✍🏼Winter Simpson

@winterandwords.social

894 Followers 615 Following

🏳️‍🌈 Writing queer neo-noir fiction 💻 All the links at winterandwords.social 📚 Read at patreon.com/winterandwords 🚫 No AI anywhere

Weathered fenceposts in uneven grassy terrain with a forest in the distance. The sky is vibrant blue with wispy clouds and the grass is shades of green and gold.

I guess it’s never too late or too early to pay a tax on futility through a bookmaker’s screen and drown your sorrows with whatever you have left after you lose.

And I’m still tired, right down in my bones. Tired in my heart and my hands and my skin. I’m tired in my scars because scars know how to be tired like nothing else does.

I can’t keep putting on that uniform and strapping those weapons to my body and pulling that mask and visor over my face so I can ruin strangers’ lives with government-sanctioned anonymity. What if I get used to it? What if I stop hating myself for it?

And the bright white of the medical floors becomes the mirrored shine of the lift becomes the metal and glass of the foyer of HQ becomes the rush and neon chaos of the street outside.

Then she fires her impatience at me. “Turner, you can’t just go around breaking people’s wrists when they piss you off.”

I’m not sure there’s any worse I can make this, so I may as well be honest. “I can. I’ve done it loads of times. Not always wrists, but—"

Text: We’re not keeping the city safe or supporting a better society or anything like that. We’re just supplying industry with free labour while everyone else looks the other way because they like the convenience of their lives too much to ask questions.

Image: (Fake!) blood running down a plug hole from a hand

Text: We’re not keeping the city safe or supporting a better society or anything like that. We’re just supplying industry with free labour while everyone else looks the other way because they like the convenience of their lives too much to ask questions.

Image: Grungy monochrome photo of a factory

Moodboard of cyberpunk-themed images in shades of pink, purple and blue.

Two screenshots showing a custom theme for Ellipsus writing software in shades of pink, purple, and blue.

Normal is subjective. Normal for me isn’t the same as normal for someone who lives in a city tower and whose job doesn’t involve murder. Normal for them is not even knowing that people like me exist.

And I want this. Whatever it is, I want it. Maybe because I’m calling the shots this time, or maybe just because it’s so fucking good to have someone melt in my arms and to know that I’m worth something to them that’s beyond transactional, even for a few seconds.

I got put on a fucking fast track to promotion. I didn’t even know that was a possibility or I would’ve made much more of an effort to be shit at everything.

Whatever sedatives they pumped into me are still doing something. I’m angry, but there’s no part of me ready to do anything about it.

I am not my grief and loss and anger. I am not my shitty fucking job. I am not my violent lurches of nauseating shame.

“Anyway, what do you want to drink?”

“Whiskey. Three whiskeys. Neat.” If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right. I never was any good at only having one drink.

She lines up three glasses and starts pouring. “You waiting for people?”

“Nope.”

She stops next to me and speaks in a near whisper. “Stop pretending not to be exceptional, Turner. You aren’t hiding it as well as you think you are.”

A bedroom with blue and pink lighting. There's a wall hanging of moon phases and stars.

Danish model, Ken Bek. A man with short red hair and light brown eyes looks flirtatiously into the camera. He wears a grey t-shirt and a silver watch.

Venn diagram of the matrix, terminator and idiocracy with overlaps for AI overlords, pleasant slavery and societal decline. The centre overlap says you are here.

She nudges me with her shoulder again. “I knew you were going to be fun. Anyway, you want to try a camomile tea?”

“I guess so. If I have to.” Her enthusiasm is forceful. I don’t know how to get out of this. “Can I put sugar in it?”

She bounces down from the counter, rinses my mug in the sink, and puts it into the drinks machine. “Just at the start. To help you transition away from coffee in the evenings. Then we’ll cut you down gradually.”

This graduation ceremony is literally one of the most boring experiences I’ve ever had forced on me. We all know we’ve graduated. We all know who didn’t. And we all know where to go for our first assignments. None of this is a surprise today. It’s just a circle jerk for all the dickheads who think a uniform means something.

There are things I have done
There's a place I have gone
There's a beast and I let it run
Now it's runnin' my way
There are things I regret
That you can't forgive, you can't forget
There's a gift, that you sent
You sent it my way

[Chorus]
So take this night
Wrap it around me like a sheet
I know I'm not forgiven
But I need a place to sleep
So take this night
And lay me down on the street
I know I'm not forgiven
But I hope that I'll be given some peace

[Verse 2]
There's a game that I played
There are rules I had to break
There's mistakes that I made
But I made 'em my way

I got tired of sadness
I got tired of all the madness
I got tired of being a badass all the time
It’s only survival
Only not dead upon arrival
Only ahead of every rival that we find

And we’ve ridden beyond where we could safely touch down
And we’re out in the void past where we could’ve had turned around
I tried my feet on the floor, tried to beat on the door
But it didn’t even make a sound
Got my heart open wide
But the city been shut down

It’s easy to go babe
It’s just an easy yes or no, babe
It’s just an easy way to throw away what we have
I don’t need a letter
I don’t need anybody better
I don’t need anybody ever, I never have

Disaster girl meme. A young girl smirks while giving a knowing look at the camera. In the background a house is on fire.

He does one of those irresistibly friendly smiles that makes it feel like we’re on opposite sides of some equation neither of us are aware of.

A black greyhound sprawled across a bed with a pink blanket over her

I knock back half my coffee in one go because I’m going to need next-level amounts of caffeine to tolerate this conversation.

A chat meme that says, "Me: *being choked to death* Murderer: "Stop humping me" Me:" picture of a girl enjoying something perverse.

Somehow you are more here than I am, real in a way I never learned to be. I would resent that if I didn’t adore you so much. Perhaps on some level I resent it anyway. I envy you. I worship you. I can’t live without you.

The trigger still gets pulled and nothing matters.

The system’s bigger than any of us.

I have no power here.

I’ve learned.

Grungy textured image in black and white with a blood red overlay of the silhouette of a person behind prison bars. The text says: She left home so she didn’t have to watch her brother follow the dark path he’d been walking since childhood, but when the time arrives for his reckoning, unbreakable family ties pull her back to a truth she can’t leave behind.

I’m still working at half speed, trying with force of will alone to make her walk past me. It definitely isn’t working.

She stops next to me and speaks in a whisper. “Stop pretending not to be exceptional, Turner. You aren’t hiding it as well as you think you are.”

Doc’s like the aunt I never had. She’s everyone’s aunt they never had, even if they did have actual aunts. She’s barely up to my collarbone and she’s one of the very few people I don’t mind hugging me. OK, she’s the only person I don’t mind hugging me.

Trees with thin trunks and new leaves in a park. The ground is grassy with some wild flowers and there are bushes in the background. It's a bright sunny day creating dramatic contrast between light and shadow. A quirk of reflection has caused an arc of pale blue and pink light from the bottom left corner.

My head hurts an amount that doesn’t feel entirely safe for something to hurt and my face is aching from where I landed on it, so I run my tongue over my teeth to check none of them are missing. Then I take the bottle with its sugar and electrolytes and bright blue dye and drink most of it in one go before I even get my shit together enough to speak.

“Buy you a drink?” he says and I’m not going to turn down anyone buying me anything. I don’t get paid enough to give a shit whose money’s getting spent as long as it’s not mine.

A close-up photo of the face of a white cat with a darker patch on his forehead and green eyes.

I don’t know if people like that keep getting put in my path for a reason or if I just notice them because they feel safe and safe people are a novelty.

A forest with leaves beginning to appear on the trees and the ground blanketed thickly with greenery and bluebells. The sky is vibrant blue with fluffy clouds and it's a beautiful sunny day.

But now there are all these empty spaces that I don’t know how to deal with and my brain is desperately trying to fill them so nothing has to hurt. But it hurts anyway.

A black greyhound curled up in a couch, snuggled again a pile of blankets. Her toenails are far too long.

I walked home from school in silence, with my grief for company and my hood pulled up against torrents of rain whipped by spiteful gusts of wind.

I do what I’m told but everything about it is soaked in resentment. I’m not pretending to enjoy any of this. Thing is, he probably likes it better this way. He gets off on my discomfort more than he gets off on my compliance, so I aim to look bored, unbothered. Not disgusted. Not horrified. Not sick.

A grey tabby cat with yellow eyes sitting on a pink yoga mat. His front paws are curled under his body.

Then he wheels the trolley over to a large water dispenser on the wall. I know the water is filtered, drinking quality, and it’s heated just enough to make it easier to clean blood off skin.

December arrived, carried on storms that rolled in over the mountains, and washed autumn away with great oceans of rain.

Later, in the liminal space between night and morning, the elastic seconds when the chemical rush twists and winds, we walk not hand in hand but side by side, rhythmically aligned. Our footsteps echo the music in my head, with the first birds to sing and the first car engines to split the emptiness.

Image: Sepia monochrome photograph of a woman with long hair smoking a cigarette, silhouetted against a window with venetian blinds.

Text: Through a journey paved with fragments of break-ups and breakdowns, scorched earth and burned bridges, a brokenhearted lover learns to breathe again.

Short fiction: Cigarettes as a Metaphor for Heartbreak
Winter Simpson
patreon.com/winterandwords

A stone bridge in a forest. A faint rainbow is visible against the side of the bridge. Another thin rainbow curves over the water with blue and white light beneath it's arch.

Text: Perhaps I even remembered Amber’s stories wrongly and there was nothing in Dr Eaves more sinister than the perpetual tension of a man frustrated by the world and unable to process his own sadness.

Text: Give me something heavy. I want my brain pulled out, kicked about, and stuffed back in the wrong way round.

Text: And I was disgusted, more by how much I still wanted you to need me than by the poison in my lungs.

Heather plants with orange, yellow and white flowers moving in the breeze.

A tree that looks like a person waving their arms over their head with fields in the foreground.

Text: I think about tomorrow, when I can take a second shower, with no-one staring at me this time. When I can scrub away memories of Hristo Sullivan’s hands and all the other hands that may as well be his. And I try to imagine what I could do to my body to make it something no-one would ever want to touch again. What I could do to make it safe.

Text: He looked like he’d been born frowning, thinking too deeply about the world and frustrated by all the parts of it that weren’t good enough. Barely turning towards Darwin when he addressed her, he spoke in a voice like the ice that gathered in the cracks of frozen pavements.

A lake with sunlit ripples on the surface and trees on the shore.

Rolling green fields separated by hedgerows with a scattering of trees.