skonen_blades

In some ways, a lot of the public assemblies I remember having when I was in high school play back like some sort of freak show.

I remember he came to talk to us about workplace safety in our high school. I was in twelfth year. He’d been a scientist in a solvent factory. He was there to tell us that accidents in the workplace were as commonplace as they were preventable.

We’d had someone come to talk to us about drunk driving earlier in the year. He’d lost his license and his wife and all that. I remember my heart going out to what he’d been through but it didn’t really affect me.

There was a positivity seminar from a woman I wouldn’t have trusted to borrow fifty cents off me. She had bright shining teeth offsetting her golf tan and a tight emerald-green dress. She wore pearls. She told us we could do anything. She closed with a musical number. Rumour has it that she slept with two of the students.

We even had a religious guy come through town to tell us how ‘hip’ G-O-D was. His attempts at banter and our ‘teenage slang’ were more hilarious to us than the clown that came through six months earlier to tell us about sexual abuse using balloon animals and magic tricks.

A clown, I might mention, that was busted for sexual abuse two years later. The cycle continues.

People with broken lives attempting to serve as signposts for us came to talk. They told us of their evil ways in some sort of twisted form of confession that, in all honesty, served no purpose other than amusement for us. Even though a third of us would unintentionally end up on unemployment later on in life, all of us knew at that moment that we’d never sink so low. We were idiots.

The hypocrisy was being shown to us. The education that took place in that auditorium was happening on a second level that was completely unintended. Have fun while you’re young, they were shouting at us, because it just gets worse and worse afterwards. Your morals will smear like chalk drawings on a rain-soaked sidewalk. Behold the ravages of age.

The only man I actually enjoyed was the solvent factory guy. I remember he came to talk to us about workplace safety. I was in twelfth year. He was there to tell us that accidents in the workplace were as commonplace as they were preventable. He’d fallen into a vat of hot glue five years ago and was on his twentieth skin graft/plastic surgery operation now

For one thing, he’d unintentionally huffed so much glue as part of his job that he was permanently high. The other part was that .He made Freddy Kreuger look like a success story. His hands and legs were artificial. His head poked out of his loose-fitting sweatshirt like a turtle’s head in a wrapped in a condom.

It was the laugh, really. He kept losing track of what he was saying and staring at the lights. Then he’d do this high pitched giggle before someone from the audience would have to give him the last sentence he’d said. He’d talk for a little longer before laughing again. He’d tell us stories of the time he’d had sex with a dancer in Vegas before being interrupted and put back on track by the attendant teacher. Apparently his handler had missed the connecting flight so he’d decided to do the show solo.

We got a special opportunity because of that handler's missed flight. For one thing, the guy was having a great time despite his injuries. He wasn’t pious. He had a filthy mouth. He wasn’t bitter. He gleefully told us that he got more pussy now than he ever did before. We laughed our heads off. Every time he got off track was funnier than the last.

After he left, the teachers apologized for the shambles that his talk had become and told us to remember the other people that had talked. They shook their heads in disgust.

Looking back, he was the one guy that actually gave me hope for the future. He was the one person that proved to me that it was still possible to have a good time no matter how bad times got.




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The tail-lights of the dragon in front of me flared red before the impact, prisming through the rain on my goggles into red 80s science fiction. I woke up with ‘mancers around me and doctors applying bandages. I had no idea how much time had passed or how badly injured my mount was.

I also realized with an inner jolt that the person standing beside the bed and looking down at me with pity and panic in her tear-filled eyes was me.

A wave of pain followed closely by a wave of pain medication took me under again and two weeks later I was sitting on a bench with a spell of silence around us while the pretty precog doctor told me what happened.

There’s a switchspace junction protocol lock that the interface on my mount hadn’t heeded. The intangibility protection spells of the other rider had reacted badly with mine and in effect, we had switched places. Our bodies and souls had shuffled apart to become four entities before panicking back to the closest body. The closest body at that exact moment happened to be wrong. This negated the spells and brought us back to solidity just in time for full-force impact. Our mounts fused painfully and screamed. The tangled mess ricocheted off of buildings on the way down. I got the worst of it.

We were now in each other’s bodies. Our mounts were dead.

Not only were we grounded for life but our friends had to get used to a new person. I had become a tall strong man and he had become a young short woman that used to be me. In terms of physicality we both won. I mean, we were both riders. That kind of training guarantees a certain level of fitness.

Other than that, we were both fucked.

My new body had tattoos of allegiance to the darkwing collective, two brands of hotpark escape successes and fifteen body count trace markers burrowing around in its bloodstream.

His body, my old one, was a curse to him. He had belonged to the order of the Jesuit Flame. No women allowed. His rather incredible career with them which appeared to have just been reaching its zenith was over.

My crew were peaceful. The tattoos would make them uncomfortable. The facial scarring and the tribal flesh-warping would make them even more so. My deep resounding voice and huge frame would never be accepted.

I was thinking of maybe looking this guy up and asking him out on a date. I mean, I know exactly what I like in bed. I could really show him a good time by taking him on a tour of what his new body likes. I can’t remember if those Jesuit Flame people were celibate. I hope not. I’m pretty sure we’d only have each after this.

The pretty precog doctor hands me his phone number, already written on a card in her pocket, over to my large callused hands.



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