Iris Darke learns about a new four-letter word.
This work contains CWs for: usage of homophobic slurs, gore, and cannibalism.
One Ugly Bitch? by xexnoncores
June 1st, 2015
“Nice ass on her, eh?”
Iris Darke sighs, taking a sip of her brandy. The words hang tepidly in her ears as she slices the end off a Gurkha Royal cigar, hoping that nothing of note follows. That titanium blade cleaves through thin leaf in her hands, leaving behind nothing except tobacco so bare a guillotine would blush.
The patron next to her laughs, pointing far out right. A sack of curly red hair juts out hazily from in front of a wall of wine.
"Me, I'm torn between that one or the brunette downstairs with the double Ds. Which one do you want? I’ll let you pick because you look like you need the lift, mister.”
She cooks the end of her cigar and sucks in cleanly. It tastes like cedarwood smothered in vanilla. The nicotine hits her like a car as the smoke clouds over the bar, fluttering between dim orange lights and a pacing bartender.
“I’m not here to pleasure myself,” she responds, gaze trailing sharply to the ceiling. “If you wish to engage with those women, then be my guest.”
“Wha—”
The man’s face changes quicker than a stock crash. Ivory revulsion crawls viciously over his mouth and temples, spilling onto the polished mahogany floor.
“Jesus fuck,” he huffs with a spit. “You’re one ugly dyke. What, did your pansy daddy not know how to rear a bitch?”
Iris’s eyes widen. Without a word, she whips her head around, but he’s since left his seat. Her vertical pupils burn like lit needles as she watches him sprint out the door, the air he left behind bleeding with sweat and expired cologne.
Her teeth pinch the cigar too tightly, leaching ash onto her tongue. She coughs, trying not to let the light go to waste, but all she can find herself doing is repeating that string of words in her head.
Dyke, dyke, dyke. Excuse me, but what did you call me?
The bartender lowers his head without a word. When Iris looks to him for some kind of tether, not intending to come off as weak, he just turns his face. He turns his face with derelicting cavalierness, his eyes closed like a statue forever carved to be unobservant.
Not even an offer of more alcohol to smooth out the lack of sugar in the air tonight…
She snarls and clenches her jaw, flashing a pair of nasty fangs that go unnoticed and unkiltered.
Without a word, she refuses him a tip and leaves too, her head buzzing louder than she can remember in recent memory.
“He called you a what?“
Traffic sludges to the beat of metronome routines as the black of tinted windows carpets her from head to toe. Iris taps her foot, gripping the phone nearly hard enough to dent its jet case, trying to savor the way her thick soles hit the concrete. In an empty garage like this, that’s all she has to keep her on the ground, to anchor her in totality, in certainty.
Percival’s voice may be filtered through a microphone, but it’s good enough for now.
“Goodness, that’s a vulgar insult,” she continues, clicking her tongue. “Almost old-fashioned, too. Where on earth did you hear such a thing?”
Iris swallows. “Some wanker lobbed the word at me in a hotel bar. He thought I was…”
One deep breath. Two deep breaths. She closes her eyes to let the sound of cars rumbling wash over her completely before she continues. Their engines beat faster than her runic heart ever will, but they are companions in how such anxiety actualizes itself within her chest.
“…He thought I was a man, egging me to join in on ogling some unfortunate vixen. When he heard me speak…that’s when he…”
She trails off, voice falling to a lukewarm death. It needs to stay alive, but she can’t force it to, even in the snug comfortableness of her preferred clothes. Normally they are a buoy for her, a lighthouse in the march of transactions, capital, ink and paperwork, but these dark dyes have seemingly betrayed her into this situation.
“Oh, you poor baby!” Percival cries.
Iris whimpers, hating herself for the noise but wishing that exclamation was right next to her instead of halfway to Orlando. Her bare hands clutch the phone tighter. She waits for the sentence to finish.
“What a horrendous experience that must have been. My sweet pumpkin, you didn’t deserve to come underfoot of such a backwoods slur.”
Iris tries to summon words again, but they merely tremble as she runs over some knives on the table. One glows red, while another flickers white. A third, paired at the handles in conjoining forks, gluts a sickly violet.
She keeps her hands still, though. Focus is the must of all good business.
“What does it mean, though?” What a disgusting waver in her cadence. Pick yourself up, girl.
“Oh, um…well…”
The sound of a lighter clicks on the other end of the line. Iris purses her lips, wishing that could be her. She made herself leave her cigars behind whenever she had to indulge in delivering punishment, but that didn’t mean she wanted to. It was a crime, honestly, that their sweet taste got in the way of necessary work, a crime that was all the more reason to punish whatever found itself writhing under her palms.
“…Well, it’s a derogatory term for a lesbian.”
Silence.
She stiffens. “I’m not a lesbian, though.”
“I know, honey,” Percival chirps. “I know you’re not, but the way you present yourself is typical of the stereotypes many expect of such individuals.”
“How?” Oof, that was a bit too loud. “H-How can someone assume such a thing just from a simple glance? I am not following you here.”
She begins trotting a pace, but stops as soon as a new question weighs her down.
“What does being a lesbian have to do with how I look? Why would they dress in a suit and tie to signal such qualitative notions? It doesn’t make sense. Suits are for business, mother. Business!”
Percival sighs, and Iris chatters her teeth. Her free hand darts for a surface, any surface, and she ends up on the smooth plastic of a roll of scalpels.
Ah, that was better. She squeezes, relishing the way the metal juts into her skin. Not enough to harm or seriously slice, just enough to preserve an orientation to tactility.
“That…That is a very loaded inquiry, I…”
“Please, tell me.” She turns away from the window to the blankness of a smooth, black wall. Jackhammers hang down heavily, their thick-headed ends pining for rust, but alas, they cannot. Their master is watching.
“…Please,” she repeats.
“Iris, you know being a lesbian isn’t a bad thing? You’re speaking out of breath like you’ve just witnessed a murder.”
“I know,” she says, her eyes burning. “I…I know. Because you…you’re…”
“Correct.” Percival laughs. “So what’s the issue here then?”
Silence again.
Iris perks up once she steels her will against her head fogging with gray dust.
“…I just don’t want to be mistaken for something I’m not.”
Being mistaken for someone else meant death. Her name, Iris Darke, was who she was, who she was born to be. It was the identity gifted to her to grow into as the world’s potentate, its overseer and ruler. She was in charge of who she became, but the double-edged sword of that power was that she needed to control others’ perceptions of her, as well.
People did business with those they liked, after all. Who they liked was who they needed, and once they needed you, they would be forced to forever like you, lest they suffer the consequences. Profit does not have the time to look a gift horse in its mouth.
“Ah, makes sense. I know how that feels.”
“You do?”
“Mhmhm, I do. I had to live my life that way for longer than was nearly bearable for me.”
“Ah, right. I still don’t understand, though, Mother. Who—Who made up such preposterous assumptions about people like that? A bunch of idiots? Who would ever think to throw lots over something like that based on how someone looks?”
Percival half groans, half-snickering, but Iris can’t tell if she’s straining out full laughter or trying not to come off as patronizing. Her stoic face flashes red, skin so paper-white that it’s not hard to see her blush, even in the thorny darkness she’s currently steeped in. When there’s no response, she runs a hand through her hair. It’s short, greased, and cropped in a single, smooth part across her forehead. It barely catches light at all, despite how stiff it was styled, and despite how black it was, too.
This was her ideal. The most ideal. It was her at her best, the peak of her performance. Asking her to relinquish anything to someone else’s notion of femininity would be like clipping a lark’s wings.
“…Oh, Iris, you will have to forgive me for not educating you about these kinds of matters sooner—I keep forgetting how fast you’ve grown up.”
“Huh? What? What does that mean?”
Her eyes dart wildly over nothing.
“What it means,” Percival says with another click of her tongue, a smile shining through her words, “is that I didn’t realize you’d run into this at the fledging age of twenty-one.”
“…Did you not know what a lesbian was when you were twenty-one?”
“Iris, I was eating farmers and terrorizing all of Bristol in 1421. So no, I didn’t. I didn’t know what a lesbian was. I don’t think we even had a word for it back then.”
“R-Right. How unstudious of me t-to forget.”
Breathe, Iris, Breathe. A deep inhale fills her throat, full of oxidizing aromas that whet her appetite more than she would have been able to admit in public company.
But by herself, though, she is ready. Completely ready. She deserves this, she deserves it utterly. She soothes herself by telling herself what Percival has always told her: she deserves everything. Everything. The universe is going to be hers in shortly due time.
Again her hands find the knives. They join the scalpels with doctorate precision, shining dully. But that’s only because they have not yet found their proper bed to play around in, the foyer upon which they will all be united as a happy family.
“Look—” Iris can hear Percival take a sip of something. “We can talk about all of this later. It will be a conversation of more length than can be afforded to me now—I have to take a phone call with the governor of Florida here in fifteen minutes.”
“Really?”
Percival’s voice climbs into a bell-chime verity, and Iris relaxes. “Yes, I promise. I’m not going to forget about this, I assure you—it’s just extremely complicated. More complicated than a merger of energy companies, haha.”
“Okay, thank you.” She remembers to exhale. “I appreciate it.”
“You’ll be okay,” Percival reassures her. The sizzling of her cigar catches the mic, a campfire’s comfort and a miniature sun in the back of Iris’s head. It’s the sound she grew up to, the sound of everything being okay.
“I assume you’ll be taking care of the wretched heathen who slung such disrespect at you?”
Blue eyes trail over her collected things. Their manufactured bodies look so demure all piled together.
She smiles. “Of course.” With a rise of her chest again, everything coalesces, coming together in a single plane of stillness washing over her soul. “I’m disposing of him myself, too.”
“Oh, you are?”
“Yes.” She drums her fingers against the cold steel table quietly. “I skipped dinner, so it should be no problem.”
“That’s my girl! Show him his place among the livestock, and deign him to Hell proper.”
Her fangs begin peeking out. “Always.”
“Oh, but if he’s Catholic, remember to restrain yourself with the biting, mhm?” Percival’s voice takes on a much-too-saccharine tone. “You have to make it look like a suicide so his God and family will disown him.”
Iris chuffs. “I knowwwww, Mother. You don’t need to tell me…”
“Haha, you know me, I’m just being a mom! Remember, you don’t have to though. I promise this is just making fun. Love you sweetie, see you soon!”
She hangs up, the phone keening a dial-tone Iris has heard a million times, and will hear a million times more to the power of itself throughout her lifetime.
Okay, all she has to do now is gather all of this up. Everything’s been prepared with the utmost acuity, and the shipment arrived just an hour ago with no interruptions.
Time to follow the recipe’s instructions, and carve up a pig.
June 3rd, 2015
Iris Darke is not a lesbian, because she does not like only women. She has, after much trial and tribulation, concluded that she also likes men, strangely enough.
In her mind, at sixteen, she thought she would have followed in the proclivities of her mother when she transitioned. Percival did not switch away from her attraction to the fairer sex after taking estrogen and having more surgeries than a combatant from a war zone, so that was…was it a given? Is liking women genetic? Had modern science answered that question yet?
Did the ritual connecting them do something?
But men…Iris knew of them, and was exposed to them more often than she preferred. As a child, men kissed women on the television, and they paraded their wives around at auctions like slung ferrets on their arms. Chrysophilius also watched shows full of them fighting each other in strange, bizarre ways while they went on even more bizarre adventures. He even showed her a Japanese magazine full of them once, beating each other to death. Eugh.
None of it really seemed for her, until one day, a blonde boy approached her after an event and asked about who she was, calling her beautiful. She was freshly eighteen then, he just a mere month older than her.
His name was…oh, what was it again? She doesn’t know actually if she asked, even though he took her on three “dates”. He took her on three “dates” around the hotel they both were due to stay a week in for, walking with her around the marble gardens and the grand velvet carpets.
They had a wonderful time, him talking about art, her about history. The history of the French Revolution, followed by the art of Norway, where he hailed from. His mother was a rich heiress from Oslo supposedly meeting Percival to exchange information about some kind of secret. It was a big secret, a ferocious secret that had to be kept from her fiancé back home lest the family incur not just a great shame, but the wrath of a fae queen and her servants.
After telling her that, they kissed. He initiated it, having to lean up on the very nimble tips of his polished Oxfords, but they managed to kiss.
She felt her heart flutter in a way that could only be described as genuine.
Then they exchanged numbers, and she never saw or heard from him again.
Percival would never tell her why.
Two black mannequins stand to attention as Iris adjusts her tie and clears her throat. Her private chef stands a few meters away, purple eyes searing as she snaps the head off a fish on a chilled marble cutting board. It does not bleed.
“Will we be flambéing the entree tonight, Madam Iris?”
Iris shakes her head. “No, we will not. A light sear is more than enough here.”
“Understood. Served alongside the bouillabaisse or as an included ingredient?”
“Alongside. I don’t want the flavors to clash, since I wish for rosemary to be the seasoning of choice there.”
“Excellent choice. That herb is delicious fried.”
She would lick her lips if her stomach wasn’t so disconnected from her brain. Everything was spinning just a bit too much to the left, just a bit too low out of perinatal rotation, even now. An ellipse of thoughts scatters across her mind as she pulls the red knife out of her pocket and unzips a large black duffel bag.
The man screams weakly. He’s been deprived of food and water for two days.
“Still breathing? Unfortunate. Let me help you with that burden, mister.”
Iris doesn’t actually mind being called that. It was not uncommon for her to derive a smug satisfaction from being mistaken for her mother from her kept masculine name. Being referred to as mister gave her the illusion of being a handsome woman, sparking a warm and fuzzy feeling in her feet and mouth.
The man whines, thrashing his head back and forth. Iris snarls, plunging the knife into his neck with a single, graceful movement. It’s as harmonious as a choir of birds singing, of male red-winged blackbirds undulating throughout their territory.
Scarlet gushes, splashing her on the cheek. There is no hesitation cracking the vertebrae, no wavering on the completion of that right-angle movement.
It’s a beautiful snap, but it does not bring her any relief. If it did, she would have reached for the scalpel and begin carving out his eyes. He stops moving as soon as she thinks to herself she should have taunted him more, flinging back in his face the other word he so horrendously flung at her. It would have been fitting.
Why were men like this? What about her changed when she cut her hair and wore the clothes she did? She knew she was different; she was not an idiot in that department. Skirts were not for her, makeup not either. Or heels, or pink, or diminutive purses. She abandoned those things at nineteen and never looked back.
That was when she hit her growth spurt too. She hovered at just above average height for a woman at one hundred and sixty-eight centimeters until three months later she had to throw out all of her clothes because she hit two hundred clean. Two hundred.
Doors became harder to walk through, shoes harder to find in her size. The tailors had to be called in to work overtime because of how much fabric was being burned. It was almost an embarrassment until she realized how much of an asset it provided her in the intimidation department, but what else was it good for? What else?
Did it make her more attractive? Less? She never thought about that until it came time for a quiet moment between someone she thought looked halfway interesting. Business flooded her head so often Iris rarely ever thought about anything more than a one-night stand, but just the mere notion created a paralysis of void that she just couldn’t shake off. She couldn’t.
They did not look at her the way they did their girlfriends with their hairspray and glittering jewelry.
So to the back of her mind it went, until this dog had dragged it out of her.
Her chef rings a bell, and Iris finally severs the neck from the head. She was careful to cut at the base, near the collarbone, so that the cut would be substantial enough.
“Here,” she says, bringing it over carefully such that the blood did not spill all over the granite tile. Before those connoisseur hands can take it away from her though, Iris finds herself licking that iron red and sighing.
“Madam Iris?”
Again. She sucks through the major vein, letting the harsh taste wash her away.
Other women didn’t do this, but other women weren’t her.
“Just sampling a taste.” She licks her lips as if that would clean her chin in any meaningful way, handing off the meat with wide pupils. “Raw blood is so distinctively saturated, the neck providing the best the body has to offer.”
“Certainly,” her chef replies. “That’s where much of the de-oxygenated supply resides. It’s much sweeter than normal, right?”
“Actually, a bit more sour.”
“Sour?”
Her chef’s eyes bore into her out of curiosity. Thorny veins pulse at the edge of her corneas.
“Like carbonation, I think,” Iris replies flatly, sitting down on the fancy stool to watch the flames rise and dance behind that starched outfit under steel burners. “Not unpalatable, but rather adding a new layer of complexity.”
“Haha, I remember when you asked me to carbonate that once. What a mess it made!”
Iris smiles. “We should find a way to make it work.”
Her chef returns the favor. “I shall resume my experiments in due time then. Is there anything else you’d like this cooked with?”
Iris’s eyes dart over the wall of machinery behind both the living and non-living body. The heat lamp keeping everything warm is making her face sticky. Not too much, but enough to stimulate hunger out of a tilted off-kiltering.
Would that boy love her now? She had longer hair when he looked at her back then. It was straight, flat-ironed to a crisp, diamondine sheen, draping her ears in kniving curtains. Percival had even put some blush on her cheeks that morning, and he said made her look like a rose.
“…No. That will be all.”
A white and pink rose…
“Wonderful. Please wait one moment.”
The chef steps back, taking the neck with her as the smell of bony fish, muscles and tomatoes floats on hot lightbulbs. Iris clasps her hands together daintily, assuming a proper posture as she watches, and waits.
As fat and skin sizzle, her mind wanders to other aspects of food. Her mind wanders at first to how much akin to a steak this will taste like with the rosemary, since those two went so well together. But inevitably it runs back to the man’s physique, what she was not eating tonight.
She looks an awful lot like him. Broad shoulders, strong jaw, flat chest—she barely filled out even the smallest bras. One of the things she was most happiest about was giving up dresses, because even when altered, they looked crooked on her. There was nothing for the straps to cascade down, nothing for them to hold on to. They wanted an hourglass to snug themselves into and all she could offer was a board.
What about her body made her so unattractive? To men, in particular? She would be a liar if she said women also didn’t give her occasional strange stares, but it was always the men who were the quickest to jump to judgment.
How was a flat chest unattractive? How could someone taller than they ever could be a threat to their own sense of ideals? Why did it matter she didn’t have a tiny waist?
Would anyone ever find her appealing? In pursuing her true self, had Iris cut the entire world off from her heart?
She swallows wet spit as obeying eyes return, pushing forth a porcelain plate and bowl, both as crimson as a blood moon. Thick lipids waft on hot, seared edges, pushing down on her unnaturally blue irises until her cat-like pupils widen into black orbs.
“Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve you. Please, eat to your heart’s content, and let me know if you need anything else, ma’am.”
The chef pulls out a glass and pours it halfway empty with sparkling water, the remaining space halfway full with lemon and lime juice. Hissing fizz crackles and pops all over the bronze counter, each stray drop a microscopic star.
A deep breath. Iris does not look to the empty seats besides her, or to the notion in her head she’d like for them to be filled one day.
“…I appreciate your service,” she says quietly, as she picks up her provided fork.
What I need most is to know who I am… she thinks. And who I should be.
There is no one else she can be except herself. She must be known as nothing else, and yet why did such things bring with it such a cost? Was she going to have to conquer the land and oceans before people would think to even look at her gently?
Lucky for her that she does not know women are not supposed to eat as much as she does.