simply two friends

NSFW character work

[ocapgras]

kick back

Best thing about owning a dog is hitting it ‘til you feel better.

I loved it. I loved the sound we made and the weight connecting the point of my shoe with the skin, the fat pad, and the muscles of his back. One flat note between us. We wrote a song with no music. Once I kicked until I swore I dozed off - it’s the tempo - it’s the surety in moving from Point A to Point B with a single sweeping arc. The sound of it and the way he’d curl like an insect. He’d flinch and I’d hit him twice as hard but then he stopped flinching. Real docile thing.

You know I actually had two boys from that mining colony? Him and another - an older towheaded kid, little taller ‘cause he was so much smaller than average. I thought if I had a pair who looked so different then the compare and contrast’d make it a more compelling value for the right client. I kept them in a shed for a little while with enough food and water to last until I could convince the client. We come back in less than a day and he’s dead. I’ll never forget. I unlocked the door and he’s - the one that’s left - he’s just standing there with smears all over him like he never thought it possible to hide what he’d done. Compared to the other kid, I thought he might be slow. Hand to god I never heard him make a sound in the first few months.

I might’ve confused the ambivalence of the deaf ‘n’ dumb with the stillness of a something accustomed to lying in wait. He looked at me then and the color of his eyes wasn’t right. This brown seedy hue with the intelligence of something that watches and understands what it meant to be watched. He looked me dead in the eye - I thought he could see right inside - and I kicked until he stopped looking.

"Hey, whoa-", fool said. You didn’t want him anyway. Make up your mind.

"Problem?"

"You'll kill him. C'mon. They probably got into a scuffle and things went too far."

"I'll knock twenny percent off for each kick. What am I at? Four?"

"Eighty percent?"

"Sure." I pulled the kid up by its shirt and kept him high enough he almost swung off his toes. "See. He's fine. Show him your teeth. See? He's only, like, twelve years old."

"He's got pox. Look."

"Nonono nono no that's normal where he's from. It ain't syfy."

Fuck. His teeth are weird. His teeth are fucked up. Fucking inbred rednecks they all like this? Why did I keep this one.

"It ain't syfy," I said again. "You can't catch it from a kid anyway. It's cool. C'mon, why're you being weird about this, Michael?"

Fucking Michael. You play your little queer butthole games and you're scared of syphilis. Grow up.

Fucking Michael palmed the back of his neck. He wasn't a hard no yet. I could turn this around. I got him to come all this way after all. Throw in some head and get this deadweight off my hands. The kid made a noise from the back of its throat. I might've been twisting his shirt collar to shorten off the air and make him docile. It was a stertorous sound I felt way up in my fist. Lower than it should be. Did I get the age wrong?

"Why's he so small?"

Fucking Michael I don't know. Because they ain't feed their fucking kids when they're economy goes under. Why'd you think I could find literal children and put them in a shed without anyone giving a -

"That's normal where he's from. I tol' you, man."

"Where are you from," he said in a voice people speak to pets in. It didn't look at the guy even when he dirtied his knees to get a better look.

"Where you from," I repeated.

"Einhardt." The 'd' is silent but he pronounced it. Sounded his age after all.

"Do you want to get out of here?" Fucking Michael put his hand on its shoulder. They were close enough to kiss. So much for poncy drama over syfy. "Want to live with me instead?"

For a hundred forty kay yeah you do, idiot. Say 'yes' or I'll beat you blind.

"I'm small."

"I like little boys like you." He took its right hand and lay it on his cheek. I watch the thumb, too calloused for a child's, brush the contour of a stranger's face. "See? It's alright. That's why I'm here. You can call me Mike. What's your name?"

It drove the thumb into Fucking Michael's eye. I heard the nail scrape socket.

Ah.

I scooped the kid out of reach but he was dragged back and I watched a sore loser try to bend the bones in its wrist. He squeezed too high up in the wrong place.

“I’ll teach you a fucking lesson, you little shit.” Classing Fucking Michael. I peeled them apart, tucking the kid under my arm at the waist.

“I gave you two free touches. You pay for the third. Two hundred kay.”

“One eighty.”

“Two hundred. You have time to play games or we can hurry and get you to an urgent care for that eye.”

“One eighty cash.”

“Where?”

“Here. In the car, here.”

I thought. I felt the kid’s pulse quicken at my hip and my skin crawled. What do you want? Maybe you shouldn’t’ve throttled the good-looking kid, man. I dunno. Reap what you sow.

“You don’t teach him a lesson now,” his hands went out for the boy. I tilted it out of reach. “He's going to keep doing it, Sef.”

“That's normal where he's from.”

“No it’s not.”

Small or not, a limp body is heavy. I set the boy down. Fucking Michael had him. These people cannot keep their hands to themselves.

“What’d I just say?”

“Your money’s in the car.”

My fingers wrapped back into its shirt collar. The cotton was coming apart. “You wan’im to change his clothes. He’s dirty.”

“Take them off.”

I pulled it back, all the way back, to a free dark corner of the shed. When I bent my knees cracked. It stared straight through me. The right wrist was red already; a bad sprain or a weak transverse fracture.

“Tell y’what, you little freak,” I breathed into its ear. “Take care of him ‘n’ we work something out.”

The eyes were a bad color.

“Right or left-handed?”

“Left.”

I gave him a piece of glass. Best thing about owning a dog is owning a dog.

[ocapgras]

Sef by Beidak

[ocapgras]

by Noc 

[ocapgras]

underlying

The minute I was immune to death was the minute I was driven to embrace it. I had to die. 

I snuck out with a flashlight, crawled under the fence through the trees and into the pasture where they kept cattle. Back when it was possible to grow something and earn a living. Anyway, I snuck out there and sifted through shit until I found them. Mushrooms with caps sloped and sullen and soft as a corpse’s breast. I touched them to my lips and they tasted the same. Deadass four o’clock in the morning with my arms covered in cowshit and I found enough to do what needed to be done and there I was just stomping back to my car with the sentinel moon leering down the back of my neck. 

Don’t know when this was. Maybe around when there was subsidy-dependent land and more rivers. Back when the colony wasn’t as much of an anthill. I could drive and drive and hit grass and gravel and no road for miles. Go far enough and you’d find an old trestle bridge. I could lean over the edge and wish for the world to fall into itself.

I slugged back about a fifth of vodka in the backseat of my first car, the shitty beater Camaro. It was all window dressing. I put more into drinking because it was cheap and everyone could but the taste isn’t as simple nowadays. I was a problem’t needed solving but also wanted to be blasted outta my goddamn mind. I wanted to dream. If this was the process to suffer through then I needed to dream. I cleaned the shrooms a little, just enough to coax the stink off with the corner of my shirt, then ate them as fast as I could slide them into my mouth. Before they hit I pulled a trash bag over my head, wound the tape all round my neck, and stumbled out to the river until the water threw me off my feet. 

Sounds dramatic now. I dunno why. I was sick all the time. I felt my brain turn in on itself. Dying would stop it. It had to. Being that frantic - maybe I might’ve been real back then. The pieces of me might’ve been held together better. I might’ve existed in the legal sense but no one comes looking for anyone at the Vandiver colony. Time stops there and death crawls. Like a rag in old oil, it crawls into your fibers ‘n’ sets into them. It was nice. To break free and go on meant stretching beyond the limits of flesh. Wasn't worth it when all I could think of was how to quit being inside myself. Fighting the act of dying is pulling used toilet paper from the bowl and having the audacity to think it’s dry. It’s made to break apart. Only, my hand was up to the elbow and I didn’t have a choice. I was scared of living with it. I was barely twenty. I was Joseph. I was just a kid.

I opened my eyes to a new day - different air, less humid, bugs ticking in long grass, the belly of the clouds rosy like early dawn. Neuropathic sensation lags behind the visceral and, when I lied there then, I couldn’t think of a better use of my time than watching fish try to kiss and work open my fingertips. I’d rather be wet paper covered in shit. I tried not to move but a turtle came and scared the shit out of me. Pain took hold just as I caught sight of my plastic bag with its duct tape streamers drifting downstream. It’s the kind of overwhelming that provokes anger and, in the wake of it follows a terror because feeling one way or the other don’t necessarily make it stop. It’s a mending pain from the bad miracle needed to create life. It took its time then and I wished I was blind instead of watching my insides come together. 

You ever see your fingers coming apart in something’s mouth and watch new parts of it grow back from your palm? I felt bones break in reverse. I heard silver fascia grow. There’s a butter thin layer of fat just over it and under the skin. Even the hairs returned. To come back from the brink is to be fresh and new and beautiful and devoid of agency. My body never felt right - felt like a suit shrunk in the wash. It was mine and it wasn’t. I looked like a better version of myself but never the same again. Not that guy digging mushrooms in the middle of the night or drinking in the back of his car. Barely the one wrapping tape around his neck like a bad pipe. Barely the one sucking spent air in a trash bag. 

I'm contaminated with eternity. It’s eggs hatching into larvae into moths making holes in my memories. It’s cancer; a malignancy self-dividing its thousand small deaths and rebirths in my tissue, incapable of recreating a thumbprint. I didn’t know what was mine anymore. I wore Joseph’s clothes. Drove his car. I lost him between the mushrooms and the river bank. I lost my goddamn mind and only Sef was left. 

[art by https://cuchulainn-4.tumblr.com/]

[ocapgras]

commission by Margherita Petrucci

[ocapgras]

Remember when a podcast gave him an accent?

[ocapgras]

sketches by mal

Misinformed consent between two friends and only friends.  

[ocapgras]

commission by lenny

[ocapgras]

commission by oolonglatte 

[ocapgras]

Red Lotus

Iiiii screwed up.

“Get the fuck off me.” He wasn’t fast enough and I had the sense to kick with a foot. It didn’t feel attached to my leg and, whether I was just that slow or he was learning, it didn’t make full contact and he scuffled out of sight.

Consciousness spun piecemeal. I hated this. The neuropathic pain was maddening, typhilitic. I couldn't think. I didn't have memories. My hands and feet burned. I swept the dirt out of my eyes numbly, scratching myself and feeling little of it. My heart fibrillated and a surge of nausea hit. I wanted to throw up. I did and tasted rotten blood. Something else too. They were minute but easy to see once you knew what to look for and it was the clumps of fly eggs that pissed me off the most.

How long was I dead.

“Hey.”

“Yeah.” I could barely hear yet but I knew he was out there. His eyes were big with old tears and this was the only time he looked like the child he was.

“How long you been here?”

A pause. Out with it already fucking christ. “Eighteen hours.”

Okay, I screwed up.

“Are you thirsty.”

“What was your name again?”

“James.” Another pause. “‘Thane’.”

“Get me a cigarette, Thane.”

When he left, I heaved again and a lot of stuff came up – shards of black blood, stunned blowflies, and another fistful of eggs. It was bound to happen with how hot this summer’s been. That’s just how things’d go once in a while. The longer I was allowed to – uh, rot – the more things piled inside. The more some parts of me curdled, the harder the growth factor, the fibroblasts, the interleukins whathaveyou went to work. Without a cigarette, I didn’t know what to do with my hands and ended up scanning my body with them. That helped and my fingers felt delicate, sensitive, again. Skin’s intact. Clothes were not. I pulled an index finger through one shirt hole and then another and another. Another. Then a big one. I liked this shirt.

“He emptied the magazine before I got here. But I think you were already -” Thane was there before I had a chance to push him away. He lit my cigarette for me and I relished blowing the first smoke in his face. He blinked but said nothing. I did it again until he moved. In this light, I couldn't see him and I didn't care.

“Go on,” I said. I didn’t sound like myself. Hopefully nothing laid eggs in my throat.

“That’s it. They buried you and left.”

“You dug me up.”

“Yeah.”

“Good boy.” I closed my eyes and took a long drag. “Did I scream?”

“S’how I found you.”

“Mm. Did you eat yet?”

“A little.”

Should I feed him? Did he expect to be fed? What a goddamn pain. This was why I should’ve sold him as soon as I had the chance. It’s been at least two years and, see, kids sucked the soul right out of you.

The words fell out all at once, “I’m not hungry. I can wait until you’re hungry.”

I smoked in silence until the light changed. The stars winked out with the crawl of dawn and I finally smelled the sea. I remembered the dock. I remembered agreeing to meet Daniel and I remembered the car tires eating gravel as he pulled up late. I remembered his buddy and his tinny little Glock but who owed who first here? Probably a bust, I guessed. And probably some snide shit I said.

I don’t die long. Some time ago it all just happened. Maybe it was because of genes or drugs or maybe because I deserved it or maybe because I was born wrong. I thought I was happy at first but it was like being a kite without a string. Consequences were fake until I ran aground and woke up spitting botflies.

“I can’t afford to keep running my mouth.”

“Hm?”

“I said, ‘Gimme a sec and we’ll get breakfast.’”

“Ah -”

I looked at him then. He wasn’t a big kid but definitely not what you’d like to sell at auction, not baby-faced or soft or pale or shy. A GnRH blocker, something to delay puberty, wouldn't give him what he never had. James. Thane? Whatever - was feral and dark and the childish parts of him just weren’t there anymore unless he got upset. And that was only when he cried. And that was only around times like this, when he was keen enough to hunt around for what was left of me when another perfect machination of mine went sour. He asked for nothing and moved in a way you couldn’t hear. Even if he wasn’t what I’d call ‘calculated’, he had intent and it didn’t fit the word “child”.

“Human”.

And, look, I’m a busy guy. I’d run goods, sell things, sell info, sell parts, sell people, sold kids before. It’s easy money but there’s a lot of moving parts and I forget things. I’d run with an idea and drop it. I forgot him once, turned around, and he was there; a shadow. I didn’t think anyone wanted what he was – an orphan of bad breeding from some podunk town, spoiled goods no longer worth offloading on some pervert. I think he knew.

“Do you want -”

“Want what? Breakfast? I said we’ll go.”

“Do you want to see?”

“Do I want to see what ferchrissakes,” I said. I stood up and my body stopped its noise.

A breeze rolled through and he lifted his nose to it. See. It’s just not really a marketable trait. Creepy s’what it was. He seemed to lose his nerve and regain it all in the same moment then pointed to our left. When he saw me look that way he ran a hand over his mouth and doggish teeth, stared at the ground, and sucked his lip briefly. That pleasant little taste of shame got me to stomp through the long grass to find what I might “want to see”.

Daniel’s face had a hole in it. When I rocked forward on my heels and the flies cleared, I saw something carved out the space between his sinus to his tongue. He and his buddy with the tinny Glock. Both corpses, edges chewed ‘n’ swollen in the heat. Something was up with their hands, like, parts were missing. They leaked through their clothes. Their money would be wet if I tried to search for it now but I smiled. Serves you right, fuckers.

The kid caught up with me. I watched him pick his way around, appraising it all as a whole then tracing his eye on fractions of old violence – the contractures, the teeth scattered like seeds, the blistered hematomas, and the eyeless holes. He stared in a way that said, “Next time I can do this better.”

What did he use. It'd be almost worth asking.

“You thought I wanted to see this, yeah?”

I flicked the butt of my cigarette his way when our eyes met. It hit him. I liked that.

“Rip the clothes and get the money.”

Thane didn’t waste time. Maybe he didn’t need a buyer.

“Don’t bury 'em.”

Maybe he needed a job.

“Let ‘em rot.”

Maybe he was born wrong too.

[END]