Large Pacific Striped Octopus

On the way back from the bar she coils around Dolfein in a tangle of limbs, flesh digging against flesh, mouths hard and clashing. Boneless with need. He gulps for air, face tight and pulsing, and she mirrors him, quivering red, lips fluttering in the wavering light. Too many mouths, too many limbs, he is the thin rubber skin of a balloon wrapped around a bubble of water.

“Tonight,” he gasps, fumbling for the door, “this once, now, please, oh, please…” She presses him down, envelops him, he is flat and flailing under a hand the size of a bed. He holds her off, but she slips his grasp, too many arms to count, around his wrists, his legs, his chest, his neck.

Squeezes.

There is a moment: the light clenches into a pinprick and he feels himself going, panic coursing through his veins like cancer, scrabbling helplessly against her arm, digging for space in the bloated meat of his throat, useless, too late, too late, not enough… Her grip relaxes and she slides off him. The world comes rushing back, he feels the color draining out of his face, his body aches, it hurts to swallow.

He cannot move, cannot do anything but drink air greedily into his lungs. Alive, somehow, still, alive, alive, o! The night is young and the weekend is long; god willing he’ll live to see Monday.

Trust Everyone

Coming home late that night, Carlisle finds a man waiting for him in the dark, bleeding gently into the upholstery of his one good chair. “They found me,” says the man. “I’m sorry… take this…” and drops a thumb drive on the floor. “Trust… no… one…”

He’s dead, and that’s upsetting, but that’s what the police are for, or so he’s heard. So he calls them, and they send over a detective, and they give him a blanket and a cup of coffee and they have a nice little chat while the paramedics take care of the body. He tells them about the thumb drive, but they don’t care, so when everyone is gone he connects it to his laptop and would you believe it’s full of games? and books?

He feels bad about the man dying, but it was nice of him to give him a present to apologize for making a mess of his chair. He spends the evening shooting little frogs in a tank in a pixel sewer, and that’s pretty fun. Not worldshaking, or anything, but it’s a cute little game.

The books are all pretty terrible, uniformly lousy science fiction from the 1970s written by men who clearly had a problem with Women Today, so he just ignores them. A few days later, a heavyset fellow in a bloodstained coat shows up and asks for the drive, so Carlisle gives it to him. The games weren’t that interesting.

Go In Your Hole!

The foul creature is alert.
The foul creature cannot be soothed.
The foul creature cannot be shouted down.

In the storm drains lives an enemy.
In the houses lives an enemy.
In the hallways and the streets lives an enemy.
In the trees and the bushes lives an enemy.

The foul creature moves like industry.
The foul creature cannot be stopped.
The foul creature cannot be turned aside.

If it jumps, it must be held down.
If it speaks, it must be silenced.
If it feeds, it must be savaged.
If it drinks, it must be driven off.

The foul creature does not sleep at night.
The foul creature has teeth so white.
The foul creature must bite bite bite.

Astrea’s Heirs

They were not meant to be left so long alone, the Ladies, nor the war to drag on so long. Greeted as liberators, was the hope, a sprightly little springtime war, but somehow the months turn into years and the years into decades and the front lines do not move more than six inches in a year and the horizon turns black with the swarms of uncountable flies. You cannot move through the trenches without wading hip deep in blood, or so they speculate; it has been so long since any word has come back to them, the distant thunder of the guns is the only reassurance they have that the war continues.

But life goes on: the sun rises and sets, just as it ever did, and if the city is empty of everyone but themselves, well, what of it? Do the Ladies not contain a nation within themselves? They work the factories, they till the fields, they write the songs and the novels and the plays; they are artists and artisans, servants and politicians, baseball players and cigar smokers. They form gangs in the bottomlands, pull knives on each other in the alleys, spin straw into gold and blood into oil. The empire cannot fall while they live, or so they hope.

When, through chance or misfortune, this or that soldier finds his way into their city, they raise their ears at the unaccustomed sound of a boot, drop to the ground and slink out of the darkness, coyotes from the storm drains. They value their privacy, their own society, do the Ladies, and immigrants are welcome but settlers are not.

William Fitzgerald Turns the Page

He’d been hired to find the husband, an ex-writer supposedly taking some kind of dipso cure at a dilapidated ranch, and William Fitzgerald had done it, watched the light drain back into his eyes as the opiates let go, but he wasn’t happy about it; hopheads gave him the itch. The reunion went as expected, back on the bottle as soon as he walked in, the wife’s long hair not quite covering the week-old bruise on her face, William Fitzgerald an unnoticed grotesque against the faded yellow wallpaper.

They pay him off before the screaming starts in earnest and he’s gone.

Two weeks later he reads with bored disinterest of the husband’s death by suicide and the wife’s disappearance, a lot of tumult for a rich artist’s colony, and the second in as many months. One of their neighbors along the beach had beaten his wife to death and fled the country, killed himself or been killed in a town on the west coast of Mexico. The only thing that summons a flicker of attention, for the novelty, if nothing else, is the sidebar about the matriarchal societies that still flourish in the area. William Fitzgerald has an ophidian sense of sociology at most, but somehow he doubts he’d be much appreciated in a matriarchy.