Queermance Anthology, Volume 1

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Queermance Anthology, Volume 1 Page 5

by Queermance Anthology- Volume 1 [MM-FF] (v5. 0) (epub)


  ‘That’s exactly what we’re getting at,’ he replies. ‘Bless your soul, Lucy in the sky.’ He tips an invisible hat and walks off, hand in hand with his possible-boyfriend.

  ‘They together again?’ Emily asks. She’s got a binder on, I notice, and loose shorts. Hair styled different, jagged and short.

  ‘I dunno,’ I say. ‘Maybe? I can’t keep up.’

  ‘Shall we?’ she asks, offering her arm. ‘The State Library’s doing a thing.’

  We make our way there, dodge the drunk men and accidentally find ourselves on a road where they haven’t blocked off the traffic. But we arrive on the steps whole, and join the line to get in. I can’t stop giggling and Emily keeps going shhhh even though she’s laughing, too.

  After a zillion steps, we’re led into the dome and the chairs are all gone, though the study desks remain, and projected on the walls and roof are colours, twirling. The whole room is silent, everyone inside takes in the sight. It takes me a while to figure out that I’m looking at a giant rhinovirus on the roof, its DNA strands crawling around the room, around the doorways and books.

  Well, they might be DNA strands. I don’t know, they kind of look like the things I studied back at high school. And now I can’t really talk to ask Emily anyway, my mouth is too heavy.

  We sit on the desks furthest away from the door; there’s still room over here. The colours change, orange and blue and angry and then it’s herpes on the walls.

  ‘Herpes has never looked so good,’ Emily whispers, and I break out into giggles all over again.

  I groan and check the time: six AM. No, this time isn’t actually real. I must be dreaming. There’s a thunderstorm outside, and I roll onto my back, listen to the rain hit the roof loud and steady.

  Simon’s in the kitchen already. I’m sure he doesn’t actually sleep and has several stomachs. Not that I’m complaining. His cooking probably kept Emily around that first morning, bless his little soul.

  ‘You’re awake early,’ Emily says as she huddles closer for warmth.

  ‘Thunder,’ I say, yawning. ‘I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘What a coincidence.’ She nuzzles into the pillow and closes her eyes again.

  ‘Why did you leave your number under my pillow that day?’

  She laughs. ‘I blame the cat.’

  ‘Is that some kind of terribly subtle double entendre?’

  ‘It might be.’ She cracks open an eye. ‘But no, your cat was sitting in the middle of your bed as I walked past your room and I fell in love with her. It had nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Of course,’ I say.

  She sits up, gets out of bed. ‘I’m gonna go steal some breakfast.’ She stoops and kisses my forehead and winks at me.

  The cat, meanwhile, leaps into Emily’s warm spot, looking quite pleased with herself.

  IT’S SO VERY LONELY,

  WHEN YOU’RE A THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME

  Kerry Greenwood

  I had one hour of air left. Fifty nine minutes. Fifty eight. Seven.

  I wrenched my attention away from the counter. These escape pods were well made, comfortable for a given meaning of comfortable, and contained food and water and even entertainment.

  For forty days. This was the thirty ninth day. I still had food and I still had water and I’d been entertained by the second mate’s complete collection of 20th Century noir films - while the automatic systems hunted across the galaxy for the nearest beacon or habitable planet - but now I was running out of air, without which all the rest were a little superfluous.

  And there was still nothing out there but the Big Black.

  And asphyxiation is such a nasty way to die.

  I tried not to think about it. I tried to think about my last lover. A brief encounter at Marsport; a sweet mouth, a strong hand, all over in a moment. Never saw him again. Couldn’t even remember his name; if I ever knew it.

  They had all been like that, I realised. Impossible to keep a planetside/traveller relationship alive, though some people always tried it. They were the ones who fornicated their way through the unattached members of the crew when they got that gram that said, ‘sorry, I’ve met someone’.

  I had been the delighted recipient of some of that attention. But people who form relationships will form new ones; and all my lovers had gone on to settle down with someone else, and make the lunchtime crew smile at how they doted on each other.

  No one doted on me. I was an easy lay, a reliable comfort, to be applied to the ache as needed; discarded when replaced. If I died out here, as it was increasingly likely that I would, no one would weep for me.

  So I began to weep for myself. I was actually sobbing, in a way I had not done since I was seven and my father died, when I heard a little voice that said:

  ‘Lonely. Cold.’

  ‘Escape Pod 459, Galaxy Class ship StarRover out of Syria Planum, Mars, requesting urgent assistance,’ said my pod’s automatic message.

  I held my breath, my face wet with tears. No answer. It must have been a ghost.

  There is a theory that everything said on any form of communicator is still bouncing around the universe; bits and pieces of conversations emerge out of the static between the planets.

  But I was in way out, in deep space, hence my present predicament which would shortly become a plight - in, oh, I don’t know, another fifty-three minutes?

  ‘Speak again,’ I said. ‘Is there anyone there?’

  ‘Lonely,’ said the voice.

  ‘So you said. I’m lonely too. Where are you? Can you come and get me? Guide this pod? I’m running out of air,’ I tried not to sound too desperate.

  ‘Cold,’ said the voice. It sounded like a man.

  ‘Yes it certainly is,’ I agreed. My surge of hope died. If this was some last cruel trick of the gods, I hoped they were laughing themselves sick. But at least I had someone to talk to, even though it was just a spectre.

  ‘Let me in,’ pleaded the voice.

  ‘Love to, but I can’t open this pod in space,’ I told it. ‘Only in atmosphere. So you’ll just have to talk to me.’

  ‘Who?’ asked the voice.

  ‘Sebastian Reynolds, first mate, StarRover, a good ship until she developed some explosive engine trouble and we all got thrown out here. I hope the others made it. I was the last to go. We shoved the families and the couples out first. But I had no one. Still haven’t,’ I concluded. ‘You can call me Sabi. What’s your name?’

  ‘Spectre,’ said the voice, after a pause for thought.

  ‘Nice to meet you, though it would’ve been better if I didn’t have, let’s see, forty-three minutes left to live. I would’ve taken you to my favourite bar and bought you a drink. Mars ale, the finest that Syria Planum could provide. Tastes wonderful, once you get over it being blue.’

  I was not really expecting a reply. These electronic ghost words almost never make so much as a sentence and they are not responsive. Unless you are sitting in an escape pod with twenty-eight minutes left to breathe. And hallucinating an Imaginary Friend to comort your inevitable death.

  ‘Let me come in,’ breathed Spectre, sounding closer and louder.

  ‘I can’t,’ I replied. ‘I wish I could.’

  Now was not the time to remember all those merry ghost stories about pods found with the occupant all wizened and drained of blood by space vampies who projected through the walls. But, I thought, so what, I was dying anyway - in twenty one minutes.

  ‘Will you harm me?’ I asked, a stupid thing to say.

  ‘No,’ sighed Spectre. ‘I’ll love you.’

  Probably to death, but the odds were not in my favour for living more than eighteen more minutes, so I said: ‘Come in, Spectre,’ and opened my arms.

  And he flowed through the hull - a lovely man-shape made of starlight - and wrapped himself around me and sank onto me, icy, beautiful, and so cold that I thought he was just death in another form. But in the atmosphere of my pod he warmed to human temperatur
e and kissed me with lips that felt real, and coupled with me with a human body, so that I wondered if he was just a terminal hallucination my brain had given me to soften my dying.

  Nice going, brain, I thought, as I stroked smooth buttocks, pulling them closer, and felt Spectre arch against me, gasping without breath into my mouth. I could only see him as a shimmering outline, but I could feel him as though blood pumped in his veins.

  ‘Let me come in,’ he pleaded, and I laid myself flat and open for him, and I have never felt so dissolved, so possessed. Something entered me. Something came to an orgasm as I did.

  Was his semen starlight, I wondered. His passion was scorching,his love was like a supernova. No one had ever loved me like that.

  ‘Warm,’ said Spectre, snuggling close to me, fingers searching my face as though he had never touched a human. ‘So warm and sweet.’

  That lovemaking must have taken up all my remaining time, so I kissed his hands, palm and back, and whispered: ‘Goodbye, Spectre, I’m so sorry I can’t stay.’

  And he kissed tears from my eyes and…

  I didn’t die. Or, perhaps, I already had. The counter had run to zero minus thirty minutes. I was out of air and dead. Except that I wasn’t.

  ‘Are you keeping me alive?’ I asked Spectre, who had both arms wreathed around my chest.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. His voice was firming. ‘You are part of me, now. I am part of you. We are one. We can live in everything but water. We don’t like water.’

  ‘So you can live in hard vacuum?’ I asked.

  ‘We can,’ he corrected. ‘By myself I am just a wailing ghost, seeking human heat. We love humans. Humans taught us love. They taught us about the flesh. We never had flesh before.’

  ‘Will contact with you kill me?’ I asked. Not that I minded. I was already overdue.

  ‘No,’ said Spectre, as he caressed my cheek. ‘We don’t die,’ he said. ‘Humans tried to teach us about death, but we didn’t like it.’

  ‘So, we’ll be together forever,’ I said. ‘And you’ll be my lover?’

  ‘Unless… you, know, water,’ he replied, resting his cheek against mine.

  I stretched luxuriously. I was more alive, for a given sense of alive, than I had ever been. And since Spectre could not survive water - and I couldn’t swim, anyway - we retained the ability to die, if we wanted to, if the centuries tired us out. Already his essence was saturating my cells. I was becoming my lover, and he was becoming me. For some reason I could smell apples, a hot orchard scent.

  A quote from the second mate’s 20th century films came to mind.

  ‘Spectre, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship’.

  His laugh was like sunlight.

  THE DANCERS

  Kirsten Henry

  The scene is sharp, transparent as ice.

  It’s late one Friday, the dancehall’s makeshift.

  Outside there’s snow, and a long old war.

  Piano notes and cigarettes thicken the air

  like the hundred soldiers in their damp uniforms,

  like the perfumed shopgirls in flowery dresses

  throwing back their heads to bite at the night

  with their lipsticked laughs and their feverish eyes.

  A young lieutenant leans into the fug,

  rolling a glass between his palms and staring

  at the room’s far edge, where a captain sits.

  I watch the lieutenant as he crosses the floor

  to stand wordlessly beside the captain’s table,

  and reach for his hand and pull him into his arms

  and without ever speaking the men begin to dance.

  And yes, at first the other dancers gawp,

  but soon the hardest of us stand aside

  as if the sudden beauty of these men

  has somehow wiped the meanness from our lips.

  Then the orchestra dissolves, with all the onlookers,

  and a new private music beyond my range

  seems to move the soldiers, unhurried and turning.

  The lieutenant’s chin on the rough serge

  of his captain’s shoulder, the captain’s whiskered cheek

  rests against his partner’s. Turning, turning,

  their lit faces, first one then the other

  sweeping the room’s dimmest corners like beacons.

  They’ve closed their eyes and they hold each other

  as you would hold a woman, and

  without one single hair of manliness lost.

  They hold each other as though they’ve crossed the earth

  instead of just a dance floor to reach this moment.

  I’ve remembered this scene; glittering like ice,

  but unlike ice, it never melts.

  VANILLA

  Mary Borsellino

  His hair is blond and soft. All of him is soft. There’s just enough fat in the layer over the muscle to smooth the planes of his body, to replace the lean lines with yielding flesh. His lower lip is plump. His eyes are dark and made all the more striking by their pale lashes, and his apricot-and-cream complexion.

  He’s dressed simply in dark blue denim jeans, a white t-shirt, and Converse sneakers. I’m much the same, though my shirt is blue and collared, and my shoes are cream. We could be variants of one another, if it weren’t for the sharpness in my features, the slightly darker cast to my skin and brown hair that makes me tan beside his peaches and gold. Everything about him is vulnerable. There’s been nothing vulnerable about me in a long time. But aside from that, we look alike.

  ‘I’m Sam,’ he tells me, voice as soft as the rest. I think he’s perhaps twenty-two. Twenty-three at the most. I’m twenty-one but my eyes make me look older. There’s something knowing in my gaze that I’ve had since almost before I can remember.

  ‘James,’ I tell him in turn.

  The bumps of the bones in his wrists are worn raw on both arms. His pretty skin is red and torn, the wounds only just beginning their slow knit. A savage anger crackle up my spine at that, a desire to hurt that has nothing to do with sharing pleasure. This young man trusted someone, and they violated that trust. Every careful part of me is jagged with rage on his behalf. Whoever they were, they weren’t worthy of him.

  Sam’s eyes widen, the dark brown of the irises going even darker as his pupils dilate. His pretty lips part just a fraction. The prey part of him has caught scent of the predator in me and is responding with deference and desire.

  Instinct tears against itself inside me. One part wants to protect him, to spirit this almost-virgin away from the dangers lurking all around in a grimy club like this. The other part wants to drag him home as well, but not to protect him. This other part of me wants to tighten loops of smooth leather over that raw skin, to see if that quiet voice can be made to yowl and scream.

  ‘It’s easy to get in over your head in a place like this,’ I warn him. My words apply to myself as much as anyone else. I want to take him home and break him slowly. I want to put him back together in my arms and then watch him sleep the contented rest of the sated and cared-for. There’s a streak of romance in my soul, even now.

  Sam gives a rueful half-smile, the crooked expression giving his sweet face a worldly cast for a moment as he glances down at the hurt places on his wrists.

  ‘I know,’ he replies.

  ‘And yet you’re here again regardless,’ I point out. Sam shrugs.

  ‘I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment,’ he offers, with a second little smile that’s verging on a smirk. It would take a better man than I to pass up a blatant invitation like that. But I have rules. I like to do things properly.

  ‘I don’t play on first dates,’ I say to Sam, deciding that I might as well be up-front. No sense in wasting our time, even if he’s just the kind of man I’d gladly waste time with any day. ‘And meeting in a bar hardly even counts as a first date. If you come home with me, we’re vanilla for tonight, got it? Mutual oral, anal with me penetrating, masturba
tion. With condoms, no exceptions.’

  My voice is firm, businesslike, and Sam practically sways on his feet with the force of his instant compliance. His head bobs in a nod. The frisson of warring impulses splinters through me again, and I take his hand to lead him through the crowd.

  ‘Come on.’

  He’s quiet in the cab to my apartment and I worry, briefly, if maybe I’m the one who’s in over his head. A slightly-damaged rookie who drops into subspace at the first stern word is hardly the safest partner to take to bed. But my fears are put to rest when we’re standing on the sidewalk outside my building and I see that his reaction in the club was lust, not submission. The smile he gives me is hesitant, maybe even shy.

  ‘I don’t really do this,’ he admits. ‘I mean, I’ve tried, but it didn’t… it hasn’t always ended well.’

  The thumb of one hand rubs at the marks on the opposite wrist, apparently unconsciously.

  I take hold of each of his forearms gently and move them apart, stopping the motion. Then I lean in to give him a slow, light kiss, keeping it scarcely more than a brush of lips even when Sam opens his mouth wider and licks at the edge of my front teeth. I want to be careful with him, to treat him like something delicate. He’s something that should be cherished. If I can’t do that, I don’t deserve to have the chance to shatter him.

  Eventually we make it inside, upstairs, into my bedroom and out of our clothes. There are fading bruises mottling his lovely chest and thighs, but the restless clawed animal inside me is calmer in the face of these old injuries now. The past doesn’t matter. Sam is here now, with me. Safe.

  My bed’s a king-size, but I’ve slept alone against its bank of pillows for longer than I care to remember. Sam’s pale hair looks perfect against the forest-green hues as he lays back, his spine arching up a little as I ease slick fingers into him as if I’ve got all the time in the world.

  Even when I slide into him the first time, slow and easy as I can manage, he doesn’t demand I go faster, give him more. As a reward for his obedience I speed up gradually, increasing the intensity of my movements bit by bit.

 

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