows flashed by on his left, their shadows turning his vision into a stuttering strobe. He started to look back when he felt an enormous, burning pressure just above his waist. He fell and the ostrich pounded through him, overtaking him by fifteen feet before turning around and running at him again. Joe barely managed to roll away from the onslaught and felt the huge talons rip through his jeans and into the flesh of his calf. Again the bird was preparing to charge - Joe tightened his fists and found that he was still holding the broomstick, his trusty spear. Intrepid Joe wasn't about to get killed in some manky jungle by any overgrown chicken. The ostrich mounted its charge and Joe forced himself to sit up and grasp his spear in both hands, thrusting it up into the body of his attacker as it came at him. The bird squawked, dragging its following foot over his shoulder as its fearsome run dissolved into an awkward shamble and fall. Joe wrenched weakly at his spear but it was too firmly lodged within his foe to come away. "Take that, you turkey," he mumbled before sagging onto the ground.

His eyes did their trick again and he was once more holding onto the earth, trying not to be swept into the fathomless sky.

Joe woke up somewhere cool, white, and beeping. Had he been captured by aliens? Kidnapped by the government for medical experimentation seemed more likely. He was thirsty and everything was too bright. He heard shouting that was getting louder as his mind worked itself around to the fact that he was in a hospital room and that was a good place to be if his body planned to continue hurting the way that it was at the moment. The door on the far side of the room slammed open and words resolved themselves from the hallway.

"- two thousand dollars worth of bird that your boy killt and I want to know who's paying for it!"

"Donny, if you're too stupid to latch the gate of your damned pens and your ostriches are too stupid not to get stuck when they're trying to kill a ten-year-old boy, maybe it's time to go back to ranching chickens. Nobody's paying you a damned penny and you should get right out of here before I decide to sue you for the hospital bill," a pretty woman with red hair and red cheeks was yelling at someone on the other side of the wall. That's my mother, Joe thought and he smiled at her angry profile, closing his eyes.

Lower now, he heard the other voice again. "Wull, I just am glad to hear that your boy will be okay. Hope he's right as rain as soon as can be, missus Martin. There's no need to talk like that - "

"Good. Now go away," the pretty, angry, mother-lady at the door said. She stepped into the room and he heard the latch click behind her. He heard her steps on the clean white tile, then felt her weight settling on the bed by his knee, and finally her warm hand picked up his cold one and squeezed.

"How you feeling, honey?"

"Ma, I killed a dinosaur," that warm hand tightened on his again. She made a sound that might have been a laugh and might have been a sob.

"That's great, Joey. Tell me all about it."