DadNet charged a lot of money and made grand promises without much to back them up. But I didn’t care. I was desperate. For the last three years, I had secretly lusted after my next-door neighbor Keith. I watched the 40-something divorced computer programmer wash his car in the driveway, mow his lawn in the summertime, and shovel the pavement in the wintertime. I had built up an entire relationship in my head and played it out in a thousand different ways. In some scenarios, we were married. In others, we were just fuck buddies. Keith wasn’t a supermodel or anything. There was nothing about him that I found particularly intimidating, and there was no real reason why I couldn’t just approach him and ask him out. I was just too scared of rejection.
And then, one day, I saw the “for sale” sign staked into his front yard. After all this time secretly lusting after Keith, now he was moving, and I would never get my chance at him. I kicked myself for an entire weekend, already resigned to the fact that Keith was destined to be the one that got away.
Category: Transformation (Page 2 of 3)
Read part 1 to get caught up…
As the evening started, Patrick perched on the edge of his barstool, his heart thumping with perturbation and disbelief. The air buzzed with an energy he barely recognized, charged with surreal, disquieting novelty. Mr. Leather Evergreen, the local fetish pageant he had followed religiously and whose title he clinched last year, had been turned on its head. The familiar program of events was gone, and each had been replaced with a bizarre suburban analog.
Instead of showing off their leather craftsmanship skills, the contestants were each handed a pair of shears and tasked with trimming a small patch of lawn to perfection. The stop clock ticked its final seconds, and Patrick watched in bewilderment as a dozen portly, middle-aged men sweated and fretted over every blade of grass on their miniature plots of turf. The winner, a guy Patrick recalled from the old Hideaway days, high fived the entire panel of judges when they revealed he’d trimmed his grass uniformly to one-quarter inch in height, exactly what the HOA prescribed.
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What a difference a year makes.
Patrick walked across the parking lot from his SUV to the venue, feeling like a stranger in a strange land. His leather jacket and pants creaked with each step, and his right hand formed an apprehensive fist in its tight, shiny glove. The Muir cap in his left hand had become a relic of a bygone era, and despite being clad head to toe in custom leather gear, Patrick was reluctant to don the cap.
“Hang in there, Sir,” Patrick’s boyfriend Vince said as he jogged to keep up with Patrick’s purposeful gait. “It’ll be over soon.”
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Read chapter 4 of “Robot cops” to get caught up before reading the final installment…
Bryan opened his eyes. His return to consciousness was met with almost debilitating disorientation. He didn’t remember blacking out, nor did he recognize his current location. The last thing he remembered was that he’d gone looking for Jack. He’d found him just off the hoverway where he—
In the haze of Bryan’s mind, his memories didn’t play out continuously, like an old cinefilm. Instead, they developed in asynchronous order in short, still images, like distorted holophotos. He remembered seeing Jack slumped against the wall. He remembered seeing his hands bound in wristcuffs. He remembered the smooth, plastic, hyper-masculine torso of a PX officer. The cold, artificial feeling of PX roboskin against his bound hands. And that low, monotonic voice calling his name.
Citizen Bryan Collins.
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Read chapter 3 of “Robot cops” to get caught up before reading on…
Bryan sped down the hoverway, his eyes darting back and forth between the road ahead and the clock on his dashboard. It was 7:53 p.m. His mind was in fits, trying to fathom what his friend Jack could have uncovered. What would make him resort to sneaking about like a spy, leaving paper messages as clues to avoid having his movements traced? Whatever it was, Bryan surmised, couldn’t possibly be good.
He navigated off the hoverway at exit 4 and quickly turned onto Olive Street. Instead of stopping there, he drove for another block and parked. He’d meet up with Jack on foot, he decided.
The sun had already sunk beneath the horizon, and the city streets were bathed in a dim gray twilight. This stretch of Olive Street crossed through the city’s central core, densely populated with commuters during the day and all but deserted after dark. Bryan rounded the corner, reaching Jack’s designated meeting place and checking his ID card display for the time. 8:01 p.m.
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My husband Terry squeezed me awake, and I looked around the living room bleary eyed. I could never stay awake in front of the TV. The Christmas movie we’d started watching was over, and a poor cover version of “Jingle Bell Rock” played over the closing credits. Instinctively, I reached for my phone to check the time, hoping I hadn’t overslept.
I felt his beard graze my bald scalp as he moved in to kiss me. The scratchy sensation sent shivers down my spine. “I’m sorry I passed out,” I said. I stood up and stretched, already missing the warmth radiating from his body. I rechecked the clock more surreptitiously this time. It was 11:54 p.m. Only six minutes until Christmas.
“It’s okay,” Terry said, reaching out to me. I grasped his hands and pulled him into a standing position. We laughed as both of his knees cracked on the way up. “I love napping on the sofa with you, but if I don’t get in bed, I’ll be a pretzel when I wake up tomorrow.”
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Todd has a secret crush on his bro housemate Will, but he’s too shy to do anything about it. After Will’s expensive flat-screen TV breaks just before the big game, he and Todd find a dusty old set in the basement and haul it upstairs. It works, but the only show they can get is Honest to Todd, a cliché old sitcom neither of them has ever heard of. The more Will enjoys it, the more creeped out Todd becomes, until the boundaries between the real world and the sitcom world start to break down.
Canned Laughter is a 9,200-word short story. All content in this story is fictional and describes activities between consenting, unrelated adults who are 18+.
The box showed up on our doorstep a week before Thanksgiving. We were confused. It couldn’t possibly have been the prep-by-step Thanksgiving dinner we ordered. It was way too early, and the box wasn’t nearly heavy enough.
“Do you think we got scammed?” I asked my boyfriend Paul.
“What do you mean we, Mr. Subscription Delivery Service Addict?” he said with a smirk. “I’m not the one who ordered it. I told you I’d be happy with pizza and beer.”
We’d done pizza and beer for two consecutive lockdown Thanksgivings. I was ready for something special, but neither of us was a great cook. I wanted premeasured ingredients and a simple chart to follow. Thanksgiving-in-a-box was the answer, or so I thought.
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Noah tapped the key card against the door panel and turned the handle. It was late, and he was exhausted. After a delayed flight, lost luggage, and a tumultuous cab ride in pouring rain, his brain was fried. The dozens of work emails he missed because the plane Wi-Fi was down would just have to wait. At this hour, the only thing he wanted to do was collapse into bed.
It was long past midnight, and all the way from the airport, Noah feared his room had been resold. In a surprising demonstration of customer service, however, the Portal Hotel had held his reservation. Despite his exhaustion, Noah indulged the excitable desk attendant as he explained the hotel’s amenities. The guy was nice enough, and Noah especially enjoyed the way his pecs stretched his already tight shirt when he inhaled.
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