Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (90 page)

The pamphlets say you are the perfect scavenger: completely self contained, no digestion, no waste; they say I can hook you up to an outlet and you will power the whole house.

You may polish the silver if you are bored; you may also rearrange the furniture, wind the clocks, pull weeds from the garden; you may read in the library any book of your choosing; my husband claims you have no real consciousness, only an advanced and sophisticated set of pre-programmed responses, but I have seen your eyes open in the middle of the night; I have seen you stare out across the fields as if there is something there, calling you.

Cook my meals in butter, I will not eat them otherwise; do not speak to the neighbors; do not speak to my children, they are not yours; do not let anyone see you when I open the door for the mail; no, there is nothing for you, who even knows that you are here?

Help me to walk across this room; help me to wipe bacon grease from the skillet—do not think I do not see you trying to wash it with soap when I am done.

Help me to knit my granddaughter a sweater, she is my favorite and it is cold where she will be going; if you hold my hands so they are steady I will allow you to terrorize my Bridge club; I will teach you the rules: cover an honor with an honor; through strength and up to weakness.

Help me to pronounce atherosclerosis when I am speaking with the physician; remember the questions I must ask him; recite my list of medications when asked; if you would like, we may go early so that you may sit with me in the waiting room with all the others like you and me.

Do you see that one?; that is the way you will carry me when my other foot has gone down the black froth of your mouth.

Lie to me about my children; tell me they have called and called again; I think perhaps you are keeping them from me; I think you hope I will forget them and change my will so you may have everything when you have devoured my body completely.

These are my personal things which you may not touch; these are the magazines you may read; these are the newspapers you may not read; the pamphlets say you have no interest in the affairs of the world and thus it is not necessary for you to have them; I wish you would not look at me when you swallow my tendons, my calves, my patella; I wish you could feel so you would know isolation.

The pamphlets say I should compliment your body as it changes: your skin has taken on a waxy texture inconsistent with the evil robot I know you are; your amber eyes glow like bonfires intent on destroying the savannah; your breath smells like swamp gas.

Do not correct me in front of my friends; I have to finesse for the queen; I know how many trumps are out; I know how to play this game; I am the reason you are here, why are you so ungrateful?

Evolution is a quirk of humans and other sentient species; you are not real, not alive, your changes may be slow and insistent but they are the result of the consumption of my flesh.

The pamphlets claim you are neither human nor alien and incapable of willful intent; you are not devious; you do not conspire to replace me, to wear my dresses, court my husband and disown my children; you are unthinking, unplanning, harmless; you are here for my comfort, I should thank your world for sending you.

You have no family; you are a construct, a robot; you were not born; you will not die; you have only the home I give you and learn only the things I teach you.

These are the toys and letters I sent my children when I was abroad, these are the folds and refolds my husband made so I would think they had been read.

This is a closet for all your things; this is its lock; this is a key; do not lose it, it is the only one.

This is the way to stumble like a human; this is the way to delete your messages from the people with whom you no longer wish to speak; this is the way to reclaim your childhood by clinging to anger and hurt; this is the way to insult your neighbors while making it sound like you are paying them a compliment; this is the way to eat ice cream in the middle of the night because you are old and no one is looking; this is the way to ignore your husband when he calls out to you from the porch and you are in your own world, sitting high in a swing and your legs are not chewed off at the knees—you are back in your space ship, you are finding a new planet, a new species, forging new treaties and living the life you always knew you would live without consequence or regret—there are no mistakes, no cardiovascular impairments—you are not host to an alien robot hell-bent on devouring you.

I think you are beginning to look a little like me; usurper; slut; flesh-eating mongrel; ingrate; monster; orphan; spy; speaking to you now I feel a stranger’s hand inside my jaw moving it for me.

My granddaughter has sent me a note expressing the appropriate level of gratitude for the sweater—it is warm and tight knit and shines like burnished steel—it is cold for our kind where she is going and now she will be comfortable; she wonders if she will be a famous explorer; she wonders if the sun flashes blue before disappearing beyond the horizon of deep space; I have left the note on the dresser in your room.

You will have to write my correspondence for me; you will have to go to the market and buy avocados which do not give in; you will learn to make a roux; you will touch my husband’s shoulder when he is about to fall asleep in church; you will watch the news and tell me when the next ships leave; the pamphlets say you are happy for this opportunity to be helpful; your only desire is to assimilate into our culture; you do not miss your home.

They say you will stop eating when only good flesh and good circulation remain; you are designed as a recycler; the flesh you have taken from me is converted into energy which fuels I know not what; you are a marvel; in a thousand years our scientists could not understand the science your makers have wrought.

I dream you will not stop; I will shrink to the size of a basketball and you will carry my head under your arms; you will tell people your name and it will be my name; you will tell people your husband is my husband, my children your children, my home is yours as well; you will place me on the sill and one day, when the window is open I will fall down and roll into the garden, into the fields and I will watch you from the horizon, the blue of my eyes glowing in the night when you pretend to look for me.

Do not believe the lies my children say about me; do not think I have not worked hard my entire life; do not think I do not notice your pity when you scrub blood from my sheets, when you allow me to lean against your legs when I am on the toilet; there are a thousand ways for a body to die, to live, to be born, to evolve; a thousand things I know I do not know.

Am I only meat to you? A mother, a friend, a tyrant?; do you sleep, do you dream, do you derive satisfaction by making more and more of me disappear every day?

There is a story my husband told me before I went abroad and I was afraid we would not find anything, we would fail in our mission: we can only see what we expect to see; when Pizarro sailed across the Atlantic, his ships appeared as great white birds on the horizon and not until he strode onto the beach, his armor shining like a burnished oyster shell, did the Incas realize he was a person at all.

About the Author

Helena Bell
is an occasional poet, writer, and international traveler which means that over half of what she says is completely made up, the other half is probably made up, and the third half is about the condition of the roads. She has a BA, an MFA, a JD, and a Tax LLM which fulfills her life long dream of having more letters follow her name than are actually in it. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in
Shimmer Magazine, Brain Harvest,
and
Rattle.

muo-ka’s Child

Indrapramit Das

Ziara watched her parent, muo-ka, curl up and die, like an insect might on Earth.

muo-ka was a giant of a thing, no insect. Ziara was the one who’d always felt like an insect around it. Its curled body pushed against the death shroud it had excreted in its dying hours, the membrane stretched taut against rigid limbs. She touched the shroud. It felt smooth but sticky. Her fingertips stuck lightly to it, leaving prints. It felt different from her clothes. muo-ka had excreted the ones she wore a month ago. They smelled softer than the death shroud, flowers from Earth on a distant, cosmic breeze. She raised her fingers to her face, touching them with her tongue. So salty and pungent it burned. She gagged instantly, coughing to stop herself retching.

“muo-ka,” she said, throat thick. “You are my life.” Ziara thought about this. “You
are
my life, here.” She meant these words, but felt a hollow, aching relief that muo-ka’s presence was gone.

She closed her eyes to remember the blue rind of Earth, furred with clouds, receding behind the glass as she drifted into amniotic sleep. Orphan. Volunteer. Voyager. A mere twenty years on that planet. When she had opened her eyes after the primordial dream of that year of folding space, the first thing she saw and felt was muo-ka pulling her from the coma, breaking open the steaming pod with predatory lurches. Its threaded knot of limbs rippling like a shredded banner in the sweltering light, stuck on the leviathan swell of its dark shape. She had opened her mouth, spraying vomit into the air, lazy spurts that moved differently than on Earth. muo-ka had pulled her out of the pod and towards it, its limbs sometimes whiplashes, sometimes articulated arms, flickering between stiffness and liquid softness so quickly it hurt her eyes to see that tangled embrace. Stray barbed limbs tugged and snapped at the rubbery coil of her umbilicus, ripping it off so pale shreds clung to the valve above her navel.

muo-ka had grasped at Ziara’s strange, small, alien body, making her float in the singing air as she tried and tried to scream.

Ziara watched the shroud settle over muo-ka. Already the corpse had shrunk considerably as air and water left it. Its body whistled softly. A quiet song for coming evening. With a bone knife, she cut small slits into the shroud to let the gas escape more freely, even though the membrane was porous. The little rents fluttered. A breeze ruffled the flat waters of the eya-rith basin into undulations that lapped across muo-ka’s islet, washing Ziara’s bare feet and wetting the weedy edges of the stone deathbed. The water sloshed in the ruined shell of the pod at the edge of the islet, its sleek surfaces cracked and scabbed with mossy growth. Inside was a small surveying and recording kit. She had discovered the kit, sprung free of its wall compartment, shattered and drowned from the rough landing. Even if it had worked, it seemed a useless thing to her now.

When the pod had once threatened to float away, Ziara had clung to it, trying to pull it back with her tiny human arms, heaving with frantic effort. muo-ka had lunged, sealed the wreck to the islet with secretions. Now it stood in a grassy thatch of fungal filaments, a relic from another planet.

muo-ka had no spoken words. Yet, its islet felt quieter than it had ever been. Ziara had learned its name, and some of its words, by becoming its mouth, speaking aloud the language that hummed in a part of its body that she had to touch. It had been shockingly easy to do this. What secret part of her had muo-ka unlocked, or taught to wake? muo-ka’s skin had always felt febrile when she touched it, and when it spoke through her she felt hot as well.

The first thing it had said through her mouth was “muo-ka,” and she had known that was its name. “Ziara,” she had said, still touching it. “Jih-ara,” it had said in her mouth, exuding a humid heat, a taste of blood and berries in her head. Ziara had disengaged her palm with a smack, making it shiver violently. Clammy with panic, she had walked away. It had felt too strange, too much like becoming a part of muo-ka, becoming an organ of its own.

Ziara rarely spoke to muo-ka in the time that followed. When she got an urge to communicate, she’d often stifle it. And she did get the urge, again and again. In those moments she’d hide in the broken pod on the islet’s shore. She’d curl into its clammy, broken womb and think of the grassy earth of the hostel playground, of playing catch with her friends until the trees darkened, of being reprimanded by the wardens, and smoking cigarettes by the barred moonlight of the cavernous bathrooms, stifling coughs into silent giggles when patrols came by. Daydreams of their passing footsteps would become apocalyptic with the siren wail of muo-ka’s cries. It never could smell or detect her in the strange machinery of the wrecked pod. She assumed the screams were ones of alarm.

“You’ve fed me,” Ziara said to the corpse. “And clothed me. And taught me to leap across the sky.” Those stiffened limbs that its shroud now clung to had snatched her from the air if she leaped too high, almost twisting her shoulders out of their sockets once. She’d landed on the mud of the islet safe, alive. In the shadow of muo-ka she’d whispered “Fuck you. Just, fuck you. Fuck you, muo-ka.”

She had tasted the sourness of boiled fruit at the back of her throat. muo-ka covered the sky above her, and offered one of its orifices. Gushing with the steam of regurgitate cooked inside it. She’d reached inside and took the scorching gumbo in her hands. The protein from dredged sea and air animals tasted like spongy fish. It was spiced with what might have been fear.

Ziara didn’t have an exact idea of how long it had been since muo-ka had pulled her into the air of this world from the pod. She had marked weeks, months and years on a rock slick with colonies of luminescent bacteria. Left a calendar of glowing fingerprints that she had smeared clean and then restarted at the end of every twelve months, marking the passing years with long lines at the top. She had three lines now. They glowed strongest at dusk. If they were right, they told her she was twenty-four years old now. muo-ka had been her parent for three years.

Not that the number mattered. Days and years were shorter here. muo-ka had always lingered by that rocky calendar of fingerprints, hovering over it in quiet observation when it thought she wasn’t looking, when she was off swimming in the shallows. Watching from afar in the water, she could always taste an ethanol bitterness at the back of her throat and sinuses. A taste she came to associate with sadness, or whatever muo-ka would call sadness.