pumpkin (vermaak incanir)
29 October 2024
When sie came in with the thing it had been soft, almost-wet, and after sie set it on the bare counter it buckled under its weight so that the wrinkled skin ruptured in ugly channels. It stank the way of all living things, and oozed a little, and one of hir thumbs had punched through the flesh of it when carrying it in, and sie narrowed hir eyes at it and then at 31βε, who had stood to meet hir. ‘Saoirse,’ now, a warmer name, and she was eyeing the tilt of the fat slouching mess with a flickering expression. It was a familiar look. 31βε too often leveled her eyes at small things, like she expected them to turn blade-sharp on her.“It’s not for eating,” she said preemptively, and 00 found it in hirself to be a little condescended to.
“It was outside,” 00 said. On the steps there, up to the building, and 00 hadn’t noticed until now because sie had been lingering inside like a looping process, trapped in a circle, some dense invisible field keeping hir inside the threshold. Funny, to think it. So long spent like a dog that had slipped its leash and now sie put hirself into the kennel, uninvited.
In any case, sie’d been for a walk, now. Uneventful and unrewarding. Sie had looked over her shoulder for the entirety.
“It was meant to be there,” 31βε told hir, lips thinning. Her fists tightened at her side, then carefully loosened. “It’s gone rotten. You had to bring it in? - It’s a seasonal thing. For a holiday.”
She stepped around 00 and ducked down to a sparsely-stocked cabinet, the things she kept to play house. To play real. She came back with the black crinkle of a trash bag and 00 watched her fit it around the spoiled vegetable, pull it off the counter with a squelching sound.
00 turned hir head. The apartment was half-empty, a hollow sort of lived-in, something that rang to 00 as a faulty mirror of the areas of the Vermaak Incanir facility where the humans gathered, the mess halls and the break rooms, the picked-over stillness that filled the showrooms in the hours after banquets and press conferences. Furniture pieces, semi-drawn curtains, plastic plants. “You’re trying to be warm again. You’re always trying to be warm.”
There was tension in 31βε’s jaw.
(In that office: that executive’s head caved in soft, blood-wet. Seeping gore from the wound and clear fluid from the ear and nose, ruptures across the skin in ugly channels, gumming up the keys on his laptop. 00 reached down to lift his head and hir thumb pushed into the open place on the side of his skull and slid into the meat there. He’d gone bad, then, blood turning tacky under hir fingers.
He had been warm, and he was still warm, but cooling. 00 shifted hir gun back into hir body and closed his laptop before setting his head back down on top of it. The satisfaction of a completed goal spun deep in hir gut.)
“I’m not trying to be warm,” 31βε said, tying off the trash bag, breathing evenly. “I’m trying to be less cold. Don’t you want something like that?”
A funny thing: want. Now that the pumpkin had been moved, the air stank of rot.
“No,” 00 answered, but it wasn’t because sie was certain.