Member-only story
*some explicit content
Chapter II. | Metropolis
Sussex erects his dark, slim form and looks around, shivering a primeval dance to summon the sun as opposed to rain. There are shoppers, vendors and news criers all in awe, certain that they are watching a dream. Oddly, they mostly appear like one another. They mind their business again once they realize Sussex is not the weirdest thing they’ve seen all morning. He believes he’s an optimist, and so he smiles at them with pee still frozen on his mouthpiece. He attempts a sprint across the street, but …
Ahh! His hand whips down to caress his now massacred knee. In pain, Sussex settles on sitting in the middle of the avenue like a pile of bricks while being engulfed by whirlwinds of snow. I should’ve stayed home — He imagines himself on a palmy beach on his sunny home island. We never get so much as a snowflake down there. But this … Well, you know by now. This is in the city.
A sound like factory workers testing some new machine pounds in the air; screeches arise mimicking an army of startled teen witches. A whole world flushes past him. Kids come and laugh at Sussex’s mangled appearance. Businesspeople on the sidewalk pinch their noses and grimace as they glide by. “These damn bums,” he thinks he hears one of them mumble. A jolt of shame within creates a dull chain reaction.
“Why did you do this to me, dawg? What’d I do to deserve this?” He curses the heavens or whatever he thinks he believes in. At that instant, an unexpected radiance from a sleek, ferret-like creature hits him from the south tracking perfumes and lotions bartered for in the city’s high-end boutiques.
“Why is everything so bad? You know, forget this. I’m going back home.”
“You should know that in my city, everyone is broken-hearted … All of them, but not you and me.” There she is with a smile and finger twirl. “Boy!!!”
So in the city — and this is the reason I’ve brought you here — lives a strange young woman named Riette. Sorry, “strange” is my opinion. Right now, she looks like one of those young actresses-gone-wild, a scruffy chick with hair like lava, short and tied back. She has a single stud piercing below the left of her lip, and she walks always wobbling, probably because she doesn’t…
