Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe

Author:Jim Krusoe [Krusoe, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Literary, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780982053980
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

In the end, I’m sorry to say, the whole selection process degenerated into little more than a question of who seemed to need rescuing most, and in that regard it was no real contest. I decided that the subject of my first experiment should be the small woman I believe I’ve described elsewhere as an Eskimo, or Inuit. But who she was exactly was hard to tell because the cylinder that was her home had been pushed into a darkish corner. Also, the fluid she bobbed in—I guessed that she was an early prototype of Spinner’s—remained cloudier and more opaque than the others’. No matter what I’d tried to do to improve the situation, her features remained a mysterious blur. In other words, if the acidophilus in which she was suspended was the equivalent of motor oil, clearly she was in need of a change.

The first thing I did was to go to the Treasure Chest and buy a loose-fitting medical smock I could give her to wear when she first revived. It was the kind of garment that I didn’t think would be raising anyone’s suspicions. After she was back among the breathing, the two of us could shop, possibly by catalog or on the Internet, and she could tell me what sort of outfits she preferred. The next thing was to find a two-day holiday—not an easy job when Mister Twisty’s was usually open seven days a week. Finally I chose as my target date Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was legendary in the yogurt business for its lack of customers (second only to Christmas, though there was a move afoot among some of the larger chains to insert the word yogurt into a Christmas carol). So because very few people ever thought of yogurt on Thanksgiving, Mister Twisty’s would be closed, and then the day after I could keep it shut if I needed to, because Gertrude would be gone on a holiday hike with Spouses Without Spouses. I would have the place to myself, except for the women, of course. The reason I needed two days was that I had no idea how long the process might take. The Dawn had worked fairly quickly with Steve Junior, but he was of no size at all, and I didn’t want to rush it with a real human being. Plus, the Inuit might well need some counseling. (Again, there was that maddening question of whether any of these women spoke English.)

Thanksgiving Day arrived. I unscrewed the top of the woman’s cylinder and opened the petcocks at the bottom and, by means of hoses, directed the fluid that had sustained her down the drain in the middle of the basement floor. I had planned, once the fluid had disappeared, to rescue her by leaning a ladder against the side and lifting her out, but what I hadn’t counted on was that as the fluid that supported her vanished down the hoses, first her head, then her torso, and finally the rest of her body collapsed under the pull of gravity.

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