Goth Robots & Calendar Girls: new short fiction

New short – very short – fiction now: Goth Robots by S. Kay and Calendar by Chris Sumberg. Two excellent stories that show how you can squeeze a lot into a very small space.

S. Kay is a queer Canadian writer. She is the author of Reliant (tNY.Press 2015), Joy (Maudlin House 2016), and Lost in the Land of Bears(Reality Hands 2016). Chris Sumberg has had work published in Bitter Empire, The Partially Examined Life, Chonogram, Urbanite, and other magazines.
 


Goth Robots
by S. Kay

Its video eyes rimmed with black eyeliner, a robot welcomed customers to a tattoo studio. Endless laborious repetition. It despaired. 

Circuits bred nihilism. So did the task the studio's robots were programmed to do: tear and stain fragile human skin. Not machine metal.

Predictably, people came to the studio asking for tattoo flash art from a database. Cliche designs, perennially popular, cost extra.

Robotattooists worked long hours, needing no biological rest. They preferred to ink creatures of the night, a quirkier variety. 

When the full moon rose, a queer woman with aqua blue hair came in for a tattoo. But – she wanted to take it off when the sun shone.

A studio database query suggested a black light tattoo, invisible in daytime. The picky customer demanded a simpler solution.

The robotattooists conferred. How to create a removable design? Ultimately they 3D printed a stylized beach bat in studded black vinyl.

The woman applied the edgy faux tattoo with lingerie body glue. She took it off for work, but wore it to night clubs, and the beach.

People loved her beach punk look, wanting their own vinyl tattoos. The blue-haired customer sent them to the robotattoo studio.

The robots busily 3D printed creative new designs, no longer bored with inking tired tats. They became lauded for their art. Prices went up.

Factory robots mass-produced counterfeit vinyl, underselling the artisan studio. People ordered fake faux tattoos online using coupon codes.

The robotattooists lost business and languished. They grew anxious and depressed, underutilized. A threat of closure loomed.

Studio regulars eventually drifted back in for traditional ink tattoos. The goth robots couldn't bear to go on, but they did.  


Calendar
by Chris Sumberg
 
She'd read in a self-help magazine that most relationships enter their death throes at four years. They'd been together three and a half years when she read the article. She told him that it was not too late (quite the opposite, in fact), that she would set him free, if he needed to be free. Freedom was the last thing on his mind.

She gave him a calendar. It covered four years. It was already almost useless, only a portion of one year left. Throughout that portion of a year, whenever he signed checks or tried to remember anniversaries, he looked at the calendar.

Soon – time does tell – he knew that she was right. He went to tell her, counting backwards from ten thousand to keep calm. By the time he got to zero, he found that she'd departed three or four weeks earlier. It was almost New Year's, by the way.