edited by Ziv Wities
Content note (click for details)
Gun violence, fetishization of violence, brief mention of child deathBlack barrels and magazines spread from his back like wings. He was larger than the world, but he sat the same as a man. Stoic, ankle resting on his knee. He was straight-backed in that antique at the top of the stairs. He’d claimed it a long time ago—this uncomfortable wooden chair—tall, carved back, and arms straighter than the horizon. I stared up the carpeted steps from the second landing of our mansion. Shaking, because I’d finally made up my mind.
***
We met in the Gulf of Mexico under the shadow of an oil rig. He was naked. He didn’t look anything like a man, but once we fished him out of the waves I swear his body changed to look like us. His face was a copy of my boss’s, spitting up water like a cat. My boss was standing next to me on the aft deck of the OSV, wondering what to do. But I didn’t say anything. I don’t think he noticed.
Back then, I was a derrickhand. Weeks at a time on a rig. I was lonely. We weren’t sure if he was a capsized fisherman or if he fell out of the sky. The Coast Guard took him before the sun set. When I was off duty I tracked down the hospital where he was recovering. He could only say a few things: “Easy, easy.” “We’ll find out where you came from, bud.” “Mind if I ask you a few questions?” But he never asked me any follow-up questions. It was strange listening to him talk at me, repeating everything he’d heard.
They thought he was Mexican (my boss was), so they were ready to kick him over the border as soon as they were sure he wasn’t dead. An idiot could tell they were wrong. The thing is, he sounded like a Texan—without a shadow of a doubt. It wasn’t amnesia from almost drowning. He was hearing English for the first time, eating it whole. His throat was a mirror.
I took him back to my place, made him sign something. He trusted anyone then. I wanted to sublet the spare room in my apartment, and I knew he didn’t have a lot of options. At this point he could already carry on a conversation.
“You live alone?” he asked me.
“Used to.”
He showed his teeth because he already knew what I meant. He got subtext. That surprised me more afterward than it did at the time.
The sublease wasn’t just for the money. He was corn-fed. He only looked a little like my OIM now. I knew there was something wrong with him, but I wanted him anyway. I hadn’t been close to anybody since I started working. I bought him a few outfits, corny stuff—bolos and boot cut jeans. I cooked for him. Nobody ever came asking where he was. Guess they didn’t really care as long as he wasn’t their problem. We lived like that for maybe three whole days before it happened.
I was coming in from the gym, already changed back out of my shorts so I was wearing my holster. I was a single woman in the city. You always carry a gun. I stepped through the doorway and I guess he wanted to say hi. I was his only friend at the time, so of course he waited at the door. I didn’t even know what was happening. He reached for me, and the Glock lifted my shirt and flew to his forearm.
It stuck there. Like a magnet.
“Sorry, Odessa.” He said it like all he did was knock over a glass of water. It was humiliating. Blood was rushing through my cheeks. I guess I was rattled.
“Give me that.”
I reached for it, not as careful as I should have been. My finger brushed the trigger. It didn’t go off but I almost wished it had, to put me out of my misery. My head was buzzing. I yanked back: one hand on the grip, the other on the barrel. It didn’t even budge. I pulled his whole body to me instead. Then I pushed him away because I was scared.
We didn’t talk about it. He tried, but I told him to shut up. I realized pretty quick the sublease didn’t matter. He had no money and he couldn’t get a job. I had to buy him button-downs that were way too big. I bought him a jean jacket. The gun wasn’t coming off, so we had to hide it.
I was getting anxious. It was six days without a gun, and I never went outside without a gun. I couldn’t really afford it, but I walked to the armory and bought a Taurus. I opened the apartment door. I was ready this time, had it gripped like a vice—so it almost took off my fingernails. It flew to him like a dart. He was all the way in the kitchen. I had to cut away his shirt. The pistol was glued to his upper rib. I locked myself in the bathroom for an hour. Couldn’t stop breathing. Ugly, heavy breaths. I bit down on a towel until all I could taste was wet cotton.
“Odessa?” He kept calling through the door. “Odessa?” Soft and gentle like he was a boy. I didn’t answer.
I calmed down, but I wasn’t really calm at all. I said let’s go to the air show. He was worried about getting deported, because before this, it was all I talked about. How he wasn’t allowed to go outside, or talk to anyone. He asked what would happen if somebody recognized his face. I took a deep breath. His face had already changed enough anyway. Forget scared, I thought. It was all in or nothing. I said, if you can do this to a whole crowd, no one’s gonna be asking anything except, “How’d you do it?”
Of course everyone was carrying. In broad daylight, in the hot sun, he walked through the crowd like a knife cutting through the sheets. My breath caught in my throat. As he walked by, every gun flew to him, shrapnel in reverse, sticking to his clothes like merit badges. Three fighters broke the sound barrier overhead and all anyone could do was gawk at him, slack-jawed.
I had to change my thinking. It wasn’t “Crap, I’m defenseless, I’ve got no gun.” Now I was thinking, “This man is every sidearm you’ve ever seen. And you’re his only friend.”
I quit my job and we started touring. Local news stations, gun shows, podcasts nobody’d ever heard of—they thought he was some kind of mascot. They kept saying, “Just make sure we get the guns back when you’re done.” They didn’t believe me when I said that’s not how it worked. They thought it was a magic trick.
I had to take out a loan to keep traveling. It was months before things took off, and I was scared all over again. There’s nothing more boring than being scared of money. Flights weren’t really an option, for obvious reasons. Had to drive states at a time, so I was losing sleep at the wheel. Half the time it felt worse than working rigs. But there was this little glow over everything. This energy.
Finally we landed a talk show, in California of all places. No one was immune to guns. Try eight hundred. We used to keep count but it was impossible now. They’d started overlapping. Fusing together. Falling somewhere into his body. You could still see parts of his skin but half of it was layered over like scales. His back was sprouting wings from the AR stocks.
After the talk show, people started throwing money at us. They knew his name. I couldn’t tell if they thought he was the real deal, or just the greatest magic trick they’d ever seen. They wanted him at the RNC. Wanted him for a show in Las Vegas. Labs asked to study him, but that was the only thing I wouldn’t agree to. Whatever he had, I didn’t want anyone else to have it.
“Caisson,” I said. “You ready to be a millionaire?”
“Will I lose you?” he said.
“What?”
“I like when we’re together.” He looked at me like a puppy.
“The Army just offered us six million for a fifteen second ad. I’m not going anywhere.”
Everyone wanted a piece of us. Of him, but I was his manager, his only friend. I was always there and I saw the way they looked at him. Terror, then awe, then greed.
We bought a house with the earnings. Moved back to Texas, where we both felt at home. The heat, the people, the guns. But the guns were ours now.
The house was more than a house. A big stone thing, historic, eight bathrooms, a chapel, stairs that had to wrap around the entryway twice to reach the top floor.
The day we moved in, we leaned over the railing, admired the square of hardwood at the bottom.
“Something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said.
“What is it?”
His face had changed. It didn’t look like my old OIM anymore. Not even close. It was dark, almost gunmetal. The sharpest jawline I’d ever seen. And his eyes were black. Like they opened once in the dark and never stopped dilating.
“How’d you get here?” I said. “You’re not human, are you.”
“No, I’m not human.”
“You some kind of squid? Shapeshifter?”
The truth was, I didn’t care. He was exactly who I needed him to be. But I was still curious.
“Polarity,” he said.
I laughed. “Caisson, come on. You know I’m not a geek. I told you we were gonna stay away from those guys.”
“How I collect the guns,” he said.
“Just tell me already.”
“It’s the weight.”
“Okay…”
“When I started, it was Earth. It’s larger than me, so I was the one who moved. But there’s weight everywhere, pulling.”
I stared at his grey face and the tiger’s eye bolo around his neck. At the start, he said. Weight. Did that mean it didn’t have to be guns? I didn’t know how to reckon with that. But what did it matter? He picked guns, and I picked him.
“A little green man, then.”
All he did was laugh, light and airy, and it echoed down the stairs.
I don’t know why I let them come. Maybe there was never any stopping it. Women, men, people I wouldn’t have expected in a million years. They flocked to our home, climbed the stairs, and they screwed him right there in that wooden chair. Put their lips on the barrels, long trails of spit on the metal, wove their fingers through the trigger guards. The line went out the door. Instead of makeup I put headphones on in the morning to keep out the moans. The rate we were charging, it was a fair trade. And no babies to worry about. He always kept his pants on.
It started by accident after a conference. A couple found us on the way to our truck. They had a look on their faces. The stars were out. I would have said no—groupies were either dangerous or distracting—but I felt safe with Caisson. He was my gun. His body kept catching on the seatbelts and I was sure the woman was going to grip one of the triggers and light up the cab, but he was always in control. The man stroked him like a treasure, played with his bolo. This was a different kind of magnetism. Not like whatever pulled the guns to his body. It didn’t affect everyone. But when it did, he was all they wanted.
Of course it got political. The sex—or whatever you called it—it still happened, but governments wouldn’t leave him alone. Activists wouldn’t shut up. They figured it out. Knew it wasn’t magic. It was real.
They flew him to war-torn Taiwan. And he walked through the streets, stepped over rubble until he collected every last gun. China never officially pulled out, but their mouths were stuffed with humble pie. Somehow I didn’t care what happened. I waited in a hotel. Couldn’t even read the room service menu. He swiped the keycard, slipped inside. He sat with me on the bed like we were lovers. I wasn’t sure what I was, but now he was a goddamn war hero.
They sent him to Russia next. Colombia after that. All of a sudden he was global. Idiot newscasters started calling him “The Serpent” on account of his skin. He ate guns faster than people could shoot them. Count must have been in the hundreds of thousands, but he hadn’t gotten any bigger. They were inside him, or maybe it was a new kind of physics, another dimension, I don’t know. It was like he got denser. Where the guns rested flat, where they were scales, they overlapped so many times it was like a maze—black grooves as thin as lines on a fingerprint. He was nothing like a man.
I didn’t like him strolling into warzones without me. There was no chance I was going in with him, either. It was awkward. But everything was fine, I guess. It was working. I had exactly what I always wanted: protection, somebody I loved. He was doing everything but I was in control, or I thought I was, and I liked that. I thought he did too.
It happened in a rest stop between Dallas and home.
He was buying pretzels from the vending machine. Somebody wanted an autograph. At this point, it was harder to find someone who didn’t recognize him. Everybody wanted an autograph. This guy, though, he had a special request. Wanted Caisson to fill him with bullets. Some kind of death wish. Caisson said he’d never fired a gun. He said he wouldn’t do it.
I knew that was true, but it was strange when he said it out loud. Everywhere he’d been. Everything he’d taken. All this time I’d thought of him as a perfect butcher. I don’t know why. It was what everyone thought. They assumed he could level a city. The way he disarmed me when I let him into the apartment. I always thought he could do that to anyone, save me if I needed it, neutralize any threat. But here he was acting like a dove.
“Do it,” I said.
“Sorry?”
“Give him his autograph.”
The guy was shaking. He looked like he’d never slept in his life. You could tell he wanted to die more than anything. He thought Caisson was some kind of death god.
“I don’t want to.”
“Do it.”
“Odessa, I don’t think I should.”
“Everyone’s waiting on you,” I said.
A crowd had gathered around the three of us. Somebody came through the door and their pistol flew through the air and stuck to Caisson’s shoulder. He flinched.
I leaned close and whispered, “This is how we keep the world safe. They need to know you don’t have any weaknesses.”
His face was all tensed up, the metal bending. I could barely hear his voice. “I don’t want to kill him.”
The guy lurched forward. There was something wrong with him. He reached for one of the triggers on Caisson’s arm. I jumped behind him, screamed that he was going to kill us.
And there it was. Like a light switch.
My ears were ringing as I opened my eyes, watched the blood pooling under Caisson’s boots. The man was crumpled at his feet, bent over like he was bowing.
He didn’t hate me the way I thought he would. It was something else. He started changing. We were still charging people to come worship him on his chair. Swarms of people. Nobody cared that that guy was dead. It just confirmed what they already knew: Caisson was the Devil. No use fighting him, so you might as well try to have his babies. The thing was, he didn’t stroke their hair anymore, didn’t encourage them. “Yes, wonderful,” he used to say. “Just like that.” He was silent now, with a steel jaw. He used to tease their fingers away when they groped for his triggers. Now he let them pull. A dark rose bloomed on the floorboards under his chair.
He still left when officials called. They flew him to London for a bomb threat. Bombs. Criminals thought they were clever now that guns were worthless. He shot the guy from a skyscraper half a mile away.
I didn’t even follow him anymore. Just read the news while I waited to pick him up from the private airport. They flew him to Yemen. Eighteen hostages held at gunpoint with unclaimed rifles. He lit up the captors like a firestorm. Then he took the guns. Prison riot, Buenos Aires. Gunned down forty-six inmates. Another bomb threat, Times Square. Fired on the suspect. The bomb detonated anyway, collapsing the 42nd Street Shuttle, killing a hundred and three. Invasion, Syria. Decimated three tanks, downed a plane, wiped out the ground forces. They said there wasn’t time to evacuate all the children.
It was nothing, all of it. A flick of his wrists. Nobody cared. Sometimes he stole their guns like a cheap magician, and left just as quickly—for old times’ sake, I don’t know. Most of the time it was extermination—everyone on sight. There was no way to know which one it was going to be. It didn’t scare me. It was beyond that. It felt like everything was over. Us most of all.
I found him upstairs after Syria.
“I want you to stop,” I said. “They’re already under our thumb.”
“Stop what?” He said it calm and slow, like I was the hothead.
“People don’t need to die for no reason. You should know better.”
“What’s a good reason?” he said.
I exhaled hard. Everything had been easy before. “I don’t know, when they’re going to kill you, or they’re going to kill somebody who doesn’t deserve it.”
“Isn’t that what I’ve been doing?”
I stared at him for a long time. He was tall in his chair, the red stain under him, his silver grin. It was impossible to reach him now.
***
I thought about the man at the rest stop. He wanted to die. Caisson was designed to kill. It made sense then. What was I supposed to do, stand there eating his pretzels like a dipstick?
I snuck into Caisson’s room and found a ruby bolo. I couldn’t remember if it was the first one I bought him. He started collecting them when money was falling into our pockets. Wore a new one every day. His neck was solid steel now. It wouldn’t even work, would it? I didn’t have a lot of options. Maybe if he didn’t see it as a weapon, he wouldn’t take it from me.
I walked down the hallway. It looked longer than a lifetime. Every board creaked under my weight. I climbed the steps, paused on the landing. He was there, like always, staring from his chair into empty space.
His lip turned up, seeing me. My hand tightened around the bolo and I rose to the top step.
“Odessa. I’m glad you’re here.”
My heart was beating up to my skull. I could still see the grip of my old Glock buried in his forearm.
He glanced at the bolo and smiled. “You’re a doll.” He put a hand on his bare, silver neck. “I’ve been feeling naked all day.”
© 2025 by Mason Yeater
3276 words
Author’s Note: I’m a fan of unlikable, unheroic protagonists. Originally, I wanted to write a love story between a human and an alien. I’d always planned for the alien to betray them in some way, based on the fact that the alien’s motivations wouldn’t be entirely comprehensible. In a way, all of that appears in the final story.
Mason Yeater writes speculative fiction near the Great Lakes. His work has appeared in Diabolical Plots and in TL;DR Press’s Curios and Through the Grinder, Darkly anthologies. He can be found sometimes @snow_leeks on Twitter.
If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings. Mason Yeater’s story “Ketchōkuma” previously appeared here in Diabolical Plots.
