FSE

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“You suck at this." Mindy rested her head on Halitzer's shoulder and twirled the antique controller by the cord around her hand. “I'm dating you for your brain, doc, why can't you play this game?"

Halitzer witnessed hazing rituals or hamster deaths less brutal than whatever smackdown Mindy laid upon him in this strategy game from before he was born. There was no outward indication of failure, but a feeling deep in his bones sufficed. “Didn't you make the quarterfinals in some tournament?" Halitzer raised a brow and cocked his head.

“Nationals."

Halitzer sighed and looked away from the screen. Mindy was a short, chubby, albino anthropomorphic rat – legally misidentified as a mouse due to hospital negligence, interbreeding, DNA tests, and bureaucracy making changing this classification a bitch, in a tight-fitting sweatshirt and no pants, the only unkempt fur on her poking out from her panties.

“I'm not turning our night into some sweaty nerd fiasco." Halitzer probably bungled whatever he was supposed to do in this game. “Our bedroom's already like that."

“That's suboptimal! You know that factories are a midgame investment and you don't have the- You're doing this to piss me off." Mindy balled her hands into fists. “I made those lecture slides, gave the whole talk - everything! You should be playing meta!"

Halitzer shrugged. “With everything that bothers you, I'm amazed you haven't shot the university up."

Mindy slumped against Halitzer's shoulder. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mostly creep 'em out when they start insinuating I'm stupid. Like, I'll hold up a rat and say 'The experimental subject rat is born - without his consent - into a system too massive for him to comprehend, his entire life is purely to benefit said system, and he dies ingloriously and to nobody's dismay. In this way, we and the rats are alike.'"

Halitzer's train of thought was immolated, decapitated, and defenestrated, and he sputtered incoherently. “Mindy, what?!"

“Spend too much time on imageboards reading various manifestos alongside esoteric religious texts and you open your third eye. All 'aeromorph' porn is funded by the government to psyop lonely men into being military engineers."

Halitzer knew when he was outmatched and retreated from the conversation. The next five seconds took a million years, at least in his head. He sighed like he received a terminal diagnosis. “I thought this would be a normal night. You'd eat all my peanut butter, lie about eating all my peanut butter, and eventually offer sex in exchange for the peanut butter."

Mindy looked about. “Don't check your cabinet but get more peanut butter."

Halitzer decided that his cupboard needed a lock because Mindy went through a jar of peanut butter approximately every three days. It would eventually go somewhere other than her thighs: an unappealing possibility. “What were we on about before you murdered the conversation?"

“How you suck at video games." Mindy leaned against Halitzer and smiled wider.

A few hours passed, and the game gradually became a spirited conversation about neurochemistry. Once they had finished their arguments and drawn up a graph between them, they collapsed back on the couch.

Mindy straddled Halitzer and then spun about so her back was to his chest. She slumped against him, eyes boggling a bit as she did. “Cervantes was right about television, you know."

“Miguel de Cervantes? I'm not a historian but I think he died before televisions were invented."

“I mean this garbage oughta be regulated harshly and Cervantes suggested that for all media. The frightening part about reality TV is that it becomes more real with exposure. If you've ever heard about egregores-“

“You got drunk, rambled about that, and I almost called a therapist." Halitzer planted his hand on Mindy's chest and squeezed. “One was needed. I don't know for who."

“H-hey, bastard!" Mindy squirmed in Halitzer's lap. He wanted to compare her to a trout, but those weren't sexy. “I'm trying to enlighten you as to the darker forces that lay at the intersection of technological development and-“

“No talking about egregores, determinism, industrial society and its future, or gnosis after eight PM on a weekday."

“But you're the only one who'll listen and know what I'm on about!" Mindy's ears flushed and she balled her hands to fists.

Halizter slumped against the couch and groaned. Mindy wasn't stupid or uncharismatic but entered that insane realm peculiar to devoted academics, and while Halitzer was also there, it still felt awkward seeing it in multiple fields simultaneously. He gazed at his ceiling, then off to Mindy's things neatly arranged across his furniture. She'd bolted from 'the warren' as soon as he suggested, and their possessions soon became indistinguishable. “I know, but I'm tired and feel like we're on a watchlist now."

Mindy spun about on Halitzer's lap and leaned against his chest, her somewhat-wet snout poking against his chin. “Like you didn't invent the word 'gerontivory' and spend a week ranting about it?"

“There is no succinct term for 'dangerous to the elderly' and such an egregious hole in English must be rectified." Halitzer crossed his arms. “But I concede. We're both insane."

“Eh, we're just academics and it's weird to see one of us think. The warrens aren't a shining beacon of intellectualism. The men spend all day downloading porn and the women spend all night uploading it." Mindy said.

Halitzer yawned. “We've gone wildly off track, haven't we? We're supposed to demonstrate why, exactly, I need a few hundred thousand dollars to investigate your vagina in front of the neuropharmacology department soon."

“Eh, we drew up the diagram." Mindy grabbed Halitzer's hand and pressed it to her chest. “And I think it's a bit late to be working, isn't it?"

“Let's at least go over the script once more. It wasn't a random sexual encounter, but a 'serendipitous laboratory discovery' which-“

“We're not the Alexander Fleming of pussy juice, doc."

Halizter rubbed his eyes. An exhausted Mindy was like a drunk Mindy and a drunk Mindy was like Satan, but somehow worse.

Mindy knew exactly what he thought. “C'mon, I'm not that bad."

Halitzer half-closed his eyes and marveled at how she could be so monstrously wrong. His mind drifted back a few days and he tried to imagine the world through her eyes.

“Wassup baby, what's a girl like you doin' all alone on a night like this?"

Mindy swallowed another overpriced vodka shot and waited for Halitzer to leave the bathroom. The world swayed through her bloodshot eyes and some hairy bastard affronted her eyes and nose like an open sewer. “Drinking."

“Well, how about you come back to my place?"

Mindy identified the orange blob offending her senses as an anthropomorphic fox, and she rested her arms on the bar to steady herself. She raised a brow. “Do you have a lawn?"

“Why?" He smiled wide. “Wanna fuck on it?"

Mindy blinked. “Why?"

The man possibly realized the danger as his eyes widened and his stance stiffened. “What? Why do I have a lawn?"

“Yeah." Mindy turned to the barman and demanded another drink. “Why do you have a lawn instead of an apple orchard, Zen garden, or a miniature reconstruction of Robespierre's sermon on the Supreme Being on his artificial mountain?" She jabbed the fox's chest with a finger. “It's because you've been inculcated into finding certain people, places, things, or concepts sexy, unaware of their origin. See, you wanna fuck me because I've got smooth fur and huge tits."

“Uh… y-yeah? Do… you still want to go back to my place?"

“Keep pissing me off and I'll tie you down and do such horrible shit to your brain that you'd find Margaret Thatcher's feet sexy! I'm a neuroscientist!" She smashed her other hand into the bar. “Now scram, I'm drinking here!"

The fox bolted for fear of castration or death and Halitzer slid into the plush seat beside Mindy. “Let's go home. You're more wasted than a student loan on a liberal arts degree."

“Don't get me started on those." Mindy's voice dripped with venom. “Joyce was a hack. Hack! If you can't say what you want expediently, don't speak. Him, and all that flowery bullshit," she jabbed her finger into the bar. “Is like the painting that's just red. The audience imagines what they want and pretends it's infinitely profound and complex. But you know what? If that's the best art, then the greatest artist who ever lived will be the man who sold the most blank canvasses."

There she was, messy-furred, huge ears flushed, nose twitching, whiskers crumpled, reflected at the bottom of a bottle. Her white fur and thick frame turned her into a low-floating cloud and her eyes were so bloodshot she couldn't tell where her sclera ended and irises began. Her rumpled university shirt and too-tight pants accentuated her wide hips, and her minor paunch overflowed from her ill-fitting outfit, with her long, hairless tail spasming about in her stupor.

Halitzer ducked under her arm and hefted her up. “You need to lie down."

“You need to wake up." She slapped him.

He yanked her tail in response and her ass up through her spine felt like an erupting volcano. She squeaked and bit the air as he dragged her flailing form from the bar and into the car like he was arresting her. Consciousness ebbed and flowed like the tide, and she realized where she was as she was dumped onto the couch back home. She groaned, tried to sit up, and flopped onto her other side, nauseous from the effort.

“Liquor doesn't suit you," Halitzer said.

“You're not a medical-“

“An idiot can diagnose you." Halitzer waggled a finger and shrugged. “Now stay still, I don't want you asphyxiating on your vomit when you sleep."

“How thoughtful." Mindy tried to sound sexy while fighting back bile but instead sounded halfway between a grandma and someone gargling. Still, her flushed tail twitched and she wiped her flushed ears and peeled off her shirt with a sigh. “Anyway, wanna fuck?"

---

“Hey!" Mindy snapped her fingers. “Stop dissociating, doc!"

Halitzer shook himself from the memory. If he were dumber, he'd probably consider Mindy an unbearable shrew instead of a hilarious rat. He wrapped his hand over Mindy's snout and held her mouth shut. “I don't want to spend all night having-“

A muffled, bewildered sound stalled him.

“Not because I don't want to, but because we have to present in a few days and we ought to-“

Another noise, flailing. She grabbed his wrist and pulled her snout free, then nibbled his finger. “Oh c'mon, the more we collect 'samples' the less we'll need to beg for. Besides, it'll only be a little while and we can sleep afterward."

“I'm unsure if we can legally-“

“The law's overrated." Mindy pressed her thumb against Halitzer's throat. “Ever been in traffic? Ever thought – 'I want to take that moron out of the car ahead of me and saw him open for science?' It's amazing how there are free-floating assholes everywhere you look."

“Can you let me finish a-“

“No." She pressed her lips against his and the mixed and peculiar tastes of peanut butter, rat saliva, far more chocolate cake than she'd confess to eating, and somewhere under that an actual dinner streaked across his tongue like a drunkard down the street.

Halitzer rolled his eyes and pressed back against her, then rolled her onto the couch and grunted. “Trophy wives are a depreciating asset, and I know what I said about talkative women, but would you mind orienting your conversation towards either our job or not complaining about… I don't know, everything?"

Mindy raised her ass. “Smack me and I'll talk about obscure JRPG development and localization history. Don't and I'll start quoting a terrorist manifesto agai-“

Halitzer struck her massive derriere with an open palm and watched her bounce under the force, her face buried in the couch's corner. He knew that he could do things human women would hate and she'd eat it up. Sometimes literally, when the peanut butter was involved. Still, was this nonsense his penance for easy sex and an intellectually engaging wife? Girlfriend? He cocked his head slightly. She was wife material: he could brand the word IDIOT into his forehead if he thought otherwise. Half her brain was in space and the other half in Hell, but most women were wholly infernal anyway. He could ramble about neurochemistry for hours and she'd be interested and understand. And he'd had more sex with her than everyone else in his family tree combined had sex with anything over the past year.

She scrabbled to pry her snout free and then waved her tail. She froze like a cop held her at gunpoint and looked about. “Hang on, where's my phone, we need to play the fucking playlist."

“If Never Gonna Give You Up comes on again I'm choking you unconscious."

Mindy pretended to think as she fished her phone from between the couch cushions. “And if it doesn't, choke me until I cum, okay?"

Halitzer shrugged and wrapped his arm around her throat. Another day in paradise.