SubTerrain » fiction

Chance

By Sandra Alland

One day they were standing outside the annoying theatre where they worked, smoking a horrible menthol cigarette they’d bummed off a horrible patron, when a pale guy with black spiked hair, black acid wash jeans and a black Metallica T-shirt came up to them and said in an almost undetectable Scottish accent, “You look cool. Want tae run away with the circus?”

They pushed their glasses up onto their not-so-pale Canadian nose, and exhaled.

They did want to run away with the circus. Only that morning, in the middle of yet another excruciating staff meeting, they’d thought those exact thoughts. When one of the seven cis white men who were their co-workers described a visiting artist as “the woman with big tits who dresses like a whore,” they’d thought:
“Even the worst sideshow would be better than this. I would eat bugs and lie on a bed of nails to escape bad plays and misogyny and racist audiences with also no taste.”

Metallica guy was looking at them expectantly. “You’d have to eat bugs and lie on a bed of nails, mind.”

From issue #66

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