I feel nauseous and hold my head over the toilet just in case. A symptom of a disease? Nerves? Then it passes.
Still an hour to go. It’s been a few days since I showered, and I can smell myself. I pull the curtains in the corner opposite Nan around myself, turn on the vacuum seal drain. I soap myself. If I slip and fall, no one will come running. Not even Nan can save me now. As I pass the soap over my skin, I tremble. Here, my stomach is flat. In a month, if I’m not dead from superbugs, a baby will be placed into my arms. Which version is the lie? I think of Alicia, her fingertip, my palm, and let the water touch me clean.
At ten o’clock, nothing happens. My door stays shut, and I am alone. I want to confess to Telo right away, nudge him awake and tell him what I hoped for, how much this world is not enough, how this cubicle that I might never leave feels like a trap and all I am able to do is run in the fields of the virtual world. Would he be enough? Would the baby be enough? Would all of our research for re-entry be enough?
The decontamination chamber outer door opens. A man rolls in, then steps out of his bioball and lifts his arms to be scrubbed by gas. The door to my cubicle opens.
He moves quickly to wedge the inner door open with one of Nan’s arms. He freezes when he looks up, as if he’s as surprised to see me as I am him. Then he relaxes and grins.
“Hi,” he says. “We have ten minutes.”
I don’t say anything. My hair is dripping down my back, immediately absorbed by the floor’s dehumidifier. I keep glancing towards the door that should be shut, that should be the second barrier protecting me.
“Here I am,” he says.
“I’m contaminated,” I warn. “Class five.”
“I guess that’s the risk,” he says, like he’s not surprised. He’s much shorter than Telo, balding even though he’s about my age, skinny like all of us in real life, green eyes to Telo’s startling black eyes. He has a scar on his shoulder. His palms are stretched out to me.
“Here I am,” I say, but I don’t move.
When he walks towards me, I flinch, but he reaches me, surrounds me with his arms. I can smell him, his underarms, my breath on his skin. I melt, and I put my arms around his neck, and he lifts me from the floor. I am floating on someone else’s skin. A hot tidal wave inside me drowns me in him. In a week, we could both be gone, dead from infection, nothing left of us—not our cubicles or robots, incinerated; not our ephemera wiped from clean.
“Babycakes,” he breathes into my hair. He is crying.
I realize. The extra money, the late nights, his nonchalance about the risks of touch. Telo has touched many people before me.
“You look nothing like your avatar,” I say, but I don’t let go. Telo is alien, uncanny, the resemblance only slight. Who are we? How can we raise a human child and teach it who we are without lying, without weeping?
“That’s what you have to say to me?” He grabs my hair, puts his other arm underneath my legs, and lifts. He trembles with the weight of me, something he doesn’t do in clean. How little we are, for how much we can ruin.
Everything in me gives up. “Take me,” I say.
“Take you where?” he says. “This is how we live.”
We’re snotting in each other’s necks, grabbing our faces, smelling each other down to the feet. I run my fingers in the curves of his ear. If we hurry, this touch could last a lifetime.
And this is what we can tell the baby assigned to us, if we survive: We can pass on our ruin through love. This box that you wake up in is evidence of how dangerous you are with need. We will give you what we can. We will offer up the whole world to your hunger.
About the Author
Brenda Peynado’s stories have won an O. Henry Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, a Vermont Studio Center Residency, and other prizes. Her work appears in The Georgia Review, Daily Science Fiction, The Sun, The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. She received her MFA at Florida State University and her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She teaches screenwriting, fiction writing, and worldbuilding at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of The Kite Maker, a Tor.com Original. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Brenda Peynado
Art copyright © 2019 by Keith Negley
The Touches Page 3
