Kent sat by Caroline’s bedside, stroking her blonde hair, coarse as the straw mattress upon which she slept. The creases in his face were exaggerated by the morning sun, its orange light splitting through the windows which had long before been boarded up. He gathered another handful of her hair and ran his fingers through it as she slept, as she shivered without end. His mouth was curled into a frown, as it had been all morning since he had awoken. His aching muscles felt like they’d been pulled into a grimace ever since she first started showing symptoms. She hadn’t been getting any better the past few days, not even with the medicine. He stopped stroking her hair and grabbed the damp cloth from the wash-basin at the foot of his chair, wiping away the sweat on her fevered forehead. Replacing the cloth to the cool water of the basin, he removed the bloody bandages from her forearm and looked at her wound. Over a week and the infection still hadn’t died down. Pus festered around the lesion and it smelt of rot. Maybe Charles’ medicine couldn’t help her. No, it had to. Kent tossed the blood-stained rags across the room and re-wrapped her arm with some rags next to the water basin, making sure to tie them tight.

Let me tell you something, man.

People say that obsession is extreme dedication, that it’s love and devotion on a huge scale. No no no no no. Obsession is a fucking snake. I’ve seen it.

And you’ll see it, too. Next time you think about that new video game you bought, or that new album you started listening to, or that smoking hot chick who sits across from you in Ethics. The next time you think about any of those things, just look carefully around you, and you’ll see it. You’ll see it coiling around, surrounding you like a never-ending storm. And you wait for the tail to come and for that giant goddamn snake to just end. But it doesn’t. It just keeps going and going, until it’s completely surrounded you on all sides, until all you can see are it’s fucking scales and all you can feel is dark and cold, like being buried in snow.

James Tiptree, Jr.’s writing style can be summed up in the following phrase: to the point. Tiptree does not waste her time with airy words and flowing descriptions, preferring to cut to the meat of the matter. Few words are wasted on figurative language; it’s merely used as a device to set up the rest of the story. Rather than spend a lot of time focusing on the descriptive language, Tiptree chooses her words carefully to depict visceral, “human” actions and emotions that really cut deep into the human experience and forces me to question the flowery writing conceptions I’ve been drilled into appreciating since a young age.

The bell in the upper-left quadrant of the glass-and-steel door rings. I pass through the threshold. There are five life-forms inside the place of business. I identify one whom is standing up. Male, 39. All others are sitting and facing away from him. Conjecture: he must be the leader. Are they afraid of him? He wields a metal object in his hand, actively dismembering the hair on their head. Identifying: object appears to be a pair of scissors. Primary use: cutting. Human functions are quite foreign; no database entry on “hair cut.”

Greeting: “Salutations, human.”

Brenton, the last in the line of the ancient kings, stood before the Warlock Lord, seated on his black throne, in the vast antechamber. Blade in hand, he slowly strode towards the figure clad in black, his boots clacking on the floor, stopping before the stairs leading up to his dark seat. The towering black marble pillars vaulted above them, opening to the inky sky, a sky devoid of the comfort of light. The only light source stemmed from the Warlock Lord, as he wielded a greatsword which flickered with crimson flame.