Join comedy star Connie Phelan on a planet where slavery is legal. Connie has suffered an unfortunate cosmetic reaction, but she isn’t going to let that keep her from her goals: outgrowing her clown identity, avoiding a love/hate relationship with her nemesis, and resisting the urge to do a good deed.
What Honey Did
excerpt from SIDESHOW IN THE CENTER RING
by Marian Allen
What a swell time I was having. What swell people these were. I couldn’t figure out why I was having such a good time. Then I realized that Darryl and Marissa hadn’t come up with us. They had returned to their suite, with Honey and Tiph and an assortment of running-dog flunkies, for a party they could pretend was ultra-exclusive. I didn’t see Jackie, so I assumed he had gone along, in his capacity as human safety net.
Well, that explained it, but it was too good to last.
By the time they showed up, though, the party was on cruise control and nobody was in the mood for drama – high, low, or otherwise.
I would have ignored the lot of them, but Jon Hister, the dog who was running for the office of my flunky, found me on the belvedere and insisted on making a report.
“Wait’ll I tell you,” he said.
“If it’s about Moran and his Harem from the Black Lagoon, I don’t want to hear it.”
“It’s a secret.”
Since he put it that way, I did want to hear it. Knowledge is power. So all right – trivial knowledge is petty power, but there it is, all the same.
“Give.”
“I went with them to their suite. I thought you’d want me to.”
“‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’”
“Huh? Anyway, Honey’s handbag fell off one of those ledges cut in the walls. Everything spilled out. I put it all back, but I looked at her pink slip while I had it. You’ll never guess what she’s done.”
“I don’t want to guess what she’s done.” I could, though.
“She sold herself to Darryl.”
~ * ~
A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: Write an unpleasant party scene.
MA
