Fabulosa glared accusingly at the company man in the zip up suit sprawled across two bench seats. She noticed sweat beading his brow. He cleared the phlegm from his throat. “You’ve probably never been there––never seen ’em with your own two eyes,” he peeped. “Th-them critters’ th-thick as bricks. All’s they do is breed and take up space.”
Fabulosa wormed between the straphangers and the waif on the bench, getting right up in his face. “We any different?” she scowled, jutting her chin toward the waif’s wailing dupe. The waif pulled her parasitic cloneling tight to her chest.
“If stupid is the only prequalification for supper,” said Fabulosa, “half of us ought to start queuing up for the spit.”
It wasn’t so much that Fabulosa swallowed the spacenik’s stick hook, line, and sinker –– but for all the spacenik’s proselytizing, she’d been the first aboard to consider, or even acknowledge, someone or something outside of the dull confines of herself.
Even if the spacenik was grandstanding –– espousing some flavor-of-the-minute rallying cry –– she’d managed to pee a bit of color across the gray, prickly drab of commuters gridlocking Fabulosa’s psychic radar.
If Fabulosa had wanted the status quo, she’d never have bothered stealing her way aboard in the first place. Half these schlubs could travel halfway across the universe, Fabulosa realized, and not go anywhere, the way they kept their heads jammed so far up their own backsides. This wonderfully abrasive spacenik was driving them back without Fabulosa having to fry one brain cell on a psychic push.
But alas, all good things must come to an end. The spacenik clutched Fabulosa’s wrist, urging Fab’s arm skyward as if they’d just been awarded a gold medal in some two-person relay. All that fantastic color the spacenik rained across Fabulosa’s psychic map began to lash like angry tentacles in Fab’s head––colorful, constricting tentacles. Fabulosa was hit with the startling revelation that this do-goodnik of a spacenik might just very well be another bull in a china shop, a bullish ego poised to flatten anybody unwilling to play the game by her rules. Fabulosa shook her hand free.
The spacenik frowned, hurt. She scrabbled for her wrist again, but Fabulosa evaded her grasp.
“It’s you and me,” the spacenik crowed. “Us versus them.”
“Look, sister,” said Fabulosa, wagging a sardonic peace sign in the woman’s face. “What you’re doing––it’s not a bad thing, but you can’t use those edibles down there like a pair of stilts –– you can’t just hop on the backs of their misfortune just so you can pee all over everybody else from on high.”