Romance

Trigona Necrophaga

Rain rattles against the windowpane and she is six feet deep in the bedding, moving inward and down. Outside the wind shakes the houses and the apartments and through the rain the sound of the freeway has dwindled to almost nothing.

The streets are not truly empty; there is never a time of day or night where something is not moving or just passed, and if the streets are still then a plane is passing overhead, a train is rolling in the distance, a siren is howling in the hills, a bell is ringing in the harbor.

But close enough.

Next to her someone snores quietly, two floors up and three units over someone coughs wetly. She may or not be the only one awake, but she is not alone, never alone, her sisters may never see her nor know her name, but they are bound together through walls and floors and the sound of the rain. The alchemy of the gut, the sour taste of the meat.

Tomorrow has a gravity like the edge of a cliff, drags at her bones like the tide. In the dark hours she staves off sleep, eyes clear and unblinking, legs and arms unresting, heart stuttering in her chest. Bones ache, teeth grind; time cannot be stopped but she tries. She cannot live past sunrise, and every minute clawed out of the night is a minute free of the dread beast of the future.

Brachypelma emilia

The doctor stares at his hands, at the bright line of new flesh peering through the slash a ragged edge on the console had torn in his palms. (The ship shakes, turbulence or fire or just miscalibration; it can be hard to tell.) Underneath, he is pale as a jelly, unlined, raw, throbbing against the limits of his old body. This is not new, in any sense, but still he is always taken unprepared, always startled and unhappy as a boy approaching puberty. This body is worn as comfortable as an old shoe, molded to him, friendly and familiar.

He locks the console and retreats to his room for privacy. Better they not see this, the young pyro in her leather jacket or the snobbish mathematician with his red star; they mean well, and they’ve grown used to his eccentricities, but it’s a delicate tension; he doesn’t want them to see him in his unfurling.

It takes days of patient, bloody work. He scrapes himself raw, runs a razor from ear to jaw, over collarbones and along the sternum, across the points on his hips and down the flat plane of his shins. He wedges fingers clumsy with new youth under his skin and pulls, a deep arachnid ache. The air hits his carapace at last and he shudders, an electric current of worry. He forces air into empty lungs, slaps his chest until his hearts stutter and start, twists and turns until his bones harden and his skin solidifies.

The face in the mirror is new but the eyes however are old.

The Duchess and the Pirate

The duchess was captured at sea, and held for ransom by the dashing pirate. She: buxom, bowlegged and muscular from a lifetime of riding, surly. Him: Leggy, raw and rude in his masculinity, dashing. A former sailor in the royal navy, he grew tired of the floggings and the scurvy and jumped at the chance to go rogue when his own ship was captured. He worked his way from the very bottom of a crew of two hundred to commanding his own ship.

The duchess is intrigued.

Sparks fly, of course, in the close confines of the ship they can’t get away from each other, but she has languished herself, and is tired of forever trailing after her husband, a civil servant in the foreign corps. Her mind is sharp, and her hands strong, and she has been wasted in domesticity; she is quick at the front of every boarding party, fierce and urgent and proud.

The pirate falls for her as she screams defiance atop her first kill.

Will they make it work? Can love — true love — blossom in the salt spray, in a time of war and plunder, between two so different people? Can they find space together to indulge in their primal, physical needs? Perhaps in a lifeboat, a gunwale, the close, airless confines of his cabin? Reader, it will all end happily; never fear.

Phylloxera

Born to a mother like our mother before, and hers before her, and so on, generations back and up the spiral twist of the vine, we took to earth and to root when the chill came into the air, the first nip of cold any of us had known after a civilization of summer. Root was safety, root was sleep; the tender flesh of the stock and the sweet sap all we needed to sleep the long winter through.

They knew we were coming, our mothers, planned for the hope of us, though never they’d see us; when we woke again, buoyed up to the sun by the rising tide of the sap, breaking black earth, spreading delicate wings, they were long dead, centuries dead. We have already lived far past our time, cradled in slumber, and wake already gravid, brim-full of portent. Time is short, and the fundatrix yet to be born — we will not live to see her or her impossible bride.

Uprooted once, borne out of our sphere, we found food and safety in alien climes, and spread; they chased us with toads and with poisons but we spread, leaf to root, fatter and more fecund than ever before, till they despaired of us and imported the old stock to keep us at bay. Still we thrive, ground to gall, mother to daughter; daughter to mother; living well is the best revenge.

Psalm 91

A foot the size of a house, and he’s enraptured. Starry-eyed, David stares up and up and up, past thighs the length of an office building, a chest the width of a city block, to a head you could fit all of city hall into. He’s never seen anything so powerfully erotic.

The streets are lit with the fires tearing through the city, a guttering light licking against the unnatural darkness that swept through town when the power plant exploded, soft as candleglow against that titanic hide. He picks his way determinedly through rubble in Its gargantuan wake, trailing the siren song of screaming destruction.

As he gets closer, the streets empty of everyone except soldiers. He gives up trying to explain himself after a well-meaning but mildly alarmed corporal insists on personally escorting him back to the lines. They can’t understand, and it doesn’t really matter.

In the final block he rams a garbage can through a plate glass window and climbs 70 flights of stairs to the roof, barely keeping his feet as the building shudders and jumps. At the top he’s barely up to Its shoulder, and he has a frisson of vertigo as he climbs over the edge and curls his toes into nothing. Heart in his mouth, he leaps, out and down, betting everything on love.