In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Yogi Berra

Theory 59 – 60

59.
I knew she was unicorn-kind when I first met her and my first instinct was an intense jealousy. Who wouldn’t have been jealous? She was beautiful.

She had hair the colour of silver – you could have mistaken it for fine silver wire, but it was her natural hair, and she had left it long and flowing and natural, like a horse’s mane. It enveloped her alert features like a halo. Two clean white horns jutted defiantly from the hair, curling towards the back of her head and ending in blunt points. Her eyes were an icy blue and her lashes were bright white like her hair, long but delicate. Her lips were a pale pink. She had a precise mouth, her two pairs of longer upper incisors glinting between her closed lips.

I met her in the forest beyond my family’s home, a mess of hammocks and platforms in the trees at the outskirts of the forest. I was wandering through the undergrowth and she was the last thing I would have expected. Of course I knew about the unicorns – every child did. But to see one was a blessing – a miracle.

She was wild. Not feral, but it was clear she didn’t go home to her family in the evening. She wasn’t clean the first time I saw her. Her white-blue skin was mud-streaked and grass-stained. It was easy to forget that such soft-looking skin was too strong to be penetrated by an arrow, but this was true.

60.
We stood there, me half-reaching for my bow and quiver. She was crouched low to the ground in the bushes, as if ready to strike. Her eyes looked calculating. Her lips parted slightly and she ran her pointed tongue along her sharp white incisors.

I wondered if I was going to be killed by this beautiful girl.

My parents had always warned me about the unicorns, but this naked girl did not look like a threat to me, despite her teeth and claws and horns. She looked gentle and scared.

Looks can defy reality, though.

Theory, 58

58.
Lightning curled herself into Numbers as they continued small talk and she was quickly asleep, and Numbers dozed off as well, not daring to throw an arm around her shoulders. Lightning was petite and beautiful and agile, and even in sleep she looked like a momentarily stilled hummingbird. Numbers was in love.

Theory, 50 and 51

50.
The fever dreams lasted for the better part of a week but Numbers didn’t know this because he was rarely conscious and had long since given up the struggle to keep track of the time.

He was given water but no food and he was starving to death but when he tried to speak, his voice was a strained wisp of breath, lost in the churring of the cicadas. There was a heated, throbbing ache to the left of his spine, refusing to bleed, and sometimes he knew someone was cleaning it because it was cold and wet and not hot and throbbing like it had a heartbeat of its own.

51.
It took him a long time to start waking up, and the first time he did there was nobody around, but he was on the ground and not in his nest and he knew he was nowhere near the boys. He lifted his arm to brush the hair from his face (and when had his hair gotten this long? Or this matted and tangled…) but the pain was sickening and he laid his arm back down again and eventually, he fell asleep.

He waited for death. He knew it was coming, he didn’t know what was happening to him but he knew he was starving and everything was pain. He waited for the black-feathered horses and the woman in the dusky grey ballgown and the man in the crimson cloak to descend and take him away, but they never came. Instead, there was the lucid girl, crouched over his chest, placing a soft wet cloth to his forehead. She jumped back when his eyes opened. “You’re awake,” she stated bluntly. But his eyes were already closing again and he couldn’t cling to consciousness any longer. At least now he could await the return of the beautiful mirage of a girl instead of the grey queen and the red king.

Theory, 29

29.
The optimistic girl’s name had been Thunder, Numbers recalled. He thought it was a dark name for a sunny girl.

She had brushed against him once, pushing past him to the blocks, and Numbers would later swear every time he was drunk that time had stopped for a moment – that their eyes had met, that it had been true love. Not even Numbers knew if that was true.

Theory, 31

(I skipped like twenty because it got into stuff that relates to some kinks that I don’t want to reveal to the public just yet xD this one works well as a standalone, I think. Some of them don’t.)

31.
Numbers scrambled so that he could see out the truck doors as the truck slowed to a stop. The first shafts of light seemed to glare at him, but his eyes adjusted quickly as the wiry guard pushed the doors all the way open and then unlatched one of the top cages. There was the sound of growing whimpering and Numbers could see the child extracted from the cage, looking remarkably like Numbers himself – the same age, the same shape of face.

The child didn’t move, but stayed tensed up as he was lifted by his armpits and he started to beg, but the begging quickly died down and the kid went limp in the guard’s arms. The guard tossed the limp body to the side – Numbers winced – and that was when he saw the guard ready the hypodermic needle for the next injection.

It was sickening waiting for his injection, watching the other kids (now mostly silent, save for some hiccupping sobs) fall limp one by one in the arms of the first grown man they had ever seen.

Theory,12

12.
Ash’s cock had just arrived in the mail.

It had been difficult for them to receive the package from the postman with a straight face, but they had nearly accomplished it, betrayed only by a crimson blush washing over their face like wine in the last moments of the exchange as she closed the door, heart beating, breathing heavily.

It had taken them a long time to finally hold the package in their hands, or at least it had seemed like a long time to them. Two weeks seemed interminably long when punctuated by the periods of dysphoria that Ash experienced at so many distinct points – putting on clothes in the morning, catching a glimpse of their naked body in the bathroom mirror, or feeling a pulse of sexuality run through their clit at a sight of a hot girl and knowing that they couldn’t fuck them properly, penetratively, like they wanted to.

But now it was here. Ash almost didn’t want to open the box with their toy inside. They had always considered the moment before opening a present to be the best, and now here was that moment, swiftly passing them by.

Theory, 11

11.
As the sun rose she laid back on her bed. There was a willow tree outside – her parents refused to tell her whether it was her namesake or not. Willow didn’t know where the name of the willow tree came from, and wished that the word was more representative of the sound the tendrils of the tree made as they brushed against each other in the wind.

Her identity wasn’t linked to her name. She tried not to link it to any identifiers except for bare facts. Female bodied, seventeen years old, mortal human.

Theory, 10

10. 

Jake was at home again, richer by one phone number, poorer by some increment of social normalcy.

He felt fine. Everything felt the same. He was reminded of his thirteenth birthday. He had always held the assumption that as soon as he hit thirteen, he would by a man. He would grow chest hair and a beard and take on some element of adulthood that he had not been allowed access to in previous years, and, spontaneously, mature.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise or a disappointment to him that this did not come to pass, but it was. Even at twelve, about to enter middle school, he had hoped that he had been missing something but that it would be revealed to him and suddenly he would be independent – or even just normal. Accepted, if not popular.

On his thirteenth birthday, he accepted, finally, that manhood was not something that could be triggered on a certain date, or at a certain phase of the moon. Manhood would come independent of his wants or his needs, or how much he was bullied for being short.

Having sex with Samuel, like turning thirteen, hadn’t fixed anything.

Theory, 9

9.
It wasn’t even anyone she knew. It was a featureless dark figure, always male, always menacing.

The dark figure would lean in, close enough to kiss her. She wouldn’t struggle. It would lean in, closer and closer, and whisper in her ear.

She never remembered exactly what it said, but she remembered the trembly, nauseous feeling of the voice on her ear, of his lips, and in one smooth movement he was up, kneeling over her, and he stabbed her and she woke up.

The sudden calm silence of her room was shocking in comparison to the chaotic background noise of the dream. The nausea, the fear, the adrenaline died down in her, leaving just an undertone of nerves to deal with. She moaned to herself and rubbed at her face. Her room was all but pitch-black in the wan early-morning light.