About eight years ago, I worked as a meat-cutter at a grocery store. That’s how I got this scar on my pinky.

When I first started working there, I trained with this guy, call him Fred, he was pretty relaxed, no-nonsense kinda guy.

One day, he brought up the concept of a cutting glove. It’s basically chain-mail, and if you’re wearing it, you can’t cut yourself while you’re cutting the meat. The way he put it, “some guys” liked safety, but he preferred control, he preferred to be able to “feel the meat” (*snort*). To have some connection to it.

I asked him could I please use a glove, and he said sure.

Well, then there was this other guy came in. I suppose maybe he was relief or something. Maybe Fred went on vacation—I forget. Let’s call him Billy. I’m changing the names here, to protect the innocent. And other folks, as well.

Billy had a different style. When he saw me wearing the glove, he chuckled. “Nobody actually wears those,” he told me, and then expounded on the virtues of going bare.

I took the glove off. This here? Scar on my pinkie? This is the result.

But that wasn’t the only problem with Billy. Billy didn’t exactly have the greatest work-ethic. Once, after Fred had been off a couple days, he came back, and it turned out Billy hadn’t switched out any of the old meat. See, you’re supposed to put the older meat up front, so that people will buy that before it expires. He hadn’t done that. He hadn’t rotated any of the meat, and now all kinds of flesh would not be eaten.

It’s a shame, really, I thought when I heard. It’s like all those farm animals died for nothing.

“If he pulls any of that shit again,” said Fred, “I’ll kill him!”

I thought that was a rather strong reaction, but didn’t actually take him seriously.

The next day, though, Billy didn’t show up for work. Or the day after that.

He was fired, of course, for truantcy, or whatever they call it when it’s work and not school.

But then he was reported missing by his girlfriend.

She was recently pregnant, so he could’ve just run off, that was definitely a Billy thing to do, but no one else had seen him, either. I don’t know how, but the police ended up figuring he disappeared under “mysterious circumstances”.

Maybe they’d heard about Fred’s threat from someone else before they called on me to testify.

Did I think he did it? No. He was Fred. Nobody named “Fred” of all things, could kill another body. And there wasn’t even any other body to find.

They brought in another relief cutter, since one guy was missing and the other guy, quote, “probably did it”, end-quote. He was all right, I guess. I forget his name. Call him Carl. He was the one who found a patch of what turned out to be human flesh in the freezer confirmed through DNA tests to belong to Billy.

That was when I started to think, well, maybe Fred did do it.

But then I met the Cow-God myself.

Crap. Now you’re gonna stop believing me, ‘cause I didn’t set this up.

Well, yeah. OK. That’s fair.

So this is what happened:

One day, completely by accident, I did the same thing that Billy had done. I was in a hurry, I didn’t properly rotate, then I forgot about it and a bunch of the meat went bad. But when I say it went “bad”. Well.

Let me tell you about meat gone bad.

When meat goes bad, you’re supposed to throw it out, and we got a dumpster out back. So I’m taking all this expired meat out back and thinking, LITERALLY, Carl’s gonna kill me. I mean, look what happened to the last guy.

But as I’m carrying the meat, something weird happens. The meat starts to move. I mean, it’s always gross if meat starts to move like that, I’m thinking, holy fuck, what is going on with this? It hasn’t been out THAT long—are there maggots festering? Is it infested with bees? Is it infected with boils that are gonna burst open and cover me in goo?

But these aren’t bubbles like you’d expect from that, these aren’t boils. The actual meat was moving.

I dropped it, obviously, on the floor. And on the floor, it kept moving. At first, it was just twitching and messing around, but then it started gliding, like it was magnetic with itself,

attracting other pieces of bad meat. The stuff I’d already brought to the dumpster CAME BACK ON ITS OWN. It was the scariest—Oh My God, you don’t even believe me, I don’t know why I’m being so—

Anyway, these pieces of rotting meat all came together and then rose up, bonding themselves into this enormous figure that, I shit you not, looked like a minotaur. Horns and all. And I’m going, where the fuck did those horns come from? ‘Cause, really, that was the most disturbing part of it, right?

And then it starts to speak. This was a bull’s face and it was speaking to me. I felt like I was in a cartoon. Written by Stephen damn King.

It told me “You have been found guilty by the Cow God.”

I froze. I mean, seriously, what are you supposed to say to that?

“I’m uh,” I swallowed. “I’m sorry?”

“How do you plead?”

Well, it had already found me guilty—maybe it didn’t quite know what “plead” meant.

“Hey, man,” I started, “This is just a job, I’ll quit if you want me to—“ To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t excited about this job, anyway. I mean, four years of college, and I’m doing this? Fuck this generation. But then I started to think—hey, wait a minute. This is a cow. Like an actual cow. And every hamburger I’ve ever eaten flashed before my eyes in a blaze of glory, in a haze of gory mulch, and I mean, I’m not an idiot, I know not all hamburgers are made from cows’ meat exclusively, but some of them are, and cows do die in the process, so I fell on my knees and wept and sobbed and held out my hands to beg the Cow God’s forgiveness.

“What are you, an idiot?” he said. “This is not about you eating cows.”

Wait—what?

“Do you think we don’t know what’s good for us? We want to be eaten. That is our purpose in life. Think about it—human beings have kept cattle for thousands of years, just like horses and pigs. How many cows do you think there are in the world? And as long as you’re eating us, there is no way we’ll go way of the Buffalo. You’re keeping us around. And we like that. That’s why we founded cow-heaven. It’s the place dead cows go when they’ve been eaten by humans. Because that’s our religion, see? That is our core belief—when a human eats you, you have served your purpose for the rest of the species.”

I had never heard anyone but another human being give a speech that long. If I hadn’t been so dumb-struck, I probably could have figured out the answer to my next question, which was some non-verbal expression of “But why are you attacking me?”

“We’re attacking you,” said the Cow God, “because all of this meat that has gone bad has come from the same cow, and now no part of her gets to be eaten. She can’t go to cow heaven now, and it’s your fault! How Do You Plead?”

Holy shit, thought my idiot brain, I was right, it was because all those cows died in vain!

“Hold on,” I said. “What if I made it up to you?”

“Our Religion is as valid and as arbitrarily strict as your human religions!” the Cow God insisted. “There is no possibility for atonement!”

“But wait—what if I…” The prospect sounded gross, but not as painful as being eaten—or whatever—by a giant cow. “You said someone, some person, had to eat her… What if I did?”

“You would do this victim the honor?”

“Yeah, sure, what if I took… Like, say, that piece—“ I pointed to a piece of what looked like top round right over the monster’s heart. It was a little bit discolored, but looked edible enough to save my life in a pinch.

“You must eat the entire piece,” said the God. “Cook it first, obviously, since that’s what you humans do. But under no circumstances are you to vomit it back up. She must be completely digested. She must become a part of you.”

“I promise,” I said. Because really, what else could I do?

“Well, all right, then,” said the Cow-God, and I could see him—or was it her?—start to disassemble.

“Wait!” I said, and it stopped. “Fred is standing trial for murdering Billy.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So, if you killed Billy, shouldn’t you like…”

“I didn’t kill Billy.”

“Wait—what?”

“No, that guy Fred? He’s a psycho. He totally did it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, fuck that guy.” And that’s when he disassembled.

So it occurs to me now—‘cause I’m a fucking moron—that if the Cow-God didn’t kill Billy, I was probably never in any real kind of danger. But that piece of top round I was still holding in my hand didn’t look that bad. I’d thrown away all the packages, but it couldn’t have been that far past its expiration date… And it only made me a little bit sick, not enough to really throw up. I might have had a fever. And there’s a chance I have mad cow, but that’s a whole other story.

The next day, I nicked myself with the knife again.

That other guy—what was I calling him? Chad? Carl! Whatever his name was, he looks at me, he goes “Dude, why’d you do that? Why don’t you wear a glove?”

I looked at him, somewhere between incredulous and sheepish. Like a cow caught eating grass where it shouldn’t, only dumber. “Because Billy made fun of me?” I offered.

“Billy made fun of you for following standard safety procedures?”

“And Fred said I probably didn’t need one.”

“Well, Fred for sure is an idiot, and Billy sounds like a dick. Wait here, I’ll get you a band-aid and some chain-mail for your hand.”

I liked that guy, but I still wasn’t gonna keep working there. Never work in a place where there’s a Cow-God made from rotting meat who could kill you if you fuck up, that’s what I always say.

Once upon a time, there were twin sisters named Grace and Glory Goodkind who did everything together, especially once they realized that they both had special powers.

Grace was the first to realize what was going on. She noticed something was up one day in Math class when the teacher gave her a D on a test, but then changed the grade to an A once Grace started to express her opinion. From that day on, she knew (after a couple of other experiments) that she ws able to convince people to do things against their will simply by exerting her own.

Naturally—because they were twin sisters and allies—she spoke to Glory about this, convinced that, if she could do something extraordinary, they both must be imbued with the same abilities.

Sadly, though, her hopes proved unfounded as it seemed Glory could not even make their mother absentmindedly put that extra teaspoon of vanilla in the cookie recipe. It was only after several months of careful observation that Glory discovered where her power truly lay.

It became apparent over time that everyone felt about Glory exactly the same way that she felt about them. Now, obviously, this effect is very subtle and as such Grace herself was, at first, reluctant to admit it (as was Glory). But the truth of it became undeniable when they remarked that the neighbor from across the street whom both sisters hated was nice to Grace but rude beyond accounting to Glory. This was exceptionally striking in that this particular neighbor had never been able to tell them apart.

By the careful application of these two Talents, Grace and Glory were able to secure themselves quite a bit of comfort generally denied to high school students.

That all changed the day that Ralph came to their school.

Ralph was, despite his name, the most singularly astoundingly shaped and proportioned boy that the two girls had ever known in person. This was a problem, of course, because the girls both felt the same way about this beautiful boy. And it’s amazing how long it took these two girls, who had always shared everything, to realize that this was a very big problem.

The problem stayed hidden, in fact, until the day that Ralph walked up to Glory as she was standing in line with her sister and completely ignored Grace.

Grace noticed and took exception, whereupon she immediately flung Ralph the singular thought: Talk to me. The reaction was, as usual, instantaneous. Ralph broke off in mid-sentence and turned on his heel, stopping shortly thereafter with a frown on his face to wonder what he had just done. And why.

Later that day, the sisters spoke to one another of the incident by way of review. “Well, obviously we can’t both have him,” argued Grace. “You went ahead and proved that.” She was annoyed because “yours” and “mine” had always been “ours” before and she was getting the feeling that that was changing now.

“Then I guess there’s just one thing to do,” said Glory. “We have to ask him which one of us he likes best.”

Any sane outside observer would have expected Ralph to be confused and unable to distinguish between these identical twins, but Ralph didn’t miss a beat. He didn’t need to say “Glory is the one I want” because it was all in his eyes as he said simply, “Grace,” then closed his eyes and shook his head with a look both dazed and confused. “I meant—Glory. Glory. Sorry.”

Glory glared at her sister.

“Well, it’s only fair,” Grace said later. “You’re obviously using your powers on him to get him to like you. It’s like this whole contest is rigged!”

But Glory couldn’t accept that rebuke. “Grace,” she said, “You can have any other guy in the world—all you have to do is think it. Just let me have this one love of my life and I won’t need any more.”

How is that fair? Thought Grace. How is it fair she gets the guy just because of her power? Well, if she’s gonna use her power, by golly, the game is on!

The next day was when Glory was expecting Ralph to ask her out, but when he came up to the two of them at lunch, though he had been looking at Glory, it was to Grace he turned, wearing that same puzzled look on his face as he flirted with her and ultimately asked her out.

Glory was not pleased at having lost. She remembered the look he had had in his eyes as he’d approached her—her, not her sister. She remembered the silky tone in his voice the one time he had spoken to her, the one time she had seen him when Grace hadn’t been there, which Grace didn’t know. It was the only thing Glory knew that Grace did not.

That was how Glory knew something was afoot and just before class, she excused herself and chased down Ralph, but once she’d caught up to him, she found herself utterly tongue-tied. And she didn’t know why. Until she turned around and saw her mirror image, smiling.

That night, Grace met up with Ralph to go out on a date while Glory stayed home, in tears, much to the amazement of her family. But out on the town, Grace started to notice that though he was out on a date and, more importantly, a date with her, Ralph wasn’t smiling. So she told him—or, rather, though at him, to smile. And he did, he smiled; yet the smile wouldn’t reach his eyes. So she taught his eyes how to smile properly, the way she wanted them to smile, and they still did, but there was something wrong behind them.

When he took her home, he dropped her at the front door and turned to leave with a wave of his hand, but she stopped him and made him come kiss her. It was her first kiss and she felt a fluttering of pride at having beaten her sister once again, and yet the kiss was not as she’d imagined. When she let him pull away from it at last, he gave an awkward smile and a bow, turned tail and she allowed him to go.

Still, she gloated her way up to her room.

Over the next couple of days, she saw Ralph constantly and made a point of making out with him every time, just to see if it got any better. But no matter how she instructed his mind, there was simply no way for her to feel the magic she was supposed to have been feeling.

Then finally she realized the problem.

“It’s you!” she told her sister. “You’re doing this to me! You can’t stand it that I’ve won and he’s with me, so you’ve decided to ruin my fun, is that it? Is that what you’ve been doing?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Glory replied innocently.

Grace screamed: “Don’t lie to me!”

Glory fell silent.

“Are you messing with my emotions?”

Grace stayed silent.

“Did you make me fall out of love with him?”

Still, Grace stayed silent.

“Answer me!” Grace commanded.

“You were never the one that he wanted and you never wanted him, you were just trying to get back at me for being the one that he wanted when you thought you had all the power!”

“I do have all the power!” Grace gloated. “He’s with me, isn’t he?”

“Is he?” said Glory. “Is he really?”

And Grace shut her up again. “The only reason that he loves you is because you’re making him love you!”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s what you do!”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen you do it!”

“How do you know that’s not just how people think of me? As opposed to you. Could you love someone who you knew was forcing you to date them?”

Grace left the conversation angry, and yet, deep down inside, she knew that her sister was right. Even if she was forcing him to love her, he still loved Glory, not Grace, and Grace was the one keeping him from what he wanted. She didn’t love him, but she did love her sister and she was hurting both of them by using her powers for selfish ends.

So, yes, maybe it was unethical for Glory to force him to love her and to make Grace fall out of love with him, but no more so than what she was doing. And, most of all, none of what she was doing was making her happy, in the end. So she decided to let him go, to accept defeat with grace and to leave her sister all the glory.

The dark figure rose the slight step onto the bus from the pavement. The long, black trench-coat, the black gloves that quietly flexed and unflexed with every breath he failed to take and the boots that seemed to fall so lightly in his tread, the perfectly black sunglasses he wore in spite of the gloom that day…

But they were unphased. No matter how bad the road, no matter how sharp the turns, how sudden the stops, no one noticed how firmly he kept his feet planted, his poise perfectly balanced as he stood in the empty space at the very back of the bus.

But no one joined him, either, until after a few stops, a woman got on at the back with a baby stroller. A kind-hearted gentleman outside was good enough to lift up the end of it on his way in and nodded his welcome when she smiled and offered her “merci”. The dark figure moved out of her way, twisting in one broad motion and spinning to join back his feet.

The woman with the stroller muttered to the infant child something about staying quiet and what a good boy he was. Though no one on the bus could see the man’s eyes through the dark sunglasses, they had been following the young woman and her stroller in a steady sweep from the moment she had boarded to the moment she sat down. Now those eyes rested on the child.

The child craned its neck—his neck—to look at the dark man. The man’s face seemed imperceptibly to have pointed itself down and in his direction. The little boy, too small to speak, smiled. A goofy, open-mouthed smile. Not just the smile of the innocent, but the smile of the precious. The dark figure raised an eyebrow, but quickly lowered it again in discretion.

The bus started moving again. The little boy waved his arms. His mother tried to tell him to keep himself still, though, after all, the little boy only waved his arms in excitement. It was then the figure smiled.

Few enough people in this part of the world ever desire their child to be looked at, let alone flirted with, and understandably so. It was only natural that the mother start to shift uneasily. And yet this mother thought her fear irrational and so, set it aside as paranoia, trying her best to look the other way, leaving no more eyes to check the black-clad figure smiling now behind those glasses. So no one saw how, in response to the child’s grunts of excitement, the smiling lips curled back and the mouth opened to reveal its fangs and a tongue that forked and hissed.

But the child, still smiling, rocked back and forth and giggled, and a single eyebrow lifted itself up behind the sunglasses.

There’s a video game that I want to write. It’s called Technomancers. The idea is that you are a hacker and you have to make programs that protect or disseminate different kinds of information. Information is the McGuffin, but it’s also the weapons and the tools to use it. The information reflects real-world issues and if you play the game right, you can affect the real world just by hacking the code and manipulating the information.

The problem is, I don’t know how to write a game like that. I wouldn’t even know how to play it. I’m a fiction writer drafting this story out by hand with a fountain-pen: the very definition of a luddite. I don’t even play video-games, they’re too time-consuming.

But it makes me wonder how many games like this are being played without our knowledge. How many hackers are building and besieging firewalls around fortresses of info-treasures or palaces of lies. How many massive online multiplayers fall victim to coups and find themselves infiltrated. How many social platforms are robbed.

And above and beyond, how many forces are at play in our actual world, tweaking the data and twerking to distract from such magic until the world is unrecognisable, the very fabric of reality altered by these tailors of code.

I wake up next to a stranger. It’s despicable how often I end up in this situation, but it’s not like there’s much that I can do about it. I know how I got here, but that doesn’t make it any better. Does it make it any worse? At this point, it doesn’t matter.

I look at the man. The boy. The kid. He really is just a kid, probably no more than fifteen. That should make me feel bad—worse—or something, but it’s hard to feel anything anymore. Right now, though, he’s still asleep. He is dreaming, so his mind is not on me. I steal to the bathroom.

I look at myself in the mirror. The face I see there is the same face that I see every morning when I wake up, as long as I wake up first, or alone, but it’s not the same face that I saw in the elevator mirror last night. This is my face. These are my dark green eyes, these are my damp hands sweeping back my curly hair. This is the color of my skin. I try to enjoy it while it lasts, but what’s the point?

I can hear him groan himself awake in the next room and I close my eyes, hating myself, hating him, hating everything.

“You still here?” the kid asks. His question demands an answer, a very specific answer. Sometimes, if they’re uncertain, I can choose to stay silent. But this one? This one has plans.

It’s showtime, I can’t help but think. I spin on my heel and my posture straightens against my will even as I lose three inches of height. His attention is on me and it makes my skin lighter, it makes my hair straighter and it turns my eyes blue. By the time I’ve opened the bathroom door, my face is unrecognizable—it would never be confused for the one in the mirror.

Against my better judgment and against my very will, I linger in the doorway, coy, balance shifted all to one side to subtly show off the other leg, hand at my hair (is it longer or is it just the lack of curl?) to twirl it, and my lower lip curls up under my teeth, again to draw attention to it, to my mouth, as my eyes brighten. It shouldn’t confuse me anymore that my hair is suddenly sopping wet, but the surprise that I feel when my fingers touch the dripping ends of it doesn’t register on my face. Because I shouldn’t be surprised.

I shouldn’t be surprised, as far as he’s concerned, because I just took a shower. I just took a shower, because (as far as he’s concerned) that’s what girls do the morning after, so that they can look good and be clean again for their man—and let’s not forget the fact that wet hair just looks so amazing, right?

He is right, though, I should have just taken a shower. If it was up to me, I would have used any extra seconds to wash off everything that happened last night. It wouldn’t do me any good, of course, because the first person who saw me leave the hotel, alone or otherwise, would assume things about the girl trying to make her escape, would see her as dirty, and all of that would be back again. It would only be symbolic.

But that’s not how this all plays out in his mind, so it doesn’t really matter anyway. It doesn’t really matter what I think. I’m just a blank canvas.

“Hey, babe,” he says, putting one pasty, smoothe-skinned arm back behind his head like he imagines an adult would do and smiling in the way he figures the hot guy smiles at the woman he just slept with.

This is his script, I’m just acting out the lines.

“Hey,” I tell him, still smiling, still swaying on one leg.

“Some night, huh?”

Does he really not have anything more interesting to say?

“How ‘bout you come back here for round two?” He puts his other hand on the bed next to him and rubs it like it’s flesh.

“I’d love to,” I find myself saying. “But I really have to leave.” It’s what I want to say, but that doesn’t mean it’s me saying it. These are still his words.

“Come on, baby…” He reaches out that hand, but does he really want this?

“Look,” I tell him, “last night was really great, but…” What will be my excuse? What will be his excuse? “I have a boyfriend,” I hear myself say, like a casual reveal at the beginning of a movie, a minor character’s confession to illustrate that the main guy is a stud who can take another man’s girl just because.

“That’s okay,” he assures me.

Am I going to give in? Is that how this goes? Is he that kind of man? He’s not a man at all, of course, but is that the kind of man he wants to grow up to be? “No, it’s not okay,” my character says, suddenly blaming herself. “I can’t, I can’t do this.”

“It’s all right,” he says, but—

“No, it’s not all right! I’m… I’m dirty, even after taking a shower.” Sometimes I think the worst part of these little charades is the dialog they come up with.

“It’s okay. We don’t have to… We don’t have to do anything.”

That’s a comfort—note the irony. “Are you sure?” Why is he playing with me? Why is he playing with himself? It plays like indecision, but—No. This is a carefully planned script.

He lures me back to the bed under false pretenses and then waits for me to break the arrangement and have at him again. And I’m helpless—after all, didn’t he act the gentleman? Gentlemen are always rewarded, aren’t they?

I remind myself that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. No one ever knows what they’re doing with me, what they’re doing to me. I play into their fantasies without them even noticing. If they’re confident, like this one is, I end up on my back. If they’re not, if they doubt themselves and their abilities, they will leave me alone. If they feel guilty afterwards, sometimes they will let me go. Unless feeling guilty is what they want, too.

This one is simple. All he wants is power: to win the girl, to get laid, to get one over on some other guy. I hear myself pleading with him when he’s done and leaves. “Will I ever see you again?” I ask.

“Is that what you want?”

Coy, “Maybe…”

He has no intention of ever seeing me again. I’m nothing but another notch on his belt—am I the first? Honestly, most men are such shit and keep being such shit, it’s hard to tell for sure. I probably was. He was a bit more awkward.

Why am I even asking these questions? It’s not like I care. It’s not like I care about him—at least not as a person. But I do need to know. For strategy. I care because understanding him might—what? What can I do?

I gather my things, I put on my clothes, I go back into the bathroom. I still don’t look like myself. The image is starting to fade, but he still hasn’t forgotten me. He may be thinking more about himself than he’s thinking about me, but he’s still thinking about me more than anyone else is. I’ve left an impression on him, so he’s left this impression on me, of this girl that I’m not, of this girl that he slept with, this girl who slept with him, who isn’t me.

But who am I?