author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

Maria Dahvana Headley has written a beautiful short story, “Ivory Darts, Golden Arrows,” which you may read for yourself in Uncanny Magazine. And you should, because it’s glorious. It takes a fresh look at love letters and lust, cupids and postmistresses, gender and godhood and choice and the seasons, and it mixes them all up thoroughly. It’s a lush and gorgeous read, and a little erotic besides.

This story is not nearly as ambitious. All it has in common with that one is that it’s about cupids. Cupids, and other gods.

Cupids are nasty, selfish little jerks. They have less empathy and social awareness than a trickster god, and that’s saying something. Popular media has them flitting around, pairing people up into unexpected happily ever afters, but that’s bull. Cupids aren’t in it for anyone’s happily ever after. They’re just in it to get laid. They’re horrible little serial rapists, is what they are, their love-barbs nothing more than supernatural roofies.

One of them had set his sights on Michaela while she tended her bar on Florida Street. And it’s not like Michaela didn’t have enough problems. She was coming into a storm of legal troubles. Some asshole’s parents got their noses in matching slings over her having reported their son’s fake ID. They’d decided to teach her a lesson by reporting her for serving alcohol to minors. Well-meaning friends had insisted she had nothing to worry about, she’d carded the brat and confiscated the fake, that was an unassailable defense. But Michaela knew how easy it was for people with money to stack an investigation. Besides, the troublemaker had friends, and they had friends, and a lot of them had fake IDs of their own. Michaela and her staff only had to slip up once to wind up head down in the outhouse.

So that’s what was on her mind when the cupid walked into to the bar. He was tall, fair-haired, apparently young, good-looking in a tousled kind of way. In a college town within ten miles of three different tourist beaches, he didn’t stand out. Michaela noticed the cupid only as a new customer approaching the bar. She was in the middle of fixing a double gin and tonic for a regular. “I’ll be with you in just a moment,” she called.

The cupid didn’t wait. He made his move....

This has been an excerpt from the Friday Fictionette for November 4, 2016. Subscribers can download the full-length fictionette (1037 words) from Patreon as an ebook or audiobook depending on their pledge tier.

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