mother – an accumulation of things

Elon Musk was on the telly, his dead face glistening under the studio lights.

“Rrrrrrrrr” he said, as the motors that powered his jaws slowly powered up. “Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

A single drop of blood welled at the edge of his final human eye, seeming to defy gravity at first until you realised it was a fake, made of resin or wax or plasticine or from carbon nanotubes or jam or something, created to evoke a sympathetic response in the viewer. “See,” your brain went, “he’s human just like you.”

You hated your brain but it was the only one you could afford.

His other eye pulsed through sixty trillion colours a second, each one newer and more expensive than the one before.

“If we’d kept the old tv, we’d never have been able to see them all,” your brain said.

“I like that one,” your mother said, freezing the image and then cycling back through the frames until his eye was teslorange (a sort of purple). “I wonder if I could get some antimaccassars that colour.”

You pressed his eye and the catalogue opened up directly into your brain and crowded out most of your other sensory inputs until it had loaded the page.

“They cost $87348732.21,” you said, glumly.

“Oh, that’s quite a bit,” your mother said, but by the end of the week you knew she’d have one over the arm of every chair in the pod.

You wondered sometimes where the old antimaccassars went, but you never quite dared ask.

The image on the tv unfroze. “Hsssssk,” Elon Musk concluded, as his hour came to an end. “Hsssssssssssssssk.”

It was Mark Zuckerberg next, the camera centred on his jumper, the top half of his head protruding out of the shell of the telly and half way up your living room wall.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaater,” he began. “Proooteeeeeeien.”

Your mother was entranced. You feigned disinterest. Later you bought four decilitres of water and several unsorted proteins.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on September 3rd, 2018

__________

Support An Accumulation Of Things

If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi.

Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.

(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more).

Thank you!

There was a growth in the kitchen, protruding bulbously from the fruit bowl, furred and quivering where the pineapple should have been.

“Where’s my pudding?” called a voice from the garden.

I looked at the growth and tried to direct my mother away from it and onto the idea of having something else for pudding.

“What do you want?” I said. “There’s some ice cream.”

“Fruit,” she said. “You know I always have fruit for pudding.”

“I’m not sure there’s any left,” I said.

“There should be a pineapple in the fruit bowl.”

“Are you sure you don’t want any ice cream?”

“No! Fruit! I want my fruit, David!”

I picked up the growth, hoping until the last it was a miniature coconut, that the quivering was a trick of the light, that

that

anything

except what it was

It was soft in my hand, and almost definitely alive, moist, like wet bread, and as hairy as a tarantula you’d been forced to stroke at the zoo, but warm and responsive, unlike the refrigerated docility of those poor captive beasts.

I placed it on the chopping board and cut it in half. Blood seeped out everywhere, green and sickly and thin. I skinned the thing, dumped it’s abject flesh into mother’s favourite cereal bowl and took it out to the garden where she sat grimly underneath the parasol.

On my way back inside I absentmindedly licked my fingers, and they tasted like acid. Like acid and metal and electricity being fired through the bones of my skull. I spat and spat into the sink but nothing would make it go away.

Mother loved it, wouldn’t stop saying all night how nice it was, asking me when I was going to go out and get some more.

__________

Notes:

1. This story was written on the 24th June, 2018
2. It’s not a very good story
3. I was thinking mostly of kiwi fruits, but also there’s this thing in the garden, down by the compost heap, and it’s all furry and odd and I don’t know what it is and I don’t dare find out

__________