Check this out: the very-great
Gay/Lesbian Fiction Excerpt blog just posted a very teasing taste from my novella,
"Speaking Parts," which is in my collection of technorotica:
Rude Mechanicals.
"Speaking
Parts" is one of two novellas plus four expicit short stories of sex
and technosex included in the collection Rude Mechanical: Technorotica
by M. Christian. Two lovers, one with a camera-shutter eye, come
together in a scorching, obsessive, edgy relationship that will take
them both to the limits of sexuality and beyond.
Rude Mechanicals: Technorotica
Publisher: PageTurner (November 28, 2009)
ASIN: B002Z3Z9LA
Excerpt from "Speaking Parts:"
#
Pell remembered seeing Arc’s eye—it was the first thing she’d noticed.
Tourmaline
and onyx. Silver and gold. A masterpiece watch set in a crystal
sphere, the iris a mandala of glowing gold. Her blinks were a camera
shutter’s, as imagined by the archetypal Victorian engineer but built by
surgical perfection not found anywhere in Pell’s knowledge. The
woman’s left eye was jeweled and precise, clicking softly as the woman
looked around the gallery, as if the engineers who’d removed her
original wet, gray-lensed ball had orchestrated a kind of music to go
with their marvelous creation: a background tempo of perfect watch
movements to accompany whatever she saw through their marvelous and
finely crafted sight. Click, click, click.
An eye like
that should have been in a museum, not mounted in a socket of simple
human skin and bone, Pell had thought. It should have been in some
other gallery, some better gallery, allowed only to look out at, to see
other magnificent creations of skilled hands. Jare’s splashes of reds
and blues, his shallow paintings were an insult to the real artistry
of the woman’s eye.
That’s what Pell thought, at first, seeing Arc – but only seeing Arc’s perfect, mechanical eye.
Pell
didn’t like to remember first seeing her that way – through the
technology in her face. But it felt, to her, like it had its own kind
of ironic perfection to deny it. So Pell lived with the biting truth
that she didn’t, at first, see Arc – for her eye.
But
later, right after she got momentarily lost in the beauty of Arc’s
implant, the woman looked at Pell with her real eye, the gray,
penetrating right one – and Pell forgot about the tourmaline, onyx,
silver and gold machine.
She had finally seen Arc,
herself – the woman, and not the simple, mechanical part. Next to her,
the eye was cheap junk: a collection of metal, old rocks, and wires.
* * * *
She
wasn’t Arc at first. She began as just the woman with the perfectly
created eye. Then she was the beautiful woman. Then she was the woman
where she didn’t belong. Seeing her eye, then seeing her, Pell lastly
saw her as oil, the kind of oil you’d see pooling in the street, that
had somehow managed to make its way into a glass of wine. Agreed, it
was cheap red wine – something out of a box and not even a bottle, but,
still – she was oil. She didn’t belong and that was obvious, despite
the cheapness of the gallery. She could tell, cataloging her bashed and
scuffed boots, noting her threadbare jeans, her torn T-shirt, that
amid clean jeans and washed (and too black) turtlenecks, she was a
discordant tone among the harmonious poseurs in Jare’s tiny South of
Market studio.
The woman was aware of her discrepancy.
She wandered the tiny gallery with a very large plastic tumbler of
vin very ordinare, stopping only once in a while to look at one of
Jare’s paintings.
Holding her wine tight enough to
gently fracture the cheap plastic with cloudy stress lines, Pell
watched her, stared at the tall – all legs and angles, broad and strong
– woman with the artificial eye. She tried not to watch her too
closely or too intently, sure that if she let slip her fascination
she’d scare her off – or worse, bring on an indifferent examination of
Pell. Through a sad ballet of a slightly curved lip and a stare that
was nothing more than a glance of the eyes, the woman would see Pell
but wouldn’t – and that would be an icy needle in Pell’s heart.
Pell
had already taken too many risks that night. She already felt like
she’d stepped off the edge and had yet to hit the hard reality of the
ground. Traps and tigers, beasts and pitfalls for the unwary loomed all
around Pell. She moved through her days with a careful caution,
delicately testing the ice in front of her, wary of almost-invisible,
murky lines of fault. She knew they were there, she’d felt the sudden
falling of knowing she’d stepped too far, moved too quickly, over
something that had proven, by intent or accident, not to be there. Pell
didn’t push on the surface, didn’t put all her weight, or herself, on
anything.
But then everything changed. She’d seen Arc and her eye.
The
plastic cup chimed once, then collapsed in on itself. Turning first
into a squashed oval, the glass cracked, splintered, then folded, the
white seams of stress turning into sharp fissures of breakage. The red,
freed of its cheap plastic prison, tumbled, cascaded out and down onto
her.
Pell had worn something she knew wouldn’t fit
with the rest of the crowd. The official color of San Francisco, she
knew, would fill the place with charcoal and soot, midnight and ebony.
White, she’d decided, would pull some of their eyes to her, make her
stand out – absence of color being alone in a room full of people
dressed in all colors, combined.
"Looks good on you."
The
shock of the wine on her white blouse tumbled through Pell as an
avalanche of warmth flowed to her face. The decision to wear white
that night had come from a different part of herself, a part that had
surprised her. Now she was furiously chastising that tiny voice, that
fashion terrorist who had chosen the blouse over other, blacker ones.
And
so Pell responded, "Not as good as you would" to the tall, leggy,
broad shouldered girl with the artificial eye. Which was beautiful,
but not as beautiful as the rest of her.
* * * *
Pell’s
reason for being at the gallery was Jare. Although she could never
wrap her perceptions around the gaunt boy’s paintings, she still came
when he asked. Jare, Pell, Fallon, Rasp and Jest. They weren’t close –
but then foxhole buddies aren’t always. They weren’t in combat, but
they could be. All it would take would be one computer talking to
another – no stable job history, thus conscription.
All
it took were two computers, passing pieces of information back and
forth. Till that happened, they hid and watched the possibility of a
real foxhole death in a hot, sweaty part of Central America fly by.
Foxhole
buddies. It was Jare’s term – some fleck of trivia that’d hung around
him. They didn’t have an official name for their tiny society of
slowly (and in some cases not too slowly) starving artists, but Pell
was sure that Jare would smile at his trivial term being immortalized
among a band of too-mortal kids.
That was Jare. While
the rest of them tried to focus on pulling their paintings (Pell,
Jare, and Rasp), music (Jest), and sculpture (Fallon) as high as they
could, there was something else about Jare – something, like his
paintings, that refused to be understood. His techniques were simple
enough, broad strokes of brilliant color on soot-black canvas, but his
reasons were more convoluted.
Or maybe, Pell had
thought earlier that evening (before turning a white blouse red and
seeing the woman with the artificial eye for the first time) both man
and his work were simple: broad, bold statements designed to do nothing
but catch attention. He was like his paintings, a grab for any kind
of attention – an explanation too simple to be easily seen.
In
the tiny bathroom, Pell tried to get the wine out of her blouse.
Contradictory old wives’ tails: first she tried cold, then hot water.
The sink ran pink and so, soon, did her blouse.
The
woman with the eye stood outside the door, a surprisingly subtle smile
on her large mouth. Every once and a while she’d say something, as if
throwing a bantering line to the shy girl inside to keep her from
drowning in embarrassment.
"Who’s he foolin? I can do better crap than this with a brush up my ass.”
"You should see this chick’s dress. Looks like her momma’s – and momma didn’t know how to dress, either.”
"Too many earrings, faggot. What year do you think this is?
"Hey, girl. Get out here with that shirt. It’s better looking than this fucking stuff on the walls."
Cold
water on her hands, wine spiraling down the sink. Distantly, Pell was
aware that her nipples were hard and tight – and not from the chill
water. Down deep and inside, she was wet. It was a basic kind of primal
moisture, one that comes even in the burning heat of humiliation.
Finally, the blouse was less red than before. Planning to run to where
she’d dropped her old leather coat to hide the stigmata of her
clumsiness, her excitement in two hard brown points, she opened the
door.
The tall woman smiled down at her, hot and
strong. In one quick sweep of her eyes, Pell drank her tall length,
strong shoulders, columnar legs. She was trapped, held fast between
the hot eyes she knew must have been staring at her, pinning her
straight to her embarrassment, and the presence of the woman.
Her
eye, the eye, clicked a quick chime of precision – as if expanding its
limits to encompass the totality of Pell. Pell did not mind her
intense examination. It added, with a rush of feelings, to the quaking
in her belly, the weakness in her knees.
"Gotta splash. Wait right here,” Arc said.
Of course she waited.
After
a few hammering heartbeats, the door opened and she came out – butchly
tucking her T-shirt back into her jeans – and Pell was again at the
focus of her meticulously designed sight.
"You live anywhere close? I’m tired of this shit. You?"
"Down the block. Just on the corner," Pell said, trying hard not to smile too much.
The
woman downed the small sample of red in her glass and, looking for a
place to put it down, and not finding any, just dropped it with a sharp
plastic clatter on the floor. "Show me. It can’t be worse than here.
Too many fucking artists."
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