edited by Ziv Wities
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Body horror; extended description of assisted suicide with dubious consentThe attractive blonde technician responsible for your death smiles lovingly, and a smooth plastic pen slides into your gnarled fingers. She lowers her facemask, deep dimples puckering. “Okay, Michael, got everyone else’s. Just sign one last time for me, sweetheart.”
Crippling arthritis, an insidious thief, stole your hands long ago, but your arm flexes ennuied muscles, enough for the scratch of ink to paper. Blondie leans over your bed. The hospital perfume, sterile and ugly, reaches your nose and she reclaims the clipboard. “Wonderful,” she croons. Her voice is red velvet and her slender fingers brush hoary slips of gray hair from your face. Has she been trained to do that? Did they pay her to act kind to old, withered men? Did they extra her water rations?
Her agile fingers take yours, cradling them tenderly. “I’m gonna be with you the whole time, staying quiet, making sure it goes alright. Won’t even notice me, ‘kay? Remember, you focus hard enough and this can last days, maybe even weeks. Just enjoy yourself, and thank you for your service.”
Leaned over, your faces are so close and the creases of her parched skin crinkle deeper and she subtly runs her hand over the IV lines, checking them, then cups your face, making you feel small and young. But if you had been young, you wouldn’t have volunteered. You wouldn’t have needed to.
After petting your weathered skin like a forlorn dog, she focuses on the machine beside your bed, flicking a switch with a beep. Tubes running into your body change color, flooding your veins with the strong pump your heart no longer holds. Her warm hand flutters over your brow, so dry and smooth and the world is already a little blurry.
“Wherem I goin, ‘gain?” you mumble, drugs already consuming your mouth, heavy and lazy-like.
Blondie, studying the time machine, looks to you, her white mask replaced, dimples hidden. “Back to the summer of Oh-Five. You said it was your happiest time. Chose a beautiful day in July. Different times back then, so I’m told. So happy, everyone full and happy.”
“Won’ feel anythin?”
“Oh, no, darling. You won’t feel a thing out here. Time is different in there. Longer. You just go and enjoy yourself. Hot summer days… melting away,” she mumbles distractedly, flicking another switch and touching the device in her ear, her attention now on procedures and company orders. Water tinkles beneath her feet like distant bells. A long-forgotten sound.
The summer of Oh-Five. “Mmmm, good summer…” you murmur. Somewhere fruitful. Alive. It would be nice to feel life. The hospital room dims, the ceiling lights blink fluorescent and then to sunshine. Rhythmic pumping flushes your ears, whoosh-hiss, a river runs through the room. Men outside the door, bulky orderlies in white overalls, inquisitively peek around the doorway. The room shutters black when you blink at them. Black until you blink open and the room floods with sun. Bright, dazzling sun reflecting the lazy tinkling river in triangles of prismatic light.
Glorious.
Whoosh-hiss. Marta stretches beside you on the river’s shore. She’s the epitome of a lazy house cat. Always has been, with her night hours spent locked in her studio, day-napping and claiming the entire couch for swathes of the day. Even now, she might be asleep on the hot rocks. Her neon pink swimsuit contrasts against her brown skin, darkened by the Texan summer, and all you want to do is touch her to make sure she is real. Alive again. Your hand, strong and limber once more, gently grasps the firm muscle of her upper arm, and you marvel at the ease of your movements, recalling past-future you. A young man in motion stays in motion, and time is a weight all men struggle against.
She mumbles, eyes still closed. “I can’t remember a day like this. So hot. I love it when you play hooky and take me fishing.” Her skin soaks sunlight like a sponge and you notice the speckles of paint stubbornly clinging to her fingers, recalling how she had been painting that morning before you whisked her away.
Your conversation, now forty years old, comes back easily. “Me, too. Ought to do this more often, huh? Though seems everyone’s getting laid off right now.” You recline your young body onto your back, hot river rock comfortably cooking your skin, and blink at hospital fluorescents passing quickly overhead.
“What’s that?”
That nothing, Michael. Gonna take a minute or two for you to immerse. Just ignore anything that doesn’t fit in. Focus on Marta. This can last weeks.
“What’s what, hunny?” Marta asks, and you stumble over your words. No good deviating from the past conversation, otherwise your time together might glitch.
“Just saying, with everyone getting laid off, probably shouldn’t take too many sick days, playing hooky and whatnot. Never know what the future holds.”
Marta blinks at you, her lop-sided smile twisting to the left, and leaning on her side, the curve of her hip pops up into a beautiful hourglass. Her ringlets, wet from swimming, fall in front of her face. “Why you talking crazy? You’re a manager at the plant and only thirty! Gonna be there for a long time, probably move up and everything, Mr. Get-it.”
Your sight blurs, thinking over how wrong she is, was, and your glazed eyes wander across the river above her hip. On the far shore, the decontaminated hospital corridor passes by. Rolling fast behind a filmy glass. Stocky men pushing your bed, Blondie power-strutting with you, her hair now covered with a cap, and a tablet in her hand, business like.
Focus on Marta, Michael. Enjoy yourself.
Marta abruptly stands, jumping to her feet. You remember this part, vividly. A favorite memory, replayed over and over on cold nights when there is not enough wood and everything is hollow. Her playfulness. The vitality she brings to everything from painting her pictures to dancing on a rock. The ability to afford mischief and frivolity. The river and water hole is, was, blessedly empty on this hot Tuesday morning. Every other sucker is at work. Slaves for a machine that would eventually grind itself to dust and then leave the survivors to lick up the detritus. Marta towers over you, blocking the blinding sun, and impishly smiles as her bikini top falls away. Her breasts are high and full with youth. Cupping them with her own hands, she giggles, her laugh like bells ringing in a church you want to worship in, and turns, sprinting to the rock precipice, jumping with strong calves and plunging into the water hole.
You stand and watch her, brimming, replete with unreserved happiness. She was so alive, unapologetically kind and warm and strong of spirit, and all of her exists in tiny, little moments, squeezing every second of worth from them. You jump in after her, chasing that high of living. The one lost beneath burning sand.
You plunge beneath the roiling river, submersed in a watery corridor, bubbles racing along the clinical white as your body is transferred to the factory. Your limp, shriveled feet are flat below as you are wheeled into other, darker corridors. Whoosh-hiss. Reaching, gasping for air, you breach the surface, Marta laughs as you both paddle water. You are disoriented, the scene too noticeable to ignore, synapses firing in your brain, alarm bells unfathomably howling.
“What’s happening out there?” You ask the sky, your voice octaves too high.
Nothing, Michael. Is Marta having a good time? Is this where you proposed?
“Oh! Baby! I think I saw a carp down over there! Did we bring the sweet corn for bait?”
Your interest is immediately piqued and you paddle water harder, reaching your head to see downstream. “A fish? Can’t remember last time I saw fish, or had a flavored nutri-bar. Before the droughts, surely…”
Marta, treading besides you, suddenly sticks tight in the water, her whole body unnaturally inert while the river flows around her taut muscles. Hell, you messed up. Deviated from topic, gave her information she wouldn’t understand and couldn’t respond to.
“Sorry, hun, just brought the usual worms.”
Marta unfreezes, her feet back to kicking, her full, thick hair sitting atop the water while she bobs up and down. “That’s okay, we got enough of them in the freezer anyhow. I’m looking for bass today. Honestly though, don’t think we gonna need anything else to fill that garage fridge for a few more weeks.”
You bite your tongue instead of responding incredulously. Fridges full, flowing water, hard work rewarded. No wonder you chose this memory, this time. Water licks across your skin, currents of underlying coolness caressing you like soft winds. Each of your nerves tingle. It is overwhelming, the vividness, the way they could make you remember. A little blue bird, long extinct, sings on a tree on the opposite shore, the woods behind it are dense and black. A line of hospital beds, a body on each one, a technician for each body, waits behind the line of trees.
You rub water from your eyes, the dense and dark trees serried in long rows, stretching forever and eternity. But only the trees. You exhale.
“Well, guess I’ll get the poles outta the truck…” Marta mumbles, her eyes frowning over your inattention. She submerses into the foaming water, frog-kicking towards the shoreline and you check the pocket of your shorts. The little box waiting, zipped up tight against your thigh. You overarm stroke across the water, muscles and sinews strong and supple, and you snatch her ankle.
Marta yelps and splashes, laughing and spluttering as you drag your bodies to an outcropping of rock. An island in the middle of the river, alone and private but absolutely exposed. You enjoy the proposal more this time. Nerves don’t tremble your hands, anxiety doesn’t stutter your words, you look Marta fully in the eye, confident and relaxed. Her ring finger has blue paint on it that rubs off when you plant your ring. You revel in her surprise and the overwhelming emotions flooding her long-dead eyes. The second time proposing on that rock gives you greater happiness than the first.
You make love on that smooth island, water spilling around you like time running away. Time and water escaping somewhere else, as it eventually will. Marta climbs on top, her face hovering against the azure sky as she finishes in a grand crescendo and suddenly Blondie is above you, holding a flashlight. An uncomfortable sensation pinches your eyelid, a light probing, wrenching your eyelid open. You squint and Marta has returned.
“Hunny?” Marta stops and watches your disorientation, her concern endearing.
“I just…” You pause, trying not to ruin this last, perfect moment. Focusing hard. “It’s wonderful,” you say and Marta pinches your chin before kissing you, and then slides off so you are two long bodies laying on the timeless rock. Whoosh-hiss. The rushing water is louder in your memory, a white drone filling the comfortable silence while you bask in the euphoria of belonging to someone else, belonging to the warmest, most creative person you ever met. You lay in the sun for hours yet it never moves across the sky. The silent delight passes for Marta, her ideas coalescing into dreams and plans for the future she needs to expel so that maybe they’ll come true.
“Maybe we move North? Texas is getting too hot, yeah? North will be warmer soon, you think? All this talk about global warming. Yeah, places where they talk funny probably gonna be nice and mild soon? I could do my art anywhere, really. What you think, baby? See us on a ranch in the middle of nowhere? Beside a stream? Bet they got big fish up there. Lots of salmon, I hear. I would like to catch a salmon.” She muses and you wince, biting your tongue against revealing any of the hellish future she would never see.
Whoosh-hiss-gurgle. Marta ignores your silence, hugging your side, a white noise drifting in and out, machinery whirling on cogs, louder but no less monotonous. White water churning cogs and eating people. Your throat tightens, your toes tingle. She dreams aloud. “Two… no… three, definitely three kids. Three kids mean at least six grandkids, right?”
You finally smile. “Three, definitely. And eight grandbabies.”
Marta delights in hearing the future, though she knows it not. “Woo-eee. Getting ahead of yourself, huh?”
You continue, dreaming within a dream, “And they’ll have your hazel eyes, but my smile.” Two kids were taken by the war, four babies by the military, but your daughter’s family shelters close. Her children, happy little kids who always cuddle when they visit. The only ones you happily give your rations to. Marta looks at you with wonder, like she has never seen you before. Never knew the bounds of your creativity, though you’re just reciting the past. “And they’ll have that silly laugh, a stilted one, like they’re choking. Oh, it’s sweet, baby.”
Marta, lays on her side, her thick eyebrows arching. “You’ve really thought bout this…”
But you’re on a roll, the last thirty years of turmoil and hurt in the world fades, and only the sweetness remains. Your thoughts churning over every delicate detail. The smell of a newborn grandbaby, the way they curl up and ask for the last of your nutri-bar, the protectiveness you felt every day since they were born, the innate need to shield them from crisis after crisis. The world is harsh, oppressive, and bleak. But it’s also fiery-red sunsets blazing the horizon, with a kid asking silly questions. It’s rubbing noses and blowing sand off of eyelashes. It’s a dry kiss on drier skin. It’s love, even when love is simply giving your water. The white noise of machines thrums through the river water. Whoosh-hiss-gurgle. There’s all the time in the world and not much of it left.
You’re leaving your family, those babies. Your body, though worn and tired, still worked, somewhat. You could still be of use. A table to crawl under. A shield, maybe. More use that what Blondie would make of you. What the machine wanted you for. What it made of you. Whoosh-hiss-gurgle.
Marta’s face is a naive puzzle that would never be solved. “I can’t leave them, yet, Marta,” you say. ”I know you understand.”
Marta glitches, flickering in and out of existence, the memory,, and panic sledgehammers your chest.
“Blondie! Hey! I want out!” you holler at the sky.
Michael, relax. Please. Enjoy your time with Marta. This time can stretch for hours if you focus and play it out.
“No! I want out! No more memories! I want back into my body. Right now!” Alarm threatens your voice, trembling. Was it too late? No. You could still think; it couldn’t be too late if you could still think. The arch in your foot spasms. “You hear, Blondie! I want out!” Whoosh-hiss-gurgle.
River water flows over your feet, the cold air of a refrigerator, and the sky is silent for a long moment, thrumming, pulsing machines approaching. Whoosh-hiss-gurgle.
I’m sorry, Michael. You signed your contract. We’re mid-process. Just enjoy Marta, she looks so happy.
“NO!” you shout, your chest, your lungs tightening. “No! It’s not too late! I don’t want to donate! I rescind! I cancel! I’m fucking cancelling.”
Michael, I’m afraid…
You recall the room, the bed you’re laying on, rough threads beneath your limp fingers. You push your brain, succinctly un-focusing. Havoc. Chaos living at the periphery. Fluorescent lights scatter on and off. On the far shore, Blondie blinks into existence, a dark room with cold blue light behind her. The metallic wall close. The factory.
“I want out! Rescind! Rescind!” you shout before she can say no. You dive in the water between, your body laying in the riverbed below. Old and worn. An old, worn man drowning. You surface and your thirty year old body frantically strokes to the shore. Blondie flickers, her white tech suit is unnaturally clean, the forest blinking in and out behind her, the shore and Texas bushland lessening with each stroke.
“I’m getting out, I’m living, you hear me? I wanna see my family!” You exhale with each exertion, your muscles transmogrifying between old and young. You waver in the water. A corpse inside a man. Whoosh-hiss-gurgle. Your heart, your real heart is a war drum, the beat of galloping horses everywhere in your ears above the drone of the machine. Whoosh-hiss-gurgle-whoosh. You scramble onto the shore at Blondie’s heels, her mask lowered, a pained expression contorting her features. The actress reemerging.
Michael. It’s already begun, your body…
“No! Nononono! No, I rescinded, stop everything! I still have my daughter, my grandchildren! I shouldn’t have said it, I shouldn’t have agreed!”
You stand, water dripping off your body and splattering on tiles, shaking your head like a rabid dog sloughing off the river. Your feet, your ankles tingle, they’re asleep. Panic now controls you, the river and forest disappearing in harsh neon bulbs, your brain escaping the forest, your brain running out of the memory and the past, clawing into the future, the present. Back to your grandchildren who need you. Blondie speaks without moving her lips, her voice in your mind.
Michael, your family already signed consent.
They’ve already accepted payment.
“They wouldn’t,” you argue back. This was your idea. “That’s not true. I’m in control of my body.”
You shake your head, wildly, fevered, the ceiling above you, the bed beneath, metal beyond. Your eyes open, the real eyes. Whoosh-hiss-gurgle. You can’t move. That sound freezing your blood. Each muscle alarmingly numb, heavy beyond reason. Trapped. The young man’s body has morphed into the old decrepit one; your shaking head was an illusion. Your heavy head was the only body part not anesthetized, so you could replay your dearest memory—the reward bestowed for the gift of your body, its nutrients for a hungry population. Whoosh-hiss-gurgle-slurrrrp.
You scream. Your real mouth screams.
Your old man’s feet, bare and dirty, laying limp, toes and soles already swallowed in the great tubes. Gray worms of plastic coating connected to the nutri-vats, the towering metallic cylinders with their rusted struts, extend unfathomably high before you. The factory side. The input. Whoosh-hiss-gurgle-slurp. You shriek again. The indifferent machine has already begun consuming, you’re already inserted, the input valves attached, sucking water and stripping flesh from your numb body. Skin and hair and nail and sweat and sinews and muscles and bone and flesh and blood and everything that makes you a man, all eaten by the machine feeding the world. You can only watch the long suctioning tubes infinitesimally move up your inert, helpless body. Every millimeter revered. Careful to gather everything. A hungry, greedy worm you can’t escape. Blondie forces your head back down, staring at the blue sky. Her hovering face belies a human quality of sympathy. She speaks with chapped, thirsty lips.
“Michael, go back to the river. Hurry, remember. I’m giving you more Glutamate. Your memory cortex will flood. There’s still time there.” She’s whispering frantically, wiping tears from your still-functioning eyes and sucking them from her fingertips. Water the machine won’t have. Sorrow, loss, punches your limp chest. But she’s right and you madly nod, your heart choked with distress. There is only one option now. The past. Be with Marta. Always Marta. Not with the future. You squeeze your eyes tight, Martamartamarta. River water splashes your face, hot rock beneath your phantom, tingling feet. Your dead wife tucked into your side.
Michael, stay here, calm down, stay with Marta. It can last for hours. Shhhhhh.
You whimper. It is difficult to forget the image of your body mid-harvest. Your family signed you off. Already accepted their payment for your nutrients, the company product. “It’s it’s.. Fine. I’m fine”, you exhale, breathe, burrow to stay in your thirty-year-old body. You open your eyes, the river beyond. Smooth water lingers on your legs. Try to stay on this river. You could make this last for hours. Slow time. For weeks. Be with Marta for weeks. Marta… Marta… Marta.
Marta smoothes your wet hair away and you can’t forget the tingling in your feet, sure you feel it higher in your ankles. A kernel of doubt remains, fed by the diminishing panic. You are here but also there.
In and out, Michael. Deep breaths.
You exhale. Try for calm. Calm, smooth water. Life. It’s over. You thought you had accepted death. And you have. Your heart whooshing like river water. You smile, unsure at Marta. She is here. She touches your chest firmly and you feel locked in, engaged tight, somehow. The river churning, the sun the same, brilliant color.
Marta also senses you have calmed from something she doesn’t understand, and she opens her mouth.
Whoosh-hiss-gurgle-slurp, she says.
You focus real hard. Leave the present behind.
Marta’s mouth purses and she whispers,
Whoosh-hiss-gurgle-slurp
It lasts for weeks.
© 2026 by Rowan Hill
3502 words
Author’s Note: What inspired “Euthanasia Influx”? The state of health care, the pending Water Wars and current food-safety crisis, the advances of neuralink technology, pick any one of those and you’ll see inspiration. For the old film lover, of course they’ll see Soylent Green in “Euthanasia Influx”. The ending of the elderly in this movie is portrayed as a calming LCD trip that they peacefully pass from, but I always wondered about those with second thoughts. Those who made a rash decision and wanted to back out. It happens, I’m sure. But the machine needs to eat, and you’re already on the conveyor belt.
Rowan Hill is a sci-fi horror author from a little bit of everywhere. She has published many short stories, (usually of flawed women committing terrible things) and her last collection, No Fair Maidens From Earth to Mars, was released October 2024 with Trepidatio Press. She is on all forms of social media as writerrowanhill, and has her own website of the same name.
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