I felt them coming in the soles of my feet. A tickling sensation. A vibration. Hard to quantify, but there it is. I felt my doom coming feet first. 

I thought the prickle was the result of my before work barefoot walk. That’s how things always go for me, one good thing leading a long line of bad. I like to walk through the old, drained woods behind the apartments where I live to clear my head. It calms me.

 There are thorns and poisonous things in the process of taking over the giant stone-skinned trees, but I was careful. I knew that forest. A lot of my childhood I worked those trees with the rest of the village brats. It was the only place that felt safe to me anymore, even though there was nothing safe about it.

 But my little free time in nature led right into some kind of weird reaction.  Of course. That’s how my life is. Not health issues, no, those were rare for me.  But weird. Weird stuff happened so much I should get used to the whole process of it.

I’m just a null. A plain nothing of a human being, trying to survive a world politics has torn from sky to shadows. I am regular Jane Nobody, and still stuff like this happens to me all the time. Everyone who knows me says I’m a First Order Shit Magnet.

I didn’t like the connection to the First Order and the rest of those dedicated fanatics, but it couldn’t be denied if shit was gonna happen, I would be in its pathway and it would hit me first.

The tingle didn’t hurt, but the feeling demanded attention. It was an annoying bug crawling across my skin biting all the way. I had to sit down and see what was going on.

Out of my shoes, my feet stank, days from a good wash. My eyes watered from the stench, but feet weren’t red or swollen from anything. The lack disappointed me. A thorn stuck in my heel provided an explanation for this new case of mysterious weird.

The second after I sat down on a freight box in Jak’s kitchen, the wood still creaking under my butt as I looked one foot then the other, was the second the giant slab of a bald man came back around the corner to see me doing it. 

“Boy, for fuck’s sake, I pay you to sit?”

His hand shot out to pull me up and I dodged it, jumping as my feet hit the floor like I landed on a hot plate. My brain sizzled with the renewed contact. The floor was on fire.

“Even the rats get a break once in a while.” I told him as he reached for me with the other giant block he used for a hand.

“I don’t pay rats.” 

“You pay me?” I hopped away, making faces at him. 

“Boy!” 

“Dumpling Man! Sack o’Stink! Blood Bar Toad!” I shouted as he grabbed my shoulder and twisted until I faced him.

Jak knew I was a girl. He called me a boy as insult. As irritating as it was, this worked in my favor. Half his customers thought I was a lumpy, dirty, drudge of a boy who never bathed and hid his long hair under his cap. The village had boys a plenty like me to boss around and I for some reason Jak decided I could be another one of them. 

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Still high-stepping imaginary hot coals, my bare feet pricked and burned.  Jak shouted in my face, his spit dotting my cheeks. “Promised your sister I wouldn’t kill you today.”

She’s not my sister, I said in my head, on reflex.  Aloud, I spat back, “You also promised her a silver coin the next time she let you touch her tits and made you feel like a man. Cause you’re really not a man, are you Jak? You’re some-kind of magicer in disguise.” 

Jak thought he was this, that and all the hairy balls in between. He brewed a sour ale that had all the village addicted, as tasty and as cheap as piss but stronger and cheaper than the dreaming drug blue. In short, the males of Little Indio loved him. Jak could do no wrong.  But being called a magicer could get a person hauled off to the city by a desperate, quota deprived patrol. And we both knew that was the last thing he wanted.

I’d never get close enough to a patrol to report the muscle-bound-sack of puss and sweat. I didn’t want their notice any more than Jak did. 

Good thing his stupidity rivaled his size. He may be natural-born, a native creature made of magic, but he wasn’t smart. And the patrols were the only thing that scared him. 

“Shut your fuckin’ hole there, boy.” He snarled the words, digging his fingers deep.

It hurt. Bad. Jak was powerful strong. I turned my yelp of pain into a manic laugh. Very un-boy like and nothing like a normal null, who’d be begging and crying if they could manage sound at all.  But I knew how to play Jak to my advantage without showing my bare chest to every dick and blick in town like Bredonna. 

“Then let me get back to work. I thought I stepped on something in this nasty sty of your kitchen. But it was only another cockroach.” I said it, but the kitchen floor was spotless. I kept it so after that first time Jak made me lick the floor for mouthing off to him. Now it had a nice citrus taste. 

He walked away, but the back of my knees, the tops of my thighs, the meaty part of my palms were all buzzing crazy and hot. It was uncomfortable as anything I’d felt before.  

Jak’s rough handling turned to a memory the moment he left me alone. I didn’t have time to dislike him when he wasn’t in the room. Felt and gone. But the weirdness spread into my chest and started to turn cold. Death was a’coming. 

I’m a skinny little null. In this world of have and have nots, I was so low on the not list that anything can kill me. That’s what I told myself every day, and damnit to all the powers high and low, that is what I believed. I am a null.

So, I downed two fat spoons of mineral oil and baking soda and hoped that would cure me before going back to my kitchen work. My stomach would hate me. And everyone would smell me. But it was a remedy null mama’s swore by, so I did it. 

 Thirty minutes later I ended up trapped in the toilet box with an eye watering brown stink worse than my feet. This disgusting smell was sticky.

I could hear Jak shouting at me from inside his pub, the dirty dishes and pig slop piling up in his kitchen. He bellowed like an angry bull. I suspected that was his other shape, a bovine-duka from the plains. About ten years ago, those pains had been tilled up and turned into crop lands to feed the bulging bellies of the Consortium’s Cities.  Jak must have immigrated to the out-of-the-way-little-bit with a few other survivors of the Patrol’s sweeps. 

I had an illegal book from my mom with all of the known creatures of E’rrin in it. Creatures made of of magic that had survived the Consortium’s Balancing, like Jak, disguised themselves or they found high-up protectors. Or they disappeared. 

My remedy for the attack of the weird did me not a lick of good. The cold became ice, pushing on me, knocking on my bones in ham-fisted dread. Like I should know something. Do something.

I’m a null. What would I do? Nulls are not fit for more than farm work or washing dishes by hand. I wouldn’t do nothing. I wouldn’t feel anything. I wouldn’t answer no bone throbbing knocks like an idiot either. This girl was not having anything to do with trouble like that.

I shat my guts out in the poop house and wiped myself as best I could. Then, stinking to the stars and back again I went to work, minding my business and my mouth.