Brutal Women by Kameron Hurley

ribcage. The body shudders. She digs around for awhile. Her
hands come out bloody. No sludge. Clean. She looks up at me.
    “Clean,” she says.
    “Now what?” Luce says.
    “We burn them,” I say.
    They don’t have a better idea. So
we burn them. And they burn. Like good little girls, my little Wonder, Maul,
Doll. They burn.
    I chew some more sen. Telle flicks
on the tube.
    There’s nothing dangerous in Pekoi.
     
    We ship out three weeks later.
We’ve got a new first, and a new flank. We’re the last squad to take off, so we
get to see it. It’s Telle who’s on the tube, Telle who says,
    “We’re clear.”
    They drop fire on Pekoi. Pekoi
burns. Just like anything else.
    The brains say Pekoi is too
dangerous to the civilized world. Doesn’t matter what the muscle says, what the
muscle did. It’s all about the brains, in the end. What they thought they saw.
What they thought they knew.
    Telle’s got the tube up by her ear.
I’m watching the city burn.
    “You hear it?” Telle asks our
first.
    Our first shakes her head.
    “Eighty percent of the districts
reporting. Nabirye’s leading fifty-six to forty.”
    Luce is wiping moths’ wings off her
boots, smearing dusty color on her cheeks. She laughs and laughs.
    Nabirye flies us to another city.
     

Genderbending At the Madhattered
    “The Madhattered” was, I
believe, the name of a bar in one of fellow Clarionite Andy Scott’s workshop
stories. I loved the name so much that I vowed to use it in a story one day. In
2004, I got my chance when Strange Horizons Magazine published Genderbending at
the Madhattered, probably the only magazine that would ever take a weird little
story like this. Turns out I can write about painters afterall – so long as
they’re gender/sex morphing ones. This is also, possibly, the closest I will
ever come to writing a romance with a “happy” ending. Or at least a romance
about two people who don’t totally annihilate each other. You’ve been warned.
     
    My friends are cyclical, like the
eight seasons—always changing, always the same. I never believed this. About
them. About myself. I didn’t like politics.
    I photograph the perpetually
gendered in little rural towns outside the city, towns with names like Ash and
Beech and Coriander. After half a year of churning along muddy rails, knocking
on knotty doors tied with twine; after half a hundred debates with operators
about misdirected calls, charges, disconnected or nonexistent lines; after all
that, all I wanted was to be back in the city, drinking at the Madhattered,
thinking about anything but politics.
    My friends kept tabs on when I’d be
in; we’d meet at the Madhattered thirteen hours till dawn. Nib and Page were
always there first, always arguing: debates about heterosexist dogma, or who
could drink the most tarls without compromising gender propriety. Margin would
drink mandalas and tell me it was barbaric that there was actually a country
where drinking processed food was taboo.
    Rule showed up the same every
night, of course. He’d walk in, tall and straight-hipped, denouncing social
authorities and gender prescription. He’d come in with his beard plucked
because the government wouldn’t let him get it surgically eradicated. His wish
for smooth cheeks fell outside his gender prescriptions, especially since he
was queer. “Nothing personal,” Rule told me the first time we met, when I asked
him to be female for the night, and he admitted to his inability to alter sex.
“Just born that way.”
    Rule always ordered the drinks:
mandalas straight up, sprins over ice, four tonic and tarls . . . and then he’d
order drinks for the rest of us.
    By the end of the night, we were
always drunk, and Margin would be slumped over in the seat next to mine,
wearing a blue tunic or pink tutu and enough makeup to paint a landscape.
Margin would blubber about the latest love he or she had lost that night, Page
and Nib would be yelling about whose turn it was to be male