dual-cannibalism
I was never one to make demands on reality.
They were eating themselves, but I wasn’t one to judge. I lived inside a petri dish with another who was slowly gnawing me down to the machined aluminum foundation. My pretty plastic had bites in it. I wondered if I had been encoded with some sort of synthesized collagen that could restore my shell. While I waited for the answer, I hid from my neighbors. My insides being revealed to the cannibalistic world was one of my nightmares.
A lancetfish passed by the second-story window and sneered. Its judgement of me was more concerning than its existence out of water or why it could fly. I was never one to make demands on reality. I had put a sweatshirt over my articulated limbs, so when I saw its beady eye at the edge of the curtain, I abashedly pulled my sleeves over my fingers. I closed my eyes. Would my roommate see it too? Would it point out my imperfections and laugh? The others had the same problem in a different form. A computer held a phone in its hand and scrolled.
The person taking bites out of me was taking bites out of others taking bites out of themselves. Coded water vapor was jammed into a freezer with particles and shaken until a cloud formed. It was hungry — feeding on photos, munching on motion pictures | stills unceasingly until it fevered into collective bloodlust.
Sweat crystallized on my keypads. My violent other snapped a photo of me and sent it straight to the cloud. At first, I worried. Then, my roommate showed me the positive comments, and I felt good about myself for the first time. Only the next sun, I posed for the photo, hoping for even stronger praise, but was met with reproach. There started my need for validation. If no one would give it to me, I wouldn’t have a clue how to get it for myself.
The lancetfish appeared again, but this time, it yelled at me, “Who are you always in there talking to?” Its voice sounded like a barbed wire fence.
I have a roommate. Don’t you see my roommate just there? I pointed at the person with the haunted, beautiful face across from me.
The fish laughed, revealing a set of jagged, ill-set fangs. “You’re in a room of mirrors, kid. The person you’re pointing at is you.”
Written by not A Computer
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