I sneezed explosively; by happy coincidence, the sound bore an uncanny resemblance to the word, “bullshit.”

The Other Side of Me – Part 25
by Lily Rasputin

“No,” I said, trying to inject nonchalance into my voice. “I didn’t forget. Uh, the time just sort of got away from me.”

There was a pause from Sam’s end, just long enough for me to wonder if she was mad that “I” had apparently forgotten we were supposed to get together today. If she was, I’d just have to find some way to put out that fire as well. After all, it wasn’t as if I could tell her that it wasn’t really me she’d made plans with.

I opened the year with an end-of-the world story, and this continues the subject of earth-shattering occurrences . Like the previous story, this one was started early last year, and had to wait until the end of the year, when my muse came back from where-ever it had disappeared to.
Marianne.

Part 1

“Say cheese!” Those two words summed up a lot of my young days. My father, Allan, was an avid photographer, while my mother, Wanda, had been a model. They told me that when they met, it was a marriage made in heaven.

The Other Side of Me – Part 24
by Lily Rasputin

“Well?” The furious woman across the table from me said. “I’m waiting.”

I stared at my mother, pain aching in my chest as I was torn between the elated feeling of seeing her again, and the sheer terror that her sternest glare always provoked from deep inside me. Unlike my father, Mom was slow to anger, but when she got mad, she really got mad.

I held up my hands, shaking my head back and forth. “I …”

Her finger came back up again, pointing right at my face.

Then she asked me what high school I’d gone to before I dropped out, and apologetically asked me for my deadname so she could ask them for my records, and made an appointment for me to come back the next day for placement tests. I was in!

Our hero surrenders herself up to the rebels but mainly to start a dialogue.

It was too short notice to make a birthday cake, Mrs. Ramsey said, but they had a couple of boxes of Girl Scout cookies that they’d bought from the scouts at church the previous Sunday, and we nibbled on those and they sang “Happy Birthday” for me, and I cried, and everybody hugged me.

“Wake up! It’s Christmas morning! You just missed Santa Claus!” Mrs. Ramsey called out from the hallway.

“I still miss them, though, even though I’m worried about how they’ll react. Does that make sense?”

I thought about what Sophia and Savannah had talked about last night, about their fathers and their long estrangement and how they were trying to be friends again now. Would it be like that between me and Nathan when I made contact again after I turned eighteen?

Queen Dana of Highwinds the Elf Kingdom inside the Empire has a problem. One that she cannot fix personally. The problem is with a small minority of her population. A problem that has been brought to her attention by the half elf son of a problematic Duke. What is a Queen to do? She calls on help from a friend. The question now is does she realize what she is letting loose on her kingdom?

From the fact that this isn’t their first time, I’m guessing they’re both realizing — or at least suspecting — they’re not as purely cis as they thought.”

After the superhero Curador and his more experienced partner are captured by the evil Dr. Quasi, the demented genius subjects them to bizarre and horrifying experiments to satisfy his thirst for knowledge—as well as his own lascivious desires. Helpless to defend themselves from his depravity, the humiliated heroes soon discover that there are some fates far more outlandish than the merely life-and-limb dangers to which they had become accustomed. (A tale of Faraday City.)

Zane has worked for four months as an android operator at Castor Analytics.
A company specializing in storing androids and doing maintenance on them.
Of all the androids Zane had transferred into, Candi has a special place in his heart.
It had been the android he went through his trial by fire with.
And by now, Zane thinks he knows everything there is to know about Candi.
But Candi has a few more tricks up her sleeve.

“That’s one small step for a woman – pretty much just another Saturday, really. But sure as hell, it’s one giant leap for mankind.”

“So this is it?” Dela said, looking anywhere but the crack in the wall.

“Unless you want to start drinking your own pee, yeah,” Flamer replied. The cadet was tying the last loop in their makeshift rope, it would keep the crack in reality from vanishing and separating them when they went through.

“At some point, InstaThere is probably going to be offering body swap services. It’s going to be expensive at first, but I’ll probably be able to get you a big discount. You’d just need to find a — um, a trans woman to swap with you... But she probably won’t want to swap if you’ve been taking male hormones or had a mastectomy.”

“Okay,” Carmen conceded, “if multiple bodies is a core part of your identity, it’s probably fine to take them all to the protest. But venning into multiple bodies for the protest just to inflate the numbers —”