Hero Stuff: Teasers, Shorts, and Random Stuff

Working Title, Virt: The most messed up thing I've ever written, coming 2018

Prologue First Draft:

When her husband giggles, my husband screams.

While the one man lounges on the arm of his wife's throne, Mathias writhes against the sterling bracelets that anchor him to his chair. Veins bulge in his neck, his eyes big and white and wild, the panic alive in his face and voice. I want to tell him that everything will be okay, but that's a lie and we both know it.

Right now, I'm dead. And if not in this moment then in a couple or three. 

As the doctors prepare me for dissection, my Handle hovers above my body, invisible even to Mathias. The Override has been torn out, so when I die in this reality I'll die in the next, and as I watch my body twitch and wriggle, my pulse ratchets up. No. Not now. Not yet. But there's nothing I can say or do. 

I'm trapped. 

Tufts of yellow fluff float from the leather cushions, brushing Mathias's bare feet and splattering in a puddle of his own blood. "Please," he says. "Please." Like that's the only word left in that big brain of his. "Please." Tears drip down his scarred skin, brown hair oily with sweat and tangled with blood. His clothes are tattered, his hands quivering. The other man takes it all in with a smirk, leaning back with a contented sigh. The dictator flicks her hand over, two fingers parted as if holding a cigarette.

The room is narrow and white, all white. White walls, white floors, white lights. My limp body is warm on the gurney and the sensation muted doctors cut me. From up here, it's ticklish even. A slight buzz where beads of blood bubble up through the slits in my skin and creep onto the doctors' plastic gloves. The dictator leans back in her throne chair, her bony shoulders nestled precariously in the swath of broken glass. 

"No," she responds, as if he was asking a question. She smiles, her eyes bright and round in her ageless face. Some days I think her shaped of clay. Her first husband drapes his arm over hers, laughing and whispering, still charming her with his sweet, silver tongue. Her second husband yawns, his head lolled in her lap. For some minutes I thought this one was dead.

Lines are drawn and cuts are made. One gloved finger digs into the seam of my chest, yanking at bone and muscle and grit. My husband wails again. Hers laughs once more. The dictator strokes the man with his head in her lap, her fingers tracing delicate circles on the back of his neck. She is an artist, and with every stroke she paints the Citadel red with blood and the countryside white with the bones of her enemies. Watching her methodical movements makes me chilly even up here.

"Please," Mathias says. "Please."

The woman rouses her husband with a nudge. He yawns and stretches, blinking the sleep from his eyes. "Oh," he says in his delicate consort voice, "her heart is still beating, isn't it?"

"Love, I'll have it ripped out if I must."

I wish I could say I have an easy explanation for this. Having a husband at seventeen. Fighting a dictator at seventeen. The being dissected alive and watching it all from the relative comfort of my handle at seventeen, too.

The short explanation, I suppose, is that it isn't real.

But the more complicated one is that is. Everything that happens in the virt is real. Everyone in the virt is real. And when my virt heart beats its final thump, so does my real one, and so do many others' because people are counting on me.

But this is too much, too fast. I should rewind to the beginning, for the historians.

It starts in a stuffy classroom during the fall of 2017.

****

I've wanted to write about a matriarchal autocratic state for at least two years now and the urge has only gotten more intense as times passes.  I've read, watched, and listened to sooooo many stories that feature an evil patriarchal society, and every time I spot one, I just want to gender-bend the heck out of it. Don't know why. It's like an innate desire or something, the way cats have to sit in boxes, or how geese have to walk across traffic-filled roads when they have friggin' wings, yours truly has to gender-bend. 

Plus stuck-in-a-video-game stories are way fun.

And being mean to characters is my thing.

Is this story turning out to be the most messed up thing I've ever written? Yeah. And that's sayin' something for sure. But it'll definitely be coming around by 2018. My queue is pretty long and growing still, but this story has caught my attention and working on the details of this dystopic nightmare is honestly such a treat.

So long, Starlighters. 

xMichelle