Dylan smith's Arc

Chapter 1 of 12

Dylan Smith was rotating a tire in his head when the sky split open above the dusty road. He had been on this planet six weeks. He still wore the black polo with the red Fud's Tires logo, the grey cargo pants, the black shoes. He still read pressure the way other men read faces. He had come here wanting one quiet thing: a small crowd of big-bellied women who would burp without thinking and compete to keep him. Back home he had never said that out loud. Here, every woman fit the shape of it, and one had already decided he was hers before the others could try. She landed in front of him with a sound like a dropped anvil. Red skin, white hair, two black horns, a belly that pushed past her spiked armor. A tall bone totem stood behind him at the roadside, stacked vertebrae glowing with warning marks he had not put there. He understood, finally, who had set it. Newcomers had been turning around at that totem for a week. He had been counting who came back. No one did. "You're mine," Voracia said. "Come." She carried him by the wrist into a carriage and then through gates he had only seen from far off, a black stone castle with a statue of a bellied demon crowning the highest tower. Inside, she sat him on a low couch, set a woven basket of bottles at his feet, and looped a braided collar of shimmering fiber around his neck. The fiber pulsed in colors he had no names for. "Anyone who sees this leaves," she said. She tapped her stomach. "Tell me what you think of my belly." Dylan looked at her. Six weeks of holding still cracked open. "I love it," he said. "I love the size of it. I love when a woman eats until she has to burp and then does it without covering her mouth. On my planet that's strange. People would have looked at me like something was wrong with me if they'd known. I never told anyone." His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat on his knees. "I thought I was settling at the tire shop. I was hiding." Voracia watched him finish. She did not smile. She uncorked a bottle from the basket, drank it in one pull, set it down, and let out a burp that rattled the stones in the wall behind him. A small crack ran up from the floor. "Good," she said. "No more hiding. No more competition either. The others will see the collar and go." She sat beside him and put his hand on the top of her stomach. "You will live here. You will tell me again tomorrow." The door behind them closed on its own. The arc he had wanted was over before it began, and a new one had started in its place.