Donor
by SaraG
His daughter Claudia was crazy: she changed jobs overnight and he
never knew who she was dating. When she was home, she scribbled on her
notepad and left the scraps of paper lying around for him to find.
Whenever his guard was down, he’d be jolted by men suffocating on
their top-hats, amoebas with eyes and tentacles, frog eating
princesses.
They argued a lot.
When Claudia came visiting, she drank his beer and stretched out on
her mother’s cream sofa. Metal studs inched down her ears and
eyebrows, down the nape of her neck, disappearing under her clothing
to find secret places to pinch, to rub.
His daughter suffered from kidney failure; she shouldn’t drink.
Dialysis became more frequent. Claudia could no longer live alone so
she moved back into the house. The cream sofa became her fiefdom,
where she received men with soft voices and sad eyes, women with dyke
haircuts and well-toned shoulders. The visitors brought crocuses,
dandelions, snowdrops.
The doctors pronounced them compatible. He gave her a kidney.
She lived. He still thinks she’s crazy. She drinks his beer and gets
grease stains on the sofa. The amoebas have multiplied into a sea of
little monsters. Once in a while, a kidney makes its way into her
drawings. He swears that he’ll use them for toilet paper, but he never
does. They argue every single day.
The Six Degrees of Marcus Sansome
by Edd
It’s really beyond the purview of this narrative to tell you how the alien got into Marcus Sansome’s body. Suffice to say it involved a meteorite, a nearsighted chicken, a national chain of grocery stores you’d certainly recognize, and two eggs he cooked over easy with bacon and an english muffin.
The alien ate Marcus Sansome from the inside, growing carbon nanotube tendrils through his body to manipulate his fingers, his mouth, his neck and back and legs. The alien’s distributed memory recorded everything it found: Sansome’s DNA and the nucleotides of which it was composed, his cell structure, the varied compositions and purposes of his many organs. Reaching his brain, the alien slowed to savor its complexity, to encompass its entirety. Holographs reproduced its synaptic structure, and the alien spent delicious microseconds unravelling as much as it could of Sansome’s memories, his sensory perceptions, his thinking processes.
Tendrils reached the limits of Marcus Sansome’s body, and encountered anomalies. Hair and nails, dead tissue, were they part of this body or not? The alien consulted the analogue it had built of his self-image. Yes, it thought, and pushed air from Sansome’s lungs to say it out loud in a breathy whisper. “Me.”
Clothing presented the next challenge. Their construction differed from that of Marcus Sansome’s body, and there were many anomalous substances in them. Yet they obviously served as a second skin. Once more the alien referred to its reconstruction of his brain. Then, satisfied, tubes furcated a million times, assimilating cloth and leather. “My clothes,” said Sansome’s voice.
Why stop there? The alien found in Marcus Sansome’s consciousness the concept of possessions. Ownership extended to this house, to these furnishings, to all these belongings. Tendrils grew from the soles of Sansome’s shoes to spread throughout the house, interpenetrating and cataloguing all they found. “All mine,” the alien made him say, in a tone approaching wonder.
The doorbell rang. The alien heard it with Marcus Sansome’s ears and felt it from inside the bell. It swiveled the body’s head and made it walk to the door. Thousands of tubes parted as the body lifted each foot, thousands connected for the second his foot again touched the carpet. He turned the knob, pulled. Outside the door stood a being. The alien consulted Sansome’s memory once more. Then, delighted, it extended a hand.
“My friend!” it said.
