Saccharine (a short story)

This is the society that we have always planned to evolve into, a society where the feminists won and genders are regarded equally. “Honey!” her voice carries through the house from our picture perfect front door, “I’m home!” I fight off every urge to run to the door to greet my wife, with the dog-like love that I have for her. It’s always been this way; ever since I met her, I couldn’t imagine what life was before her. She always compared my love for her to that of a dog’s, utter unwarranted loyalty and an unconditional attraction that hasn’t faltered after a decade together and three pups that run wild around our home.

            Our kids meet her at the door long before I can pull myself from the roast that I’m preparing for dinner. With the kids at her feet and the groceries overflowing in paper bags that her slender arms have gathered, I look at her in awe. My oven mitts are covering my well-worn hands, splintered with the love of service and scrubbed clean with the organic soap from the company my wife manages. I watch on as her cheeks turn rosy, struggling to step into the foyer of our home as she’s ushering our 5 year old away from her path to the kitchen.

When she catches my eye, it feels as if she hasn’t aged a day since we met, she is still the 25 year old graduating economics student that I met… where did I meet her? My brain feels as if it’s getting zapped, a malfunction that causes a sour expression on my face. An oven mitt falls off of my hand and onto the floor, which is swiftly picked up by hands that embrace the sides of my face. My eyes feel welded shut, a sudden splitting headache forming in an unknown lobe of my brain. It’s a headache that I’ve felt many times before, more so in the past year. I wonder if it’s cancer. The thought dissipates along with the headache as my eyes open to find my beautiful wife’s face in front of mine. “You’re okay,” she whispers sweetly, but there’s some kind of panic in her eyes that betray her words, something that I cannot place.

In what feels like a few seconds, she sees fit to pull away, deciding that my pain has settled. Unsure how I should be feeling, I watch as my wife gathers the groceries she dropped when coming to my aid. She gently swats our children away from the treats wrapped in parchment paper that rolled a few feet away from the dishevelled paper bags. The roar of the flame in the oven pulls me back to my task; the roast in the kitchen sitting raw and untouched by the fresh herbs I spent my morning pulling from our miniature greenhouse. I wonder if my wife’s company also oversees the production of these greenhouses. The oven mitts lay loyally on the counter next to the oven as I stand over the cutting board that holds the herbs. I stare blankly at them as the sound of my wife putting the groceries away and her breathtaking voice yammering vaguely about her day at work dances in the back of my mind.

I can feel her eyes on me, the ocean blue that surround her pupils feel almost like ice on my skin. I don’t notice her words faltering, the brief moment that she stands across the counter from me as she watches my disassociation. Her voice is replaced by our kids prancing around the playroom, their attention quickly pulled away from their mother’s arrival and back to the make believe games they were playing before the keys turned in the lock.

She takes advantage of their distraction to whisper shout at me, but her words aren’t discernible. My gaze jolts up to her, this time her lips formed into a sweet smile, unlike the sharpness of her words. I find myself confused, unable to respond to my wife or take any action. “Maybe you should get some rest, love,” she says in an undeniably saccharine tone. I try to say something, to argue or attempt to reassure her that everything is okay, but nothing seems to come out, at least not before she swiftly ushers me up to my pod room.

As she shuts the door behind us, I automatically step into my sleeping chamber. I stand in the machine and turn, the transparent door open wide to see my wife’s back without the glare of the glass. The fabric of her work dress seems soft and a part of me wants to reach out and touch it. But I keep my arms steady at my sides, watching patiently as she pulls our house phone off of the wall by the door, flipping through the notebook attached to it by a metal string. She pauses to glance back at me, noticing that I haven’t closed the door behind me. “My beloved,” the words that finally pass through my lips sound like static, almost robotic, “Why don’t I sleep in the bed next to you?” Her heels click against the cold metal flooring of my pod room as she makes her way over to fully enclose me. The door closes with a loud click and is followed by the hiss of nauseating air filling up the machine.

            “I hate this smell,” I try to say, my voice muffled by the airtight machine and silenced by the coughing that follows. I watch her placing her finger on a set of numbers that sit engraved on the front of my pod. My wife leaves the notebook abandoned, hanging there choked by the metal string as I choke on the air. She types The Company’s number into the phone and waits with the speaker to her ear. She watches me as she does this, her eyes not meeting mine, but I can still see the cold worry painted across her expression. Then her lips move. She speaks words that I cannot hear through the machine, but I continue watching as I blink into a sleep deeper than I have ever experienced.

—

            My gaze is locked on her. My wife is sitting in our dining room working on her laptop, her mother watching over our kids as they fuss over the eggs that she set in front of them. “They prefer cereal,” I think to myself, “the sugary kind that my wife used to love eating with them.” Normally, I would be the one feeding them breakfast, their fussing wouldn’t have lasted this long if they were waking up with their father. I pull my mind back to the scene I am witnessing, forcing such wicked thoughts away. Their grandmother was only trying to keep them healthy. I forced myself to be grateful that our kids had somebody looking after them when I couldn’t. “Jealousy is a nasty thing,” I remember my wife saying. She always knew what to say. I sigh and bring my vision back to the bleakness of my pod. “Just a little while longer,” I tell myself the same phrase I’ve been telling myself for the past few days. I let my legs bend and lower my aching body onto the ground. The pod was certainly not big enough to allow me to do this comfortably, but I don’t care. My legs ached from standing for so long. I figured I would need some oil to prevent them from creaking soon. The synthetic skin had already started flaking away from a lack of care. In the few days since my wife locked me in here, I haven’t had any contact with my family aside from through the security cameras that are linked to me neurally. It is the only thing that hasn’t been taken away from me.

            Maybe I have always been fated to end up this way. But what have I done? I have only shown love.

            It felt like hours before I heard the door to my pod room opening. My wife steps in cautiously, as if she was entering a room with a lion on the loose. Her blue eyes were round like the LED lights that shine down on me in this pod. Although, this time the whites of her eyes are a little bit red, telling me that she had been crying. She doesn’t sniffle the way that she did when I watched her cry in the past. My wife has always been the strongest person I know.

            I could see the softness in her hands as she presses them to the glass of the pod. “I don’t want to let you go,” her voice is laced with sorrow, crackling as her throat threatens to break away into tears. She looks at me through blurry eyes and I can see the fear in them as she takes in my decaying state. My wife’s fingers drag across the transparent film of the pod, as if to touch the metal beneath the skin that I’m losing. Why would she let me go?

            “You’re broken,” she lets out a sob, a singular sob, just one. Releasing from the pod, her hand covers her mouth. I can feel my head tilt unwillingly, as if my thoughts and emotions were unmasked. I figured she could hear my thoughts. Isn’t that what happens when you’re in love? Even through the glass of my cage, I feel connected to her; I feel the warmth of her body, the opening and yawning of the birth of our three children, the burning of pain that shoots through her heart. All the things I will never experience, all the human things that The Company failed to incorporate into my code. Everything is synthetic after all; I’ve always known this even though I have chosen to ignore it. Everything has an expiration date.

            Knees still drawn to my chest, my hand presses against the glass with a clink, right where her hand was. I can still feel her warmth in that spot, even against the metal exposed on my hand. I want to hate her. I want to yell at her and break the walls like men of her kind do. I want my anger to be heard and seen. I love my wife with every wire and circuit in my body, every line of code and every shred of electricity. I sit in horror as something unknown takes over my body, something unknown that wants to see my wife in fear. The voices of men like these carry up the stairs and through the crack in the door of my pod room. My wife’s head shoots backwards as she hears their footsteps.

“N-no…” she croaks these words out as if she’s trying to find her voice over the booming of their boots against the hardwood floor. There’s the fear. Or… was it desperation? “Ma’am,” one of the five men made himself known as they piled into my pod room. It was less of a greeting than it was a formal acknowledgement. They didn’t have to say who they were and why they were here. The Company’s symbol, an eye enveloped by a hermaphroditic shape, was strongly contrasting against their black suits.

My wife looks smaller than I have ever seen her, sitting on the floor behind The Company’s men. She shouts desperate pleads to them, her words lost in the breaking of my pod door. Of our home. The building feels as if it’s crumbling around us. I wonder where my children are. I wonder if they are safe, I wonder if this pathetic woman that is being restrained by one of The Company’s men is a fake version of my wife. I wonder if my real wife is safe with my real children in our real house. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder. My mouth fills with a taste of saccharine, the sweetness of my wife’s smile.

I wonder if they made my blood from sugar.