Stories I've Enjoyed: "Rescue Wounds" by Kal Cobalt

Yup, trying to resurrect this weekly feature. Mostly because I got really excited about this story when I read an excerpt in a recent Circlet Press Chat. Kal Cobalt's "Rescue Wounds" was published in Circlet's Queerpunk anthology a couple years back.

I found the writing dense and gorgeous. I had to slow way down to read it, because the words have a deep sense of strangeness. They work like cyberpunk should, though. Cobalt doesn't so much explain the world as let it hand within the words on the page. The writing has a lovely way of creating double metaphors: on one hand technological and on the other hand lovely and organic. The relationship in the story is handled with similar subtlety.

Here's a sample, which I hope you'll find as gorgeous as I do:

19178 ticked my cock, again, and delivered a contented little hum at what he found. He started in on the usual behaviors we'd established - all things he took the lead on, so I could respond as necessary and concentrate on the bore. He tongued my ethercock, giving me a truly boring lickjob while I broke relay codes.

The undergrove sprawled beneath six commerce towers; it was going to take a combination of geo-location and cracking the distribution codes to pinpoint his bodyshack. Numbers raced past my right eye faster than I could consciously process. My subprocessors ground through the data in the background, making my skull ache. 19178 kept licking, slipping me an image of his wet lips wrapped tight around my shaft. I blinked the bore into high gear; it was a question now of which would finish first, my subprocessing or my cock. Both ached,pushed to their limit.

I hate it when I come before I'm done cracking.

You can read the rest in the Queerpunk anthology.

Full disclosure: A few of my stories have been published by Circlet, but when I write stuff like this, I'm acting entirely on my own, using a copy of a book that I bought myself.