Page 16 of Satisfied By the Slime
Instead, every particle of me is leaning into her fingers like a dog pressing its head into a stranger’s hand, desperate and obvious and completely without dignity.
She pulls away.
The jar ofmica powder shatters.
Rose gold fills the air between us, catching the fluorescent light, and through the glitter I watch her face cycle from shock to denial to something that looks like anger but sits closer to grief.
“No,” she says.
I keep waking up anyway.
I can’t help it.
Her touch opened something, and my body is answering the way a body answers, with breath and movement and the slow, luxurious unfolding of limbs that have been packed in custom foam for two hundred miles of highway.
I have been so still. So small. So contained.
And now I am standing in her studio at my full height and her heartbeat is a drum I can feel from four feet away.
She says, “What are you?”
And I say the first word I’ve spoken to another person in over a year.
“Hello.”
Chapter 5
First Contact
Oz
The fluorescent tube above theworktable buzzes its flat, tuneless note.
Same as it has for the full minute I’ve been standing in this woman’s studio with my form half-solidified and mica powder settling on every surface like rose gold snow.
She is four feet away, crowbar raised, knuckles whitearound the grip.
Her pulse hammers through the floorboards and into my base where I meet the concrete.
She’s terrified.
Completely, cellularly terrified.
Yet she’s still here.
Still looking at me.
I have been composing the word I would say next for a long, solitary time.
The risk is that she may scream, or swing, or back away and call someone to drag me out of her life.
The reward is she might hear it, and answer it.
I shape the sound carefully, letting it rise through my substrate and out through the place where a mouth would be if I had committed to one.
“Hello.”
It comes out better than I expected, clear and warm.
