Thanksgiving in a Strip Club

Thanksgiving in a Strip Club
by
Bobby Derie

Ferguson was burning. The smell of pumpkin spice lattes was in the air. The Baby-Boomer FM stations were already mixing in Xmas favorites. At 10 AM, Bill wasn’t surprised to see that the parking lot of the Library Lounge was already half full. He picked a shady spot between a palm tree and the dumpster.

It was unseasonably cold out, for Florida. The snowbirds still wore t-shirts and shorts; the natives were breaking out their winter gear. Bill split the difference with a jean jacket too heavy for normal wear, but refused to button it up.

Jake had the door, and nodded Bill in; the lights were set for eternal twilight, except for the blazing spot on the stage, but the music was off. A flat-chested young black woman was on stage, a half-dressed librarian doing a slow strip while reading aloud passages from The Way of a Man with a Maid, little black nipples pert as she gave herself a tweak. No one needed a pounding beat at this hour in the morning.

Bill started out his two-drink minimum with a double whiskey and a beer chaser; he could drink it slow and nobody’d pay him any mind. He ended up, looking for a place to sit, sharing a table with Frankenstein - a scarred young veteran of the sands that had been blown up by an IED and stitched back together again; Frank liked to joke that they’d missed a few bits, but the VA picked up the tab, so that was fine. They shook hands awkwardly; Bill was a righty, but Frank was a lefty by elimination.

They watched the stage. Two girls in masks had brought out a small red couch, and one of them had brought rope.

“Kinda artsy,” Bill noted.

“Manager’s kid is running the show,” Frank said, “Theater major.”

They watched, and listened, and drank. People came in and out. Hollow-eyed men and and a few women that needed a break from family drama, visibly unwinding in the quiet anonymity of the crowd, the shared hush-hush of staring at strange titties and firm little asses working their way through college. Bill and Frank were as rocks, rarely moving except to piss or get another drink, part of the shiftless crowd that had nowhere better to go.

They lived in a world without turkey - because what was turkey, anyway? Or a ham, or cranberry sauce, or dressing. Mashed potatoes and green beans, rice and black beans, brown gravy and yellow corn and the unnatural store-bought orange of pumpkin pie. They could have any of that any time of the year, on their own. There was nothing special about it today. Traditions are empty, unless they’re shared.

Around 4 o’clock, the art wound down, the stage lights dimmed, and the implants took the stage, silicone funbags working the pole in a Buccaneers cheerleader outfit as a DJ cued up a set. An hour or two more and Thanksgiving would be over for a lot of people, and the crowd would pick up. Bill finished the dregs of his sour, crushing the ice in his teeth.

“Reckon I’m done, Frank.”

“See you around, Bill.”

They shook hands again.

“Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.”

###

Cherry Gimlet

Cherry Gimlet
by
Bobby Derie

Brains were raining on the street, splattering against the asphalt with wet smacks. Some of their transparent membranes burst open on impact, others ruptured beneath the tires of passing traffic, leaving behind streaks of slippery grey matter and blood. A few managed to crawl on their tentacles into the storm sewers; the next generation, who would grow and survive, to spawn again in a few summers, perpetuating the cycle.

The street smelled off spoiling fat and rotten eggs. I was glad I'd decided on the rubber overshoes before I left this morning. Damn shame about the coat.

Samedi's Set was a wanga club that used to be a speakeasy, back when blood was off the menu. The front still looked like a butcher's, but now a trio of shrunken heads hung out in the window as a sign. Duma was at the bar, and looked like he'd been freshly embalmed, the skin on his brown dome shiny and stretched tight. He didn't even nod as he started making my gimlet, and set it at my usual stoop on the bar.

I was just sucking down the gin when an old story started playing itself out in the corner. A young blade, a fish-lipped underboss in a booth, harsh words you could hear over a quiet afternoon rain. The glass didn't even hit the counter; it slapped into Duma's dry pink palm, and he handed me another one.

"You don't want none of this trouble, Mr. Cherry." he intoned.

"A girl?" I said. Bringing the drink up for a sip while the soda still had some fizz.

Duma shook his head. The voices reached a new pitch. "One of Zooey's boy-toys. Had them working last night."

"In this weather?" I said.

Duma nodded sadly. There was the flash of a knife, and one of the mooks in an adjoining booth stood up. I handed the glass back to Duma.

"Run me a tab?"

"Always, Mr. Cherry."

The smell of the street preceded me as I walked toward the back booth. By the time I got there, the mook had the lovestruck lad in hand, the knife was on the ground, and was helping the kid scratch parts of his back he didn't know he could reach.

The fishlips in the booth was a wavy-haired, pomaded prick with light dusting of fur on top of his lip. A white zombie, or one that was light enough to pass - but how many of them would do that, even if they could? I flashed my star, and watched the light die in his eyes for a moment.

"None of your business," he said.

"I decide what is an isn't my business." I said. "You running for Zooey now?"

"Ladies need a roof. My house is warm." he said. I grunted.

"Must be you're new at this. Your boy-whores shouldn't be working the streets in this weather. Bad for their health. Bad for business."

He smiled, like a big-mouthed bass trying to be a Cheshire cat. That was his first and last mistake. I might have talked him out of it, except for that smile. My left hand grabbed his cheek, the thumb digging in at the edge of his mouth in a fishhook, and I bounced his head off the edge of the table once, twice, three times - and there was an audible crunch as something inside gave. I let what was left of his head slip off my hand, and the rest of his body decided to follow suit and crumple to the floor.

I eyeballed the mook. He'd already dropped the kid's arm, but made no move for a weapon.

"Sorry," I said. He shrugged great shoulders; quarterbacks had nightmares about those peaks and valleys.

"Guy was an asshole anyway," he said.

"You need work, I hear the Boa Mambo down at the Skell is looking for muscle."

"Yeah? Thanks for the tip."

He smiled; we shook hands. It was nice dealing with professionals.

The kid had the presence of mind to pick up his knife, but didn't seem to know what to do with it, so he stuck it in his pocket.

"What's you name?" I asked.

"Jaime."

"Jimmy. I'm Cherry. Let me buy you a drink, and give you some advice about falling in love with whores..."

###

Speed Dating

Speed Dating
by
Bobby Derie

"Hi! I'm Kylie. I'm 31 years old, and a zoologist specializing in saving endangered species." she smiled. Her mother had paid a lot for that smile, when she was a teenager, and had never let her forget.

The lump across the table wore a salmon tie on shirt the yellow of a dead canary, the threadcount not high enough to hide the dark v-neck underneath, with a grey striped blazer and black trousers, brown leather slip-in shoes completing an ensemble that no loving parent with working color vision would have let their child out of the house in.

"Kylie. I'm Mark." He was a tenor with a voice pitched so low she had to lean forward to make out his words. "Graduate student at NYU. Business Management." He leaned in close. "Kylie, have you ever worked in porn?"

Kylie flashed back to a sweaty morning in China, the sunlight breaking through the bamboo as the pandas she'd come here to shoot finally finished the preliminaries and began their great furry humping. It was a grant project, the digital recording to be spliced, edited, and shown in zoos so the big, lovable furry lumps could figure out which end was up when it was their time to perpetuate the species.

"Never in front of the camera." Kylie said, the half-life coming out smoothly before her brain worked out what he was getting at. Mark was halfway through his pitch when the buzzer sounded, and left his business card on the table as the next one wandered over.

Her smile came back on, automatic pilot. "Hi! I'm Kylie..."

The bugbear that sat down across from her had shaved today, and his clothes were clean, even if he had never progressed past "everything matches if you wear black." The glasses were thick, rape-prevention plastic rims, which with the buzzcut screamed military - either shortly after basic or just got out, maybe ROTC. He looked at her with worrying intensity, and caught the whiff of Old Spice - probably trying to smell like his dad had; she wondered if he used the little brush to apply the foam when shaving. A little plastic nametag announced him as a Ricardo.

"Saving endangered species" he said, rolling the idea around his head, having forgotten to introduce himself. "How do you do that?"

Behind her smile, Kylie flashed back to collecting sperm samples from an African elephant - a virile but gentle male that could have stomped her flat, and which had decided in his old age that he preferred to try and bugger the other male elephants. It had been a long and exhausting day, but a good workout for upper body strength.

"I generally work with fertility issues; I've done quite a bit of field work..."

Ricardo said nothing, and trying to get him to talk about himself elicited three-word answers. The buzzer didn't come soon enough.

Number three had the slightly desperate whiff of the engineer about him, all shaved head and slight gut, glasses and grey polo shirt over black jeans. Still, he seemed normal enough, and had a nice smile.

"Desmond," he said, offering his hand. She took it politely, her callouses rubbing against his soft palms. "I'm a werewolf." He paused. "I like to get that out of the way ahead of time. It's not the kind of thing you like to find out after you get to know a person, you know?"

Kylie digested this. "Any particular species?"

It was Desmond's turn to be confused. "What?"

"Wolves. Canis lupis. There are multiple subspecies, not counting things like the Tiger Wolf or Tasmanian Wolf which aren't really a wolves, even though they're called that."

"Oh. Uh. Just, common wolves, I guess? Here, I have a picture."

Desmond pulled out an iPhone, fiddled through three clicks, and showed her a picture of him in a full-body fur suit, blue coat with a white belly, a head that looked like a husky but with eyes like a cartoon character on top. There was an anatomically correct - if far too large - silicone canine dick located at groin-level, knot and all.

"Have you, uh, done any furplay?"

Kylie remembered her graduate thesis. Head-to-toe in lizard drag, she crept up on all fours to a female komodo dragon. Female komodos can reproduce through parthenogenesis, and her theory was that pseudo-copulation would stimulate the process - unfortunately, they couldn't get another female komodo, and the one they had didn't respond well to the puppets. So Kylie had slinked up and gently dry-humped giant lizard.

Six of the eggs have hatched.

The buzzer sounded while Kylie was still formulating an answer, and Pavlovian instinct forced a smile.

A young woman smiled back at her. She was in drag, or maybe transitioning - brown striped trousers and vest over a decent, long-sleeved white shirt, hair cropped short, no breasts to speak of unless they were wrapped down, but the lack of an Adam's apple was a dead giveaway.

"Hi, I'm Sam. I'm twenty-eight, and I'm a cat breeder and vet tech."

Kylie's smile widened and relaxed into a more natural grin. "Hi Sam, I'm Kylie. It's funny you should mention that, I'm into breeding myself..."

###

The Sun Not Shining

The Sun Not Shining
by
Bobby Derie

From the depths of Erebus the Titans had arisen, and in accordance with Nick Silver's divinations had taken the parliament of the gods, locking in a thousand years of antiquated fiscal policies and regressive gender laws, and rendering the President of the Gods a limp dick atop a molehill Olympus. Atlantis was sinking, and liquor sales had spiked shortly after the returns began, following swiftly thereafter by harder drugs - dealers in Los Angeles complained of a massive campaign shortage to their contacts shortly before the Republican Einherjar began their return to "traditional small-town values" by raping and pillaging Alameda, the enslaved screenwriters and actors hauling the accumulated loot back to their Hollywood Hills mansions. It was not quite Ragnorok, but there was still a hell of an afterparty.

One fair intern pried herself from the nest of bedding she had made around herself, a magic circle of spent bottles and unlabeled pills to ward off the nightmares that crept and crawled at night, and grumbling refused to come out from under the covers until she had, with the aid of a coathanger, retrieved her panties from where they had fallen outside the circle. Thus garbed and with the familiar burning need to add to the nightsoil, she limped between the scattered bodies to that most familiar and sacred temple of the household, where more prayers were uttered - and answered - than in any other. Finding the toilet already occupied, she rudely lifted the sopping head out of the bowl shoved the dead or unconscious person backwards into the hall, flushed twice, then locked the door, lit the candles, and plunked her ass down to begin the business of the day.

An hour later, the sun was not shining, and her head felt three sizes too big for her skull; her lips were cracked and dry, and her throat filled with an acidic phlegm. Various bodies had begun to stir in the household, and she no longer tiptoed among the fallen revelers, but kicked and shoved and spat black loogies into the faces of the crowd as she made a single-minded lurch toward the beer fridge, though she had to glass a fratboy dudebro in the face to secure the last remaining microbrew for breakfast, and as his hands went to his bleeding face she snagged the last three cigarettes from his right breast pocket, and lit them on the stove. She might have felt worse for him if he hadn't confessed to voting for the GOP, or if the cigs weren't clove. Mindless, rutting servant of the Great Devourer, he deserved her abuse and more she determined as her hands stopped shaking, smoke and drink taking the edge off of the night.

Having finally struck the right balance between pain and belligerence, she dared open the blind - to find the swollen wolfs-head of Karl Rove still hanging in the sky, choking slowly on the moon, which was as yet too large for his ancient gullet; elsewhere in the valley skeletal titans walked, plucking tourists like sweetmeats, calling women sluts and cracking open the roofs of maternity wards and kindergartens - for the conservatives never did anything but feed on the blood of the young and innocent. Somewhere downtown she could see the golden furnace of Baal rise; John Galt hard at work.

And these assholes voted for them AGAIN.

Sighing, she disappeared back into the house, turning a heel and wading once more through the drowsy doom-partiers, bare feet sweeping through the detritus of empties, used condoms, and torn ballots cast down by those who had decided there was no way they could face the next age sober.

When she emerged again, she was at least dressed - and from the closet had taken forth her old battleaxe, which had tasted the blood of Tea Partiers and Libertards before, and even an ancient Paleoconservative risen fresh from his crypt. It would serve her well again.

###