Love Is the Law by Nick Mamatas

driveway; perhaps Belle Terre had local rules to keep aged automobiles out of the development, and she had had to walk up the long and winding path to get here.
    And the man was home in the enormous living room. Disappointingly, he wasn’t in drag, or nude and swinging from a noose, or fucking a ten-year-old boy. He was watching television. CNN. Protesters in the GDR again. What a huge television it was, practically the size of one of the walls of my bedroom at Grandma’s apartment. He had something in his lap: a white bread sandwich. And he lifted half of it—did the maid cut it diagonally for him on request or out of long-standing habit?—to his rich face and bit into it like an animal, his cheeks stuffed. Did watching history end before his very eyes give him an erection? The inevitable triumph of capitalism must have made his Wonder Bread taste extra special, I’m sure.
    Suddenly, I was sick. My stomach turned inside out and started crawling up my throat. This was something other than Will; it was pure autonomic response. My arms moved, herky-jerky, and picked up one of the bleached white rocks at my feet. The shrubbery was lined with them. I threw it at a window and it bounced off. Then I screamed, picked it and a few more up, and flung them at the window with both hands. A clatter, then a scatter. Not even a scratch. High-tech, high-security stuff designed to look just like every other early twentieth-century mansion in Belle Terre. He didn’t even hear it.
    I avoided the comic shop and the rest of downtown Port Jefferson, though I hadn’t eaten and was getting very hungry. I even stayed off Main Street, in case someone recognized me from my morning antics at the LIRR. I thought to try to find Roderick, but given how my last stunt with finding someone had gone, I thought the better of it. Greg, I could talk to, if only to warn him away from Chelsea.
    How strange my libido was. It was an animal of its own, a lioness in the cage of my skull. I was in mourning for an older man, on a mission of j______. No, a mission of revenge. I had spent the last couple of years purposefully alienating myself from the local boys, with Twinkies and Manic Panic and a cultivated surliness. And now I was jealous of another girl, and desirous of cock my own age. Hell, had Riley turned around after I’d thrown that rock I probably would have offered to suck his dick too. Learn a little capitalist magick for once, maybe.
    I was surprised to find Greg and Roderick together, in Greg’s front yard. Greg was raking the leaves, or pantomiming the same, working over the same mud-brown pile. Roderick stood on the curb, smoking a cigarette. I saw them before they saw me and got a chance to listen in for a few seconds.
    “—all fucked up,” Greg said.
    “The whole world is, it’s true,” Roderick said. “Ever see that movie, Something Wicked This Way Comes ? It’s like that—a storm is coming.”
    “The seller of lightning rods arrived before the storm,” I said as I walked up to them.
    “I didn’t even read it. I think I saw the movie once,” Greg said. “Oh, hi, Dawn.”
    “You guys know each other?”
    “Who do you think the lightning rod seller is?” Roderick asked me.
    “Maybe a better question is who the lightning rod is, Rod.”
    “I’ve known Roderick for a long time. Forever even.” Greg leaned on the rake as if his labors of several minutes had exhausted him. “We took tae kwon do together when we were seven.”
    “I went to Catholic school. My mother used to drive me all the way out to Huntington and back every day,” Roderick said.
    “Is that what you two were doing? Reminiscing about karate class?”
    “ Tae kwon do ,” Greg said.
    “We were talking about all the weird shit going on lately,” Roderick said.
    “You told him about Bernstein,” I said to Greg, who just shrugged. “What other weird shit is going on lately?” I asked Roderick.
    It was his turn to shrug, but he answered, “Well, there