MICROBABE

“Look,” Dad says, “she’s smiling at you!” 

2.

It’s always a Saturday afternoon. I’m brinking six. Sprouting teeth. Tonguing at shallow gum wells. 

I stare at our box computer. Cathode grey. RAM heat collects in the corners of the room. Spring bloom struggles at the skin of my window.

PIXEL-YOU-ME-DOT-COM has an exit button shaped like a flesh wound. One click, a stutter on a mouse wedge, and the era Pixel Me could turn to effluent in a binary sea. 

She’s modest. Unblinking. I carve her mouth out to be pink. Bitten. Heart-shaped. My own lips, at the mercy of an afternoon of Zooper Doopers, are sliced at each corner.

Pixel Me has lens-capped sight. Her eyes are stretched tightly between the letter coded bone of her temples. She looks straight into the warm glass that shuts her in. Stares. Stares like she can melt it. Rev her skinny limbs. Blink. Climb out. 

Six, balloon skinned, swelling with ego, I knock against the computer screen. Clock-clock-clock. She is trapped in a mollusk of Raspberry Pi. Shaped like a grave. Hiding a womb. 

1.

The cobblestone curling around my yard traps and swallows the rain. I am five. Counting cracks and smearing my toes into them. 

“Is that your friend?” 

A thin shadow dribbles out of the dark. A few steps ahead of Dad, by the street lamps shaped like pale moons, a shape melts in and out of the amber.

I pinch Dad’s trousers between my fingers. “Which friend?”

Moonlight slicks into the path ahead of me, but the street is still too dark. The breeze is wet. The deepest patches of dark look like they’re swimming.

“Look,” Dad says, “she’s smiling at you!” 

There is a flash of teeth in between two slices of night. A gummy space in the left where a canine ghosts over. 

“Can we go home?” My breath thins. Every word is a stolen exhale. The friend ticks her head, like the hand of a clock. An aborted question. A glitch. 

Soundlessly, the sky floods with clouds. Dad pries his trousers out from my nails and turns us back into the house. Top row. Creeping right. A caustic taste sludges down the ribs of my throat. Fresh iron coating my mouth. 

“Dad,” I say. “I think my tooth’s falling out.”