I know you'll see me across the room. I'm in disguise; curls swept back under a trucker hat pulled low enough to hide most of my face and dark sunglasses helping. I have a camera and a faked press pass. All it took was a pair of low slung jeans and an ACDC hoodie and I'm blending in with the crowd so well that no one else even notices me. Ah. You've spotted me though. You know I'm here. I can see it in the slow, wicked grin promising a long night for a certain someone. They think they know, but they think of the wrong one and it's almost funny enough to make me giggle and blow my cover. Stuffy press conferences are always such a bore. You've told me a thousand times and you're right. I can't wait until we can get out of here. Hiding in plain sight for your interviews, a thousand different looks keeping anyone from seeing me but you, is a game we love playing. One day we'll get caught, but not today. No Estrella, not today. Today we'll enjoy the game. You keep using my favorite word
You. Are. Mine. by CalleighCaineWriter, literature
Literature
You. Are. Mine.
His voice, almost forgotten over the years since his death, calls to her; the wheezing of his air more disturbing than the words. "I've come to collect you. Come to me." She wonders how he manages to speak without his head, but she isn't willing to find out. She doesn't open her eyes yet as she hisses, "No lo creo. No me toque." She knows by the feel of the air that he is near enough to touch this time. "Puta." He says it with slight affection, the impossibility of his rancid breath washing over her face making her tense, all of her muscles feeling as if they will burst with the effort of staying still. She pulls her lips into her mouth, biting them hard enough to draw blood, turning her head away from him, unwilling to see the sight before her, even as she thinks, "It's not real. Dead men don't breathe." The air over her face chills and she feels him lean back. She relaxes slightly until he grabs her arm hard enough to bruise her, as if to let her know, that yes, he is real.
"I'm getting married." Emma Lee just blurted it out to me in school one day like she'd told me she hated tapioca pudding or some other mundane, every day pronouncement. "What?" I hissed it, careful to be quiet. I knew what she'd said. Ever since we were 10 we'd been waiting for the day the Elders would cut our lives short. It was what they did around here. The moment you were woman enough to be able to withstand childbirth they married you off to someone old enough to open you up, break you in, make you a wife and a mother, to uphold the ideals of the Church, to bear many children and "breed out" the outsiders. We'd be worn out and dead by 30 and they'd just marry another child. She looked at me with sadness. We were 14. "They're marrying me to Shannon McClellan's Father." I sucked in a breath. His last wife had died at the ripe old age of 13 and taken her baby with her to the grave. We'd heard horrible rumors that she'd died screaming, bleeding and in pain, too scared to remember
He runs his fingertips slowly along my legging-covered kneecap. The light pressure is just enough to drive me crazy as he paints invisible pictures absentmindedly on my knee until I begin to shiver. Sweetly, foolishly, he turns from the tv and asks if I'm cold. I almost laugh as I smile at him. I'm on fire. I lean in for a hot, wet kiss without giving him time to respond. Surprise shades his pretty, expressive eyes when I break away. He turns back to the tv without saying a word and I think he doesn't want what he could so easily have from me. I momentarily feel like a fool for trying anything. It's my turn to be surprised when he hits the button to turn it off. He slowly, oh, so slowly leans in, turning me, laying me down on his couch before he kisses me. His kisses are light at first, building in an agonizingly slow dance that has me writhing under him as my body takes over and my mind takes flight. He pulls back abruptly, sitting up again, leaving me dazed and confused at the
There is a line of magnolias, old as antiquity, in the cemetery, separating the gentrified, civil war, old money dead from the gauche, war of words, new money dead.
It was under the secretive shade of those massive magnolias, my feet tangled in the roots, that he first kissed me. He was sudden, unexpected and cocky, sure footed. I was startled, off kilter and off balance, tumbling backward against the trunk of one of those solid, old trees.
He dipped his head to kiss my neck, yanking my head backward too hard, grinning against my skin, his dark hair soft against my palm, silky as it sifted through my fingers. I should have tried to stop him
Abby woke with a start, a conversation with someone vaguely familiar against a kaleidoscope oceanview suddenly vanishing, dulcet tones replaced with a hockey organ ringtone her ex had programmed that couldn't seem to be exorcised from her phone. "Good morning, you'll want to get a robe on, our package is about to arrive." The voice was familiar, but she wasn't expecting anything, was she? She jammed her feet into raccoon slippers, pulled on an Osaka Spa terry robe she'd liberated years ago, and shuffled towards the front door, startling as the buzzer sounded. "Sign here," the brown uniform all business, presenting a tablet and a pen, then, formalities behind them, wheeled a Pelican case taller than her into the front hall before turning and leaving without another word. There was a label stuck to the front of the case above a hand-shaped impression. "Push Here" was scribbled on the label in a typeface a little too uniform to be hand drawn. She placed her hand flat on the
Rip cleared everything off the dining room table, piling books on top of placements on the sideboard, and his discarded sweater over the back of one of the chairs. "Doris, give me a map of the continent." He'd been dreaming of making the trip from his home on the shores of Hudson Bay to Southern California for as long as he could remember. A roadtrip to end all roadtrips. "Continental map. Topographical, weather, street..." Rip cut off the disembodied voice mid-sentence. "Street maps. Local destinations, points of interest" The surface of the table was bathed in monochromatic light, a surface map of the continent in three dimensions, with a softly strobing green light at the point at the edge of the bay where they lived. "Plot me a route to Baja." A point at the southwestern point of the map glowed blue, and a spider web of light traces crawled across the map, highlighting highways and city streets as Doris carefully routed multiple possible ways of making the journey. "No
I'd never dreamed before, at least not that I could remember. Sure, a lifetime in that chair, I'd hoped for things, but that's different. Sleep was always empty, vacant. Dreamless. Ever since I've become a retread, the visions have been relentless. This reclaimed meatsuit must have been saturated in deeply emotional experiences, and when they bleached it, some of them didn't wash out. Most of these meatsuits come from habitual offenders; death row inmates, the irredeemable dregs of society. Their family gets a payout, they get off the hook early, and people like me born with a body broken in all the wrong places get another chance. Retread. I don't know where this meatsuit came from, and the plastics work had all been done before I moved in, so I can't even track down the history by likeness, but there's something about these fragments that I see when I close my eyes that are undeniable, unavoidable, unnerving. Standing here, now, at this intersection, I can understand why. The