Steelstorm by Thomas777

Author:Thomas777
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Imperium Press
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

The months leading up to winter of 1983 in Chicago were characterized by Indian summer. It was well over 75 degrees in the hours past high noon. The true season was indicated only by a low orange sun, a gallery of pumpkin faces atop porch rail balconies and poorly kept brickwork stoops, and a brilliantly colored patchwork of leaves mere days away from falling to reveal the skeletal arboretum that stands year after decade after century as a sentry corps of winter.

Billy set eyes upon her for the first time at the Pal-Waukee—it was rare to see anyone else at early weekday matinees, least of all an unaccompanied young woman. He was inspired by her almost spectral emergence, watching her through the thick, languorous haze of intoxication. The contrast between the woman-child’s stygian pallor and luxuriant, impossibly red mane struck him. There was a jarring yet harmonious effect, her spectral eyes flashing hazel and yellow when the rhythmic points of artificial light from the SPACE INVADERS pinball machine and the always lit, always empty popcorn cart danced across her wetly glazed corneas. The whole scene contrasted sharply, supernaturally. Her dress was a bit too formal, too impractical for the grimy movie house, yet at the same time provocative—deep red turtleneck sweater, knee length skirt, high faux leather boots of the sort that women wore on the covers of fashion magazines as of late.

Billy did not believe in harbingers or spirits, yet he was not immune to the superstition of his mother’s lineage. He found the girl’s emergence upsetting, sharply felt but difficult to articulate. He felt magnetically, irresistibly drawn to her, yet repelled at the prospect of abiding his usual habits of predation and forcing himself rudely inside of her, then destroying her upon climax. For the first time, he felt a peculiar shame so pronounced as to be almost tangible.

Never in his life had Billy felt as exposed. In his mind’s eye, he saw his skin flayed off, sheared from his body, the slightest breeze causing a cold wetness to envelop him that became intolerably painful. He reached into the front pocket of his jeans before anxiously recalling that he had consumed his last Valium tablet the night before last when the nightmares had been particularly unrelenting. He felt a sudden urge to leave the Pal-Waukee and run to his mother’s deteriorating flat. The shame of the impulse prompted a brutal wave of nausea as he smelled and felt and saw his long hair, dust particles illuminated in slivers of artificial light, and all manner of microbial ephemera envelop his skinless body, coating the raw and bloody sarcomere. Just as rapidly, the dust morphed before his eyes into tiny crystalline shards—shards becoming salt, salt becoming glass. Sweat mingled with blood coated him, gluing his shirt to his heaving back, generating pure agony.

As his panic reached a crescendo of intensity, he registered something fragrant and intoxicating—lilac, cinnamon, and the unmistakable scent of a woman exuding fertility, opening as a garden does to a rainstorm, revealing its sensory delights.

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