Wilde Stories 2013: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2013-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

Wetside Story

Steve Vernon

1

There is nothing more beautiful than a dead fish under moonlight. There’s just something in the way that their scales catch the dance of lunar beams and streetlight and shard it back into your eyes like a perfect cod liver oil slick.

Bucky threw the mackerel high over the deep water and Big Stinky rose up and caught it.

“Damn, that’s pretty,” I said.

Bucky grinned me back a picket fence full of pleasure. The toxic waste that riddled his cavities gave them a wonderfully fluorescent neon gleam. His scales glittered as prettily as those of the dead mackerel had.

My heart went thump.

Bucky and I had been lovers for damn near ever, since about three minutes after we’d first met. Not that it’s all that much of a deal, mind you. Cross-current sexual practices aren’t nearly as commotion-worthy for us Wetsiders as it is for you intercity pinks. This was our sixth summer together. I hadn’t realized I was a sea-fag until I met Bucky. Things can happen awfully fast, here in Darktown.

“You want me to throw another?” Bucky asked.

I shook my head. “No. I just took a swim and I wouldn’t want Big Stinky going all Technicolor in the mouth on us.”

Darktown was where the monsters lived. It had been built back in the 1930s when Senator McCarthy had decided that in addition to blacklisting authors, actors and directors that filmed monsters also needed to be attacked. His campaign against the film monsters had proven to be so successful that a congressional committee came up with a plan to segregate all of the monsters from proper society.

“Shh, Finn, she’s sensitive.”

“She’s a two-hundred-foot bulimic sea monster who weighs about as much as a half-dozen fully loaded super tankers and that’s talking post-barf. The word sensitive just doesn’t come into it.”

“Finn!”

What can I tell you?

I’m just not one of those sensitive kinds of squids. They call me Finn and I’m the war leader and head bullyboy of the Dread Darktown Cephalopodic chapter of squids. We’re the original squids, the primal spawn and I don’t care what anyone else tells you. We don’t claim to be descended from any dubiously tentacled elder god. A bunch of freaking name droppers I call them. Hell, half of them couldn’t even pronounce the elder god’s true name.

I knew better. Forget about all of this guppy-swallop about in-the-elder-god’s-image. No sir, we’re just a handful of bottom-sludge, social-climbing mollusks that have crawled up from the mud and made good.

“Don’t you remember last year when Big Stinky swallowed that school of killer whales and then power-hurled them up onto the beach? The damned deadheads frenzied into the freshly spewed mess and we were cleaning up zomboid orca fish-chunks for two full moons!”

“Even deadheads have got to eat,” Bucky said philosophically. “Besides, some of that zomboid orca was pretty good eating, not that I would know.”

“Right,” I tactfully agreed. As much as I loved Bucky there was just so far I could expect his gustatory predilections to expand. Basically, Bucky was a goddamn eating machine.

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