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  “I want you to kiss me,” Mara said. She gave a girlish giggle.

  “I want to kiss you too, babe. I’ll make a point of it tomorrow. Why are you calling so late?”

  “I’m calling because I want you to kiss me,” here she gave another giggle, sounding like a fourteen year-old sharing secrets. “I want you to kiss me right now.”

  I had been staring at those moving lips while she said this. The effect was mesmerizing. Those cheeks, the way they swelled up when she smiled and the way the teeth parted when she giggled. It was unsettling. How did they keep it so wet-looking in there? Was there really some form of moisture? It had felt wet when I had accidentally touched it a few minutes before. Automatically, I rubbed my forefinger against my thumb and wiped my hand on my pants.

  “Come on… Kiss me.”

  “What?” I asked a bit hazily, but already my heart had quickened a bit in alarm. Slowly, it dawned on me. She wanted me to kiss the thing.

  “You mean…?”

  “ Kiss me, William,” the thing said. It made horrid puckering motions that I would have thought cute and enticing, if Mara had been making them.

  “I can’t do that!” I blurted. For the first time I let my real feelings of disgust creep into my voice. The puckering and giggling faded immediately.

  “Don’t you like my gift, Will?” Mara asked.

  “Ah… Of course I like it. No, I love it, babe. How could I-”

  “You hate it.”

  “No, no Mara. I think-”

  “Then kiss me, dammit.”

  So that was it then. I was stuck. It was like knowing that you were going to get your teeth pulled today. There weren’t going to be any more excuses or postponements. The surgeon had started gunning his drill to tooth-burning speeds and set his robot’s-paw lamp to shine directly on your mouth. This was it. I looked at the false female mouth on my bed stand. The sight of it brought weird thoughts to my mind, thoughts of (Phone Sex. Just have your Visa ready, and a voice called Candy will talk you into ecstasy) rubber dolls and kissing robots.

  The thing needed to be locked up. I needed a bigger strongbox. My lips curled and my eyes squinted closed in disgust. I decided to get it over with.

  I knelt in front of the thing and bent to kiss it. It was like sinking into the dentist’s chair and clipping on the bib. I kept telling myself that it was only plastic. The thing puckered horribly, and I kissed it. It was just like giving Mara a quick smack, except that the realism boys in Korea had forgotten one thing. It felt like flesh, it was smooth and soft and pressed in like flesh, but it was cold.

  Mara’s, that is, the thing’s, lips were cold like those of a puckering corpse. I nearly screamed. Jerking back, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand repeatedly and quelled the urge to spit. Stomach acids burned the bottom of my esophagus.

  “Ahh… That was nice, honey,” said Mara, sounding satisfied again.

  “Sheez,” I exclaimed as it hit me. I cuffed myself in the forehead with my open palm. What an idiot. What I should have done was make some kissing sounds up close to the receiver. I hadn’t needed to really kiss the thing. Damn.

  “Isn’t this great? Now we can kiss anytime, we never have to be apart.”

  Dream on, woman.

  “Yeah, right,” I answered. I scratched my head. Funny how your head always itches when you get out of bed. A jingle from a dandruff shampoo ad ran through my mind.

  “Bye, bye babe. Go back to sleep now.”

  “Goodnight babe.”

  The phone clucked, the tongue hitting the roof of the mouth and making an unnatural sound. The connection was broken.

  “Sheesh,” I repeated to myself. I got to my feet and headed for the bathroom. I could still feel the cold press of those dead lips on mine. I washed my face and dried it, rubbing hard with the towel. Then I brushed my teeth and washed my face a second time. I headed back to bed and just as I was switching the light out, I noticed that the thing’s lips were puckered up again. I paused for a moment, frowning fiercely in the dark. Then I switched back on the light.

  The thing’s mouth had relaxed. It was bland and expressionless. I shook my head, switching the light out again and climbing back into the sack. I did not fall asleep for perhaps an hour.

  When I finally did slip off, I dreamt of Mara’s funeral. She lay in a casket in a Southern-style service, where they often kiss the dead. After I had kissed her, the cold touch of her lips lingered forever, a taint that could not be washed away.

  The next morning found me lazing in bed, as I am fond of doing on the weekends, contemplating the day ahead. The prospects were not pleasant. It was Saturday, the day of the reunion. Every time I thought of it, a groan sounded in my mind. A tortured groan. Truly, it was going to be torment to spend a perfectly good Saturday afternoon with Mara’s relatives.

  Shaking hands and mouthing greetings. Smiling, even as the flood of new names is being instantly forgotten by all. Uncle Larry from Utah with the bad foot. Cousin Paul with the headphones and the complex handshakes. Aunt Edna with the innumerable surgical scars, ancient stinking pets, blue-rinsed hair and liver spots.

  They were bizarre, every one of them, and yet they were all so typical. It was going to be a long afternoon of paper plates loaded with potato salad and deviled eggs. I hate deviled eggs.

  It was 8:30 a.m. and as I had not slept well I decided to catch another hour of sleep. I recalled the brush of those cold pseudo-flesh lips and rubbed my mouth disgustedly. I fingered the radio to a station that featured soft music with few commercial interruptions and set the timer for an hour of music followed by an alarm signal. Performing perhaps its first useful service quite well, the box sang quietly, and as long as I averted my eyes from the moving lips on the bed stand, I found the music quite pleasant. I soon drifted off.

  I awoke to the sound of the doorbell buzzer. Immediately, I had an uneasy feeling that I had overslept. The soft music station was still playing. I glanced at the clock. It read 11:02. The door buzzer sounded again as this sank in. I was supposed to have picked up Mara at 10:30.

  “Damn it.”

  I climbed from bed and grabbed up a pair of shorts. When I had one leg in my briefs and was struggling with the other, shaking sleep from my head, an impatient pounding began on the door. It had to be Mara. In another twenty seconds I had the door open.

  “Hi babe,” I greeted Mara with a weak grin.

  Arms crossed and eyes storming, she looked me up and down and without a word walked past me and seated herself on the couch. I could tell she was too pissed to talk. Great. The frigging box she had given me couldn’t even be trusted to keep time and now I was going to have to kiss up for being late. Wonderful. My neck muscles pulled painfully taunt. I tried to relax, but couldn’t.

  “Something must have gone wrong with the alarm. I overslept,” I said. I stepped back into my bedroom and eyed the distasteful machine. The settings were indeed wrong. The alarm mode was off, and the radio was on. No sleep-timer function, it was just on.

  “That’s wrong!” I shouted, my voice loud and indignant. “I didn’t set it that way!”

  “What?” asked Mara, sounding irritated, but curious as always. She appeared at the doorway.

  “This thing has switched modes by itself!” I accused, jabbing a finger at the hideous box.

  “You’ve really been acting oddly today, Will. Here you are, standing in your underwear and claiming that an inanimate object switched its own alarm off.”

  I hate lectures. I could sense one coming. I decided to cut it off right here. “Let me just get dressed and we’ll go.”

  Mara left with an exaggerated sigh. When she was safely out of sight, I let the box have it. I hit the top of it with a downward stroke of my clenched fist. It felt good, the way it had felt to knock the cat a good one behind my mother’s back when she played a little too rough and hooked me with one of her claws.

  “Cheap Korean crap,” I muttered. I dressed quickly, skipping the shower. I shaved a
nd started brushing my teeth.

  “Don’t you think we’re late enough, Will?” called Mara from the other room. My cheek twitched, the way it does sometimes when I am having a bad day. My brush slipped because I was pushing too hard. When I spit, the white foam had turned pink, tinted with blood. As I left I gave the box a last hateful glare. I froze.

  There was a single drop of liquid running down the thing’s cheek. I knew what it was immediately. A teardrop. But where did it come from? Crying? Just why in the hell and how in the hell was it crying? Did the goddamn thing have eyes up there in the housing? I shuddered and turned to find that Mara had already left. I followed her out the door, walking fast.

  Two steps behind, my mind whispered.

  The reunion was worse than my blackest fears. I endured the long afternoon, maintaining a jovial front, while Mara continually humiliated me in front of her family. She pulled every trick in the book, obviously feeling that I owed her tribute for having been late, snubbing me to talk with cousins and aunts, ordering me to get her things from the picnic table and even taking the last folding chair so that I had nowhere to sit but on the grass at her royal feet. She offered to give me her chair, but I refused of course, hating myself for it almost as much as I hated her for offering.

  She even scolded me for having too much beer. I felt like a punished serf. I dropped her off at her parents’ apartment, receiving only a slight peck on the cheek for my troubles. And no invitation to come in and talk.

  “I’m sorry, but I really need to get some housework done, Will,” she explained. Her eyes flashed at me, a sexual promise. She saw the look that twisted my face for a moment then vanished and her own soft face creased with worry. I felt a pang of regret. I didn’t want to cause her any discomfort. A stray blonde hair slipped down over her eyes. She pushed it back. I remembered that she was trying to grow her hair because I liked it long. She was beautiful. She kissed me, a light brush of the lips that made the skin on my cheeks tingle.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You don’t look too happy.”

  “Nothing,” I said, making an effort to smile. My lips twitched upward a bit.

  “You aren’t upset about anything are you?”

  “No, of course not,” I lied. Suddenly, my mind was burning hot with alcohol and rage again. As if she didn’t know. She was playing me for a patsy and I hated it. I had to stand there and act like I was being loved. A small dog doing tricks for table scraps. I left and returned to my apartment in a foul mood. I got a can of Budweiser out of the fridge and popped the top. I gulped half of it while standing with the refrigerator door open and cool air blowing softly over my lower body. The beer felt good going down my throat.

  Somehow, the alcohol strengthened my resolve. Without conscious thought, I turned and strode directly for the bedroom. I sat on my bed. There it was, waiting for me on the bed stand.

  Mara’s face. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I rose and struck the box for the second time today. Sure enough, another tear ran down (her) its face.

  I had had enough. It was on my mind too much lately, it sat on my brain. It mixed with the alcohol in my blood and made fire. The thing disgusted me. A man should not have to live with a thing that disgusted him. He should not have to sleep with it, for God’s sake.

  I took another hit from my beer and rage seared my mind. I reached a trembling finger out and brushed the teardrop from the thing’s cheek with my knuckle. The skin was still as cold as death, but it felt just like Mara’s cheek, Mara’s cheek as it might feel on a February morning just as she arrived at school to meet me for an eight o’clock class.

  For just a second, I looked at the thing and it seemed to me that it was Mara. It was Mara’s face and it was mocking me. I could stand it no longer. I stood, dropping my beer can onto the carpet where it spilled out its foamy contents audibly in a growing dark stain.

  I stepped to the window and twisted the lock too hard, so that the cheap aluminum bent and would never close quite right afterward. I shunted the panel aside with a shove and cool air flushed over my sweating face. Then I turned and advanced on the box. I could see, as I grabbed it up from the bed stand and gave it a savage tug to rip the cord from the wall socket, that more tears had fallen down from the black recesses above its cheeks. The power cord held through the first tug, like a weed might hold to the earth through the first ripping pull a man might give.

  The second tug was a little weaker, as I had the thing with my arm curled around it and had to twist my body at a bad angle, but it caused a momentary power glitch that made the thing’s lips shoot static and buzz together. It sounded as if it were being strangled. I felt a light spray of simulated saliva on my bicep. The third tug brought the cord loose from the wall, bending the tine on the plug and tearing the insulation so that the copper filaments gleamed red-orange. There was a short blue arc as the connection was broken.

  With its last moments of life-giving capacitance, the thing spoke in Mara’s voice, “…Love…you…”

  With eyes popping in rage and murderous determination, I stepped to the window and threw the box out. I watched her drop to the concrete five floors below. She smacked into the sidewalk with the sound that an over-ripe melon or a suicide case jumping head-first might make. Milky, bluish-white fluids flowed out of the cracked black case to soak into the porous surface of the concrete. Her lips of plastic flesh gave one last tremor and froze forever in death. Far above, I ducked my head back into the window and stepped back, breathing hard. A sudden surge of exhilaration shook me. A choked laugh escaped my lips. I stood in my bedroom, grinning and red-faced. I had destroyed the thing.

  Like the snapshots encased in steel and hidden away in my closet, it was now harmless. Muscles that had long been pulled taunt like vibrating wires now loosened. My pulse slid down from a furious pounding to a pleasant steady drumbeat, sounding in my head like a man’s footsteps on gravel. My fingers quietly unclenched themselves, changing from a white-knuckled fist to an open palm, like a morning glory as it is touched by the first light of dawn.

  I felt safe. Very safe.

  The Insect Requirement

  “Paul found one attached to his thigh,” said Dr. Beckwith quietly.

  Captain Rogers’ body stiffened visibly in his pressure suit. “That’s it then.”

  The two men stood in the tool storage pod adjacent to the ship’s engine complex. They both wore full pressure suits of stiff, crinkled fabric. They stood because there was no room to sit.

  “What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?” Dr. Beckwith asked. His breath blowing over the microphone poised in front of his mouth sounded like a strong wind.

  Captain Rogers picked up a hand-held pneumatic drill and checked the digital pressure readings that glowed in red on the side. He held the drill to his chest and gripped the steel casing in powerful hands. His arm muscles bunched and the casing came loose with a jerk. A piece of black plastic from a ruptured gasket spun away and bounced off the ship’s hull. He could have used tools to remove the casing, but Captain Rogers rarely did things the easy way.

  “We’ve lost too many men. We’ll have to leave.”

  “But the contract-” began Dr. Beckwith.

  “They didn’t pay me enough to die here. Nobody could pay that much.”

  “It’s not that bad, really-we aren’t going to lose him,” Dr. Beckwith fought to keep the panic out of his voice. The muscles in his neck were stretched like guitar strings. When he moved his head pinched nerves twinged as if plucked by playful fingers. He rubbed and scratched his left hand through the thick material of his glove. He had to have more time.

  They were in the first Earth ship to have landed on the planet, which they had christened Jade, the name specified in the promotional section of their contract. Although the executive who had come up with the name had never seen the world, Jade deserved her name. The newly-discovered planet was vast, tangled jungle. Huge land-masses of brilliant foliage dwarfed small seas. Seen from space, the s
eas appeared as silver-blue islands in an ocean of greenery. Above all, Jade was a world of wet, green life. An immense, tropical hot-house.

  But in addition to the flora, particularly large and vicious insects had evolved. They buzzed and hummed everywhere. Every yard of ground rustled with them; they wriggled in ponds and darkened the skies with their bodies massed in overwhelming swarms. Some of them were as big as a man’s hand and just as powerful.

  Captain Rogers gunned the pneumatic drill experimentally. The glowing digital readings fluctuated wildly, climbing up the scale, then dropping back. Rogers was a big man with bulky arms and shoulders. His pressure suit exaggerated his size, making him look like a massive white giant with thickly wrinkled skin.

  “How did it happen?” he asked.

  “What?” replied Dr. Beckwith.

  “I mean Paul-how did the bug get into his suit?”

  Dr. Beckwith waved impatiently at the air with his gloved hands. “I don’t know-he must have been carrying eggs or larva since his initial exposure.”

  In contrast to Rogers’ build, Beckwith was a man of medium height with a bulging mid-section that barely fit into his suit. His arm muscles were like loose rubber-bands. He blinked rapidly as he brought his mind back to the present. He had been thinking about what Jade would mean to Earth. A whole planet full of living creatures men could eat without being poisoned. An entire planet to be homesteaded and explored. Back home there would be parties and bands. He could open a school of extraterrestrial biology. The colonists would name one of Jade’s mountain ranges after him.

  “Is he hemorrhaging?”

  Beckwith shook his head vigorously inside his helmet. He regretted it immediately, as fingers plucked painfully at his neck muscles. “We’ve got that stopped. He’s conscious, too.”

  Captain Rogers said nothing. He finished adjusting the drill and tossed it back on the workbench. The heavy metal drill hit the table with a clang that neither of them could hear inside their thickly insulated suits.