by arianna kanji
edited by alloe mak

“I am going to kill you.”

Your head twists to the side. Your bolts protrude, pointed and rusting, from the nape of your neck. “Okay. Why?”

“Self defense.” I feel the words leave my mouth but can’t remember saying them.

“Why?” You smile. Like a child in a chocolate factory—serene, superficial happiness dancing behind your eye sockets. Not your eyes. You don’t have those.

I squeeze your hand, nestled in the palm of mine. If you can still feel it, you don’t say. You don’t say anything. You only turn your head to the other side and wait. You are good at that. You told me once that you waited thousands of years for someone like me. You didn’t care about how long it took me to respond—you waited this long, and you would wait even longer.

“That’s the only way they’ll let me go.” I’ve gotten better at lying since we first met. I was callous and young. I can barely recognize myself in the reflection of your smooth metal skin. “You know that.”

“So you are going to kill me.” There it is again—that smile. That stupid fucking smile. “That is not going to end well for you.”

“And why’s that?” Behind the strong metal bars, bleak and grey, your body seems to shimmer despite the dirt and grim eating away at your exposed wires.

Your smile deepens into a frown, like you are thinking, though of course that isn’t true because your brain is lying in a desolate puddle at my feet. You crouch down so we are eye socket to bleeding eye. Your large, omnivorous tentacles reach through the bars and settle on my shoulders. A droplet of something sticky and wet—not blood, because I drank all of yours just two nights ago—slips across your cheeks. The source of your rust. “Because then you’ll miss me.”

I arrive at the lab late, tired, and with something strong pulling at my eyelids. I have no family. I don’t know where they’ve gone, but they are not here. The world outside is barren, or at least to my eyes it is. Beyond the veil of humanity, beyond the shiny skyscrapers and the electronic signs, there is a beautiful expanse of horrifying forest. I stare at it every night before I go to sleep. Today, it is on fire. It reminds me of something—something else bright and fiery. It reminds me that I have a soul, and the fire does not.

I begin to work slowly. I don’t rush. I never rush. Yesterday, the woman with the long blonde hair told me that I was on a tight deadline. I didn’t listen to her. I calmly attach metal pegs to boards and drill holes into steel plating. I carve out eyes but run out of plastic. I drill lips but forget that, without texture, they look like disfigured jackal kisses. I remember that success is born out of failure. I remind myself of this over and over and over again until my knees are weak and my palms are bloody. I remind myself that I must love my creation enough to bring it to life.

Number 1 is empty. There is nothing behind your skull. You cannot move. You only stare. Your glass eyes make you seem like a life-sized doll with plastic fingers and a painted-on face. I stuff you in the incinerator and try again.

When I was seventeen, I stopped by a record store down the road from my house. I used to know the man there. I don’t—not anymore. I can barely recognize his shriveled-up carcass on the side of the road, or the pot-bellied pictures of his son crumbling sideways in his hands. When I was seventeen, I’d enter and leave as I pleased. I’d listen to music as I worked. I’d place the spindle on the record and let it spin, entranced by the noises it would bring. I do that now. I listen to the music of someone banging their tire into gravel and hum along to myself.

Numbers 2 to 7 are defective. They send sparks up my eyes and they collapse, half-dead, right at my feet. They blink up at me. That’s all they know how to do. Blink. I don’t bother to teach them anything else before shoving my boot into their faces.

This continues for a very long time. 3 to 15 didn’t smile and they could only shift their right arm. 16 to 23 were ugly, their skin melting in patches against the metal. I lose count, after a little while. 56. 102. 368. 500. Eventually, I forget what it feels like to roll a new set of eyes and wonder in awe about what they may see that I don’t.

Only one of them came to life. You came hurting, raw, curled like a baby in the womb, your body slick with sweat. You begged me for forgiveness like I was a deity you were afraid you had angered. You could barely form words and the saliva dripped from your lip in rapid mania. You fell to the floor, dead and unclothed. I let my hand tumble down next to yours and started up the incinerator.

My lab sits on a cliff next to a beach that would prefer I didn’t exist. Seaweed slips over the once crystal clear water that surrounds the rocky outcropping, like a disease spreading through human veins. It spreads its reddish brown seeds and fills the murky green water with a pungent scent, one of flowers and citrus and rotting. The animals in it are alive, unfortunately. They float just above the surface of the water, choking and gasping for air, their little eyes beady and blank. They don’t need those eyes anymore. Or those gills, really. The ocean has it out for them as much as I.

I sit on the shore of the beach and watch the waves. They lap against my ruined muddy rain boots. I feel like a child. A small, lost child. If I were to let go of the sand, I may just float away, a spot of brown amongst the leaden sky as it mixes in with the horizon. I would drift away, and yet I would also stay right here.

The skull of a flatfish bumps into the sole of my shoe. I glance at it. It perks its nonexistent lips as if going for a kiss, a dribble of something acidic leaking from its mouth. I reach for it and grab my knife. Its eyes are sharp, slick. I feel a twinge of humanity for the creature, all ugly and lonesome, its eyes wide and body thin. It wasn’t meant to be seen, and yet here it is. I slide open its sharp gills and it stops squirming. Then it starts again, foam dripping down from its now empty eyelids. I toss it back into the water. It struggles to swim away. We are the same, in that regard, though I have eyes in my sockets while it cannot see the sand that slides along its sides.

I have a container for miscellaneous items—fish eyes, trout scales, eel tongues—things that may turn out to be useful and would have otherwise been useless. Then I have the bucket, heavy like a roll of rounded rocks in my fist. I wander over to the farthest side of the shore, away from the rickety old lab lying decrypt on a hill. The water is finer here, the verdun colour more prominent amongst the rusted spots of red. I slip it under the surface, the blue outer rim turning brown, and let it come up for air. Then I begin to walk back, the bucket hitting against the backside of my legs and splashing greenish-brown water along the ashen sand.

My family used to vacation here, long ago, during a time I can no longer really remember but still envision behind my fuzzy eyes. There used to be islands stretched along the horizon. Now the only remains of such life are the piles of metal and scraps near the horizon, rising high above the surface of the water. Cold. Domineering. I sometimes wish I could swim all the way to those precious piles and collect their remains as they tumble into the vapid waters. But alas, my deranged mother, with her pink flushed cheeks and skeleton arms, never taught me how to swim.

I stare into the unbroken plastic eyes of a faulty build. It glitches and screams, consumed by the electricity I have run from the ground into its melting pot of a brain. I slam my palm into the side of its head and it falls on the floor of the lab. Pathetic, isn’t it? That in all my genius, in all my years of watching the world rise and fall, I have yet to build something worthy of loving?

Something shifts out of the corner of my eye. I move and see the gutted remains of a fish—I’m not sure what type, as all identifying features have been eroded by my fisherman’s knife—struggling limply across the floor. It has no eyes. It has no brain. It is not supposed to be doing that. But its scales are shiny and multicolored, so it is beautiful nonetheless.

I look back to the faulty plastic model, headless and decrypted. They were all functional, the same way a creature without consciousness or a heart could slide along the floor of my lab. They were all alive, in some desperate fashion. But very few of them could be considered beautiful. So I sit down at my desk and begin to sketch.

I want you to be hungry so I build you in the image of hunger. Your flesh is absent but the metal plating is dyed a voracious shade of red. Your lips are sharp. You are something other—something different than the others. You are built out of the hunger that drew me to carve out those fish eyes and drink buckets of toxic water—the hunger that forced me to kill my mother and my father and the little girl that used to swim just near the edge of where the ocean met the shore. I told those women with clipboards that this was all going according to plan—that the others had died out on the beach of starvation. They didn’t bother to question why I had not.

Genius is bred from insanity. I learned that at a very young age. Genius is built from the bones of an insanity that wraps itself in love. I create you to be a genius. I do not give you eyes. Somehow, when you burst to life, you can see anyway. You hurtle towards me, breaking free from the wires I embedded into your rubber stomach and metal arms. You snap my neck clean in half. Within an instant, all that hunger has shrunk down to a pebble of something cold and dark.

“Hello,” I whisper, so softly I hope you do not hear.

You only smile in response.

A woman whose name I’m supposed to remember visits the lab. She has a clipboard and looks tired. Very human—all flesh and blood. Quite rare nowadays. She has the look of someone important. She pokes and prods all around the lab, around the desk where I’d written my notes and the windows where I’d shown you the stars. She inspects the spots of blood where you’d tried to rip my arm clean off, the balcony where I’d stopped you from catapulting off the top floor, and the soft sand you treaded through every time you went off on a midnight walk. She gazes in peculiar horror at the piles of fish carcasses draped along the stairwell and the squid corpse tied up in the closet. 

“It did this?” She seems almost frozen in awe.

“No. I did.”

She stops once she gets to the creature. To you. She peers into the cage and whispers softly, curiously, tapping her clipboard with her long nails. Her face is puckered up like she is sucking the rind of a sour lemon, licking her tongue against her lips. She asks me questions. I give her few answers. She reaches out to touch the glass. I don’t stop her. Perhaps that is my mistake. I’ve forgotten to care, at this point. All that hunger I felt is gone. It has hardened to a rock in my stomach. She taps her long nails against the containment and smiles. You smile back and reach for her fingers, your claws slipping right through the thick foam green glass.

I carry her unconscious body, bloodied and bruised, to my living quarters. I set her down in the guest bedroom that is never used and tend to her dismembered body, stitching up the smooth lines cut right down the side of her stomach. I fill a glass with greenish water and set it down next to her. I stay with her, the door locked and bolted. I watch her chest move up and down until she wakes up. She stares into the deep abyss of the darkened window, the mangled mess of metal and bolts rising high in the distance.

“Do you know what is most horrifying?” she says finally, her head resting bluntly on the cheap plastic pillow. Her voice is hoarse. “In the darkness of the attack, I could not separate flesh from metal. I could not tell which one of you was the monster.”

I nod. She seems satisfied and downs her glass. In an instant, she is asleep. Or dead. I am not sure I fully care. She has something I want, I realize. Something very important. It is like I said—a full human corpse is something rare. As I cut open her stomach it is like I am cutting open her soul, too. Her behavior and her habits. She held her pencil weirdly, and a bump had started to form on her ring finger. She was left-handed. She ran often. She had done gymnastics in school, but not for quite a while. She was young. She was healthy.

What the fuck am I doing?

“She’s very beautiful,” a voice behind me echoes, sending something akin to electricity up my crooked spine. You move into the room like a ghost.

I didn’t realise you could speak yet. “Was,” I remind you.

You press a long metallic fingernail into the bend of my neck. “I’m sorry. She was very beautiful. It’s a shame what you’ll have to do to her face.”

“Why can’t you—”

“Like I said. She’s too beautiful.” You smile. It’s dazzling. As if a million suns were stripped of their light and their glittery bones collected themselves into your teeth like toothpicks. “Why do you think I still keep you around? I’d miss you if you were gone.”

“Sure you would.” I package her organs into a tightly-sealed container and get to work on her limbs. I cannot remember the last time I was this…empty. It feels nice. Like someone hollowed out that voracious hunger and fed me a stew so filling I’d never have to eat again. The absence of hunger is not satisfaction. It’s just that—an absence.

“You doubt my claims. Do you believe me to be a liar?”

I hand the container to you and fail to respond.

In that cell, surrounded by the corpses of you I failed at bringing to life, they give me a choice. I stare into the unbroken glass eyes of number 205 when they tell me the deal. They toss all those carcasses down in front of my feet, missing eyes and limbs and spines. Kill or be killed, I can see it in their eyes before their mouths even open. Save the monster or save God. A simple decision, really. Except how can they ensure that I do not simply create you again? In response, they split open the bones in my hand and leave them hanging limply by my wrists. If I were not already an abandoned cocoon, void of a single butterfly, I most likely would have screamed. But I am, so I do not. It’s funny, how they knew I didn’t even need my hands to kill you.

“I am not going to miss you. I do not miss the frogs in my cabinet or the eyes in the dresser downstairs. I hardly miss my humanity and you’ve only just stolen it. I am not going to miss you.” I don’t know if I say any of this aloud. All I know is you. Your horrifying, melted skin, and your head shining through tufts of yellowing hair. Your crooked teeth. The gaps between your silver plating and the bloodshot skin littered with wirey veins. Your dismembered and disfigured corpse. I have to admit—even after all this time, my sewing still holds up.

“Do you believe yourself to be a liar?”

“No.”

“Then your beliefs are more inaccurate than I imagined.” You do not smile, even though I truly want you to. You do not let me see the glimmer of something beautiful that I created. You do not allow me such pleasure. “You said you were going to kill me.”

I stand up. Between us, there is nothing but bars and air. You dig your tentacles under my skin. I cannot feel it. I cannot feel you. What the fuck am I doing? “I am going to kill you.” But my voice is lost to your skin under my mind, peeling away the shell like my mother used to peel onions in the kitchen, fingers shaky and raw. Perhaps I was once too beautiful for you to devour. Luckily, today is not that day. 

I can feel, now. I can feel something. I can feel myself being eaten alive, slowly, surely, like a wolf devouring its first full-course meal. I can enjoy that, can’t I? That I am the first full meal you will ever swallow? That I am the last, too. That the acid in my stomach will tarnish your metal insides and you will die with me within you. I do not open my eyes to find out if this is true. The water in your stomach surrounds my body, my face, my smile. I just breathe and die quietly.

I return half here, half there. I return solid—a formation clawing on rocks and becoming coral over millions of long, tedious years. There is metal in my mouth and blood on my tongue, and together, the rust is the only taste for miles. Somebody will slit me open and find a mixture of body and mangled alloy, like a fish consuming the fallen pieces of a long-lost civilization. I am a time capsule of what I have created.

You stand there, gazing out at me, wishing you could swim up and press a hand against my mass. An ocean of something strong separates our shores. So you settle for collecting the little pieces that wash along the grey sand. You are tired. You are hungry. So you consume those bits, one by one.

Even thousands of years away, even with only a small bed of hunger to calm your longing, I can tell by the look in your eyes that you still think I am beautiful.