"Blackberries are actual purple," said Bill, shortly before his head exploded.

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Green Sun
Chapter 9
No Accounting for Taste

by Donna Lamb

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Bruce drove back toward his base camp in the desert east of Christmas Diggings, very distracted by the happy burblings in the cargo compartment behind him. "The truck bouncing makes my boobies jiggle all over," said the girl. "It's so funny. I think I like it."

He turned on the air conditioning, something he didn't always do but he definitely needed to cool off. What am I going to do with her? he wondered. I know what I'd like to do but that would be like.... like stealing from a poor box. Well, sort of. He knew he could turn her into the authorities, that she'd probably been involved in drug smuggling as an accessory, that only someone with resources of a government would be likely to find out who she really was. But something made him hesitate. Something besides that, he told himself.

He could take her to the motel he kept in Christmas but he resisted that idea. Just before he passed the turnoff toward Arthur Bullrush's new camp he realized he needed to talk to someone. He slowed. Arthur had almost a decade more experience of life than Bruce did, he'd actually finished his twenty in the Marines and lived off his half-pay pension and what little he and a cousin took out of an old turquoise mine. Bruce made a decision and turned down the lane that ended in the dry wash that led to a burro track that went up the canyon where Arthur lived under a stand of cottonwoods very like the ones where Bruce had first met him.

On the pile of blankets in the cargo compartment, the girl giggled. "Whee! Look'at 'em go! That tickles!"

* * *

Out in Los Angeles, Davy Wilson did not make it home before his pants split along the rear seam even though he ran as fast as his new longer legs would carry him. Fortunately, he made it into the house before anyone saw him due to the coincidence of a well-placed whirlwind blocking the view of his sister and her friends climbing into the six-year-old Toyota Corolla Mandy had inherited from mom. Davy went in the side door while the girls piled into the car out front They had loaded down themselves down with video players, drink coolers, beach hats and blankets--and were squealing about what the wind was doing to their hair.

Davy dived into his room and hid in his own closet until the girls had been gone for ten minutes at least. Then he'd ventured out and looked at himself in the mirror over his dresser. Long, straight dark brown hair hanging past the bottom of his now very tight Westside Pizza Soccer Champs t-shirt, prominent titties making two bumps in the shirt. Slender waist, oval face with light brown eyes, arms almost as thin as his own had been. He didn't have pierced ears, blond, gold and red streaks died in his hair or fingernails painted Industrial Orange Smoke but otherwise he looked exactly like his sister.

His eyes got very wide like an anime character, even if he was half-Chinese and not Japanese at all. "Holy cow!" he yelped. Then he ran down the hall to the bathroom he shared with his sister so he could see all of himself in the full-lenth mirror on the back of the door. Even though his jeans hung in tatters, split in the back, crotch and inseam, he could see that he looked like Mandy from head to foot. Mandy's grown-up features and body looked back at him, not his own 11-year-old boy looks. "Holy cow!" he said again. "I'm a girl?"

He took the tattered jeans and very strained briefs off to check. "Oh, good," he said. "I'm still a boy."

* * *

"Kid ought to be more upset," said Sophie, watching the scene on the sideways screen of her pocket iHell. "And there's some meddling clarence on the job there, I can smell him."

"No accounting for the perversity of the human race," said Bill. He slurped at a blackberry, licorice, and peanut butter fudge triple cone outside of the Rite Aid in a shopping mall next to Highway 111 in Palm Desert. Sophie had a cherries jubilee and devil's food cake double in a cup. "Blackberries are actual purple," Bill added for no particularly useful purpose.

She frowned. "Here's a pair," she said. She unfolded the screen twice, making it large enough for Bill too watch.

"Where's this at?" he asked.

"Henderson, I think. She's a showgirl and he's some sort of security at one of the casinos," said Sophie. "Watch."

On the screen Tiffanee Topps (nee Bettina Phillips) gurgled a sob. "I'm getting fat and ugly!" Her tall blond hair looked as if she'd been running her fingers through it and tears left grayish tracks from her mascaraed eyes to her carmine lips.

"No, you're not, honey," Bret Dane (nee Daniel Bott) said. "Why, you're not showing at all! And it's only going to make you more lovely, darling." He tried to pat her on her naked tummy but snatched his hand back when she tried to sink her two-inch plastic claws into his wrist.

"A lot you know, Mister-Safe-as-Houses-If-I-Pull-Out-in-Time! I've gained six pounds! Six pounds! My costumes don't fit!"

Bret really couldn't tell that she'd gained any weight at all but he supposed that six extra pounds into costumes as tight as the one's Tiffanee wore might be noticeable. "Oh, honey." He tried to console her. "Oh, sugar, it's okay. You can--you can quit work till after the baby is born. I make enough for us to live on."

"Oh, right!" she said sarcastically. "That's why your car is a twenty-year-old Dodge and I'm driving a new BMW!" She sniffled. "We couldn't make payments, buy gas and pay insurance for my car on your pay. We're screwed! And it's your fault!" This time she did hit him, a back-handed slap on his biceps.

Watching, Bill and Sophie laughed. Violence is like chocolate to demons, even a taste is good.

Bret didn't flinch. Even though four inches shorter than Tiffany's six-one, he worked out a lot and his muscles were hard as iron. "It's okay, honey. It'll be okay. You can wear a different costume or let them out or borrow one from a girlfriend. Something. See? It'll be okay."

"You just don't understand, you...you...you man! I don't want to get fat and ugly and lose my job! Even if we get a kid out of this, I'm going to be ugly for months!"

"You won't be ugly, it's all natural and beautiful," said Bret. "And I'll be right here with you telling you everyday just how beautiful you are."

"Oh, that's so sweet, I could puke!" protested Tiffanee. "And that's another thing, how can I gain weight when I throw up everything I eat?"

"Baby," said Dane. He didn't mention the bacon cheeseburger, big salad and milkshake Tiffanee had scarfed down at three a.m. last night. "I understand," he said.

"Here it comes," said Sophie.

"Oh you can't understand! I wish you were going to go though this with me feel exactly what I feel and get all porky with bad skin and your tits hurt and then try to squeeze a watermelon out your pussy!"

"Wow," said Bill. "That's a doozy."

"Good one," agreed Sophie. "But I can't make him pregnant, against the rules for me to create a life. And she wants them to feel the same thing."

"Heh," said Bill. He reached over and manipulated the zoom to take the view inside Tiffanee's womb. "Twins," he said, pointing out the two separate blobs of tissue.

"Perfect!" said Sophie. "Watchit! Your dripping ice cream on the screen."

"Sorry," said Bill, putting the much-demolished cone behind his back.

Onscreen, Tiffanee and Bret embraced. She'd expressed her concerns and felt enormously better and Bret liked nothing better than comforting her.

The two demons cackled while the lovers merged down to a cellular level then separated into two identical pregnant Tiffanees.

About that time, while he was taking another bite of the cone, Bill C. Bubb's head exploded.

"Idiot," Sophie screeched. "You got brains in my ice cream cup!"

continued...