An old-fashioned auto-V glides to a stop at the embarkation point, its curved roof gleaming wet in the drizzle like the carapace of a beetle. The passenger door slides open with a faint hydraulic hiss, and the courtesy light illuminates the bare black interior — but not the face of the man inside.
Us slide into the auto-V, musky aftershave now smothering the spit-roast stink clinging to us nasal cilia from the kebab shop across the street, where us have been shivering for twenty long minutes. The leather seat is heated. It sears the cold skin of us stiff, mottled legs, and us adjust us skirt with blue, twig-like fingers — more bone than flesh, more tool than touch. Us allow one quick thought of precious Ithic’ius to sustain us through what must come — small form curled under the foil blanket, translucent eyelids fluttering with dreams of oceans, though ’ius has never seen the sea.
“Tattoo?” the man says, like please, like password. Us tilt us wrist, exposing the green biolume sigil inked beneath the thinnest membrane of skin. It says: clean. It says: usable. The man has no tattoo. Us will only find out what diseases he might be carrying if the medical ink in us tattoo changes colour afterwards.
Oblivious to us fear and us burning legs, the man lifts one hip and pulls a wad of money from the front pocket of his jeans. The notes are greasy, warm. He has tainted this cold, hard currency with mammalian heat, with sweat. Us shudder slightly. He doesn’t notice. Us jam the notes into us bag, burying them amongst the detritus of us life; wet wipes, antibacterial gel, pain shots, a half-empty atomiser. Us bag is a midden heap of survival.
The man tells the auto-V to play the radio. A news bulletin hums into life: thousands of dead and dying, victims of hemorrhagic fever in a place us can’t pronounce. Somewhere far enough that the man doesn’t have to care. The news drones on: rising sea levels consume a Pacific island; another species extinct… The auto-V drives the short route us direct. All the while, the auto-V’s electrical field buzzes against us skin like angry insects. Humans live blind to the electromagnetic symphony wrapping their world — the phone towers singing their high-frequency songs, the power lines humming bass notes through the urban grid. Us experience it all. A ceaseless vibration. Us feel almost relieved when the auto-V stops in the deep shadow of a derelict paper mill and the grave tones of the newsreader fall silent.
Alongside the auto-V, a moss-crusted brick wall stretches off into the murk. Graffiti decorates the wall — thick white brushstrokes screaming anti-alien slogans and spray-painted cocks in sloppy arcs of colour. Us see cocks everywhere. They scar walls and windows — a primal signature, endless and obscene. It’s the oldest mark of territory, of power, of childish bravado. Even the moon, some say, has been defaced — a crude cock scratched in the regolith. Men’s fascination with their own genitalia borders on homoerotic, but us daren’t ever voice that theory.
Above the walls, above the old-fashioned auto-V, looms the mill’s tall, cylindrical chimney stack. The men us bring here never realise how puny they are compared to the phallic majesty of Foxworth and Co’s two-hundred-and-eighty-foot tower. It is us own private joke.
The man’s pulse quickens. Ninety-seven beats per minute and climbing. Us know this rhythm — shame and want warring in his bloodstream. They all carry this contradiction, these men who despise what they desire. Through the floorboards, us sense the larger rhythms of the city: subway trains grinding through tunnels; construction equipment shifting rubble; the collective footfalls of eight million humans walking out of step. Most want to skip the niceties, but this one fumbles through the motions of civility. He complains about the drizzle, never realising us am here, now, thanks only to the persistent precipitation at this latitude. Southern climes were uncomfortable
Still, the clock’s ticking. The longer us spend with this virg, the fewer punters us can do. And us have to finish early because precious Ithic’ius is troubled by the development of ’ius brachial photophores and Sist-us can only watch over ’ius until nine. Sist-us has the promise of a role in a porno, another doomed audition for integration. Like the others, it will end in black bruises and even blacker stares that all Sist wear afterwards.
The man is squirming in the seat like a snake in a sack. Us banish Ithic’ius from us mind. The windows have steamed and us can no longer see the wall, the graffiti or the chimney. There is only the man’s pale, oval face and his fumbling hands, trying and failing to undo his zip. Us lean over to help, impatient now. The man removes his jeans and his boxer shorts. This might be his first time, but the man has heard enough whispered gossip to know the protocol. The driver’s seat reclines, and he turns around, scrambling onto his knees and resting his weight on his elbows.
The man trembles. The cocktail of his chemical signatures unfolds on us skin: testosterone and sweat, yes, but also the metallic tang of prescription medications, the yeast-funk of poor diet, the bitter edge of chronic stress.
Us unfurl an iridescent blue and silver tentacle and wrap it around his dangling cock, sheathing the blunt, pink thing from base to tip, fisting his flesh with us, slick suckers; a cold kiss from another world. The man arches. Goosebumps pebble his skin, but the heat from his body scalds us like acid. Us reach out a second tentacle, retracting us suckers to make the limb smoother, and enter the man from behind. His eyes squeeze tight, and his knuckles whiten and bulge as he grips the headrest. Us don’t think about mechanics. Us think of Ithic’ius instead, of freedom, of the future… Flesh is flesh. Openings are openings. But minds can dream of more.
Us hesitate, just for a second, with the third tentacle poised midair. Not because us don’t know what to do, but because for one breath, us wish to hold something back, just once. Us release a sigh, then us worm the tentacle into his mouth, filling his throat. The man gags. Adjusts. Accepts. Enjoys. How can a body comprising seventy percent water feel so desiccated? They are oceans wrapped in bark. Their mucous membranes crackle like old paper. Their secretions taste like ash. Even their blood whispers rust.
Us probe deeper, allowing lymph to engorge us tentacle. His shit is a distant taste, one us hardly register anymore. Us still have four tentacles free. Some men like their balls cupped in us suckers, each fragile testis drawn inside the cool recesses of us own body, inside the small acetabulum cavity, but us don’t need to waste these extras on this virg. One, two, three simultaneous pulses of us clever limbs, and sweat bursts from pores, breath stutters, hips jerk, nervous system short-circuiting in a flood of neurotransmitters and hot protein, a biological reflex like coughing. A climax, in their tongue. A purge, in ours. The man calls out the name of his god — the one who values purity and chastity — then collapses in a heap.
Us retract us tentacles quickly, coil them up, and put as much distance between us and the man as the auto-V will allow. Often, after an orgasm, men are disgusted by the very thing which gave them pleasure. Us always brace for the shift, the flicker in their eyes. Violence wears many masks. One smiled and said “thank you” before trying to crush us windpipe. One said “sorry” as he stabbed through us thorax with a screwdriver. One sang a lullaby while peeling off us skin.
The man is breathing hard, but his pulse is strong beneath the skin of his neck. Us map the thermal landscape of the man’s body: the fever-heat in his groin, the cooler patches where poor circulation leaves his extremities pale. His left shoulder burns three degrees hotter than the right — inflammation from an old injury. Us slip out of the auto-V, clutching us bag.
He can clean his own mess. And for all the mess, at least it was a clean transaction. At least he wasn’t Pigman, who squeals when he comes and grunts when he hits, who carries a meat hook in his pocket instead of currency, who knows how deep to cut without killing us.
The drizzle kisses our skin like absolution. It wicks away the stink. Us slip through the carcass of the old mill, its belly littered with shattered glass and fungal lace. The walls weep. Paper rot perfumes the air. Once, this place fed on forests — now it is being fed upon. Every surface succumbing to the slow appetite of time and lichen, the bricks slouching toward surrender. Us walk down cardboard streets, past cardboard houses heaving with life, love and laughter, through a whole shanty city, safe — for now — behind the mill’s high walls. The urge to stop and gaze on Ithic’ius pulls at us like the tide, but us resist. Us must work. Nodding to the cudgel-clutching sentries guarding the street entry, us edge down a crooked, litter-strewn, piss-stinking alley and emerge opposite the kebab shop spewing its fatty miasma into the night air. The other tentacle-faced, bone-thin sex workers wave, us wave back and gaze skyward, past the sodium lamps and smog, toward the sky. Their clouds are so thick with sulphates and soot, even their gods must squint to see them now.
Us remember clear skies, and the weight of three moons pulling at us blood, how it sang in harmonics through us bones. All the Sist remember. The tidal memory flows between us like current, muscle-deep and salt-sweet. Here, with only one pale moon, us blood moves sluggish as cooling tar.
It’s somewhere up there, beyond the bank of newspaper-grey clouds; their moon. One hundred and sixty years ago two men visited that sterile satellite for the first time and drew a massive cock in the dust on the dark side — and that grotesque glyph — like a red light above a brothel door, advertised to all intergalactic species that Earth was open for business.
How different Earth would be if an aggressive, armour-clad species had arrived first? Mankind unleashing their big guns, firing their impressive weapons? The dick-swinging would have been catastrophic. As it was, world leaders welcomed us docile, nubile, muliebrile refugees with open … everything. Gates. Borders. Legs. Of course, they tested us for diseases first. They weren’t stupid. Months in a lab being injected, vivisected and inspected. Poked, pierced, biopsied, flayed — every orifice swabbed, every fluid catalogued. They injected dyes that made us muscles seize and foam. They scraped us skin for fungal cultures, swabbed us eyes with dry gauze until they bled. They dissected us dignity along with us flesh, catalogued us pain like data points. The touch of stainless steel still makes us gag.
First, they made us specimens. Then, they made us whores. They made us into meat and blamed us for their hunger. Called us seductive. Called us willing. As if survival were consent. Now, they want to make us grateful for the privilege of their abuse.
A large, shiny auto-V glides to a stop, whisper quiet. The door opens. Us slide in beside the man. He removes crisp notes from his sun visor and rubs absently at the side of his neck. Us blink — once, twice, three times — the nictitating membranes add ultraviolet light to us visual spectrum. Old scars fluoresce pale blue against his darker flesh, mapping a history of childhood accidents and adult violence. His aftershave glows neon orange under the black light of us vision, garish as warning colouration. But it’s the heat signature of the stippled rash running from the man’s hairline, down his neck and into his T-shirt that glows bright red like a beacon.
The fourth this week. The disease has a timeline: seven days from the first symptom to the hemorrhagic stage. Ten days until the blood weeps from every pore. The men us infect today are walking masterpieces, their cells already surrendering to us patient artistry. It gives us a week before us need to pack up us cardboard castle and move to another city. An outbreak zone is no place for precious Ithic’ius.
He demands to see us tattoo. The green sigil reassures him that us carry no pathogens in us body. But the tattoo can’t protect him from the secret pherotoxins us exhale, a biochemical mist which converts the small confines of auto-V’s into leather-lined gas chambers.
As the windows steam up, us reach out a finger and draw a cock on the cold glass. Then us erase it, slow and deliberate, each swipe a cleansing. This is us plan for all the puerile cock graffiti, us plan for the whole planet. A tabula rasa for this scarred rock. A fresh start. A new beginning — for Ithic’ius and all Sist. That they might live without trading their bodies. That they need never be clever with limbs or silent with pain.
But us will preserve one monument: Foxworth & Co’s two-hundred-and-eighty-foot erection — a fossil phallus in brick and moss. Let it stand as an epitaph to a race of fragile, arrogant sadists who mistook size for supremacy.
Amy is a working-class writer from the South Wales valleys. She has survived a 6.2 earthquake, been run over crossing the street, and once shared a flat with a ghostly monk. She has watched minke whales in Icelandic fjords, stood by the eternal flames of Azerbaijan’s Fire Mountain, camped in the Sahara, and seen the northern lights above her own garden. These are the moments that shape her work — when the world feels impossibly old and vast, and utterly indifferent. A former member of Literature Wales’s Representing Wales 2022–23 programme, her writing has appeared in Fairlight Shorts, Funny Pearls, Lucent Dreaming, Fictive Dream, and Dime Show Review.