As soon as my period stopped coming, I knew it was only a matter of time. Indeed, the letter had arrived almost one month later to the day, in a starched white envelope with a little window showing my misspelled name.
Miss Kemmery Cole
It was Dr. but no one ever got that right and anyway the people sending the letter wouldn’t have cared. All that mattered was Miss, not Mrs.
Not mother.
Dear Miss Cole, said the contents in a stamped Courier New, like a typewriter, You have reached your expiration date. Please report to the 5th precinct Reclamation Office for your reassignment.
Good day.
Don Rodrick
Secretary of the Bureau of Reclamation
I don’t know how I expected to react when I got the letter. Would I scream? Cry? I’d done both plenty in the last four weeks. But now, I was a dry well, a husk scraped clean of its meat. Even the flies didn’t want to flitter around me now.
I was dried up. Old news.
And I was to be reassigned.
I could have run, but that was the problem, wasn’t it? Who would I run to? I had no one. I was sixty-three. My parents were dead. My friends were few and in the same situation or near to it. I had no husband, no children, upon whom to lay my sorrows.
If I’d had, I’d be with them now, instead of packing a small satchel of personal items I wasn’t sure I’d need and preparing myself to leave.
The 5th precinct Reclamation Office was in a seedy part of downtown, but the building itself was a massive edifice, a Taj Mahal of white brick and brass fittings. Someone had taken care in its design. Someone had designed it to endure. To last.
Unlike the people entering it.
Unlike me.
Rubbing my thin, flabby arms from cold or fear or whatever, I entered into an antiseptic waiting room, like a DMV of plastic chairs with a long desk. A short line separated me from the people who would decide my fate. Two armed guards flanked the front door. In case you changed your mind.
Clutching my letter, I waited behind the line of three women. One was actively crying, which seemed a little much, to me. The other two sniffled but weren’t making a scene. That was good. If you’d made it here, there was no point in watering their ground with your tears.
When I got to the counter, a white man with brown hair and beard and dark eyelashes held out a hand. “Do you have your letter?”
I expected to feel something. I was empty, numb. I nodded and handed the letter to him. He read it over, then typed my name into the system.
“Kemmery Cole. House. Floor four. The elevators are over there.”
As I was plodding towards the elevators, more ice than woman, the crier broke into sobs and then took off towards the front doors. She didn’t have a chance. One of the guards yanked out a baton and whacked her SMACK across the temple, knocking her down, while the other pointed his Sig at her.
Blushing with vicarious embarrassment, I hurried into the elevators. I didn’t want to see what would happen to those who changed their minds.
They were waiting for me on the fourth floor, a male doctor in a white lab coat and two attendant male nurses. I was expected.
“Miss Cole,” said the doctor. “Come with us and we’ll get you ready for your procedure.”
The nurses surrounded me, and I followed the doctor down the long hall, to a room with a hospital bed. He told me to lay down, so I did, even though it meant he could loom over me. What else was I supposed to do? I was expired.
“Now, let me explain the House procedure to you,” said the doctor, his lips curling back in a strange, unaffected glee. “It’s really quite beautiful.”
And so he told me. How my body was to be enlarged. How my bones were to become the bones of a new house for a family of four. A mom, a dad, and two children. My ribs would cradle them as the scaffolding for walls. My spine would form the peak of the roof. My arms and legs would be chopped off to build up the foundation. And my skull would form a fireplace at one end of the grand hall, my eye sockets forever gleaming with the fires of their devotion.
It was just then that I began to cry, tears slicking down my sallow cheeks. It would be nice, I thought, to have something warm living inside of me.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll do it. I want to do it.”
The doctor looked at me with condescending pity. It didn’t matter what I wanted. It had never mattered.
One of the nurses brought over a tray with a single plastic syringe full of liquid. The doctor took it up, tapped out the bubbles, and set the needle to my inner arm.
“Now close your eyes, and sleep. This will all be over soon.”
I closed my eyes.
I didn’t dream.
About the author:
C.J. Subko is a dreamer and a dabbler. She has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Michigan State University and a B.A. in Psychology and English from the University of Notre Dame, which makes her highly qualified to think too much. Her short fiction publications include Die Laughing (October 2024), Small Wonders (November 2024), Morgana le Fay (Flame Tree Press; March 2025), and upcoming issues of The Deadlands and Penumbric Speculative Fiction. She is a member of the HWA. Her novels are represented by Maria Brannan at Greyhound Literary Agency. She can be found at http://www.cjsubko.com.
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