The Dark Discord of Ravensbane and Kim (sample)
“Ugh, it’s freakin’ hot in here,” said the girl with half her face torn off. “Mm,” agreed the evil Queen of Hearts, absently scratching her back with her scepter. The hotel ballroom was in fact air-conditioned, but convention attendance and concurrent body heat had exceeded expectations. The resulting odor was more or less familiar to Ravensbane and Kim, who were used to navigating large crowds of sweaty people in costumes lacking decent ventilation. “Ugh,” said Ravensbane, again. This was not the ladies’ first con, which made them very comfortable in judging the event: Hoboken Horror-Con sucked, it was decided, but, as was often said about golf, the worst day at a con was better than the best day at work. Although Kim, despite her regal getup, was working, and attending on the company dime. Ravensbane—not her real name—absently picked at her makeup. “Hey. Dealer tables, dead ahead. Look at the Doc Ock.” She pointed at a portly chap with four dryer hoses attached to his back. “He’s never gonna make it down the aisle.” “Maybe he’s not looking to get married,” said Kim. Ravensbane shot her friend a sideways smirk, not that it registered well beneath layers of blood. “It’s brides who walk down the aisle, jackass.” “Thank you, Rave. I never knew that.” “It’s, like, he knows it’s a horror con and he’s dressed as Dr. Octopus anyway,” Rave went on. “He probably just has the one costume and wears it to everything. Anime, sci-fi. I bet he brings that shit to Harry Potter night or whatever.” “He goes to Atlanta,” Kim snickered, “and wears it with all the pretty ladies doing Gone with the Wind.” “Shut up. You know about those people?” Kim nodded. Her spiky crown bobbed. “Guess what they call themselves.” “Slaveholders?” “Windies.” Rave laughed so hard that the stray latex bits hanging from her face wobbled. Kim checked her phone and said she’d better head to the Women Write Comics panel. It was one of her assignments. “You don’t have to come to that if you don’t want,” she said. “No, I want to,” said Rave, and she gladly followed behind. Hoboken Horror-Con sucked, but that was okay with Ravensbane and Kim; they were made-up, wigged-out and dressed to the nines, and they were together, and it was everything.
Ravensbane and Timeshaper (now known as Kim Wells) became best friends forever in fifth grade, when Rave’s family moved down to Jersey from Maine. Their rich fantasy life and co-dependent stand against suburban alienation was, they would realize in hindsight, not unique, but at the time it meant a lot—and still did. Neither could articulate how they’d become friends, how Rave had been absorbed into Kim’s group, how the other members of the group had faded out across the years. Nor could either quite chart how their postgrad years had easily dragged them back into their mutual gravitational pull. It just was the way that things were.
The Women Write Comics panel was held in a conference room with a whiteboard; Ravensbane and Kim could see the remnants of the last panel’s use of the whiteboard, wiped away but still somehow readable as negative space. Kim delicately scratched at her porcelain-white makeup around a heart-shaped beauty mark she’d placed. She was always one to pick a ‘pretty’ costume, but then—Rave conceded this—she was the prettier girl of the pair, blonde with a pointy little nose, “at least an 8, a convention 9,” as Rave had once put it in a jocular mood. “Itchy?” Rave asked her. Kim shrugged in the affirmative, then gestured at the women in chairs. “I hate being treated like a niche, we’ve seen all these people before.—Hey, did you know that women write comics?” she asked in derisive singsong. “They do!” “Quit complaining. You’re our free ride.” Kim worked in marketing for a digital media company that published a vertical, or blog, or some other such thing, on the comic book trade. Sometimes the company let her use her journalism degree and write a guest post, and the free press passes to cons were a pitch-perfect perk; Rave’s job behind a register at Ackley’s Drugs afforded her an employee discount, which she used a lot for things like pens and Cokes, but it wasn’t quite the same.
However disappointing Hoboken Horror-Con was, at least it was only the start of their summer. They went to a minor league baseball game in Newark, not because they were big on sports but for the good excuse to drink beer from plastic cups and shout at men. They caught a free outdoor screening of Jurassic Park in Sunset Park. “It’s all about a park and it ends with a sunset,” Kim squealed with delight, and Rave spent the subway ride back geeking out about how the seatbelt gag on the helicopter neatly foreshadowed the dinosaurs’ ability to breed—“Life finds a way”—and Kim, who always did a good Jeff Goldblum, approximated Jeff Goldblum’s laugh.
This concludes the free sample, but you can buy the full story at this link! . . . |