Shivering, she pours her child a bowl of sugar-frosted cereal. The soured milk is two weeks expired. The body of her child has been buried in the local cemetery a week longer than that.

Three weeks of rotting under tightly packed soil while a robot sleeps in her child’s old bed. The dead’s soul roams untethered still—so said the instruction manual. And this robot she has mail-ordered to her empty house—this emptier husk she calls by her child’s name and feeds with her child’s favorite breakfast—is a homing beam. A decoy to entice and tether the wandering soul.

Behind her, the stairs creak like a maggot-infested coffin; a small, clumsy body ambles into the kitchen. She closes her eyes, as if to trap the illusion of normalcy behind spasming lids. The chair groans under the weight of silicon and steel. Spoonfuls of soggy cereal slosh down an artificial esophagus. According to the manual, the food gets stored inside a sealable balloon. Yet the sugar is unable to fill the hungry hollow carved out in waiting for the runaway soul.

“Good morning,” she says, and swallows her erosive bile. “Eat up, you’ll need your strength.”

* * *

She thought you a changeling even before the wooden casket cradled your corpse; before the robotic chassis was delivered to her door inside a factory crate like another coffin.

The crate was labeled ‘grief dummy’, its contents bearing perfect resemblance to me, her dead spawn. She had to put your new parts together with her own hands.

Before, she looked at the old-you and saw a child not of flesh and bone and need, but of metal. These silicon and metal-alloy components, the tear-drenched gears? What makes you think she knows to build you—build me—back the right way? 

* * *

Wincing, she looks at the little robot playing quietly in the living room, and she thinks: this is not my child. A fake ghost to summon the real one, yes. But it goes deeper than that. When the robot picks up a mecha toy, she wonders: what if her child doesn’t pilot this mechanical husk? Recharging the robot’s batteries is expensive, but a body powered by the animus costs next to nothing to maintain.

She needs to calculate the expenses, recheck her bank account, ignore the mounting house bills. “Quiet!” she barks into the silent living room. 

The robot doesn’t flinch, focused entirely on the toys. Just like before, when her child rarely spoke to her. Never looked her in the eye.

Another dreaded thought: how will she know when the husk has been inhabited? When her child has roosted inside the dummy summoning, displacing the placeholder persona?

How can a mother ever know?

She calls the factory, shouting at the recorded voice into the phone, “I want my money back. What is wrong with him? Why won’t he listen to me?”

Anger-limp, she lies on the couch strewn with unpaid bills and old takeout menus.

When the little robot worriedly hovers above her, her hand shoots out to slap the simulacrum of comfort on the cheek. Her palm’s torn open by the sharp metal under the façade of skin.

* * *

She thought me a changeling. Ask me and I’ll tell you how she looked at me and saw a trick of the light, an alien thing she had to hurt until it became real again.

Her flesh-and-bone child, she once thought, had been stolen by fairies. So it was the fairies’ fault when the blemished body they’d left behind malfunctioned. She replaced it with a robotic decoy, hoping to lure the real child back. But is this decoy, too, another changeling, she wonders? Another falsehood she is forced to foster under her roof?

Are we robots? Ghosts? Changelings?

Are we one, or many? Most importantly: are we hers?

Ask me, little robot, and I’ll tell you all about the price of her love.

* * *

Gasping, she awakens on the couch to see the child haloed in the glow of a nearby lamp.

“Mommy,” the child speaks. Sitting hurt but obedient by her feet.

When she hugs the robotic chassis to her chest in a rush of relief, she feels not the residual coolness of a short electrical charge, but a heat suffusing the clangy, cumbersome body. A lingering warmth that can only originate from the soul within.

The child has been, at last, embodied. The robot is now occupied, possessed, that much is certain.

But by whom? she can’t help thinking as she hugs the child tight. The child that will not meet her gaze when she cups a silicon-clad cheek. She sniffs the synthetic hair and thinks she catches the familiar whiff of a forest, pine and soil and lingering rot.

Perhaps the same forest that stole her sweet child from her, not too long after birth. 

And now, she calculates, the way she did the bills earlier. Counts the robotic breaths for a sum of humanity. Like the bills before, the breaths do not add up. The machine is warm, but the steel underneath is her own flesh no longer. A strange reverb; a double echo. The uncanny syncopation of a fairy child.

What are the odds of the wrong ghost inhabiting this grief-husk she paid for so dearly? This decoy to absolve her of all guilt?

The little robot did not come with a return address, nor refund instructions. Still, she knows where her late husband kept all his tools: the wrench, pliers, and hammers to make metal yield under pressure.

She hugs the imposter close, and counts.

* * *

She thought us a changeling.

She still does.

She hugs us close—this body shared between robot and ghost—and we count the memories, too. They sway, intersect, superimpose—

The lid of the factory crate, like the coffin where we slept before our summoning.

Like the pillow that once crept over our nose, our breath smothered by motherly hands.

* * *

Ⓒ Avra Margariti