2011 - Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science

Robots and War Paint
Rachel Banka
Third Place – Short Story Competition
36
The robot was at least fifty feet tall and
over 200 trillion pounds heavy. The
enormous thing sat on peg legs and corporategrade
“carpet” and towered over Lorie with
a poor, electronic imitation of a soul.
“Beep, beep.” This manufactured monster, with
its red war paint scratched and peeled back to reveal
the metallic silver skin lurking beneath, demanded
something from the tow headed six-year-old with
the bright eyes and uncombed curls. Its glass front
glinted under the naked light bulb of the cinderblock
room, but little Lorie could still see the jumble
of captives peering at her behind the glare. Red,
yellow, brown, green – none had been spared from
the massacre.
“Beep, beep.” And now the living cage
demanded a dollar.
But dollar or not, the
only thing that penetrated
the hazy mind of the
monster’s potential next
victim was that “This was
not fair!” Lorie hadn’t
been the one who decided
that she needed to get out of bed early! She hadn’t
been the one who decided that she needed to spend
her Wednesday off from school at Work! But “Rules
is rules,” as Mamma always said, and today the
stupid rule was that Lorie got to skip a day of first
grade only if she went to Work with Mamma.
So eventually the sleepy school-skipper had
settled upon a pair of polka-dotted socks to wear,
pretended to brush her hair, actually brushed her
teeth (because Best Friend Jen said that anyone who
didn’t brush their teeth was Gross), and walked hand
in hand with Mamma through the glass doors of a
million and two story building. And just as she had
expected, of course, Work was not that much better
than school. Work had the exact same white lights
that made you blink extra, the exact same tolerance
for noise as the school’s library, and the exact same
so-called food as the school’s cafe-a-gym-a-torium.
But worse yet, when Lorie had told Mamma she was
still hungry, Mamma sent her to a room where she
found a hideous robot-monster!
“Beep. Beep.”
***
“Yes, hello?... This is she speaking, may I as —
… Bob! No! Of course she’s with me; it’s South Bay’s
Career Day, remember?...
[
Was the concrete room
]
getting smaller? Or was
Lorie getting bigger?
What?!... No, I… Bob,
just sign the papers. And
stop worrying about what
I’m doing with our child,
ok?! I don’t have time to
deal with this… Bob!..
Fine! Same goes for you!”
Click. “Jerk.”
Deborah L. Jamison was an Accounts Manager
at L.T. Huey Firm and considered herself a woman
on the wrong side of thirty. Deborah, or “Deb”
as she preferred to be called, knew that her oncesmooth
face now bore the marks of thirty-five years,
a dead-beat (Almost)-Ex-Husband, a bored six-yearold
somewhere in the building, and enough stress
to last a lifetime. Her main accessories were a thin
Mercedes, the Best or Nothing
Josh Stone
2nd Place—Drawing Competition
Graphite