A true story.


My heart was racing a million miles an hour.  The cops had been called but we didn't know if he'd be back before they came.

I stood in the dark living room staring out the window onto the brightly lit parking lot of section eight housing, listening to the gentle sobs of my friend's mother.

Her husband had beaten her again.  As he often did.  Always increasing in intensity.

"Next time he's going to kill her," her son had told me.  Her son, my wonderful friend.

He was barely 17 and was too far away to be of help.  So, he'd called me and asked me to go protect his mum... the cops were in route.

His mother, a frail woman with most of her teeth missing, because men had been knocking them out her entire life, sat hunched in the corner and unresponsive.

Eventually the cops came, and her husband became her ex. 

Then my friend died.

Died of an aggressive brain tumor, the same kind that had taken his dad.

Unfortunately my friend never had a relationship with his father, not only because his father had died so young, but also because my friend was the bi-product of an affair. 

My friend was an illegitimate son.

Him and his mother... the throw-away family no one really wanted.

Or so at least it had felt, to the small woman with too many scars to count, who gave up and died shortly after her son.

My friend was barely 30 when he died, and left three small children who desperately depended upon him.

All of them acceptably lost - so our society has deemed. 

Just like all the folks too weak, too unlucky, too sick to stand up for themselves. 


It is for people like my friend, his mother, and his children that I will never stop. 

Not until long after I am dead.



For the children who cry alone because 'superheroes' sold their dreams.








© Raena Exe 2023 
​*All rights reserved

Hel – Volume 3 (Part 3)
 
 
 
A beautiful woman sat at a table in a dingy out of the way pub known locally as ‘The Inferno’, however the only sign on the door was BAR.
 
In truth, the bar was called Dorothy’s Diner as it had once been a lunch kitchen that had devolved into just serving semi-cold beer and one or two types of wine.
 
But that was enough for the locals who mostly preferred to bring their own booze anyhow.
 
Of course, Jimmy, the grandson of Dorothy, was happy enough to oblige, as he made most of his money off of the pool tables, darts, and vending machines.
 
The woman most people now days called Emily stared around the unfamiliar room taking in the smoke covered pictures from days long past.  Pictures from a time before the constant bombardment of information.  Back when time was slow, and people were even slower.
 
“Thanks for meeting me here,” a handsome woman with long red hair said as she took a seat opposite from Emily.
 
“I didn’t think I had a choice,” the woman whose skin was crisscrossed in scars said with a rather dry grin.
 
“No, I suppose you didn’t.”
 
Didn’t have a choice or didn’t think so… Hel had not been specific, as she tended to prefer people fill in their own narrative.  Because quite honestly Hel couldn’t care less if she was the hero or demon of any particular tale.
 
“Karma is a bitch,” Emily snorted, as she turned to watch a couple of men play darts a few tables away.
 
“Sometimes karma is just karma, and a bitch is just a bitch,” Hel said as she waved over the bartender.
 
Normally Jimmy would have stayed behind the bar and simply waited for his patrons to figure out there was no table service at this particular establishment, however, seeing as how the two women who sat in the furthest corner were fine as hell, Jimmy grabbed a semi-clean towel from a half-dirty bucket of water and rushed over to take their orders.
 
“Good evening, ladies,” he remarked with a crooked grin as he slopped his dirty rag across their table, making a half-hearted attempt at hospitality. 
 
“What will it be?” the smallish man with an overly groomed beard asked of the two women, both of whom were dressed head-to-toe in black.
 
“What do you have for wine?” Emily asked the man without any sign of warmth.
 
“Well… we got a nice red and a white one, I believe…” Jimmy said, his head on a swivel as he turned to look towards the back sign where he hoped like hell he’d written down his most recent Walmart purchase.
 
“We’ll have two glasses of the red, please,” Hel told the man with a rather limp smile, one Jimmy was more than happy with, as he hadn’t expected better from such attractive women.
 
Just then a loud cheer erupted from a group of mixed couples who were standing around an undersized pool table.
 
Over the ruckus Emily asked, “I need backers, money men, folks who can front me the funds needed to get the ball rolling.”
 
Hel smiled a genuine smile, her first for the evening.
 
“And what will I get in return?”
 
Hel didn’t ask because she was greedy, nor because she thought it wasn’t a noble cause.  Hel asked because all gifts come with a cost.  In life, and most certainly in death.
 
Emily sat back in her chair and watched as the sweaty, nervous looking man approached with their wine.
 
“What do you want?  My first born?” she remarked coyly, though for a moment, from the flash of light that lit the strange woman’s tawny eyes, she regretted it fiercely.
 
But when the woman replied lightly all fear evaporated instantly, as if it had never been there at all.
 
“How about you owe me a favor?  And a better glass of wine when this is all over,” Hel told the woman who had never learned her name.
 
You see, they had met the same way Hel met everyone she knew, when Emily had died.
 
Only… Emily hadn’t stayed dead, unlike the rest.
 
No, somehow, despite all laws of God, nature, physics, and the Pope, Emily had come back.
 
And she had come back changed.
 
“It will mean giving up everything you love,” Hel reminded the woman of thirty three, with the dark hair and brown skin.
 
By all rights Emily was a stunning woman, elegant even, if you could get past the feral look in her eyes, and all of her scars, of course.
 
So, it seemed at odds with the route she was now choosing.
 
“Surely there are those you don’t wish to leave behind?” Hel inquired, not so much out of an interest in knowing, but rather in an interest in making sure she wasn’t doing any more damage than required.
 
For a long time Emily just sat there sipping on the cheap wine and thinking back on her recent past.  Because that was the only part of her past she ever cared to recall.
 
Finally, when her glass was empty she wiped the back of her hand over her mouth and said, “I’m sure.”
 
For Emily’s part the discussion had all been internal.  The goodbyes had already been said. 
 
In fact, she’d known from the second she’d walked into the disgusting little pub on the corner of Mads and Emblem that she would never see any of them ever again.
 
With a nod, Hel smiled her last smile of the night, and then slid a small black leatherbound book across the table at Emily.
 
“That’s everything you’ll need.  Those people will support your cause.  But take care, Emily…”
 
Hel paused then, as she finally released the book from the tips of her fingers.
 
“Every single one of them has an ulterior motive and an alternate end in sight.  What power you give them now they will try to use against you later.  It is their nature.  Every single one of them are survivors and intend to remain so.  You will never in your life meet a more dangerous group of people.”
 
Emily smiled for a second, but then her stomach turned rancid, and bile rose up in the back of her throat.
 
Because for a moment Emily had thought to chuckle, and state that couldn’t be possible. 
 
But then she suddenly realized with absolute horror, as she looked into the mysterious woman’s eyes, that she knew well enough the atrocities Emily had already suffered at the hands of some extremely dangerous folks.
 
“Every single one of them will be plotting every single day how to use any advantage towards their end.  But you are the only one that can succeed.  You must make certain of it.  Otherwise, we are all doomed.”
 
Emily didn’t understand the woman’s stake in all of this.  She seemed wealthy enough to be above it all if she wanted to be.  She wasn’t in the gutter starving like the rest of the people Emily had gathered to her cause.  No… this strange woman seemed almost pampered, by the care of her clothes, hair and skin.
 
But when Emily looked into the woman’s eyes, all she could see was suffering.  Lifetimes of suffering.
 
In fact, when Emily really looked… the woman’s eyes seemed to hold all the suffering of the world… all of it there… swirling in dark clouds at the center of the woman’s eyes.
 
“Now, go, before Jimmy decides to ask you on a date,” the woman who had never truly introduced herself remarked.
 
No fan of small talk, Emily instantly got up and went to the door.  But something in her made her turn around just as the door was closing behind her.
 
Back inside the dimly lit smoke-clouded room there was a sudden soft green glow, and then… just as the door sealed itself shut, screams from everyone inside.
 
 
 
TO BE CONTINUED



© Raena Exe 2023 
​*All rights reserved

Hel – Volume 3 (Part 2)
 
 
“There are so many evil people in the world.  I don’t know how we’re supposed to do anything but run and hide and hope for the best,” the shy ten-year-old said to her new doll later that night, after she’d been released from the closet her brother had locked her in while he’d gone to the skate park to smoke some weed with friends.
 
“I know you can’t fight ‘em all,” she told the Namatu the witch had given her.
 
“But if you could make my brother stop hurting me…” the little girl whispered in between sobs.
 
She’d grown accustomed to crying alone, you see, so it felt mighty odd to have the doll’s dim eyes watching her now.

Still… she hoped he saw, hoped he saw how much evil he’d put into the world… all that killing.  How it had changed her brother, who had been so much nicer before he’d gotten it into his head to become an assassin.
 
Her mother said it was just a phase and he’d eventually grow out of it.  But Jenny had seen Danny and his friends do the cruelest things, not just to her but to the squirrels in the park and other animals too, and it didn’t seem to Jenny you just grow out that kind of meanness.
 
Afterall, Jenny had met her fair share of mean adults; she imagined they had all started off just like Danny… playing with cars and Legos.  Then something had turned them… turned them to the dark side. 
 
Something had made them so angry they never could put it down again.
 
Jenny knew Danny was mad, mad about their father leaving for that stupid waitress who worked at the motel bar three blocks from her school.
 
Jenny knew Danny was scared too, scared that in a couple short years he’d be forced to get a job or go to college, and Danny sucked at math.  He’d failed basic algebra twice and now, as a junior, they were threatening he wouldn’t even graduate with his friends if he didn’t take summer school.
 
He was pissed too because his mom couldn’t afford braces, so he constantly got made fun of for his crooked teeth.
 
In fact, Jenny knew Danny hurt her the way he did because he was hurting too, and just like Jenny, Danny didn’t have anyone he could talk to. 
 
All he had were dreams of killing so many people everyone would finally respect him.
 
That’s how Danny had put it.  When he’d stashed away some bullets he’d taken from their father’s safe.
 
Danny scared Jenny. 
 
And not because he was always terrorizing her for fun.  But because Danny was so bitter and so angry at everyone, Jenny was sure it was just a matter of time before he did something serious.
 
Why else did he need that old gun?
 
“I don’t want him to hurt anyone,” Jenny whispered to the doll made to look like an indifferent killer.
 
“But I don’t want him to hurt either.”
 
You see, that’s the thing about little girls… the thing Baba Yaga had known all along…
 
They aren’t malevolent.  They aren’t motivated by greed.  They aren’t plotting and planning.  They simply want to love and be loved.
 
In fact, there is no heart more pure than that of a ten-year-old girl who’s never had it good.
 
“I need you to help my brother,” she told the hollow-eyed puppet.
 
“I need you to help save his life.”

TO BE CONTINUED


#TickTock
#Namatu
#HadensDream


© Raena Exe 2023 
​*All rights reserved

Hel - Volume 3 (Part 1)
 
 
Baba Yaga sat cross legged on the rug in front of the fire.  It was an old rug, worn thin in many places to the point holes were beginning to form.  But it was soft, and familiar, and it held a lot of power.
 
With a delicacy few could understand, the young woman who appeared no older than thirty-two began the slow and tedious business of creating a Namatu.  Or… a voodoo doll in modern terms.
 
It was a gift, meant for a young girl who had been wronged by a powerful man she herself could not get to.  So, Baba Yaga thought she would even the odds.
 
Hours and hours of meticulous work it took Baba to finish the small likeness of the lithe yet greasy man.  With his stringy black hair and tarantula like arms and legs, and his hollow eyes.
 
Those she’s saved for last, though.  Because that’s how you transfer a bit of soul into a doll, a doll that would provide a young girl with some much-needed justice.
 
“Deep,” the young woman with the flowing red hair chanted as she began to rhythmically rock back and forth.
 
“Deep from bone, deep… let it flow,” she whispered in her raspy voice.
 
It was like this with the old ones.  The ones who’d walked since time itself began.  No special sacrifice, no alter, not even a candle or a knife.  Just the will of a woman… or rather a creature… willing to reach all the way into the depths of her very soul to call upon the threads of time itself.
 
“Deep,” the wise woman of ancient creed intoned, again and again, over and over, as her naked body rocked with the rhythm of some celestial tune only she could hear.
 
When it was finished there was no burst of light and no great crescendo to mark the deed as done.
 
There was just the swelling of her heart and the throb of impulse deep in her belly.
 
Three days later, after the charm had time to set, Baba Yaga made a short trip across three thousand years and roughly forty-two-hundred miles.
 
“He will be your thrall, now and always,” the young woman told the young girl of ten.
 
“Thank you,” the young girl with the blonde curls said.  Then she looked down at the doll she held in her hand.  It was perfect, down to the man’s arrogant grin and his many guns.
 
“I would ask… but I already know,” the ancient woman remarked with a sad smile.  Then she patted the young girl on the head.
 
“Just remember, whatever you do can’t be undone.  It’s absolute.”
 
And with that the mystic evaporated into the darkness of the girl’s bedroom.
 
No evidence of her having been there remained.
 
Except for the doll, and the warning.
 
“Why did you ask for it?” the young girl’s best friend asked the very next day.
 
“Because Danny loves him and wants to be just like him.  And after every new movie he’s even worse… hitting me all of the time.”
 
(There was much more that Jenny wanted to tell her friend, so many things that Danny had done.  But ten-year-old girls don’t have words for such things.)
 
“Why don’t you just tell your mom?” the best friend asked, though she already knew.
 
Still, it is the way of the young to rip off bandages to expose any festering beneath.
 
But Becky knew what she’d asked had hurt her friend, even before she’d finished asking the question, and so she winced the same time Jenny did.
 
“She never believes me cuz he rarely leaves a mark.  Besides, she can’t afford a nanny… and I can’t go stay with my uncle ever again.”
 
From the look in Jenny’s eyes it was easy for Becky to recall all of the stories she’d heard about Jenny’s uncle Ben.
 
So, this time Becky bit her tongue, and then asked instead, “What does it do?”
 
With a smile reminiscent of a slave finally given a whip, ten-year-old Jenny firmly replied, “Anything I want him to do.”
 
 
 




© Raena Exe 2023 
​*All rights reserved

“Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.”   Jim Carroll

Part 2
 
 
Kyle had been rehearsing for days, and yet it still didn’t feel entirely natural, the way his service revolver felt as he pressed its cold barrel to the side of his warm head.
 
And it made him nervous, because he’d read about guys who had chickened out at the last second, guys who’d wound up blowing their jaws clean off – yet were still very much alive.  Alive and unable to speak or chew solid food ever again.
 
For a quick moment he considered putting the barrel into his mouth instead – that way he’d be sure to get the brainstem too.
 
It was one of those wet nights when the air itself hung in ribbons around the stale room.  But Kyle didn’t really notice the weather anymore.  Nor the fact he’d let the cockroaches take over the takeout from the day before that had gone uneaten on the cheap motel room table.
 
You see Kyle didn’t want his family to be the ones to find his body.  So instead, he had booked a seedy motel for the week.  Of course, he didn’t reckon he’d be needing the room that long but figured the extra funds would cover any cleaning expenses.
 
With a sad smile he considered moving to the tub, as to make it that much easier for the cleaning lady who would no doubt have to clean up after him.
 
‘Cleaning man’ now that’s something you never hear… Kyle pondered, as he thought back on his own mama, and how hard she’d worked at her custodian job at a local elementary school.  And how it hadn’t done her a bit of good when she’d gotten sick and had to retire early.
 
A lifetime of cleaning up after hers and everybody else’s kids, and she still didn’t have enough in savings to cover the meds, and the rent, and the food.
 
Kyle had wanted to help his mama, so he had joined the army.  But after three tours he’d come home with nothing but a death wish and a college fund he’d never get to use cuz of the non-stop PTSD.
 
But nobody wanted to hear about that these days.  Not even the folks down at the VA who had moved him from one understaffed clinic to the next, only to eventually tell him he would have to wait another six months to get the lumps in his throat looked at.
 
Now… it was all just too hard.  Too hard to keep going without any hope at all.
 
“We can be together,” the voice had told him… as it had wound its way through his mind at night, when long stretches of insomnia had plagued him.
 
And at first he had known it for what it was, a siren, who was trying to lure him to his death.
 
Some buddies had warned him of it.  How it hides until the darkest hours of night when it sings its sweet song of release… luring one into believing there is no hope left.  No hope at all.
 
“Just do it,” the voice taunted him from the darkness.
 
 
 
Part 3
 
 
“Stop him!” Gretchen screamed at the teenage ghost she was standing next to.
 
But the ghost just smiled a sad smile and waited.
 
“You have to stop him!” Gretchen begged, as she reached for the gun in his hand.
 
But she too was nothing more than a phantasm, so her hands just glided through him as though he were nothing but air.
 
“You can’t let him,” Gretchen moaned as if she felt every inch of the man’s anguish.
 
That’s when the beautiful phantom turned and said with a shrug, “free will is the ultimate bitch”.
 
A moment later Kyle Richard’s body slumped forward and fell lifelessly to the ground.
 
“She’s not for you,” the phantom at Gretchen’s side said then, as the man’s ghost drifted up and out of its body.
 
“Pardon?” the puzzled man’s ghost inquired.
 
“That voice you hear.  It’s not for you,” the blonde in the pixie cut told the man in desert fatigues.
 
“I wasn’t sure,” he said rather confused.
 
“Who are you?” he asked then, as if he had been expecting someone else.
 
“We’re the brute squad,” the pixyish woman remarked with a wide grin.
 
“Pardon?” the polite soldier asked, the heaviness of hurt still very much evident in his voice.
 
“Too many folks are dying, Kyle.  Too many by far.  And I think you can help.  I think you and others like you can make a difference.  Will you come with us, Kyle?  Will you help us fight the darkness that’s spreading?”
 
Sergeant Kyle Richards looked from the young woman who spoke to the middle-aged woman dressed only in a long T-shirt, a look of utter confusion marring his normally quite handsome face.
 
“But who are you?” he asked again, hoping this time to get a proper answer.
 
Hel leaned forward then and reaching up on her tiptoes whispered into his ear, “I’m the justice you prayed for every night before you fell asleep.”
 
And then she smiled a huge smile and planted a large kiss on his cheek.
 
“I’m building an army to help me save as many souls as I can.  Will you help?  Will you help me get justice for all of the soldiers they let die?”
 
Kyle thought about it for only a quick second before he snapped to attention and saluted the young woman.
 
“Ma’am, if your intentions are stopping what just happened to me from happening to anyone else – consider me in.”
 
 
 
 
(to be cont.)
 
 


© Raena Exe 2023 
​*All rights reserved

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.” Salman Rushdie
 
Part 1
 
 
“Personally I’m surprised she waited this long to do it,” a sallow-faced man with grey curls and a square head said, as he leaned across the desk of his subordinate.
 
A subordinate that scared the living shit out of him.
 
“I mean, really.  What does a woman like that even have to live for?  Coming in every day to a tiny windowless cupboard of a room only to toil away at a thankless job where we never once respected her.  Just to go home each night feeling less than the day before?”
 
It had been a rhetorical question, at least the derpy man with the bland clothes and the too-well rehearsed laugh hoped.
 
But his henchman (and somehow boss) just smiled a self-satisfying smile as she flipped a mop of dirty uncombed hair around for effect.
 
On the inside though… she was smiling.  After all it had been her who had let the fox into the henhouse in the first place, as it were.
 
“I mean… the way you shut her down over just mentioning PTSD, and then the way you fed her to the wolves when she was at her most vulnerable, ALL while knowing she didn’t have the funds to fight us in court… BRILLIANT! I say!  Just brilliant,” the hockey loving imp remarked, just loud enough so his personal assistant couldn’t hear.
 
I mean… this man’s only skill was being two-faced, getting people to believe the Kool-Aid is real and not tainted with life sucking properties.  Of course, he was super duper good at it, considering the practice he’d had schmoozing all the rich white folks who just loved to hear him talk about inclusion and diversity.
 
“I am honestly so glad that spoiled entitled princess is dead,” the man finally said, as he once again envisioned the bookish woman who had occupied the tiny closet of a room across from his large and spacious office.
 
But Darla couldn’t be provoked into conversation just then, because she knew… she knew that whatever is done in darkness will soon be brought to the light – one way or another.
 
And because Darla fully believed in ghosts, and demons, and things that go bump in the night.  And she knew the small, derpy man who loved to pretend he was tough but fair, was just too stupid to believe it himself.
 
Darla smiled as the man they all called Lumpy left, because she hated him.  Always.  Like an itch you can’t relieve.  Hated him so much it had become a reflex to smile whenever he left.
 
But like trying to drown a cat, the man had just kept popping back up – despite the many boobytraps she’d set for him.
 
However, Darla wasn’t nearly as concerned about Gretchen's ghost just then, as she was about the small man who had an even smaller sense of ethics than her. 
 
Because if he could so easily dance on Gretchen’s grave… what would he do on hers?
 
At the thought Darla’s smile instantly transformed into that of a predator sizing up its competition.
 
Which always makes for an interesting day…
 
(Or so at least Darla thought that particular day.)
 
 
 
 
 
(to be cont.)



© Raena Exe 2023 
​*All rights reserved

“They say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a scorned woman’.  Funny that…”  Raena Exe
 
 
Part 1
 
She sat naked from the waist down, staring out the window, thinking about odds and chances, and the likelihood of death.

Well… of course she was about to die.  She’d known that for a very long time.  Only… now she was determined to be in charge… of the how.
 
You see, everything else had been decided for her the entirety of her life.  The battles, the victories (few as they were), even the future she’d envisioned.  It had all been scripted by blind fools who only ever saw what used to be.
 
She often joked with herself that she’d been born way too soon – because she knew the march of time would eventually bring most folks around to seeing things the way she saw them now – that a long-sanctioned tyranny had doomed her and those just like her to less. 
 
To a famine of spirit, mind, and soul.
 
Then she remembered the dreams she often had as a child.
 
“Always alone,” she whispered into the ether that had been her only source of comfort these many long and lonely years.
 
The dreams, you see, had always been the same omens of loneliness.  Forever dooming her to going it alone. 
 
Until the day he would come and collect her.
 
You see, he’d been her only friend throughout the fifty years she’d shuffled across the planet.  Always drifting like a wayward seed, with no origin and no final destination. 
 
A random bit of dandelion tuft blowing in the wind.
 
But now that was done. 
 
Now another road beckoned her, through the long hours that were stretched impossibly thin by the endless pain. 
 
Now, as the time to shed all the things that burdened her crept closer – she wondered one last time… what might have been.
 
Then, without so much as a tear in her eye, she turned and looked at the items she’d collected on a nearby table; a bottle of pills, a loaded gun, a mirror, a copy of the last book she’d written – sprawled open to page number 75, and a knife.
 
He’d told her it was her choice - whichever way she chose to go would be fine with him.  Just so long as she did… finally join him.  Her ghost.
 
After all, this was what she’d been waiting for – for him to finally come and claim what was his.
 
Once more, she looked out the window, because honestly the choice had already been made. 
 
Made a long, long time ago and reinforced ever since - in her every imagining of this moment.
 
Without looking, a cold hand wrapped icy fingers around the sharp knife.
 
“Just a tiny little nick…” she whispered to no one at all.
 
 
Part 2
 
 
 
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice said from nowhere at all.
 
“Pardon?” the woman asked of the empty space all around.
 
“He’s not what you think,” the voice told the woman who didn’t really care.
 
“So?” the woman asked, as the knife went limp in her hand.
 
“He’s not your long lost love, calling to you from the grave,” the very feminine voice informed the suicidal woman.
 
“Honestly, he could be Satan for all I care.”
 
“Be careful what you say,” the voice intoned in a very menacing way.
 
The woman laughed, and then she slumped back in her chair, as if already defeated.
 
A moment later a young woman of no more than nineteen years appeared out of nowhere.
 
“You’re younger than I imagined,” the woman remarked dryly, not really caring much for the conversation or the interruption.
 
“I come as I come.  For some I am old and ugly and mean.”
 
This made the woman laugh.
 
“Am I already dead?” the woman asked, a sudden light flickering in her once emerald eyes.
 
“Oh yes,” the young woman remarked.  “You were right – just a nick – and it was done.”
 
“So… I guess that makes you too late,” the woman retorted with a somewhat laugh.
 
“No… I’m just on time,” the young woman with the sinister smile said.  And then she pulled the woman by the hand and replied…
 
“If you had chosen to go with him you would have been enthralled.  Lost, forever beyond my help.”
 
“But instead?” the woman who was trained to see every possible motive (hidden or not) inquired.
 
“Instead, you get to come with me so I can teach you – the ways of Hel.”
 
The woman smiled broadly at that, and then gave a simple nod.  But then, as a thought hit her, she planted her feet and refused to budge.
 
“But what if I don’t wanna come back?” she asked, her voice suddenly filled with trepidation and dread.
 
“Well I guess you should have thought of that before you made yourself dead.”
 
 
 
 
(To be cont.)
 
 
 
 

© Raena Exe 2023 
​*All rights reserved

"The plethora of buttholes on Twitter aught to show you just how effective mass social mind-control really is, my friend.  Why, all that unregulated access to porn combined with our outlawing of sexual education... why... of course we've got our whore class right where we want them... with our fucking 'All-Nude-Barely-Legal' strip clubs on every other corner..."  Emily joked, in a tone she hoped was a decent mockery of the new Texas Governor's overly worked southern accent.

"You never talk about your past..." a young man's voice remarked, from the other side of her bed.

Emily, however, didn't respond, instead she just took to once again planting little kisses along his lower stomach.

"No one knows you... not really," he groaned at the same time she took his half-hard-cock into her hot, moist mouth, instantly making it as stiff as it could possibly get.

"Some are saying..." he moaned, so pathetically Emily knew instantly the young man had been tasked with the asking.  And that he wasn't gonna relent... just because she needed some playful distraction.

"Some are saying I'm not really Emily at all?  That I'm just pretending to be her in order to carry on the fight?  Is that it?"  Emily asked as she wiped some precum off of her light pink lips.

"Something like that."

"Does it matter?  I mean, really?  If I'm not her, at the end of the day? If I get the job done?  Or perhaps if it's the next woman who steps up that gets it done?  Does it really matter?  Who wins... so long as it's us - in the end?"

The man was barely thirty, but he had always taken top marks in school, so he knew he wasn't dumb.

Still... this notion of hers hadn't been something he'd put much mind to.

"I don't... well... I guess I don't know," the IT major confessed, as he took up the charge of planting a minefield of kisses all along the inside of her left thigh.

"It doesn't.  Because this fight isn't about me.  And it'll never be about me.  That's why, from now on - I'm a ghost... the idea of a woman in power... but no one will ever know exactly who... That way..."

But Emily never finished.  Instead, Ivan remarked, "That's why we walk side-by-side," as he suddenly joined the conversation, as he continued to thrust inside of Emily from behind.

"So that if one of us falls - another can pick up the slack," he growled, in a such playful way as to make Emily giggle, and then she giggled again when Ivan grabbed the newcomer by a fistful of hair and pulled him in for a long an luscious kiss.

"There are no betters here.  Just us.  Just us sexy rebels..."


X

© Raena Exe 2023
​*All rights reserved

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”  Hermann Hesse


Emily smiled as she fell, long enough to totally disappear from sight at any rate. 

But her smile was long gone by the time she landed with a loud grunt on the deck of the large stealth drone which caught her half-way to the valley floor. 

At the same time the drone released an extremely convincing dummy of her which hit the valley floor a few moments later.  Just after the drone and its cargo had vanished from sight, thanks to some fiberoptic stealth technology.

Emily smacked her back hard upon landing, instantly getting the wind knocked out of her.  So it took her a long tenuous moment to catch her breath.

But this was it. 

This is how life works for folks like her.  On-the-fly reboot - rebuild - destroy - walk away - never a gaddamn goodbye.

A survival pattern perhaps - like bees grown too big for the hive.  Rebooting is just a natural way of things, she supposed.    Or so at least it felt to Emily.  For Emily, rebooting was survival.

Reboot on the fly, don't ask why.  (No one to ask why.)

Besides, the answers are never what you want to hear anyhow.

And quite frankly she knew it was gonna be these very same bumps and bruises that were gonna see her biggest dreams eventually come true. 

Because of the fuel it gave her.

"A goddamn spiritual atomic bomb... "

isn't that what her shrink at the hospital had called her?  A spiritual light?

Whatever it was.  Emily had it now.  Fused into skin, bone, marrow and blood.  This was who she was now.  A tool, much like a pen, by which others would become free. 

And goddamn, if that weren't somethin' worth fake dying for, she didn't know what was.

Old Bright Eyes taking the wrap for her murder... well, that was just icing on the motherfucking cake.


...

#EmancipatedEmily
#TheBeginingofEverything
#MotivesMatter


© Raena Exe 2023
​*All rights reserved

Emily always knew it was going to end like this.  That neither would be free, while the other exists.

"I'd point the gun at your heart, if I thought you had one," she told the man who had laughed at every ounce of her pain.

His smile his only reply.

Emily turned away, turned and looked out over the great expanse of the valley below.

She hadn't the heart to tell him she'd lured him here to this particular location on purpose - for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with him.  His ego being what it is.

"I never meant for it..." he began, but never got to finish.

Because the look in Emily's eyes as she turned back to him, told him another syllable from his goddamn mouth would only speed them both to the end that shone brightly in her eyes.

"I should have known," she began as she once again took aim right between his eyes - where the man's third-eye shoulda been.

"I reckon we were doomed to end this way from the very beginning.  I always saw it coming, from as young as I can recall... in all those fucking dreams... those goddamn eyes... always reflecting back to me this inevitable end."

There wasn't an ounce of wobble in her voice, and for that Emily was glad.

"The saddest part... is you'll leave here thinking it's you who's finally free."

And with that, Emily turned on her bare feet and ran... ran and then leapt out into the broad sky, as if its waiting arms were just aching to hold her once more. 

The only arms... she'd ever known she'd be safe in.


And somewhere off in the distance a radio played a Kaleo song... "I want more..."

© Raena Exe 2023
​*All rights reserved