The Ides of February
By Bruce Holland Rogers and Jay Lake

emember, my love, how innocently it all started, a few cards with black hearts appearing among the more traditional selections of Vie Amoureuse Day cards?  The I-Hate-Love books released during the ides of February?  Candy hearts started appearing with anti-love messages.  The newly divorced gathered at parties for the ritual burning of their marriage certificates. Vie Amoureuse vandalism was minor back then, graffiti spray-painted on florists’ delivery floaters: VD Sucks!

It turned ugly.  Slashed tires.  Jewelry shop windows painted over in black.  Gangs of singles barging into nice restaurants to dump buckets of salty ice water over dining couples.  We’d have been among the casualties that time at The Savoy Truffle if we had been sitting one table closer to the door.

Now, here we huddle in the dark under the stairs, away from the windows and the viewscreens, listening to the drunken revelry outside.  This is the one night of the year when, if you’re going to be out on the street, you’re safer to walk alone.  Not that we could safely go out from our house now, even one at a time.  They know who we are.  They always have, I suppose, but by now one of them will have painted our names on our front door, inside a heart.  There’s the sound of chanting at houses up and down the street, the words indistinct but the playground rhythms familiar.

It starts up outside of our door.  “Steeeeven,” they call out.  “Are you in there with Melodeeeee?  Do you like her?  Do you loooooove her?”

Even when we took their names, nothing changed.  You lean back against me and I press my cheek against the top of your head.  I inhale the perfume of your hair, hug you close.

“Oh!  Oh!  My heart’s on fire!  My heart’s on fire!”  Laughter.  I don’t know what they’re doing.  Burning a paper heart, maybe?

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

One of them starts in:  “Steven and Melody sitting in a tree...”

Others join in the chant:  “K-I-S-S-I-N-G...”

Glass shatters with a pop.  Only a bottle.  They haven’t started breaking windows yet.  Maybe they will just taunt us from outside and go away this year, satisfied that they have done enough by driving us out of view.

On the other hand, they could be out for blood.  Last year, in Vendredi Landing, they dragged couples into the streets, surrounded them, and screamed for them to renounce one another.  By strange coincidence all of the victims were Vendredoise.

So regrettable, the Governor-Resident had told the press.

“Melodeeee,” they call.  “Is Steven the one for you?  Is he your soooul mate?”

“Izoo in lub wid him?”

This time the shattering was a massive sleeting, one of the front windows giving way.  Feet pound even as they laugh all the harder, driven by gin and separatism and their oh-so-moral strictures against armed violence.

You squeeze my knee.  I hold you tight as they come and drag us out, big Terran hands with their hairy knuckles and meat-rot breath above.  I won't give you up; I hold you tight.  I try to whisper something even I don't believe as we are taken down the front steps.

Your head bangs against the stone with a dull crunch that stops even this raucous crowd in mid-stride.  Your body shakes, heels drumming as your scent sharpens in a fatal stink.

The Terrans back away, no one meeting anyone else's eye, no one willing to talk, to face each other or us.  There is a clatter of tools, boards, pipes falling to the ground as footsteps fade.

It is working, you know.  Their ridiculous doctrine of separation of bodies.  Even if none of them on Vendredi ever breed again, there will always be more Terrans, a fountain of flesh taking ship from their crowded, stinking, meat-ridden motherworld to fill the stars while our kind slips away for lack of love.

They didn't need to take up arms against us.  This has been a war without expense or blame.  I hold your hand as you breathe your shuddering last and mouth your name in the language of our vanished mothers.  I will not think on the fading defeat of our hearts.  Instead, I start to laugh, though for us that is the same sound as tears.

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