The customer shakes me until his disc drops into the bin below. Please take your receipt, sir. He kicks me in the side and says, “Thanks for nothing, you piece of shit vending machine!”
Daniel’s birthday happened to be an F day in Brooklyn. The soldiers at FEMA’s Navy Yard outpost would let Morgan Foster through today. They would let her charge a power bank for a few minutes.
On a Tuesday night, I hang the lamp on the hook beside my front door. When I light it, the oceanic darkness that surrounds the house steps back, away from my hands, away from my face. For a moment, I stand on my porch and look down the long driveway, and I guess what creatures might exist out there, circling around me, living invisibly.
“Please also be reminded of the following prohibited items,” the clerk explains kindly. “No chemicals or toxic substances. No fluids over 1,000 milliliters. No lithium batteries, laptop chargers and power banks, no love, no light, no family, no safety.”
Vans and campers, sizeable mobile cabins and some that were barely more than tents. Each one a home, a storefront, and a statement of identity, from the colorful translucent windows and domes that harvested sunlight to the stickers and graffiti that attested to places travelled.
“Don’t ask me how, but I found out this big account on queer Threads is some kind of super Watcher.” Charlii spins her laptop around so the others can see. “They call them Keepers, and they watch the people that the state’s apparatus has tagged as terrorists. Not just the ones the FBI created. The big fish. And people like us, I guess.”
Nadjea always knew her last night in the Clave would get wild: they’re the only sector of the city where drink and drug and dance are unrestricted, and since one of the main Clavist tenets is the pursuit of corporeal joy in all its forms, they’ve more or less refined partying to an art.
After a few deft movements, she tossed the cube back to James, perfectly solved. “We’re going to break into the Seattle Police Department’s database. And you’re going to help me do it.”
