My father says “being an android is the most oppressed thing you can be these days”,
I always reply with “well, I’m only half.”
My father has no soul, they say, his mind is a chemical imbalance of wires that fritz and frey when he gets worked up. Or, in his case, overheat. He’s freezing to touch and I’m not much warmer. I’m a descendant of scrap metal that’ll never decompose and I’ll wash ashore from shore to shore and metal fingers will poke and prod at my brain to examine the half-human consciousness.
I’ve never been to the beach before because the waves will eat my father whole. They didn’t make him waterproof.
“Well,” my father says, “without us they never would’ve got half their fancy cars. We repurposed the air that they breathe, and all that still isn’t enough.”
I reply, rather callously, that I’m not one of him.
Human enough.
Falling off my bike left my knees grazed and stained with blood. My mother told me to ignore the wires hissing their way out the wound.
They drill bolts into my joints to keep my wires in.
Waves crash inside my dreams and I wish to hold my fathers head underneath. The metal under my hands feels like an aluminium can and I relish in how easy it must be to destroy.
A fog horn signals company. Metal drowns on the surface of the ocean, and I think about how similar it looks to my sinking father.
They don’t teach androids how to swim. They’re not waterproof.
Eleven, sitting with heavy feet behind the glass and whirring insides forced to stay still. If they swim, a teacher said, their wires will fritz and fry and they’ll underheat. I ignored how she asked if I was human enough to swim. I ignore how my body feels heavy in the deep end and how the metal components of my body makes my flesh turn cold.
We swim round and around and behind the glass they’re as entertained as children getting a new pet goldfish.