(I apologize for the length on this one! I didn’t really have time to prune it back, but I hope you enjoy it!)
The Silhouette of Dragonflies
(a flash fiction by Maggie Slater)
Seth stared back at the holographic assistant, a girl in black business attire twenty years too young to have such solemn eyes, the sweat on his palms softening the little cardboard coffin in his palm. She spoke gently in a voice a little too quiet, just above a whisper, that forced him to listen closely. He wondered if that was the intent.
“Upon selecting the Deceased’s sensory experience of choice, our state of the art printer will place their neural sample into a micro-environment that replicates the sensation requested. This is called a Revenant Cube. We aim for perfect happiness, so on the base of the Revenant Cube, you will find a small LED light. If it’s green, this indicates the presence of dopamine and serotonin, meaning that the Deceased is happy! Here at TouchParadise, we always want you and your Deceased to be happy. If at any point the light is not green, we offer a moneyback guarantee for up to fifty years.”
She motioned to the touch display as it lit up with a series of options listed in checklist format: SIGHT. SOUND. TASTE. TOUCH. SCENT.
“Please begin by selecting the sensory experience the Decease requested, or that you believe they’d most enjoy. Many people find scents, sounds, and sights appealing, but the touch of a kitten’s fur or cool water or moss are also popular. Taste experiences do require an additional fee as they are wired to the neural matter in such a way that the Deceased’s nerves control the application of the experience in order to maximize dopamine production. So give that chocolate cake to Grandpa! He’ll enjoy it all the more, whenever and however often he likes.”
Seth wiped his free palm on his pant leg. What did his mom even want? That sensory preservation was listed on her Will still surprised him. She’d never seemed all that interested in tastes or smells or sounds as far as he’d ever witnessed.
If anyone would have known, he thought it’d be Midge, the tiny centegenarian his mom had shared a room with at the nursing home towards the end of her life. But Midge seemed just as surprised as he had been.
“She never even got a basic neural implant for phone calls, for goodness sake,” Midge said with a dry laugh. “She hated the idea of somebody getting bits of her brain on their fingers.”
“Maybe she didn’t mind so much if she was already passed?”
Midge only shrugged, unconvinced.
He asked the lawyer next, probing to see if she’d mentioned anything specific while completing her Will. The lawyer, whose name he’d forgotten the moment he’d said it (was he the Lobb, the Dearing, or the Wallace in the Lobb, Dearing, and Wallace Associates?), only said blandly, “She seemed to think you’d know.”
But he didn’t know. He’d spent all night laying on the couch, pounding DIPAs until the room spun, trying to scrape from his skull some comment, some suggestion, of anything his mother particularly loving, and drew a devastating blank. They’d been close when he was little, but they were very different people. He couldn’t recall her ever gushing over anything, let alone having a single sensory experience she loved over all others. She tolerated whatever birthday cake or pie she received. She regifted almost everything he gave her within a few weeks. She drank generic grocery store brand tea, and complained it was bland, but never touched any of the teas in the monthly subscription he bought for her one year. In fact, the one box he found partially used, Midge had sheepishly admitted she’d stolen because they were just sitting there.
His mother wasn’t enamored of small talk. She wasn’t especially emotional. He’d always attributed that to her Depression-era upbringing. She liked to look put together, btu wasn’t flashy and didn’t have any particularly favorite outfits. She didn’t have a favorite food that he knew of, or a favorite author, or a favorite place.
And now he had to choose. Sight, scent, taste, touch, sound? He shifted the little cardboard coffin made of plain white paper from one hand to the other. The corner had turned into a crunched mess where his sweat had soaked through.
All he could think about was the fact that his mom was gone, and that he was officially an orphan. A forty-seven year old orphan, but it felt weird that both people who brought him into the world were now…not there. And he was failing her in this one, vitally important final request.
The holographic assistant spoke softly, probably prompted by the time delay in response. “Sometimes it helps to consider the Deceased’s past, important moments they shared with people they loved, and search those memories for special senses that might conjure pleasant memories.”
His mother’s past. She never talked about it. And then, as if bubbling up out of his gut, he remembered: long, long ago, at the tail end of summer, just before he’d left home for college. He’d found her reclining on the front porch swing, gazing up at the twilight blue, eyes half-closed, her lips half-smiling. He’d apologized, thinking he’d intruded on some sacred moment, intending to go back inside, but she’d waved him over and pointed up at the sky. All throughout the blue, the silhouettes of dragonflies, hundreds of them, swooped and darted silently.
“They’re older than dinosaurs, but they’re still here.” Her eyes traced the tiny shadowed shapes. “Even as life goes on, even as everything around them changes, they’re always there. Same as ever. Long before us, and long after us. Isn’t that something?”
That was all she’d said, but he’d felt it deep in his chest, a little extension of herself to him, a reminder as everything around him was changing. It had stuck with him for decades, her smile and enraptured gaze coming back to him every time he saw one of the bejeweled insects perched on his car window, or tattooed on a date’s ankle.
Seth took a deep breath and tapped, “Sight.” He withdrew the set of glass slides that contained his mother’s sensory nerves and fed them into the 3D printer. After five minutes of gentle humming, the machine spat out a cube no bigger than a quarter on each side. He held it up to the light and peered through the tiny viewfinder to see what she was seeing. Inside, a bright blue sky swarmed with the silhouette of dragonflies.
The LED on the base of the cube cast a jewel-toned green, an insectoid green, across his palm. He’d chosen right. She was happy.