The Six Most Common Questions Asked by Customers in Rubian Brothels

1. "Freshly molted?"

If it's not the first question, it's the second. They prefer us soft. I think they think we're helpless fresh out of a molt. I think that makes them feel more in control.

I always tell them yes. They don't know the difference. I know workers that pluck the hairs from their carapace and file down the sharp points of their spines. They don't know our bodies well enough to see the lie. We could be a week from our next molt and the customer would still believe us, so long as we pretend with them.

There are those of us that take a different route. Honored never files its points or plucks its hairs. It takes customers only late in the molt when it is at its hardest.

"They pay for dangerous," Honored tells me. "They like to be scared."

On a good day, I say I am not as brave as Honored. When the hunger grips my mandibles I say that I am not as willing to lie. It's not fair to say it. Honored lies, yes, but no more than I do. I say I do not hunger. It says I will not eat you, no matter how hungry I may be. Neither of us dare to get anywhere near the truth.

2. "Are you a girl?"

If it's not the second question, it's the first. As if those words mean anything to me. As if categories created for another species could ever fit our forms.

I lie. Sometimes I say I am female because it's obvious what they want. Sometimes I say I am male just to see what they'll do. Sometimes I tell them that I am a surprise for them to unwrap.

They like it when I say this. I do not. There is something rotten about taking a truth and wrapping it in so much webbing that the shape of it is lost. It feels like the worst lie of them all.

3. What's your name?

I am the six hundred and seventeenth Graciousness. The teachers recognized me before I had even begun my first molt. Many have journeyed to see me after we were separated by death, loving me for the Graciousness I no longer remember being but once was. The six hundred and fifteenth Graciousness, I am told, was one of the first cosmonauts. The three hundred and twelfth Graciousness's deeds are why my likeness is hung in the Great Hall for all to venerate. It is a source of pride to know that I have been a part of this community for thousands of years, the continuation of an unbroken and meaningful lineage.

I tell them my name is Sweetness.

If there is one of us named Sweetness, I have not met it, but I have met many who use the name. I do not know how it started. Maybe one of us took the name in the early days and it became an expectation.

In its own way, being a Sweetness is a lineage as long and proud as being a Graciousness. This is what I tell myself when I hear the name drip from their mouths like secretions. This is what I pray I would have understood in my last life and will still believe in my next.

4. "Will you marry me?"

Some of us forget that they are dangerous.

"He's kind," Trembling told me. "He's generous, and thoughtful, and always asks after me."

There is a story that is repeated often and in many ways. It goes like this. One of us falls in love with one of them. He brings it home. It tries to fit in.

In one ending it starves to death, repressing the hunger so long that it no longer remembers how to eat. In another, it eats its so-called husband, unable to hold back as the hunger grows heavy on its mandibles. In most tellings, the family kills it before it can do either of these things.

We lie, all the time. Sometimes we forget what is real and what is not. Sometimes we forget that no matter what kind of connection we forge between our worlds, no matter how many of our points we file and hairs we pluck, to them we will never be anything but alien.

Honored tells the story often. In its version, the family finds it fresh from a molt and, starving, eats it.

What do we know about their habits? Perhaps, in their own way, they are as ravenous as us.

5. "Why do you do this?"

"It's trashy," Fervent tells me often. "You're flattening us out into their shape. You act like our being, our world, is something they can buy." If Fervent has ever lied, it wasn't in this life.

Truth is a molt splitting in two, a softer form squeezing from the crack. Truth is the pulsing stupor that grips me after I molt, the way days pass without me noticing at all. Truth is the frenzied hunger that comes when I awake.

Truth, if truth be told, is an untranslatable thing. They will never understand what I am. I will never understand what they want. I can only give them an approximation, and they can only comprehend the lie.

The teachers used to chide us for eating our molts. It isn't good for you, they'd say. There is nothing left but air and crunch.

At least I feel like I'm eating something. At least I can convince myself, in my insatiable hunger, that I will not starve.

6. Have you ever eaten a human?

Yes. Many times, you stupid, soft man. I have eaten many humans and I would eat many more, except I do not want to be pulled into the street and dismembered like the six hundredth and twenty-seventh Raucous, or hunted down like the five hundredth and ninety-eighth Fervent. It is a thin and fragile thing that holds the hunger in my mouth and away from your flesh.

This is, of course, a lie.

I, too, prefer my partner to be freshly molted. I, too, feel more in control when I believe them to be helpless. I would not eat you, I say, and this lie is as much for them as it is for me. They listen to the would not and feel the triumph of special treatment. I listen to the eat you and let myself believe I am more dangerous to them than they are to me.

There is a story repeated often and in many ways. It goes like this. The customer shows a video, or an image, or explains in great detail about a creature on their world that looks something like us. He calls it a spider, or a scorpion, or a creepy-crawlie. He calls it small. He calls it frightening.

They don't scare me, he says. They're not that hard to kill. But you're different. I'm more scared of you than you are of me, aren't I?

And the worker opens its mandibles, leans towards the man, and lies.

© 2023 Mo Usavage

About the Author

Mo Usavage (they/them) is a queer trans author currently attending veterinary school in the Midwest. Their stories have previously appeared in Reckoning.