“How was your week?” Kylie asked the group.
Around her, eyes looked at laps and the others sitting in the circle. Kylie suppressed a sigh. She sat still, open, willing them to share.
“I guess I keep forgetting why I am here.” said an octoputaur creature. It shrugged a few of its tentacles while itching its bull nose with another tentacle.
“This is a support group.” Kylie said, “We are here to help each other.”
“I don’t mean here. I know why I am in this room. I love coming here and talking about the horrors I couldn’t escape and the terrible things I did to survive. It’s the only time I feel my heart beating. Hearing other people’s stories is the only way I can taste this shitty coffee. Once I leave here, it all tastes like ash. Like it doesn’t matter.” The octoputaur waved a tentacle vaguely, “I mean I don’t know why I’m here. Why I exist.”
“I think we are meant to help each other fit in with the new game now that our crawl is over.” Said Kylie, wishing the course that certified her to lead these groups had better equipped her.
“Last week, I drifted off during sex. I just started daydreaming, staring off into nothing while my date just looked up at me.” The octoputaur continued. “I used to love sex. The little glances and gestures and I would just get all tingly and excited until we came closer and closer, lightly touching. Then I would twist their heads around and feel them get all hard and start cumming buckets into my abdomen.
“You were a mantid before your crawl?” The elf next to the octoputaur asked.
“My family says that I still am a mantid but I don’t recognize anything that I was or did before the crawl as at all relating to me. The memories are like touching your pseudopod when your nerve endings are asleep or having someone show you a book you read as a kid and try to convince you that you were the little bug eating the wooden boys brains,” The octoputaur took a sip of coffee. Their bovine brows furrowed at the brew. “This was one of the experimental races they offered and my girlfriend was with me on the crawl and she said it might be hot to have all those tentacles but I was cursed with madness before we hit a saferoom and I haven’t seen her since. I don’t know if she died or left me. I don’t know if I killed her if or if she fled and died by something else.” They sighed again, “I don’t know if it matters.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“You had family that survived?” Asked another member, an orc seeming creature that was actually a parasitic worm occupying the body.
“I think so. They say they are my family. My sister supposedly made it through and had kids but no one has seen her in awhile so they think she is dead. I’ve never met her. Even before and during the crawl, we never met. However, there is now a group that keeps saying they are family and invite me to parties full of loud noises where people play word games that I don’t understand.”
“Does anyone else struggle with sex?” Kylie asked.
“Yeah,” said a gelatinous creature that had tried to sit on the chair at first but had quickly engulfed it and now seemed to be sitting (standing?) on the floor and engulfing the chair. “My problem is kind of the opposite, though.” Their matrix quivered. “I can’t stop thinking about sex. And then when I find someone who wants to have sex with a big cube of acidic jello, I feel like I lose all control and I keep trying to cum over and over like it’s my job or like it’s the only time I can breathe and I know once I stop I won’t feel anything but and empty and a clawing desire to do it again.”
Kylie nodded. “I see you.” She said. “And I see you.” she said to the octoputaur. “I see all of you,” she said to the rest of the group, “Not perfectly, but partially. And with practice, we will see each other better.” She took a deep breath. This part always made her sick with hypocrisy or hope she wasn’t sure but her gut tingled hard each time she said this part, “With time, we might even see parts of ourselves that we thought were long gone or numb or beyond reclamation. Maybe we will even see new parts we never had growing from the soil of our patient, determined work.”
Kylie looked around. A few glared, a few nodded. “And if we don’t, that’s ok. There are plenty of scales which will always say we don’t matter unless we can do those things that make people smile and go to work and care about the story we find ourselves in. But it’s also ok if we stay right here in this story.”
“This cold story.” Someone said.
“We who have touched fire,” said the cube.
Kylie nodded. A few others nodded. They said their closing prayer, the one Kylie couldn’t stop thinking of as exiting the magic circle.
When she got back to her apartment, the same face of the mother who wept for her child was waiting in the hallway.
“Hey Kylie, I hate to ask, can you watch Braden this weekend? Jeff asked me out and I could really use a laugh.”
Kylie smiled. “Of course. I’ll swing by around dinner.”
“Thanks Kylie! You’re the best!”
“Well,” thought Kylie, “I’m certainly the last.” And she was. She had sworn it. If she could make sure of anything in this insane galaxy, it was that she would be the last.