by Scott Hale
Someone honked behind Asher. He looked into his rear-view mirror, blew them a kiss, and then floored it down the road. He wasn’t overtly feminine as a person, but if someone pissed him off, he’d be a sassy drag queen in a half a second flat. Nothing disarmed a person faster than a mouthy, muscled man whose hands you couldn’t follow.
Asher hauled ass through a yellow light at the next intersection and, peeling out, made a sharp turn into the nearest fast food joint. The line was long, like a-soup-kitchen-on-Christmas-long, so when he pulled up and claimed his spot amongst the rumbling desperate, he put the car in park, and got to work.
With his phone, Lux’s list, and his own additions, he had the invites sent out through social media in about five minutes. During that time, he’d barely budged but an inch in the drive-through, but that was fine. Like the sinner in a confessional waiting for the priest to get settled, it gave him time to reflect on this bad decision. This bad decision which consisted of a tub of food and a bucket of soft drink, and a small slice of apple pie. Like the teenagers of today loved to say over a cocktail of pills, cheap beer, and over-the-counter, under-the-covers prophylactics, only god could judge him.
Staring at his phone’s screen and the list of eighty he’d invited—most of whom had already accepted—a gnawing hole opened up in Asher’s stomach no amount of greasy carbs could fill. He’d known it for a while now, but with the way Lux had been acting lately, it had become unavoidable.
He didn’t care. He didn’t care about their “work,” or being an augur. He was tired of talking, day in and day out, about social justice and the patriarchy, gender roles and the spectrum of sexuality. He was tired of tearing himself apart and attaching labels to each idiosyncrasy, like some retail wretch tagging clothes on a rack. He still liked Lux, Echo, Ramona, and Fenton, but he didn’t love them like he wanted to love them. They were convenient, but he’d outgrown them. They didn’t make him happy; he wasn’t allowed to be happy around them. Happiness denoted compliance. Compliance was, according to Lux, the ultimate killer. The only way to improve something was to flay it to the bone, to be rid of the lies that rode like lice upon the flesh.
Maybe over the years Asher had become a simpleton, but hearing shit like that come out of Lux’s mouth without a hint, a morsel, of self-awareness, sounded absolutely retarded. He couldn’t be gay without being a statement. And he couldn’t be a statement unless it was Lux’s statement. Sure, he and the others agreed to their “mission” and what it all meant. But goddamn, what did it all mean? They were fighting just to fight, flaying just to flay. Aside from the occasional hatemonger, Bitter Springs wasn’t a bad place to be. Certainly better than other cities he’d gone to visiting family and friends. Lux would say he was giving up. Lux would say he’d lost his way. But he’d only lost it because it was her who’d brought him here.
After waiting a solid ten minutes, Asher rolled down his window and rolled up to the intercom.
“Can I take your order?” the worker buzzed, sounding not much different than the robots that would probably replace them years down the line.
Asher leaned out the window, opened his mouth to order, but the summer air passing through turned cold and he was reminded of fall. This was Lux’s last hurrah, he realized. Her dedication to equal rights and social justice was undeniable, but it wouldn’t be long until she reached that point in her routine where she became dormant. The collapse of Brooksville Manor was supposed to have been her summer swan song, and it hadn’t reached the chilling crescendo she’d hoped for. She was grasping at straws to remain relevant. The auguring would start soon, and they would pass judgment in the court of public opinion. He would have to talk, and goddamn it, he was tired of talking.
“Sir?” the intercom spat out in a garbled mess of letters.
Asher bit his lip. He’d lost his appetite. Laughing, shaking his head, and mouthing an apology there was no way anyone could hear, he turned out of the drive-through and back onto the road. He needed something more fulfilling than the shit he’d been eating these last eight years.
Lights blipped like beacons on the edge of Asher’s vision. Slowing with the traffic, he turned his head and muttered, “Fuck me Jesus,” as he caught a glimpse of the chaos unfolding behind the main stretch.
The Home and Garden had transformed into the Hospital and Cemetery. Four cop cars and a fire truck formed a perimeter around an ambulance, where paramedics and police, like well-dressed vultures, circled a covered body on a blood-soaked gurney. The vehicles’ emergency lights formed a blue and red sphere, and outside it, as if it were repellent, onlookers were gathered, contorting their bodies and straining their necks to have but a glimpse of the corpse that lay blooming under its blanket.
Asher’s instincts told him to watch the road. The car ahead of him had come to a stop. With a yelp, he slammed the brakes and skidded onto the rumble strip, narrowly missing a messy fender bender with the car or cars stacked up behind him.
Drivers zoomed past him, honking and flashing, and throwing up middle fingers so hard a few might’ve even strained their wrists. It didn’t matter to them that, for a moment, they’d both been ogling the crime scene with the same doe-eyed glee. That was the way it went in his circles, too, among those who prided themselves on being more open and understanding than the general population.
“An asshole is an asshole,” his last partner, Jared, had said.
Asher remembered laughing at him, because just as it had been then as it was now, his mind had been born, raised, and made a man-child in the gutter.
But for once in his life, Jared was serious. “Doesn’t matter who you are, what you call yourself, what you’ve been through; an asshole is an asshole. Even the outcasts have a pecking order.”
“I know you’re talking about Lux,” Asher had said, rolling his eyes.
Jared had been talking about Lux, and when it came down to it, Asher was given a choice to choose between her or him. He chose the Light. He always did.
By the time Asher had made it back to Bitter Springs’ Community College’s off-campus housing, social media had already convinced itself that it was Paul Zdanowicz’s corpse the cops had pulled out of the Home and Garden. The cause of death was inconsistent—in a matter of five minutes, he’d been stabbed, skinned, burned alive, beaten to a pulp, and curbed-stomped—but a few details found purchase in the perverted minds of the city’s amateur reporters: Paul’s face had been degloved, though a piece of it had been found snagged on a hook in the Lumber aisle; and the word “confederate” had been blistered into his perineum—the official term for what quickly devolved in reports into the perennial favorites of taint, gooch, and grundle.
Absorbed in the newsfeed, Asher somehow parked his car, made it to the front door, and down the hall to his apartment unscathed by pushy stoners and clingy frat boys. Entering his apartment, he found the discussion had shifted from Paul’s death being the fourth in a hate-crime-spree to the killer’s choice of the word “confederate.”
Lux was not well-liked, but she was frequently read; her influence was undeniable, and her good favor hard to grow and even harder to maintain. It had been the reason why Asher became one of her augurs. It was one of those us or them situations, and being a sixth grader at the time, nothing sounded better than belonging to an “us.” The “them” kept him around because he let the straight girls grope him—“It’s okay,” they would cry. “He doesn’t mind!”—and he wasn’t as gay as the other gay guys in their grade. He could almost pass for straight, someone had told him once. Like that was some shit he should be proud of. And shit, he had been. Once. And then some.
It was that us versus them mentality that gave Lux her power. Not necessarily naturally here in Bitter Springs, but on the Internet, which in turn gave her a presence and a voice that rose higher than the usual wails on the wind. It was that us versus them mentality which made Lux more important to most than they actually wanted her to be. It was that us versus them mentality that transmitted Lux’s words and actions l
ike signals into the minds of her allies and enemies, allowing them to take root, to take form; to eat away at their patterns of speech until the prescribed discourse replaced their own, like a cuckoo bird taking the place of a pushed hatchling, and being fed to maturity by the very thing that wanted to kill it.
So, confederate. Lux had used the word multiple times in her last blog post, the one that went out prior to Paul’s death. And here it was, over and over again, being pounded out on keyboards by kids and adults who probably hadn’t used the word since their last class on the American Civil War. It was a good word. A good word to use in auguring. A confederate could mean a supporter, or it could mean a bigoted individual still clinging to racism under the guise of heritage. The difference between the two being whether or not the “C” was capitalized, but that didn’t matter. People didn’t pay attention to shit like that.
Confederate was a good word. It was a word covered in bristles and thorns, and had a sharp taste other words didn’t when they came out your mouth. It was the cornerstone of the monument to come, Asher considered, plopping himself down onto his couch; a throne, really, with Lux upon it; Echo to her right; but who would stand to her left? The augurs? No, the lack of symmetry would make Lux sick. So if not them, then who?
“Blah.” Asher lay down on the couch, dropping his phone on the floor. So over-the-top. All of it. So over-the-fucking-top. He grabbed the TV remote and cruised the channels until landing on some glossy, empty, and utterly forgettable horror movie remake from the early 2000s. It was trash, but if trash was anything, it was sweet. Twenty minutes in, he was out.
Asher woke up to rolling credits and some nu-metal song that was playing over them. He couldn’t explain it, but he had a mad case of the heebie-jeebies, which, though off-putting, made him smile, because the word made him think of Ramona, and how badly she wanted to punch him every time said it.
It was dark outside. The only light in his apartment came from the TV screen, and the faint glow of the moon just barely pushing through the windowpane, as if the clouds that covered it were in league with the sun. In a building with forty other students, Asher somehow felt disconnected from the world. That which wasn’t touched by the harsh illumination of his television or cell phone was lost to the gray dark, where vague outlines lurked amongst the mildewed vapors of the central air.
Asher sat up, broke the crust on his lip with a raspy, “Goddamn,” and leaned over on his elbow. He grabbed his cell phone off the floor from where he’d dropped it earlier. He had about one hundred notifications, thirty texts, five missed calls… and why the hell was there blood on his phone?
He went from comatose to practically caffeinated as he sat up, the glaring device oozing a chunk of gore from its charger port. Instead of geeking out and shaking it off, he watched the piece of pink, mushy meat inch down his wrist and forearm, like a slug. His throat tightened, as if to seal off his esophagus from the sick threatening to escape his gut.
And then he did flick it away, as he felt an intense stinging at the spot on his arm where the fetid lump had stained it. And he dropped his phone, too, as the foul ejaculate continued to seep from the seams of the phone’s plastic shell.
“Whatthefuck?” Asher’s knees shot into his chest and he scooted sideways down the couch, as far away as possible from the phone. “Holy Jesus jumping Christmas shit!”
Damn near asthmatic, Asher stopped breathing and bent over the edge of the couch. The cell phone’s screen lit up. A text message ran like a news ticker across its upper half. It was from Ramona. He could tell by the icon he’d used in place of her photo—a pink pig that looked as if it had eaten its way halfway through a make-up kit. A pretty shitty thing, all things considered, but that was the nature of their relationship. After all, the picture she used in the place of his photo was a turd-shaped cock with a rainbow flag planted at the top of it.
“Ramona,” Asher whispered. Did he leave the voice assistant thing-a-ma-jig on? “Call Ramona.” He clenched his teeth, leaned farther forward. “Call—”
His eyes lingered on the text message.
It read thusly:
Did you see what Lux said about you?
He hadn’t. And it was the last thing in the world he cared about at this moment. Because there was something in his living room with him. Something standing on the edge of the shadows, in that no man’s land, where perception and reality gave birth to horrible imaginings best suited for purgatorial vaults and breached Membranes.
Asher had always wanted to be a writer, but now, he just wanted to live through this night.
It wasn’t human. It couldn’t be human. Seven feet tall. Translucent. A billowing, gelatinous bell for a body; from it, countless undulating limbs, thin and thick, unfurled. Not flying, rather, floating; swimming, even; riding on the hidden currents of an uncharted sea.
It wasn’t human, but it wanted to be. Its body twisted like a sheet, as if it were trying to wring from its form the telling signs of its morbid symmetry. At first it was male, then female, and then both—a perfect harmony of each manifestation of gender and sex from every point along the spectrum.
Aroused, disgusted, but mostly horrified, Asher leaned in and learned that the vein-like structures that grew along the creature, inside and out, weren’t veins, but sentences—vessels comprised of words and punctuations through which a dark oil pumped in short, forceful movements, as if it were mimicking the brutal hammering of a piston. If he forced his eyes, Asher could almost make out the sentences. It wasn’t gibberish. Adverbs, adjectives; verbs, conjunctions—their meaning was lost on him, and yet he could feel it all the same; a great, bullying swell of emotions. The same way one might feel if they stared into the sun. To understand, to know anything more than its surface level, he would have to burn out his eyes, and live with their secrets in the lonely dark of his mind.
Asher was certain that this was the killer, and it must’ve decided this delay had been torturous enough, because with one graceful, eerily silent push, it thrust itself onto him, over him, and laid its stinging limbs upon him.
Its form was male now. Its shoulders, the color of smudged glass, were wider; its torso had folded itself, and used the word veins as stand-ins for pectorals and abs. It had no legs, save for the appendages that waded on the air, but from where a pelvis might be, the limbs wrapped together, forming a penis-shaped trunk that was heavy with the hateful substance that coursed throughout its body. It pressed down on Asher’s crotch with a stomach-turning weight, and then split apart, from improvised frenulum to absent scrotum, forming a grinning smile of tissue inside which rows of teeth were fixed—the building blocks of their jagged form also words. Words, such as gay, faggot, hate, pathetic, and sick.
Asher managed to whimper. And whimpering, he said, “Don’t… don’t hurt me.”
The killer had no eyes, but because looking at it was like looking through a window, Asher felt as if he were being watched, being judged, being consumed. He felt the same way he felt when he used to give presentations in class, or once, in the auditorium, when he’d been convinced to run for president, despite not being nearly as extroverted as the world had decided him to be. He felt thousands of eyes gazing upon him through that gelatinous mesh that gave the killer its shape. It made him want to die, more so than the creature that straddled him, its gasping, grinning cock in his lap.
“Gay men are still men,” the killer whispered. Its voice was neither male nor female, but something else, something alien. “They are one of us, until they are done with us.”
The killer raised its limbs—a writhing bouquet of glassy tentacles—and pressed them against Asher’s clavicle. Hot, shooting pains drove into his flesh, and he drove his body into the couch to break free. But he was harpooned, fixed to the creature; the pain it made and pain he felt the singular bond between them.
“It hurts so bad,” Asher said, voice breaking.
His skin bubbled along his neck and chest. A necklace of blisters formed and immediately pop
ped. While their slick, stinking fluid oozed down his nipples, more blisters formed; little domes of rancid filth.
“You mother fucker.”
Asher drove his fists into the killer’s torso.
“Get off of me!”
And when his knuckles would’ve met the meaty bell of its body, the killer vanished. Or at least, he had thought it had. Asher sat there, reclined, wracked with pain, his mitts ready to bludgeon, and still he could feel the killer’s presence. Like a ghost, it haunted the place where it had once hovered. It was still with him, but it couldn’t touch him.
A touch of trauma kept him rooted, but after a few minutes, the paralysis waned. He sat up, his shirt drenched in blood and pus. With the harsh light of the TV, he could see it, the killer. It wasn’t a hallucination. The thing was in his living room, watching him. At times, there would be a new dimension added to his living room—a portion of its bell-shaped torso, or the faint outlines, like fossils in rock, of its tentacles. It hadn’t gone anywhere, and yet it couldn’t hurt him anymore.
Asher sat there awhile longer—hours, maybe—staring into that space, searching for signs the same way scientists scoured the stars for life. There were hints, promises, and though he couldn’t always see it, he knew it was there. It refused to leave his side. Such a terrible dread filled him when he wondered if it would be this way forever.
With dawn, the living room lost its deathly qualities. The killer hadn’t left. It was quiet, contemptuous; hidden like a spider in the folds of reality.
Frozen to his spot on the couch, Asher found with the sun he began to thaw. Muscles aching, drenched in the acidic run-off of fear, he carefully came to his feet. When his body nearly touched where the killer resided, there was a dimensional shift, as if it were making room for him, as if to say he could go where he wanted, but it wouldn’t be far behind.
Asher’s mouth was hot and raw. His tongue flaked. The blisters on his chest had mushroomed into ripe, pale yellow bulbs. Overdosed on his own adrenaline, his ears buzzed, he couldn’t breathe well, and parts of his body had taken on a phantom limb quality.