misunderstood supervillain Junkyard Heart’s secret identity is Moxie Cheerwine
her sidekick is Glass Rat
he’s the ghost of a dead rat that only manifests as a spectral reflection in broken glass
he can’t talk or do anything useful but she likes knowing he’s there for emotional support
the glass has to be broken or he can’t get in so she’s always smashing glass things
she has trash powers
she eats cigarette butts and breathes fire
she swallows batteries and she’s electric
she eats a shopping bag and she can fly
“I was thinking we could go get coffee?”
“Uuuuh.” The rubber tips had come off of her box heels, and they made a hollow sound against the pavement, like hooves. “Nnno?”
“Why not?”
“I mean. Like.” She scratched her nose with one mismatched press-on nail. “I’m trash, for one thing.”
Brian grinned. “Like, you’re really into Hamilton?”
“Yeah, but that’s unrelated. Are you done with that?” She pointed to the glass bottle his kombucha had come in, and he nodded, offering it to her with agreeable confusion. She took it, and threw it hard against the sidewalk three feet in front of them. He jumped when it shattered. She kept walking, bending to pick up the biggest shard remaining without ever stopping. “You’re also not really my type?”
“Oh. Really?”
“Yeah.” There was a rat looking at her through the glass in her hand. He blinked at her. She rubbed her thumb over his little rat reflection, but it wasn’t an effective method of rat petting. The glass was in the way. “You’re, like? The kind of guy I might bang, if I was super desperate? Not that you’re uggo, it’s just, I can already tell the sex would be kind of bad?”
“That’s–”
“Not, like, universally bad or objectively bad or anything,” she assured him, cutting across the street without waiting for the light. “Just, you know, you’re not going to be into the stuff that I’m into, so I’ll end up asking you to do stuff, but you’re not going to understand what’s hot about it so you’ll do it wrong. But from your end everything will seem fine and you’ll probably get all clingy afterward like you think we have something special because we did a weird sex thing.”
“That seems really specific and unfair,” he protested, “especially when I thought that you were flirting with me, and after Jennifer and I–”
“Yeah,” she agreed, only half paying attention as she stopped to dig through her bag. It was a large tote from some kind of convention for pharmaceutical sales reps. The buildings on this street formed a sort of wind tunnel, and it would have ruined her hair if she’d had enough of it to ruin. Instead she was in a perpetual tousle. “I was actually just flirting with Jennifer?”
“What?”
“Yeah. Like, I guess you were confused because you thought you’d be involved? When I said I wanted to bang your girlfriend? But you’re literally wearing khaki cargo shorts right now, so.” She found what she was looking for, a plastic bag full of plastic bags. She’d folded them into neat little triangles – it was easier this way, she’d found.
“What’s wrong with my shorts?”
“I feel like that question is just, really representative of your whole deal and there’s not a whole lot I can add to that, so I’m just gonna go.” She shoved a folded triangle of white and red plastic into her mouth, using two fingers to push it back against her throat so she could swallow it whole.
It really was the best way. She’d tried doing a whole strips-of-plastic-like-spaghetti thing, and that actually made her gag worse. Then she ended up having to pull the whole mess out of herself before she got sick, like a dog with dental floss.
It wasn’t even the worst thing she’d put in her mouth since lunch.
She swallowed plastic, and it stuck in her throat, but she was weightless and empty and her shoes left the concrete as the wind filled her up with air the color of an ashtray. “Bye, don’t call,” she said, giving a half-assed wave without any confidence that it would be in his direction. She could never manage to stay upright when she did this. She could get pretty high and she could sort of do directions, but mostly she just had to shut her eyes and wait to end up in a tree.
As long as it was within robbing distance of a payday lender, she didn’t really care too much about specifics.
Published
Dama Cherepaha 