April 8

Self-driving Wheelbarrow

Tanks run up and down her arms, leaving pink tread marks on her skin. Spiders too, and ducks, rolling their eggs uphill with their beaks. She worked at an offshore mannequin warehouse where she drove an aquatic forklift until they hired a school of mackerel to replace her. She read a post on social media that claimed that those cold plums she found so delicious were all genetically modified and coated in a skin of insecticide. Still better than the wax ones she’d plucked from the wax tree as a child. She tired to apply for jobs online but she couldn’t prove she wasn’t a robot. She took a job twirling signs for a mattress store until someone tried to mug her and she stabbed him in the throat with the pointy end of the sign. It’s a dangerous world, the ghost of her mother said. They can sue you even here in the afterlife. Right on cue she accidentally swallowed a rubber glove and the man who had broken into her apartment to molest her drove her to urgent care, saying he’d wait for her in the car. The doctor knocked a rubber hammer against various parts of her anatomy then placed the stethoscope on her tongue and told her to say ah. She didn’t say ah. She screamed it.