My parents weren’t married; they didn’t believe in it. This was established from the beginning of their relationship: when they met, they decided to stay together for as long as they wanted, then split. The schism happened on my third birthday.
They parted ways easy, like the Red Sea. Maman took with her my two sisters, aged five and seven. She wanted to take me, too, but Papa said it wasn’t fair, and I wouldn’t be good for travel, anyways, that I was too fragile, too young. She didn’t protest, just left.
I don’t remember the goodbye; I don’t remember that far back. We’ve never owned a camera, never had snapshots taken on holiday, and so I’ll never know what they look like. Looked like. I wouldn’t even recognize them if we were face to face. I wonder if I’ve seen them since.
I certainly saw a lot of Papa, though, enough to know him inside and out. We lived in a beautiful home, the quaintest cottage in France, though on land with a bloody history, a place of war in past and present. The soil was gritty, salty from tears. Nothing could grow. That should have been an indicator, a warning.
Obviously my childhood remained far from idyllic, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.
It wasn’t like Papa was a bad father. He tried to make me happy, and I think he thought I was, for awhile. He worked hard, and was passionate about nature, about farming. He talked constamment about herbs and their uses, the ways to design a garden, how to prune shrubbery –but there was only so much I wanted to hear about greenery. He tried to make me feel included in his work by giving me small tasks to do, like picking weeds, thinking I would love it, though I didn’t see the use.
Papa realized my mood, and tried to find the root of the problem. Like always, he fixed the wrong thing. Instead of cultivating our relationship, he tended to the desolate and forbidden environment. With determination and a great deal of compost, soon our house floated in une mer des fleurs – a sea of flowers.
I often treaded in this sea when I was supposed to be doing chores – the main one was dusting. With all those flowers, there was always pollen, always dust, always sneezing, always itching. I was itching from sitting in the grass, and itching to find myself sitting elsewhere.
I never did pull the dandelions from the yard, and they multiplied, camouflaged amongst the other fleurs. In autumn, I plucked the surviving puffballs and luxuriously wished away my afternoons. I should have wished to stop the sneezing, to give up the itch, to just be happy. Instead, I wished frivolously for someone. I didn’t even care if they were my friend or not, just that they were real, my own age, and had distinctly non-environmental interests to talk about.
I wished so much that I didn’t even blink when a strange teenager sauntered up to my door one day.
“You’re here for me!” I squealed breathlessly.
“I am now,” he replied.

His name was Gaston Lesauvage, and his auto had broken down – something about strange yellow particles clogging up the fan system, so the engine just overheated and died. His portable wasn’t working and he wanted to borrow our landline. I was sorry to tell him we didn’t have one.
“Pas de problème. Does a neighbor have one?”
We didn’t have many neighbors. None, in fact. Instead, I offered to show him the way to town. By this point he knew better than to ask if we owned a car. I would have hitched up the buggy, but Papa was out tilling the fields with the horse. We had to walk.
It had not rained in a week, and little clouds of dust puffed up around our feet, putting the whole scene in a haze. Despite the drought, la mer des fleurs still displayed its best colors.
He was amazed by the flowers, had never seen them before.
“So many variations! How did they get that way?”
I shrugged. “Evolution, I guess.”
He laughed. “You guess? I want to know exactly. One thing’s for sure: someone doesn’t know how to measure bloom pigment.”
“What?”
“Bloom pigment. That’s what makes the colors. Right?”
This went against everything Papa had ever told me. He said life was all about chance: it cannot be measured, and no one is in absolute control.
“That’s not how it works. Life isn’t measured, it just happens. How can you talk about something that does not exist?” I spouted Papa’s opinions.
“Oh, it exists; it just hasn’t been scientifically determined yet. I’m out to accurately measure everything, to make everything orderly and balanced. I’m a Mechanic.”
“Papa’s a Naturalist.”
“And you?”
I thought. The best I could come up with was “I’m Mallory.”
It was hot for October, and the rest of the afternoon must have been burned out of my mind, the memory all dried up like the dirt road we walked. But I remember that I have never laughed as much as I did that afternoon, and that there was no more discussion of flowers.

Naturally, Papa wanted to know what I did that afternoon. Fortunately, I had an alibi. I said I went to town to buy pastries. I didn’t tell him that it was Gaston who had bought me pain au chocolat. Papa just smiled at my sweet tooth, and went back to check on his rhododendrons.
Gaston came back the next week, wanting some flowers. I said he could take as many as he wanted. He said he’d like help selecting the best. We wandered out into the fields to gather them, and came back covered in petals, laughing, grinning, sneezing.
It was barely noon, and his auto was working, so he drove me to town. He bought me more pastries, and I arrived home plenty early before Papa returned from the fields. This time, Papa grumbled a little about the excessive chocolate, but eventually ruffled my hair.
We went on like this for weeks. Papa started to question my outings, becoming irritable whenever I was in a good mood because he knew I’d been out. He said sweets weren’t good for me, that I was being naughty. Eventually, he followed me into town, where Gaston and I were caught at last.
Much fighting ensued, I was torn between lives, and ultimately, I made the wrong choice.

I left pastoral Normandy for the city of light, love, and buttery baguettes. Gaston was in school there, at the Paris Descartes Université. We stayed in his tower dorm. For awhile, it was like a fairytale.
Then there was “le projet” – said he wanted to build armor for the heart, so the only people who could get inside were already in it. Of course I wanted to help him. I loved him. And the way he said it was cute – l’armure pour la cœur, armor for the heart. There might also have been wine involved.
I wasn’t even mad right afterwards because I didn’t know. Gaston told me I’d had the flu. I was tired and sore, and so drugged it didn’t even matter for a month. When I had recovered, I started to recognize the symptoms of being a cyborg – overheating, was one – but there was nothing I could do about it. I just dumbly accepted it. He was all I had, and he said he loved me and this didn’t change anything, so why wouldn’t everything be perfect like it used to?
I was a fool.

Gaston flaunted me at first, brought me to fêtes, so proud of his little debutante. He was so proud of himself, that anyone could look at me and never know that my lungs are steel-wire bellows, or that my heart ticks with a ¾ tempo.
He called me la belle, the beauty, too. I was so flattered, smug, had no problem showing off my almost-invisible scars written on my pale skin – his biggest bragging point. I would stand demurely on a rotating pedestal as Gaston described dramatically how beneath my ordinary exterior there was missing life beneath.
I can’t believe I went along with this. It’s humiliating to think of now.
Here’s what I lost: my circulatory system, and my respiratory system – two organ systems so intertwined that he couldn’t screw up just one, he had to ruin both. His blunder with the “armor” installation nearly cost me my life. Actually, it may have. His hand slipped, lacerating my heart and puncturing my left lung. Couldn’t stop there, had to finish what he’d started, and so my heart and lungs were removed, arteries ripped out, tubes soldered to veins, until I was completely dissected, open, belly-up on the table.
I gained something – a coolant system, though that’s not a plus. Gaston had taken out my sweat glands so I wouldn’t accidentally short-circuit myself, but soon after my first operation I overheated almost immediately – that “flu.”
Fortunately, Gaston stopped there. My stomach – and basically my entire digestive system – remains because the acid within would corrode any metal. My brain, too, was spared, and my reproductives because he didn’t have the skill to fabricate and program them, and I’m glad.
Together we charmed his friends, working our way up to politicians and celebrities. We worked out the kinks in the presentation, the biggest of which concerned my life-saving coolant system. I make a buzzing noise when my coolant system starts up, which disturbed the viewers, so we determined that I would hum a tune to cover it up, something pleasant and loving. We settled on La Vie en Rose.
Il me dit des mots d'amour


He tells me words of love
Des mots de tous les jours


Words every day
Et a me fait quelque chose


And that does something to me
Il est entré dans mon Cœur


He has entered into my heart
Une part de bonheur



A piece of happiness
Dont je connais la cause


Which I know the cause of
C'est toi pour moi



It’s you for me
Moi pour toi dans la vie


Me for you in life
Il me l'a dit, m'a juré pour la vie

He said that to me, swore to me forever
Gaston swore to me that we’d be together forever, and it seemed for awhile that life would play out that way. But when it came down to it, our relationship only began because of “le projet” and his grade. He wanted an A, and I know that I was just a stepping stone on his way there.

I like to imagine what I would say if I saw him today. It would be pointed, witty, and the wave of my words would wash his oily composure away, leaving the sopping, sniveling wretch I vindictively hope composes his core behind.
Not my fault you messed up, stabbing my heart, having to build me another, makeshift, clockwork one.
Not my fault you were horrified with the results. If you don’t want a girl that makes whirring noises in her sleep, moves slowly because of increased internal weight, or has to stay in the shade because she overheats sometimes, don’t build one!
Not my fault you were kicked out of school, either, because you cheated – using a human being for the structure of your project, your experiment, instead of starting from scratch. What sin!
“You were supposed to create a human from a robot, not a robot from a human. And you didn’t even make a complete one.” Their words will haunt me forever.
My ruined life was of absolutely no concern to anyone, just the fact that you cheated, cheated. Let me tell you, tell everyone: I have been cheated.
Japan has been very open to cyborgs – the whole orient has, actually – and the Americas. Africa is so thirsty for tech that they’ll accept them—us. But not Europe, not France, not Paris. There is too much history here.
Sure, there are pockets of acceptance, but they are few and far between.
For the most part les français will import warehouses of parts, only to leave them collecting dust. They refuse to build them as if that means they’ll cease to exist. The few cyborgs who are brought in have no rights, they’re thought of as the equivalents of robots, of pets.
Society may have started this, but you’re the one who went too far.
I never said these words before because I was too weak or too proud.
The fact is: I will never get the chance to say these things now. He is gone. And I hope gone means dead, but I honestly don’t know. I didn’t stay to check.

When he finally presented me to the college, his professors said I was beastly, called my real organs “flaws,” and he followed suit, telling me to get lost.
“Part, la bête!” Leave, beast! Leave, stupid! Either way you translate it he sounds haughty and oh-so-high above me. That touched a nerve.
I said I’d leave, but I wanted one last kiss.
When I overheat, my lungs pulsate rapidly to get two time the ordinary amount of air into my system. Half goes to my circulatory pipes, and the other half travels through the miniscule vent shafts of my coolant system. It works, but I become a living circuit in the process, the friction of my fibrous lungs generating an electrical spark. The current will fizzle out after a few minutes, but otherwise I will shock you. Badly. I become a living taser.
I was overheating from the lights and the stress of the presentation, and Gaston knew this because I was humming. I was humming the newly ironic La Vie en Rose.
He was well aware of the consequences, but he didn’t have the chance to move before I kissed him on the mouth.
There was a sharp crackle, and a flash. Ozone perfumed the air. While everyone was momentarily blinded, or tending to stunned Gaston, I ran.
In the end, I suppose I was the one who went too far.
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What? Why do you give me that pitying stare? You should be running away. Everyone else does.
I told you my story, and your curiosity bloomed. You checked my pulse; you felt the unnatural, mechanical thrum of forced blood, heard my ticking heart. You got close enough to hear inhaled breath bounce around in my cavernous lungs, sounding like a tympani drum, and the empty whistle as it came back out. You knew the truth, and you were fascinated. I will never understand you scientific types.
I am impressed by the way your young but practiced, carefully rubber-gloved fingers found and lovingly traced the now-healed incisions that spiderweb across my forearm in the dim candlelight. It takes a special type of person to see the hidden and still care for. Especially towards one like me.
I’m so mixed up, a flesh-and-metal patchwork, barely stitched together. My real bits don’t like the metal gears and bolts – icy or burning, never the right temperature for neighboring tissue. They shy away from the not-real parts, ripping seams, separating, and I feel all messed up with stuff floating around. I am just a hollow vessel, full of stew insides.
Emotion? It’s just a word. I’m not sure I feel anything anymore. Maybe just anger. But that could just be in my head.
I’m not sure what’s real, what’s programmed, what I am, anymore. Am I a woman? A cyborg? A monster? I don’t know. And it scares me.
I scare me.
But I am neglecting the last, the third man. In a way, he’s the best of them, because he reminded me what it was like to live. In a way, he’s the worst of them, because with living, he deluded me into feeling again. And then he left me, too.

I left Paris. I couldn’t return to Normandy because the pollen would choke me like Gaston’s auto, and the coastal breeze would cause my lungs to rust. Papa himself would hurt me as much as the land. There was no way he would want his clockwork daughter back.
I went to Toulouse, a city known for technology appreciation, specifically in aerospace. They tolerate clockworks because it would be hypocritical not to. So obsessed with machinery, the people themselves adopted mechanical habits similar to mine. I fit right in.
And that’s where I met Beau. He worked in the aéroport, where I had taken up a job checking electrical circuits – as I could not be electrocuted, I was hired on the spot.
Beau Chevalier. Bullied all his life for being as his name suggested: beau, beautiful, and chevalier, knightly. The work he did was beautiful, too. He was mentally wired for manufacturing plane engines. He built the hearts of the planes, understood what made them beat, what made them stop.
We spent a great deal of time together. He would build an engine, and then bring it to me for testing, just to be polite.
“Miss Larme, is this propeller rotating properly?”
“Of course it is. I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
We both knew he couldn’t mess up if he tried.
He learned my story and didn’t mind my quirks. Soon, I found my machinery being tweaked by him. It wasn’t long before I was laughing again, and had this warm feeling, something like overheating.

I have things to say to Beau, as well, still full of hurt, though shorter, and only because I care.
Why did you decide to let one of your less-than-brilliant friends operate on you, too? I know you wanted to be with me forever. But at least we’d have Happily For Now if you hadn’t. Happily For Now might not be Happily Ever After, but it is better than Happily Nevermore.
Now you’re just a husk. You left me. Alone.
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And so, now I am here, au hôpital. You say you’ll do everything you can for Beau. Merci, infirmière Evony, but sometimes everything isn’t enough.
I’ll say my au revoir, seal the end of our forever with a kiss.

Toulouse is a dimmer star than Paris, but it is still bright at night. That has something to do with the two rivers running right through the middle – the reflections double the light.
A lonely little bateau glides past the riverside hospital. The focused skipper doesn’t see the flash from a low, open window, and the smell of the river negates the zing of electricity in the air. But as soon as he sputters out of sight, a precisely-measured, tinny double-melody takes over the silence. If one were imaginative, they would think it sounded like breathing.