Therese came over to look at Isabella’s garden, and Isabella gave her a tour of the flowers and the ornamental kale, which theoretically we could have eaten but was such a brilliant red I didn’t really want to pick it. “Would you like to give Therese some turnips?” I asked Isabella as we reached the turnip patch.
“Oh, no thank you, I couldn’t possibly . . .”
“You wouldn’t reject Isabella’s turnips, would you? Let me just get you a sack. We have tons.” I left her protesting in Isabella’s garden.
While I was filling the sack, I saw Isabella showing Therese her carrots and cabbages, and Therese glancing my way and then bending down to whisper something to Isabella. I tossed in an extra turnip and went back outside. They really were pretty vegetables, purple and white, but we were never going to be able to eat the two bushels of them Isabella had grown.
Therese glared at me as I handed her the sack, but she thanked Isabella for the kind gift and headed back to her own house. Isabella was looking with sudden new interest at her garden, and I had the bad feeling that she was going to demand to plant something new, but instead she went to get her little wheelbarrow so I could help her dig up more turnips.
I had hoped that her interest in her garden would wane a little bit as we got closer to winter—it was going to snow, after all, and there was a limit to the number of things we could grow in pots in the house—but if anything, over the next week her interest intensified. As soon as she was out of bed, she wanted to run out and look at it. At the very least she wanted to walk through it before eating her breakfast, clutching a little plastic toy—she seemed to have lost interest in the baby doll, I hadn’t seen it in days. We’d come back out after breakfast to pick anything that was ready to harvest, and then she’d want another walk-through in the afternoon.
About a week after Therese’s visit, I woke up one morning to a funny noise coming from the back yard. There’s a cat out there, I thought. Isabella was already up, standing expectantly in the hallway. “Want to go to the garden now,” she said.
“Get your clothes on first,” I said, yawning, putting on my own blue jeans and sweatshirt. Isabella vanished back into her room, emerging minutes later with her shirt on backwards but otherwise fully dressed. “Now we can go to the garden,” she insisted.
The cat was still there. We went downstairs and I opened the back door; Isabella sprinted out. “There’s the baby sister!” she called to me.
Lying beside the cabbage plant, I saw a flash of pink. She must have left her doll out here, I thought. But it was moving.
“The cabbage patch,” I whispered. Therese must have told her that babies grew in cabbage patches. And then if she planted the doll . . .
The baby in the cabbage patch was crying: a thin little newborn wail. She quieted as I picked her up. Isabella peered at her with interest. I stroked her soft hair, so much like Isabella’s, and her tiny toes. She had no belly button. I traced the edges of her stomach, not quite daring to touch the middle, smooth like an egg.
“That’s a baby sister,” Isabella said.
“Isabella, where did this baby come from?”
“She grew,” Isabella said.
“Babies don’t grow in gardens, sweetheart. They don’t. Whose baby is this?”
Isabella reflected on this for a minute, then said, “That baby sister grew in the garden.”
I sat down on the porch swing, swaying back and forth, my head spinning. Should I call Charlie? The police? What was I going to say? What am I going to do with this baby? It’s not like we can just bring it in and keep it like we’d keep a stray cat.
The baby opened its eyes and regarded me for a moment.
What am I going to do with you?
Isabella skipped over to lean on my knee, her hands empty. I blinked at her, thinking, she had a toy when we came outside. Where is it?
“Want a dragon,” Isabella said.
I blinked again, then looked at the yard, at the tangle of pumpkin vines, eggplants, beans, cabbages. And one dragon. One dragon seed.
Maybe there would be an early frost.
BITS
o here is something a lot of people don’t realize: most companies that make sex toys are really small. Even a successful sex-toy manufacturer like Squishies (™) is still run out of a single office attached to a warehouse, and the staff consists of Julia (the owner), Juan (the guy who does all the warehouse stuff), and me (the person who does everything else).
(You are probably wondering right now if that includes product testing. I make it a habit not to talk about my sex life with strangers but Julia requires that everyone she hires take home a Squishie or a Firmie or one of the other IntelliFlesh products and try it out, either solo or with a partner. I pointed out that if she ever hired an alien—sorry, “extraterrestrial immigrant”—the neurology doesn’t match up, and does she want to admit she discriminates in hiring? But I didn’t argue that hard, because hey, free sex toy, why not? Frankly, I found it a kind of freaky experience, having this piece of sensate flesh that didn’t really belong there, and after a little bit of experimentation I stuck it in a drawer and haven’t touched it since.)
Anyway, we outsource the manufacturing and the boxes of Squishies and Firmies get shipped to us on shrink-wrapped pallets and Juan breaks them down to re-ship in more manageable quantities to the companies that resell our products.
The original product were the Squishies, and Julia is not at ALL shy about people knowing about her sex life (we have an instructional video, and she’s IN it) so I don’t mind telling you that she came up with it because her boyfriend at the time had a fetish for really large breasts, we’re not talking “naturally gifted” or even “enhanced with silicon” but “truly impractical for all real-world purposes like breathing and using your arms,” and conveniently at the time she was working at a company making top-of-the-line prosthetics with neural integration. She made herself a really enormous set of breasts and after a lot of futzing with the neural integration she got them to be sensate. Then the boyfriend dumped her and she didn’t really need them anymore, but her friend who’d had a double mastectomy said, “why don’t you make me a smaller set?” and that, supposedly, was when it occurred to her that maybe she could make this product to SELL. She found a manufacturing facility and office space, hired me and Juan, and went into the Fully Sensate Attachable Flesh business.
Depending on your predilections you may already be wondering why she started with boobs. IntelliFlesh is re-shapable, at least up to a point, and since I was the Customer Service department I started getting calls from people who wanted to reshape it into something longer, stiffer, and pointier.
“Julia,” I said one day, taking off my headset, “you need to start making strap-on dicks.”
“I can’t call those Squishies,” she said dismissively.
“So? Roll out a new line. Hardies. Dickies. Cockies. If you go with Cockies you can say ‘like cookies, only better’ in the ads.” Maybe I should note that one of the few things Julia doesn’t let me do is write the ad copy.
The Firmies were an even bigger seller than the Squishies. Between boobs and dicks, we had most users covered, but every now and then I got a call from someone who wanted something a little more customized.
“You’ve reached Afton Enterprises, home of Squishies and Firmies,” I said. “How may I help you?” (In addition to not getting to write the ad copy, I don’t get to decide how to answer the phone, judging from the fact that Julia shot down the greeting, “How may I improve your sex life today?”)
“I’m thinking about buying either a Squishie or a Firmie, and I . . . had some questions,” the woman said, her voice hesitant. “They’re sort of expensive and I’m not sure which will meet my needs.”
“Well, the Squishie is squishier,” I said. “It’s more malleable, but it also doesn’t tend to hold alternate shapes for very long unless you refrigerate it for a while before you get started. The Firmie arrives long and narrow, but if yo
u want it to have a different shape—say, a curve or even a hook—you can gently heat it up and mold it.”
“What I want is a prosthetic vagina,” the woman blurted out. “In a different spot.”
You’re not really supposed to say, “you want what?” to customers when you’re doing customer support for a sex toy shop. We are pro-sex, pro-kink, and anti-shame: there is officially no wrong way to have sex. So: “Which spot?” I asked.
“Well, we’re not exactly sure. Part of the advantage of your products is that we can move them around. What if I bought two Firmies? Could I reshape those into two halves of a vagina, like maybe one could be the top of the, um, tube, and the other could be the bottom . . . are your products compatible with lubricant?”
“There’s a special lube that we sell,” I said. “Other lubricants might void the warranty.”
“That adds to the cost even more,” the woman said, clearly frustrated. “Is there any way to find out before I put down all that money whether it’s going to work for me? If they sold these at REI I would just buy it and figure I’d return it if I needed to, but nobody takes returns on sex toys.”
“We do, under some circumstances,” I said. “Can you give me a little more information about what your goal is with our product?”
“I want to have sex with my husband,” she said, impatiently, “real sex, or as real as it can get. And he’s a K’srillan male. Our God-given parts just don’t match up.”
*
The K’srillan—our “extraterrestrial immigrants”—made radio contact about a decade ago, and arrived on earth a year and three months ago. Juan periodically mutters about how no matter what they say, they might still be planning invasion and how would we even stop them? But they offered us suspended-animation technology in exchange for asylum (from who? was Juan’s immediate question, but we’ve been assured that they were fleeing the death of their sun, not some second wave of dangerous aliens) and a dozen U.S. cities wound up taking settlements. (They’re spread around. There are a bunch of others in other countries all over the world.) So far in the U.S. it was mostly okay, other than some anti-immigrant rioting in Kansas City. I hadn’t actually met any K’srillan—there was a settlement in Minneapolis but I live in St. Paul and don’t cross the river much—but from what I could tell they were all law-abiding and hard working and in general the sort of people you want to have come and settle in your city.
They also looked kind of like roadkilled giant squid. They don’t have faces, as such. I mean, they have eyes, seven of them, which are on stalks, and they have a mouth, which they use to eat and speak, but they’re not right next to each other the way you would expect in practically every earth species out there, from mammals to reptiles to fish. I mean, okay, we do have squids. But they don’t walk around the shopping mall. On tentacles.
K’srillan do talk, but they aren’t physically capable of making the same sounds as us, so they carry a voice synthesizer for communication.
The thought of sex with, or marriage to, a K’srillan was completely baffling to me.
Even, dare I say it, gross.
*
But we are pro-sex, pro-kink, and anti-shame, so I said, “Okay!” in as cheerful a voice as I could muster, and didn’t add, “Husband? You sure moved fast.” (I might not judge sex lives but I reserve the right to judge major life decisions.) “I don’t actually know that much about K’srillan sexual anatomy. So, um. He has a penis?”
“Yes, we don’t need a Firmie for him,” the woman said, dismissively. “Your products don’t interface with K’srillan neurology anyway or we’d consider buying him a Firmie and having him use that instead of his own penis. He has a penis, but it’s eighteen inches long, and bifurcated.”
“Bifurcated?”
“Branches into two, basically.”
“You’d need at least four Firmies,” I blurted out. “To make a vagina for eighteen inches of branched penis.”
“That is a lot of money.”
“Yeah, for that much you could practically get a custom order.”
“Oh! You do custom orders?”
“No. We don’t. But surely someone . . .”
“Do you think I haven’t checked?” the woman asked, exasperated. “There has been a lot of discussion of this in the Full Integration community. I am not the only woman looking.”
“You aren’t?”
“No!”
Well, that changed things, maybe. A custom order was one thing. A prototype was potentially a whole different matter.
“No.”
“No? Just no?”
“Would you rather I went with ‘no, that’s a repulsive idea?’”
I stared at Julia. “I thought we were pro-kink and anti-shame?” To be fair, I’d had a similar reaction at first, but I was actively trying to get past my emotional reaction. Everyone involved was a consenting adult—okay, so the K’srillans had a different life span and developmental arc from humans, which was still being discussed in Congress, but I’d checked, and since the K’srillan males didn’t actually develop a penis until sexual maturity, clearly these were adults were were talking about. Anyway. “Did you know that there’s already a sector of the porn industry devoted to sex between human women and K’srillan males? Apparently an 18-inch bifurcated—”
“STOP. I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Did I ever say that about your ex-boyfriend’s fetish for massive boobs? NO. Your kink is not my kink, and your kink is okay. Their kink is not our kink, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sell them stuff!”
Julia threw down the silicon butt plug she’d been examining. (We’d been thinking about new ways to extend our line anyway. It’s not as if my suggestion had come completely out of the blue.) “Okay. Fine. You want to design something, we’ll test the market. But you are going to have to take the measurements, you are going to have to build the prototype, and you are certainly going to have to do the focus group and interviews because this is a repulsive idea.”
“Fine!” I said. “Fine. I will handle—” I cut myself off. “I will deal with all of it. And we’ll see if enough people want this to make it viable.”
*
The woman who’d called was named Liz, and her husband’s name was Zmivla, and it turned out that Zmivla was part of the group that had settled in Minneapolis, so they lived less than five miles from my office. I drove to the high-rise apartment where so many of the new arrivals had moved in, and took an elevator to their apartment on the 12th floor.
“Come in,” Liz said when she answered the door. “I’ve made coffee.” She laughed nervously. “Do you drink coffee?”
Zmivla was lounging in the recliner, tentacles draped over both the arm rests and the foot rest. Two of his eye stalks swiveled to look at me when I came in and his speech synthesizer said, “Hello, Ms. Marshall.”
“Call me Renee,” I said.
Liz handed me a cup of coffee and I studied Zmivla, wondering if I should just whip out the tape measure and ask him to whip out his penis, or if we should have some more preliminaries first. When Julia started making the Firmies, I think rather than measuring actual penises she bought the dozen or so top-selling models of dildo and measured those. But there aren’t currently any K’srillan dildo models on the market, so we were going to have to go with some actual penises. I took a deep breath. “I should ask some sort of basic questions first, I think.”
“Would you like to know how we met?” Liz asked, brightly.
Actually, I mostly wanted to know how K’srillan sex normally worked with another K’srillan but if she wanted to start with something a little less explicit I supposed that was a reasonable lead-in, so I nodded and drank my coffee while they told me their how-we-met story. I think it involved a conversation that started at the Powderhorn Art Fair but it’s possible I’m mis-remembering and actually that’s how my sister met her ex-husband. If you want to know the truth, all the cutesy “how we met” stories blur together for me. If you met
your sweetie because he was third in line for the organized gang bang at the local dungeon and you really liked the shape of his dick, that I’ll remember. If he offered to help you carry your pottery in his tentacles while you kept your dog from bolting, I just don’t care enough to keep it in my head for more than fifteen minutes.
Liz had a boring office job and Zmivla had a boring job that was clearly beneath his talents and after they told me that Liz’s hobby was making still life paintings it was clear they were stalling, and I couldn’t entirely blame them, given that I was there to measure the guy’s penis.
“I know this is a somewhat uncomfortable situation for all of us,” I said. “But we really probably should get down to business, okay?”
“I just want you to . . .” Liz hesitated.
Zmivla stroked the back of her hand with the tip of one of his tentacles, delicately. With one of the others, he brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “Liz and I appreciate your open-mindedness,” he said. “But it’s important to her that you see us as people first. As a couple who has a right to be together, to share the love that we do.”
“You want me to think that you’re normal,” I said. I tried to keep the edge of sarcasm out of my voice, but I probably didn’t entirely succeed. “Just another Minneapolis family.”
“I know we’re not like everyone else,” Liz said. “But we love each other and take care of each other. And that’s what’s important.”
“Right,” I said. “But you didn’t call me to affirm your relationship. You called me to help you with your sex life. So let’s talk about that.”
*
So, among actual K’srillans, the female folds herself around the male; she does have a short channel that’s there all the time but a decent amount of her sexual passageway is constructed on-the-fly. I took notes. The actual sex involved friction, but some of it was accomplished by the same muscles that were used to fold the extended vagina into place; I wasn’t entirely sure whether the male K’srillan thrusted, or not.
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