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kaladinkholins · 4 months

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i love being southeast asian.

despite whatever unhappy history, despite the rise of ethnonationalism and racism in our countries; despite the fact that most of us remain in the global south under the invisible thumb of western empires and conglomerates, exploited by rich expats and beg-packers; despite the conservatism, the bigotry, the pain and prejudice and the corruption.

despite all that, i love where i am from. this is my home.

my hands tenderly trace the lines of our history and find within it a colourful collection of influences that continue to shape us until today:

the native malays, javanese, sundanese, minangkabau, bugis, visayan, tagalog, and other dominant peoples.

alongside indigenous tribes like the iban, kadazan, sama-bajau, temuan, penan, jakun, and hundreds upon hundreds more ethnic groups.

all of us holding onto our ancestors' mysticism and spirituality and animism, the watchful gaze of legacy fixed on us as we move through an ever-changing and modernising world (and what is modernity anyway? isn't civilisation overrated?).

and then the chinese peoples. the hainanese, hokkien and cantonese and more, many of whom came here due to trade in the pre-colonial era, but then most arrived as the imported labour for the colonial powers.

but this is their home too. we live here together, and through them we all celebrate lunar new year and the mid-autumn festival. all of us give red envelopes during our many festivals. we give oranges that symbolise prosperity and ring in the year of the rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat. we hold lion dance performances in our malls and marks. we eat and exchange mooncakes.

and then the indian peoples, though mostly tamil indians from south india, but also sikhs, malayalis, and punjabis, who arrived and assimilated and spread their culture and beliefs much earlier before the pre-colonial era, causing the indianisation of southeast asia. then more indian peoples came during the colonial era, again, as imported labour, working our fields or donning the uniform of our common oppressors, kept walled away from us despite how alike we look and sound.

because truly we do sound the same. sanskrit remains an abundant source for a large chunk of our languages. i hear the vedic mantras and can pick apart words that sound familiar. hinduism and buddhism still leaves its traces in our cultures even for those of us who've shifted to islam.

and yes, islam. we're not what the west thinks of when they talk about the muslim world, but southeast asia has some of the largest muslim populations in the world. because through trade, since the medieval times, islam came here and with it brought so many arabic influences that has come to shape our languages and customs, with plenty of our cultures having since been morphed around islamic beliefs and ideas. in malaysia and indonesia and brunei (and perhaps even certain parts of the philippines) you'll find a mosque or a prayer room everywhere you go. and every ramadan millions of us fast, every eid all of us dress up and visit each other's houses for feasts and festivities.

then of course came european colonisation at the hands of the portugese, dutch, british (in malaysia and indonesia's case we got all three), spanish, and french their reigns lasting over 400 years. and from them we came european culture and more new languages, english quickly becoming a second language (or even a first language) for so many of us, missionaries building churches and spreading the word of jesus christ as the son of god; with their fair features they draw a line between us and them, between the civilised and the barbarians, between the light-haired light-eyed and the unruly dark-haired dark-eyed.

and then comes world war 2 and the japanese invasion, and for most it was so brutal and violent, and for the rest it was miserable, with famine and inflation but we were forced to sing songs in japanese anyway, to watch their planes fly in the sky towards their enemies, to swallow their ideas in our parched throats.

and then the war ended and wounds began to heal, and then came the 1980s until now with all its shiny technology: nintendo, panasonic, television and anime, and now we have leagues of people learning japanese language and culture anyway, except now it is done wholeheartedly, and as it turns out japanese isn't even that different from our own cultures anyway. houses on stilts made of wood with thatch roofs, making our living from the sea and coast, eating rice for every meal, our phonetics and theirs so alike.

and today we have waves of their expats migrating here because of course they do, we're the Global South™ and for them it's cheap and affordable, so we have little japans sprouting here and there and sometimes i go to a random street and find signs written in japanese and read bits of broken hiragana.

and it's beautiful, being able to move through this world and find the handprints we've all left upon it. it's a wonderful amalgam of so many traditions and colours and beliefs and language all mixing around in this huge bubbling melting pot.

and i'm not chinese or indian or arab or british but when i see them on tv, i'm also seeing a part of me, i hear the words in their tongue and i recognise them as mine, i eat their food and know them as intimately as my own.

but of course our politicians, our kings and our prime ministers (and the divide-and-conquer rule of colonisers now gone) continue to divide us and make us hate each other, fanning flames of distrust and fear of that-which-is-different.

it's such a shame too, because it's so special. it's what makes us us, our dozens of creoles, the way we can speak a sentence comprising vernacular from at least four languages and we all understand each other anyway.

we have a word in malay, "rojak", which is also the name of a dish that mixes a bunch of different ingredients, and is found in malaysian, indonesian and singaporean cuisine. but where i'm from, we also say "rojak" to mean anything that's an eclectic mixture of things, things that seemingly don't go together and aren't necessarily pleasing to the eye but still, somehow, it works, in fact it tastes good, spicy and flavourful and hearty.

and that's us: southeast asia, all of it, a beautiful rojak culture. and it's ours.

#writeblr #people of color #writers on tumblr #writers of color #writing #southeast asia #asian culture #i woke up today and started feeling so many things. i looked around and felt full of love.#but i go on social media and it makes me angry and sad to see how much everyone hates each other #my love is not for what it is but what it could be #lots of my friends wish they could leave. emigrate to australia or UK or US. but even if i could i wouldn't.#this is my home. there is nowhere else.#when i was teaching and i saw those kids' faces it cemented it for me even more.#like if not for anything else i'll stay. i'll do it for them. carve out a community for them. for us.#shut up haydar #scribblings.txt

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autumnalwalker · 6 months

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The Melts

Author's Note: A while back I had a bit of a ramble on how I wished that it was more common to find examples of human bodies artistically warped into new and interesting configurations presented in a manner other than horror and gave an off-the-top of my head example of a hypothetical episode of a slice-of-life series going on that theme. A couple months passed, and then with Halloween approaching, I decided on a whim to slam out a rough draft of that story over the weekend. So here we are. Summary: What if your entire body slowly melting over the course of the day got treated as being no worse than the common cold and you still have to go to work because you work retail and already used up all your sick days? Wordcount: 5,295 Content Warnings: Descriptions of the sensation of one's body slowly melting into a fleshy pile of goo, various weird anatomical modifications, spider-like creatures crawling all over people, having to go into work while sick.

Mil had the melts.

They became aware of this approximately four and a half minutes after waking up when their hand made an unfortunate squelch sound upon palming their alarm clock’s snooze button. They held their hand in place in denial for another half minute while their arm slowly stretched and drooped down into the space between bed and bedside table. They reluctantly opened their eyes and groaned at the sight of the clock’s contour pressing up through a hand whose bones had gone limp and elastic.

It was going to be one of those days.

The thought of calling in sick today briefly crossed their mind, but no, it was close to the end of the year and they’d already used up all of their sick days. Any more would have to come out of their precious holiday leave time.

It was fine, they told themself while throwing back the covers of their bed and pointedly ignoring how that arm curled back around on itself from the momentum. It was only a mild case and it would probably clear up by the time their shift was over. Enough to be annoying but nothing worth making a fuss over. Unless it was a severe case, but that almost never happens.

As a small mercy, Mil’s legs weren’t as melted as their arm so they only almost fell over immediately upon standing up on appendages that bent and swayed in spots that don’t have joints. Thank goodness for counterbalancing tails. People often called their look basic, but Mil preferred to think of it as classic. Feline ears and tails had been among the first reshapings to see mainstream adoption and Mil had personally always found more complicated additions of prehensile limbs and sensory organs to be a nightmare of overstimulation. Plus, the ears and tail were a nice aid in emoting to make up for the difficulty Mil usually had with expressing themself by voice and face alone.

By the time Mil reached the kitchen they’d found a workable rhythm to their unsteady gait that managed to keep them mostly upright. No time for anything complicated for breakfast, and probably best to keep away from the toaster in this state, so cereal it was. That had its own complications of course - grip the spoon too loosely and its weight would stretch their fingers down and apart, but too tightly and their whole hand would roll itself up and try to retract back into their arm - but several minutes of grumbling around mouthfuls of wheat byproduct and dairy tree milk where enough to convince Mil that it wasn’t really all that bad and that they’d be able to manage at work today.

They pointedly ignored the ensuing contrary evidence that came in the form of their legs getting stuck on the inside of their pants and rolling up into lumpy balls until they gave up and went with a skirt. They’d already spent all the time they normally would have devoted to their morning workout on trying to pour themself into a tight turtleneck while getting the right body parts through the right holes. Supposedly wearing snug-fitting clothing like this was an effective way to hold your shape relatively solid in a bad case of the melts - which Mil definitely (probably) didn’t have - but in practice it was not as useful a tip as its popularity would suggest.

But hey, they were fed, dressed and out of the house almost on time, so that was a victory. And it meant they were almost on time to catch the tram before it left. Oh. Wait.

It’s fine, they told themself while fiddling with the straps on the mask they’d donned on their way out the door. It would only be a few minutes until the next tram scuttled up. They’d only be a little bit late to work. Everyone would understand. Afterall, who hadn’t had the melts before? In the meantime it gave them a few extra moments to try to get their mask to squeeze their head into a less embarrassing shape. If Mil had to go in sick, it was the least they could do to try not to spread it. But if they could be considerate while not having their skull get squished in the middle into the shape of a peanut, that’d be great.

A few pats on the side of the face, a push on the the top of their head, some hard nodding, get their fingers untangled from the mask straps aaannnddd…. A plop and a dizzying snap as Mil felt their jaw distend and the lower half of their face slide fully into the mask just as the next tram arrived. Checking their reflection out in the tram’s shiny carapace confirmed that their head was an acceptable shape. Maybe a little bit snout-y, but they could write that off as being part of the feline look. So long as no one saw the mess under their mask.

The good part of being out at the end of the line like this is that Mil almost always got a decent seat on the tram and plenty of time to listen to their audio books. It almost made up for the long commute. Of course, today one earbud kept falling off the top of their head every few minutes from that ear not holding its shape well enough and the other one was worming its way uncomfortably far into an ear that seemed to be trying to swallow it through a series of expansions and contractions that mirrored Mil’s breathing. By the second stop Mil gave up and shoved both earbuds back into a skirt pocket, resigning themself to ride stewing in silence.

That silence only lasted one more stop when the bulk of the other commuters started to pour in. By the fifth stop Mil was firmly wedged between a shell-backed construction worker and a twelve-armed switchboard operator who had enough respect for personal space to keep those arms wrapped around zemself but not enough to not press three different elbows into Mil's ribs. Mil tried not to hold it against zem. It was the morning rush hour. Getting pressed together was to be expected. Even if that meant winding up half a foot taller and considerably flatter. Mil tried not to think about how many people they were spreading their melts to.

At the ninth stop Mil extruded themself from the over-packed tram and toddered over to a bench to catch their breath. If they were going to be late anyway, what was an extra minute or two to let their shoulderblades stop overlapping and left and right halves of their ribcage stop interlacing? Just a few deep breaths to puff their torso back out and they were good to go. They could fix their hair later after they got into a restroom to wash the public transit funk off their hands.

Walking into the store’s employee entrance a couple blocks down the street, Mil was greeted with the terrifying visage of their manager, Baroft. The smile wasn’t terrifying because of the fangs (Mil had been considering getting some themself for some time now but couldn’t quite justify it with how little meat they ate), nor because of the extra pair of slit-pupiled crimson eyes (pretty standard for those who could adapt to the extra sensory input), nor even for the contrast with the face’s second mouth that wasn’t smiling (that one never smiled, it wasn’t the customer service voice mouth). No, that smile was terrifying because if Baroft was happy - even worse, relieved - to see them walk in the door late for work, then that could only mean one thing.

The store was short-staffed today.

Mil would have to deal with customers.

Mil was - generally speaking - not good with people even on the best of days, and today was - as the flesh of their hand pooling at their fingertips under the force of gravity like ripening fruit would attest - not the best of days. Most of the time they got by on trading duties with coworkers to spend as much of their workday as possible on the backend duties; stocking inventory, cleaning, feeding the weavers, updating displays, etc. If one good thing could be said about Baroft it was that after seeing Mil awkwardly stumble through enough customer conversations and fitting attempts, yt had realized that putting them in a customer-facing role was more likely to lose the store money than earn it.

But now Baroft was complaining about Rangel being out on jury duty at the same time as Kalei being unable to come in due to thons kid pupating, and Paras from the evening shift had called in sick, so Mil could just imagine the sort of morning Baroft has been having, and Mil was going to have to be a team player and pull through just for today all the way through until closing time, and yes there would be overtime compensation once they made up for arriving late, and what’s Mil complaining about it’s just the melts, if they were able to get here then obviously isn’t that serious, now no attitude and best behavior in front of the customers, it was already bad enough that yt had had to call Leolani and ask eir to come in early today.

That last part cut through Baroft‘s blizzard of words and caused Mil’s heart to skip a beat. Leolani usually arrived just as Mil was getting ready to leave for the day so they didn’t know eir all that well, but the handful of brief conversations the two of them had shared always left Mil wanting to change that. It wasn’t a crush per say, only that everything about Leolani struck Mil as indescribably cool and made them wish they could be friends and hang out. Eir jacket covered in punk patches that ei left draped over the chair in the employee breakroom that no one else dared claim. Eir perfect eyeliner. The way ei could multitask taking one customer’s measurements while uncoiling eir twelve-foot neck over to help another customer pick out a suit off the rack. Eir taste in music that had made the basis for the longest interaction Mil had managed with eir.

Under other circumstances, the opportunity to spend the day commiserating with Leolani over being the two youngest employees by a wide margin and how awful the holiday rush that started earlier every year was might have almost made up for having to work late. Now though, they were suddenly feeling self-conscious about the way their spine had started to go limp in places and force them into a slouch.

Mil’s trip to the restroom to straighten up in front of the mirror was a perfunctory one. They might have arrived late to work, but no way were they going to be late to feed the weavers on schedule. Elam - in early and still in nir fall look of leaf-like orange hair and skin covered in gray keratin growths mimicking tree bark - gave a marginally less brusque than usual greeting when Mil pushed aside the heavy curtain separating the dim tailoring room from the shop, even going so far as to offer nir sympathies for Mil’s melts. Mil’s more solid hand glorped over one of the nutrient slurry canisters on the shelf as they insisted that they were fine. Just a minor case of the melts that would clear up by the afternoon.

Elam raised a skeptical woody eyebrow and offered to handle the feeding duties today, but Mil declined and stepped into the weavers’ enclosure. The way Mil saw it, they were something like an apprentice to Elam who had finally promised to teach them how to direct the weavers once the new year rolled around, so any chance to prove themself… well, it wasn’t so much welcome as not something they could afford to pass up. Experienced weaver handlers were always in demand (as evidenced by Elam being able to afford four full-body reshapes a year just to keep up the image of a tree changing with the seasons), and honestly it was the closest thing Mil had to a career advancement opportunity.

Besides, Mil genuinely liked working with weavers, they thought as the small swarm of arachnoid bio-tools began crawling all over them to get to the nutrient slurry. It was important that the weavers were well-fed in the morning before any clients came in for a fitting lest they get either too tired or too carried away with their purpose. As it was, a few of the weavers must have failed to recognize Mil’s scent and shape due to their illness and mistaken them for a client, forcing Mil to gently shoo the engineered creatures off before the threads of their turtleneck could be unpicked and reassembled into whatever pattern the weavers had last been installed with. Most of the chittering swarm sloughed off to feed once the nutrient slurry had been dispensed and Mil was able to encourage the stragglers to depart from their body heat without too much trouble.

To Mil’s chagrin, once they stepped back outside of the enclosure Elam leaned over and plucked a weaver off the back of their neck that had pushed their unusually pliant skin into a little bowl to nest in. Mil’s stammering apology was met with a laugh and an encouraging slap on the back that made their whole body ripple unpleasantly. Better than a reprimand.

Back out in the main store, Leolani had already arrived and engaged with the first customers of the morning, signing at one with eir hands while stretching eir neck over an aisle of racks to explain the fitting process to another. When ei caught Mil staring, ei sent the second customer their way. The next few minutes constituted the first grueling attempt of many that day to talk someone who wasn’t really all that interested (whether due to boredom, intimidation, lack of intent to buy, or just wanting to get their stuff and get out) through pricing options on bespoke versus alterations by limb configuration and fabric type. Or failing that to sell something off the rack, even if it was just an expensive pair of socks with the store’s monogram on it. Or failing that at least collect an email address for a mailing list. This is what made the holiday rush so awful. The rest of the year most of the store's customers were regulars who mostly had a specific goal upon walking in, but for the next couple of months traffic would surge with only a minimal uptick in actual sales to show for it. All the same, everyone that walked in had to be treated as a potential new regular just in case. As if it wasn’t already anxiety-inducing enough to deal with people whom Mil possessed at least a passing familiarity with.

By noon Mil’s ears were pressed flat back against their skull. In part, this was an expression of their mood, but mostly it was a matter of the ears’ swivel muscles losing cohesion and getting stuck in the last used position. It was making it a little bit difficult to hear clearly, but they had long since learned the hard way that making a rough guess and sticking to a script tended to be received better than asking people to repeat themselves. At last the lunch-time lull arrived and Mil was able to steal off to the break room for a reprieve. It was blessedly quiet in there save for the hum of the refrigerator holding the protein shakes Mil had stashed for days too busy for a proper lunch. Mil dipped into that stash today. Their melts were getting worse before they were getting better and the prospect of trying to wobble down the street in their current state to their usual lunch spot where they would surely be recognized struck Mil as lethally embarrassing. And exhausting.

They took the opportunity to examine the patches on Leolani‘s jacket (draped over eir chair in undisputed claim as ever) while they struggled first with the shake’s cap and then with their mask. Their fingers weren’t cooperating much at all now, between having gone mostly limp and being plumped up with all the flesh their normally-flatteringly-body-hugging turtleneck was now squeezing out of their torso and arms and into their extremities. At least one or two of the patches on the jacket had to do with bands, Mil was fairly certain. Would it make for a better conversation starter to ask Leolani about those bands, or to look up and listen to the music up themself first in order to have something in common? Mil mulled the question over while nursing their shake. Better than thinking about the similarities between their lunch and the weavers’ breakfast.

As Mil threw their head back to drain the last few drops from the protein shake’s bottle, they felt their spine come loose and their head just kept going back. And down. And around. Until it bumped into the back of the low-backed chair, upside down and just above their own waist.

They had folded themself.

Mil took a breath, held it, let it out, and came away even less calm than before. Lungs not making up their mind where they should be will do that to a body.

It was fine. This sort of thing happened. Annoying, but nothing serious.

Mil tried to swing themself upright, but it was the sudden lack of back muscles that got them into this position. They tried grabbing the chair and pulling themself up into an unbent vertical, but the strain just stretched out their hands. They tried to do the obvious thing and just stand up, but folded like a wet, heavy towel as they were over the chair’s back, they couldn’t get the proper leverage and just scrambled their feet, scooting the chair along the floor with a teeth-itching squeak.

Mil heard Leolani walk in before they saw eir. Not that they could see much besides the floor behind their chair. Leolani asked if they were alright and Mil’s mind raced with enough potential responses that it might as well have gone blank. But then fear of getting stuck won out over pride. There was no salvaging this one to come out looking cool.

Mil asked for help. Just a little bit mind you. They’d be fine if they could just get themself unfolded.

Boots made for digitigrade feet stepped into Mil’s inverted view, followed by a round face with perfect eyeliner that then rotated to match their perspective in a motion that suddenly shifted the impression from serpentine to owlish. A light joke about the view from down there was quickly followed by a warning that came at the same time as a pair of hands gripping (very literally) into Mil’s shoulders and lifting. Once ei had them upright ei asked if they were good. Mil said they were and then immediately slumped forward, overcorrecting and refolding in the opposite direction.

Leolani, neck now coiled up over and around eir own shoulders like a scarf, told them to hang for a minute and then came back with a mop handle and a roll of duct tape. A comment about a friend of eirs once having done this for eir and an apology about this feeling weird was all the warning Mil got before the Leolani began working the mop handle up the back of their shirt. Ei called it the scarecrow method of stabilization. After producing a pair of compression gloves from eir messenger bag and helping Mil get them on, Leolani let them apply the duct tape in private with a reassurance that it was the cheap stuff and would come off after a decent soak in a hot bath, if not sooner.

Trying to walk with the improvised back brace was awkward, but better than the alternative. Mil shambled out of the employee break room, wondering how much longer their legs would stay semi-solid, just in time to see a regular they recognized but couldn’t put a name to walk in. Somehow additional legs were far less popular than additional arms, so this regular’s centaur pattern group body configuration stuck out. Not that Mil knew for sure whether it was hooves, feet, or claws beneath those patent leather shoes and it would be rude to ask. What Mil did know at a glance was what xe was here for. The regular’s bat-like wings (aesthetically impressive and flexible enough to clasp in the front and fold into a cloak, but almost certainly not flight-, or even glide-rated) hadn’t been present on xyr last visit to the store. Now here was something that was as close to Mil’s comfort zone as anything got.

They greeted the regular and went through their mental script for this sort of interaction, making the appropriate vague inquiries about xyr wellbeing, complimenting xyr new wings, trying not to drip on anything as their melts slowly got worse, guiding xem through the booklets of fabric swatches and catalog of styles, and dancing around the fact that they couldn’t remember xyr name for the life of them. Once the regular made their selections, Mil led xem back to the tailoring room where they handed the selections off to Elam. Strictly speaking, Mil should have left it be from there and returned to the main display floor of the store, but they liked watching this next part and were even more willing than usual today to take any excuse for a break. If anyone asks (no one will) they’ll say that they were taking notes. Or would saying that they were assisting sound better? Whatever the truth would be on most days, this time Mil simply leaned on a wall for support and watched Elam type in a console to install the selected pattern on the weavers, guide the regular into the weavers’ enclosure, and start speaking in the language of clicks, snaps, and command phrases the bio-tools had been trained on. What before had been a disorganized collection of individual lab-created arachnoid creatures became a precision swarm washing over the regular (who had been through this enough times not to flinch too much), taking xyr measurements by touch with sensitive legs able to estimate and account for offsets due to the regular’s clothes by pressure and texture alone. Once each of the individual weavers was in position on the regular’s body Elam snapped nir fingers to send the swarm skittering into a different position, held for a few seconds of processing, then snapped again for a third configuration. A larger swarm could have generated a full three dimensional scan of a target’s body in one go, but the upkeep costs on swarm size wasn’t generally seen as being worth it just to shave off a few seconds. A final command word cleared the swarm back into the corners of the enclosure.

Like most customers, the regular elected to come back later in the day to pick up xyr new suit and have any last-minute alterations made then. As opposed to partially undressing and allowing the weavers to weave the new suit directly on. Supposedly the latter option would get a truly amazing bespoke fit, but for most it wasn’t worth standing still for an extended period of time with bug legs crawling all over you and working miniaturized biological sewing machines millimeters away from your exposed skin. Maybe one day when Mil had Elam‘s job and income they could find out for themself. For now though, Mil simply offered to lend nem a hand with loading in the fabric feedstock to get the assembly process started. It seemed that pinstripes were making a comeback this season.

The next few hours were, all things considered, not too bad. A decent portion of customers were regulars rather than randoms, Mil got to watch a couple more sessions of the weavers at work, the one song that they weren’t tired of on the station the store had been running on loop for the past three weeks came on, and - most importantly - they’d managed to keep up something like an ongoing conversation with Leolani in between customers. Now if only their melts hadn’t been getting steadily worse instead of better. By the time Mil’s normal shift would be ending they were having trouble standing up for more than a minute or so at a time. Elam even offered to talk to Baroft on nir way out - ne still got to live at nir usual time today - about letting them go on home. Against Mil’s better judgment, they turned nem down, citing the appeal of overtime pay and silently fearing that leaving might reflect poorly on their performance or attitude.

So, of course, two hours later Mil’s skeletal structure gave out altogether, reducing them to a fleshy puddle on the floor. They’d felt it coming on and had just barely been able to make it back to the breakroom and out of sight of customers. Leolani came rushing in moments later, having seen their attempt at a distressed and hasty exit. If there was a silver lining to the gross (they were on the floor in a public building) and embarrassing situation, it was that their skirt had flared out enough to preserve some semblance of modesty and mostly cover up the skin-covered blob slowly spreading across the linoleum.

When Leolani asked if they were alright, Mil’s response came out garbled and bubbling. So, no, not so much.

After several rounds of “One blink for No, two blinks for Yes,” Mil managed to first turn down an offer to call an ambulance (it might be a severe case, but it was still just the melts; they would sleep it off and be fine by morning) and then to direct Leolani to retrieve their phone and its neurolink adapter from their skirt pocket and attach the adapter to Mil’s forehead (or at least a spot on Mil’s increasingly amorphous form slightly above their eyes). Neurolinks like this one were a clumsy technology, still in its infancy, so Mil had to concentrate on a single letter at a time for a second or three apiece to make words appear on the screen, but it beat the alternative. From there the two of them were able to talk - after a fashion - and settle on the plan of laying Mil out in the tailoring room, out of sight of both customers and Baroft. If Baroft asked where they were, Leolani would cover for them and say that they were handling some task or another that Elam left for them. Afterall, with Mil only being able to sort of writhe and flop around, it’s not like they were going to be able to get themself home, so may as well just sleep it off here.

Unprompted, Leolani input eir contact info into Mil’s phone before leaving them in there. Being able to exchange text messages made lying there barely able to move in the dimly lit room for the remaining hours until closing time considerably more tolerable. Almost pleasant even, despite how exhausting trying to type with the neurolink for extended periods of got to be. The white noise of the nearby weavers’ chitters and skitters helped.

And then, as the store’s closing time was approaching and the last customer left for the night, Leolani offered to take Mil home instead of leaving them in the store overnight. Mil could keenly feel the spike in their heart rate at the question rippling through their not-quite liquefied form. The added clarification that Leolani had realized about an hour ago that the two of them both lived roughly the same part of town with the same tram stop so it wouldn’t be much of a detour for eir to drop them off at their place quickly dispelled the wilder fantasies (terrifying and idealistic alike) that Mil’s mind had started jumping to.

Mil was aware, objectively speaking, that they didn’t really know Leolani all that well outside of the off-and-on conversations about hobbies and interests they’d been having most of the day and that letting someone like that know your address and handing them your keys wasn’t really the smartest idea. Subjectively speaking however, Mil was tired, young, and platonically infatuated with their cool coworker whom they seemed to be hitting it off well with.

A few minutes later Mil heard Leolani‘s and Baroft‘s voices outside the backroom’s curtain and caught snippets of Leolani offering to close up the store for the night and lying that Baroft had just missed Mil leave a minute ago. Another minute or two of silence followed before Leolani pushed aside the curtain and strutted over to Mil carrying a large bucket. It took some doing, but ei got them to fit. The melts made flesh as compressible as it made it elastic.

Somehow being scooped up, poured into a bucket, and pressed on until they fit was not the most embarrassing experience Mil had been through that day.

Leolani was able to lift Mil’s bucket with relative ease. Surprising at first, but on second thought, Leolani must have had some manner of musculoskeletal reinforcements for strength and balance if ei was walking around with all that extra weight from eir neck sitting on eir shoulders all the time.

The conversation on the way back home was fairly one-sided. It was simply too hard to concentrate on typing through the neurolink with all the novel sensations going on. Sloshing slightly in the bucket as it swung with Leolani‘s gait. Staring straight up into the night sky (or eir face) while moving. The uncomfortable warmth generated from being their own folded blanket stuffed in a tight space. The rumbling of the tram transferred through the floor and sides of the bucket making their whole body quiver and vision blur. It was fine though. Mil had never been a big talker and Leolani seemed more than willing to fill the space. Or was ei intentionally trying to keep Mil distracted from all those other less pleasant aspects of their current situation? If ei was, it was working. And it turned out Mil hadn’t even needed to ask about the band patches; Leolani had started talking at length about them all on eir own. Best of all, stuck looking out of the bucket up at the ceiling like this, Mil couldn’t see anyone else staring at them and could almost pretend it was just the eir and them without the eyes of strangers that had always made them uncomfortable.

And then Leolani was standing at the door to Mil’s apartment, holding their keys. Ei let eirself inside, carrying Mil’s bucket with eir, found their bed, lifted them from the bucket, and laid them out flat on top of the sheets. Being exposed to cool air again was a blessed relief. They would absolutely need a shower in the morning, but for right now they were too exhausted to care. They tried not to think too hard about how being rather literal putty in Leolani‘s hands felt.

Duty done and aid rendered, Leolani left the neurolink on Mil’s face in case anything came up in the night before they solidified, left the keys on the bedside table, left the lights off, and left the apartment.

On eir way out, ei suggested hanging out together sometime when they weren’t sick.

*******

Mil’s hand made a perfectly normal pap sound upon palming their alarm clock’s snooze button. Their hand was hand-shaped and none of their bones wobbled. And why wouldn’t that be the case after a good night’s sleep?

It had only been the melts.

#writeblr #my writing #writers on tumblr #original fiction #body horror #sliceoflife #slice of life #short story #Halloween #If I were ever to go back and do a second draft of this the two main things I'd want to do are add dialogue and make it weirder.#More mouths and eyeballs in places they're not supposed to go. Everyone loves those right? Maybe some tentacles.#Maybe add another coworker who used to be two or more separate people before fusing their bodies together into a lovely chimerical mess.#Going all in on the neopronouns and giving every character their own individual pronouns was a fun exercise.#Mil using they/them is part of them being “basic” and boring.#I'm a little sad that I wasn't able to work a “nyanbinary” pun in there somewhere #but with binary identity already being out the window to begin with I realized that it would have been out of place/redundant.#Mil's name derives from me watching “Milo and Otis” as a kid then naming our first orange cat that #then having an old recurring catboy OC named Milo that I used a lot of games and stories I never wrote down #and then shaving off the “o” for this newest iteration to make the name a little more gender-neutral to my ears.#Everyone else had placeholder names until after I finished the story and then filled them back in via random generator.#The real monster here is capitalism and the real horror is having to go to work while sick.#I've never actually worked in retail myself so most everything I know of it comes from movies and TV. And seeing it from the customer POV.#There's a semi-upscale clothing store near where I live that I briefly visited years ago and I got halfway through this going by that memor #Then to refresh myself I went there again and straight up told an employee I was writing a story and asked what it was like to work there.#It was a strangely liberating experience. Especially with my usual social anxiety issues. (Sorry Mil those are yours too now. Lacuna too #That's where I got the thing about regulars being the normal main customers the detail about the one liked song song on the looping radio #most of the staff being older and the tailor/bespoke clothing guy being sort of a separate business within the store.

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