Spider

The tiny spider vibrated on it’s invisible thread hidden beneath a leaf of the small spiked succulent on the desk. She spied it as she moved the plant up on a shelf above the laptop where she could look up at it as she worked. She imagined the tiny bit of oxygen it generated, and figured it at least kept the spider breathing. She felt for the spider, as the complex was tightly controlled and sterilized, there were unlikely to be any insects for it to eat in the tiny colorless room. It’s existence was doomed. It would be killed eventually anyway at the next scheduled pest eradication. 

Work began in 6 minutes, and she sipped her hot synth-cafe from a steel mug. She watched  mesmerized as the brown spider looped round and round in a widening spiral beneath the fat purple and green leaves, oblivious of the futility of the act. “There is nothing to eat in here, fair lady” she said aloud. She savored every second of that last 5 minutes before work, the bland balanced synth-cafe with vanil-cream flavoring. She remembered that once there were lots of different kinds of coffee, and you made it yourself, grinding beans with a noisy little machine first and then dumping the grounds into another machine, which would heat up water and bubble with a familiar noise and fill the house with the smell of Arabica or Colombian, Italian Roast or Blonde, or sometimes when she was feeling whimsical, almond roca flavored breakfast blend. That was back before the coffee trade collapsed. It had only been 8 years but it felt like a lifetime. She was one of the lucky ones who had the connections and funding to move into the complex, where she could enjoy all the necessities and amenities a person would need, food, clothing, shelter, medicine, social opportunities, special events, and entertainment. She was assigned to a job by a computer based on rigorous evaluations. It was only able to find a data entry position with a match of about 56 percent, based on her typing speed. It was a low match, but there wasn’t much use for artists in the complex. She reasoned it was better than living outside.

She imagined that outside the complex, black market coffee was a rare, expensive and dangerous commodity. She mused at the thought of trying to find an excuse to get permissions to leave the complex so that she could find a way to buy black market coffee and smuggle it in. That musing was cut off by the ping of an alarm, telling her work was beginning. 

Usually she spent her lunch hour looking at pictures of natural wonders, wonders she’d probably never see, longing for a childhood scrambling over rocks and camping in river valleys next to roaring water and singing crickets. She wondered if any of the campgrounds were still there. The mezzanine that rimmed the complex against the sides of the dome was built so that the immediate vicinity outside was not visible, only the distant hazy mountains could be seen. She used to go look at them every day but it made her sad and frustrated so she stopped. Today was different. Today she would go to the community garden in the center. 

The garden was immaculate and pristine, flowers planted in geometric patterns. There were no weeds in the garden, only what was planted, or so she assumed. But there on the stem of a well manicured pink rose bush, a single aphid crawled around the edge of a leaf. She glanced around to make sure nobody was looking and pinched the leaf and quickly folded it around the aphid. She slipped the bundle in the pocket in her jacket with her phone and walked quietly back up to her cell. 

It took some time to get the stupid aphid into the web, as it didn’t seem interested in doing anything but crawling into the corners of the succulent, but eventually she coaxed it onto the sticky filament and watched as it panicked, watched as the spider swiftly made its kill and wrapped the aphid up in thread. The ping of the alarm alerted her to work and she reluctantly began to type. 

WARNING: Gore, sex, dystopia

Recommended for adult readers. This story contains graphic elements, including graphic self mutilation, blood,  and some sexual situations that may be triggering or inappropriate for some readers. This is also a dystopian story which shows severe class inequality and an oppressive power structure. Read at your own risk. 

Besides, The Family Had to Eat, by Willow D’Arcy

With a slip of the cleaver, Myrnal missed a carrot and sliced her middle finger clean off. It took a moment for the pain to start, red blood formed droplets on the cut and pooled before the surface tension gave and it dripped onto the cutting board, onto the last of the shriveled. purple carrots from the rooftop garden. She stared at it for a long time there on the board. She cried, but she could not waste – neither tears nor blood nor fingerbones, so she put the finger in the stockpot in which she wept and bled until her tears were dry and her throbbing hand stopped bleeding on its own.

Her two husbands came home and kissed her and sat at the table already set, waiting for her to serve the soup. Neither noticed the missing finger, nor her swollen eyes, nor her bloodstained blouse. Her daughter, Saylah, she noticed, and tears welled up in her eyes too, but only for a moment. They all knew the machine, Carbondine, would take care of it by tomorrow, her finger would be replaced by 3d printed Biocarbonsilicase™ embedded with bio-electronic connections fused directly to her nervous system, better than organic. 

Besides the family had to eat. 

The next time it happened it was not an accident. There were no purple carrots in the yard, nor little brown mice in the attic, and there was a shortage of nutritional supplementation powder. She stared a long time into the mirror that day while the news blared multilevel multilingual blather at her from her skull implants, sliding into her ears, directly manipulating parts of her brain so she could feel, taste, smell whatever the new advertised diversion was. It felt like little electric green snakes vibrating into her head. She remembered a time when there was an illusion of choice when it came to content. She had no use for that hand of flesh and blood, so she placed several rubber bands around her arm as a tourniquet, popped the last of her leftover pain pills, and used the cleaver to hack her hand off.

She woke up on the floor, her arm still throbbing, but still feeling an absent hand. Her dog, Clipper, was licking her wrist, her ghost hand reaching to stroke him. He was looking thin. The bones would do him good, and she’d rather him eat her than her eat him. Carbondine could make no synth parts for dogs, not anymore. 

Saylah had placed the hand in the pot whole, and it had simmered until the meat fell off and the bones were soft. The broth left was a pork flesh smell of protein and old dreams. Carbondine would print her a new hand, this one designed to spec, perfectly suited to sorting old discarded chips in the recycling center. 

The anniversary of the first coupling of Myrnal and her first husband Cap was due for a sensual evening. He was the darker and more handsome of the two, and also the more distracted, but his smile sometimes made up for it. One night just for him, with the help of a little black market morphine she got from her sister in The Quilt district, she sliced off her left labia carefully with a razor blade and simmered it in sauce. She told him it was lengua, her great grandmother’s old recipe. She told him she got it from her sister. It was tender and well spiced with synth-chile and smoke flavor. Actual nutrition was hard to come by, but flavorings were plentiful. They both savored it. When they made love that night, her new silicone printed Carbondine left labia tingled with the touch and texture of his human flesh body, heat and blood. White electric tendrils slithered through her nodes and mingled with human nerve endings still aroused, soft as the spicy lengua, and almost as hot. 

It was only a week before Cap would stay at the office until late. Myrnal stared at herself in the mirror. Her mouth, lips like roses, still youthful but starting to wilt, still pink opened and closed and mouthed words unsaid. Her eyes still golden brown and wide, pupils voids of space vortexes as her face disappeared in the mirror made way to a ghoulish creature she could see only if she stared too hard. It wasn’t her, but it was her. Her in a hundred years, and her dead and buried in the ground. Her ground into the protein mill and fed back to the people. In a moment without thinking she slammed her forehead against the glass, shattering the optical sheets and internal wiring of the mirror, leaving only a vague glass reflection sharply shattered in a bloody circle radiating out like the tendrils of a solar eclipse. Her forehead kept embedded in it a shard. She pulled it out and more blood painted her face. She used the shard to remove her lips, teeth now bared like a skeleton, screaming, laughing. Saylah saw her and screamed. Myrnal shook like a prisoner being executed on the square, she figured Saylah would be used to that. The school always required students witness all prisoner executions. Her face grew pale as the blood continued down her neck and chest. 

She didn’t pretend the tender morsels in tonight’s meal were lengua instead of labios. She served both men and her daughter lips simmered in sage and savory, but her daughter didn’t eat, nor did she look up at her mother’s skeletal ragged face hole of a face. Dinner was tense, both of her husbands refused to look at her. Finally, her second husband, Shane said “For fuck’s sake, Myrnal, Carbondine is RIGHT THERE! I don’t know what you are playing at but clean yourself up!”. Cap said nothing. Myrnal slept alone that night in the printing bay, allowing Carbondine to print a new, fuller, younger mouth. 

The next morning Myrnal hooked herself up to an IV plugged into Carbondine and set it to access pain level. There was none. Using her teeth and newly printed mouth, Myrnal began to chew off her right arm at the elbow. Her pain level spiked and Carbondine administered a numbing agent through the IV. Too much, and Myrnal would simply pass out or be unable to feel what she was doing, not enough and she couldn’t make herself finish the task, so she had to pinch the IV. The gruesome process took until lunch time. She ate some of her own skin, pulled out strips of sinew, chewed muscle right through. She gnawed on her own elbow until the cartilage came off. She dragged herself shaking into the automatic body printer, and carbondine replaced her arm, but this time Myrnal didn’t bother with realism. The new arm was all metal and wires coated in a clear silicone skin. She woke up in time to cook dinner. She sliced the meat thin and fired them in high heat in hot oil seasoned with synthetic pepper. She wondered where the chemicals were sourced. She tossed the elbow cap to Clipper. The poor dog was looking even thinner. He got a few scraps of meat, as well. They were able to supplement their diet for a few days on one arm. 

Naked, Myrnal looked in the broken glass left from the broken mirror. She assessed what was useful and what was not. What would be better replaced. If she took too much at once, she’d have to use more than the family’s alloted energy to refrigerate the leftovers. She calculated the caloric content of parts of her body. Her arms, her breasts, her belly. Fat was energy suitable for selling on the black market as material for soap and fuel. She had very little fat left, but she could sell the little that was left and Shane might find her desirable again. It had been some time since he’d been interested in coupling with her. She and Shane were matched by an AI algorithm, and she had long suspected that whatever criteria he’d entered was dishonest, both in what he was looking for and what he was. Those lies were to his own detriment but he seemed to resent her for it as if it had been she that had lied. 

On her walk home from work, rain and ash fell from the sky, the streets were slick and stained her shoes and the bottom of her pants black. The fake trees were strung with lights which were coated with grime from the smoke and smog. The filter in her breathing mask was clogged and wet, but her coworker Felina walked out in the open with her face uncovered. “Carbondine lungs. The filter is built in.” she smiled. Carbondine would replace damaged lungs, but the biological leftovers would be sent to processing if she just had it done. Myrnal needed another way. 

  Felina admired Myrnal’s new hand. “I love the transparent skin. I think maybe I will do that with my own arms. My hands are getting carpal tunnel, anyway. I don’t know why I haven’t done it yet. I think I have always felt attached to my hands. I used to be a sculptor.” She looked at her wiry and well used hands and arms sadly as dirty rain spattered on them. She winced as the acrid rain irritated bare skin, and wiped them off on her clothing and tucked them back under the flaring drapes of her rain cloak. 

Felina was a good decade older, and had replaced much of her body over time with silicone parts, but had done her best to match her skin so it was impossible to see where the synthetic transitioned to biology. They parted ways towards their homes, each heading through crowds in hoods and umbrellas as brightly lit transit tubes hissed by holding wealthier citizens, alienated and still looking at screens in their pristine bubbles. 

Myrnal took a detour through alleys and down small side streets into The Quilt, a part of town that was built haphazardly with parts cannibalized from other buildings. Rusting metal hammered into shape, half rotted old wood, chunks of plastic, pieces of old vehicles and patchwork fabric awnings fused together into a motley colorful maze. People in ratty robes and homemade masks and headcovers ducked between dimly lit spaces, dodging potholes and drunks huddled under makeshift tents. Further into the maze, the rain petered out to a slow drip, as the spaces between buildings had been filled in with all manner of rickety dwellings, and the streets became an uneven tunnel. 

The people who lived in this part of town lived in the dark. The little electricity that could be stolen or gathered using old downspout generators and tiny wind turbines fed dim and flickering LED lights that people would gather around to share. People huddled in clusters around public lamps. Some families, some raucous groups of ragged middle aged laborers, some bored teenagers, some children playing a game. Arguments, debates, stories, flirtation, brawls, education, gossip – everything took place around the public lampposts, each with their own unique mirrored half dome to reflect more light downward; each with chairs, tables, cushions or other furniture. 

The only reason she was able to get into the market at all was because of her sister Raka who had defied the AI coupling selection and run off to eke out a living in The Quilt. Her wily intelligence had served her well, as she ran her own antique tech and information shop, supplemented, of course, by Myrnal’s occasional recycling theft. 

“What happened to your face?!” Raka chided. 

“I … I had an accident and had part of it replaced. One of these days we should see if we can snag the scrambler software so you can use Carbondine to fix that scar.” 

“I like my scar” Raka said rubbing the white line across her forehead “It reminds me why I’m here and not in a nice apartment in Uptown with a nice family like my sister.” 

The two sisters exchanged stories while Raka sorted tangled masses of wire and metal, gutted chunks of old tech.The meeting was brief, Myrnal had someone else to meet. 

The woman in the dirty, dark liposuction lab seemed old from the replacement tech on her body, decades out of date synthetic skin over poorly constructed carbonate bones. She was efficient and quick as she hooked the hoses up to Myrnal’s body. There was no numbing agent at all, no narcotics, not even an aspirin, so the shocking spikes of pain as her fat was sucked through her skin made her cry out and scream. Fat sellers were strapped down so they didn’t flail in pain and injure themselves on the probes. She wasn’t the only one in the lab, others strapped a few feet away in their own cots screamed and cried as their bodies were drained of precious fuel. Some passed out. She spent a good half hour in a state of shock, trembling from the experience. The old woman gave her a noxious fluid to drink, handed her a small bar of soap in trade and told her to get out. The soap and the parts should be enough for the software she sought, but she needed to go home for the night, have Carbondine treat the bruises in her belly, thighs, and breasts and make dinner for the family. 

Over the next few weeks, Myrnal replaced more of her body with synthetic parts. She had to get creative about how to remove things in pieces without getting sent to processing. She stole a circular saw from Cap’s machine shop on a weekend to remove her feet one at a time, and returned the saw before work started on Monday morning. She built a kind of makeshift guillotine contraption to cut her legs off at the knees, to remove her other arm. She figured out ways to slice her thighs and buttocks off inside Carbondine, face down with springs, an extremely sharp blade, and large elastic exercise bands. She had to toss them out before they were sent through a tube for processing, and before she passed out.

She awoke feeling shaky. Her vision was blurry and the interior of Carbondine’s pod was still dewy from the automatic cleaning process. Through it, she could see Saylah holding Clipper. The pod slid out the processing tube and the lid opened. 

“I put it all in a pot. It’s a lot, are we going to cook it all at once?” Saylah asked. Her eyes were red. There was blood everywhere from tossing body parts into the kitchen, but it looked as if Saylah had tried to clean part of it up. Clipper’s muzzle was covered in blood, his belly looked a little swollen. “Clipper ate a lot of it before I stopped him. I’m sorry.” Saylah lowered her head ashamed, though she didn’t exactly know of what. 

“Oh, sweetie!” Myrnal reached her still human hand out to her daughter, who immediately started sobbing. “No, sweetie, it’s OK! It’s OK. Look, I’m in one piece. It’s no big deal. I’ll clean everything up, good as new.” She sat up and hugged her daughter while Clipper squirmed between them. “Clipper got to eat tonight too. Hey, things will get better, right? We are just going through a temporary economic downturn. That’s what all the newsfeeds are saying. We might even have cake for your birthday this year. Real cake!” 

Myrnal knew she was lying. She guessed that Saylah probably knew as well, but she seemed soothed at least by the distraction. 

That night Saylah helped her mom prepare dinner. They sliced and salted bits of thigh and butt meat, laid it out in the oven on low to dry. The three of them scrubbed the kitchen clean together, Clipper with his tongue, the two women with towels. They sterilized everything with bleach and sent the towels through the tube for processing. There were no humans on the other side of the Tube to be suspicious or worried, Carbondine’s AI wasn’t set up to find suspects or stop crime, only to process biological material and heal and replace parts. It was set up to deter theft after things went into the tube, however. Material was weighed and analyzed for mineral content. If the material didn’t make it to the processing center, theft was suspected and investigators would come to your house first before they tried to find a breach further down the line. 

Breaches did happen. The tubes ran underground throughout the city, it was inevitable that the hungry desperate people would try to get the biological material for themselves. However, if the material didn’t make it into the tube, there was no suspicion. The AI was simply not programmed to investigate what happened to biological material. Trying to investigate when someone lost a finger to a grinding machine or a vehicle accident was not worth the manpower or the money. 

After work, Myrnal went back to the Quilt. She brought with her some strips of thigh jerky and soap. “I need some parts, and some programming. No, more like hacking.” she told Raka. 

“Hacking? I’m not a hacker, Myr!” 

“No but you know someone, don’t you? I can pay.”

Raka hesitated. Then sighed. “Ok, but you will have to talk to him yourself. He and I are, er, not on speaking terms.” 

Myrnal laughed. “Didn’t work out with Mikal after all? Hah! Well, at least it’s not too hard to break up in The Quilt.” 

Raka looked up at her older sister and a smile crept across her face. They laughed together. Then Raka stopped. “I miss your old face. I feel like I’m talking to some kind of sex doll.” After that the two fell silent for several minutes looking at the floor, Myrnal holding Raka’s hand with the real hand she still had left. 

Myrnal, Saylah and Clipper were underground inside the sewage and tube system near their street. Myrnal had studied electrical infrastructure her first few years in college, back when it still seemed possible to have a real career. She knew how to find the buried wires were that powered her building. She knew generally how the tunnels were built, so navigating underground from The Quilt to avoid the ubiquitous cameras wasn’t impossible. 

“Ah hah! Here it is. Saylie, look.” She shone her little LED keychain light across a steel pipe painted bright blue with a series of numbers on it. “See? The number corresponds to the building address. We have to get this done quickly and get back.” Using a drill with a metal bit, she began to drill into the steel slowly, stopping to allow the bit to cool before drilling again. The sound of the drill echoed down the halls. Myrnal’s ears itched, her face flushed, her body felt drained of heat from the fear. Saylah stood, pale and white, trembling as she watched for inspectors, vagrants, or maintenance workers who might come to investigate the sound of the drill. Clipper looked alert. Good, he’d hear someone first and start barking. 

The drill suddenly shot through the rest of the way just as Clipper started barking. Myrnal was shaking. “Hurry give me the bottle! Then run back the way we came! I’ll be right behind you!” Saylah pulled a little glass bottle with a cork stopper full of liquid from her pocket. Her hands were shaking, she fumbled, the bottle fell to the slimy ground with a clink. Both of them froze expecting it to shatter, but it didn’t. “Run, Saylah!”

She didn’t, she stood, frozen, while clipper barked. They couldn’t hear anything yet. Myrnal took a deep breath, picked up the bottle, and placed it through the hole in the pipe. She mustered every bit of focus she could to puncture the cork with a syringe needle and squeeze something into the bottle. She heard shouts down the hall and Clippers barks got louder, more aggressive. Myrnal tried to shove the syringe back into her pocket, but she dropped it just as she saw lights shining from one of the tubes. “C’mon Say, we have to go!” she cried, picking up Clipper with her synthetic arm and grabbing Saylah with her other hand, dragging them down the hall. Saylah’s freeze instinct turned to flight. Clipper squirmed as Saylah broke free and ran ahead into the darkness, Clipper, loyal to her, squirmed free and chased after her. Myrnal heard a loud “thump” as the bottle bomb exploded in the pipe behind her. She pocketed her light and ran in the dark, trying to follow the sounds of Saylah’s panicked footsteps. Neither of them knew where they were. 

Meanwhile, Mikal was carefully replacing the sensor unit inside the tubes with an old, jury rigged computer component. The new component didn’t have sensors on it, only a computer program designed to feed information back to the system. Mikal would get to keep the original sensor unit in exchange. All this he managed to do, but Cap returned home from work early, so Mikal sat hidden in the wall cavity, the hole in the wall Myrnal had sawed with a skillsaw barely covered by a small bookshelf that he’d dragged as best he could over the hole. Cap didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t spend much time in the kitchen. He worked as quietly as he could to remove the parts while the power was still out, soldering the little mass of wires and chips into the system and taping it with electrical tape to secure it. The sensor unit would go for massive amounts of fuel and supplement powder on the black market. It could be programmed to test for contaminants and useful biological material. He barely got the new part on before the power came back on. It took a couple minutes for Carbondine to reboot the local network. Mikal held his breath. 

Myrnal stopped, her wrecked lungs burning. She bent over to cough and wretch. She couldn’t hear anything but her own coughing. She tried to hold her breath enough to hear Saylah, but couldn’t. She also couldn’t hear anyone behind her. “Saylah!” she whispered loudly into the dark, not wanting to alert her presence. Nothing. 

Myrnal jogged down the unfamiliar sewer tube to an intersection, coughing and wheezing. She used her light to look for footprints in the damp slime on the ground, nothing. It was hard to tell. She headed towards The Quilt a long way around. It took her a couple hours, getting lost a few times, before she finally found a route into the heart of The Quilt, where she had to climb up rusted old metal stairs, some missing, to a very heavy manhole cover. She used her synthetic arm, but the rest of her was exhausted and weak. With a final cry of adrenaline and determination, she shoved it aside, crawled out onto the dirty street, and lay in the stinging acid rain dampness catching her breath. No matter if it stung now, Carbondine could replace anything now without her having to cut parts off herself. 

She went to Raka’s house first to clean up and change clothes. She was filthy and covered in scrapes and lesions from the rain. Raka came to the door and let her in without a word, turned aside to gesture towards the couch where Saylah sat covered in filth, clothes torn, a distant look in her eyes. She gripped Clipper in her lap as he panted. 

Myrnal ran to her daughter and wept as she held her. “I’m so sorry baby, I never should have let you come along.” guilt wracked her chest, burned into her brain. Her traumatized daughter simply sat, cold and still while her mother squeezed her. Clipper was too tired to care that he was being squeezed between them. 

“She hasn’t said a word since she showed up. Myr, what the fuck did you do? What happened?!”

“I – I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, this wasn’t supposed to happen.” she cried. 

Myrnal cleaned up and went back home alone, leaving her daughter with Raka. It wasn’t unusual for her to spend the night there. Her husbands didn’t question her when she came home, wearing her sister’s colorful rags. Myrnal visited her sister all the time. She mumbled some excuse about her clothing getting torn when she tripped in an alley and something about Saylah staying with Raka but they barely glanced up from their tablets to look at her, grunted assent in unison, and went back to what they were doing. She walked into the kitchen. 

A sound of a cleared throat startled her. “Mikal!” she whispered as she helped him out of the hole. “Shit, I need to get you out of here so they don’t see you. Did you do it?” 

“It should work. I think. Now you just have to find a way to reroute the tube itself on the other side of the unit.” he grimaced as he tried to stand. He’d been folded up like a human pretzel inside the wall for hours. His feet were asleep. She helped hip to his feet. 

“I’ll deal with that, just, let’s get you out of here.”

It wasn’t that difficult to get Mikal out of the house. Shane went into the air shower unit and Cap went to bed early. Alone in the kitchen, Myrnal stripped naked, leaving her sister’s clothes in a heap, typed in some commands, and climbed into the pod. 

For the next few weeks, Myrnal’s body was replaced from the outside in, bit by bit. She cooked everything she fed her family with love. She replaced her bones, her organs, hear heart, and of course her lungs, with new, built in filters. Last was her brain. 

Brains were technically replaceable, and supposedly people with synthetic brains were basically the same people they were before replacement. However, everyone knew someone or heard rumors of people with synth brains who were different. People who replaced their whole bodies were even more different, because the hormonal chemical secretions that created the emotional makeup of a person were synthetic. The brain was still not clearly understood. 

But Myrnal wasn’t deterred. She felt too emotional anyway, too irrational, too moody, too needy. Not only could she replace her brain, she could replace it with something better, more logical, more efficient, more motivated. Edits were only allowed if they were fixing pathologies, but anything could be framed as a pathology. It was easy to get a diagnosis through a psychiatric AI, all a person had to do was answer a series of questions the right way. 

She entered the mood disorders, PMS and ADHD into the monitor. She ramped the “treatment” options as far up as she could, increasing “focus”, “logical reactivity” and “calm”. She then tapped “start” and climbed into the pod. She didn’t see Saylah watching her quietly from the kitchen door. 

The world seemed so clear when she emerged from the pod. Gone was the guilt, the desperation, the scattered thinking, the indecision. She still had emotions, of course – the software didn’t allow for changes that deep, but they seemed manageable, subdued. Almost pleasant. She felt love for her daughter who had sat on the kitchen floor waiting for Carbondine to finish the brain transplant, and now sat impassively watching her new, synthetic mother emerge newborn, as if from a mechanical egg. She felt love for the dog, who sniffed at her synthetic body suspiciously, then barked at her. She felt love for both of her husbands. A sense of forgiveness and fondness felt like a flood of cool liquid and electric impulses in the computer in her head. Even for Shane. In fact, she didn’t even know why she resented Shane, he couldn’t help who he was or what his desires were. She had no anger at all. No fear. She knew the system was doing it’s best to take care of as many people as possible, and if some died, well, we all die, and there were too many people in the world anyway. 

She decided that the best course of action was to simply get ready for work, make it on time, and efficiently play her part to make sure that society worked as well as it could under the circumstances. She put her hand on Saylah’s shoulder. “Time to get ready for school, sweetheart.” she said. Her daughter’s eyes welled with tears, which she felt a small flood of synthetic sympathy for, but no real pain. She could remember the pain, all memories were intact, but she couldn’t actually feel the way she’d always felt in the past when her daughter was hurting. Before, her chest felt it was about to burst. Before she’d do anything to help her daughter feel less pain. Before, she’d have chewed her own arm off to feed her daughter. Now, she appreciated that her past self had done such a thing. After all, she was biologically wired to care for her offspring and her family. But now, that wiring was replaced by something a little more general, a little less emotional. 

There was a knock on the door. 3 inspectors in black uniforms stood at the door. One, clearly in charge, an androgynous person with opaque, greyish white synth skin stood very straight and very still. Mikal went pale. “Myrnal, I…. what happened to you?”

“Mikal Remy, you are under arrest for tampering with Community Organic Recycling Supply, hacking, and theft of public property. You have the right to remain silent. You may be subject to cranial scanning, anything you think can and will be held against you in a court of law. You will be assigned an attorney. Please come with us quietly.” , 

Dead Rabbit

I nudged it with my toe to see if rigor mortis had set in

Wondered if it was fresh enough to eat

Imagined bringing my father the find,

Proudly procuring fresh meat. 

I was 9, on a mile-long hot walk alone between the arroyo’s eroded walls 

From the rural highway bus stop to the tiny trailer on the hill. 

Tired, thirsty, hungry, lonely, A quiet wild animal,

A reluctant element of the land. 

I marched through the pale yellow ravine 

Paused where the willow shaded the clear cool trickle of a creek 

Skirted past the coyote caves avoiding patches of prickly pear cactus. 

Once we were out of water when I arrived. 

Alone for hours, dry tongue pressing against my teeth. 

It was dusk when my dad drove up the rutted dirt road in the truck

The water, in a 500 gallon blue plastic tank, sloshed.

I gently pushed the body over with a stick

Long dead, dry tongue bulged through yellow teeth, 

Black eye socket gazed

Patches of speckled fur blew off in the breeze. 

The skin crawled with a colony of living things underneath. 

Its belly, a balloon full of liquefied innards, sloshed.

I uncovered maggots, newborn babies in the dirt

Squirming in their first sight of sun.

Someone else was eating well that night.

Coulee

When the thaw came, 

The ice dam collapsed. 

A cataclysmic torrent scoured deep 

Into skin and flesh down to the bone, 

Ripped away the fertile layers built in millimeters over eons, 

Drilled down and tore out a carefully laid foundation, 

Ruptured columns,

Plundered broken stone,

Hauled everything 700 miles out to sea, 

Left 

A hole. 

Would I be more whole 

if those layers were intact? 

Or am I something more now that I’m open to the sky?

~Willow D’Arcy, 2018