A Vessel for Offering
Hard boiled pseudo- Lovecraftian noir science fiction with squishy (and doomed, of course) romantic bits.
Approx. 221,333 words.
him--hanging upside down on the wall, in fact--and experiences a woozy shudder of vertigo. Two ships passing in the night, Ray thinks, then gets his balls firmly in hand and humps it the rest of the way until he has the rat's nose pressed against the top of his head.
The nose is cold, which is what he would expect from a robotic multi-function sensor drone encased in a pseudo-metallic fiber carapace. If the casual observer somehow neglected to notice the rat was constructed entirely from non-organic materials, he or she might be struck by how rat-like the rat was--the expected chubby rat body, the long rat face, the coiled and icky rat tail. Even the delicately clawed and prehensile paws were rattish. Ray didn't know if this extreme mimicry had been aesthetic or functional, only that it was a little creepy in a hip sort of way.
At this moment, the rat is doing a big bunch of nothing except hanging on the wall.
"What's the matter with you, then?" Ray says.
At the sound of his voice
