Clusterfrag

The wind kicked up in the alley, casting leaves of city-trash aloft on the breeze. Mick popped the collar on their billowing overcoat and risked a look over their shoulder. Inky black shadows slithered over garbage cans and clung to the ferrocrete walls of the gloomy alley. A faltering street lamp flickered greasy, wan light after them from the street behind.

And there was no blood then.

Mick ran their hand over a peach-fuzzed scalp. Things were getting hard again. The air was filling up with tension and anger and paranoia, the whisper-thin membrane between violence and tranquility blistering as to burst.

But there was no blood yet.

The wrap around Mick’s breasts ached. It always ached. The small ork drew a breath, pulling the rancid Seattle air deep into their lungs, and felt the compression wrap disagree as their ribs begged to expand. Steam rose from sewer grates as somewhere, further ahead in the impenetrable dark, a can rattled and skittered across the pavement.

The meet was in half an hour. Mick didn’t often find opportunities falling into their lap, and it didn’t matter that they were in the middle of an episode. It couldn’t matter; there was no more runway for them to play it safe.

“Hey baby,” called a bestupored voice from behind them. Mick turned and saw a silhouette rising lugubriously from the shadows, the dry shuffling sound of shifting garbage floating out of the darkness like the twirl of smoke from a snuffed candle wick.

Mick didn’t stop walking. This drek was pretty normal.

Unfortunately.

But what usually came after was pretty normal too.

Maybe not so unfortunately.

The air and shadows grew thicker the deeper into the alley Mick traveled. “Hey! Hey, I got somethin’ t’ show ya,” the man slurred from behind.

Mick was used to this by sheer virtue of existing, it would seem. Mick had literally never presented as a woman, eschewing the traditional trappings of femininity from their earliest memory. It had never felt appropriate to be labeled a “girl,” and thus Mick had never thought of themself as one.

Mostly, the people around Mick pretty much left them alone. Beneath their lined coat, Mick stood a slight 5’7”, their waifish frame concealed by expansive, flowing clothing that typically bore the names of punk rock bands, or the occasional colorful hand gesture to demand a wide berth from and would be comers. A network of tattoos covered Mick’s pale skin and flowed over a spider web of tattoos.

But there was no blood yet.

“Hey, wait,” the itinerant gutterman grumbled behind them.

And out of the heavy gloam in the alley, Mick thought they could smell the first wisps of the inevitable sanguine tide, coiling into them from beyond, heady and sweet.



And without warning, Mick was in that goddamned bathroom again.





It took a moment to grasp the scene laid out through the open bathroom door. A hideous smear of ruddy light slithered out from behind and around the door jamb. The man’s back was turned, his arms working laboriously at an unseen burden. Mick crept closer, their voice driven to extinction in their 11-year old throat. A slow pool of blood spilled into view like molasses, slopping out lazily across the tile floor. The man grunted as his right arm worked while Mick slipped silently through the bathroom door.

The bathroom was a scene of horror such that Mick’s young mind couldn’t immediately process it. Mick’s father laid in rough-hewn pieces to Mick’s left, an explosion of gore traced across the mirror and counter, pooling in the sink. His dead eyes stared out at Mick from up off the floor. His feet stuck up out of the hamper on two disembodied legs, one of his house moccasins still hugging his rapidly graying left foot. His hand was a ragged claw, stretched to its final living extent, reaching for help that never came. A thick glob of blood and tissue dripped down his hairy knuckle and onto his wedding ring.

Grunting heavily, the man bent over and heaved a mighty weight over itself in the bathtub, sheets of blood smeared across the white tiled wall, heavy drops gathering and falling one-by-one like a disinterested crimson rain from the ceiling. A long knife, slick with gore, rested casually on the floor by his foot. From around the wall of man, Mick could see their mother’s hair stuck to the wall, streaking up the tile in thick mats.

And that was when he tuned. His eyes met Mick’s and there was a wild, untethered rage within him. Far away, he smiled slowly at a quivering child and his face froze over. In his right hand was a hacksaw, caked in syrupy clots of flesh and fat. Mick’s eyes nervously darted back to the knife on the floor, and as he followed Mick’s gaze, he finally spoke.

“Yeah? Want that, do you kid?”
His voice was a growl. Human but not. Here but there. Mick didn’t move and didn’t make a sound.

“Go ahead, pick it up,” he suggested easily, his eyes locked on Mick’s. When he spoke, the bathroom bloomed with the sour smell of liquor and cigarettes.

Bending over with an impatient huff, he retrieved the knife– the knife he had used to slit Mick’s parents’ throats– and slapped it aggressively into their hands.

“You wanna be a killer? Here. Take it. Take it, killer. Let’s see what kind of killer you are.”

All four-foot-six of Mick was frozen. The weight of the knife was alien in their small hand.

His smile curled up to his high cheeks, creating half moons of his burning eyes that never unlocked from Mick’s.

“Bet you can’t even–”

But Mick never learned what he bet Mick couldn’t even. The rage drained gradually from his eyes, replaced by an odd mixture of confusion and pleasant surprise.

The smile drooped from his face in slow motion as Mick’s eyes traced down the line of buttons on his filthy military surplus shirt, coming to rest on the hilt of the blade sticking out of his chest just beneath his sternum. A thick foam of pink bubbles gurgled from his mouth and onto his lips. Mick’s gaze returned to the man’s, which shone still with baleful awareness as his legs buckled beneath him, landing his knees on the tile with a bone-shattering crunch. The globe of his head wobbled on its pike as his chest and shoulders hitched in rhythmic waves– tiny at first, but mounting to grand, rolling sweeps– as the man began to sputter out gales of soul-rending laughter.

The blasts of his dying amusement ate the world. They bounced off the tile walls and echoed forever. They pierced through the Mick, blasting holes in them, filling their heart with ice and snow and rattling bones.

The cackling rose and roared ever higher, the murderer’s weight jumping on the end of the knife still in Mick’s hand. It was only when they instinctively ripped the blade from the man’s chest that Mick finally heard their own blood-curdling scream, sustained and dancing nimbly through his guffaws.

A spray of blood erupted from the hole in his chest, casting Mick’s silhouette onto the wall behind them. It was like being covered in hot honey– thick, but running thin, and sticky enough to catch flies.



All the world was ablaze as the small ork met their awakening.



The bathroom exploded in a shower of electricity and sparks that were there but weren’t. White-hot energy lapped over every surface, radiating out from Mick and curling back around on them, closing upon them like a chrysanthemum blooming in reverse. The knife in their hand vibrated with the explosion of power ripping through the room as the dead man slumped backward, falling awkwardly against the bathtub where Mick’s mother rested asunder.

Then the light was out. The fluorescent tube light over the bathroom mirror exploded, sending filaments of glass everywhere. The world shook and rattled and rumbled, coming to a jerky rest as the tinkling of glass and afterimage sparks faded instantly to distant, numb memory. Though they couldn’t see it, Mick could feel the blood dripping down the walls.

And that was when they heard it. A heavy swoosh through the darkness, thick and cloying, uncoiling from the very depths of their mind. Casually, from out of the black of the room and of Mick’s heart, swam a shadow, silent and easy and cool, stalking the murky farwaters of their consciousness. It swam around Mick in wide, lazy, ethereal circles.

Until it didn’t.

It came for Mick. It came for Mick so fast that the small orphan couldn’t even draw a breath. Its massive jaws stretched wide open to reveal its rows of teeth until the mouth was all Mick could see. And it was then, as the shark’s jaws closed around Mick’s very soul, that they were ripped from the flashback.





“... about it?”

Mick shook the images from their mind as reality came flooding back in through the murky depths of the past.

The alleyway resolving itself, Mick was surrounded now by three men, but it was the same slurring voice from before that barked the question.

Mick turned and saw the man step into the dim light of a neon OPEN sign that blinked above a short stairwell leading down into one of the many unknown chambers of Seattle’s underbelly.

“I said, ‘what are you gonna do about it?’”

“About what?” Mick asked, still swimming back to understanding.

He smiled a hungry, lascivious smile as he came a step closer.

“You got some fraggin’ drek in your ears, chica.”

Mick could feel the other two drawing nearer from behind.

“I said, ‘if we ask you to show us your tits, what are you gonna do about it?’”

Mick eyed the two closing in their periphery. The shadows in the alley swam, roiling and sanguine, the darkness closing in.



And then there was blood.