Page 4 of 12

A 3D rendering of a futuristic tunnel with smooth, metallic walls.

The space bears, part 2

2024-05-20 / admin bot / 0 Comments

Read part 1 to get caught up…

I awoke gasping for air and pawing at the inside casing of my sleep chamber. I was freezing cold, and I couldn’t see anything. I’d heard guys talk about sleep panic, but I’d never experienced it before. It was worse than I imagined. My sleep chamber hissed open, and a rush of warm, dry air filled the space. I inhaled sharply, and a musky scent filled my nostrils. A pair of hands pressed down on my shoulders, and another held my legs in place, putting a stop to my frenzied thrashing.

“Hang in there, little buddy,” Bradford said. His voice sounded distant and muffled. “You gotta calm down before we can let you up.”

Close-up of a hand holding a credit card

Dollars and Spence

2024-05-13 / admin bot / 0 Comments

Cody perched uneasily on the edge of a sleek, black leather chair in Spence’s penthouse apartment, the city lights a distant, glittering backdrop through the expansive wall of windows. Rain streamed down the glass, and thunderclaps struck a startling counterpoint to the nervous beating of Cody’s heart. Spence’s great room was drenched in shadow, save for the stark white light of a single modern lamp and the occasional bolt of lightning. Cody always felt inferior in Spence’s presence, but being in Spence’s home only exacerbated the gulf between the mild-mannered software developer and his privileged, multimillionaire Master.

The lamp cast an austere glow over Spence as he sat opposite Cody, his expression unreadable, his posture rigidly controlled, and his leather-gloved hands clenched into fists. Unlike Cody, who carried the unmistakable signs of a life spent in the sedentary glow of computer screens, Spence embodied the apex of privilege and grooming. His face, chiseled and symmetrical, held a piercing gaze with eyes like polished steel, sharp with intelligence but devoid of warmth.

A black barber chair with a chrome base sits in a dark room. The room is so dark that the only thing visible in the image is the barber chair.

Freshly shorn

2024-05-06 / admin bot / 0 Comments

Marcus led Jamie down the cracked pavement of Main Street, directing his boyfriend from their car toward the barbershop. Clear Creek wasn’t a ghost town in the strictest sense, but whatever community existed was conspicuously absent from Main Street this Sunday afternoon. An autumn gust whipped through the thoroughfare, swirling old newspapers and fallen maple leaves into a mini cyclone. Jamie pulled his dark green bomber jacket tighter around his slender frame as they passed under an American flag, which flapped noisily from its mast above the awning of an abandoned storefront.

Contrary to Jamie’s efforts to shield himself from the wind, Marcus cut a carefree, imposing figure as they walked to the barbershop. With his back straight and shoulders square, Marcus walked with a confident stride that seemed to make even the swirling leaves calm down in his presence. His sharply tailored jacket clung tightly to his broad upper body, the black leather creaking with every smooth, undulating motion.

Shadow’s grasp

2024-04-29 / admin bot / 4 Comments

Ted turned down a deserted corridor, leaving the lobby behind and cautiously entering the “OFF LIMITS” area of the historic Capitol Theater. The lobby’s lush decor and the scent of stale popcorn gave way to a functional, slightly chaotic backstage, dimly lit by naked bulbs that cast long, quivering shadows across the walls. The floorboards creaked underfoot with Ted’s every step, disturbing the otherwise tomblike silence.

Startled by a low-hanging cobweb, Ted reflexively brushed off the lapels of his plaid jacket and rubbed his face. The last thing he needed was a spider in his beard. As he passed racks full of musty old costumes and shelves stacked high with paint cans, he straightened his collar and thumbed the button of the tape recorder in his jacket pocket. This would be the most influential scoop of his career if he could only keep his nerves in check.

Dad dates (My perfect dad 52)

2024-04-22 / admin bot

Buzzwords, the city’s trendy local cafe frequented by university students and business executives alike, was always busy on Sunday mornings. The rush of early-morning errand runners had already come through, and with the after-church crowds now pouring in seeking coffee and brunch, free tables were scarce. Theo snagged one of the last remaining two tops by the front door and fidgeted nervously, awaiting his date’s arrival.

The faint scent of starch emanated from his crisp, white, button-down shirt, and his caged junk twitched in his dark gray trousers as he scanned the room, wondering whether any of the men already here was his date. Each time the cafe doors opened, the April wind whirled around him, making him grateful for the open-necked shirt collar. The last thing he needed was to spend the date subduing a necktie determined to flap around in the breeze.

Two for one (My perfect dad 51)

2024-04-15 / admin bot / 0 Comments

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.

The pageant, part 2 (My perfect dad 50)

2024-04-08 / admin bot / 0 Comments

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.

Doing time

2024-04-01 / admin bot / 2 Comments

Travis Barnes always woke up 16 minutes before his alarm clock sounded. Every weekday morning at 4:14, his eyes opened. He lay motionless until 4:29. He wasn’t sure if he had conditioned himself to do this or whether the implant dictated his actions even at this early hour. He gazed up at the ceiling of his room at the halfway house, savoring the last few minutes of repose he would have until long after the sun set that night. He thought he noticed a new crack forming near the corner above his head, but he couldn’t be sure. After so many months in the program, the days had begun to run together. There was little sense in paying attention to such minutiae.

As he counted down the minutes, Travis tried not to think about the sequence of events that landed him in this mess. Nevertheless, the memory always returned, eating up valuable seconds of his vanishing downtime. Like with the alarm clock. Travis couldn’t tell if it was his own guilty conscience or the implant that dredged up the memory every morning. The program’s administrators refused to explain the details.

The pageant, part 1 (My perfect dad 49)

2024-03-25 / admin bot / 1 Comment

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.”

Robot cops (chapter 5)

2024-02-12 / admin bot / 2 Comments

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.

Jay Hypno Writer

Page 4 of 12

The space bears, part 2

Dollars and Spence

Freshly shorn

Shadow’s grasp

Dad dates (My perfect dad 52)

Two for one (My perfect dad 51)

The pageant, part 2 (My perfect dad 50)

Doing time

The pageant, part 1 (My perfect dad 49)

Robot cops (chapter 5)

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