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Ma wouldn’t tell me anything,
but I knew. That inkblot bruise
on your belly—it bloomed like
a dying star.

So hot that summer, your fingers
left bio-ink on the monkey bars.
“It’s sweat,” you said, your eyes
cutting, daring me to say otherwise.

Good times that summer. Saturday morning cartoons on our
dying TV. How I spun you in the dryer and you came out all
pixelated. Lego tower to heaven, we stacked by Lake Ontario,
so easy for you. How you were airbrushed by fumes from Ma’s
wok, fish boiling and Sichuan peppercorns sizzling like tiny
time bombs. Claps of joy and laughter, Ma’s face glowing red
from baijiu. My arm in a cast after the skateboarding crash,
yours reprinted anew. You telling me on that wet balcony in
Scarborough: “You can do anything.”

Then that bruise. Then two.
More bio-ink smearing off you like
pigment from a butterfly’s wing.

Blur. Break. Scream. Tires
screeching. Red valve shoved
down the slit in your neck,
pumping. Recalling the product
recall. Your atoms scrambled and
refused. Mouthing freezies in hospital
rooms stinking of old glue, my tongue
lime green, yours blueprint residue.
Holding your hand, hot heart beeping,
synthskin and boy bones, HD feelings.

On the postcard I received a month later:
Preserve my body groove, which was
so you.

When I visit Ma and she pours me tea,
she sometimes apologizes, still, for having had
to print me a brother that one time.

I always remind her of that summer, that one
summer, your last summer, one of many summers,
made real by their weight in sweat.



Millie Ho’s work appears in Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, and others. She was a finalist for the 2019 Rhysling Awards, and lives in Montreal. Find her at www.millieho.net and on Twitter @Millie_Ho.
Current Issue
28 Oct 2024

By: Anna Martino
Translated by: Anna Martino
The truth is that I don’t know how much of my life was a dream and how much was reality. Does it matter in the end?
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Translated by: Lakshmy Nair
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എനിക്കിനി  ആസക്തി മരുഭൂമികളോടാണ്
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Translated by: Xueting C. Ni
PX9345 is a solar system situated on the outer edge of the Milky Way. It has one star, seventeen planets, three of which are located in a habitable zone, where water is not only present, but present in large amounts.
px9345是一个处于银河系边缘的星系,它有一颗恒星,十七颗行星,其中有三颗都处在宜居带上,不仅有水,而且是大量的水。
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