KATHERINE MARTIN / TELL ME I'M ALIVE
I was scrubbing the toilet when the phone rang. The bathroom light buzzed (too bright, state-issued, like everything here) and for a moment, my reflection in the water wavered, thin and translucent as a mirage.
A stranger’s voice filled the line.
“Five minutes,” he purred. “Tell me what you’re wearing.”
“Rubber gloves,” I said, still scouring porcelain.
“Perfect,” he said. “Now slide a bottle between your thighs, so far up—”
Telephone sex.
Terrific.
I hung up. The filth of his voice lingered, slick as bleach vapor in my lungs.
The next call was from my husband, orbiting in the company’s new office satellite on the other side of the world. The video didn’t load. A recent solar flare. Only his voice, tinny and urgent, came through the screen.
“The realtor will ring at noon,” he said. “You mailed the Population Bureau packet, right?”
“Yesterday,” I lied.
The truth: the form still sat in the printer tray, ink dried for over a week.
Six years ago, he’d proposed in a Kyoto conservatory, koi flitting beneath our reflections on a bridge. “You’re my anchor,” he’d said.
Now I was cargo. Signing those forms would sanction my export. Wife-as-freight, shipped to a lunar desert base where the brochure’s “family housing” was artificial air and prefab silence.
After we hung up, I folded the letter, stamped it, and walked it to the curbside postbox. Then I tore it to confetti and shoved the pieces in my mouth. Black ink bloomed on my tongue, bitter as glue.
That was when I felt him behind me.
He was only two feet away, as if he’d ripened out of the winter air: tall, wind-tousled, long black coat. One hand was buried in his pocket, the other rested on a fence, missing its ring finger at the first knuckle. He waved and the stump glistened: pearlescent, as if dipped in liquid glass.
“Cold day,” he said.
I swallowed the last of the paper. “Freezing.”
He offered a cigarette, lighting mine then his. I took it even though I didn’t smoke. I held the fumes in my mouth, faking it, then exhaled, praying he wouldn’t notice.
“You live nearby?” he asked.
I nodded. My make-believe smoke drifted between us like a half-formed ghost.
“Got any money?”
It felt less like extortion than a dare.
Before I could speak, he had already turned and started walking, like he was expecting I’d follow.
We went to a bar at the back of an alley: half fish shack, half dive. A neon marlin in the window blinked epileptic blue. The grease in the air left a tangible film on every counter and chair. He slid onto a stool.
“Two beers and the special,” he told the bartender. “She’s paying.”
I surrendered a twenty and watched the register swallow it whole. The beers were for him. Next, a platter of fish. Three lifeless eyes pointed in my direction from the plate. He dismantled them quickly, tongue darting on bone.
“She asked for the ring,” he said, catching me staring at his hand. “I refused so she took the finger.”
“You were married?”
“Briefly,” he smiled as if the story amused him. “But you can’t graft back what’s severed.”
He clinked his glass against mine. For a hallucinatory moment, the missing digit flickered into view, translucent, glowing, before dissolving.
Outside, the alley reeked of brine-rot and melon. He looped his arm through mine. I didn’t fight it. The nub of his missing finger pressed against my ribs like a phantom kiss.
“It’s hard to tell you’re starving when you’ve been hungry for so long,” he murmured.
And so we went to my place.
My apartment keeps a bright yellow HappyBox in the entry. State-mandated light therapy for civilians “in transition.” I shoved my head inside. A white blaze seared my retinas. Government-sanctioned euphoria, straight to the optic nerve. Emerging, I felt hollow and buoyant, my head waiting to burst.
“Your turn,” I told him.
He basked in the synthetic sun until sweat glazed his brow. When he stepped out, his skin shone like oil on rain puddles, slippery rainbows swirling beneath the surface.
When we reached my unit, he moved through the rooms, casing each with his hands in his pockets.
The phone rang.
“If you’re calling about bottles again,” I snapped, “find another number.”
Silence, then my husband’s baffled voice.
“A prank call from earlier,” I said. “Ignore me. I’m fresh out of the HappyBox.”
Satisfied, he launched into logistics: visas, vaccination records, the specialized shipping container for my cello.
Remember the conservatory? Those koi in the water? I almost said, but bit my tongue. I was no anchor. I never was. His voice trembled in the way it did when he didn’t want to be alone. As always, he stretched the silence at the end of the call, like he was afraid I’d disappear the moment he hung up.
“I’m exhausted,” I said, cutting him off. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
When I set the receiver down, my guest was leafing through a magazine, shoes off, feet on the coffee table. He looked like a kid, the rebellious kind determined to escape the future.
“You’re married.”
“And moving,” I sat next to him. “If you’re struggling for cash, take the stereo and leave. One less thing for me to pack.”
“Money isn’t what I’m after.”
His stump brushed the pulse point behind my knee. I felt the missing digit more vividly than the four intact.
“No,” I said, not out of prudence but principle. A void shouldn’t take another void hostage.
He weighed the refusal, then leaned back on the sofa, palm splayed over my thigh like a collector admiring his prize. When he finally moved his hand, his touch left a mark on my jeans. Cold, damp, and sticky, almost glowing in the overhead light.
I woke alone. The pillow beside me contained the shape of his skull and a lone black hair. My skin tingled. In the bathroom mirror, I looked bleached from the inside: milk glass dermis shot with mother-of-pearl. Light from the window pooled beneath the surface, restless and tidal.
I touched my cheek, and my finger refracted like a stick in water. A primal thrill shivered my organs, organs I could almost see. Gray lung, pink brain, all the secret meat.
The pantry stood empty. Even the emergency cans had vanished, as if hunger itself had been repossessed. The stereo remained in the corner.
Out the window, pedestrians blurred into gelatinous shapes under ordinary daylight. Somewhere among them, I knew the ringless man stalked.
A girl pedaled by, a pinwheel spinning on her handlebars, her expression unstoppable. I moved, and the world tipped, my blood a strange current surging inside my new translucent shell.
To stay is to solidify.
To move is to liquefy.
It filled me with a ferocious hunger.
I inhaled, feeling the soft membrane of skin flex, thinning to silk. Outside, traffic lights dripped watercolor pooled on asphalt, everything bright enough to eat.
The sun hit my window. I turned, radiant as a jellyfish. In the glass, my reflection: a shimmer of skin and light, no edges left to hold me.
Katherine Martin is a data scientist and writer. She holds degrees in creative writing and chemistry, and spends her time building predictive models and watering her one particularly large houseplant. This is her first publication.