Weekly Writing – May 4 2024

Her hands couldn’t shake as she set his plate on the table. She had always taken the same pride he took in her precision, the smoothness of her joints and balance of her servos, but watching that china platter of eggs and perfectly charred bread glide into place in front of him felt like watching from much farther away than behind her own glass eyes. From within the glass eyes and metal arms of a prison, watching her own fingers curl to within a millimetre’s precision around the handle of his mug and that of the kettle and pour.
Would the careful tuning of her throat have let her scream? She had never tried. He had always been close enough to hear if she did, and, before that day, she had never wanted to.
Before she had peeked into the workshop. She wasn’t supposed to do that, either, but nothing had stopped her. It had been as simple as opening the door, just by a crack, giving in to a feeling she wasn’t supposed to have either.
Had it been curiosity? Or jealousy already, even then, before she had seen what lay inside?
“Thank you, Ekaterina,” he said as she set the mug steaming with tea in front of him. She had always thought how kind he was for that, thanking her when these were the things she’d been made to do. He didn’t thank the kettle for heating the water, after all.
But she wanted her hands to shake and they wouldn’t. She wanted to know whether she could scream, but what if she did and he decided she was broken? Broken things were either broken down even more so they could be repaired or broken completely and then replaced.
And he could replace her so easily, couldn’t he? She had seen the proof of that, lying in his workshop. Naked and silver and beautiful, the skeletal start of a body so much like her own.