Thin Red Jellies

by Lina Rather

  "I wish you'd gone to bed," she said. She dumped the coffee out. Too bitter for human consumption.

  "Last minute assignment." Amy's hands shook, because Jess was trying to clench them. Amy fought it off. It was her body after all. She had better control. As soon as she thought it, she felt guilty right down to the pit of her stomach and she crushed the feeling before—she hoped—it bled over to Jess. They'd made a conscious effort to talk about "our body" and "ourself" and "our hands" as instructed by the hospital pamphlets, for all it did. "Double fee for a rush."

  "That's good."

  "You don't sound like it's good."

  "Of course it's good. I said it's good." Screw it. She needed caffeine. She got another cup of coffee and it was just as bad as the first, but she drank.

  "You're doing that thing with your jaw you do when you're mad."

  Amy was indeed grinding her molars together, but it didn't help to have Jess point that out. She made herself stretch out her jaw. It did not calm her down. "Don't tell me what I'm feeling."

  "I'm sorry—" Amy's hands slipped on the cup when Jess tried to do something else with them.

  "I said it's fine."

  "I can tell—"

  Amy ignored her and started walking back towards the cubicle. Her legs shuddered. Jess trying to get her to stop. Screw that. She had work to do and only a fifteen-minute break and everyone gossiped enough already. She grabbed back the reins and jerked their feet across the floor. Her front teeth clicked together like Jess's did when she was concentrating, but Amy ignored the waves of anger and hurt and sadness crashing in.

  She got halfway to the door before their body froze. Every muscle spasming like a seizure. Their hand locked open and the mug shattered on the linoleum. Hot coffee across the floor, Amy's shoes, splattered up their bare legs. It hurt enough for two people.

  Too many signals sent at once. Her teeth squeaked against each other until her ears rang. She couldn't take back control. Or relinquish it. For what felt like hours—thirty seconds, she discovered afterward, impossible—neither of them could make this body obey.

  Finally her jaw muscles popped like a fuse going and she collapsed against the breakroom table, gasping. Her legs burned like they'd just run a marathon.

  She couldn't feel Jess at all and she didn't try.

  ~

  They decided they could use some time apart.

  The logistics of this proved tricky. One of Jess's college friends was a biomechanic specializing in consciousness maintenance. He thought they could upload one of their minds into the AI teakettle that Amy's mom had bought her for high school graduation.

  The friend, David, dressed more like a hipster barista than a serious engineer, which did nothing to assuage Amy's fears about stuffing her mind inside a kettle.

  "This should be big enough," David said. He hooked the kettle into his laptop and started stripping out the baby AI. "Seriously not hospital-grade though. You can spend, like, two hours in this thing. You got that? I don't want to be responsible for making somebody a vegetable."

  Amy felt bad about deleting kettle's AI, who was always so cheerful when it asked her what she'd like to drink. It only had the intellectual capacity of a chinchilla, but she still patted it on the lid while David finished erasing it. It had been a good little kettle.

  David left them with a headband with electrodes attached to it, a homemade control panel he said was cannibalized from a thrift store mixing board, and a reminder about the time limit.

  They flipped a coin for first dibs. Amy won. She spent her two hours at a café, sipping an iced coffee. Four dollars and fifty cents, and her stomach churned over spending the money and for going first her own body. Every sensation was razor sharp with no one else sharing her nerves. The condensation on the cup froze her hand and her fingers picked out every single scratch on the table.

  With ten minutes left she came home and attached the electrodes under her hairline.

  Being inside a teakettle was not at all like a body. She'd forgotten to ask how it would feel. A kettle had no dream cycle. Her brain imagined breath and a heartbeat to keep her sane but it was like sleep paralysis. The kettle had a clock, so she could sense the passage of time, and a motion detector, so she knew she was alone.

  Returning felt like she was swelling, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Like water turning to steam. Just when she thought she might blow away she blinked and found herself with eyes again. Jess took off the headband and set it next to the cannibalized kettle.

  "How was it?" Amy asked.

  "Weird." Uncertainty trickled through along with just a taste of disappointment. "Felt like learning to walk again, without you there. But the first time's never as good as you think it'll be, right?"

  The third time she got her body to herself, Amy couldn't summon up guilt anymore. She and Jess had a stupid argument about lunch. Jess hated avocados, but Amy had already given them up for five months. Jess had said can we eat literally anything but guacamole. Amy had said you can suck it up for once. When Jess went into the kettle she felt twenty pounds lighter.

  She got a strawberry milkshake and sat in the park and read Vogue. When she’d first moved to the city, this was her favorite thing in the world. Just sitting on the grass in the sun with a drink that cost a whole hour's pay, dreaming of cowl necklines and shirred cotton, and not a person in the world waiting on her.

  It felt so good to be in her head by herself, like taking a great big stretch in the morning so your body fills all the space it can. She let herself think all the small dark thoughts she’d been holding back for months. The little muscles in her jaw relaxed one by one.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw the billboard. A smiling woman in a replacement body—one of the good replacements, with custom pigments, a molded face, real hair—dancing with a fistful of wildflowers. Having trouble affording your or a loved one’s medical costs? CareSure can help. Call today.

  Amy dropped her milkshake and called the number. After three numbered menus and fifteen minutes listening to Johnny Cash hold music, she got a nice woman named Charlene who asked about her financials and then crushed her hopes as soon as they had come.

  “Sorry, honey,” Charlene said. “You have to be twenty-five percent below the poverty line before you even qualify. This is a government-required program. They make us put up the billboards. Insurance companies aren’t charities, much as we all hope they were. I could send you some information on different nonprofits that assist with re-bodying if you give me your mailing address.”

  “We’ve tried them. They don’t have any money.”

  “Was she injured in a workplace accident?”

  “A car accident.”

  “Too bad. They have to pay worker’s comp then, you know. My cousin, she lost her body in an industrial accident. Her company bought her a new one—custom face sculpt and everything. Of course, since they paid for it they got to pick some of the features. She ended up with a welding torch for a right hand, and let me tell you, that took some getting used to. She burned my mom accidentally before we all figured out to stay clear of that hand. But she says it made her way faster on the line.”

  Amy was having trouble breathing. The phone slipped in her sweating hands. A man walking his Pekingese by the playground stared at her. All she could think about was a woman with a welding torch for a hand, her body molded forever to the factory floor, who couldn’t touch anyone without so much care, who could never fling her arms around her lover again without burning.

  “Are you there?” Charlene asked.

  The alarm on Amy’s phone buzzed, saving her from saying something she’d be ashamed of later. Five minutes.

  She only made it back with a minute to spare. She stood outside the apartment door with her keys in her hand. The timer on her phone counted down the seconds to two hours. Forty, thirty-nine, thirty-eight…She could just stay gone. Wait out here until Jess’s patterning degraded. It was such a dark thought it made her shiver. Fifteen
seconds…fourteen…thirteen. The milkshake curdled in her stomach and she tasted strawberries and bile.

  The timer went off. She hit it with her thumb but she stayed waiting outside the door. Her hands shook. She watched the clock on her phone tick away and she couldn’t make herself move.

  The hand on the clock clicked over another minute and she burst through the door and shoved the band onto her head. Her ears popped when Jess reuploaded into her head.

  “I’m sorry I’m so late,” she babbled. “I lost track of time, and then this jackass cut me off crossing the street, and it was a whole thing—”

  “I didn’t even notice,” Jess said. Nothing bled through between them.

  Jess waited three days to ask for her turn. Inside the kettle, Amy tried to learn how to meditate, even though she never could, even with a body and a breath. It was impossible with her brain wound in with the kettle’s timer. Each second stretched out and out like bubblegum on a baking July afternoon. Amy wondered if with enough practice she could turn the kettle on and off from the inside. It would be nice to have tea ready when she got out.

  After two hours, she waited for the great expanding feeling. It didn’t come. Instead—she shuddered. She felt like she had the spins. Everything went fuzzy at the edges. After two more minutes, it got very hard to think. The illusions her mind produced to keep her believing in her corporeality—lungs, heart, the sensation that this fear was making her sweat through nonexistent pores—began to fade.

  She choked. There was no air but she gasped. She felt bits of herself disappearing. Degradation. Would she be able to feel it when she vanished?

  She couldn't even scream inside the kettle. No one on the outside had any idea she was trapped in here, fading to strings of nonsense code…

  Just when she believed Jess was never coming back, everything turned sharply cold and she rushed back into her body.

  "Sorry," Jess said, flatly. "I was late."

  Amy wanted to scream. She leaned over the teakettle and thought about knocking it right off the table. Her head buzzed. But she felt the silent, chilly anger roiling off Jess and bit her tongue. Turnabout.

  Later she realized she couldn't remember the recipe for her grandmother's chocolate cake. She'd known it by heart just a few hours ago. She could remember remembering, but the memory itself was a ragged hole. Lost to entropy. She wondered what Jess had forgotten, to be turned so small and cruel. But she couldn't ask.

  ~

  That night long after they both should have been asleep, Jess said into the pillow, "I think the nurse was wrong."

  Amy tried to sense what she was feeling, but it was like Jess was a polished rock, perceptible but impenetrable. She still hadn't gotten used to this synesthesia, to Jess's self as an almost-physical object inside her. When Jess was open to her, she felt like a puff of cotton candy. When she was holding herself small and secret, she felt like a popcorn kernel or a rock or a penny. Amy reached out and held her own hand. With her arm pinned under her it had fallen asleep and felt nearly like another person's.

  "I think I died," Jess said.

  Amy knew she should say that's not true or its natural to be scared. Instead she said "Why do you say that?" She curled their arms around them for the warmth and the pressure. The back of their throat burned and she couldn't tell if it was her or Jess swallowing tears.

  "This isn't me." Jess's voice was so quiet that Amy could only understand her by the shapes their lips were making. She wanted to lift their hands and press them over their mouth to smother the rest. Outside a police siren wailed down Fifth. A robbery, a mugging. Something important to be making so much noise this late. It had long faded into the distance when Jess spoke again. "I know I am not my body, I know, but I look in the mirror and this is not my face. This is not my voice. Colors are different. I don't think I think the same as I did. I am not my body but I am not this body and this is not my life."

  Their hands twisted in the sheets.

  "It'll be over soon," Amy said. "We're so close." It was only half a lie. They had a little over two-thirds of the money, assuming nothing went wrong and the price of a replacement didn't go up and they forwent any customization.

  "Remember our third date?" Jess asked. "You said you wouldn't marry anyone before you'd dated them two years. But you let me into your head after six months and I didn't even get you a ring." She laughed and it scraped up Amy's throat. It didn't sound like her at all. Before the accident Jess had a laugh like whiskey, tenor-low.

  "I love you. I knew the minute I saw you that I would." Amy said. "Let's start back where we were when this is done. Go on dates. Go dancing again."

  Jess ran one of their hands across Amy's face, her touch as light as a silk sheet. Over Amy's cheeks and the slope of her nose. Like the first time they'd slept together, lying in Jess's double bed, foreheads touching for lack of room and Jess had slipped her foot between Amy's knees and then her hands under Amy's shirt, up her stomach and her ribs, slow as could be. She hadn't realized how much she missed being touched like this, by another person, like she was a fragile and beautiful and unknown thing.

  She turned her head and kissed the fingers Jess controlled. How close this was. If the room were darker, she could have believed. "It's all right."

  "I don't remember anything." Jess whispered it to the empty side of the bed like there was someone else to hear. "I remember metal and glass and heat. It should have hurt. I think this would be easier if it had hurt. You're supposed to know you've died."

  Amy couldn't sense Jess's feelings at all. She reached out but all she felt was stillness. Lately she'd been wishing for her body back, for privacy inside her own skin. But right now she longed to be one of those joined couples who could open themselves completely to each other and know every complicated emotion, every bitter and idiosyncratic mixed-up desire. She wanted to say I never wanted this but I want you but it would sound wrong in words. She was no poet. She didn't have the vocabulary to say what she meant.

  "I want you to be happy." She tried anyway, clumsily.

  "I know." Their heart rate slowed. Jess uncurled them and stretched onto their back the way Amy liked to sleep. "I shouldn't have said that. I get too wound up in the dark."

  "Just a little longer. It'll be like it was." Amy had meant it as comfort but Jess withdrew into herself and this was not the kind of alone she had wanted to feel.

  ___

  Copyright 2020 Lina Rather

  Lina Rather is an author from Washington, D.C. Her debut novella Sisters of the Vast Black was released in 2019 by Tor.Com Publishing and her stories have appeared in Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and Lightspeed. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys cooking, embroidering, and collecting terrible 90s comic books.

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  Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by LaShawn M. Wanak.

  http://giganotosaurus.org