Working on story for 'Wallowing in Pessimism's Mire'

Love During The Year Of Sandpaper

Simon Bucher Jones

Cruellest of all the weapons of those times

Invented by old men to hurt the young

By truthless bastards,

In hermantic labs,

Adjacent to the lustless and the death:

Was what they called the ‘sandpaper’ effect,

Which turned the touch of skin to agony,

(Sheer hell),

That burnt and slaughtered every soul,

Drove love apart from lover, kith from kin,

Turned food to ash, music to shriek of pain,

Un-natural inversion of the world.

Bain BeyBalor: 'Poems of The Twenty-Seventh Epoch'

Dressing, Maloth Scinitar felt the first tingle of fire where the elasticised sleeves of the free-fall jumper bisected the hairs of his fore-arm.  WELL FRANKLY I'VE NEVER READ ANYTHING SO OVER-WRITTEN AND IF I WERE YOU I'D BE GRATEFUL THAT I'M PRE-EMPTING THIS NARRATIVE WITH CHARACTERS LIKE MALOTH SCINITAR, DALO, AND PYSSHER had forced their way into the enrober-tron, he had not only stripped himself naked he had, all the evidence indicated, clawed the hairs off his own arms. His flesh blistered and pustulated where the hairs had lain – each one making its own cancerous cicatrix  - a labyrinthine map of acid-etching over his frosted glass skin.  Dalo had heard the alarm and shucked her own clothes in time, a flexible force-field – strategically opaque at elbows, domino mask line, and in a diagonal over the primary, secondary, and tertiary-sex organs (the major taboo areas of the Jagged Veil worlds) – protected her from the razor air, and the shredding floor. Unlike Maloth (perennial risk-taker) she had depilated her hair but the torment of blinking, blinded her, and she stumbled.  Pyssher, one of the few on the station to have had masochist training, was sublimating as much of the pain as possible into pleasure, but even perversion could only bear so much.