Full story this time, as it is a flash of dubious literary merit and one that took all of–when did I put up the last post?–30 minutes to write. Good to know the old 365 Tomorrows muscles still work. This puts me, word count and story count -wise at…where I should have been Sunday. Ah, well.

This story amuses me to no end, though, and it’s the perfect palate clenser for more involved fiction. Expect ol’ Bronco to show up again the next time I get frustrated.

In the cold, clear light of dawn, Bronco McGillicutty could see all the way to Jupiter. As the sun spread over Ceres’s rocky surface, Bronco looked at the massive gas giant with awe and wonder. He turned to Grangoff Sletch, the man he had hopped halfway across the solar system in search of. Sletch was a criminal and degenerate, but Bronco knew the poor bastard had to appreciate beauty of some sort. Bronco yanked the manacled man up by his hair.

“You see that red-spot, Sletch? Take at good look, the sky’s gonna fog up when the sun gets too much higher. That storm there. You see it?”

“Yeah, I see it,” Sletch drawled. “So what?”

“So what? Goddamn! Look at it, dammit! Ain’t that storm the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen! Ain’t it? If I met a woman, man, androgyne or hermaphadite half as beautiful as that mass of swirling gas, why, I’d fuck ‘em until my dick fell off!” To punctuate his point, Bronco threw Sletch to the ground and starting humping the artificial atmosphere. “Now, say it’s pretty, you piece of shit!”

Sletch spat out a mouthful of Ceres gravel. “Fine, fine it’s pretty, okay? It’s pretty.”

“You’re damn right it is.” Bronco stared at the storm until the yellow sky of Ceres made it impossible. Bronco looked back at his quarry, a skinny, spent man with chained hands and feet. “Hey. What you say we go fuck that storm?”

“What?”

“You heard me. Let’s go fuck it. You and me. We’ll fly in close, I’ll take the chains off, and we’ll dive naked into that fat red eye of Jupiter! You and me, we’ll do it! Whaddaya say?”

“You’re crazy!”

“That I am, Sletch, that I am. Crazy to have spent my life chasing after worthless wastes of skin like you, crazy to have let my first wife and my third husband go, and crazy to have left my children to grow up without their father. I’m crazy. But I’m sane enough to know you’ve left a similar trail of human wreckage behind you. I’m sane enough to know that our lives ain’t worth shit. But imagine, if we end them like that, fuckin’ a gas giant. Well, shit! That’d be something, wouldn’t? Shitballs, that’d be something!”

Sletch looked at Bronco as if he had some sort of disease. “You can’t be serious!”

Bronco gave Sletch a hurt look, then grabbed him in the hair. “Well, fine. You wanna be that way. We’ll just haul your skinny ass back to jail. Shit. I had high hopes for you, Sletch. I hoped you were a trooper. But you’re just like the rest.”

Bronco’s fast, angry strides toward his ship made it difficult for Sletch to keep pace, and he found himself dragged more than walking along. “You don’t really want to jump naked into Jupiter do you?”

“Well, not alone,” Bronco said. He paused at the hatch of his ship, his large frame a stark shadow against the golden sky. “That’d make me some sort of a pervert.”

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