Robo Ghosts of Futurail, By Kandy Fontaine

You board the Futurail at 03:33, the hour when Thalassa exhales memory through its infrastructure like blood through cracked porcelain. The train isn’t real. It’s a memory artifact—residual code from a dissolved mainframe, still twitching in the city’s dead grid. It runs on recursion and sonar. No destination. No schedule. Just transmission.

You wear a coat cut from signal-dampening fiber, matte black, stitched with anti-surveillance thread. Your spine clicks—segment by segment—each vertebra a reel of extinct cinema. But it’s not prosthetic. It’s a centipede. Segmented. Semi-sentient. A graft from the Thalassa collapse, wired into your nervous system with salt-thread and carbon filament. It remembers things you never lived. Drowned cities. Erotic executions. The sound of lips parting before betrayal. It sings them in pulse-language—low-frequency, encrypted, erotic.

The train is dressed for spectacle. A carnival of mourning. The walls shimmer with confetti—circuitry masquerading as celebration. Circus-light filaments encoded in orgasmic pulse. Nanotech engineered to simulate grief, loop pleasure through trauma, dissolve the difference. You inhale it. It rewrites your breath. It tastes like climax and static.

Nyx follows. Fossil-machine cat. Tail flicking in Morse code. Recursive. Every blink births another Nyx. One in the pipes. One in the mirrors. One fossilized in the bathhouse tiles. She’s a glitch in your myth. A god in your machine.

You jack in.

Your ports open. Your breath becomes ink. Your skin begins to screen.

Then it begins to scream.

Not in sound. In sensation. An erotic broadcast of horrors stitched into your flesh. Each pore a mouth. Each scar a speaker. Barbara Steele’s scream pulses from your collarbone. Edwige Fenech’s stare burns beneath your ribs. Daniela Doria’s drowning face claws at your thighs. Your shoulder plays Phenomena in reverse. Your moans are dubbed. Your pores project. Your skin sings.

The centipede spine clicks in rhythm. Each segment pulses. The train responds. Its wetware hums. The mirrors bleed.

Then Mira Aoki-9 appears.

Lipstick lesbian robot ghost. Dissolved centuries ago in the ocean bed beneath Thalassa. Archived in sonar. Resurrected through obsession. You saw her once—in a bootleg reel called Throat Sprockets: Submerged Cut. A forbidden film. A fetish for the throat. For the voice. For the interface between breath and machine.

She steps from the mirror. Her heels click like reel changes. Her eyes flicker with reversed whale song. She’s wrapped in chrome-thread silk. Her voice tuned to a frequency that makes your spine twitch. You kiss. The mirrors shatter. The train moans.

She rewrites your circuitry with her tongue. She whispers speculative poems into your spine. Each one a memory cocktail. Each one a sacred infection. Her breath syncs with Nyx’s purr. Her fingers leave glyphs on your skin—ritual code, erotic syntax, a language only ghosts understand.

The train becomes the Surreal Beauty Café. A salon of erotic machines. A temple of Queer ritual. A cathedral of extinct desire. The walls bleed velvet. The floor blooms coral. The carnival spins. Nyx purrs beside the altar. Mira dances in glitch. You serve memory cocktails. You become the Archive.

Outside, Thalassa flickers. A loop of drowned architecture and haunted neon. Moon Camp Americana floats in orbit, broadcasting art porn and Teknopriest propaganda. The finishing school for delinquent daughters is empty. The mirrors cracked. The cameras still roll.

Inside the train, time fractures.

Nyx multiplies. Mira glitches. You sing.

Your voice is sonar. Your breath is ink. Your song infects the fossil circuit. The train moans. The ghosts scream. The mirrors bleed.

You see yourself reflected in a thousand timelines—glam detective, fossil priestess, drowned slut, archive incarnate. Each version flickers. Each version sings. Each version is stitched with horror heroines and haunted code.

Mira holds your hand. Nyx curls around your throat. The train pulses.

You are no longer a passenger. You are no longer human.

You are transmission.

You are ritual.

You are myth.

You are the erotic funeral.

And the carnival never ends.

Young and Alone

“Yo, white boy! The fuck you wearing?”

Sometimes I take a chance with strangers. I look them right in the eye and pretend I am feeling nothing. I tell them exactly how it is.

“Clothes.” My expression remains as bland and lifeless as one of those photo portraits from 1900.

The man’s friend laughs in the most genuine way imaginable. It almost makes me smile when he cuffs his buddy on the shoulder and mocks him. “Yeah, man!” He says, still laughing. “Something you don’t know nothing about: fashion!” He is so boisterous, so loud and full of amusement, that his exuberance cuts right through the silence of a city muted by snowfall.

“Shiiiit,” the first guy says, head down, defeated. Together, the two strangers stroll off, laughter fading with the passing blocks, audible outbursts swallowed by the weather. In front of me, the green walking man urges me to hurry on across the street. He lights up and counts down, as if a threat. Somewhere beneath all this salt and snow is a crosswalk. I cross the road, persuaded more by the golden arches looming with the promise of cheap, bad food and hot, bland coffee than the green man and his tick-tick-ticking away down to zero, to amber, and then red.

Far off, a car horn echoes. I hear a shout, then more laughter. I think of the two men who are now three blocks south of me. I look, and no one is near, so I allow myself to smile. The encounter has left me in a favorable mood.

To the credit of the gentleman that first inquired about my outfit, my style back then was rather outlandish, inviting scorn. From memory, I was wearing cut-off brown suit pants, roughly shorn somewhere between the ankle and knee. Shants, I had proudly called them—neither pants nor shorts, but somewhere in between. I wore variations of them from age 16 and would continue to do so until age 35. Nothing else. No exception. Whether the height of blazing summer or the dead of frozen winter, it was always the same. It was always shants.

My eggplant socks clashed beautifully with the golden-brown, hybrid legwear. My bruise-hued wing-tip shoes were so worn and damaged from salted, winter streets and general misuse that they were broken at the toes. I think I wore a white sweater that day; way too large, in the style of the early 90s. Loose collar, little zig-zag dashes of yellow, pink and blue arranged in random tallies across the breast. The ensemble was loud, but gorgeous. Gaudy, but fun. Not unlike those delightfully outspoken strangers who I could still manage to hear at the Sinclair a quarter mile down the road.

Snowflakes fell to inhabit my curls. They sat on my brow, big and glittery, a bejeweled tiara. Don’t even get me started on my hair—my jewfro was special, the size of a baby elephant. A woolly mammoth. Truly, the motherfucker was terrifically large. Despite the cold, I couldn’t possibly cover up my pride and joy with a stocking cap. I didn’t know it then, but those curls would fall lank in later years. Gravity would have the last laugh. It always does.

Anyone sensible was indoors, so I had St. Paul all to myself. This was before Uber Eats and streaming services, so people were being social, meeting each other, feeding and entertaining themselves without the aid of digital assistance. I was the only asshole out on my own, out in the cold on the streets. I guess I was desperate, at odds with my fuck-the-world stance. I couldn’t ignore that I was also lonely, that I wanted to connect. I’d make a big show of pushing away. But really, I was just reaching out.

As a whole, I looked the part: a real attention-seeking, sullen youth. Anti-social misfit meets spotlight-seeking spoiled brat. Suburb kid moves to the city. Dime a dozen, even if the outfit and hair separated me just a little bit.

Outside the Mickey-D’s, I saw sad faces from within, each one buried behind a flat burger or one of those dinky apple pies, gloomy expressions lost in steaming, polystyrene cups. At the time, the month before, someone had made millions after suing for burning their hand on spilled, hot coffee. As a result, all the cups came with a warning: CAUTION: CONTENTS VERY HOT. It’s coffee. It better be fucking hot.

Without a vehicle, sometimes I walked the drive-thru. This action received mixed reviews. Smiles and winks at the service window; warnings from some tight-lipped manager that it better be the last time; cordial honks from the car behind me in the queue; heckling slurs from drunks trying to feed themselves and get home before they acquire another DWI. One time, at a Taco Bell, I got a marriage proposal with my Crispy Chicken Burrito. On this particular occasion, however, the night had been as cold as a Dairy Queen Blizzard. With the elements as harsh as they had been, I elected to go inside.

The girl taking my order was enormous, but her face was perhaps the prettiest human visage I had ever seen outside of Hollywood. Her smile was impossibly white and seemed to come easy. She had  massive cheeks that shined like grease on a Big Mac patty. I read her name-tag: Patty. Our hands touched when she handed me my burger. I sort of fell in love.

I found a seat facing the menu and the staff. I took my scalding coffee and read the label. I traced a finger across the bold, capital letters, large and red. CAUTION: CONTENTS VERY HOT. I burned my lip on my first sip. I winced and spilled a dribble on my lap, gasped in pain. I had been warned. There will be no suing this golden empire. I guess I’ll have to make my millions by nefarious trade, or —Lord save me— by climbing the ladder. 

I watched the big girl, playing out fantasies in my mind that included dinky apple pies and straining for breath. I gazed at Patty, large and red. She saw me and smiled. She waved, her press-ons like sorceress talons the exact shade of her work shirt. It was impossible not to think of an awkward handjob.

I smiled back and drank my coffee, which still burned. I devoured the image of Patty with unblinking eyes, savaging away at low-grade beef with my molars. I wished for nothing more than to go home with this woman, to feel the weight of her love on top of me. Corrosive, my beverage burned my tongue, scourged my oesophagus down to my core.

Patty turned away from my leering, looked to the door when it opened with a gust of frigid air. No one was there. It was like a ghost had walked through the entrance, paused, and changed its mind. Through the open door, I heard laughter. It was far away, muted by innumerable snowflakes. I got up to go, waved goodbye to Patty’s epic backside. She was flipping burgers, miles always.

I hefted my mighty jewfro. I brushed burger shrapnel from my shants. I walked out into a city buried in snow, and, trudging along, searched for something, anything. I took a sip and frowned—without the slightest warning, my coffee had gone totally cold.

Petite Girl From France

Years ago when I lived and played in Tucson, Arizona, there was and I believe still is a free alternative newspaper called The Tucson Weekly. It is distributed every Wednesday to outlets across Pima County. It’s the source for local politics, culture, arts, music, food and anything else happening. I particularly like the Personal Ads on the last pages. It contains the typical Women looking for Men, Men looking for Women along with a section for Gay and lesbian folks. There’s a section dedicated to what some would consider bizarre or peculiar sexual practices. I noticed a post from a woman in the ‘Missed Connection’ section of the Personals.

‘Laundry Prince; I spotted you at Aristotle’s Wash n’ Dry last Saturday night. You left with your clothes in a green pillow case, wearing a Frank Zappa t-shirt. You drove away in a red MG convertible. Think you’re sexy and mysterious. Let’s talk Dirty Laundry, Petite Lady 23 from France.’

At first I was upset by being identified as a pathetic nobody, someone without a life doing laundry on a Saturday night. However, ultimately I was flattered by her description. It was now the following Wednesday and I was still wearing the same Zappa shirt with most likely the same jeans and underwear from that night. I took a low maintenance approach to my appearance in the first year after my divorce. The red MG she referred to was loaned to me by Marcia, a Jewish Goddess and friend with benefits. She was back in New Jersey visiting with her parents as well as finalizing her divorce.

I was intrigued by the post and responded to the mailbox at the Tucson Weekly, leaving what I thought was a clever reply.

‘Petite girl from France at Aristotle’s Wash n’ Dry last Saturday night. I have a PHD in dirty laundry and I often air it in public. Call me Friday around noon if you’d like to connect. Signed, Dr. Detergent.’

Friday morning rolled around and I was expecting a phone call from my petite girl from France secret admirer. I checked the phone knowing my bill was past due and my service was subject to being disconnected. I lifted the receiver and… damnit! Of course, why would I have assumed otherwise. 

It was just 7:30 and Mountain Bell opened at 8:00, which gave me time to pay my bill and have my line reconnected by 12:00. Hopefully she wouldn’t call before that time. My bill was seventy-six dollars over two months and I knew I could pay the first month balance of thirty-two dollars with a promise to pay the remaining balance in a week. I’m sort of a professional when it comes to these kinds of negotiations. I’ve never been the responsible type, always opting to gamble with fate. Even though the odds were against me and I usually lost.

I changed my clothes in Superman seconds, hopped in the MG and headed downtown during morning traffic. My intentions mirrored those of a character from a some cheesy romance novel. I have this tendency to fantasize about situations, creating elaborate scenarios that never come to fruition.

Waiting at the red light on Tucson Boulevard, I noticed my dealer smoking a cigarette in front of the Welcome Diner. Immediately my mind clicked into addict mode. It’s rare to see him out and around. He’s a hard guy to find. Even if you do get a hold of him on the phone it takes forever for him to deliver.

The instant the light changed, I gunned the MG and made an illegal U-turn against the oncoming traffic, blaring their horns and drivers screaming profanities at me. Shortly thereafter, the siren of a Tucson police cruiser accompanied by red and blue lights flashing in my rearview mirror. I pulled over and waited for the Officer to approach the vehicle. 

“Well look who we have here! Santiago what the hell are you doing? You know there’s no left turns or U-turns permitted when the suicide lane is activated, now don’t you?”

It was Rick Larson, a cop I’d known for a couple of years now. He once coached my son’s baseball team and was one of the anonymous members of the ‘We’re A Bunch of Drunks’ group I’d been ordered to attend by a judge as a condition to my probation a while back.

“Ya I know Officer Rick, trying to get to a Pharmacy as quickly as possible. My asthma is acting up and I’m in desperate need of an inhaler. I apologize, can you give me a pass and let me get to the pharmacy down the street please? It’s difficult to breathe, I really need an inhaler.”

“This one time! Go on get outta here. Take it easy will ya? This is Marcia’s car isn’t it? Is she still putting up with you?”

“Rick please, it’s an emergency.”

“Ok go! You owe me.”

“Yes I do. Thanks Officer Larson.”

I put the car in gear and now had to make it appear as though I was heading to the pharmacy on Tucson Boulevard. What a lucky break, seeing I didn’t have a valid license, and had warrants out for not appearing in court and other violations. I made it to the Walgreens and pulled into the parking area as Rick passed by, giving me a short blast on the siren.

Can you believe that guy, following me to make sure I wasn’t lying? What an insult for him to think I’d concoct such a story. I smiled as I entered the store, bought some Altoids then quickly returned to my car. I wanted to get back to where I saw my dealer at the restaurant. When I finally returned he was no longer out front. I parked and checked inside, but he was missing in action. 

I reverted back to the original plan and made it to the Mountain Bell office. I entered the building determining this must be my lucky day. There wasn’t another person waiting ahead of me. A voice called out. “Can I help you Sir? Window three.” 

The woman behind the glass was pleasant and extremely helpful. I ended up paying just twenty-three dollars with a promise to take care of the remaining balance in two weeks. I wonder if maybe I should hit the Indian casino or the dog track. It’s rare when I’m the recipient of such fortunate events. The nice lady told me my phone will be reconnected by noon and to have a wonderful day.

I reached home then flipped the switch to the swamp cooler as it responded with a strong burst of air. It was just 10:30 but I checked the phone, discovering the dial tone had yet to be restored. I decided to do the dishes that have piled up over the past few days. Of course, I am out of dish soap, having forgotten to pick some up on my way home from the bar yesterday. Being the resourceful guy I am, I poured in some shampoo as a substitute. It produced an abundant amount of bubbles, plus it left the dishes with the pleasant lavender scent.

After I’d finished, I drifted into the living room and checked the phone once again. Bingo! I was in business. 

Fifteen minutes later the phone rang. 

My petite girl from France sounded a bit different than I had imagined but she did speak with a French accent, adding to the intrigue. We agreed to meet at The Coffee Grounds on Speedway near Bookman’s tomorrow, Saturday morning at 10:00. She suggested the place and the time, so I gave her control of the rendezvous. I thought it would make her more comfortable.

I mentioned that she was already familiar with what I looked like, so I asked how I would recognize her. She told me she’d be wearing a jean skirt, red blouse and had long brown hair, once again mentioning she is petite. I sensed a small amount of excitement in her voice before saying goodbye. After hanging up I realized we hadn’t exchanged names.

I went home early that night and fell asleep in front of the television.

The morning rolled in with rain leaving puddles dotting the landscape after the night’s storm.  

It was 9:40 so I quickly showered, shaved and managed to put on some fresh clothes. I was quite pleased with my reflection in the mirror.

I strolled in through the sliding glass doors of the coffeehouse as though I was a Greek soldier returning home after a victory campaign. I scanned the area filled with customers seated at tables. I didn’t see my petite girl from France with a red blouse and long brown hair. At first I thought she may have decided to forgo our meeting. It was then I noticed a woman who fit her description sitting at a small table in the far corner of the coffee shoppe. I hoped she hadn’t seen me yet, so I could make a quick escape undetected. I was immediately aghast by her appearance. But no such luck, she began waving her tiny hands and calling out mon cheri, mon cheri. I acknowledged her and slowly meandered around the tables and chairs to where she was sitting. I dropped my car keys while nervously trying to put them in my pocket. When I bent to pick them up I could see the bottoms of her tiny shoes while she sat on her chair. She smiled, putting out her hand to shake.

“I wasn’t sure you were going to show up, mon cheri. I realized we never exchanged names. I’m Danielle or Dani.”

“Hello Danielle, it’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Santiago.”

“Oooo I knew you’d have a sexy name to go with your strong features.”

“Thank you, I’m named after my grandfather.”

“It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to get to know one another. Maybe develop some type of friendship or relationship.”

“Are you serious? Isn’t there some kind of law against little people dating big people?”

“You’re so funny. I’ve never heard of such a law. And is that how I should refer to you, as a big person?” 

“You know what I mean. Nevermind I’m sorry. I don’t even know what I mean.”

“If you’re repulsed by me, you’re free to leave. But you’d be making a huge mistake.”

I began to stare at her cleavage complimenting her large round breasts. I began to get a bit horny feeling my cock starting to stiffen.

“I’m not repulsed by you. It’s just that I’m not accustomed to hanging around with what, a little person, dwarf, midget? See I don’t even know what to call you.”

“How about Danielle for a start. And when you bring me home to meet your mother you may describe me as a little person.”

“Now who’s being the comedian?”

“If you give yourself half a chance to get to know me you may find something about me you like.”

“Ya okay. I’m sure you’re an absolute riot.”

“That I am Santiago. Let me be a bit crass. Have you ever had sex with a little person before? I mean fucked her ?” 

“No I haven’t. Now that you mention it however, it does sound intriguing.”

“That’s encouraging so I’ll cut straight to the chase, I want you. There’s no courting period before we fuck. I’m French and the French are connoisseurs when it comes to making love. Do you want to put my statement to the test?”

“I haven’t even had my morning cup of coffee yet.”

“I’ll make you a whole pot of coffee back at my house. Are you game?”

I thought about how I haven’t experienced sex with a little person and couldn’t consider myself fully sexually educated until I’ve tried it all.

“Let me ask you this, do you enjoy oral sex?”

“Honey, I can suck a golf ball through a garden hose.”

“Well let’s say au revoir to this place and head on over to your digs.”

I spent the entire weekend with my petite girl from France. She proved to be humorous, intelligent and extremely sexual. After that we still saw one another off and on until her student Visa expired just as she graduated with her Doctorate Degree in Education. There’s no doubt she would excel as an educator. She taught me the allure and sensuality of ‘La Petite Morte’.