Page 11 of Satisfied By the Slime
The face that isn’t a face tilts. The smooth surface shimmers, and something happens to the area where a mouth might go. The surface thins, becomes translucent, and a sound comes out of it. Low, resonant, slightly liquid, like a voice heard through a wall of water.
“Hello.”
One word, and my knees almostbuckle.
“H-hello,” I repeat, because apparently my crisis response is etiquette. “Hi. You can talk.”
The head tilts the other direction. The colors shift, teal blooming warmer, almost curious. “Yes.”
“You’re… alive?”
A pause. The surface ripples, traveling from its shoulders down its arms to those long and smooth and dexterous-looking fingers.
“I was… dormant,” it says. The voice is clearer already, steadier than just seconds ago. “During transit. Your touch woke me.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again. The crowbar is getting heavy, and some distant, hysterical part of my brain registers that the knot between my shoulder blades, the one I’ve been nursing for a week, released the moment I made contact with its surface.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m going to need you to explain some things. Starting with what you are, then ending with why the listing said ‘deep-tissue relaxation unit’ when you are clearly, obviously a whole entire living being standing in my workspace.”
The colors pulse. That breathing rhythm.
“I am what you ordered,” it says. Gently. Like it’s trying not to spook me.
“I ordered a vibrator!”
The silence that follows this outburst is so complete I can hear the fluorescents buzzing and the distant, homey hum of Mrs. Pritchett’s swamp cooler a quarter mile away, keeping her little house comfortable.
The abstract figure stands perfectly still. The mica powder continues its slow descent around us, rose gold glitter catching the light, and the scene looks like the world’s most unhinged snow globe.
Then the surface of its face does something. The colors warm, deepen, and the area where a mouth would be curves, just a little.
It’s smiling at me.
And the smile is kind. Not mocking orcruel.
“I am adaptive,” it says, and its voice is settling into something that resonates behind my sternum in a way I’m going to have to think about later. “I am what you need.”
“What I need is a refund and a therapist.”
“You needed rest,” it says. “You needed relief. The tension in your upper shoulder alone—”
“How do you know about that?”
“You touched me.” As if this explains everything. As if two seconds of skin contact was enough for a full diagnostic workup.
I stare at it. It stands there, iridescent and enormous, colors pulsing in that slow, steady rhythm, and it waits.
Infinitely patient.
My hand is trembling around the crowbar. My shoulder, the left one, the one that’s been clicking for a week, feels better already.
And the thing I’m thinking, the thing I can’t stop thinking, is that when I touched it, when my fingers pressed against that warm surface, something behind my sternum exhaled for the first time in years.
The studio is silent. The rosemary-oat bars are sitting in their molds on the far counter, forgotten, slowly passing the point where I should have checked their temperature.
The figure takes one step back. Gives me space. The movement is deliberate and careful, and I understand that it’s showing me it won’t come closer until I say so.
“I’m going to put down this crowbar,” I tell it, “but only because my shoulder is about to give out. I want you to know that has nothing to do with trust. I trust you exactly as far as I can throw you, and since you appear to be made of some kind of sentient jello, I honestly doubt that’s very far.”
