The Fittest
art by Gregory Stump
by Michael Murphy
Nate and Lily have everything they need. In bed, on screens, they comfortably receive, blanketed in a surety that nourishes them, umbilically bound to the ether. Telework, telehealth, telelife. Add to cart, buy now, deliver today. Desires form, are filled and forgotten, footprints in the sand swept to sea.
Their apartment is bedroom, kitchen, and living room in one. It is capsule and craft sailing true through the all-against-all. A button push or click of key and onward in a woosh of serene.
There are two doors. One to a bathroom. The other leading out forever opening in. The wall in which it is set flashes blue then red, lit from below through a floor-to-ceiling window. Down there, in the cold, the crowd has returned, angry again at something. Its chanting is muffled by building height and soundproof panes. Nate and Lily lie side by side and stare.
“Dead penis?” Lily swans herself across the duvet, wineglass in hand. “Drink this unusual tonic every morning to reverse erectile dysfunction.” She reddens her lips with what remains and places the empty glass on the nightstand.
Beside them both, a clutter of bottles, takeout containers, screens of various shapes and sizes. Tablets, phones, watches. Everything smart. The devices. Apartment. Nate and Lily. So very smart.
Nate gently pinches the flab above Lily’s hip. “Are you obese?” he asks. “Soak this orange peel in hot water to melt your belly fat.” He pulls flesh from rind with his teeth and holds the peel aloft before tossing it on the floor.
“Soak feet in a bowl of this to vanish toenail fungus,” Lily replies, nudging the bowl of pasta in hand. She lazily forks cavatelli, her gaze fixed forward and unblinking.
On the wall before them, on the biggest screen, a woman rocks a baby in her arms. She begs Lily and Nate to not let the media weaponize their compassion.
“Is your sleeping position causing eye bags?” Nate tugs at his own with a finger. “When it comes to retaining your beauty, there’s a lot of misinformation out there.”
“Nerve pain keeping you up at night?” Lily asks. “This nine-second habit may help soothe it.”
The apartment is oasis, fortress, and incubator in one. Environmental reply to evolutionary beckoning. In it, Nate and Lily flower in a dead glow, luminous homo superiors, tapped by our divinities to prosper. Outside the chill finds form in the icy, indecipherable demands of a megaphone.
On the biggest screen, the algorithm cycles and chooses. A man in black appears. He tells Lily and Nate that in business, as life, we are wired to win or destroy.
“Feel drained no matter how healthy you try to be?” Nate brackets the word healthy with air quotes. “Ninety-three percent of women over thirty have this hidden energy glitch.”
Lily exhales, rolls out of bed, walks to the window, and twists a rod to close the blinds. She struggles to find her footing, rubs thighs to rouse the blood in her legs.
“Think your occasional dizziness is just an inconvenience?” Nate asks. “You’re dead wrong.”
“Eat this weird fruit to eliminate neuropathy in four weeks.” Lily crawls into bed, offering a cupped hand full of nothing.
“One spoonful of this mysterious black substance can decrease your risk of heart attack.” Nate balances a measure of empty in the air.
They sink into feathery pillows and flannel sheets, warm. They fill empty hands with each other’s. The fireworks outside could be gunshots. The gunshots fireworks. Whatever they want them to be.
On the biggest screen the man in black is paralyzed, his mouth frozen open, in its darkened hollow a spinning disc.
“Final notice,” says Nate.
“Act now,” Lily replies.
Nate and Lily lie side by side and stare. They stare until the biggest screen dims and dawn paints the apartment an anxious orange. They stare and wait. Wait until there is nothing fed in to spit out, until they are hungry again, beset by a long forgotten emptiness and pounding on the door that only opens in.
Michael Murphy’s fiction has featured or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Notre Dame Review, and La Piccioletta Barca, among others. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Home is currently Florida and formerly London, where Michael wrote a satirical column for the Hampstead Village Voice. He can be found online at oddlogic.com.
Gregory Stump, an emeritus professor of linguistics, is a visual artist who currently works in digital media. His drawings juxtapose the familiar with the unfamiliar in enigmatic ways, often involving asemic representations of written language in a variety of contexts. He has provided cover art for books issued by Cambridge University Press, State Street Press, Finishing Line Press, Main Street Rag Publishers, and Pine Row Press; his art has also appeared in the journals Kansas City Voices, Glacial Hills Review, The MacGuffin, and Folio Literary Journal as well as in various juried exhibitions. He resides in Lenexa, Kansas. (See www.stumpdrawings.com for a partial portfolio of his digital work.)
