Issue Three

When Janie came to her senses, she
was no longer seeing the world through
a sane, undivided angle. Her vision was
scrambled two dozen different ways, like
she was looking through the geometrical
facets of a diamond. She blinked
fervently to right herself, and what
closed over her brand new eyes were
not human eyelids but a translucent
yellow film viscous with slime. She saw
through two kaleidoscopes, tripping over
her cheap heels and flailing her arms for
balance, the world swimming around her
in phantasmagorical patterns.
Her exoskeleton smashed into the wall
with a grotesque crunch that was like
stepping on a bag of aluminum cans,
and without her control a bright red
chemical spilled from two small holes in
her face; a signal to let her brethren
know she was in distress. The gas
diffused throughout the room, dying the
air in a rosy pink haze that looked like
the colour of asphyxia. As she reeled
back and reached up to inspect the
damage, Janie knew, without any prior
knowledge of how insects
communicated, that she was seeing
smells on top of everything else. Her
manicured hands fluttered on the
surface of her head in a spasm of panic,
and when a bent, injured antenna
brushed over the back of her hand, the
truth was obvious to even an idiot of her
caliber.
She whirled on her legs, faint and
delirious, and as she turned she brought
herself to face the mirror by
chance. Thrown off equilibrium by her
damaged feeler, Janie crawled toward it
on her hands and bloody knees, and
reflected in her eyes, two dozen Janies
crawled back at her, Janies only human
from the neck down, Janies reborn with
the green, alien head of a praying
mantis.
Like the others before her, like anyone
in the whole wide world would do, Janie
Sanders opened her flytrap mouth and
screamed. Out of the dry, cavernous
hole came the rattling hiss of locusts
and the noxious malodour of black
licorice mixed with cigarettes. Brooding,
Janie let her feelers flit across the
mirror, feeling with her whole body the
cool, perfect smoothness of the
glass. She blinked over and over,
hoping it was all just a mirage, coating
her alien black eyes with a fresh layer of
slime that could have been tears.
Even though she’d never been better
than anybody, Janie had all her life
thought her every minute action an
expression of fine art. When things
turned against her, she decided it was
only because she was too good for
them. She was too good for school and
too good for her parents, but above all
Janie was too good for The One. Now
she could truly show The One mercy;
now she could truly bite his head off and
spare him the mortal anguish of living
without her, for Janie Sanders was too
good to live without.
But nothing, not even Janie Sanders,
was too good for the Uglylights. Nothing
was good at all.
Eli Sykes stood in the dark room with
the bat drawn and his teeth bared,
THE UGLYLIGHTS