#WHEN HE GETS SO WORKED UP POTASH IS LIKE TAKE A DEEP BREATH

[goaliekisses]

"it's sharp emoji. look! nice glasses, yknow, this is what i like. cigarette. (mimes smoking) cigarette? you smoke or no?"

"no"

"no? okay. no cigarette... glasses? yes. nice haircut?"

"falling out. losing hair."

"no you okay."

wait the full version of potash's geno outtakes is even better (thanks @suiheisen for the bootleg iph as usual ilu)

also: hello twitter people stop reposting this. thanks bye

[titusreno]

titus and reno

new first chapter draft idea

Reno

The sun was in my eyes as Benja launched his elbow into my solar plexus. His mask was sagging down the side of his face with sweat, the nylon snake eyes staring unnervingly at me, hollow with shadows. Behind him, the trees rose up from the swamp that had swallowed the old neighborhoods of Cypress Hills. I could hear the cry of seagulls and the thrum of cicadas. I stumbled backwards, trying to catch myself before I fell against the rough pavement of the road. I wrapped my arms around Benja’s neck and shoved hard with my knee into his stomach. He hadn’t expected it, and he lost his footing enough that I was able to hook my arm under his throat and spin him backward, moving fast enough that my momentum carried him. Benja was bigger than I was, but I had enough leverage that it just barely worked. I kicked him again in the chest as he fell backward, landing on his ass. I followed him down, grabbing for his mask and just barely getting it up over his eyes. I tried to let out the kind of howl that Benja did when he was competing, deep and guttural. I bent over him with my knee in his chest, pressing his face into the pavement. I could feel his breathing, fast and ragged. Benja coughed and looked up at me.

“Okay, fuck, time. Uncle. Whatever.”

Behind me, I heard Pancake laugh. He and Rustler were sitting at the edge of the practice ring, smoking, their legs extended just over the yellow line on the pavement.

“Was that your frog yell, Reno?” Rustler asked.

Benja laughed. “He’s learning from me, he’s gonna yell. I���m gonna teach him to yell. It’s cool.” He sat up, rubbing the blood from under his nose with the back of his hand.

“You aren’t mad that he’s stealing your thing? Your whole trademark?” Rustler let out a long puff of smoke. The smell carried over to me, pungent and green.

“You might wanna work on a kind of loud ribbit,” Pancake said. He snorted and tried to approximate the noise a frog makes.

I helped Benja up.

“I’m gonna get you back next time,” he said, reaching up to yank the frog mask off my head. “But that was pretty fucking good. You stepped it up since last time.”

I laughed. “That’s because you nearly killed me last time. I had to protect myself.” We walked over to where Rustler and Pancake sat. Overhead, the clouds moved faster and faster over the edge of the horizon, leaving the late afternoon sky a thin, dirty blue. The double electric fences at the edge of the facility reflected the light back in large flat gleams of yellow. I had to squint to see anything. “When am I going to fight you, Rustler?” I thumped him on the back as I sat down.

Rustler grinned, in the slow, half-lidded way he has. His eyes are darker than most other people’s at Auxie Mautlin, and his hair is almost as long as mine. He’s strong and about as beautiful as any of us here get. His legs are half the size of my torso. “You may need to wait a little. You get a little bigger or I get a little sicker. One of the two. If you wait about six months you’ll be able to pulverize me.”

“Don’t say that,” Pancake said. “You have at least a couple years.”

“Dude,” Rustler said. “Don’t bullshit. I’m eighteen already.” His voice was still measured, but his tone shifted a little. “You know I don’t have that long.”

“I bet you’re still gonna be the strongest Fore for a little longer, though,” Pancake said.

“Well, let’s hope.” Rustler offered me his joint, avoiding Pancake’s eyes. I took a hit and passed it to Benja, whose nose was still bleeding.

It isn’t a total taboo to bring up the worms when you’re hanging out with friends. Obviously, we all have them. But talking about death is something else. I remembered Rustler’s friend Foz, who was the biggest Fore when I first came to Auxie Mautlin with a selection of other piggos from my work camp. He had won sixteen matches my first year in the dorms, before the boils under his skin got larger and he started having seizures and was removed to the late-term infirmary. We don’t know how long he lasted after that. We aren’t allowed to visit the hospice units—they’re three miles away.

I got infected when I was two or three, which means I probably have longer than Rustler and definitely longer than Pancake, who had the worm in him already when he was born. They take about sixteen years to start affecting your central nervous system in a serious way, though some piggos start getting headaches at age fifteen.

“Do you guys wanna go take some K-po with me in Caldegot?” Benja asked, after a couple minutes of silence where the only noise came from the seagulls and the sound of the distant gymnasium, where the letlets were still having their phys-ed class.

Pancake laid back on the pavement. “Nah, I hate the stuff it makes me see. It’s all like, purple dripping. Like every time. And those weird stars. It makes me feel all weird and out of it.”

Benja looked at me.

“I haven’t ever taken it,” I said, which was true. I’d had hits off joints that Rustler got from the truck driver that brought the cricketbev and frozen chicken, but never anything else. K-Po was newer, rarer. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. “It’s like LSD, right?”

Rustler laughed. “It’s just fertilizer.”

“No, man, it’s real,” Pancake said. “You do really see shit.”

“No, I know,” Rustler said. “But it really is just fertilizer. Potassium, you know. Potash. It only works because potassium makes the worms in our guts release weird chemicals. It does it to anyone with the worm. If we were healthy, it wouldn’t do anything.”

“Is that true?” Pancake said. “I for sure thought it was like, a party drug someone snuck in.”

“Pancake, you’re a dumbass,” Rustler said. I couldn’t tell what his tone meant. Pancake looked a little hurt, but he might have just been out of it.

“I wish I knew where they got it,” Benja said. “I guess it’s from the garden sheds. But those are locked down. It’s some girl in Caldegot. She’s got like a total monopoly.”

“It can’t be Kacky,” Rustler said. “I thought she got sicker.”

“No,” Benja said. “Her name’s Jenny.”

“Huh.” Rustler stretched and stubbed the joint out on the pavement. “Well, you know, whatever. I’ll go over there with you if you’re going. Reno, you wanna see some weird purple stuff with us?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to eat fertilizer. “Does it do anything to like, hurt you? Do you get like hungover or strung out or anything?”

“If you take too much,” Benja said. “But we won’t. You have to stay in top shape if you’re going to be able to beat Fib.” He punched my shoulder hard. I flinched a little, but less than I used to when I first was training with him. Benja tries to act tough and rowdy all the time, like he’s so strong he doesn’t know his own strength. I guess sometimes I do too.

As we walked over to Caldegot, I felt the sweat prickle uncomfortably down my back and run down my face. My hair melted against my ears and the back of my neck with sticky intensity. January isn’t the hottest season, yet. That’s still July and August, when temperatures can get into the middle hundred-forties and we all have to stay in the underground dormitories where the air conditioning gets pumped in through dry metal vents. But January is hotter than it was when I was born. I’ve heard that in the part of the country where Auxie Mautlin is, it used to get down to ten degrees in winter just a hundred and twenty years ago. There would have been snow. In the history classes we take, they show pictures of it. Once Mrs. Y showed us a picture of Queens, New York during a blizzard in 2015, the old cars buried in feet of snow, a bicycle completely cemented onto the sidewalk by mounds of shellacked ice. Now, January is hot, and it gets hotter every year, but they don’t let the older piggos go inside for gym because it is still supposed to be winter. When we ducked into Caldegot through a side door, the rush of cold air made me breathe a heavy sigh of relief.

The old dorms at the edge of Auxie Mautlin are different from the ones on the south side of the facility. The south dorms used to be a community jail, so they’re built with thick, bunkerlike cement and heavy doors. The Caldegot and Armistad dorms are just big brick buildings that used to be warehouses, and are almost three hundred years old. They remodeled them inside with the same fabric walls and florescent lighting as the other dorms, and they still have checkpoints and cameras, but they’re lower security than the Bertol or Musk buildings that the letlets live in. I was lucky to get in Armistad when I moved last year. It’s easier to get out to the roof or sneak to matches. I’ve heard older Fores say that things used to be stricter, but the facility is getting harder to staff and the older minders care less and less what we do. I guess that’s good luck.

Jenny’s room, a triple on the third floor, was already full of people when we got there. At least three of them were girls I knew from class. I hadn’t seen Jenny before except from a distance. She was oddly sinewy and sharp-looking, with long hair plaited into two braids that fell across either collarbone. Her uniform was opened to her belly, and I could see the faint sweat gathered at the top of her stomach. She was wearing one of the regulation bras, but pulled down a little, and I could tell that some of the boys were looking at her chest. She sat on the edge of her bunk bed, counting out small packets of something wrapped in brown paper towel. It felt so shady that I almost left then, but Benja moved to sit down next to one of the younger Caldegot girls and raised his eyebrows at me, so I moved inside the door and stood there.

Jenny looked at me. “You with Benja?” Her eyes were as black as Rustler’s. I figured she must be from the Arizzy worktown. I didn’t know any of those piggos very well.

“Yes,” I said.

Jenny nodded. She looked over her shoulder at the bunk above her and craned her neck. “Titus, get three more sets going,” she said. For the first time I noticed the scrawny boy in the bunk above her. He was hunkered down, portioning powder out into the paper packets. His dark hair was almost as long as Jenny’s, and fell across his face. His uniform shirt was open in the same way Jenny’s was, exposing an expanse of pale brown-pink skin that went down to his belt line. He grunted in response to Jenny’s command. Then, in a single long, lazy motion, he wrapped what looked like three packets of the orange powder. He tore each packet off after pouring the fertilizer—or whatever it was—onto the paper, and folded them into little squares. He licked the edges of the squares to make them stick, then looked up directly at me with a strange, unreadable glare. He was so delicate-looking that for a second I wondered if I was wrong about him being a boy.

“Here,” he said, and tossed one of the packets at me. I caught it and looked to Benja, who reached his hand up for his packet. Rustler, who still stood next to me, laughed, maybe at my expression. He ruffled my hair. I would have bristled if we hadn’t all just smoked together. I knew he was trying to be friendly.

“Reno here is going to be taking K-po for the first time today,” he said to Jenny. “Let him know what to do so he doesn’t make a fool of himself.”

Jenny looked at me closely, then nodded. I felt like I was being assessed. She stood up and brushed off her pants briskly. “Do you know what I do here?” she asked me.

“Um,” I said. “I guess I’m not really sure. You give people fertilizer to eat?”

One of the Caldegot girls snickered. The scrawny boy on the top bunk tensed, and I wondered if I might get myself in trouble if I sounded like I was insulting her business model.

“Well, yes,” Jenny said flippantly. “It’s fertilizer. But it is very important, cool fertilizer, because it lets the worms in our bodies show us things.” She smiled at me. Her canines were sharp, like Rustler’s or Pancake’s. Fighters do that to make themselves scarier. “The hallucinogens that the worms release are remarkably consistent. Right, Pozzlin?” She looked at the girl next to Benja.

“Yeah,” Pozzlin said. “You always see the purple planet.” She turned to me.

“The purple planet,” I said. I had heard people say it in classes. I assumed it was an in-joke in some clique that I wasn’t in on. There were a lot of those kinds of things. Everyone had their groups, their own special language.

“It’s like, a theory, right, that we all see the same waterfalls and birds and stuff—the stars and the sky with two moons and all that. And it’s a theory that that’s because it’s the planet the worm comes from. And it looks like it does because it’s an alien planet. It’s not just an acid trip. And sure it’s all like wavy gravy and you see like paisley and stuff too and colors move and distort, but you always see the same kind of cliffs and oceans and always two moons in the sky.”

Pozzlin let that sink in, smirking smugly at me. Benja was playing with a strand of her hair, and she didn’t seem to mind. I looked around the room for confirmation. People nodded.

“It’s like, maybe crazy,” Benja said, “but it’s like, it is sort of interesting. It’s true that you always see the same stuff. And it looks alien.”

“And we know the worm is alien,” another girl with long tight braids said. “It came here on a UFO.”

“A ship,” Benja corrected her. “A ship with a dead mummified humanoid alien on it. If you’re gonna say it, you gotta say the full crazy thing.” A few people laughed. When the doctors first announced that they were able to confirm the thing about the dead humanoid, back when I was still a letlet, everyone had taken bets on whether or not it was true. It was accepted fact now, but it still sounded crazy. Especially because the pharma companies and the state agencies had been insisting for years that the worm was a mutation of a tapeworm that had been bothering pigs for eons on Earth.

Jenny nodded and looked back to me. “So, it’s fun, right, and it is fun. But the real reason I do this is to get as many people as possible to document, to write down, what they’re seeing. Because I think it really might be the world that the bug came from. And if that’s true, it’s data. Important data.”

“Question,” I said. “How would that work? The hallucinations being like, a message. That’s like. Telepathy, right?”

“Yeah, something like that,” Jenny said.

“Do you think the worms are trying to send it to us?”

Jenny shrugged. “Fuck if I know. That’s why we’re out here. More data the better.”

“Hey Jenny,” a boy I didn’t know said from a corner. “You could get more data if the stuff was free, you know.”

“I have to make a living,” Jenny said. Her voice was mild but firm. “I don’t see you guys sneaking into the garden sheds at night to get this shit, so I can charge whatever I want. And it’s more affordable than it was when Kacky was here.”

I looked over at Benja inquiringly. I didn’t have that much to trade for shit. He shook his head and waved me off as if to say I have this one.

A girl laughed. “Bottoms up for science,” she said, and tipped her orange powder back into her mouth.

“Not yet,” said another girl. She looked at Jenny. “Is it okay to start?” The orange sun filtered down through the window and I felt for the first time how warm the room was. I was sort of thirsty.

“Cheers,” Jenny said. “I’m going to put out the paper and markers in the middle of the floor. When you come back up, draw or write what you saw, okay? Nobody leaves without at least one detail.”

“How long does it last?” I asked.                “Like twenty minutes,” the boy sitting on the top bunk said. I looked over at him and he stared back, unblinking, for a second, before he gave a small grin, as if he had just remembered that it might be a nice thing to do.

I saw Rustler raise his hand and dump the powder into his mouth. After a couple seconds, I did the same. I felt someone watching me and looked up to see the scrawny boy on the top of the bed staring me down. When he caught me looking, he looked away. I noticed that he wasn’t taking any K-po. For a second I thought about saying something to him, to try to ask a question or seem cool. But I wasn’t sure what to say. And then my vision started to swim. It was so instantaneous that I sat down against the door heavily, in shock.

At first it was just colors, and this sense of weird peace bubbling up in my stomach. I felt for a second like looking at the scrawny boy on the top bunk and telling him that I wanted to kiss him—which was weird, though I realized that I sort of did. But then I sank deeper, and the colors started to condense and drip and I started to see real pictures. The room in front of me completely vanished, and my hands and arms felt dense and numb and like they were made of fragile glass.

I saw four figures walking on a moonlit landscape, tall and strangely stretched. I couldn’t see their faces, but I knew they weren’t human or piggo. I felt a cold sensation in my gut at the strange trancelike way they walked, and I tried to turn away, but I couldn’t. I was stuck watching them until they vanished over the edge of the horizon. Then my vision danced again, dissolved into colors, and melted into a new scene. I was on a hill, looking out at a sky of strange stars and a red sun. There were flat plains of weird plants, and spires stretching up that might have been stone or vegetable. I couldn’t tell. Spinning above me were two flat blue moons, and under my feet was an ocean of clear water. When I looked at the ocean, I moved toward it, into it, falling down from the hill so fast that I stretched out my hands to catch myself, sure that I would be dashed against the ground, that the pink rocks at the shore would tear me apart. But they didn’t, and I landed in the water. Worms swam around between my toes, the light shimmering off their opalescent bodies. The sensation was still peaceful, sensual. It took several minutes before occurred to me that these were the worms inside me. The ocean rose up under me and I got cold, as if it were really there. The sky went yellow, blue, deep pink, red. I felt a little nauseous, but somehow was having a really good time.

And then I started to come out of it. The ocean stopped feeling cold and I could feel the hot sweaty dorm room and the bodies on either side of me. The moons above me splintered and vanished, and I felt the floor under me for several minutes before I opened my eyes. As I did, I realized that the boy –Titus—was still staring at me from the top bunk. I felt too dizzy to sit up, and closed my eyes until I felt the world settle. When I sat up again, Titus was gone. Around me, other people were already awake again. They were writing and drawing with the markers that Jenny had provided. As the light stopped hurting my eyes, I looked around and realized they were all drawing basically the same things I had seen—everyone focusing on different aspects of the scenario. Jenny approached me and gave me a pen and a marker and a piece of paper that I realized was someone’s old medical form.

“Draw on the back,” she said. “Emotional woo woo stuff is fine for writing but try to draw as literal as you can.”

I’m not a very good artist, but I tried to draw the hill and the two moons. I tried to describe what I saw. I didn’t want to put any more effort into it than anyone else, but I felt profoundly changed and—I guess disturbed—by the whole thing, and suddenly it felt very important that I be honest and try to actually talk about what it had been like. I thought, well, maybe this is a real thing, a real project.