you're too young & eager to love

I’m late, I’m late for a very important date.

No time to say hello, goodbye, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!

… This should have been posted yesterday.

-



There could be three times the legal amount of alcohol in her blood, and she would slur just barely. An extra whisper to her consonants, a waver of weight shaking her dusky legs. Brando thinks it’s unfair that her ruin only makes her more desirable, that the unshielded, exposed underbelly of his sister’s being is highlighted, not shadowed, by ten dirty martinis.

He opens the door after she’s knocked for three minutes straight, the flat of her palm red from the force of her demanding.

“Hi,” Emere says, breathless, grinding her cigarette into his welcome mat. “Let me in?”

Brando has sleep in his eyes, has a weight hitting his chest the moment he steps aside and recloses the door. The familiar pressure of his undoing and a source of his resentment. But his arm knows how to slip around her waist when she stumbles, remembers the feel of her hip as she drunkenly untangles herself. Bending down to the Rottweiler that meets them in the hallway, she scratches the back of his head. The dog’s tail thumps loudly, and he licks the side of her face. “You were a pup, once. What happened?” She chides, tapping the end of his wet nose with her manicured nail.

Humming low in her throat, she braces herself against the walls to make her way to the bedroom. He follows, tall and dark, simmering with responsibility and frustration. Brando is too old to be patient but the only one of the family to understand commitment. His sister, pretty with her hair thick around her shoulders, perching on the side of his bed, looking at him expectantly and the cut of her eyelashes dramatic.

“Do we pray now?”

“We don’t do that.” He reminds her, taking her left foot into his hands, removing the leather heel off carefully.

“Because you’re the man in black?”

Brando resists scoffing, removes the other shoe. She’s easy to direct, he remembers, if one knows the path. “Tell me about Macbeth.”

Emere grins, moon-sharp while she tries to remove her silver earrings. “Paddock calls.” She taps her brother on his temple, does not realize that he tilts away from the brush of her fingers. “Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, for a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”

“You always do the witches’ parts.”

She shrugs her shoulders, presses a naked sole into his chest lightly. “And yet I sold my soul for advertising.” His bed is large, and she slides back on the covers, finds her way beneath them and curls, gripping pillows that smell like cologne and heat.

Brando will sleep on the couch, disliking how she wraps herself around him during the night otherwise, searching like a stranger. The dog, however, will lay by the side of the bed, stirring occasionally when Emere sighs in her sleep.

I didn't get to go nearly as in-depth or cover as much as I would have liked with this piece since I'm at work. But it's a start! I also have no idea what I'm doing in this genre. I'm fumbling around in the dark without a flashlight. Or a handy-dandy wand that has a glowing tip like in Harry Potter.

Anyway, here is my introduction(?) to a sci-fi alien doctor character. Yup.

-

The captain is a rough, aged man, and he eyes her wearily. Distrust shapes his eyebrows, and he runs the back of his hand across his dry mouth. He’s met his fair share of species, and it isn’t the blood difference, he thinks, but the silver-blue of her eyes. The way she never blinks.

Although the hiss of the doors opening signals his entrance, his voice booms out welcomingly anyway. “Priam.”

The human-shaped female’s back straightens. She drops a scalpel onto a tray and turns her head.

“Interesting name.”

“Chosen by the cataloguing system, sir.” Her voice is not monotonous but a subtle combination of tones. As though her tongue and teeth work precisely for each pronunciation. When she was taken aboard the ship, the captain was told that she spoke fourteen major languages and thirty-four dialects. He heard her once conversing in a series of shuddering clicks and gurgles – the type of noises that, he thought, needed mandibles.

He makes a noncommittal sound, sucking on the end of a fat cigar. “Just stopping by to see if there’s any news.”

She flexes her fingers and for a moment they look too long. Her nails, briefly, seem too sharp. More like talons. “The subject is a variety found in the third region of mercurial star hexes.” She isn’t wearing any gloves but her skin is pristine. There’s a blue tint to her, just barely, noticeable more in the length of veins running up and down her arms. She taps the surgery table for emphasis where a hulking foreign frame is half dissected.

The captain snorts. “That’s not possible. All those colonies were extinguished.”

Priam’s human guise is lithe, blade-slender, but he swears she grows before him. A thunderous, oppressive shape, the shiver-stretch of her flesh that encompasses her anger. But he blinks, and the guise is there, has not changed, while the alien clicks her tongue impatiently. “If you doubt my professional judgment, Captain - “

“No, no.” He chuckles even though nothing is funny, running his hand over his mouth again before taking another pull on the cigar. “I’ll report the finding to the home front.” Turning to leave, he swears he hears it again, that stretch of joints reshaping, of limbs being molded and released, once the doors close behind him.