Free Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby

years, braying at the entrance to her unwitting, shadowy womb. Something inside me broke like a glass vial. I got it all over myself.
    I sat there in the same fashion as, probably, my wife had when she was taking in this particular sound. And what about her life? What was she doing in this scene — how could she have stood for it, any of it? Is this what they did back then, night after night, squirming nakedly in each other’s spaced-up Western Coastal apartments?
    Predictably enough, my wife showed up then, having forgotten the kid’s day-care bag. We regarded each other for some time, the silence of the room interrupted only by the inane, periodic bursts of the child’s father. She made a series of high-pitched, desultory sounds, on the pretext of making language. I had nothing to apologize for, never having promised her anything by way of personal consideration. She took a step forward. I put the machine on the bed and grabbed my jacket. She assumed, I think, that we would have something to say, but I pushed past her in the narrow hall and took the stairs all the way down.
    Outside, it was bright, unforgivably so. I could hardly see to my car. And what then? Should I say that I got in and drove off, smoking one cigarette after another, lining them up end on end until I was all of the way out of that life? Because what happened was that I stayed there, with those people, for another three and a half dreadful, thoroughly forgettable years in the way that we best know how to make ourselves feel welcome wherever we’d least like to be.

Fragment
    D
id you pack your ointment, dear?” I called across the hood of the car.
    The Child Harvesting counselor had just called to confirm our slot at 15:30. It was conception day.
    Chu Su gave me a look, so I went and got the ointment myself. The drive took half a day. “The second half will be better,” I told her. She just looked straight ahead at the road, her face blank as chalk.
    The building that housed the Ministry of Child Harvesting had just recently been converted from the Ministry of Adhesives and Wood. The whole place smelled like pine sap. Good, though. A fresh scent.
    The counselors guided us down a long hallway to a white room with glittering, quilted walls. At the center of the room was a small vehicle for two. The seats faced each other, one with a recessed area for the man and the other with a single curved prong for the woman. Rising from the center of the vehicle was a steel post from which branched two sets of handlebars, and where the handlebars joined the post there were two monitors.
    This was a conception simulator, the counselors told us. They told us to disrobe and promptly left the room.
    “I didn’t think it would be quite so — I just feel a bit empty,” Chu Su said. We knew little about the procedures involved beforehand, only that a child would be legally assigned to us at the end of the third trimester.
    “Let’s just get it done quickly. If the brochure is correct, the rest is much easier and more pleasant.”
    We got naked. She was gorgeous when dressed, but without clothes she was like a packet of sugar with toothpicks for limbs. Thin, but in the wrong way. I wondered how the trimestral simulation vests would even fit on her. Probably they’d have to sew a custom model.
    “Stop looking at me like that,” she said. “Your body is nothing exceptional, either, Mr. Fake Foot.”
    Yes, the fake foot. The real one I’d lost in War 5. I’d gotten it caught between two rocks during a decisive retreat. “Either we cut off the foot or you die,” the captain said, and before I could respond they’d severed the foot at the ankle with a pair of bone-cutting shears. I went back to the spot some months later, after we’d retaken the stretch of land, but the foot was gone.
    We got into the vehicle. When our genitals had warmed the receptacles sufficiently, the monitors clicked on and the vehicle started to drift across the floor on a cushion of