Status Updates From The Heart Goes Last

“But you’re young, you have a whole life ahead of you. You should live it to the fullest.” Here comes his hand, planing slowly across the white tablecloth like a manta ray in one of those deep-sea documentaries. It’s descending onto her own hand, which she shouldn’t have left so carelessly lying around on the table.

She smiles her tight, wrinkle-free smile.
What if it’s not her real face? thinks Charmaine. What if it’s only stuck on and there’s a giant cockroach or something behind it? What if I grabbed her by both of the ears and pulled, would the face pop off?
“Oh, thank you so much,” she says.

“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” Arf arf, real dog barks. Charmaine thinks that song is cute. Cute is a primary category for her, like right and wrong. Crocuses: cute; thunderstorms: not cute. Eggcups in the shape of chickens: cute; Stan angry: not cute. He is not cute a lot these days.

Her face barely moves: she’s had work done and they went too far[...]

Aurora can’t smile like a normal person, but it wasn’t just the weird smile, it was the tone. Overly mollifying. How you’d talk to a child about to have a painful vaccination or a cow on the way to the abattoir. They had special ramps for those cows, to lull them into walking placidly to their doom.

Incidents of violence are way down, they’re told today – a graph pops onto the screen – and egg production is up. A new process will soon be introduced at Poultry: headless chickens nourished through tubes, which has been shown to decrease anxiety and increase meat growth efficiencies; in addition to which it eliminates cruelty to animals, which is the sort of multiple win that Positron has come to stand for!