Space Man
Once I saw a real Astronaut yell at a nice lady that she was not a chihuahua, and that fear wasn't real.
Fiction from first (and I think only) issue of a short-lived mag in the states, A*N*U*S, back in 2022. Never got my own copy of it sadly, nor a few extra copies I’d ordered to give to pals. Oh well.
Working on a few different essays and the like but thought I’d bring this one back from obscurity for the paid subscribers. The story is quite different now, and part of a much longer SF cycle. But I like this version of it too. And sharing it buys me a bit of time to better development some of those essays I’ve been researching and writing to go between the interviews.
The story is A L O T. Sex and hate and all of it. What A*N*U*S published was roughly 70 percent of the original story. It turned into hyper-violence at the end: Matilda stabbing an air cadet with a screwdriver he’d just tried to kill her with, “she drew the dark juice from his ear,” all out assault and Chris Hadfield, err, umm, Cross Hazland, turning into an antlered eldritch horror to devour a literally captive audience. That ending is lopped off here. I’ll find a new home for the completed story cycle, “The Mattildeiad,” one day.
Fair warning for the intensities below.
And see you in two weeks with a really really cool interview with 1 of a kind micro-press.
I was almost sure of my fuckability, standing before the leant body mirror, hitching my thumbs on the beltloop of my navy-blue fur-trimmed mini-skirt, while the rest of my costume hung on the door-hook, my reflection appearing longer and taller and as though reeling back from the mirror’s lean, the rest of the Nelvana of the Northern Lights ‘fit hovering in reach like a halo for the taking.
I was in a rush now. I hadn’t dressed for Halloween at work because Ambrose, my manager who hated me for being a “trap,” lied that the Regional was coming by and didn’t like costumes; no one else got that memo.
His play didn’t to me, I thought, as I yanked the avocado green tights up my unshaved legs, feeling the slippery thighs, wondering how I made it through the day without constantly swishing my hands up and down the synthetic length of them.
The doorbell rang and broke my neurotic bitter spiral, and my little Chihuahua went full sicko-mode, chasing his tail, barking loud to raise the dead. I picked him up like a deflated football and walked to the door, expecting the mailman with a package.
My neighbor from across the hall, drunk, in a nude bra and unbuttoned button-fly jeans. “First, a bowl of liver, for the thing,” she waved the bowl with the wrinkly, doubly re-used saranwrap on it at the squirming, drooling Saint-Pol-Roux. “Second, can you open this?” She shoved the bowl of liver into my free hand, and then pushed an eye-dropper bottle of ‘weed-juice’ at the other. She lifted her glasses from her eyes to her steel-gray hair, and then I noticed the transition lenses were dark even though we were inside; her left eye’s bag had a throbbing vein threading thru it. “See, I got it two days ago, for my chronic pain, but I can’t get the damned child-lid off.”
I’d opened it two days ago, and again yesterday. She was a sweetheart.
“My daughter down in Miramichi says they use this on the international space station, on account they can’t smoke joints up there.”
“Could be.”
I pinched the bowl of liver awkwardly in my armpit, then one-handed, tugged the bottle’s lid to its body and spun. The dropper lid wobbled loose in the bottle’s mouth but didn’t spin out to the floor.
My neighbour snatched the open bottle from me. “You look like some slut tonight.”
That was the goal. “That’s the goal” I smiled.
*
The light steady cogwheel hail sunk into my duck-cloth coat like a baby vampire’s bite, like a child’s Velcro shoe strap. It was Halloween. First snow Halloween. The hail guttered where the wildflowers met the canted sidewalk, took on the shape of wet milk sugar slurry. My leaf-green Doc Martens would be too slippery to wear soon, but I’d get through the night alright.
My Jamaican ‘newcomer’ neighbours gave me a dirty look because I hadn’t come to church again (and had no plans to anytime soon). I tried to make myself small enough to hide behind the smoke curling off my cigarette, and then walked toward the garbage shed to give a wider berth to the dog-fearing, me-hating wife. The child looked at me the way most children looked at me when I was in full girl-mode, which is to say, it stared, and I couldn’t figure out if it hated me; it stuck its hand up beneath its mask to pick its nose, then followed its parents in through the heavy metal doors.
I was waiting for Erin1 to pick me up for the party before the public talk. A Domino’s driver soared by doing 40 over.
I’d been thinking, “if 120mph were womanhood, and sitting in park with the emergency brake on were manhood, I’d never be able to avoid returning to a stop. I’d always be forced to gas up. And it’d be reckless to go as fast as I wanted just to feel like myself.” It was a contrived thought, but that wasn’t to say it didn’t touch somewhere on the feeling that was shattered on the ground in front of me, just that I couldn’t find the right way to express that feeling yet. The feeling of freedom that driving gave you, god I missed it. I dreamed at least once a month about go-karting, the glossy helmets with the cheap lice-trap hairnets; heavy is the head that bobbles with the ill-fitting helm.
The bus floated by with its destination panel reading first “Lest we,” which blinked blank a beat then “UNIVERS.,” and then blank a beat and then “FORGET.” So I did.