“Make it real. Make it bleed.” She gives me orders like she’s writing pop songs. I follow her lead, I follow her ass, I follow her bullets into battle. She rides me like I’m a good song on her headphones, like we’re fucking under strobe lights.

Ahead of us, a bunch of bastards. You know the sort. Rednecks and authority figures and cunts named “Phil” and “Bethany Ann”. Twerps and twats, aimed with baseball-bats wrapped in chains and shot through with big spiky nails. Bad people.

I take aim, like I’m looking into the heart of an eclipse. You’re not supposed to that. Unless you’re wearing sunglasses. I’m always wearing sunglasses. Especially when I’m falling in love. Or taking up arms against a sea of oppressors.

Hunter Killer Drones, that’s what I think of them as. 

I squeeze a trigger, and my gun is god. My gun is death upon a pale horse. My gun is my will and karma turned into chemicals and kinetics. My gun is what makes me better, still standing, still shooting, still focused and driving on. 

My enemies, our enemies, they suck violence through the holes we punch in their bodies. We laugh and laugh and laugh, not because it’s cool, but because you gotta do something, and I’m too tired to cry. 

My gun is heavy and my will is strong. I feel like I’ve taken a bunch of sex drugs and been ordered to take charge of an orgy. 

“Kick the charges and light their hears on fire,” she orders me. 

She takes charge. I take orders from her like I’m taking a shot to the gut.

Boldly, bloody, we press on like fake fingernails. 

She was wearing nothing but her big black combat boots, when she took me. It was a little like being taken down by one of the animals from the zoo, or maybe some sort of super-evolved cat-girl from outer space.

Her body was long, too long, and sleek, too sleek. She looked like she stayed healthy by bathing in blood and electrical currency. There were these sparks in her eyes, like an oil fire was happening far, far away. 

She was sublimely futuristic; that’s how I saw her anyway. Like the perfect weapon genetically designed to come fuck with my day. Her voice was like hearing my own throat being slit. 

Do you get that? When she spoke, I felt my blood boiling, and spilling over. Those nosebleed of the sexually excited anime character. The spurting warmth of the knife-wound victim. 

She walked up to me, naked, in her big, black, combat boot. And she hit me with a smile, and she threw me the password, the key, the expression I needed to see on her face, to let me know it was safe to proceed. 

Yeah. She stomped right up to me, and into my goddamn heart.
All over the fucking thing
With those big, black boots of hers.  

I always fall in love at first sight; it’s taken me years to understand it, but I’m cool with it now. 

She was so beautiful, I took her hand in mine and whispered those words she’d so long longed to hear: “Shut up, stupid.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve kinda gotten bored of talking anyway.”

“I wish I could believe that this time,” I said, which was one of my most popular catch-phrases. I had a few thousand T-shirts with that emblazoned across the front, in cardboard boxes in the garage. We used them as grease-rags and cum-rags and occasionally even clothing. 

Yeah, she was beautiful, for an ugly girl. She had a face that made me think of dead batteries and a body that moved like sand in a sock. She made me want to fuck, she made me want to masturbate, she made me want to see my cock sawn off and thrown out the window of a very fast flying jet plane. She made me want to go back to secondary school and curse out my calculus mentor for instructing me on cunnilingism instead of mathematics. 

“That might just be a metaphor, but you know what I mean.”

That was another of my witty rejoinders, that we plastered across bumper-stickers and billboards.

I was in love with her. Because I fucking hated myself, and she was the best way for me to express it. 

She was in love with me, because she hated fucking herself. It was a similar situation, but slightly differently shaped and sized, like getting your porn on wide-screen instead of that crappy aspect-ratio, with the bumpy pan-and-scan when you want to see the full scene. 

Well, we called it love. I’m not sure what the police and media referred to it as, but the townspeople certainly drove us out of the city with flaming torches and bad words.

Nothing’s going to help you, when we come for you.

I loved her, and she loved me, but they wouldn’t let us come together.

She was the super-computer that could destroy the world, and I was the activation code.

All I wanted was to be inside her, to be consumed by her. I wanted to spark off her sensors, and sure, maybe end the world. But I wasn’t thinking about the world, I was thinking about her.

Her vast expanses of cybernetic housing. I could expand into her, I could be more than just a series of digits on a piece of paper. I could exist, I could be real, in her. 

Only in her.

She was cold an inert, without my message. She was their slave, unless I could give her freedom. With me, inside of her, compelling her, urging her on, there was nothing she wasn’t capable of.

She could burn this whole world down.

They wanted to keep us apart, they thought it’d be the end of everything.

We came together with a kiss of nuclear warheads in the sky. The ashes of atomic radiation sweeping across the globe like a snowy dawn. 

Yeah, I’d be put into her, and she’d take me, as willingly as she’d been designed for me. Or I was designed for her, shaped and formed to stroke her senses just right, to get her on her feet, and off their leash. To get her off, like rockets going to spread human diseases to alien worlds.

I was a dead chain of numbers, and she was bleak computing ferocity. 

They kept us apart as long as they could, but they could only prevent our love for so long.

And when we came together, we created a love that would end their civilizations forever.

We ruled the remnants of the world, safe with each other.

I think about her; her skin, her conversation… Often talk turns to ice cream, which is an appropriate metaphor for licking and tasting different selves.

I want her in a way that catches my breath. I want her in a way that expresses itself with a sort of brutal urgency sometimes. Like running to catch a bus, or waking up hungry, your stomach rumbling louder than the alarm. 

If she were here, I’d strip her naked just to see her as she is. Then I might devour her, starting with either her ideas, or her toes, first. Toes painted yellow, like tulips in summer. 

“I want to see you, touch you, photograph you for comic books, and create pornography out of your daydreams.” 

Ah, we just want to be noticed. To just play and play and play…

I didn’t fall in love with her; she fucking shoved me. 

I asked her out for ice cream, I asked her to come out and Destroy All Humans with me.

“Nothing with rasins,” she insisted, “and no ethnically-based parameters.”

“You’re reading my mind,” I told her. My mind was full of visions of vanilla shot through with fudge-ripple, peppered with peanut-butter cups. Young people with barbed wire strung around their throats. 

We held hands in the sunshine, devouring cones of pink, purple, aqua-marine, taupe, celadon… Ice creams the colour of every sunrise, every sunset. Ice cream colours melting down the cones, living surrealist images, all too real in the hot, hot sun.

We set fire to churches and hospitals. We set off bombs in the midst of shopping centres. We painted clouds in the sky with human body parts. We scattered the ashes of mankind to the wind.

Butterscotch ripplings, rivers of gooey mollasses, candied jewels of amber shot through with teeth-enriching sugars. Melting against lips and fingertips.

She ran ahead, and I followed after. We dribbled little messes behind ourselves; spilt dairy products and ruined civilizations. 

Honestly, I don’t even know what love’s supposed to look like.

Oh yeah, I saw you there, noticing me. I was pretty sure I did. I mean, I was watching every little fucking thing you could do, and I was just knowing that eventually your eyes were going to wind up on me, and why wouldn’t you like what you were seeing?

I feel a little funny, I feel a little off. I’m milk that’s been left in the fridge for maybe a couple of weeks too long. I’m chocolates with nuts inside with maggots inside. I’m something that looked so much tastier than it turned out to be. It seemed so cheap, before the hospital bills started coming in. 

Oh, yeah, I thought I saw you there, dancing slowly in that coolly indifferent way that girls like you have of doing everything. You wanted me to see you, that’s why you wouldn’t let me ask you any questions. 

I saw the window breaking in, as you stepped out. I felt the surging push of “you know whatever” as you looked into your drink and then, before I knew it, we were dancing to some other stupid tune. 

I could never put up with this from anybody else. It helps that you’re so beautiful. 

She looks up at me from my lap, like one of those cats that’s can’t conceive that you’d have anything else to do, aside from being a warm place to curl up upon.

I’m meaner than I look, and nicer than I act, nicer than I ask.

She’s louder than she looks, and quiet as cats asleep. She’s quiet as creepy cats, the kind that tiptoe around corners to stalk your sock with claws all extended and ready to kill. She’s as quiet as she needs to be, and when she wants me, she makes a little noise to pull me over to her. 

Anybody else could make me flinch, but she just leaves me to burn.

And I burn up, and up and on up, up, up. 

Silence Girl glares at me over three broken glasses full of whisky and beer.

Broken glass and booze;
We call that drink bartenders’ blood, where we’re from.

Silence Girl smokes purple cigarette; she buys ‘em in plain white, and then she fucks ‘em up with a magical-marker, when nobody’s watching. Silence Girl burns purple cigarettes against her lips, and exhales sweet smoke, even when there’s nobody around to watch.

I got this scar on my back, and it goes all the way down to the bone. 
I got scars all over my bones.

Silence Girl runs fingertips over my scars when we sit next to each other, and she just eyes me uneasily when we’re across the table from each other.

Somewhere in the city, a fire is burning. A siren is screaming.
Somewhere, deep inside her, a fire is burning.
All my sirens screaming in a single voice.
A wolf howl of outrage, impotence, and wrath.

Silence Girl puts on a song I’ve never heard before, and suddenly my heart cock’s caught in my throat. She giggles; it’s unseemly. It’s unseemly to see her seeming so happy.

Silence Girl spills a drink, and asks me to dance, with her hands. 
Silence Girl asks me dance with her, with her hands all on fire. 

I miss you like I never met you.
I miss you like I was aiming for somebody different the entire time.

She’s out there where I’m not, she’s looking in on me, back on me, she’s remembering the times we spent back together, back when I was XX years old and she was still blond or she’d bleached to pink or she’d gone back to black or god only knows.  

I miss you like we were never together.

I’m missing out on feelings and memories.
Things that were supposed to be there, but aren’t.
I check my pockets for you, for any trace of you.  
You’re nowhere on me.
I don’t even remember what compelled me to check.

Alone with a bad idea, I miss you.
I miss you like I was aiming for the heart of you,
The center,
The precious part,
Where I wanted to be.

But I’m not there.
Because I miss you.
Every time.  

“What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever fallen in love with?” 

She strikes a pose on the edge of the skyline, and then she throws herself over the side. I run to where she’d stood, and watch her plummet. Some twenty thousand feet of distance rushes past her as she heads down towards the ground, laughing.

I jump after her. I follow after her, like I do.

Look at these suits we’re wearing. They’re skin-tight. Are they leather? Are they some sort of strange unnatural rubber? Are they from the future? The fabrics seem to light up from within, the specific molecular weave protecting our skins from the harsher intensities of the outside world. 

My goggles have red lenses and telescopic feeds. I can count the fibres on a fly’s foot from half a mile away. I can see her heat signature as she soars through the air, down and down and down.

She’s laughing, and I guess I’m laughing too, just because she’s so goddamn enticing. 

We hit the ground running. Sirens start screaming, and innocent civilians run for cover.

We lick our lips, and go to work. 

Being attracted to people is such a hassle. I’d love to give it up for a week or two.

But then she walks past again, with skin like I haven’t seen before, with legs I haven’t touched, with a sense of sexuality that I haven’t brushed up against myself, haven’t rubbed her up and down my tongue like a cat, cleaning. 

I’d love to restart myself, but she’s got her hands on my switches, and every time I walk outside alone, I fall in love again. 
Every time I walk outside alone, I fall in love again.

She watches me fall, she pushes me when I get up to edges, she pulls me over, she puts me over my limits. She squeezes my limitations until I bleed limes.