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NOT SUITABLE

There was a time before jealousy. A time of happiness or at least quiet contentment.

And now there was this.

Looking around at everyone else wearing their Suits. Sleek, boxy, fitted, loose, every style and color and type worn with the unselfconscious ease of personal excellence. Of knowing they were wearing personal armor and strength and flight and immortality all tailored to their particular gene structure.

Even the ugliest eyesore Suits were beyond his reach.

“Bad genes.” That’s what he was told. Blunt and casually cruel. As though destroying dreams was just another everyday thing.

An Unsuitable. That’s what he was. Him and a handful of others. A minority segment of the population that were by turns pitied and reviled.

Cosmic rays. Contact with forever chemicals. Some terrible mix of events that happened pre-conception. All the different ways that a gene structure could be so damaged as to make someone forever Unsuitable.

He remembered lining up with the other Aged Tens. All excitedly describing what colors and styles they would turn their Suits once fitted. Planning where they would fly and what they would do. The Suit feats that they would accomplish.

Everyone secretly fearing that they would be found Unsuitable. Loudly boasting to cover up the sense of dread.

He’d been the only Unsuitable in his Sector that year. The only one hunching his shoulders under the weight of looks and whispers and unwanted notoriety.

It had been near unbearable but there was nothing he could do about it. His genes were what made him Unsuitable. But they were also what made up his body and being.

He’d looked at the research. A desperate and sad kid that suddenly had no friends as everyone else was exploring the wonders and joys of Suit life. He’d had plenty of free time on his hands to look things up.

There was no changing his Unsuitable status. Science had attempted to make changes. To rewrite genes, to splice in changes, to delete the bad and promote the good. A lot of people had volunteered to die in horrible ways before experimentation had been made illegal.

Some people couldn’t bear to live as an Unsuitable. They were a demographic with a high instance of suicide and drug and alcohol abuse.

He’d even had thoughts before. When he looked around the dinner table at his family in their Suits. When he went to school and no one wanted to get close to him. When those around him were warned about his “delicate constitution” and treated him as if he could be broken by a hard look.

From the time he was ten years old, he had felt as though all his dreams had died. Because in a world of wonder and joy, he was found to be Unsuitable for any of it.

He was a normal human in a world populated by gods. That’s how it had been described on the Not Suitable website. Gods and humans.

It wasn’t that he was defective. His genes were perfectly fine. Look at him. Two arms, two legs, a face, a body… he was completely and normally human.

It wasn’t his fault that his genes refused to accept fusion with a Suit.

It was something that had been done to him before he was born. Likely before he was even conceived. Some unlucky turn of events that resulted in the mutation of the cells that had become him.

He didn’t envy what he didn’t have. He was jealous of the opportunities that had been taken from him.

He was Unsuitable, but he was alive.

=END=

Allies & Enemies at Amazon
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VIGNETTE

The blood was black. Tar-like as it oozed from the shallow cut on his arm rather than the smooth up-welling of red from before.

It had been a gradual change. Painful at first until nerves became numb and dead.

Dead like me, he thought.

His vision had grown dim and narrow, as though a vignette filter had been snapped over his view of the world. His ears felt muffled, sound distant and directionless. His brain had become slow, his thoughts anchorless yet deep.

He’d thought that dying was terrifying and final. Instead, for him and others like him, it was a gradual transition from vibrancy to distant echoes.

There was an ache in his chest where his heart had once beat–thump thump–but had fallen to silence and stillness. It wasn’t pain, but loss. The realization that something that had always been had now ceased to be.

He was still moving. Still realizing. Still existing in some semblance of self.

But it was only a matter of time before he began to rot. When his skin would begin to slough off and the collagen between his bones would congeal and his flesh would fester and bugs would burrow into him.

He was dead, but he was still moving. He was a living soul trapped in a decaying flesh prison.

There was no treatment, no cure, no vaccine. Survivors out there, huddling in their hideaways, they could maybe be saved by some future medical science. But for those like him that had already been bitten–infected, killed–there was no turning back. No chance to return to normal.

There was only waiting for the inevitable loss of self that would culminate in mindlessness and the instinctive drive to consume human flesh.

He could already feel it. Not hunger as he once knew it, but something like it. The closest concept he could imagine.

Hunger had always been centered in the belly, but this was a whole body need for warmth and filling. A sense that if he didn’t fill himself, he would collapse empty and deflated after his body ate itself to nothing.

He was dead, but he was still dying. If he ate, he would taste warmth and life. He would be able to move and exist for a little while longer.

His mouth wouldn’t be so dry and shriveled. So tasteless and empty.

He walked toward the front door. Worked the locks and pulled the door open. And went out into the world.

To eat.

=END=

Panoply at Amazon
0 comments on "12 Days of Xmas: Eleanor"

ELEANOR

“🎶 Driving. Driving all night ’til the mornin’ come. Wanna see my bed, but first I’mma see the sun. Wishin’ you were here to whisper sweet things. Gonna close my eyes and visit you in my dreams.🎶”

He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he sang to fill the silence. The radio had been broken since before he bought the car.

He’d been driving since he left work. Had barely taken the time to change his clothes and wash the makeup off his face.

His eyes felt gritty and dry. He would stop for something to eat and drink but he barely had money for gas. There would be food when he got there, hopefully.

He’d gotten the call late and hadn’t hesitated to tell his boss he had to go. She’d been angry but understanding. He was grateful. It would have been hard finding a new job.

Things were hard all around. People were struggling. It made it hard to be kind even when kindness was the most necessary thing.

The car went over a bumpy spot in the road and he blinked hard to make sure his vision was clear.

It was a long dark stretch of road out there. An endless expanse of highway that seemed to go on forever, his headlights the only illumination.

There were tiny shiny eyes on the side of the road. Small animals darted here and there. Occasionally one would attempt to pass in front of the car.

He hoped he didn’t run any over. But there wasn’t time to stop. And there wasn’t anything he could do for them anyway. He was passing through their lives at close to 80 miles an hour.

“🎶I promise I’ll be there before you close the door. Hold on for me, my sweet Eleanor. Ohhh. Elea-nor. Ohhh oh oh-h ohhhh. Sweet Eleanor.

“🎶I’m drivin’ all night until the morning comes. All to see your face and hold you in my arms. My dreams are so sweet since I fell in love. With Elea-nor. Sweet, sweet, Eleanor.🎶”

eleanor.m4a

=END=

Fortress in the Eye of Time at Amazon
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ANYTHING

Snow Blossom had been sick for days. His fever had burned for nearly a week and finally he had stopped talking. He lay still on the bed, his skin hot to the touch.

Snow Lily mopped the sweat from her son’s forehead and neck. She had been caring for him since he had first fallen ill.

There was no medicine. The recent drought had caused more than food crops to wither. All pharmacies had been ordered to maintain their stocks for the wealthy and government officials.

Even if she’d had the coin to spend, Snow Lily had been unable to buy fever reducing herbs. No one would sell them to a peasant.

Her son was dying and there was nothing she could do other than wiping him down with wet rags and trying to get him to eat porridge. After five days he had become too weak to respond and not even rubbing his throat would get him to swallow.

He’s dying, she thought in despair.

“Don’t leave me, Snow Blossom,” she begged, pressing her face against his small chest as she wept. “I will give anything for your body to be healed. Anything.”

“ANYTHING?”

It resounded through her. Not sound. Deeper than sound. It pierced her through to the bone then stirred her marrow until she fell away from the bed and huddled on the floor, clutching at her chest and the heart that pounded within.

“YOU WILL GIVE ANYTHING FOR YOUR CHILD’S BODY TO BE HEALED?“

Snow Lily frantically looked around, but there was no one else in the room. Just her and the so still Snow Blossom. She couldn’t see if he was still breathing. Feared that he had stopped.

Tears flowed down her cheeks. She didn’t know what was speaking to her, but her desperation was stronger than her fear of the unknown. “Anything!” she screamed. “I will give anything for his body to be healed. Please. Give him to me.”

“WILL YOU GIVE YOUR LIFE?”

To die so her son could live? How could she hesitate? “Yes.”

It tore through her. Flooded through her veins and organs and overwhelmed her brain. And then it, whatever it was, rushed out of her.

And the empty husk of Snow Lily collapsed to the ground. Dead.

. *. *. *.

Snow Blossom weakly opened his eyes and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling.

His mouth was dry and his body ached as though he’d been sick for a long time. He felt tired and weak. He blinked a few times, then was unable to hold his eyelids up.

He didn’t know where he was or why he was here. The last thing he remembered was drinking the cup of tea offered by the “kind” old woman at the boarding house.

The poisoned cup of tea, he thought.

He and his friends had gone on vacation together and pooled their money to stay at the boarding house. One by one, the others had disappeared until he was alone.

He hadn’t believed the ghost stories the locals had fed them, but at the end he’d begun to fear that they were true. And so he’d run back to the boarding house and begged the nice old lady to go away with him before they were both murdered.

She’d patted his arm and told him to sit down. Have a cup of tea and calm down. He was hysterical. Nothing was happening. His friends would turn up, maybe they had simply lost their way?

Snow Blossom hadn’t wanted any tea, but he’d trusted the old woman that had been so helpful. So kind. So generous. So reminiscent of the grandmother he had loved.

He’d accepted the cup of tea after she had promised to go with him once they finished drinking.

And he hadn’t noticed anything strange with the taste, not with the amount of sugar that had been added. But then the room had begun to sway around him, only it was him that fell down.

And the pain that started in his belly and burned his throat consumed him.

And she stood over him, and her face wasn’t kind. And she didn’t make him think of his grandmother anymore.

And he died.

She killed me, he thought. She killed me and she killed the others. She killed us all.

There was no ghost, but there was an evil spirit. And she’d lived in that town and she’d killed the people that passed through.

But how am I here? he thought. Is this the local hospital?

The town wasn’t rich, but he would have thought a hospital or clinic would be better than this rough pallet and thin blanket.

He tried to open his eyes, but he was too weak. Against his will he fell back asleep.

And he didn’t know that a mother named Snow Lily had traded her life for her son’s body to be healed, but that her son’s soul had already fled. And that into that empty shell a recently murdered soul with the same name had been snatched from another world and pressed into place.

He didn’t and would never know why he lived again as someone else. He would simply be found by an aunt and taken away after his mother was buried.

He would never know Snow Lily. She would simply be another name mentioned to him. Yet another stranger that the original host had known and loved.

He would live in the body of her son and never know of the sacrifice she had made.

And the world would know of the great deeds of Snow Blossom and never think of poor Snow Lily.

=END=