skonen_blades

Our breasts are sore and our balls itch.

We feel like half of our food goes towards our tumours now. The black accordion beside our bed makes our four lungs work, squeezing long and then flat, our only sense of passing time when the lights are off. All of the instruments around our bed make the room look like Christmas. They softly ping and beep, scratch and whine, record and bear witness.

We are in the grip of a sadness so total that it will last us the rest of our lives which, if the doctors and technicians are right, will be about another six days.

We raise our hand up to the button that makes more pain medication drip into the tubes and it’s exhausting. The competing muscles from two people fused together struggle and fail before flopping back down on the bed. Several medical alarms go off and then go quiet again, just like they do every time we move.

The irony is that we were in love before all this. Two cadets on a starship. Cadet Robert Jacobs and Cadet Linda Castle. Bright kids with bright futures that knew nothing about what cruel surprises fate had in store. We held hands in the corridors, had sex whenever we could, and blushed when we thought of each other.

What fools.

The transporter badly needed a resequencing, the official inquiry found. Our molecules were transposed, inverted, inverted back and then met in the middle somewhere. Normally, when this sort of thing happens, the victims die immediately or are returned to the pad intact and separate as their backup selves. In this case, not only were the safeguards dormant, we survived the melding.

The mashing of our bodies and minds together has changed us into a giant lump of flesh with arms and legs splayed out like a starfish. Our heads are mashed into one staring monstrosity. Our nervous system allows us to feel pain but it’s almost impossible to move. The tumours started immediately and continue to multiply and grow. Our entwined DNA is rejecting itself but we cannot be separated.

And now we know way more about each other than we wanted to. We know that Linda did not love Robert and much as she said she did and that she had her eye on another cadet. We know that Robert had a history of sexual abuse that he never disclosed to Linda. We know that Linda was very mean to her ex-lovers. We know that Robert tortured insects. Our minds are one and the veil is down. We know so much more about each other than any human has a right do. Every insecurity, bathroom memory, unfair thought, dark corner and weakness laid out like an autopsy for us both to see. It’s not voluntary.

We’ve been told that our backup selves will be returned to life after we die and informed of the anomaly. This ruling is supposed to be humane. They will never be allowed to witness the abomination we’ve become. We will never be able to tell those two idiots to break up immediately. That’s the most frustrating thing about this entire experience.

We have a unity two humans have never before achieved.

We cannot wait to die.




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It started with a phone call. That’s how I lost my leg.

I guess one could also say in a roundabout way that my arrival into this world is what will cause my eventual death. I’m not trying to cast blame here.

I was in the shower when I heard my phone ring. I jumped out the shower to answer it. I ran over my hardwood floors to answer the summons. I turned the corner on soapy feet and with a tiny squeak, my points of balance were gone.

The hallway was narrow. I was wedged in an unnatural position for a millisecond before gravity took over. My leg gave way with a loud crack of bone. Looking down, I could see a sudden extra joint in between my knee and my ankle. Bone jutted out of my leg. I was reminded immediately of a half dozen special effects that I’d seen of broken bones in the movies.

Blood flowed freely but it wasn’t jetting out so I was pretty sure I hadn’t ruptured an artery. The pain immediately put me into shock. I passed out.

I woke up. It wasn’t a dream. I went under again.

I woke up shivering. There was a lot of blood around me. I crawled to my room to get dressed. I didn’t want any ambulance technicians to find me naked and wet on the floor. That would be embarrassing. I was in shock.

I managed to get a shirt on. I wrapped another shirt around my waist as a kind of skirt before crawling to the living room and calling the emergency number.

I called the ambulance. I was so tired. I gave them my address and went to sleep.

I woke up in the ambulance twice, smiling at the attendants. They smiled back.

The next thing I remember is being in the hospital. I remember swimming back up into consciousness, the white room blinding me. I remember having a dry mouth and being really groggy.

It took me fifteen minutes to realize they my left leg was gone below the knee.

Later on, I found out that waiting so long and then twisting it around before calling the ambulance had made it impossible to set. They’d opted for amputation.

All because of a phone call. The world is a crazy place. I never found out who called. If it’s one of my friends, they’re apparently bent on taking that guilt to their grave.

I wonder if it was a telemarketer who never knew what he or she had accidentally set in motion.



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