"I'm Not A Bloody Robot, I Have Feelings Too" by Mark Barlex

When she stops, it stops, and when she starts again, it also starts again . It’s loud going up hills but quiet on the flat. It thrums in queues and pitches up a semitone round corners, and, finally, she’s forced to accept that the whirring sound she’s been hearing for months is coming from her.

“You have motorised hips,” the doctor concludes. “It’s fairly common. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed.”

“Will I live?” she asks.

“Oh yes,” he replies. “And some.”

For a start, she has gears. 

And until now, she’s been stuck in first. 

Clicking her fingers takes her to second. In third, she catches the bus she’s been running for. Overtakes it in fourth. Trips a speed camera in fifth, and cruises in the woods by the reservoir where she keeps pace with deer. 

There’s more.

“Don’t do that,” her husband says when she makes her eyes move in different directions.

“Why not?” she asks, watching him on the sofa and the twins in the kitchen. 

“It makes you look weird.”

“You should see how it makes you look. Watch this.”

She blinks, taps her temple,and sneezes. An eyeball pops into the palm of her hand. The twins applaud. 

“For God’s sake,” her husband scolds.

Later, she hides the eyeball in the bathroom, by his shaving foam.

“You didn’t floss,” she says when he comes to bed. “Also, who were you texting?”

“Work,” he says. “Wait. Could you see me in there?”

“Oh yes,” she says. “I’m finding things out all the time. Look!”

“Christ!” he shouts. “Where are your hands?”

“I unscrewed them!” she says. 

She waves her stumps. 

“What? Why?” her husband asks. “Where are they now?” 

He slides into bed. “What the …”

“There’s one,” she says.

His bedside light turns off.

“There’s the other.”

At breakfast, her husband asks, “If bits come off, can you put different ones on instead?”

“Apparently,” she says. “There’s a website. With next-day delivery. I’ve ordered chunkier calves.”

“Why?” 

“They help with running. I might get a spleen. It’s good to have a spare.”

She buys a hand, a right, half as big again as her own and a slightly different colour.

She clicks it into place. She opens pickle jars and loosens wheel-nuts. She crushes full cans of beans and explodes cartons of milk. She grinds a house brick  to powder on the patio because she can.

“Who wants a tickle?” she asks The twins squeal.

In bed, her husband says. “Show me this website of yours.”

They browse.

“They do legs,” he murmurs.

“Hmm,” she says.

“And washboard stomachs.”

“I’d prefer a spleen.”

“I just thought … ” he begins.

She takes out her eyes, leaves one on the landing in case a twin gets up in the night, and the other under the Velux to look at the stars.

“I’ve always wanted a bigger nose,” she says, feeling her way back to bed.

“I like the nose you’ve got,” her husband says.

One of her hands runs its fingers through his hair.

“Oh. OK,” she says. “Thank you.”

The nose he gets her anyway is small. But neat, she thinks. And sensitive.

Ketchup and fries, she guesses when the twins come home from school. Plimsols. Wet dog. Paint.

Jalapeño peppers, she speculates, when her husband comes through the door. Polos. Single malt.

He kisses her cheek.

“What a day,” he says.

Gin spritzer. Someone else’s Eau de Cologne.

“No problem,” she says.  

But the next morning, she unclips an ear and hides it in his Audi.

Poolside at the leisure centre, while the twins perform widths, she hears him indicate, get honked at by oncoming traffic. The engine purrs down. The passenger door opens.

“Hi,” he says, but not to her.

Clothes rustle. There’s a bout of urgent breathing and, as one twin dive-bombs the other, further towards the deep end than they’re supposed to go, then a gurgle he’s never made with her.

Heart-broken, her heart broken, she shops for another, but, uh, what the ... her heart is the one thing she can’t replace.

So, she buys another hand. The left, even bigger than her mighty right. 

And two evenings later, when the twins have gone to bed and he’s at five-a-side, yeah, right … she snaps both hands into place, and goes out to the garage to bend the crossbar of his trail-bike ninety-degrees and crumble a breezeblock. 

Back in the living room, she dims the lights. She lays on the sofa, hands folded like walrus flippers across her chest. 

“What are you doing?” asks a twin from the top of the stairs.

“Nothing,” she says. “Waiting for your dad to come home.”

“Are you going to tickle him?” 

“No,” she says. “I’m going to bloody well tear him a new one.”

Mark Barlex began writing fiction in 2021. His stories have appeared in Bandit Fiction, Flash Fiction North, Your Fire Magazine, Scribble, Coalition Works, Litmora, Roi Fainéant, Fireworks, Spank The Carp and Streetcake Magazine, accepted for Sci-Fi Lampoon, and performed at Liars’ League events in London. He was a semi-finalist in the Wergle Flump Humor Poetry competition, shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and runner-up in the Missouri Review Jeffery E Smith Editors’ Prize.