By Matthew Bruce

Saberqueen tapped her bronze bikini top.

“Lo,” she called to Thunderclap, the bull-chested man standing on the golden bridge above Moaning Chasm. Tattoos of stars and moons covered his face, and his hair—dark as the lethal night orchids in these parts—fell to his chainmail kilt.

He lowered his crossbow and nodded. “Lo.” Somewhere an ox-horn bugle blared a single high note. And so connection was made.

Saberqueen’s bare feet puffed up dirt as she approached. Arrows rattled in the calfskin quiver on her back. “Long time,” she said.

They’d been meeting for months to trade booty from the villages they’d ravaged (wolf pelts and magic bones, mammoth tusks engraved with runes, goblets inlaid with diamonds) and to chat. Thunderclap comforted her. She knew he was an attorney from Utah—he’d let that much slip—but nothing more, and their hidden histories put her at ease. With Thunderclap, she could vent about her husband, Tim Ryan Pace, whose beef-jerky breath and grey ear whiskers somehow convinced Joy Kilcrease, the manager of Clothland in Jonesboro, Georgia, to sleep with him. Thunderclap might be a sleaze himself in Salt Lake, but Saberqueen didn’t think so. He listened. He let her slaughter villagers first. Anyhow it didn’t matter when Saberqueen joined him above the Moaning Chasm, in sweet mists that wrapped them in a manner that felt fated, so that everything they said echoed like a vow.

Last time Saberqueen hailed Thunderclap, he gave her a curved dagger, its onyx hilt carved in the shape of a stallion’s head. Later that day, while Tim Ryan manned his Sports Chalet store and the twins, Ryan and Timothy, Jr., doodled or did subtraction or whatever kids did in first grade on Mondays, Saberqueen had tackled and killed an ibex with the dagger. Thing is, Thunderclap understood. He said she gutted prey the way a Baptist opened a hymn book.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” she said, stepping onto the golden bridge. Week after week she’d found the bridge empty. She’d sat and waited, hummed some Van Morrison, the spotted fur of her legs rippling in the chill gusts as she dangled her feet over the Chasm. Thunderclap had never shown up. Each time, Saberqueen drew her bow and shot down a few pterodactyls, got bored, left. Without the companionship of Thunderclap, the thrill of ripping through forests to invade tranquil huts near bays jeweled with sunlight faded.

“Hey Saberqueen!” he bellowed.

She stopped, gripping her bow.

Thunderclap smiled. His blood-speckled teeth spread the stars on his cheeks apart. “I can’t believe it!” he shrilled. “I got a free iPad Mini! Only available until supplies last! I just love my iPad Mini!” He crossed his arms and squinted, rolling his tongue in his mouth.

Saberqueen glanced behind her. The dirt road twisted into the distance between giant boulders. The two suns flared at the horizon. She looked back.

Beside Thunderclap stood a small tattooed man whose hair, night-orchid dark, fell to a chainmail kilt. He held no crossbow. Instead, the screen of his iPad flashed spastic colors in his right hand. Wires from the device were fastened to his bobbing head.

Saberqueen reached back for an arrow.

“Wait,” Thunderclap said, voice guttural as a sputtering lawnmower.

“You don’t sound like yourself,” said Saberqueen, staring at the small Thunderclap. “The hell is that?”

Big Thunderclap exhaled, and his chest bubbled. His eyes became black question marks, black number signs, black ampersands in succession like a slot machine of symbols. He shook his head and garbled something doggish. He beat his fist into his stomach. He gestured at the small Thunderclap and said, “This hack is—” before erupting with a cough and spewing TransUnionMakesUhornyHAPPYEASTER!60%OffMysteryDealsUSECodeREFRESH in a rainbow string that jittered in midair until an actual griffin screeched down and clutched its talons around the worm of words.

“Well, out with it,” Thunderclap gasped. “I’ve contracted something, Saberqueen. The Nesting Hydes, maybe, or even the Trojan Dittos.”

“Nesting Hydes don’t exist,” she said. Thunderclap had always been superstitious. Once, he gave her the boiled egg of a basilisk and told her to eat the steaming yolk because it would help stave off her creditors.

“I’m sorry,” he wheezed. “Reason I’ve been away. Unsafe to see you like this anymore.” Saberqueen began to pant. Thunderclap was for real. Why hadn’t he told her? She could have the bug, too. How many times had their muscular thighs touched, swapped musk in lazy afternoons spent counting the teeth of victims beneath the pitiless two suns? She glanced right, left, checking for mini Saberqueens.

“You’re fine,” Thunderclap said. He twisted his hair into a thick ponytail whip. “It’s just me.”

The small Thunderclap had slid his iPad into a jumbo fanny pack decorated with the mutant reptile faces of Pokémon characters. His eyes were closed, showing a blue crescent moon inked on each lid. “Let’s get physical, physical, I want to get physical,” he sang.

“Slay him,” Saberqueen said.

Thunderclap shook his head. “Tried.”

Saberqueen gripped the stallion handle of her dagger. “He’s fucking up our world,” she said.

Thunderclap hung his head. “I’ve missed you, Saberqueen.”

“Look at me,” she demanded. “What are you saying?”

He met her gaze, and for the first time she noticed the bruised bags under his eyes. His face looked swollen, battered.

Saberqueen clanged the dagger against the bronze top of her bikini armor and roared. Pterodactyls rasped into the trees. Raptors cowered. Venus flytraps winced. Stegosauruses hid their heads in tree hollows. The T-Rex threw up its bitsy hands and tiptoed off. Saberqueen pointed the blade at the small Thunderclap and advanced.

“No,” big Thunderclap croaked. “Then you’re sure to get it. Don’t.”

She froze, dagger still thrust out.

“My sadistic Sabernip,” he said—what he called her in the glades, when the shade made them purr together—“there’s only one way to be rid of this.”

She lowered the blade. “And still meet here?”

He glared down at her, for the moment regaining, she thought, the stature proper to a lusty beast. “Delete Thunderclap,” he said.

“What?”

“Delete me.”

The small Thunderclap winked at Saberqueen. He moved his potbelly as if hula-hooping in slow motion. “Let me hear your body talk,” he teased.

“I don’t follow,” she said to the big Thunderclap—her Thunderclap—fibbing.

He came to her side, leaned close. “I’ll come back,” he said. “I might look different—new password, new digs—but I’ll be here on the bridge, waiting for you. Remember this: you’ll know it’s me when I offer you the bacon-scented feathers of a Protarchaeopteryx.”

Saberqueen stepped back and said with a simper, “You crafty heathen.”

Big Thunderclap beamed at her. “Until the bugle blows.” He climbed the golden rail of the bridge and balanced there holding his crossbow like a guitar. “You’re beautiful in bronze,” he said and dropped into the Chasm, ponytail snapping in the wind.

The small Thunderclap bounced. “I can’t believe it!” he shrieked, running in a circle. “Limited time only! Free to test, free to keep!” He leaped off the bridge.

Saberqueen sheathed her dagger and turned to the long dirt road. One of the two suns had set. The other hovered above a boulder like a paused explosion. The horizon flickered red.

She kept her eye on the second sun. Nothing to do but go back to Jonesboro. Home was worth less than a scarab’s dung, but she had her work. She needed to prescribe more Zoloft and Lexapro, more sleep and more me-time to her patients, and soon it would be tax season.

Matthew Bruce’s writing can be found in The Cincinnati Review, At Length, Gargoyle, West Branch, Hotel Amerika, Superstition Review, The Common, and The Carolina Quarterly, among others. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart and the storySouth Million Writers Award, with one story a finalist for the Mid-American Review Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize. He lives in Minneapolis.