I had a dream last night. She was a big girl, voluptuous, with dark black skin, and tattoos. She was wearing a bikini, or something that didn’t cover her very well.

And she fell.

It was just a moment. Just a snip of an encounter.

She tumbled, trustfully, and I was supposed to catch her. I tried, I was standing in the right place, and at the right time. But I wasn’t sure that I could catch her. 

I readied myself, and felt her weight fall against me.

And then, I woke up.

Am I out there? Am I in here?

I set the mirror up, and I start to broadcast.

I’m on radio-frequency zero-point-zero-point-one. I’m defacing your interface, drawing moustaches on your genitals and genitals all over your face. Yeah, you looks so cute with a cock along your jawline. Your cunt looks all dignified with a curly-ended handlebar drawn on with thick black marker. 

I’m on Channel Null, caught somewhere between three and four on a dead TV. A screen blinks static and pukes broken glass. Little barefoot children run across the broken glass, and are punctured, and enlightened. 

Technology is a costume I wear; a suit of cybernetics and digital transmissions turned to text. I have nooses and ties made of pure internet, pure signal. Sexy pornographic images adorn my presence. Stolen cartoons and songs from faded rock stars, they were there, too, twinkling in the background like so many of the regular kind of stars. Those big dead balls of fire up on the other side of the sky.

She thinks I’m scared of her, but really, it’s just the intimacy that throws me off.
She thinks I’m waiting for her, but really, I’m just not hungry yet.

I spin the dials.

The machines go dead.

The signal starts to fade. 

I was famous for finding a robot arm on the side of the road.

Nobody ever figured out where it came from. Maybe the future, said somebody. I don’t know. I just know where I found it, there on the ground, in a big pile of burnt dirt and broken glass that I guess used to be melted sand.

It was a robot arm. It attached to a torso, or it should have, and it had an elbow, and a wrist, and a hand at the end, with three angry mechanical fingers, and a thumb. A thumb of pure malevolent, machine-driven evil. 

Or so the churchmen had said. I hadn’t really paid much attention to that sort of talk, though it did drive up the price of a viewing, on many mist-covered evening. 

“Have a look at this robot arm,” I’d tell folks, taking a dollar or two for the trouble, “and think about your own life. Where it might be going. What the future might look like.”

“Is that robot arm from the future?” they’d always ask me.

“Ain’t mine for the saying,” I’d tell them back. Every time. “Ain’t mine for the saying.” You say it twice on the quiet nights, or if there was a really pretty face in the audience, you thought you might be able to lay down with for a while. 

You skip from town to town, you meet some nice people. Every once in a while your goddamn robot arm kills a few people, but hey, who’s gonna tell me that death ain’t as much a part of life as eating or crying? 

Yeah, I was famous, for a while, me and my robot arm. And when I got tired of it, I sold it to one of those big companies that wants to rule the world. You know the ones, those big conglomerates with about a billion part-time souls on the payroll? Yeah, they got it now. Under lock and key, or maybe arm-wrestling giants somewhere.

But once upon a time, I had me a robot arm. 
And everybody knew my goddamn name.  

Fuckin’ just look at her go. 

That girl’s so fucking hot.
That girl’s so fucking wild.
That girl’s got a fucking tapeworm.

Yeah, she told me about it once, over cheap beers. I did the buying, she did the drinking.

“Caught it while swimming through some real murky shit water,” she confessed. She’s drinking a local beer; it’s bright yellow, like wasps. The bright buzzing warning yellow colour of wasps. 

“But see, the thing is like, it’s not a parasite. It’s a symbiote. You know? Like, it helps me, and it does a bunch of useful stuff.”

“Like what?” I had to ask.

“Well like, for one thing? I sleep like, two hours a day. And it’s a deeper, more restful sleep than a normal person could get in eight hours. And that’s just like, to start.”

She grins wildly at me, and flexes her biceps through her torn black T-shirt. “Super-strong, super-fast… And not like, tearing buildings down strong, but… You know how like, in emergencies, people can become super-strong for a few moments?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ve all heard crap like that.”

“Well, I can call that shit up, anytime I want to, thanks to the super-intelligent little worm that lives inside my belly.” She burps. “I’ve got perfect balance, my digestive system is like, I don’t know, a perfect machine from the future or something.”

“That’s pretty cool,” I said. The beer was hitting me a bit harder than her, or maybe she was just used to being louder.

“And it’s like an ipod too,” she went on. “Like, I can hear music, whenever I want. Whatever I want. It’s got recordings of everything I’ve ever heard, you know?”

That doesn’t even make sense, but I’m too far gone now. And she’s so fucking cute. That crazy head of hair, those weird bits of metal she wears in her face, those big black fucking boots that look like they could stomp my head into goo. 

She giggles, she laughs, and when the drinking’s done, she’s gone into the night like a whisper or a cat. I catch a glimpse of her, halfway up a highrise, spinning and dancing like the side of the building was her own private dancefloor. 

She asked me, anonymously, “why don’t you love me anymore?”

I told her, “I never did. I just loved that costume you’d wear for me. I never even realized there was a person under it all. I thought it was a series of automated responses. I thought it was battery plugged into something mechanized.”

Her eyes are soft and sad, like somewhere I could lay down and stay for a while. Curl up tight upon yourself, and just cry yourself to sleep. Cry me to sleep. Cry me a nice little river to drown in. Hold me down, tears seeping into my lungs like ocean water. Like dying under perfectly clear waves.

Like dying frozen under glass.

She asks me, anonymously, “do you still think about me?”

I tell her, maybe. I tell her, sometimes. I tell her, what I think she wants or needs to hear. I tell her what I have to, the words forcing themselves out of my mouth like a viral attack. My ideas in her head, my little letters spelling out messages in her head.

This is one of them. Her robot head was swapped with yours, and now you’re thinking her same thoughts too. The plagiarism of ideals; a pirate radio broadcast of internalized frequencies. Get off my heart-beat. She gets off, on my heart-beat. 

She asks me, anonymously, “do you think we’ll ever fuck?”

I’m not sure what she’d call this. 

Her clockwork heart slows, and spits a broken gear into the sand. 

She and I wanted to live in a better world. So first we had to tear down the old one.

She had hard iron nails, jutting out from her fingertips. She pressed them up against me until they drew blood, and she pushed them against paper until they drew a pretty picture, a pretty picture outlined in my blood.

Red fades to black fades to grey.

She tracks me, she follows me.
She tracks me like little needle marks moving up her arm.
She follows me like I’m the opening act. 

She wanted to have a happier life the next time around, so this time through, we aimed to burn our karma down to its core. Make it all sparkle, make it all shine, until it all fades. 

She fades around me, like a high-top hairdo from the late nineteen-eighties. 

She comes to me, and she rolls away, a yo-yo on my string. 

Give me your hand.

Cut it off at the wrist, and put it in a box. Put a ribbon on the box. Wrap it in red, red wrapping paper. So nothing will be spoiled, if your hand bleeds through the box.

Give me your hand.

Extend it to me when we’re sitting next to each other in the movie theatre. Entangle your fingers with mine. Let our palms slide together, like a couple of naked lovers in a bed.

Give me your hand.

Give me some assistance. Give me some applause. Let me know that you’re on my side, that you’re willing to help me out. Help me get up. Help me get out. Get on up, get on out. Get the message across the lines. 

Give me your hand.

I’m so fucking lonely without it.

……….

(Inspired by zaedilux’s profile pic)

She’s got a mouthful of sand. She’s trying to tell me something, but she’s got a mouthful of sand. Dry, white, desert sand. It crumbles out between her lips when she tries to speak to me. She looks like she’s being buried alive on the beach.

She’s got a mouthful of sand, and when she breathes fire, as girls do from time to time, the heat of her fuses all the grains of sand together, into jagged spirals of glass. Long lines of jagged glass that could slit your tongue when she put her lips to yours.

Yeah, she could slit your tongue open, putting her lips to yours.

So, what do you want to get out from her? Is it just the experience, or are you letting her tattoo you, mark you, define you, up and down? Yeah, you let her define you, sketching a sketchy outline of you with that same dagger she takes to the bedroom. 

She looks me deeper in the eyes than I’d like her to go. “I just can’t stand those fashion victims you sleep with,” she says so simply, so simply it’s like being slit open, like she could just slit me open and climb inside, drive me around like a little car.

One of those little cars you drive around in bumper-cars, at the fair.

She looks so deep into me - she spits into the well. She says cruelly kind things like, “Well, enjoy your fey little fuck-friends,” and she leaves me to gather up my notes and the twenty yards of intestinal tract she pulled out of me.

She leaves me a happy little bloody mess on the floor. 

She wrote herself into my story, with bright hair and scarcely visible scars. 

She came to me, not crawling, yet still somehow on hands and knees. 

She lied to me, a mouthful of my blood just behind her teeth.

She opened me up, just by opening her mouth up wide against me; her lips against my belly, my belly falling open like a cupboard door. My heart opens for her like the damn thing was installed on a hinge, like she should be able to just walk into me and do what she likes. Move furniture. Write her name in smoke and violence against the walls of my body. 

Do you know what I’d let the perfect girl do to me?
Anything.

I’d let her write my biography with two knives and a broken typewriter. I’d let her hold me down in the shower. I’d let her have just the bits of me she wanted, and throw the rest to the birds outside. Big black crows with little hungry mouths.

There’s something about her, something sick and surreal.
She moves unnaturally, like over-animated snakes.

She was my favourite character of all the fictional beings I could’ve ever wanted to fuck.
And she made herself real.
Just for me. 

I’m an okay writer, but I’m a pretty crap friend. 

She can see that I’m not in the room anymore. I smile politely, and I answer her questions, but I’m clearly one foot out the door, one eye on the clock, one finger on the trigger. 

Absolute absolution. She could cure me every sin, cleanse me of every crime. 

I could be somebody new, something fresh, something unscarred and sullied like this ancient skin has become. 

I was younger once. I quoted funny TV shows and played superhero with my friends. We’d sneak into the baseball stadium when it was closed down, and hunt for monsters we’d seen in movies. I had sleepovers where boys kissed each other for practice, hoping to get to be close to girls someday. 

But I’m not that child, or any other, these days. If there is a child within me, it’s been buried deep under years of smoke and mud.

All the important stuff is the stuff I give away.  

She sucks me in, and spits me out again.  

She stole my heart, and replaced it with smoke. 

So now my veins pump pure grey puffs.
Now I don’t bleed, I just sort of evaporate quietly.
The sun turns me translucent.
A strong wind can, baby, it can just blow me away.