The Bread We Eat in Dreams

  fourteen intra-optical displays

  a codedump wafer like a rose petal

  under the tongue,

  silver tubes

  wrapped around your bones.

  It’s just a job.

  Why do boys have to make everything

  sound weird? It’s not a robot

  until you put a girl inside. Sometimes

  I feel like that.

  A junkyard

  the Company forgot to put a girl in.

  I mean yeah.

  My crystal fingers are laser-enabled

  light comes out of me

  like dawn. Bright orangecream

  killpink

  sizzling tangerine deathglitter. But what

  does it mean? Is this really

  a retirement plan?

  All of us Company Girls

  sitting in the Company Home

  in our giant angular titanium suits

  knitting tiny versions of our robot selves

  playing poker with xray eyes

  crushing the tea kettle with hotlilac chromium fists

  every day at 3?

  I get a break

  every spring.

  Big me

  powers down

  transparent highly-conductive golden eyeball

  by transparent highly-conductive golden eyeball.

  Little me steps out

  and the plum blossoms quiver

  like a frothy fuchsia baseline.

  My body is

  full of holes

  where the junkbody metalgirl tinkid used to be

  inside me inside it

  and I try to go out for tea and noodles

  but they only taste like crystallized cobalt-4

  and faithlessness.

  I feel my suit

  all around me. It wants. I want. Cold scrapcode

  drifts like snow behind my eyes.

  I can’t understand

  why no one sees the dinosaur bones

  of my exo-self

  dwarfing the ramen-slingers

  and their steamscalded cheeks.

  Maybe I go dancing

  Maybe I light incense.

  Maybe I fuck, maybe I get fucked.

  Nothing is as big inside me

  as I am

  when I am inside me.

  When I am big

  I can run so fast

  out of my skin

  my feet are mighty,

  flamecushioned and undeniable.

  I salute with my sadgirl/hardgirl/crunchgirl

  purplebolt tungsten hands

  the size of cars

  and Saturn tips a ring.

  It hurts to be big

  but everyone sees me.

  When I am little

  when I am just a pretty thing

  and they think I am bandaged

  to fit the damagedgirl fashionpop manifesto

  instead of to hide my nickelplate entrance nodes

  well

  I can’t get out of that suit either

  but it doesn’t know how to vibrate

  a building under her audioglass palm

  until it shatters.

  I guess what I mean to say is

  I’ll never have kids. Chances for promotion

  are minimal and my pension

  sucks. That’s ok.

  After all, there is so much work

  to do. Enough for forever.

  And I’m so good at it.

  All my sitreps shine

  like so many platinum dolls.

  I’m due for a morphomod soon—

  I’ll be able to double over at the waist

  like I’ve had something cut out of me

  and fold up into a magentanosed Centauri-capable spaceship.

  So I’ve got that going for me.

  At least fatigue isn’t a factor. I have a steady

  decalescent greengolden stream

  of sourshimmer stimulants

  available at the balling of my toes.

  On balance, to pay for the rest

  well

  you’ve never felt anything

  like a pearlypink ball of plasmid clingflame

  releasing from your mouth

  like a burst of song.

  And Y Prefecture

  is just so close by.

  The girls and I talk.

  We say:

  start a dream journal.

  take up ikebana.

  make your own jam.

  We say:

  Next spring

  let’s go to Australia together

  look at the kangaroos.

  We say:

  turn up that sweet vibevox happygirl music

  tap the communal PA

  we’ve got a long walk ahead of us today

  and at the end of it

  a fire like six perfect flowers

  arranged in an iron vase.

  A Voice Like a Hole

  The trouble is, I ran away when I was fifteen. Everyone knows you run away when you’re sixteen. That’s the proper age. At sixteen, a long golden road opens up before you, and at the end of it is this amazing life. A sixteen year old runaway walks with an invisible crown—boys want to rescue her and they don’t even know why. Girls want her to rescue them. She smells like peaches or strawberries or something. She’s got that skittish, panicky beauty that makes circuses spontaneously sprout out of the tomato field outside of town, just to carry her off, just to be the thing she runs away to. Everyone knows: you run away at sixteen, and it all works itself out. But I couldn’t even get that right, which is more or less why I’m sitting here with a Vietnamese coffee telling you all this, and more thanks to you for the caffeine.

  My name is Fig. Not short for anything, just Fig. See, in eighth grade my school did Midsummer Night’s Dream and for some reason Billy Shakes didn’t write that thing for fifty over-stimulated thirteen-year-olds, so once all the parts were cast, the talent-free got to be non-speaking fairies. I’m not actually talent-free. I could do Hermia for you right now. But I was so shy back then. The idea of auditioning, even for Cobweb who barely gets to say: “Hail!” felt like volunteering to be shot. Auditioning meant you might get chosen or you might not, and some kids were always chosen and some weren’t, and I knew which one I was, so why bother?

  I asked the drama teacher: what can I be without trying out?

  She said: you can be a fairy.

  So to pass the time while Oberon and Titania practiced their pentameters, the lot of us extraneous pixies made up fairy names for each other like the ones in the play: Peaseblossom and Mustardseed and Moth. I got Fig. It stuck. By the time I ran away, nobody called me by my real name anymore.

  Talking to a runaway is a little like talking to a murderer. There was a time before you did it and a time after and between them there’s just this space, this monstrous thing, and it’s so heavy. It all could have gone so differently, if only. And there’s always the question, haunting your talk, the rhinoceros in the room. Why did you do it?

  Because having a wicked stepmother isn’t such a great gig, outside of fairy tales. She doesn’t lay elaborate traps involving apples or spindles. She’s just a big fist, and you’re just weak and small. In a story, if you have a stepmother, then you’re special. Hell, you’re the protagonist. A stepmother means you’re strong and beautiful and innocent, and you can survive her—just long enough until shit gets real and candy houses and glass coffins start turning up. There’s no tale where the stepmother just crushes her daughter to death and that’s the end. But I didn’t live in a story and I had to go or it was going to be over for me. I can’t tell you how I knew that. I just did. The instinctive way a kid knows she doesn’t really love you, because she’s not really your mother—that’s the same way the kid knows she’ll never stop until you’re gone.

  So I went. I hopped a ride with a friend across the causeway into the city. The thing I like best about Sacramento is that I don’t live there anymore,
but I’ll tell you, crossing the floodplain in that Datsun with a guy whose name I don’t even remember now—it was beautiful. The slanty sun and the water and the FM stuck on mariachi. Just beautiful, that’s all.

  My national resources sat in a green backpack wedged between my knees: an all-in-one Lord of the Rings, the Complete Keats, a thrashed orange and white Edith Hamilton, a black skirt that hardly warranted the title, little more than a piece of fabric and a safety pin, two shirts, also black, $10.16, and a corn muffin. Yes, this represented the sum total of what I believed necessary for survival on Planet Earth.

  I forgot my toothbrush.

  So here’s Fig’s Comprehensive Guide for Runaways and Other Invisibles: during the day, I slept in libraries. If questioned, I pretended to be a college student run ragged by midterms or finals or whatever. I’ve always looked older, and libraries always have couches or at least an armchair to flop on. I flopped in shifts, so as not to arouse suspicion. Couple of hours asleep, an hour of reading, rinse, repeat. I got through Les Miserables, Madame Bovary, and Simulacra and Simulation before anyone even asked me what school I went to. Don’t just drop out—if you bag one life, you have to replace it with something, and old French men usually have the good stuff: R-rated for nudity and adult concepts.

  It’s best to stay off email and computers. They can find you that way. Just let it go, that whole world of tapping keys and instant updates: poof. Like dandelion seeds. I could say: don’t do drugs, don’t do anything for money you wouldn’t have done before you ran away. But the truth is drugs are expensive, and you kind of have to want to crack your head open with those things, to get in trouble. You have to set out to do it. Save your pennies, like for the ice cream man. And hell, I just didn’t have the discipline.

  At night, I stayed up. All things considered, as a teen wastrel you could do worse than Sacramento, California: warm, lots of grass and trees and open spaces. But not if you run away in February, like I did. Then you’re stuck with cold and rain and nowhere to go. So I went where everyone my age ends up: Denny’s.

  See, Denny’s won’t kick you out, even if you’re obviously an undesirable—making it the beloved haunt of goths, theatre kids, and truckers alike. You’re always welcome under the big yellow sign—so long as you don’t fall asleep. If you nod off, you’re out. So I availed myself of their unlimited $1.10 coffee and stayed awake, listening to conversation rise and fall around me, writing on the backs of napkins and in the blank pages in the backs of Tolkien, Keats, Hamilton. I never got those pages, why they left them blank. I fit in; before I left home I had the means to dye my hair a pretty choice shade of deep red-purple, and nobody looks twice at a girl in black with Crayola hair scribbling in a Denny’s booth. But as time went by, my roots took over. It’s naturally kind of blah dark brown, and it kept on growing all dark and ugly on top of my head, like a stair back home,getting longer and longer, more and more impossible to take.

  Around 6 am, the commuter light rails start running and back then you could get on without a ticket and dodge the hole-punch man from car to car. Or if you don’t give a shit and are a somewhat pretty girl who doesn’t look like trouble, just sleep by the heater and take the fine the man gives you. It’s not like I was ever going to pay it. He could write out all the tissuey violation tickets he wanted. The morning March light came shining through the windows, and the train chugged and rattled along, and even though I was always so hungry it took my breath, I thought that was beautiful, too. Just beautiful. That’s all.

  And so I went, day in and day out. Eventually my $10.16 ran out, and I was faced with the necessity of finding some other way to pick up that $1.10 for the bottomless coffee cup, sitting there like a ceramic grail night after night on my formica diner table—drink of me and never sleep, never die. At sixteen, you can get a work permit. At fifteen, you’re out of luck. I didn’t want to do it—but sometimes a girl doesn’t have any nice choices. Remember—I said I wasn’t talent-free.

  I could always sing.

  Not for a teacher, not in front of parents at talent night, not for Oberon and Titania. For a mirror, maybe. For an empty baseball diamond after school. For a forest. And when I say I could sing, I don’t mean I could sing like a Disney girl, or a church choir. I mean I could sing like I was dying and if you got just close enough you could catch my soul as I fell. It’s not a perfect voice, maybe not even a pretty one. A voice like a hole. People just toppled in. I stood outside the Denny’s and god, the first time it was so hard, it hurt so much, like a ripping and a tearing inside of me, like the hole would take me, too, my face so hot and ashamed, so afraid, still Fig the non-speaking fairy, can’t even say hail!, can’t even talk back, can’t even duck when she sees a blow coming down.

  And I opened my mouth, and I turned my face up to the sunset, and I sang. I don’t even know what I sang about. I just made it up, brain to mouth to song. Seemed better than singing some love song belonging to somebody else. I don’t know anything about music in a technical sense, and I hated the jolt of it, hearing my own voice break the air, to stand up there and sing down the streetlights like I was better than them, like it mattered, like I deserved to be heard at all. So I just kind of went somewhere else when I sang. Somewhere dark and safe and quiet, and when I came back the song was over and my feet were covered in coins. Usually. Sometimes I got a dollar or two.

  That was my life. Sleep, read, sing, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake. Ride the train, all the way around the circuit and back to Starfire Station. I’m not even kidding, that’s what it was called, the station nearest my Denny’s and my library. I’d get on the train with the morning sun all molten and orange on a beaten-up blue sign: Starfire Station. The rails glowed white. I thought: maybe something wonderful will happen here, and I could tell people about it later, but no one would believe me, because who names a train station that?

  I didn’t talk to other runaways much. It was always awkward, dancing around how bad you had it in some kind of gross Olympic event. And even if I made a friend, we’re sort of a transitory race by nature. It got repetitive:

  Fig. That’s a stupid name.

  Thank you.

  Where’d you come from?

  Over the causeway.

  Where’re you going?

  I don’t know.

  I didn’t see the point. I had my routine. But I heard about it. Of course I heard about it. There used to be a place for kids like us. Some kind of magical city half-full of runaways, where anything could happen. Elves lived there. Wizards. Impossible stuff: unicorns and rock singers with hearts of gold. A girl told me about it at this shelter once—and let me tell you shelters are fucking mousetraps. A warm bed and a meal and a cage overhead. All they want is to send you back to your parents on the quick, so they rate your crisis level and if you’re below their threshold they up and call the cops on you. I went to one called Diogenes. I liked the name. I knew it from books—I’d moved on to Greeks by then. Diogenes searched the world for one good soul.