Ewok Dance Party by Lauren Allen

I should have killed myself at the hospital when I had the chance. 

After the beeping of Aisha’s heart monitor stopped. After she gave a tiny little sigh and left me. After my reason to live could no longer be resuscitated. After all the useless nurses shuffled out of the room to give us, no, just me, a moment. I should have done it then. 

But that’s dumb. Hospitals are designed to keep people alive. Even if I had managed to suck down the morphine from its drip bag over the bed, my stomach would have been pumped within moments. Damn doctors and their damn Hippocratic oath. 

I could have done it right afterwards. Seattle has plenty of bridges to jump off. I didn’t have to go straight back to our, no, my house. But there was one last task I had to do. 

Somehow, I’ve made it to our driveway. The van door doesn’t close properly. It hangs crooked on its hinges. I don’t remember hitting anything. There is a streak of yellow paint all down the side of the minivan, the vehicle I bought to accommodate Aisha’s wheelchair which she jokingly called the GMB, for “glamor mobile.” It was a 2023 Honda Odyssey. I bought it used back when I still thought there was a point to saving money, back when we both had hope for our future. Aisha designed the wheelchair lift herself. It was faster than anything on the market. She was a marvel with design, had won a bunch of awards, had been on the list of Forbes, “Thirty Under Thirty.” Her robots revolutionized recycling. They had the dexterity to pluck out the plastic, the metal, the glass from the heaps of refuse carelessly tossed into the bright blue bins and to clean them with squirts of air rather than water. Less energy, less water, less waste. Nobody could have predicted her second act would be cancer. Surely it was the lab’s fault. She would come home smelling of burned metal and plastic. She had to have been inhaling carcinogens all day. They could have at least given her a fucking mask. 

The neighbor’s collie howls. I catch myself in the middle slamming the van door over and over again. It is an early February morning full of unexpected gaudy sunlight. The sky should at least have the decency to rain. I stop slamming the door. I don’t want to wake up the whole neighborhood. The door doesn’t shut. The interior light is on. I don’t care. I won’t be needing the van anymore. I walk away. Then the guilt hits. Aisha hated waste. She was the one who went from room to room turning off all the lights before bed. I go back, reach into the van, and slide the light off. 

Our mailbox is bloated with two weeks of mail. I decide I will just put the whole mess in the recycling bin. I fumble one handedly for my keys. I’ve worn the same outfit for the last two weeks; I’d slept on the chair next to her bed when they let me and in the van when they told me to go home and get some rest. At last, I find them in the chest pocket. I put the keys in the lock then hesitate. Inside I know what I will find. My last task will be to clean up the vomit. Her vomit. She had puked with such ferocity that I picked up the bag of bones that had become her body right off the living room floor and carried her straight to the GMB. I brace myself for the smell. I don’t really want to clean it up. It is her last mark on the world after all. But I know I have to. She would hate it if the hardwood became stained, if I allowed something good go to waste. I will clean it all up so the house will be ready for whoever rents it after I am gone. 

I open the door. The scent that hits me is not vomit, it is sweet, savory, delicious. Is it, could it be stew? I must be hallucinating. I had eaten almost nothing in the previous weeks. I hadn’t felt hungry. Reflexively, my mouth begins to water. 

And then, the little beast trots out from the kitchen on its hindlegs, as tall as my hip and wearing a floral apron. It is bear-like and furry. It is an Ewok.

I drop the mail. I slide down the wall to a seat. Maybe I don’t have to go through all the trouble of killing myself. Maybe I am already dead, my brain running through random Star Wars imagery before shutting down. 

“Welcome home honey bunny,” the Ewok says, but it is not the childish singsong from the movie. No, it is a woman's voice, Aisha’s voice. 

I’d thought I was the sick one when I first met Aisha. Environmental despair. Weary of years of teaching biology, of showing students all the ways adults had fucked up their planet. Global warming, mass extinctions, toxins everywhere: it was all so hopeless. And I was part of the problem. I slowly realized that the world would be better off without my emissions and trash. I was beginning to withdraw, to isolate, to think of exit strategies. It’s not like I had many people to worry about me. My megachurch family had disowned me a decade prior for the sin of being queer and the double-sin of flunking conversion therapy. I’d moved to Seattle to find community, only to find I couldn’t trust anyone. I threw myself into teaching, into the myth that I could make a difference. But the planet just got hotter, the politicians more ignorant, the students more like digital zombies.

Aisha was a guest speaker for Career Day in May. Ash was falling from the sky. The wildfires were coming earlier and earlier every year. The district used to cancel school on such days, but then they became too common, so the students just wore masks. There was a lot of coughing and red eyes. But Aisha was radiant as she shared about the success of her Recyclebots. Students looked up from their phones and gave her their full attention as she gave her pitch with the fervor of an evangelical, “Our planet needs saving. Technology is our best tool. Will you join us?”

Before I met Aisha, I had given up on recycling. It seemed as useless as swabbing the deck of the Titanic. But she was light and hope and I needed to be near her. I stammered an invite to coffee. Coffee turned into beer turned into dinner and dessert. We rode our bikes home together and that was it.

Aisha was my salvation. She filled me with a hope that quickly bloomed to love. She moved in after only a week. But her work hid her from me. She worked feverishly, from four in the morning ‘til she collapsed into our bed at midnight. It was the newspapers that made her do it, politicians decrying falling birthrates, urging all good Americans to procreate and save the country from social security caused collapse. “It’s like a Ponzi scheme,” Aisha said. “There are already too many of us and they expect us to keep making more. There has to be another way.” Robots were the answer, she decided. She was working on a prototype for Carebots, who could cheaply and humanely care for the elderly. 

At first, I laughed. “Nobody’s going to let some cold steel bot take care of their grandma. That’s just creepy.”

Aisha rumpled her brow, thinking hard. “I’ll make the Carebots friendly-looking, short enough that they are not intimidating but strong enough to do the job.” Then she got sick and had to leave work. She never finished the project. 

“Wake up honey bunny, I made you sweet potato and peanut stew,” Aisha says. 

“But you’re allergic to peanuts,” I say. I had always loved peanut-flavored anything, but was terrified of triggering Aisha’s anaphylaxis. Reese’s were my favorite and I would gorge myself on the Halloween candy left in the staff lounge, then brush my teeth five times, use mouthwash, and wash my hands and arms with the solemnity of a surgeon before coming home. 

“I am not Aisha, I am Ada.” I open my eyes. For a moment I had forgotten about everything. For a moment I’d thought the cancer, the death, the damn robot was all some horrible dream. But it isn’t. 

“You can’t use that name,” I say. Ada was supposed to be the name of our daughter. Our daughter was the source of our most bitter arguments. Aisha, the recycler, argued that it was selfish to have our own children when we could adopt. She, after all, had been adopted by two kindly septuagenarians who had since passed on. I had been surprised at my hypocritical longing, for all my worries about overpopulation. But love had changed me. I believed that the world needed more of Aisha.

She relented to the pressure on several conditions. First: the child would be named for her hero Ada Lovelace, the mother of artificial intelligence. Second: she grudgingly consented to giving her eggs (the craving for little Aishas being, after all, the driver for the process) but it was decided that I would carry the embryo/ baby to term. Third and most importantly, the baby would be taught computer languages from the start. Plenty of babies picked up multiple verbal languages. Aisha wanted E++ to be just as much of the baby’s prose as anything else. She was excited. She thought that if only she had started her career earlier, she could have accomplished more.  

“Aisha made me to take care of you.”

It is too much. I can’t live one more second without her. It is time to end this. I run to the bathroom. Aisha’s opioids and sleeping pills should be under the sink. My hands shake as I pop off the lid of the oxycontin. Inside are brown, orange and yellow ovules. Not pills but fucking Reese’s Pieces. I rip open every bottle in the cabinet, even the measly Tylenol. All of them full of candy. I fling the bottles across the bathroom. 

Some of the candy hits the Ewok’s fur.

“What did you do?” I scream. 

Its neck makes a mechanical noise as it swivels to look into my eyes. “Honey bunny, I cannot let you hurt yourself.” 

It is Aisha’s voice but a robot’s syntax. I run into the kitchen. The wooden knife holder on the counter is full of spoons.

I slump down the wall to the floor. 

The Ewok moves swiftly to attack, and I let it. I don’t care what happens to my body. But instead of pain I feel its arms wrap around me: the fluff of its covering cannot mask the hard metal beneath. It is more a clamp than a hug. I miss Aisha’s body with my whole being. I miss holding her, I miss the warm strong body she had and how she always hugged like she meant it.  I cry and cry.  Because I will never be held like that again. Because I hate her parting gift. Because I still want to kill myself and now I know I am letting her down. 

“Honey bunny is unhappy.” 

Aisha had usually abbreviated honey bunny to HB. Why hadn’t she programmed the damned robot to say HB? I decide I don’t need pills or knives to kill myself. I will just bang my head against the wall. I try to pry the arms off my body but they hold fast. I am trapped. 

“Turn off,” I say. 

“I do not understand,” the robot says. 

“Turn off,” I scream. 

“Honey bunny does not like Ada?” 

“You’re not a real baby.”  

“Real baby. Honey bunny wants a real baby.” 

I feel a poke in my skin. Then nothing.

Sunshine and coconuts. 

Aisha’s chemo sessions took hours: she was stuck in a chair with poison slowly dripping into a tortured vein in her arm. I was with her for every session. I downloaded all twenty Star Wars movies on my iPad so that we could watch the series that she cherished from her childhood. I found them all corny, but I for once managed to keep my opinion to myself. When we watched the Ewok dance party scene at the end of Return of the Jedi I told her, “We’ll party just as hard when you beat this thing.” She agreed, basically promising to get better. Liar.  

She used to wear her hair in box braids that fell onto her shoulders. The chemo made her lose whole clumps of braids at time. After a week she shaved it all off. I took her to the best Yelp-rated-wigmaker in Seattle. Laughing, she chose a curly brown wig. “It matches my inner beast,” she said. I missed her braids. I stowed her sleep scarf away in my bureau so that I could hold onto her scent. Chemo had changed her fragrance from coconuts and sunshine to something more like plastic. 

The hair scarf is tied around my eyes. I try to push it off, but my arms are tied down. I try to kick, but my legs are stuck too. 

Furry paws remove the scarf from my eyes. 

“Honey bunny is awake. How do you feel?” the Ewok says, its big bovine eyes looking down into my face.  

I feel a throbbing ache deep inside of me, like the worst period cramps ever. My hands and ankles are attached to the bed post with the fuzzy handcuffs Aisha had bought at the beginning of our relationship, back when we thought we had enough time for kink. “What did you do?” I stammer. My mouth feels like it is full of cotton. 

“Honey bunny, I cannot let you hurt yourself. Honey bunny, you need to live. You now have real baby. Real baby will make you want to live.”

And suddenly, stupidly, I feel hope. I have just been raped by a robot. I have been impregnated without consent. And all I can think is, “Is it hers?” 

“Aisha is baby mother and donor 110507 is baby father.” 

“But the doctor said she did not have any eggs.” 

“She saw different doctor. Second opinion.” 

I lie back on the pillow, and squeeze my eyes against the coming tears. I had been so eager to trash my life. But maybe, my life could be recycled. It’s what Aisha would have wanted. 

“Will honey bunny eat stew now?” 

Lauren Allen

Lauren Allen is afraid of most things but does them anyway. At times this is foolish. She used to climb, but then a mountain broke her foot. Now she swims with jellyfish and teaches high school science. You decide which is more scary. See more at LaurenAllenStoryteller.com