She's Always Hungry: Stories by Eliza Clark

Author:Eliza Clark [Clark, Eliza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Psychological, Humorous, Black Humor, Literary
ISBN: 9780063393264
Google: c4T1EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0063393263
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-11-11T23:00:00+00:00

2

I keep the five original Objects, and the first three I fertilised. I grow another handful and they are sent in pods of five to test in polluted places; from China’s great industrial cities, to the ruins of London, to the blackened, uninhabitable counties of California, to Chernobyl and the Fukushima power plant. We try them in oceans, rivers, in the Arctic. They thrive. And they clean.

After positive, unexpected results in the Arctic, Microplastics commandeer one of my Earthlings – one I had named Septimus. It shivers when the guards take it away. Apparently, the test batch appear to have been cleaning the oceans, quite literally removing microscopic particles of plastic and converting them to fresh air. They want to test this in a controlled environment, to make sure their field results weren’t a fluke. They don’t tell me when they’ll be bringing Septimus back. But they tell me that the Objects do appear to clean out microplastics. In fact, they seem to swallow anything, from plastic bags and sanitary pads, to chemical and nuclear waste.

I am called into Director Viridi’s office. She shakes with excitement. I am told that I will have to breed thousands of them. I will breed thousands of them, and they will be deployed all over the planet. Vacuum cleaners for our collective garbage, they will cleanse the plastics from the oceans, and the CO2 from the atmosphere, and temperatures will drop and so will sea levels. The director looks mad. I think she might cry.

I am given a team and an orchard. Then, when I am too careful and too slow, they take the orchard and the team away from me. Some jackboot agrarian expert is pulled in to supervise instead, and I’m sent back to my lab, to continue to assess and monitor ‘the test group’.

*

At dinner, one evening, I fret to Ji-Ah. I complain that they took Septimus weeks ago, gave me no estimated time of return, and no one at Microplastics will respond to my messages.

‘You gave them names?’ she says. Then she tells me to keep my voice down. That I should just be patient. That nothing bad will happen. ‘They’re too valuable,’ she says.

Then we watch someone from Biodiversity (red jumpsuit) climb onto a dinner table.

‘Why won’t they let us call home?’ he asks. ‘My mother lives alone, all on her own. If we all, if we all,’ he waves his arms, urging us to stand, ‘if we all refused to tolerate these conditions, then they couldn’t—’ A guard tasers him in the leg. He collapses, and the guards drag him out of the room. We all go back to our food.

Septimus is returned to me the following morning by a pair of sour-faced guards. The others seem to perk up when it returns. Their colouring brightens, they stand taller, firmer. I am in the habit of chattering to them now, and I say: ‘Septimus is back, aren’t we all pleased to see it?’ like a schoolteacher, welcoming a pupil back from a brief illness.

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