Edith is a connoisseur of the flesh. She was trained for it, first voluntarily and then not, but it has always enraptured her—she would not be suitable for her work otherwise. Once it was her first love, when she had not yet learned self-control or how to make herself useful, though she was never any good at cleaning up after herself.
Anne does not like the subway. It is not that it is crowded and noisy and dirty (although it is), because her politics do not allow her to dislike things on such fundamentally bourgeois grounds, and she would be affronted by the suggestion that the variety of people who ride the subway play any role in her aversion. She would never feel uneasy because of a group of black men standing near her, an immigrant loudly talking in an unknown language, or an unhoused person sitting with their entire life in a pile of dirty bags. Anne has done the work to unravel all of the forms of implicit bias that her upbringing taught her, and any suggestion otherwise is probably simple transphobia. ...
She was a girl of flawed and low character, suitable for little more than feedstock.
Miranda “Dove” Tuesday, Janitor First Class, really doesn’t deserve what’s about to happen to her.
Two vignettes about Callista Hayes, followed by descriptions of her and her superior officer.
Alexander’s stomach rebels. It cramps and spasms as his body struggles to contain the wrongness inside him. Sweat beads on his smooth skin; his muscles ache and his mouth forces itself open. The bathroom’s tiled floor is cool and peaceful, and he desperately wishes that he could let himself collapse onto it, to curl up and dissociate until it’s all over, but he can’t, he really, truly can’t. He is here and this is now and everything is happening so much. ...
The story of Afterbirth, North Dakota first came to my attention through back issues of the Bismarck Daily Sentinel, which I was reading for my own private purposes. This was before the Great War, of course, and many of its pages were concerned with the tensions that anticipated it, but the paper still made space for local occurrences. Many of these were of little import: the winners of local contests, the highlights of a fair, a new building being erected to house the blighted state’s government, and … a stray mention of Afterbirth, found abandoned at high summer.
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?
The sun is hiding behind a cloud when Lost bursts out of the stairwell into the open air. The rooftop is a wide plaza, peppered with an eclectic assortment of beach equipment and the usual detritus of disused spaces: buzzing heat exchange units, vents slurping down fresh air, and a handful of pigeons. It feels like it is about to rain, but she hopes that it will not; she needs a fast burn to put an end to things. ...
Intoxicating noise fills the club. The music’s throbbing beat, glittering with crystalline static and the crowd’s excited shouts and bursts of laughter are obvious, but Fel has never found a way to drown out the oceans of blood pulsing just beneath their skin. Earplugs and thick, insulating headphones help a bit, just like the smelling salts and herbs stuffed inside her mask help with the smell, but it is never enough. Will never be enough. ...