written by Susan
February 3, 2022
0
written by Susan
written by Susan
February 3, 2022
0
written by Susan
February 3, 2022
0
written by Susan
February 3, 2022
0
written by Susan
February 3, 2022
0
At first, I had every intention of doing the right thing. I was not a religious woman but even if I had been, it wasn’t like there was a commandment that said, “Thou shalt return what thou find.” But I was a simple woman and there was a feeling inside me that demanded I return him to his owner. It was his fault that I didn’t, really.
In the summer of 2055, I found him lying on the sidewalk baking under the sun-filled sky. Frankly, when I saw him I almost ran away. Nobody goes outside anymore because it’s just too hot and the administration issued warnings that the outside air was no longer safe. People disregarded these warnings to the danger of themselves and their children until the administration made laws prohibiting anyone from going outside without prior authorization and equipment.
That was exactly why I still came down from my apartment 423 floors above ground level at least once a week to clear my thoughts. The chance to be completely alone even if I had to walk around with an oxygen mask and an umbrella was worth it. Needless to say, when I found a random man lying face down, his naked body badly burned on an old abandoned sidewalk at ground level; it made me nervous first and then concerned second.
The concrete around him was busted. I looked up at the structure I already knew was there. Many people lived and worked in the buildings that stretched from ground level and connected to what used to be the first space station but now was much more than that. The structure connected each building together at height intervals, in essence extending Earth outward on all sides via the man-made structures.
There was no way for me to tell how far he had fallen. I was deliberating if I could even report him found without giving away that I had come down when he moved. His left arm moved and he slowly pushed himself onto his back.
Pale blue eyes that were so beautiful that they could only be digitally manufactured looked at me for instruction. They showed no concern over the burned state of his backside or the circumstances of where he was. He confirmed my suspicion when he sat up and said, “I’m sorry, but I seem to have been reset. If I am not yours, could you please guide me to the nearest service station?”
As I said, I had every intention of doing the right thing. I had never owned a robot before but I knew they were high maintenance like any advanced piece of equipment. Generally, only one percent owned such a luxurious piece of equipment. I was lucky to afford my cramped little apartment and the utilities.
I tried not to talk to it. I figured it would be like naming a puppy, if you could avoid getting personally involved then it would be easier to leave it in a hallway later. It was the small things that made me change my mind. Little things it did things on its own. Like it took my umbrella on the way back and held it for me until we were back inside. Can you imagine? He fell thousands of feet, was burned on one side and he held an umbrella just for me.
I had no idea where the nearest service station was so I took him home first so I could look up the locations online. I think I was still going to return him until he said, “I can cook.”
written by Susan
February 3, 2022
0
written by Susan
February 3, 2022
0
Don’t go, I thought. There’s so much you’re going to miss.
I see your eyes, and although they don’t move from their skyward haunt, I imagine that you are there—just waiting to breathe. Waiting for me to start your heart again because it must have been a whim that it stopped in the first place. It was a game that you were playing to get me to come play with you in the middle of the night like you so often wanted.
I used to stay up all night and wander the house. Creep from my room and check the fridge just in case something new and appealing hit my nose. I never knew if my shuffling in the kitchen woke you up or if you waited for me, but as I rolled my feet like a cereal ninja, I would hear your soft laugh. So I would deviate and kiss your peach fuzz forehead. Cover you up if you were cold, pull them down if you were hot. You loved when I would flip your pillow so you could feel the cool side. Always before I left, I would kneel on the floor and put my head on your chest. Like we practiced so many times, your arms would wrap around my head and give me a hug that I knew took all your concentration.
I always felt safe hearing your heartbeat when we hugged, something I relied on since you were a baby slung haphazardly over my shoulder. You loved that when everyone treated you so carefully as if you would break, that I held you like a sack of potatoes. You learned that way to hang on to Sissy. To wrap your arms around my neck and your legs around my waist and hang on with everything you had and laugh about it.
That’s all I wanted.
For you to hang on while I fixed everything. To breathe and look at me and tell me that it’s alright that I didn’t wake up last night. To let me hear your heartbeat one more time while I hugged you.
To ask you not to go, because there’s so much that I am going to miss.
written by Susan
February 3, 2022
0
Sometimes I can still see the bright lights of Vegas. The flashing bulbs that reflected off the glossy streets at night visit me in the darkness. I was strutting out of the Cosmopolitan in a gold-sequined cocktail dress when the colors converged and exploded, leaving me blind and pissed. The old hag wasn’t supposed to die for another ten years, but there I was, just shy of thirty and the newest blind Fate.
Some women are born with the gift of sight, but I’m not one of those. I was born with a special gift of touch, which up until that point just meant that I had a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Some dresses felt warm and slick when I touched them and made me nauseous with remnants of the last cheap whores who tried them on. Some felt soft and comforting because they were handled with care, but they generally looked like they were made from a Do It Yourself kit. Needless to say, I grew accustomed to wearing unsavory things that looked fantastic.
As far as Fates go, I was one of the best. Granted, my perceptions were a gift from God, but I had a certain talent for storytelling that made life worthwhile for anyone who crossed my loom. But it wasn’t always that way. Realizing that my life as Anna Snow was over and I would be called Sister by a room full of blind lunatics made my first few years a little tense.
It was during my first week that I met our young protagonist. I had been weaving souls flawlessly for hours before coming onto one that I couldn’t place. I knew that souls were like veins. It took a practiced touch to distinguish one from another and even more, practice to know which ones should cross for a moment or a lifetime. As a Fate, my job was to braid these fragile souls together and form their Story. I was a divine tool. I was supposed to just know … without knowing. The contradiction wasn’t lost on me.
But hers felt like a dandelion. It was soft and vulnerable, and I had no idea what to do with it. I spent hours with it cradled in my left hand while I strummed and stroked the other souls with my right, looking desperately for others like it.
My stomach growled. No matter how many times I ran over the other souls nearby, the only ones that stood out were ones I thought were incompatible. One felt like a bizarre guitar string… It was discordant. The other felt crisp but smelled like burnt wood.
When I finally snapped, my stomach was growling impatiently, and my grip on her soul was less than gentle. “When can I get a fucking burger?”
The old weaver that I dubbed Hagniss for reasons that will become obvious later, chuckled from the left behind me. Being blind was a bitch.
“Why is that so funny?”
“We don’t eat anymore, Sister.”
One reflexive jerk, and she was gone, nothing but a soft fuzzy soul dangling from my hand. I must have made a noise because everything stopped and became quiet. No one moved. I wanted to run my hand along the length of her soul to make sure it really snapped, but I couldn’t risk the noise. These women had been Fates for a long time. They could see better by sound and touch than they could when they had eyes. Besides, I could feel her lifeless thread in my hands.
I was in deep shit.
I heard Hagniss push her chair back and the whisper of fabric and the crackle of old bones as she stood. “What’s wrong, Sister?”
“Nothing.” I would never admit fault. If God didn’t like it, he could have replaced me in a heartbeat.
When a few minutes went by and I remained unpunished, I cleared my throat and shifted in my seat to give the illusion that I was going to continue. The sound of the looms resumed and I heard Hagniss sit back down. “Very well, then.”
I had no idea what to do. I had her severed soul in my hand and no idea where it came from. With the busy looms and somewhat psychotic hums as background noise, I ran my right hand along the thread. Too long. It was too long. It must have snapped from another lifetime altogether. I felt along the woven cloth and my hand shook. There was a feathery ripple along the cloth where her absence had unraveled the souls. At least a handful of souls were barely laced together. There was no fixing it without unraveling the whole thing and starting over. I may have been naïve and reckless, but not stupid.
I suppose that was where my stubbornness came in handy. If I couldn’t fix a mistake that was already centuries old, I could at least fix it from that moment on. As I wove her carefully between Guitar String and Burnt Bark, I occasionally pulled in an array of other souls that while I was sure didn’t resonate, would push and pull her to others that did. I didn’t realize then the full extent of my mistake.
written by Susan
September 3, 2021
0
It took months to get here, even though it was clear now that all the other options were never going to work from the start. Like a drowning man, he had to cling to all the buoys before admitting that there was nothing left to do but sink into the abyss.
And make no mistake about it. It was a deep chasm to fall into, but there was no better place to fall so far. Some people said love was like jumping off a cliff or drowning in the ocean. He disagreed. To him, love was learning to breathe underwater.
So here it is. Sitting outside again on a clear, starry night with Seong Mi. His eyes locked up at the stars as he took a deep breath and prepared himself to say what he hadn’t ever intended but somehow had already said many times in the last few months. Seong Mi, for her part, was mostly silent. That itself a testament to how the two were finally coming back into alignment. Mostly silent because she couldn’t help a final, “Are you sure?”
He chuckled, glancing down at her and offering a nod and a smile to show how alright he finally was. “I’m sure. The melancholy, the discordance…I think it’s been because I was fighting myself. And not just you, this time. We tried, Seong. We tried so hard that I think it was hurting more that way.” He leaned over and knocked shoulders with her lightly. “You can feel it too, right? We’re closer now than we’ve ever been and I think that’s why. We want the same thing. Maybe not the same ways, but your goals and mine are one. I appreciate how hard you’ve tried lately to hold us up, but there is no letting go. Not yet. Maybe never.”
She winced, looking away. “Never is a long time. That could be how long we have to wait.”
She snapped her head around at the chuckle he gave in response as well as the muttered, “Probably so.”
“Have you gone mad.” She demanded.
“Yes.” His chuckle had broken down into a slightly mad laugh at this point. It was crazy enough that her lips twitched as she resisted the urge to smile. Hell, if it made him that happy.
“You too.” He murmured. “I’m not doing this alone. You agree with me and you know it.”
“I do, but I don’t know if I can say it.” She sighed and flopped back onto the cold grass to get a better view of the stars.
“Technically, you said it first.” He smirked. ‘Remember? If you can’t be mine, then I’m yours.’
“I was being rediculous.” She whined.
“You were being honest. You don’t like not being connected to him.”
“It can’t be any more serious than that. It’s the pressure that he doesn’t like.” She muttered and rolled away.
“Pretty sure that he’s complained about us deciding how he feels about things before.” He countered, for once completely unswayed by her petulance.
“THIS is not the argument with which to use his logic.” She snapped.
“Fine. Then as a counter-argument, our decision and feelings are not debatable nor do they require validation, confirmation or a fucking receipt. Love isn’t a fucking transaction.”
She sat up abruptly and smacked him on the chest. “You fucking cad. You used that word.”
He grabbed his chest and sat up, glaring at her for once again, not understanding. “Oh piss off, seriously? Do you think that using it somehow invalidates what we want to say? I could go into a long diatribe about love and all its forms, but that’s really just pussyfooting around. Isn’t it? Put a fucking box around everything physical and toss it away. Sex…sex is not love. Sex has no fucking room to even stand where we are.”
“Bullshit. You still want him.”
“We do because, fuck you, we aren’t dead. But this whole conversation isn’t about sex.” He sighed and scratched the back of his neck. “We’re not dead, Seong. There’s no one that I want more. Frankly, I’d be fine telling the whole world to fuck off. But that’s not really what this is about. This is about a simple observation. One that has taken months of deliberation because it’s not smart. It’s likely the worst decision that we can make together, but we’ve tried everything else and rather than feeling free, the alternatives have made us fucking unhappy. And why? Why was it so important that we distance ourselves and create lines where there doesn’t have to be any.”
“Lines are important because they protect him.” She reasoned.
“No, lines were drawn to protect us. We know where the lines are and we never forget. But that has nothing to do with forcing ourselves to find replacements or create distance just to prove we can. What you said? It got stuck and I’ve been thinking about it. And you know, since I started thinking about it- I’ve gotten fucking happier.” He huffed a soft melodic laugh. “He can be mad if he wants. The fact is that on some level, we can and will provide what he needs. He’ll continue looking for his perfect love and we’ll support him every day in any way that we can because we love the fuck out of him. Unconditionally. If he wants to be petty and angry because he’s having a danger night, we’ll handle the flames because it’s worth it. If he wants to ignore us until he feels like we’ve lost interest, it’ll be a really long, lonely time but we have goals and we’re persistent as fuck. We’ll still be there.”
“And if he finds his perfect love?” She murmurs, shifting over to lay her head on his lap. “What is your grandmaster plan then?”
He hums at that, his hand raising to trace a strand of hair from her face. “So we’ll love him more. I can’t really see how anyone can have too much love.”
“Won’t it hurt?”
“No more than it has trying to ignore it for the last few months. Personally, I may still want to make him kneel…but we’re fucking switches. We’re his whether he wants us or not. I don’t see any use ignoring it anymore.”
After a moment of silence, she sighs and plays the mediator between them and their unspoken audience. “So what exactly does this change? What do we want by saying this?”
“Nothing at all. Maybe I just want to share it the right way. Since last time I was too upset to get it right. I was pining and pouting like a fucking child and I didn’t understand what I had versus what I didn’t. I have…the best friend I could ever ask for. I have someone that I care for more than anyone else on this earth right now…and he doesn’t have to do a damn thing differently than he has for months. Just accept a fucking warm and fuzzy compliment.”
written by Susan
September 3, 2021
0
“What is this?” He muttered, blue eyes narrowed at the surprise that his ridiculous twin left on his bed.
“I would think that’s rather obvious.” Seong Mi yawned and looked down at her cherry pink nails as if she were bored, even if it was impossible to hide how absolutely proud she was of herself.
Obvious indeed. In his bed, fucking Shibari-tied with a baby blue ribbon was a man. Probably. Well, most certainly. She was fucking crazy, but not a criminal. So logic said that the thing on his bed was an adult, but the lithe body was lacking most of what Seong Bin considered masculine. Was the lack of body hair natural? Jesus. “How long has his…thing…been tied? It looks a bit red.”
“That’s because he likes it. It hasn’t been that long. It’s not like it’s going to fall off. I thought you were the kinky one.” She snorted and leaned over the bed to run her fingers through the man’s hair and coo at him.
Seong Bin took a calming breath, looking away from the sight and starting to count in hopes of achieving peace before he spoke again. It rarely worked, but flaming at her was useless. Her pouting was much, much worse than just humoring her most of the time. “What gave you the idea that he is my type?
At that, she looked up from her affectionate petting and frowned. “Of course he is.”
“He’s not. He’s pretty, don’t get me wrong but we could have absolutely nothing in common.” He cast an apologetic look at the eager-eyed…. pup? Yeah, that’s absolutely what this guy was. A fucking puppy.
“S-E-X, Bin. This is about sex. You don’t have to TALK for sex.” She sat up and pointed one of those long pink nails and Seong Bin knew she was about to preach and countered as quickly as he could.
“Bullshit. Did you fuck him?” He was 90% sure that he’d know if she had. The brat was a bigger sap than he was and he wasn’t about to be handed the blame in this weird unnamed war. Seong Bin glanced down at his present and immediately barked out a laugh. Trussed up as he was with his privates twitching with each shake of his head with how the ribbon was leashed, the young man answered for her by a vehement shake of his head. “You are a fucking hypocrite. I don’t even want to know how you got him tied up without any fuckery.”
She opened her mouth to answer before she stopped and rolled her eyes. “I was just trying to help.”
“You can’t help me. You can’t even save yourself.” He muttered, stalking forward with a pair of scissors to cut the guy free. The man made a few muffled noises until Seong Bin finally stopped to remove the ball gag from his mouth.
“That’s part of a song.” Was the croaked response.
“No shit.” Could you give real life League honors? Because if so, he’d get Tilt-proof.
Seong Bin cut the loop around his ankles when Mi interjected. “It would have unraveled by itself if you’d have pulled the ribbon around his dick first.
“Never going to happen.” He growled.
“Is anyone going to fuck me?” The words came from the newly freed present. For fuck’s sake.
“NO.”