showing up at school each day—both the boys and the girls found me repulsive, especially my heavy acne when I was eight years old. Once, I sat there bawling when the school photographer tried to take my picture, while a group of Mexican girls stood behind him, taunting me and telling me how ugly I was—and when my mother saw the resulting picture, she told me flat out, “You look like a witch.”
And on top of everything physical and academic which plagued me, I was incredibly socially inept, just totally unable to connect with any of my classmates....many, many years later, when I was in my forties, I finally found out what caused that—I have Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. Which wasn’t known back then, alas....
Thus, being a literal freak of nature in so many ways, I could only connect with the characters in science fiction—their differentness was my differentness, and their sense of not belonging mirrored my own.
I do believe that watching and reading science fiction was the lone thing that kept me relatively sane, even though my mother tried to get me to read adolescent romance novels a few years later (romance is actually more alien and unbelievable than sf could ever be to me!), hoping that I’d “grow out of” my interest in science fiction.
The stories in this collection are an outgrowth of my lamentable childhood, as well as a reflection of those things in life which I found fascinating in that they could mentally take me away from the horror of my daily life, and at least on the level of imagination offer me something worth waking up each morning for—at least more so than dealing with my family and others around me who disliked me for what I was.
The universes in this collection center around outsiders, artists, and freaks (be they natural-born or self-made); some of the stories are interconnected, but also designed to stand alone. I’ve also included afterwords for each to shine additional light on both the works and their cultural personal inspirations. But more than a collection, to me this volume is a glimpse into my creative soul—and as such, it may not be perfect, it might not even be logical, but it is what I am, love it or hate it. Personally, I’m more accustomed to being greeted with the latter reaction, but part of me does hope you’ll find something to at least like here, too.
—A. R. Morlan
2009 & 2012
TATTOO
“Like your ’mum,” the girl in the plastic raincoat said, shifting her glass of cola around on the sticky bar surface until the rounded nubs of dying ice cubes sang a soft, desultory melody. Reflexively, I rubbed my right forearm, where the two-dimensional chrysanthemum bloomed soft red, and nodded Thanks.
It was that kind of night in the grimy Village bar: When the jukebox is stuck on “Walk on the Wild Side,” the flames gutter low and smoky in squat, pebbled glass globes, and the neon bar signs flicker and sizzle. And it was hot, hot enough for the thin girl sitting beside me to sip cola with dying ice not three minutes after the bartender had set the glass in front of her. But yet—
The raincoat she was wearing was translucent green, and covered a snug, long-sleeved sweater and skin-tight jeans. There were tiny patches of condensation inside the plastic coat, like when you put a hot roast beef sub into a sandwich bag. Wondering what her temperature was, I longed to take her pulse, listen to her heartbeat and tell her—
What? I thought, stubbing out my cigarette in a hobnail ashtray. That she shouldn’t go trying to smother herself in Saran Wrap? That you’re a doctor, the voice of authority? Not smoking two packs a day, you aren’t.
The girl shifted beside me, the rounded ice cubes piling against her lips as she tilted her glass high, draining it. In the brief silences between the notes of the jukebox and the hum of the neon, I heard the cubes striking her teeth. For no good reason, I shivered.
“You have to keep that out of the sun, y’know,” the steaming girl said, placing her empty glass on the Formica bar top, neatly covering an old burn scar in the artificial wood grain surface.
“Keep what out?” I asked around the cigarette I’d just placed in my mouth. There was no one else sitting at my end of the bar, save for the girl. Her raincoat crinkled damply as she replied, “Your tattoo. They fade. In the sun. Unless you’re careful.” She paused to push a strand of limp, light brown hair out of her eyes; each strand of hair looked thick, coated with sweat. Then:
“I mean, after all the trouble, y’know, to get it—”
I was tempted to either get up and leave or tell her off, but like I said before, it was that kind of night: brownout season, when the sidewalks resemble blackhead-pitted skin, and the air is so grimy you can almost feel it blackening up your nostrils. And down in the subways, all you see are hands, palms up, intruding on your space, and those defensive eyes—
Hell, maybe she doesn’t want to go home either.
Putting my lighter back in my shirt pocket, I said, “Doesn’t matter much if it fades or not. I just got it to cover something up. Looks better than what was under it.”
The girl started nodding, her bangs slithering across her colorless brow, as if she agreed that my tattoo was, indeed, an improvement over the vaguely oval scar which had once graced my arm—even though she couldn’t have known about it.
For a moment, everything swam around me, good old déjà-vu. I felt a need to right the situation, to loop back and give the woman (her coat was now completely steamed over inside; I could barely make out the brown dots on her sweater) a reason for nodding at me.
I took a sip of my beer, another puff, and began, “It was a bite. Human. Good thing it happened in ER. One of the nurses swabbed it out before infection set in, gave me a tetanus. Happened when I was a resident in Manhattan, five, six years back. Some guy I was treating in the same ER suggested it. I was setting his leg—he’d been in a car accident, bad fender-bender—and he’s looking me over, noticing my arm, and said, “Somebody was mad at you, eh, Doc—?”
“But they weren’t, were they?” The girl crossed her legs, thin calves ending in hightops over scrunched cotton socks.
Again, my head swam. Behind the bar, the “d” on a Bud sign fizzled into a glassy colorlessness, and all the lights went slightly darker: Brownout coming.
“No...the person who bit wasn’t mad at me. I was mad at her for a minute there, but....”
How could I tell her about the woman in the ER, the harsh billion-watt lights bouncing off her bruises, her welted flesh? Rape is never pretty, and gang-bangs are ugly. Cops found her, running naked down West 57th, away from the wacko section where women shouldn’t linger come sundown. Some creeps had dragged her into an alley, a bunch of them. Cops caught most of the punks, not quite enough to account for all the different semen, but enough of them to satisfy the brass downtown.
But it didn’t do squat for the woman: No sound left, just this tiny wheeze that’s even worse than a wall-shaking howl. And she wouldn’t let us look her over, she kept trying to cover herself with arms so thin they barely hid her wounded nipples, her damp mons. And before the shot I gave her could work, she leaned over and bit me. Had to grab her by the hair to make her let go of my arm, shake her head like a bird-eating cat. Cops took pictures of her; every time the bulb flashed, it was like her wounds rose off her skin for a second, hovering there before settling back down to hurt her again. And you could see the hurt there; every cut, welt, and bruise spoke to me, and the throbbing bite on my arm answered them.
I made myself stare at the flickering Bud sign, my cigarette ashed almost to the filter before I went on, “I don’t
