Beatrice was my first ‘love’. The dark contours of her delicate skeleton, the glowing flesh made translucent by my X-ray gaze, drove me crazy. Microprocessors whirred within me. Interface adaptors fluttered. Various regulators jumped out of sequence as I reveled in the perfection of her organs – especially the beautiful efficiency of her heart, which throbbed at the core of her, even when she was at rest.
Read “The Love Machine” online at www.granta.com.
Call me a trendmonger, but I’ve sprung for a tree house. My bamboo pod hovers amid galba trees, nestled in jungle but open to the sea, the porch equipped with hemp hammocks. A flowering vine snakes along the railings, pimping its wistful perfume. With a single remote control, I may adjust the ceiling fans, fine-tune the lighting, or lift the plate-glass windows, which flip open like beetle wings. My eco-friendly rental has so many amenities, but my favorite is the toilet: a stainless basin that whisks your droppings through a pipe, down into a pit of coprophagic beetles. These bugs, bred to feast on human shit, have an enzyme in their gut that makes the best compost on the planet—a humus so black you’d think it was antimatter. The spa uses it to feed the orchids in the Samsara Complex. As visitors drift amid the blossoms, we may contemplate the life cycle, the transformation of human waste into ethereal petals and auras of scent.
Read “Regeneration at Mukti” on www.conjunctions.com.