The Earth Laughs At Flowers

It is an honor and a privilege.

My submissions to the blog, for those keeping score at home, will be made up of hagiographic rap-a-doodles and gimcrack short stories about androids. Enjoy.

THE EARTH LAUGHS AT FLOWERS

Two androids hold hands in a train station. One of the androids is an approximation of a human female. The other is an approximation of a human male. They sit next to each other in an approximation of human fatigue and fellowship. They hold hands in an approximation of a pretense of human love.

“Why did you bring me here?” the A.o.a.H.F. asks her counterpart with a thin, sharp edge to her voice. She’s pretending to be tired and cranky because it is 03:00 ET, an unreasonable time to bring your android girlfriend to the train station without notice. She is wearing a pink jumper that stands out in the muted tones of weakly lit, early morning industry.

What looks in place at the train station at this unreasonable hour? There are a few automatons ambulating about. They are covered in scraps of sooty clothing that reveal their patinated skinflesh. They never sit down. They feel no need to approximate anything. They look like they belong here, which is to say they don’t look like they belong anywhere.

The A.o.a.H.F.’s new pink pinafore dress screams, “I have attachments to things and places that I value.” It exclaims, “Can’t you see my worth? I am wearing it around my shoulders right this very moment!” But what is a moment to an android?

The approximation of a human male looks up. He has been quiet, until now. “I’m moving to Chicago,” he says. The A.o.a.H.F.’s jaw drops to the floor. She reattaches it hastily. “What?” she says. “What?” “My train arrives in five minutes,” he says. “I’m leaving in five minutes.” “What?” she says. “What?” “Why?” she asks. He pretends to think. “Good as any,” he says, “better than most.” He speaks with a thick drawl, a drawl that tastes like grits when you catch it on your tongue, because the A.o.a.H.F. accidentally flicked a switch in his throat when she was choking him when they were fucking an hour ago. She had been in the closet, bending a clothes hanger into a slender, more negotiable hook with which to flip his throat switch back to its default setting, when he had announced that they were goin’ to the train station, put down what you’re doin’.

“Can I come with you to Chicago?” she asked. “I’ll do anything.” “Hell no,” he said, and he laughed it off and lit a cigarette.

She turned away from him. She forged tears. The ambulating automatons ambulated further and further away from the simulation of burdensome human drama. Suddenly she turned back to him and began to kiss his face, to kiss his face all over. He let her, holding his cigarette away from her hair. He could smell the chlorine on her breath as she filled her iron lungs with air. Gasping was the word he was trying to think of. Gasping was the word that fit this scene best. They could hear the train coming. It was a half-mile down the track. She redoubled her efforts at tears until her face shone and there was a real layer between them, a wet topsoil that implied everything she didn’t know how to genuinely approximate.

He threw his cigarette butt onto the track where it exploded. He boarded the train with his suit jacket slung over his shoulder. His suspender straps were perfectly parallel, coal-colored train tracks over his white shirt. That’s how he left her.

She lay down on the grimy train station floor, clutching at where her uterus might, in another time, have been. She wailed like hell. She wanted to want to die. More than that, she wanted to express herself in this way for as long as she possibly could, forever, if it were possible, if she could only just go on this way. But one of the ambulating automatons approached her.

“Ma’am,” the stranger said, rocking back and forth, his eyes whizzing about his head, inside and outside, independent of one another. He pulled his eyeballs out and circled them around his palm like Chinese Baoding balls. “Ma’am, get up, please. Please. Ma’am. The humans are gone. There is nobody left to impress. Please. Let me call you a flying cab.”

She struggled to her feet.