Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung

Author:Gina Chung [Chung, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

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The next day was Saturday. We took Elly to a park a few towns away, where we were unlikely to run into anyone we might know. It felt odd to strap her into her car seat once again, to wrap the seatbelt around its base and buckle it into place, a task that had seemed maddeningly complex when she was a baby.

We watched her climb up and down the jungle gym and slide down every slide. I watched her for more signs of slippage, looking for holes in Irene Nakamoto’s code. I had barely slept the night before, and I felt feral with renewed grief.

“It’s not her,” I said.

“We knew that going into this,” Dan said. “That isn’t the point.”

“I don’t even remember why we did this. It just feels wrong. She’s not even a child.”

“She can feel things, right? She can respond to stimuli, to questions. And we are still responsible for her. We helped create her and bring her into the world,” Dan said. He looked tired, older. Not for the first time, I wondered why on earth he had married me. He deserved to be with someone uncomplicated and beautiful, someone with a name like Bethany or Kaitlin. A nice, smooth-haired girl who would never have let what had happened to Elly happen.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait and see how things go.”

“Umma, Daddy! Watch me!” Elly shrieked as she waved, one-handed, from the monkey bars. No one could have known, from watching us, what she really was.

“What are we going to tell our friends?” I asked. “We’ll have to tell them soon. They’ll think we’re monsters. They’ll want to know why.”

“We’ll tell them that we’re just trying this out, that it’s been proven to be very effective as grief therapy. Everything we’re doing is perfectly understandable.”

“What if I can’t get this right? What if I screw up a perfectly functional child robot, too?”

“Don’t think like that,” Dan said. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

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