His lips are dry and his hands move across my shoulders, down my back, over all the places where he has opened cuts on me and seen them heal and opened them again. All the places I wish different, that I do not like, gouged or no. His hands don't shy away. He never breaks away.
Then somehow my sports bra is over my head and his jeans are coming off. Oh, I think, it's so simple. Simple as throwing that first punch. These barriers between people, these gulfs, how easily everything collapses.
There's a moment, later, when I revise: Really, that was not like fighting at all.I swing on-and-off alien narratives. They're sort of overdone now and rooted more in spectacle than anything else, which is strange because the best alien stories are ones rooted hard in humanity. Blood, Blood by Abby Mei Otis is a pretty brilliant example of this. Heartfelt and biting and oddly horrifying, Blood, Blood traces the days post-contact, with an invasion that's not really an invasion, and a world that doesn't know a good thing when it has it. Abby Mei Otis' world is invasive and uncertain and one that plays with prejudice and first loves and the anger that arrives hand-in-hand with the excitement of the new. It's a pretty special piece of writing.
You can read Blood, Blood over at Strange Horizons here.
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