t=0s

Just a moment ago, Leah’s cock was struck by a whip.

Leah is naked and screaming through a ball gag and contorted in an elegant snarl of rope threaded through a metal ring connected via rope to a hard point screwed into a wooden ceiling beam twelve feet above the floor. Each of her ankles has been bound to its respective thigh and then drawn up and towards her head and secured to the metal ring such that she can’t close her legs. Her hands are tied behind her back with rope that wraps around her tits and chest to form a knot in the back and then upward, to the metal ring. Her head can move freely. She has long, dark hair with streaks of silver that has been pulled back into a tight bun. Some hair near her right temple has escaped the bun and is dangling on her face in front of her eyes.

A drop of Leah’s cum is starting to drip from her cock but hasn’t reached the floor. The whip is being wielded by Saffron, a short Black dyke with a soft beard and elegant AFAB shoulders and sinew and strength. He met Leah just days ago and Leah invited him to this party—her party—in part because Saffron was a known member of the lilac and black and in part because Saffron said, “I want you because I just met you.” And also, “I want to make you scream.”

Saffron is standing with his legs open to accommodate the tongue of Lauren, a half-Mexican-half-Irish not-really-cis woman who will never get a chance to explore all the pleasures of not being cis that she deserves. Lauren is on her knees and crying while eating pussy because a cane has just left another mark on her ass. The cane is held by Amy, one of Lauren’s partners, a lithe Black goth with piercings on her lip, tongue, cunt, and nowhere else. She is halfway through saying, “I love you.”

There are lips on the back of her neck belonging to Nora, a tall, pale, angular trans woman who has fucked and broken up with and been forgiven by everyone in this room. Two of her submissives, Ruth and Elise, themselves a loving couple, are licking Nora’s leather boots. Their tongues are perfectly synchronized. They started at the toe line of each boot and have since moved up along their left and right sides. Their tongues continue upward for three quarters of a second.

Aiden, a queer elder and a perfectly passing trans man, is holding down Ruth’s and Elise’s heads. He is a witch and has sight beyond sight and has seen what is about to happen downstairs. His mouth is opening but he hasn’t yet shouted.

There are four police officers at the door to the building. They’re all encased in mirrored helmets and carapaces of armor, bodies beyond their already-large bodies. The expansiveness and anonymity of their new selves emboldens them. They are all armed with assault rifles and live ammunition. One of them is holding a battering ram and is less than a second away from swinging it into the wooden door.

Across the street, Jocelyn and Cheryl, the most codependent lesbian couple in town, are perched in an attic peering through a window at the cops. Cheryl is looking through the scope of a sniper rifle she stole from her dad. Her finger is on the trigger and there are bullets in the clip that can be propelled faster than what the cops’ exoskeletons can mitigate. Jocelyn is just here for moral support.

The occupants of this house were intruded upon and tied up and gagged. They are a wealthy white cis straight couple without children that met these members of the lilac and black online, back when that was still possible. They chatted for a bit and then decided to meet in-person at a coffee shop. Jocelyn explained the scene and the risks involved. The locks to their house would be picked. The cis couple asked that the lesbians be careful not to damage the locks. The lesbians promised they would be careful. Cheryl, Jocelyn continued, and herself would barge into the house. The cis couple would know the week this was going to happen but not the day or hour. The lesbians would restrain the straights. They would ignore the pleading of the straights unless they uttered their safeword. There would be a sex party in the building across the street (yes, the one that used to be a warehouse, yes, we agree that its high ceilings are beautiful) that the straights wouldn’t attend. There would be cops, and there would be sniper rifles, and there would be insurrectionist violence. The cis straight couple consented enthusiastically. The white cis straight man asked if they could be gagged as well, which the white cis straight woman agreed would be hot, and the lilac and black lesbians said: “Yes.”

The straight man and straight woman are now happily incapacitated on the second floor of the house. The man is whining with joy because he is finally, finally, having his sexual awakening. It’s not the women-tying-him-up that’s making him hard, he realizes. It’s that this scene is queer as in fuck you and that he is a willing participant in radical defiance. His name was Steve and as their pronouns shift and their name morphs into Steph, Leah, in the apartment building, whipped, continues to scream while Saffron, whipping, spontaneously starts to come while Lauren, licking, learns something new about herself while Amy, striking, feels herself getting wet because she, like everyone else, knows that she’s bait that has just been taken. Downstairs, the battering ram breaks the door open. Across the street Cheryl pulls the trigger.

t=1s

The bullet penetrates the cop’s armor, and he never gets a chance to realize that he shares a secret truth with the queers he intends to kill, which is that the body and self are mutable and that armor and vests and skirts and satchels and key chains are transformative, because the bullet proceeds along its trajectory until it enters the cop’s internal organs, which are shredded by displaced energy.

The cop’s soul escapes his body faster than light, which means that it defies time’s rules and regulations.

Most people don’t have souls. They are bodies and hormones, and when they die, they decompose in peace. The only people who have souls are White American Christian Nationalists because this is a Christian nation with Judeo-Christian values. This is a nation where faggotry is illegal because it promotes Cultural Marxism, and pornography is illegal because it faggotizes children.

This nation isn’t entirely wrong, of course. Leah, currently suspended, was exposed to internet pornography at an early age. There was a .jpg of a woman, suspended. The rope was red. The hair was Leah’s thick Ashkenazi hair, and the eyes were Leah’s eyes. She didn’t understand what she was looking at but she knew it was her.

Saffron, whipping Leah, has performed in pornography and subsequently learned that being a femme with a strap-on wasn’t quite what he needed. Leah once came while watching Saffron top a woman, but Saffron looks so different now that Leah doesn’t know it was him in the video clip.

Lauren, eating Saffron’s cunt, was never really into porn but Nora, who was kissing Amy until she heard gunshots, who is now reaching for her holstered pistol, was corrupted by pornography at an early age and now she has a persistent urge to top hot dykes.

The cop, dead, has never watched porn because he is, or was, a Christian Nationalist. He was a crusader cleansing this broken country of sin. He spent his life concussing Black people, torturing queers, ignoring his sons unless they cried, eating at the same pub every Thursday despite never really enjoying the food, and believing wholeheartedly in God’s White America.

Two extremely Protestant angels are now looking at his soul the way you’d look at an A/C window unit that has fallen several stories out of a window. They’re honestly getting a lot of secondhand embarrassment from this experience. It’s not cringe because that concept is outlawed in heaven, but it’s close.

Now that it is detached from reality, the cop’s soul can see that it has sinned, continuously and terribly. It is the very blight it sought to purge from the waking world. It begs the angels for forgiveness. It’s heard a lot of scary stories about hell.

“Look,” the first angel says, “you’ve got two choices. You can come with us and sit with your bullshit for the rest of eternity. You’ll never heal and you’ll never find redemption. That’s not our department. Or, my friend over here will help you process your feelings and then hold you while you cry.”

The cop’s soul didn’t know it was traumatized until just now, didn’t know that it needed fixing until just now, and didn’t know the second great queer secret until just now, which is that there is a violence beyond violence that is but a taste of the world to come.

The cop’s soul feels something that it thought it felt often but never actually had, which is horniness. It asks the second angel if it can be ordered to do things and the angel says, “Say that again, but this time I want to hear a ‘please.’”

t=2s

The three remaining cops turn around to face the attic across the street.

Above them, Naomi, an aging, stocky butch, is dribbling wax on his partner Tom, a twink who is lying on his back on the hardwood, open-mouth moaning. Naomi was startled by the gunshot downstairs and his arm jerked. Now he accidentally dribbles wax into Tom’s mouth that burns him and Tom then realizes that there is a depth of masochism that he hasn’t yet asked for.

Tom is getting a handjob from Joey, a lispy bear. Joey is, not for the first time in his life, abruptly superimposed over two timelines. In one, he’s an alluringly aggressive man with three pup-boys (Tom is one of them). In the other timeline, Joey is an alcoholic prepper, a massive man with massive guns living alone in a massive forest. Prepper-Joey is always angry and hates homosexuals. The two timelines are equally real. The gunfire outside the building narrows the distance between them. In the other timeline, there is a hunting rifle hanging on the wall that this-timeline Joey reaches for with a cum-smeared hand.

Leah, suspended, hears the gunshots and a burst of adrenaline mixes with the endorphins already flooding her brain. All this hormonic potion needs now is a catalyst, which comes in the crack of a whip from Saffron, orgasming and unrelenting. Leah’s cock starts to glow.

Lauren stops eating Saffron’s cunt and instinctively drops to the floor. Amy’s cane misses Lauren’s ass while Amy barks “GET YOUR FUCK—”

Nora thumbs the safety of her pistol and takes a step away from her subs. Aiden lets go of Ruth’s and Elise’s hair and shouts “THEY’RE HERE!” Ruth and Elise are magnet-bound to Nora’s elegant leather boots and they can’t help but crawl after her. They perfectly match Nora and a booted right foot leaves the ground and steps forward, and a booted left foot starts to rise, and their tongues remain on the boots as they lick upward, their heads twisting to compensate for Nora’s movement.

One of the cops fires a short unaimed burst at the attic across the street, and then they all break for the doorway they just burst open. This is unwise. They don’t know what’s inside. They should look for cover. But they’re chickenshit guys roleplaying as soldiers and all their ostensible training is immediately discarded.

One of the bullets of the wildly fired burst arrives at Cheryl’s throat. This bullet hasn’t yet entered her flesh; at this moment, it just barely touches Cheryl’s skin like a gentle kiss.

Cheryl was raised in a small rural town in New Hampshire in a White American Christian Nationalist death cult. The town had an abundance of leafy produce and police armaments. The local cops had at their disposal twelve assault rifles, three sniper rifles, an APC, a surveillance drone, one flamethrower, and one hundred and eleven white phosphorus flares. Over twenty-five percent of the cops were members of the local death cult, and so over time the distinction between sanctioned and paramilitary weaponry blurred.

Cheryl was from an early age taught how to maintain and fire guns. The shooting range was in the woods behind her house. She woke up most mornings to percussion.

Cheryl first realized she was gay when her friend, another cultist spawn, invited her over after school and, in the toolshed, tied each of Cheryl’s wrists to a table leg and fucked her with two fingers. Cheryl’s friend vanished the following day without explanation. The day after that, Cheryl hotwired her dad’s car, threw a duffel bag containing a disassembled sniper rifle in the back, and drove away. She was stopped by cops/cultists from her town on 93. She stepped out of the car, shot them both, swapped her plates with theirs, and continued onward to Manchester. She ditched the car and got on a Greyhound. When she arrived in South Station, an internet more-than-friend was waiting for her and it was love at first sight. It was also the first time she learned her friend’s non-internet name: Jocelyn.

Someone else saw Cheryl at the station, a man from her hometown who was well-known among the local girls as someone you should stay away from. Cheryl took Jocelyn’s hand and they ran for the escalator to the Red Line. They arrived just seconds ahead of the man, who bull-rushed towards Cheryl. Cheryl unslung her duffel bag, the one with the sniper rifle in it, sidestepped the guy, and swung the bag into his back, and he toppled over, down, over the edge of the platform, and was hit by a train. Cheryl and Jocelyn retraced their steps until they were aboveground, walked to Downtown Crossing, and took the T to Jocelyn’s shitty apartment in Roxbury that she shared with five deadbeat roommates. Cheryl lived there for years until the two of them saved up enough to move out.

The morning after the fascists finally won, Cheryl drove herself and Jocelyn out to the woods and taught Jocelyn how to aim and fire a pistol.

By day, Cheryl and Jocelyn were inseparable and insufferable. By night, they were skilled assassins. They were the first cop-murderers of this new dangerous era. They were the core of the local lilac and black, though hardly anyone knew it.

They weren’t indestructible and they didn’t go without injury, but when they made physical contact with each other, their love was a shield that deflected bullets and batons, anything aimed with the intent of harming them. This is why it took an unaimed bullet fired by a terrified man at an unknown target to spray Cheryl’s blood all over Jocelyn’s face.

t=3s

The potion inside Leah is frothing. Her cock glows brighter and starts to shimmer in vibrant blues and pinks and whites. Saffron’s whip strikes it again and the light travels up the length of the whip and Leah screams because the pain is literally unendurable, though luckily this sort of pain is meant to be experienced, not endured.

Leah is a centerpiece and also a person, just like we are. We are all things and Leah is a thing. Leah is a thing and a concept and the concept is home. When she gets tied up by her lovers and comrades, she goes home. She closes the door. She takes off her shoes. She hangs up her jacket and the need to make decisions. She sits on a couch. The whip is a welcoming couch she relaxes into that she has owned for so many years that it really is hers. She is home with her family, some of whom are strangers, and they are taking care of her, and she is giving giving giving giving giving everything they need.

Amy’s cane slashes down toward Lauren’s ass. Lauren has been a bad, disobedient slut and she’s already bending her legs to arch her ass back up and wailing “I’M SORRY!” while Amy finishes shouting “—ING ASS BACK UP!” It’s a brutal blow that bursts blood vessels and brings forth a swiftly brightening bruise.

On the other side of the room, Tom, waxen-mouthed, screams, “MORE!,” not knowing whether he’s asking for the wax that Naomi is dripping on him or the handjob that Joey has rescinded. Naomi lets another dribble cascade into Tom’s open, willing mouth while Joey takes the rifle in both hands.

Across the street, blood spurts out of Cheryl’s mouth while Jocelyn screams wordlessly.

t=4s

These days, we have every reason to party except optimism.

There is COVID in each and every cop and they are bringing it into a carefully COVID-cleansed space. In the corner furthest from the stairwell, Zephyr, Leah’s ex and the second-hottest trans masc in the room, is shocking Hades, the hottest trans masc in the room, with a violet wand. Hades uses a wheelchair due to long COVID. Zephyr gets winded very easily, due to long COVID. Most people these days are disabled, due to long COVID.

Outside, it is ninety degrees, as it has been for the past eight months, because the planet is dying.

Inside, everyone is dying because that’s what humans do, but they’re doing it faster than their shitty parents because there’s no healthcare anymore except that which we give to each other.

There are cops in the stairwell because yes of course homo parties are illegal but, more importantly, because of the essential killability of everyone inside. Leah is too transfeminized. Saffron and Amy are too Black. Ruth and Elise, bootlicking, are helpless and debased females who must be protected at all costs, and also they must die because when one dyke kisses the boot of another, a hammer once again strikes a chisel on the balls of the neoclassical marble sculpture of Patriarch, God of America.

Aiden, a witch currently drawing mystical powers into his perfectly passing chest, must die because, like, he’s a fucking witch, man.

Joey, taking aim at the stairwell, is cloaked in his other-timeline self. He is so close to being an angry, self-loathing man that the cops don’t want to kill him because they don’t know he exists.

Jocelyn, living, cradles Cheryl, dying.

When the cops, still running up the stairs to Leah’s party, crossed through the doorway, cowardice became irresistible attraction. They are moths drawn towards Leah’s whipped cock, shining like a light bulb.

Leah wants to be led down the street by a stern butch tugging at a string attached to a clothespin attached to her tongue. Leah wants tall femmes to slap her in the face. Leah wants short mascs to hold her gently and refuse to hurt her no matter how much she begs. One time, Leah and a now-ex negotiated a scene in which the ex tied Leah to a chair and flogged her tits until Leah revealed something that she had never told anyone else. Sometimes at night Leah touches herself and imagines being force-masculinized back into her old self. Be a good boy; say ‘yes, sir’ for me again, but in your old voice.

A bubble of incandescent anti-cruelty is expanding out from Leah’s cock. This broken world abhors anti-cruelty. Anti-cruelty spontaneously manifests and is immediately annihilated by equal and opposite true-cruelty. It happens all the time. The cops are almost at the top of the stairwell.

t=5s

Two cops wearing articulated slabs of plastic armor step off the last stair. One of them is wearing leather boots.

As Nora, pistol in front of her, closes the distance between her and the cops, she perceives a single facet of the interconnectedness of all of humanity and the folly of separating the self from the group, which is that she is wearing the exact same brand, model, and size leather boots as the plastic cop-slab. Their boots were purchased at the same store within a few minutes of each other. The cop was not in armor nor uniform and he stared at Nora while she was trying on her pair.

The boots—Nora’s and the cop’s—rise to the mid-calf and are laced. They have combat-boot-esque grooved rubber soles without actually being combat boots. They have metal zippers on the sides. The toes are pointed just enough to be either cowboy or tomgirl. The heels in the back are just pronounced enough to be either ruggedly pragmatic or breathtakingly butch.

Ruth and Elise are bootlickers. They’ve been consensually hypnotized, repeatedly, over an extended period of time, to insatiably bootlick when Nora says their trigger word. It started off simple and light, on Nora’s bed, with some soft music playing and Nora’s sweet, calm voice guiding them. Later, they agreed to take it one step further. Nora made a looping audio file of her telling them that they are such good boot-sluts, that this is the only thing they need and want, that good toys worship boots, that when they are boot-sluts they will feel pleasure licking boots and yawning cravings when not licking boots. And then Nora tied up Ruth and Elise on her bed and blindfolded them and put noise-cancelling headphones on their ears and played video games for a few hours while they listened, entranced. The following weekend, Ruth and Elise begged to her do it again, but longer, and Nora said, “Yes, of course.” Eventually, the three of them agreed to a regimen of one hour of hypnotic trance per day, plus five hours every Saturday. Ruth and Elise aren’t acting. They’re in boot-slut mode, which has become an important part of their identities. Whenever they aren’t bootlickers, they need to care about the harshness of a collapsing society. Whenever they are bootlickers, they are in a utopia created by themselves and their community where there’s something they can do to make the world a better place and where someone is going to make sure they stay safe.

Ruth and Elise live on the first floor of a Jamaica Plain triple-decker with a mold problem. A trio of cop-worshipping white bootlicking men live on the second floor. They go to public events hosted by the Boston Police Department and tell the guys that they’re all heroes and that they’re keeping our streets safe. They fly a Thin Blue Cross flag out of one of their bay windows. They have been brainwashed for so long that they can worship dangerous men without wanting to fuck them.

From an early age, bootlicking white men convinced Nora that she couldn’t ask for what she needed. Real men respect authority and keep their heads down and stay out of trouble. Real men also emit authority and wield pain and terror as a tool. Real men don’t emit authority for the sake of pleasuring themselves and others. And they sure as shit don’t want tits. Except when attached to women. It’s okay for men to constantly yearn for tits as long as they’re not attached to themselves.

Nora fires her pistol. The shot goes wide. In one-tenth of a second, the cop is going to kill Nora unless someone does something.

Joey has never yearned for a single tit, attached to himself or otherwise. He used to want to yearn for tits so much that it nearly killed him. Right now, he’s aiming a hunting rifle. He’s still invisible to the cops.

“A little lower,” other-Joey whispers to this-Joey. “And a little to the right.”

“Why are you helping me?” this-Joey asks.

“Because I love you,” other-Joey whisper-replies.

“You don’t even love yourself,” this-Joey retorts.

“All the more reason,” other-Joey says.

Meanwhile, Naomi is pouring a steady stream of wax into Tom’s mouth that burns and burns his tongue but it never chokes him and it’s never consumed. Meanwhile, Zephyr is preparing to shock Hades in the cunt because he knows that Hades hates it and Hades is opening his legs. Meanwhile, Amy, caning Lauren, shudders with grief because she isn’t going to get what she wants. Amy wants to punish Lauren until Lauren says, “You can do whatever you want to me,” and then do that and then hold Lauren while she cries and let Lauren ask if she’s ok and then ask through tears if Lauren can kiss her, please. Amy wants this and she’s not going to get it because of the cops and their guns. Meanwhile, Lauren flattens herself on the ground again, too terrified to continue the scene. Meanwhile, Saffron’s orgasm crests and his whip strikes Leah’s balls. Meanwhile, the glow around Leah’s cock has expanded outward and now encapsulates most of her torso. Meanwhile, Aiden is bellowing, bellowing, ancient words of power.

Joey fires his hunting rifle. The bullet hits the cop in the shoulder. It’s too slow to penetrate the armor but it’ll leave a bruise. The cop staggers backward, such that when he does fire his own rifle, the bullets miss Nora, and everyone else, for now.

“Reload,” other-Joey whispers to this-Joey.

t=6s

This is how a trans masc can gain mystical powers. It doesn’t involve praying to a god or making a deal with the devil because there are no gods or devils unless you’re a White American Christian Nationalist. Crystals don’t work. Astrology is fake. Wild pagan rituals are just spooky, and sometimes fun. There’s no point in waiting for a gender-euphoric moment to turn into mystical powers. No one goes to wizard school because it’s not real. Tarot is also fake. If you pick an unassuming dusty book from a dimly-lit library shelf, it’s just going to be yet another biography of a Victorian sex freak. The only way a trans masc can gain mystical powers is by having keyhole top surgery and retaining full nipple sensation.

And now Aiden’s perfect nipples are folding, around themselves, through themselves, and in directions that have no name, revealing the higher-order numerological forms that bind our three dimensions.

The cop takes a step to the side to get out of the way of the other two cops, who are now at the top of the stairwell and aiming their assault rifles.

Joey reloads.

Across the street, Jocelyn, bloody hands gripping her dead lover’s sniper rifle, also reloads.

The light around Leah’s cock expands into a vibrant sphere surrounding herself. Leah is a trans woman. Leah is an angry trans woman and the anger is grief. Leah is unemployable because she’s a liability. Leah has many dead friends. Leah has two ragged guy-outfits that she always wears, like a fucking cartoon character, whenever she’s outside. Despite this, when Leah is in public she always feels eyes watching her. Sometimes the eyes belong to a confused and scared egg, who knows without knowing. When this happens, Leah will casually walk past the girl on the sidewalk and take a zine out of her pocket and palm it to her. Their hands will briefly brush each other. The zine is a 101 of the local E and Spiro dealers: who to trust, how to find them, what to expect. It makes Leah feel like she’s some Jehovah’s Witness asshole passing out fliers at the bus stop trying to save people, but this is it, this is the only way left to tell a closeted trans woman that she isn’t alone.

The zines were of course written by the local lilac and black. Some of the authors are in this room and some are not. Saffron wrote the equivalent zine for the mascs. Saffron clandestinely sets up rendezvous times with the mascs. They just need to walk down a designated street (usually Bishop Allen Drive in Cambridge, though it varies) and as they pass by a certain luxury condo complex, Saffron, standing on the rooftop, will throw a testosterone-filled dart at them.

On the other side of the room, Zephyr, shocking, gives a look to Hades, silently asking: “Do you still want to do this?”

“Yes,” Hades silently responds, and then he feels the violet wand slide into his wet cunt, which starts to shock him from inside.

Hades was one of Saffron’s closeted boys. Saffron doesn’t remember throwing a dart at Hades and Hades is too shy to tell them.

Nora fires her pistol again. Nora has been out since well before the coup. She remembers the days when you could coerce certain doctors by telling them you were going to inject yourself with hormones that you bought in parking lot from an internet rando, unless they fork over the HRT right now. Good times.

Nora’s bullet cracks the visor of the helmet of one of the other cops, obscuring his vision.

The first cop, the one who tried to kill Nora, fires his gun again, at Lauren, cowering and crying.

Concurrently, twin bolt-like topologies extend out of Aiden’s unfolded nipples and into the chest of that same first cop. The cop unravels, revealing horrifically error-ridden internal logic, and then is gone.

Then, Ruth’s and Elise’s tongues reach the tops of Nora’s boots, and then begin to lick and kiss the boots back downward.

Then, Hades screams in pain and pleasure.

Then, five bullets penetrate Lauren. The first bullet passes through her shoulder and shatters her collarbone. The second bullet strikes her heart. Bullets three and four pass through the back of her head. The fifth bullet passes through her palm.

t=7s

One of Amy’s lovers has just been murdered by a fucking cop.

Amy needs to have total control over someone's physical well-being and then be reassured that it’s OK for her to be in control of anything at all. Lauren understands—understood—that about her. Lauren gave Amy what she needed.

The moment Lauren is torn apart by gunfire, Amy flips from an aggressively sexy top to a weapon of righteous hate. The change in mood and objective is literally instantaneous. Amy has prepared her whole life for this moment. She has dealt with a lot of shit in her life by getting angry and staying angry. Amy would have anger management issues if she wasn’t so good at not managing them. And right now, she is really, really done with these apocalypse fascists. She is thirty feet from the nearest enemy. She leaps for it.

Joey aims.

And, across the street, Jocelyn aims.

Leah is queer community. Leah is expanding and expansive. Leah wants to fall in love with everyone still alive in this room and beyond and be their bottom for a night, just one night, though she wouldn’t say no to more than one. Leah wants to love the queers she’s never going to fall in love with because they’re not her type. Leah wants to love and bottom. Leah just wants America to leave her the fuck alone.

Saffron drops his whip and lunges for Lauren’s disintegrating body.

Amy is two feet in the air, and a little over two feet forward.

Tom abruptly feels overstimulated by the wax and the vague awareness that something else is happening in the room.

The cop with the damaged visor aims at Nora. Nora aims at him and fires. The shot harmlessly clips his shoulder. The cop fires and Nora’s arm explodes in pain and viscera. Nora drops her pistol.

Tom safewords. Immediately, all the wax disappears and Naomi’s powerful arms are wrapped around him.

Amy is six feet up, four feet forward, and sobbing.

“Just under the chin,” other-Joey whispers to this-Joey. “That’s the one spot without armor.”

Amy, seven feet in the air, thumbs a button on her cane and a spring-loaded spearhead snaps open from the cane’s tip.

Nora’s dropped pistol clatters to the floor.

Amy has cleared half of the distance to the cops. She is nine feet in the air. She draws back her spear as she arcs downwards.

Joey fires the hunting rifle. The bullet passes through the gap in the armor of the cop with the undamaged visor. The cop won’t live for more than a few more minutes. He’s about as surprised as Joey is. He was looking forward to many more years beating his wife, abducting probable immigrants, ignoring his daughters unless they became sons, and drinking until he could stop feeling anything.

The bubble of energy expands from Leah to encapsulate Nora, blood gushing forth, stumbling onto her knees; and Elise and Ruth, still licking her boots, her blood dripping onto their heads; and Saffron, cradling Lauren as she dies.

t=8s

On the second floor of the house across the street, Steph, tied-up and newly transed, is weeping with joy and fear. What will they tell their tied-up cis straight affluent wife Amanda? Shit, Amanda is going to hate them. They’re in so much trouble. Steph and Amanda agreed to this scene to add some spice to the bedroom. To bring them closer together. Oh, thank fuck there are no kids! Oh, thank fuck Steph finally identified the thing that was devouring them! Amanda will be cool about it. Maybe she’ll even like it. She’ll hate it. But what if she likes it? Oh, what if Steph tried wearing lipstick? Are there dresses that even fit them? Steph wants boobs but doesn’t know how to get them. Oh, there’s gunfire across the street. It sounds like someone might’ve gotten hit upstairs. Shit. What if the girls upstairs are dead? Steph needs them to remove the rope and gag. Steph can’t come out as a non-binary pansexual trans femme with a gag in their mouth. Pansexual?? Oh fuck that’s why Steph likes to go to the gym with Dave and why they’re so sad when the two of them finish their sets and change in the locker room and then Dave gets into his car and leaves. Shit, what’s Steph going to tell Amanda?

On the other side of the street, Amy is falling, falling, falling, screeching, rippling with the potential energy of rage.

Blood is pouring out of Nora’s shoulder and she screams in pain and horror. There’s blood on the floor. There’s blood dripping down her whole body. There’s blood on her boots, which Ruth and Elise dutifully lick clean.

There is one living cop and he can’t see anything out of his visor anymore. He is frantically trying to remove his helmet.

“Sorry, it was hot and then—”  Tom says while Naomi, stroking his hair, is saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right …”

The extent to which the body that was formerly Lauren disintegrates in Saffron’s arms frightens him and will continue to frighten him for the remainder of his days.

In another world, Lauren is alive. They’re nowhere near this shootout. They live in Beverly and came out as non-binary a few months ago. By the most incredible of coincidences, this other-Lauren lives in the same timeline as other-Joey. Lauren and Joey met at BU and everyone said they acted like they were a couple. Then they graduated, and Joey got stranger and moved to New Hampshire with his guns. Other-Lauren has had a lot of angry Signal chats with other-Joey since the coup. They text Joey that they are thinking of seeking out the lilac and black for some T-darts. Joey responds: “You have to put your SELF first!!! You cant [sic] rely on anyone until you can rely on yourself.” This is dubious advice, but Lauren is convinced to at least try T. Maybe they’ll look cute with a mustache.

In this timeline, Amy, avenging her beautiful dead Lauren, descends on the cop and shouts “FUCK YOU!” She thrusts her spear towards the cop’s helmet.

There is no possibility of the spear piercing the helmet, even as damaged as it is. It will ricochet off the helmet and then the cop will murder Amy.

That is not what happens. What does happen is that a shot resounds from across the street. The bullet’s origin is the gun held by Jocelyn, avenging her beautiful dead Cheryl. The bullet shatters the helmet. Shards of plastic go flying, some of them into the cop’s face.

It is possible that the queers could now bear down on the cop and eventually kill him. Maybe Joey would hold down his hands and Naomi would try to hold down his feet and be slashed by a sudden and unexpected knife and then Saffron would pummel the fucker’s face. But, this, too, does not happen. What does happen is that Amy’s spear penetrates the broken helmet like a dildo and enters the cop’s skull between the left nostril and the upper jaw. It pushes aside bone and muscle and brain until Amy lets go of it. She tumbles gracefully to the floor while the cop, now a bag of meat, collapses.

The entire room is within a sphere of brilliance. Everyone still alive is glowing.

t=9s

Leah is a thing that is more than a person and greater than a group of friends who happen to be sex perverts. It’s fine, it’s OK. Whatever you want to do in bed is your damn business. We’ve all made such quirky lifestyle decisions! We peer pressure each other into getting septum rings and hate crimes. We want to be like everyone else. There’s no gay agenda. There’s no trans agenda. We’ve never recruited anyone. You’re either born this way or you’re straight. When a lesbian is born, she arrives into this world desiring Subaru Outbacks and U-Haul trucks. If she had been born two hundred years ago, she would’ve desired Subaru Outbacks and U-Haul trucks. We were born this way. We all start out with an itchy brain. It’s always there, all our lives. We’re born with itchy brains. And then one day a ten-year-old girl goes to the movies with Mom and Dad and they park next to a Subaru Outback. Two women are getting out of it and the girl sees them and it’s like calamine lotion on the brain.

No one is born knowing what a Subaru Outback is. Not even lesbians. We’re born this way insofar as we never know what the fuck is going on.

Time passes. The girl grows up. She sees a .jpg of a woman tied in red rope.

Leah is poisoned bait that just killed four queer-hating cops. Leah wants someone to tie her up and then exit the room and just leave her there for hours. No one has done this to Leah before. Leah wants to do everything right and be told she’s a bad girl. Leah wants enough safety to be in danger. Leah has an itchy brain and needs lotion. Leah needs to exist with us.

Two lesbians get out of a Subaru Outback and they see a child staring at them and they know that this one is one of us. They hold hands and walk through the parking lot laughing loud enough for the child to hear because none of us were born this way.

Years later Leah puts on the dress that makes her feel brave and goes to a rope bondage event near Porter Square. The metal door to the event space is closed. Leah doesn’t know if she should knock. The door opens and two gray-haired lesbians, holding hands and laughing, step out into the cool autumn night. They see Leah and say yes, of course, please come in, we’re so happy to see you again.

The gray-haired lesbians are dead now due to long COVID and its complications, and injuries sustained from post-coup cops and their allies. When gray-haired lesbians die, they don’t go to any afterlife. They just become inert and peaceful.

The angels responsible for the souls of White American Christian Nationalists are hard at work today. Something keeps killing all the cops.

For a while, there were just rumors that throughout America the homosexual underground was hosting the most depraved sort of secret orgies. An infection on America that was incurable because America isn’t capable of curing anything anymore. Then rumor became known fact and the queers prepared and waited for the cops to find them.

Naomi is whispering to Tom and glowing brightly. Tom is crying and glowing brightly. Zephyr and Hades and Amy and Saffron and Ruth and Elise and Nora and Aiden and Leah most of all are radiating. They are individuals and they are community, and the community is militant lilac and black resistance. And then everything is light of impossible concurrent hues. A rainbow. The blue-pink-and-white. The colors of a sunset. The colors of printer ink. Grays and purples.

The light contracts into itself like a living organ and then there is a room. This room may or may not be in the same neighborhood, or even the same city. Moss, a handsome they/them, is slapping Theresa’s tits, who is laughing with delight. Erica is gripping Jon’s hair and fucking their ass with a strap-on. Steph—a different one—is raking Erica’s back with sharpened fingernails. Meanwhile, Callisto and Ari and Felix are aiming rifles through cracked windows at a group of cops approaching the apartment building. They are not the same people as those at Leah’s party, except for all the ways in which they are.

Leah, elsewhere, whispers into all of their ears. She is counting down the seconds until the cops are within firing range.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

t=0s

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors