Children At Heart

Between this lifetime and the next, in artificial heaven, one may meet their true love again. I met Anna-Marie Boeglin under different circumstances. It’s funny how the circumstances of your life don’t change one lifetime to the next.

She is the only girl I’ve ever truly loved.

There is nothing like having a spoiled beef with somebody. It was the year 2133 A.D., and I still haven’t gotten a digital television. My family might as well ride on horse and buggies.

The thing about family holidays, is that I very rarely ever actually got to enjoy them, as I would so often have to catch up on schoolwork. Why bother catch up on work, if you’re only going to get half credit for it, it’s really more of a teacher’s benefit than it is to the student’s benefit. Christmas and Thanksgiving were the only holidays besides traditionally Irish ones I got to celebrate with any regularity.

If you’ve ever seen a slab of corned beef, you’ll know exactly what corned beef and cabbage looks like. My mom used to make this for dinner from time to time on Irish/Scottish holidays although her own family was Welsh. Usually it would come in the form of a soup, I suppose as that is what is considered traditional. Can you blame me for initially expecting it to be my dad who would poke his fork sometimes, and just saying I just got less than I was expecting? The corn beef in the bowl would eventually go completely missing, and dad would just keep saying he wasn’t doing anything. Obviously I was to docile at that point to really say anything.

So one night I checked the inside of the fridge, as it turned out the corn beef was seemingly dissolving. So that’s what they put in that meat these days, I thought. Once again, as docile as I was I never made a sound about it. Well it turned out a few years later it turned out that studies would show that with some cows in a specific date, had almost an immortality gene. And so the beef would choose to eat itself rather have humans eat upon it.

So next time you get beef at the grocery, check the label.

You may have just eaten an immortal cow.

Now I once knew a girl who claimed to visit the arcades, however at times she would get locked inside those buildings when she was in to late and the staff had went on home. Her parents didn’t seem to care whether she went missing. So her life was largely doomed from the start. She would tell me how at times various tap dancing ghost girls would haunt the facility, and that was part of the reason the staff would often leave early. So there would be her and these girls that would hang out. Unfortunately none of the girls seemed to like to much, at least initially that she would go into their home at night and try to continue playing those girls.

She told one night, how she wanted to play this game, that she had heard was taken off the available game list. The game involved pillories and guillotines. Heads up, you’ll need to avoid sharp pains. Well eventually she managed to score some pink Teddy bears, she would give this to her little sister when she returned home. She would always arrive at home by bedtime, and so her parents never made a comment. They assumed as long as she got good grades then all was well. However one night, a particular girl wanted to challenge her.

So she tried to play this game.

Well lets put it this way, that’s how I know ghosts can kill you. The blade humanely cut through her neck, and her head gently rolled off her falling body to the ground as she bled profusely remaining conscious for the next thirty or so seconds, mouthing words of something related to “tell me sister I love her.”

But nobody would get the message. I found this out from scoring a job there once, and shaking my head is dismay watching a security camera. It wasn’t like I didn’t feel sorry for her, honestly if you didn’t you were human. But there is something bizarrely amusing about watching a runaway die so young in a “OMG I want to bleed my eyes out” sort of way.

Her parents dropped her severed head in the grave. It was unmarked by their house, which they say her spirit still roams around looking for her parents.

So I thought I’d go visit her.

Maybe offer a bit of some corn beef.

I went to visit her grave-sight, and her mother came out with a shotgun, shouting specific curses in a language that sounded a little like French. Her family was marked by a particular matriarchal structure, so I politely raised my hands up.

“Sorry miss, just paying my respects.”

“You were one of her friends right. Why weren’t you there when she died. We were so worried about her.” She was able to fall down, pushed herself up, heaved, and had a hard time not restraining tears. “Sorry, I know you didn’t know she went missing. Here take her pocket watch, she wanted you to have it.”

“But it’s a family moment.” I said.

“Just take it, … we were going to burn it anyway.” she said.

Her family, other than her sister, was only emotionally involved in her loss, only as much as mourning the loss of any other beheaded human being, although her mother really did seemed to be bothered I wasn’t there to rescue her. But believe me, I had my own reasons for this.

But I hugged her gently.

I didn’t want to see anyone cry.

“Here, have my corn beef.”

How was I suppose to know it was mildly offensive to share food between an Irish family and an French family. But that’s exactly how it is with my body language, as I … roll my eyes, roll my tongue, and do everything else in a nuanced and personal way that makes things hard to communicate.

But I was human to, I drunk out my own sorrows.

And then finished a pack of cigars.

My quirk was a mix of sexual pleasure and complete depression. I could go all day masturbating to decapitated girl heads and not blink, and there was something always there that would make me regret that decision. Some girls I knew had similar life stories to my own, and at night I would cry till I fall asleep. I dream of a day when friends didn’t wander off alone into the dark on a suicidal bent to destruction. I wanted at least some girl I knew from my hometown that would survive long enough to have a kid with.

Then they can take her head off if they must.

But I was inherently against the idea of capital punishment, and suicide even more so. And I was left wondering what could have made a sixteen year old girl those years ago, choose to eventually go somewhere she knew would end her life.

I wondered what her life was like.

It wasn’t every day you found another girl threatened by beheading, and as usual I kind of just sort of let it happen. That’s how things tend to be with me these days. I used to court girls who I would want to rescue, but they would slap my face. Others would stab me in the back, and then decapitate themselves with their own guillotine gun. And she only was the exception, because she found some interest in me beyond romance. She had read my autobiography about having originally having the desire to masturbate to girls having their heads cut off. And she wondered what could possibly motivate a change in me.

Well as usual, I didn’t have an answer to that.

It wasn’t like I tended to not give answers to French girls anyway, as they were the ones that introduced beheading into the family that took away my cousin, who I had fallen in love with at the time. It was her people that threatened Anna-Marie, who would go on to briefly meet my presence. I never spoke to her before, but from my understanding she was never completely the same after being initially sentenced to death in her home country. But here out here, where the zones are always decentralized and anonymous, she could be anyone.

She could be a tap-dancing ghost girl in a dark arcade. She could anyone at all. So from time to time I still visit her. I think she was the only girl I’ve ever met that didn’t die on me, and she had a figure that made me ignore my mommy issues. So after walked over to visit her standing in the pillory after visiting the black smith, I took a lock of her hair, and then kept it in my pocket watch I remember my first girlfriend by.

“So what brings you to the US.”

“I have no family, nobody. Who the hell are you?”

“I am Hemato Tomato, nice to meet. Will be seeing you later.” I tried walking away after saying this, then found her shudder. “You OK, those things are fun.”

“Shut up, I don’t trust you.”

“Perfect English, they taught you well.”

My sex life was like a deflated air balloon, constantly being reminded of my mother. And the thing about my mother is, I could even consider doing her unless I didn’t see her face. As if her head were removed. Girls reminded me of my mother, and girls who reminded me of my mother needed to have their heads removed. I certainly wasn’t going to do it, that would absolutely kill me inside and out. So I walked to the dock, to board a faerie. She fluttered away along the lake like a miniature cruise ship of the human girl variety. I heard faerie girls give free tit grabs. Not that I was going to go around doing that either mind you.

So then went I got off, Anna-Marie caught up with me. She purchased herself a shot gun, and a few rounds of ammo.

“Why didn’t you rape me?” she asked.

“Well loaded question, was I suppose to rape you?” I asked.

She had that long yard tear, “They always rape me. My father, my brothers, everyone I ever knew. And yet, you stood beside me.”

“I didn’t want to see you cry.” I said.

“But I’m a criminal in my home country.”

“Sweet heart, we’re all criminals here.”

I took a few week to get her to completely trust me completely. It took some work to make her understand what being trans is, because … well she is French. But for once in my life, I found someone … I could trust.

She would tell me how her father would sometime touch her, I refused to tell her how they brought back memories of when my father did, but I was there only for her. And you just don’t talk about your own problems when trying to console someone. I may have a thing for decapitated heads, but it wasn’t like I didn’t have a heart.

I just wondered, how long would she poison me.

“Anna sweetheart?”

“What do you want.”

“I’d like to do the cooking.”

“I’m just glad I have a home.”

In a way I could finally love again, even if someday she may poison me. I found that, despite my refusal to admit feeling sorry her on that night all those years ago, I found myself crying true tears of joy. I no longer failed my first best friend.

If only Anna-Marie knew.

The thing about dating a parent killer, particularly a young one younger than your own at nineteen, you need to treat them with kid gloves. After all they aren’t fully adult; you don’t want to piss them off, and you also got to be firmly gentle with them. Being someone who had been part of a slightly upper crust family, I came with a certain level of an ability to read. On the hand with her, her family was poor. She only managed to avoid decapitation by matter of luck, the jury in that nation was so awestruck about the case they had to spare her life. A few centuries earlier and she would have hung by the neck instead.

Unfortunately other girls her age were not so lucky.

Most of them got the chop. There was one lady who was just a little older, twenty two a the most. She was unfaithful to her husband (well considered Anna-Marie’s experience with men, I couldn’t possibly imagine why), but eventually she would eventually go on to stab her husband to death. Unfortunately that country didn’t seem to make the distinction between serial killers and crimes out of petty spousal revenge.

So they put her head on a stick, waved it across in the air, and then burned that body to toast in an oven that can burn metal. So Anna-Marie was once again in a state of shock from losing her personal friends.

I guess killers make great bed mates.

Now you possibly wonder why it is I’m not killer, and yet seem to manage to avoid being murdered by one. Well I’ll tell you a little story, I was riding on a electronic train going faster than sound. I was riding on a sleeper train, running away from my family back down in NashChat, Tennessee. I remembered the feeling of panic I had having attacked my father with a knife, and almost would have gotten him if my mom didn’t put sense into me.

She wasn’t exactly immune to being pushed into walls either by me, and I suppose in her mind she wasn’t sure how far I would go. But keep in mind they were the ones belting me if I ran away from home, not the other way around. I wanted some other place to be, some place that was not home. Some place that wasn’t there.

So me and Anna-Marie formed our own family.

The Marie-Tomatos.

At night I would have dreams of blood on Anna’s face, I would here her crying faint tears. I would snuggle in her arms, and try to console her. After all it was the least I could do. It wasn’t easy finding someone you thought was a man at first you could trust, and then only find out later that what you know about the relationship was a lie-insofar as what gender she thought I was. But eventually it became a normal family.

I could have a family again.

She could have a family again. And there was love to go around.

At nights we would go to the water parks, shoot at things at the fare, and eventually console her from time to time to assure her father wasn’t there.

Because at the end of the day, she’s just a bad girl.

She is a child at heart. A broken child, a girl who was never treated as a child, except insofar as being spared from execution by a single thread.

On some level she felt she already lost her head.

So give her this country song.

The thing about relationships, whether it’s with French girls, American, Japanese, or the great nation of the beer brew festival. Sometimes you build an image in your head of someone you would like to know, though from time to time those images in your mind can turn out to be right. At other times they turn out differently in the real life and be … dog ugly. And yet when you stand by trying to comfort someone as long as I have, there isn’t anything turning back. Your heart is to invested in their well-being your needs being trumped by the desire for only them that you are willing to forgive a little bit of homeliness.

And yet there is a kind of inner beauty in masculine girls. One not often seen by more shallow suitors, there is a heart of gold not often given a chance. Sometimes they build trust issues with others, finding images in people they hate. I know I was there once myself, I would shamefully lump everyone who was blond under the same brush. Yet now whenever I see a blond girl be beheaded, it weighs down on my soul. It is this great indescribable feeling.

On some level I find myself scared to lose Anna-Marie, and yet I write my stories imagining some other kind of Anna-Marie. For a long time this was why I tended to avoid dates, as I didn’t trust whatever girlfriend I would date that I still loved them no matter what, and no matter what version of them I created in story in a book I would love them more than the artificial life. And so I never chose to even entertain crushes.

I feared being alone.

And yet now as I join hands with her at the local cart stop, I simply think of all the thoughts I used to have imagining creepy men admiring me as a bearded lady when I forgot to shave, with that Irish red. And think…

I’d rather live my life with her instead.

It’s my new life.

The thing about the nature of my sexuality, I’ve always tended to prefer girls from a long distance relationship.

This was part of the reason I was initially reluctant to befriend Anna-Marie. The thing about the word befriend, is all to often I tended to confuse the words behead and befriend. Do to to the nature of the relationship with my mother, and the fact that my illustrations tended to involve girls in captivity or with their necks on a headsman’s block, the general association I made for friendship with other girls tended to also include sex.

I was beginning to draw those illustrations in a time I was beginning to sexually develop. It wasn’t like I wanted to actually behead them, it was more a case of wanting to die with my beloved that was in a case of strong denial for the longest time. And so most of my fear for the longest time had been that they would assume I wanted to kill them. When that wasn’t the case at all. No at all.

I wanted to die right beside them and never leave their side as I’m caught by dream-scanners who are able to spot our locations, finding out exactly where we live and our daily living habits. Things in the town would be tailored for our least convenience. So the fact that Anna-Marie would even consider giving me a chance was an idea I wasn’t completely used to. So when we went to shooting matches, and then rode horses under flying cars, it made broaching any conversation about sex a difficult topic to approach. Especially knowing her parents were dead.

So whenever I have thoughts of a warm embrace by a bad girl, my mind immediately switches to them stabbing me with a knife, and then licking the blood off my corpse.

And for Anna-Marie, I wasn’t sure if she’d die by my side.

And yet, she was just so cute.

Unfortunately I’ve never been one to voice things, and yet on some level I think she knew my feelings for her. And if there was a single common thing about abuse survivors, often one has a hard time sorting out their feelings for other people. I’m one to assume even poisoners have feelings for other people. Almost to an exaggerated degree. You find yourself growing gradual disdain for the guardian that was suppose to take care of and protect you. Remember, I was there once. I just got out of the house in time, and never had those desires since. And so while I don’t exactly approve of slipping cyanide in someone’s coffee, it is an understandable feeling to me when someone continuously spanks you and never letting up.

And yet, despite my insistence on cooking, and her more strongly insisting I haven’t died so far, although I might give it weeks at the most.

Yet whenever I am home she is happy to see me now.

A very different girl from the one I met. She was a lot dirtier then, but now if I describe her appearance her skin tone is paradox of tan and pale, she looks as if someone who could be more dark skinned like a Spaniard, and yet do to lack of exposure from sunlight she is so pale. And her hair is as dark as a black rose. Her body was a petite skinny hour glass shape, with the larger end around the bottom and smaller on top. Her hair the gently trimmed shoulder length darkness one associates with a guillotine cut having grown out over the last six months. I asked her why she kept her hair at that length. “It reminds me of how close I came to losing it all.” And I knew exactly what she meant, teenage girl there really did.

Even their heads.

Hey don’t look at me like that, I tend to pay attention to what I like. Even if they aren’t a good person. Especially guillotine cuts. We embrace for the midnight bed, under the glow of the lunar light shining over the mountains.

You know how it is when you date an ex poisoner without the ability to poison.

I hear her loading up a shotgun, so I wake up. But instead of pointing that gun at me like I was expecting (I will not kill in most cases, but will out of self defense), she is instead putting the shotgun in her mouth.

So for the first time in my life I was forced into the situation of having to talk somebody down from suicide, not exactly something I was experienced with. I had poisoned myself about three times before meeting her, and I was barely in a mental state to help. And yet the adrenaline rush made me take the shotgun from her hands, and she fired it to the ceiling.

“Why were you going to do that, I was going to miss you.” I said.

“Nobody misses me, I have nobody.” And then she passes out onto the floor, convulsing and hoping that I wouldn’t spank her. And I didn’t, that’s just not how you treat anyone in that kind of a mental state.

And then I hugged her gently.

I allowed her to cry in my shoulders.

There were things she finally confessed, when I promised my beloved that I was not the type to judge someone based on their past.

Anna-Marie remembered when she had first took an airplane to the US. She had just barely been acquitted for her serial murder of her two brothers and her father. Her father would try to reserve sexual favors for himself, her becoming a kind of surrogate mother after Elizabeth died.

Her brothers tried to hide the fact that they threatened to hit her after she refused to get a sickle for their farming. “I’m not your servant girl, no you fuck yourself. Your smile penis does not compare to dad’s.” Her brother Jacques was not happy about this, and would eventually, with the help of his and Anna-Marie’s younger brother, stalk her and drug her with wine. Then they did was many disorderly brothers would do, that for sake of good taste shall be left to your imagination. So it was a simple solution, after she woke up in her bedroom she shared with her two sisters.

She would poison her brothers. She murdered her first brother with rice soup, and her youngest brother and her father by a fight they challenged others in order to try to win sexual favors. They both died in the fights. Her sisters felt guilty about turning her sister in to authorities, so she tried to be super nice to her after she was acquitted.

Anna-Marie only cried for what she did to her sisters whom she had always loved, but did not cry for her brothers and father.

She cried in my shoulder, partly out of joy and partly out of regret.

I was simply happy I could give her the shoulder to cry on.

Anna-Marie dropped off contact with her family, leaving a suicide letter and a farewell with an I love you and an apology for the stress of almost having lost another family member. “Don’t forget me, I want to come with you.” Ursula said, but Anna-Marie insisted she preferred to be alone. She could never go back to her old society, not with the crimes that she had done.

So coming to US was a mix of fear and emotional triggers from her old life. She wondered if she would see her sisters again.

Anna-Marie wore a cowboy hat, got herself a shotgun, and headed for the new digital frontier of the North West. Things had changed in the US after the French take over, and she wondered if she would be known her. But society had changed considerably since the former half of the twenty first century.

Perhaps she could start a new life. There was only one certainty.

She missed her mother Elizabeth.

She would tell me of difficulties she had adjusting to the new life here in the United States. Things were never really the same.

Anna-Marie had difficulty sleeping. She had constant memories of the guillotine that never came to be. She would at time wonder what it would have been like if she had her neck placed into a loop, and then it was all o’er. Her last remaining vision being the the crowd of the new twenty first, who became increasingly vicious for blood after the election of “The Ink Pen” who resigned the Guillotine back into law after the rest of Europe was dealing with the Post Nazi Restoration Party’s advance. Japan always renewed their imperialist fervor.

The Guillotine Gun. The new national razor. The second widow. It was all part of the new right wing’s game.

And poor Anna, the girl who trusted no man, almost died.

She could have been lost in the game.

I had heard about a similar criminal case who, while she was not exactly the contemporary of Anna-Marie, she was of similar type of criminal case. She would eventually come to poison members of her own family.

Really more of an Irish-American friend I knew, they called her Betty even though her real name was Bette. In case the daughter they adopted turned out to be completely psychotic in later years, they did not want their beloved classic to end up being libeled and never read again. Betty would at times deliberately change the name of the house name board on houses along the coast of the North West, out of a sense of mischief and to see whether this would manipulation local fire trucks from coming to her family, that would occasionally be called because of accidental fires her brother would cause in the kitchen.

“How many times have I told you boys to be careful in there?” said their mother, who said it in a more playful way than she would have if Betty had done so. Betty had always been the outsider of the family, and so she would often receive generally harsher treatment overall than her older male siblings.

“Sorry mom, it won’t happen again.” one brother said.

“Make sure of that guy.” Betty said, being slapped in the face by mother.

“Only natural born MacCuffins can lecture them.” her mother lectured. And this became something that Betty would come to take for granted.

Whenever they would have the local seafood, she would always hate to offend them and their cooking, and would at times find some excuse to avoid eating whatever it was they offered do to their mom refuses to cook. So eventually Betty moved beyond merely changing the name of title board of the beach house. Part of must have hoped that changing the name of the board would make them confuse houses, and so she would make her escape to a kind her family.

Her fears of being beaten for not liking their cooking were not exactly unfounded. At one point a while ago she had been paddled by one because he was some offended by one of her remarks. So she decided there was only one certain way to stop the beatings once and for all. But her family had to be gone from the beach house, and she had to offer the cooking for the following evening.

She made seafood like her family, and her brothers commented, surprisingly how particularly interesting and fantastic the fish was this evening. And despite feeling somewhat ill, in fact requested to their mother to perhaps let their sister help them with the cooking more often. This gave Betty some guilt.

However by the time bedtime rolled around, bother her brothers fell gravely ill. Eventually they fade out of existence the following morning. She had strained relationships with her parents, but her parents by this point were to afraid of pissing her off that they said nothing. But Betty started to get paranoid.

So she stabbed both her parents.

When the neighbor heard screams, the neighbors got involved. Law enforcement did not particularly dealing with cases dealing with child abuse, but had particular disdain of the old majority that ruled this country, even if perhaps the evidence suggested that Betty’s real mother was French.

Betty had a quick trail, some suggested judicial error.

She was taken to the courtyard, held in confinement for a few days. And then taken out for her execution. She walked up the scaffold stairs in a nervous wreck, and almost couldn’t make it to the center. They closed the loop on the guillotine gun around her small frail neck, and then counted down.

The trigger was pulled, the angled blade flew through her neck. Her head fell down onto the scaffold floor below. Because there was no board to hold her upright, the execution largely being rushed to avoid detection by children’s rights activists from human rights international being involved, they wanted the case to be as over quickly as they could possibly make it.

The executioner held up her head for all to see.

And then quickly prepared funeral arrangements. I only know so much, because I could have been an apprentice for said events, but had luckily gotten sick from the idea of killing a girl that could have been a friend.

So they had me watch her demise instead to learn.

And I sure did learn quite a bit. That in this country we call home, it was a vastly different from the old world where childhood was sacred.

Kids lost their heads like anyone else.

I cried myself to sleep that night, vowing that I would someday completely eliminate everyone from the French government in my country. That I would use the toothpicks I owned to torture them, and never let them die.

To poke them till they leave the country.

I was reminded again, of how much I valued meeting a girl that could have been executed. It was the first time I comprehended how opposed to capital punishment I really was.

There was a white mug spilled on the pavement of the parking lot. The manager didn’t seem to pay attention, as he was to busy picking fights with other motel tenants.

My sexuality was like a constantly moving train, no matter what stops you have you will always come out ahead. The lady lump was beginning to develop into a sore subject. The desire for human contact fading nightly, and yet some calling need to find out where Anna-Marie had gone. Anna-Marie was the opposite of a digital cyberspace dream girl. I had known others only briefly outside of the inter webs. I clung to the idea of some vague notion of human innocents from game console flower girls in science fantasy games. And yet some or the lack of it had become a moot point.

I never found myself willing to hold onto relationships. They were a burden I simply did not even need. The closest I ever came to a relationship was being sucked off by a slightly homely but not altogether ugly girl. I didn’t want to break her heart as we both knew it was arranged by some other slave master.

As I wander to find Anna-Marie, I am consumed by my inner thoughts and worries about whether she might do something stupid. I wasn’t the type to rescue girls.

I merely wanted the entrainment.

I hadn’t seen a beheading of someone I liked. I had mixed feelings of whether I wanted it to happen at all.

As I allow her decapitation to happen I am in a state of shock, the angled blade cutting through flesh and bone reverberating across my junk. I have a mixture of sexual feelings and depression as I say goodbye for the last time, watching blood spill into the basket.

My digital cyberspace dream girl was gone. Originally my feelings of Anna-Marie were that of shameful reluctance for love. She would become my Anna-Marie. Cyberspace girls cant be hurt or broken. There is only digital innocence on the web.

I wondered when the dream scanners caught her, I just needed somewhere to be.

Glad I wore three extra layers of jeans. A mixture of some horrible eroticism and sadness.

Dating girls had always been a tricky prospect for me, after all I had issues with girls ever since I first came out as trans. In my mind I wanted my own cyber pet dream girl, yet I always had one girl who would always follow me around to talk me as I felt down about Anna-Marie’s death. She was a short girl, a little under five feet, yet her proportions were like that of a smaller person rather than someone who was suppose to be taller.

I never could quite tell what region she was an immigrant from, but it almost definitely was not France or Ireland. She had the longest black curly hair, and black eyes you could stare into all night on a lunar evening under the stars. Looking back on it I should have taken the opportunity to date. Yet I was so lost in my personal sorrows without a worldly care.

Yet she was always there.

“So what’s your name?” I asked.

“They call me Dog, Dog Snacks. It’s a long story.”

“Oh I love those.”

She rested on my shoulder, her bare feet dipping her toes in the artificial lake, artificial in the sense that it was a lake crafted by engineers when building this here hotel. “Well I once accidentally ate dog treats confusing them for cocoa puffs when I was a real young girl. Family hadn’t been able to let go of the idea sense.”There were many aspects of Dog I didn’t know. I just saw her as some annoying cute girl that would follow me everywhere she went.

We would go everywhere together, she would notice my boner when girls tap danced. It seemed to take a lot of will power for her not to masturbate me on stage nights. But one day she went missing. She kept hoping, hoping, and hoping I would rescue her. She got angry when she scraped by being guillotined.

And yet she stood with me till the end. Forgiving me for not going to games.

She became the girl that would eventually lose her head in the arcades.

No wonder she never told me about her family.

Her family sucked.

And yet here I am feeling like I failed Anna-Marie and my girl named dog. My dating life would never be the same.

“She sounded like a great friend to you.” the wine glass washer said.

“Yea she sure was.” I said. She was more then a, friend.

She a girl named dog.

Devoted until the end.

It was a few months since I lost Anna-Marie.

After she died I heard about a Guillotine gun street gang. They were the most feared gang in from NashChat to Seatak, traversing across the country at the speed of an electronic train; they could ride the coat tails of corporate men, and slash the throats of ladies held for ransom. They killed close to ten thousand women, the trail of severed heads paving the road like new marbled floor.

And yet the time I met them, they didn’t seem to pay any particular attention to me at all. They didn’t seem to care about the fact that I knew they were after a particular artifact from the old era of the US. I was minding my own business, trying merely to live my life, as I’d never been one for gun fights. After all in my opinion gun fights were things macho people did to prove their worth. But when you get to where I’m at, you’re just trying to live your life as a writer, jotting down personal journals about your experience across what the Japanese called the west–the United States as a whole. So I didn’t think I’d ever been in the situation where I’d even consider saving someone’s life. That was until I saw the Rattle Snake Insignia.

The thing about Rattle Snakes, is they were like spiders to me. They could pop in and out of existence at their leisure. At night I would have dreams of giant spiders and rattle snakes attempting to bite me while I traversed the wild woods of the mind, scattering sanity like shattered glass. But I wondered what Anna-Marie would have wanted, certainly there was something in her eyes that trusted me like nobody else ever had before. I wanted some way to return that favor, even if I didn’t like the French girl that I was going to save and–at the time was entirely uncertain whether I’d guillotine gun her myself. After all a kink for decapitation was part of my human nature, as natural to me as for you you might consider breathing.

And there was something in those eyes that softened my soul, and made me realized all my personal issues from that point. There is something about looking straight into someone’s face, and finding despite unconditional love they find in your eyes someone they fear greatly, and through their own trust issues have a look of total betrayal. And they continued to love you despite your faults. My first girlfriend Dog had this trait, and to some degree also Anna-Marie. With Anna-Marie it was even more special, because I finally managed to succeed at something I never thought I could before she died, as she gradually came to trust me.

I saved her from killing herself.

And that makes all the difference when you hate yourself. Therefore I needed to find a way to tempt the gang when they came to my town. I didn’t want to save whatever girl they captured, as that simply wasn’t my thing. But I was willing to allow that to happen if the gang were more tempted to decapitate me, so that perhaps I could be with my Anna-Marie.

If not for her than for Anna-Marie.

“Go on, save yourself. Don’t worry about me.” I said to the dark brunette, likely of French immigrant origin.

As she ran her bare feet glistened in the sun like manicured hands, her heels forming the shape of hairless puff balls in the wind as they bobbed up and down in her Jesus sandals. I found that my lady junk was beginning to become a lot wetter. I managed to attract the attention of the gang, and they managed to get the loop around my own neck.

Then a bullet was fired. An actual bullet. Not a flying guillotine blade, not shrapnel. But the actual old time bullets left over from before the French take over, before they outlawed gun altogether in French controlled regions. I’m surprised the French did not take over the inter webs, but I suppose that wasn’t their thing. I may be cyber sexual, but I am romantic–almost to a fault.

A second shot was fired.

Everyone else besides her ran.

“Nice to meet you, Francisca is the name.” the cute girl said. Evidently she was less reluctant to save me than me to her, I hate it when I owe others my life. But I suppose that’s how it goes.

“Why didn’t you let me die.”

“I couldn’t resist the mix of joy and sadness.”