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| After Hours |
I handed her my card and the metallic click punched another hole around the edge.
”That’s load 124” she said wearily, “you’ll need a new card after next week. See the quartermaster on the way out.”
I hated this part most of all. I felt sickly, wet, dirty, depleted, and I couldn’t hide it. 124? Really? How many to go?
I wished for showers but what’s the use? The dome kept the compound too hot anyway. I hated it here, nothing to do but sleep, sweat, and fuck. And how long until this batch got pregnant? The ugly ones took forever.
“Make the punishment fit the crime.” the judge said, crossing himself.
“No one deserves this.” I thought, and stepped back into my cell.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~She took my card and punched another heart around the edge.
”That’s load 124!” she said giggling, “You’ll need a new card soon.”
I winked and pulled her dress down, covering her soft, beautiful skin, she made the most amazing noises today. I’ll miss her when she conceives.
We kissed and I left, wet, dirty, and depleted. Quartermaster Gus ignored my high-five and I stepped out into the dome.
I skipped my shower so I could smell her for a little longer and walked across the sandy floor to my cell. I closed the door behind me, “Nothing to do but sleep, sweat, and fuck.
“Make the punishment fit the crime,” the judge said,
“What a wise man.” I thought, and fell asleep smiling.
I wanted to do so much more with this picture, dang you France and your 124 word limit, no more no less, just 124, what, next you’ll give us a syllable limit? Ooops, I take that back, someone might just try it.
So what ran through my mind the first time I saw this? “Hey! Where’s the naked chick?” and then after that I thought of hippies, bohemians, the homeless, the poor. I thought of Aldonza from The Man of LaMancha, as played by Sophia Loren. So beautiful, bitter, and tragic, and heart-broken when a man dares love her as he sees what she might be. What a wonderful moment.
Then the idea started to gel, this wasn’t romance, or was it? The prison theme grew out of my inability to express my “humans kept in a cage by aliens for breeding purposes” idea in exactly 124 words. (You are a cruel, yet beautiful mistress France.) I couldn’t describe the dome, the glass, the chlorine-based life form just outside the walls without giving the ending away from the beginning. I had a vision that was part Thunderdome (2 people enter 3 humans leave) nor could I figure out why they were raising human babies if they are chlorine, or even arsenic based life-forms. Sure, we eat cows, but they are corn-based quadrupeds, we just figured out how to stand up.
I gave up on the alien breeding program (APB) when my editing skills failed me, so, I thought, who else hates humans and sex but loves babies? The church, of course. What if they punished us like our dad’s did when they caught us smoking. He made us smoke a whole pack, right (or something like that, I saw it on a TV show once.) What if you were forced into sex, what would happen if it were the punishment?
OK, I’ll pause here and give the women a moment to stop laughing and rolling their eyes and saying “Welcome to my world numb-nuts.” If you ladies are through, rejoin the group and behave yourselves.
The depressing one came out first, kind of like my older brother, and I liked it, but it felt incomplete.
Maybe it wasn’t punishment at all. Maybe I could make some sappy point about positive outlooks and good attitudes and pretend that life is more than a meaningless string of biological reactions and chemical stimuli and that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny is bringing vibrating rabbits and insertable eggs for all the good girls this year. Does the Easter Bunny care if you’ve been bad or good like Santa? Kringle has the twice-check list thing going, but what does the bunny do, check for uncomfortable Sunday clothes in your closet?
Anyway, I came up with a version from another outlook, and I liked that one too.
But even then, I had to cut out a lot, I wanted the prison to be staffed with angry your homoerotically confused priests, and I wanted to explain, or figure out for myself, why they needed a captive breeding program for humans, and are the women prisoners as well or just forced into breeding or what? So many questions and so few words with which to answer them.
Maybe I should have put a word limit on this commentary… Enjoy FFF, send Panser some love and see if he’ll come back to us, and a big thanks to TaskMaster France for setting us all on our course this week.
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