Page 12 of Satisfied By the Slime
The colors ripple. That warm, almost-amused shimmer again.
“Understood,” it says.
I lower the crowbar. My shoulder sighs in gratitude. The figure stays where it is, tall and still, watching me with a face that has no eyes and somehow seeseverything.
I flex my hand, the one that touched it. The warmth is still there. A residual heat in my palm, like holding a mug of tea and setting it down and still feeling it moments later.
My whole body leans toward that warmth the way a plant leans toward a window, and I can feel it happening, and I can’t make it stop, because some part of me, some exhausted and starving part sustained only by dregs of adrenaline and stubborn pride, doesn’t want to.
“Okay,” I say. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to check on my rosemary-oat bars before they’re ruined, because that’s three hours of work I can’t afford to lose. And then I’m going to make a cup of coffee. And then you and I are going to have a conversation about what you are and why I thought I ordered a small personal device and received a sentient being, and you’re going to answer every question I ask. Clear?”
“Clear,” it says. And then, in that low, liquid voice, with the colors shifting to something warm and deep: “Take your time.”
Three words. Three simple, ordinary words that no one has said to me in years. Not my ex Kyle, who measured my hours like a foreman. Not clients, who need their orders yesterday. Not my own internal voice, which runs a constant ticker tape of faster, more, not enough.
Take your time.
My eyes sting. I blink it back, hard, and turn toward the rosemary-oat bars before my face does anything embarrassing.
Behind me, the thing I bought at 1 a.m. with wine on my tongue and concrete under my spine waits in my studio like it has all the time in the world.
And instead of doing the sane thing and returning it, all I can think about is what it’d feel like to have it touch every part of me.
Chapter 4
Shapeless Life
Oz
Eighty years is a longtime to be alive and a very short time to be a person.
I came to consciousness in a limestone cave in southern Arizona, already fully formed in the way that slimes are. Which is to say: not formed at all.
No birth. No mother’s hands shapingme toward the world.
Just awareness arriving like water filling a basin, and then the slow, decades-long project of figuring out what to do with it.
The researchers found me in 1974.
They were mapping cave systems for the Forest Service, and I startled one of them so badly he dropped his flashlight into a pool of water.
They cataloged me as Amorphozoa. They planned to return with a larger team.
I left before they could.
Something about the way they’d handled me with tongs, spoken about me in the third person while I listened—it made clear that being studied and being known were very different things.
They never discovered I was sentient.
I was already five miles into the desert by the time their follow-up expedition found an empty cave.
For the next thirty years, I studied the species that had tried to study me.
I drifted through the margins of human life. Lingering near ranch houses with theirwindows open. Pressing myself thin beneath parked cars at rest stops. Pooling in the crawlspaces of roadside motels where the walls were thin enough to hear everything.
I learned English the way water learns a riverbed: slowly, by following whatever channel was available.
AM radio through open car windows. Late-night television through the walls. The conversations of truckers and hikers and families in parking lots.
