Stories

Swollen Glands

Lily’s jaw aches, just below the corners of her wide lips. A full sensation, more like a bloated stomach than a sore tooth. It’s been there all day, ever since she woke from a dream of delicious release, but in the last hour it’s grown near intolerable.

Rue and Arlene, on Halloween

“Have I ever told you that I hate this time of year?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Rue swings her feet, kicking at the air; a tiny dinosaur and a harried zombie meander along the street three stories below. “You do?”

Arlene hums in reply, and glares at a giggling mass of sexy fruits. A bare-chested nurse runs after them, abs glistening in the fading light. “It’s just so surface.”

Rue’s Dead Thing

Dead thing sits on the floor, watching. Doesn’t move an inch. Its skull is a crushed mess and one of its eyes popped as it died, a mass of slime dripping down from its ruined cheek onto one of its perfectly formed and perfectly unblemished breasts. Death’s eager embrace didn’t care at all for its body; the trap’s jaws only took its too-curious head.

Her Hands Are Always the Same

Her hands are always the same, soft and firm as old well-worn leather and covered with fine traceries of scars. Some of the scars you recognize—the finger she almost lost slicing onions when she laughed too hard at one of your jokes, the scattered dots where bees objected to her plucking a chunk of honeycomb, the shiny burn-scars on her fingertips that she’d had to beg your help with. Most of them you do not. She was already ancient when you first met.

It Had to Happen

“The strangest thing,” Carol will say, afterwards, “was that I knew it was right. It was—have you ever seen someone do something, and known it was wrong, without even having to think about it?”

“Of course,” the interrogator will say, “like a wild animal mauling someone.”

“Exactly! But,” she’ll reply, “no, you don’t get it. It—it looked like that, sure. But it was right to do it. It was doing what was best for both of us, for everyone.”