Dante's Heart
Susan Slaviero
Little Red and the Robot Wolf
I am a city girl in red stilettos. What happened to all the canids?
A silver wolf grinding gear-teeth against my apartment door,
the clicks and ticks of his clockwork belly, programmed to consume
several grandmothers in one sitting, I imagine. A plague of zoomorphic
automata in urban areas, they say. Sign of the times. So, I keep a ray
gun in my cookie jar, a taser between the sofa cushions. An electromagnetic
pulse might disrupt his integrated circuit, stun him long enough for me
to get an axe. (Some people hunt them for their exoskeletons,
which are a valuable source of fresh metal.) I don a butcher’s cloak,
hack at the slick abdomen until it cracks. Inside, a girl in a blue dress.
Together, we remove his microchips, his tubules and wires. Fill a bucket
with electronic viscera. Later, we pack his empty mechanical shell with stones.
Little Red and the Robot Wolf
I am a city girl in red stilettos. What happened to all the canids?
A silver wolf grinding gear-teeth against my apartment door,
the clicks and ticks of his clockwork belly, programmed to consume
several grandmothers in one sitting, I imagine. A plague of zoomorphic
automata in urban areas, they say. Sign of the times. So, I keep a ray
gun in my cookie jar, a taser between the sofa cushions. An electromagnetic
pulse might disrupt his integrated circuit, stun him long enough for me
to get an axe. (Some people hunt them for their exoskeletons,
which are a valuable source of fresh metal.) I don a butcher’s cloak,
hack at the slick abdomen until it cracks. Inside, a girl in a blue dress.
Together, we remove his microchips, his tubules and wires. Fill a bucket
with electronic viscera. Later, we pack his empty mechanical shell with stones.
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