Bad Ends

She was a girl of flawed and low character, suitable for little more than feedstock.

Olive couldn’t say how they met, afterwards. A consequence of the night’s debaucheries; loud music and frantic bodies and another drink, another line, always another—! And then waking up back home in her own bed, left to sort out what happened from the barest suggestions. Rumpled sheets, torn stockings, fresh bruises, all normal enough. And that new voice trickling into her DMs, so strangely familiar. She couldn’t help trusting it, even when it was so cagey about how they’d met and what happened and who it really was, and that should have been a warning sign, shouldn’t it?

“Mom?” Sarah blinks herself awake. She fell asleep on the couch again, watching late-night comedy reruns after putting Abigail to bed, with only a half-empty bottle of wine and a tin of weed gummies for company. She blearily blinks at the young girl; god damn it, she promised not to let her see her like this again. “Wha-,” she coughs, “what is it, dear?” “Auntie wants to come in but I can’t open the door.”

The first shot is cinematically wide, obviously an anamorphic lens with a slow aperture. Everything is in focus: the ruins of fallen skyscrapers. The rubble-strewn beach. The smoking carcasses of tanks and troop carriers, and the cloudless sky above. Silent except for the wind. The ground shakes. A massive machine strides out of the ocean, up the beach. Two-legged, four-armed, festooned with armor and shields; a massive claymore strapped to its back. The overall impression is a polished and heavily armed sphere, its sharp angles accented by red strips. Patriotic music swells. ...

The surgeon is sprawled out on her living room couch when you arrive, flipping through screen after screen of beautiful people on her ancient phone. One of her housemates answered the door and let you inside, their too-perfect smile drying into a polished mask as they realized why you were there. The last words they said to you before they fled were a quiet “good luck.” She’s really not much to look at. Chubby and long-limbed, with oily shoulder-length hair. You can see her split ends from the doorway; it’s obvious that she’s never bothered to put proper care into them. Her clothes show a similar lack of effort, just loose grey sweatpants and a tank-top that barely contains her breasts. ...

(I’m not sure if I ever posted this one publicly; back when I still had a patreon it was there, but now … well, here it is. 2.1k words of trauma and spiders) Kids on one side of the glass, the spider on the other. There are three of them there on that sticky summer day, Grace and Florence and Ash, set adrift in the zoo’s carefully curated expanse while their three sets of parents get drunk and reminisce about old times. They’re all old enough to be left alone—and more than old enough to insist that they’d rather not have an older teen disinterestedly keeping an eye on them—but not old enough to be left to downtown’s tender mercies. There are kidnappers about, everyone knows that! And worse things too, lurking in the shadows and blasted across every news channel lest anyone might forget that the world is a dangerous place. ...

This story was originally posted to Twitter on April 26, 2022. “Little witch, little witch~” She sits huddled inside her circle, her last little bastion against the world. A fortress wrought of old amber chips and gallium drips, a tiny pathetic thing standing firm in the face of what waits just outside. “Why won’t you come out to play~?” If she let herself look at it, if she let her eyes rest on that broken parody of a person for a just a moment— ...

“I’m glad you’re broken too.” The murmured words linger in her ears just like the sticky sweat covering both their bodies, its wet horny smell slowly fading into a memory of itself as the little room’s littler AC unit struggled to catch up with the heat. The room smells like sex, like her body and theirs, like all the gasps and touches and shuddering moments of release they’d filled each other with all through the movie murmuring its background noise from her laptop’s little speakers and long past its end— ...

Precious little witch-to-be, caught in a trap— Cold iron teeth cling to her ankle, slowly warming in her blood’s heat; she doesn’t have the strength to move, can’t drag herself across the smiling tiles. The door’s right there: those few feet might as well be miles. She can’t think how this happened. Just moments ago she was out on the street, wandering through autumn’s dripping red and yellow, just enjoying the season. Cold, crisp air filling her lungs and the warmth of her oversized caterpillar of a familiar around her neck. ...

It regards you from behind the free-standing mirror, its long-beaked skull quizzically tilted; you weren’t supposed to summon it again before your half of the deal came due. But— You’re careful not to stutter as you speak, as hard as that is. “You tricked me, and I want out.” Its shoulders shake, and it takes you a few moments to realize that It is silently laughing at you. “It’s not funny!” you sputter. “The power and wealth you gave me wasn’t what I thought it would be—you wrote the contract to be unclear, and took advantage of me!” ...