by Brandon Perkins

In the previous installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit, Mikhail, who has recently x-ed his GF (Katya), ventures out for his first major post-break up night on the tiles with the boys (Chevy and Jayson). After kicking off the night’s drinking spree at the #720’s main terminal, Mikhail gets separated from his buddies thanks to his bladder’s need for relief. The evening will subsequently take an unexpected turn after an encounter with an Internet Goddess – but first Mikhail must reunite with his friends…

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by Brandon Perkins

In the previous installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit, Mikhail, who’s recently x-ed his GF, ventures out for his first major post-break up night on the tiles with the boys at the #720’s main terminal. We rejoin Mikhail as he realizes he’s reached that dreaded part of the evening when he’s forced to make use of the terminal’s cooty-laden n’ crusty public restroom…
[..]

by Brandon Perkins

In the previous installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit, Mikhail, recalled exactly why he’d just broken up with his GF Katya for the second – and final – time. Now ready to move forward in life, and on the #720 Brown BTWN bus route around which his life is centered, he ventures out with the boys for a night on #720’s main terminal tiles – which is dangerous territory given that it’s a smoking space Mikhail used to visit with Katya…

The boys walked silently through the bar’s heavy plaster doors and Mikhail braced himself for his first encounter with the #720’s main terminal in several months. Turning the corner past Low was always Mikhail’s cue to turn his charms up. The party was around that corner. Each step had the potential for conversation. The light was harsher there. Bars and clubs, big and small, would clamor for his attention from both sides of the corridor. In their flat-screen-sized windows, blinding neon signs advertised anything a man could want, unless he wanted to see inside the club; that part of the screen was tinted. Along the path a slew of freestanding and rotating advertisements, mis-planned garden plots, fake plastic trees, and other such “city betterments” would stand in his way or distract him from whatever goal was at hand at that moment. And the ceiling would loom over everything. It was all familiar to Mikhail, but it was still something that he had to mentally prepare himself for.

[..]

by Brandon Perkins

In the last installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit, Mikhail, who’d just X’ed his GF Katya, had ridden the #720 Brown BTWN bus route to the Low bar, where the saga of their breakup continued via text. As Katya finds oblivion in the bottom of a bottle at home, Mikhail contemplates the relationship that is no more…

The first time Mikhail broke up with Katya was only a few weeks after they had begun to see each other, barely enough time to be considered an official couple in the first place. It was before he’d go back to her for a much longer and intense session, a second time around. Before he was backed into any sort of corner, when things still felt free or, at the very least, without dire consequences. It was before she began demanding changes in his life. Before he realized how deep in it he actually was. At that early stage of their first dance-less dosey-doh, Katya seemed good for him.

[..]

by Brandon Perkins

In the last installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit, Mikhail, who’d just X’ed is GF Katya, had ridden the #720 to the Low bar. Having been absent from his “regular” libation center, and therefore a stranger to his “friends” Jayson and Chevy, when he’s confronted by the later (who’s a rapper, who rhymes, all the tymes) he considers his next move carefully. Of the four approaches that run through Mikhail’s mind, option D – awkwardly asking Chevy “What’s up” – could prove optimal.

D). Mikhail absent-mindedly chose (d).

But he told himself that such stumbling wasn’t all his fault. Katya called him the second that Chevy started to trail off. Mikhail instinctually paused to silence a phone that no one could hear vibrating, simultaneously losing his beat in the conversation and train of thought. Fortunately, all awkwardness was forgotten and forgiven en route to finding Jayson – who had posted up at one of the last empty standing tables – and simple small talk was okay enough.

[..]

by Brandon Perkins

This is the second installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit. To catch up with Brown BTWN bus, find Part One here.

Please Use Rear Exit: Chapter 2 – How to Buy Low

After swiping his card and traversing the turnstile, Mikhail casually crossed the #720’s brightly-lit corridor and walked into Low without having to show his ID. Once his eyes had adjusted to the damp dimness of the bar’s dingy interior, he was immediately struck by the sharp shift in the bar’s demographics since his last visit. The beer-belly boisterousness of the blue collar set had miraculously transformed into an invasion of fashion-challenged bro’s and vodka-slamming sorority sluts. It was only a few months prior, one of those rare times that Katya had let him meet his friends for a night out, that Mikhail observed the usual Budweiser-sipping factory rats as he quickly drank a Jameson on the rocks. Back then, nothing had changed — it was exactly as he knew it, for every pre-Katya Friday night over a three-year-span, when he’d stop in Low for a quick fidolo drink to start his evening.

[..]

by Brandon Perkins

for the record, this is some shit i just thought of y’all, science fiction that’s not admissable in no court of law. 

– mf doom

Everyone on the bus was horribly disfigured. Warts, scars, stains, blemishes, matted hair, and various other dismembering smells. Fifth-generation t-shirts that started with sports-playing grandsons ended their tattered saga on the drooping shoulders of a youngin’s great grandmother. Hand-me-downs were hand-me-ups. It all went in reverse. The passengers sat two-by-two or stood in the aisles, grasping sweaty bars for balance. Their day to day bus was taking them into the night and the Brown Between had a tendency to jerk rather suddenly.

The bus ran from Los Angeles’s most maligned residential line (Compton’s Circle) to the #720 and back again. Higher class routes existed for higher-class passengers who lived in fancier places. It was mostly the poor that rode the Brown Between. Its primary purpose was to shuttle the cleaning staff, rat catchers, dishwashers, fast food short order chefs, sheet metal deburrers, and other employees of undesirable servitude to and from their overcrowded residential complexes on an impossibly rickety set of tracks-and the Brown Between was the only line in the city that still seemed to be on tracks. When the seats were comfortable they felt infested with unimaginable insects. And when they weren’t comfortable? The fabric looked frightfully diseased and the insects actually crept up everyone’s legs.

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