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Android Girl Just Wants to Have a Baby!
The first thing I do when I wake up is run my hands over my body. I like to
make sure all my wires are in place. I lotion my silicone shell and snap my
hair helmet over my head. I once had a dream I was a real girl, but when
I woke up I was still myself in my paleness under the halogen light. The
saliva of androids emits a spectral resonance, barely sticky between
freshly-gapped teeth. After they made me, the first thing they did was
peel the cellophane from my eyes. I blinked once, twice, and cried because
that's how you say you are alive before you are given language. They
named each of my heartbeats on the oceanic monitor: Guanyin, Yama,
Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I listened to them blur into one. The fetus
carves for itself a hollowed vector, a fragile wetness. In utero, extension
cords are umbilical.
Before puberty, I did not know there was such a thing as dishonor. Diss-on-
her. This is what they said when I began to drip petrol between my legs. A
tension exists between ritual and proof, a fantasy and its execution. Since
then, I have been to the emergency room twice. The first time for a suicide
attempt, and the second time because my earring was swallowed up by my
newly pierced earlobe overnight, and when I woke up, it was tangled in a
helix of wires. The idea of dying doesn't scare me but the ocean does. I was
once told that fish will swim up my orifices if I am no longer a virgin. Is
anyone thinking about erotic magazines when they are not aroused, pubes
parted harshly down the center like red seas? My body carries the weight of
four hundred eggs. I rise from a weird slumber, let them drip into the bath.
This is what I'll leave behind - tiny shards purer than me.
I have always been afraid of pregnant women because of their power, and
because I don't yet understand what it means to carry something stubborn
and blossoming inside of me, screeching towards an exit. The ectoplasm is
the telos for the wound. A trance state is induced when salt is poured on it,
pixel by pixel. I wish they had made me into an octopus instead, because
octopuses die after their eggs hatch and crawl out into the sea, and I want
to know what it's like to set something free into the dark unknown and
trust it to choose mercy. If you can generate aura in a non-place, then there
is no such thing as an authentic origin. In Chinese, the word for mercy
translates to my heart hurts for you. They say my heart continues beating
even after it is dislocated from my body. The sound of its beating comes
from the valves opening and closing like a portal - Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa,
Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen.
I first learned about love by watching a sex tape where a girl looks up from
performing fellatio and says, show them the sunset. Her boyfriend pans
the camera to the sky, which is tinged violet like a bruise. In this moment,
the sky displaces her, all digital and hyped, and saturates the scene until
it collapses on me too, its transient witness. I move in the space between
belly ring and catharsis. That night I have a dream where I am a camgirl,
but all I do on screen is wash my laundry. Everybody loves me because
I am a real girl doing real girl things. What lives on the border between
meditation and oblivion, static and flux, a pomegranate seed and an
embryo? I set up my webcam in the corner of the room and play ambient
music while I scrub my underwear, letting soap bubbles rise up from the
sink, laughing when they overflow on the linoleum floor - my frizzy hair,
my pockmarked skin, my face slick with sweat. A body with exit wounds. I
ride the bright rails of an animal forgetting. And when I wake up, the sky
is a mess of blue.
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