Been a while since I posted anything from SIDESHOW IN THE CENTER RING, my science fiction comedy of bad manners, so here’s a bit.

The first-person narrator, Connie Phelan, thinks she wants to belong to the most exclusive social group going. She wants it so bad, she even goes on holiday with them to a planet where slavery is legal. One of the inner circle is Darryl, a smug brute who digs hurting on Honey, the ex-model who is hooked on him. Connie has learned that Darryl said he was taking Honey to sell to the Omata. The Omata are cannibals.

Watching For Darryl

excerpt from SIDESHOW IN THE CENTER RING
by Marian Allen

I kept watch through the kitchen window for Darryl coming back. I didn’t want to meet him on the way: I was afraid I’d fall asleep and have a nightmare and thrash around and hurt him by accident.

What I really wanted to see was Darryl and Honey. It was always possible he had only threatened to sell her to the Omata, as a kind of refreshing change from physical brutality.

–No, when he came, he came without her, trotting across the floodplain, enjoying the day.

Where did he get off, playing with people like they were plastic action figurines, and only he was real? Like I’d said to him before, I understood the lust for power, because I had it myself, but wanting a candy-apple-red sports car and sideswiping pedestrians with one were two different things.

And he had the nerve to say we were alike. We both grew up poor. We both had to fight to get out of the gutter, and got spit on and stepped on every inch of the way. We both grabbed every chance that didn’t see us first, and twisted its tail until it took us as high as we could make it take us. But we were not alike.

Would we have been, if Darryl had had an Aunt Bootsie, or if I hadn’t? That was beyond me and, at the moment, I didn’t care. I wanted to clean his clock, not find out what made him tick.

~*~

SIDESHOW IN THE CENTER RING is available at Amazon in print and for Kindle, or from your friendly neighborhood indie bookseller, and cheap at the price.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: Whose clock would your main character like to clean? What metaphor would he or she use for that?

MA