New Story: Skins

You can read my new short story, ‘Skins’ about intimacy and refugees in a future French fascism at Cosmos Magazine (ps, a skin isn’t a cyborg). It opens:

She doesn’t know I’m hovering a few steps behind her, my skin crawling with anticipation. She’s pushing through the metro crowds, past fortune-tellers with names like Doctor Sidibe and Queen Adama, who are passing out business cards. One session to discover one’s future love and wealth – it isn’t so much.

When she reaches street level, she glances across Boulevard de Clichy, up the rising alleyway, to Sacré Coeur.

A hundred mouches buzz around the metro exit, recording and assessing for anonymous companies or départements. The government already knows me, of course. And who isn’t petrified of those policemen, hopped up on amphetamines, with their implants and body modifications? I can’t remember the number of times I’ve turned a corner to see two of them slouching, faceless behind their chunky insect-like masks with their flapping trunk-like appendages. I should be safe: I was born in France, but it has a peculiar effect on your mind, those half-hidden police and those little mechanical flies, spinning in the air, their thousand refracted eyes pinning you, recording your every move, feeding it into the System for later use.

But there’s no time to worry. Not now when I have her in my sights.