Thread Twice Cut

149 Days

149 DaysRalph nudged me with one metal foot to wake me up. I saw it was daylight out again. I sat up and wasn’t as dizzy as I had been the night before, but continued shivering despite the warmth. “I think I still have a bad fever,” I said.

“If you help me, I can cure you,” Ralph said.

“Okay,” I said, and used his metal body to pull myself up. I noticed my legs wobbled of their own accord. My old man legs, I thought, how old was I any­way? Forty, forty-two? More like forty-seven! Jesus, my birthday had passed without notice.

“I opened the port on my ship,” Ralph said, “but I cannot reach my core because it is hidden underneath me.”

An opening appeared in the side of the giant toaster. Inside the opening a pale pink light illuminated an internal white shelf. The shelf’s shape reminded me of an old-time milk shake machine from when I was a kid. My mom used to mix up healthy milk shakes using fresh fruit for flavoring. My wife only ever made smoothies in a blender using frozen fruit.

Ralph tapped the edge of itself with a camera eye a quarter turn away from me. “Just under here,” he said.

I squatted and crawled underneath. I felt too f*****g good there on my back. I eased my head down on the cool concrete and sighed.

His underpart was stained and splattered with mud and oil and something with fur that smelled dead. I found a small metal plate with a wing bolt holding it closed. My chest hurt worse and a throbbing ache ran down my left leg. I could only work the wing bolt loose with my good hand. The wing bolt felt like it was cov­ered in sticky honey, but that was probably only melted paint or plastic. For some reason, that simple task wore me out. I laid my head back down and rested. When I woke up again, the light outside was the bright of midday. I laid on my back under the wing bolt hole. I felt the wing bolt resting on my chest. I reached up with my good hand and rotated a round piece of metal to one side. The metal piece was stiff, but I managed to swing it just enough out of the way.

Everything had a fuzzy cast to it. I blinked my eyes, but that didn’t help. A beautifully complex small cylinder about the size of a tall soup can lowered out of the hole. It glowed with a soft white internal light and felt comfortably warm to my hand. It was so internally complex it was hard to look at, despite being fuzzy. “I got it,” I said, but Ralph didn’t answer. I realized I must have removed his power, or maybe his brain, and now held it in my hand. It was much heavier than I expected, and it smelled like, of all things, a barbecue sauce.

I crawled out from under the robot and used one of its legs to pull myself back up to standing. The hole in the toaster was right there, inches from my face. I slid the soup can into the hole and it vanished, quickly sucked down. The inner black door whooshed closed. Then the outer door snapped silently shut.

I felt a red hot pain in my chest and arms. I couldn’t breathe. My mouth felt shrunken down into a straw-sized hole. I fell over backward, and wheezed as my head hit the concrete. The world moved in agoniz­ing slow motion, but I couldn’t move, not a muscle. My heart, I thought. “Help,” I said, but my mouth only whistled. I knew in that moment I was dying. f**k it, I thought. But really, no regrets, none. Well maybe just one.

Goodbye my dear, sweet wife. Goodbye, my dar­ling children. Goodbye, Ralph the tin man.

Fire in my chest and arms. Suffocation. Dark­ness.