by M. Lopes da Silva
(600 words)
The little girl stared at the new robot toy her father had just bought for her: it had a black visor instead of eyes and a stiff plastic body with four stubby limbs. She hugged the toy to her chest tightly. The plastic poked the meat in between her ribs and pinched her skin. That didn’t matter; she shut her eyes and hugged the robot even tighter.
“What do you say?” her father said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Good. Now you’ll be nice and quiet while I talk to these nice gentlemen for a while, won’t you?”
Everything was nice. It was a nice day at the tech convention. The child wore nice clothes, and had a lot of nice expensive robots to play with at home, just like the one she held now. She looked down at the clean plastic visor in her hands, and blue LEDs lit up to look back at her. It really was a nice toy, but the limbs were too short for what she needed. They couldn’t hug properly, just dig in. That was the problem with all of the toys – none of them hugged. And of course that was the thing she wanted most. When she told her father about her problem, he bought her another robot, one that warmed up and had a fake heartbeat and long limbs and a layer of blue silicone wrapped around it like a skin, but that robot couldn’t hug correctly, either. It was too warm. Too soft and skin-like. When she told her mother about her problem, her mother bought her an expensive plushie, but Piggums didn’t start to feel right until the child had pulled out all of the purple pig’s polyester stuffing and replaced it with wires and plastic pipes and different things she found around the house. Even then, Piggums didn’t hug properly. They were still too soft. Not cold enough.
Her parents took her to a place with a hug machine, once, and when that wasn’t quite right either they stopped listening to her talk about the problem. She couldn’t explain to them why the mechanized pressure around her body hadn’t worked for her the way that they hoped it would. It was nice but it wasn’t enough. She worried that something was wrong with her; why couldn’t she be happy with robots and Piggums and hug machines? Why couldn’t she just be nice and quiet like her parents wanted her to be?
The conversation with the nice gentlemen was going on and on. Her attention wandered, and took her with it; slowly she headed towards the stage where they were setting up freshly-painted metal bars and rolling a tire bigger than she was out to rest between them. The stage security guard watched a man move the big tire. She avoided the crowd. Went underneath the vinyl belts that ringed the stage without bumping her head on anything. Ducked behind the screen onstage. Crouched down and held her breath as a presenter made his way onstage and started talking to the crowd while mechanisms clicked and groaned and squealed and a corporate jingle played over the speakers. The presenter cracked jokes as he put on his safety goggles and a helmet and stepped behind a clear plastic barrier.
Nobody noticed the plastic robot toy, forgotten and kicked by feet in the crowd. And nobody noticed the expression of delight on the child’s face, let alone her soft body wedged in between the bars of the tire cage and the back of the rapidly inflating truck tire, her arms outstretched on rubber as she waited for her hug.
END
M. Lopes da Silva (she/they) is a non-binary and bisexual author, artist, and poet from Los Angeles. They write queer California horror and everything else. Their horror fiction has been published or is forthcoming from In Somnio: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror Fiction, Antifa Splatterpunk, and Nightscript Vol. IV and V.