Bite Me

an hour to fix. I had heard that sometimes even when youoverdose on a whole butt-load of drugs, you don’t always die because your heart won’t stop, which is why you’re supposed to put your head in a plastic bag. But I didn’t want to because I had done Cleopatra eye makeup that was très elegant so I would look hawt for my resurrection. So Ronnie was supposed to put her hand over my mouth and nose, just until I stopped breathing, then like fix my lipstick if it smeared. Because otherwise I’d be all girlfriend in a coma for weeks while the Motherbot whined about how she couldn’t unplug me because of her guilt for treating me like an assbag and how she had never appreciated my dark complexity and inner beauty and whatnot, and I have too much shit to do for that.
    But Ronnie didn’t even wait for me to pass out. I had just taken the pills with some Sunny D (because the nosferatu love us some irony), and I laid down on the floor like we had planned, so Ronnie could just roll my body under the bed to hide me from the deadly rays of the sun and Mom. So I’m grieving for the loss of my mortality and whatnot, when Ronnie, like, just throws a pillow on my face and sits on it. And I’m all, “Wait, wait, mmphff, mmphf.”
    And then she burned one—right in my face—one of those foul, vegan farts—because she’s been a vegan ever since she had head lice and we shaved her head. (I don’t know why. Something about garlic and parasites. She’s insane.) ’Kayso, I decided that I could wait to receive the dark gift, and that Ronnie would have to die as soon as I got her off me. So she, like, burns another one! And she’s skinnierthan me. I don’t know how she could even have it in her. And she’s laughing so hard that she falls off of me and I make my move.
    ’Kayso, I’m chasing her around the house, going, “I’m going to peel off your skin and make it into boots and step in dog shit with them,” and other basic super-villain threats, and then things got all wiggly and the last thing I remember is I walked into the sliding glass doors to the balcony and kind of bounced off. And so tragically, I died young, and no one was there to grieve for me or shed tears for me or kiss my cold, lifeless lips and whatnot.
    But now I’m undead awesome. I think with practice, I will make a super, super-villain, and really, I’m okay with that, because there won’t be any student loans like there would have been with my other career choice of tragic romantic poet.
    ’Kayso, now I must fix my makeup and pick an ensem and then wander the lonely night, searching for the Countess and the vampyre Flood, and maybe drop by the love lair to totally overwhelm Foo with my haunting and eternal but still small-chested beauty.
    Kthxbye. Being immortal rocks! I can type like demon speed! Fear me! L8z.
    THE EMPEROR
    The Emperor and the men shared a submarine sandwich on a bench by Pier Nine in the bright noonday sun as theywatched a dark knife of a yacht glide into dock. She was just short of the length of a football field, all black, with stainless-steel trim—what the Emperor imagined a star-ship might look like if it were driven by sails. The sails on her three stainless-steel masts were mechanically furled into black carbon fiber shrouds, and the curved windows of her cockpit and cabin were blacked out. There were no crewmen on the deck.
    In all his years on and around the sea, the Emperor had never seen anything like it.
    Bummer flattened his ears and growled.
    “Easy, little one, it’s only a sailing ship, and a beautiful one at that,” said the Emperor, although he thought it quite strange that there was no crew on deck to secure the mooring lines. A ship of that size, and more important, of that expense, would usually have half a dozen or more tying her up, but once parallel with the dock, attitude jets along the sides opened in the hull and gently pushed her into the dock. Jets on the far side pushed back so she stopped within six inches and hovered there, the jets firing just as needed to keep her from drifting. Three hundred feet of steel and carbon fiber, probably over twelve hundred tons, parked as easily and somewhat more smoothly than a Mini Cooper at a strip mall.
    Bummer ran to the edge of the breakwater and let loose with machine-gun volley of yapping, which translated, “Bad boat, bad boat, bad boat, bad boat.”
    A barking fit from his bug-eyed companion was nothing out of the ordinary, and normally the