Excerpt from THE STRANGE CASE OF THE TATTOOED TWINK

Excerpt from THE STRANGE CASE OF THE THE TATTOOED TWINK

Braden peers into Djanni's dreams a bit deeper and follows him a little further back in time; a troupe of performers enlists the tattooed twink in an unusual project.

You have another memory. It doesn't make any sense, but you can tell it's a memory of something that happened and not just a dream. After you left the hut with the men who made your skin a canvas for words and paint, but before you found the boys and girls at the beach, you were with some other people, a sextet of twinky faggots who find you in a park when they caught you watching them hungrily while they ate curries from a street vendor. "That kid's got some seriously insane ink!" one of the boys says. They can see almost all of it because you were naked except for your shorts.

"Come here!" he says and you approach them slowly. You couldn't not look at their food. One of them reaches into a bag and pulls out a round paper container and a spoon. "You hungry, bro?" He hands the container to you and they all watch you as you devour its contents in a few huge bites. One of the others says: "This dude would look awesome in the next show! He wouldn't even need any make-up!"

You follow them home. They all live together in a big warehouse loft over the top of huge bookshop, and it looks like a junk yard of toys all over its vast floor. The one who gave you the food—a blond white boy with a little bit of acne on his face—is named Kyler and he tells you that he and his "troupe" are "performance artists" and that they are currently performing an "interpretive recreation" of an ancient TV show called Star Trek. They shoot live-action scenes and merge them with animation and music of their own devising. They assure you that this is awesome, the way that they are reimagining one-by-one all seventy-nine episodes of this show.

They are currently in production on Episode #50 of their show, titled "By Any Other Name." A short argument—one that they'd evidently had before—erupts among the group over whether it really should still be called episode #50 because they had already inserted a half dozen "original" episodes derived from fan fiction that weren't part of the Original Seventy-Nine. But Kyler is adamant that "By Any Other Name" is still episode #50 because that's what it was in the show's original production order. Kyler seems to be their leader, and the others don't press the point with him any further. He also seems to be the leader on their show because he often plays a character named Kirk who is the captain of an interstellar spaceship.

Kyler lays out for you the premise of Episode #50: "The ship gets boarded by aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy. Most of our crew has been immobilized by condensing them into dodecahedrons." He goes over to a table and picks up a white object that looks like a giant multi-sided die for use in a table-top roleplaying game. A "dodecahedron," you guess. "But Spock—who is a Vulcan—figures out through telepathic contact with one of the alien's minds that their human appearance is just a disguise and that they are actually wholly alien beings—immense creatures with many tentacles—who had to adopt human form to be able to exist on a human starship. But their new human bodies betray them! The alien scheme unwinds when the humans encourage the aliens to start feeling human sensory impressions and emotions. We think you should play one of the aliens!"

"Zero, o-rekt," you say. "Phantom, nah."

One of the other dudes—a kid named Wang who plays Spock and assorted other characters in their show—thinks that it's just fine that you can't speak normally: "He can just say whatever he wants, and we will subtitle it! It's perfect! It's like he comes with his own alien language!"

Kyler takes off his shirt and steps up to you, very close. He has some zits on his chest, too, and black spirals inked around his pink nipples. "You like boys, right? Can I kiss you?" You open your mouth a little bit and let him inside it with his tongue, and his teeth clack against yours because he is really eager for the kiss. "So, in the scene I want you to do with me," he explains, still holding you close, "you are one of the alien Kelvans who have taken over my starship. In order to awaken your new human senses, I seduce you and make love to you."