Wife #11 arrives for her shift, struggling out of the rideshare with a bulky chrysalis of luggage.
In photos, the house had been impressive. In person, breathtaking. A citadel of concrete and glass. Unlike anything back home.
Amika waits, tugging her garments into place, as the rideshare rumbles down the road. White kimono, as requested. Hefting her bag, the bride trundles up the path, steps small, wobbling. This is her first conjugal subscription gig.
Amika drags her luggage onto the porch herself. The security sensor blinks as she crosses into the structure’s shadow, pings softly deep inside the house.
The doors glide apart, and silver light blinds her as sunlight shimmies off the smooth carapace of an android’s chest-plate.
“Hello, Mrs. Ferrara, welcome home.” She reaches quickly for her bag, but the android is quicker. “Please, allow me.” His voice is smooth, strung to a faint New Zealand twang. He stands on the portico, gripping all her worldly possessions with one hand, gently iridescent eyes peering back at her, and Amika realizes he’s waiting for her to step inside.
She flutters into her new home.
Cool and cavernous as an ice-cave, the house rises around her like the foyer of a modern art museum. White marble floors veined in gold. The foyer’s slanted roof all of tinted glass. A pool, the shape and color of a blueberry jellybean, sits tucked between synthetic lawns.
And there he stands, studying her with dark, deep-set eyes.
Alfonso Ferrara, her husband.
Wrinkles crowd the corners of his mouth, sunspots pepper a receding hairline, his middle rounder than his photos.
Amika presses a smile to her lips. “Hello, Alfonso.”
“Here she is at last.” He steps forward, shakes her hand. His grip is gentle. A sliver of tension melts from her spine. “Let me give you the tour.”
He turns, touches a hand to the small of her back, and leads her left of the foyer, down a long corridor. Glass forms the right wall, gazing out on a shady garden where Neptune rises from the fountain atop writhing beasts, their fronts rearing horses, their bottom halves like mermaids. On the left wall, a row of paintings, identical in shape, dress the slate.
They continue, the android trailing behind them with her luggage, a red light flashing behind its brown eyes.
“My last wife.” Alfonso straightens the first frame with one fingertip, and gazes at its occupant. A pretty black woman with a wide smile, dimpled cheeks.
Alfonso moves on. “Too cheerful. Always smiling.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
She can feel his shrug. “Only in the sense that it rings somehow… false.”
“Ah.”
The next portrait reveals a stunning white woman, hair bubblegum pink and mischief dancing behind the eyes. The woman in the next portrait is equally as pretty, and so too, is the next.
Previous wives. No Asian women.
Not yet.
Amika swallows. Her subscription is only for two years, that being her husband’s preferred term of service. A little less than average, but still, more than enough time to make a good impression. She’s only eighteen, and this is her ticket into the States. She’s got at least twelve good years ahead of her as a rental bride. Fifteen, if she takes good care of herself.
They’re almost to the end of the corridor before Alfonso’s monologue slips to the forefront of her mind.
“I have arranged interviews for you. One for a receptionist position at my consulting firm. You can work that one Monday through Wednesday. Thursday through Saturday, there’s a part time job available as a caretaker at my mother’s hospice. You should be able to do both with little trouble and on Sundays, do a little cleaning up around the house and prep meals for the week.”
“You… want me to work two jobs?”
He frowns. Says slowly, “You are in America. The rent does not pay itself.”
She freezes beside the portrait of a regal woman in a hijab. “You don’t own this house?”
He pauses in the threshold of a wide door. The android catches up, stands patiently behind Amika. Its red light flickers across the faces of the women on the wall.
“I’m no trust fund baby. I work for what I have.” Alfonso steps into the bedroom. “And so will you.”
Now, for the first time, Amika understands her mother. A tingle that numbs her lungs. Mrs. Furukawa left Lithuania chasing dreams of cherry blossoms and ancient, holy-foxed shrines. Amika was here to claim her share of amber fields of grain, and white men with money.
And she’d thought her mother a fool.
Amika follows her husband into the bedroom, the android shadowing her soundless steps.
A four-poster bed dominates minimalist elegance, but the display is no longer impressive.
“God damn it, not again.”
Amika turns. Beside the android, her husband fishes plastic cards out of a leather wallet, and flashes them, one by one, to the dull-red senser swiping left to right across the android’s eyes. It’s frozen in place, her bag clenched in its titanium fist.
“Please,” intones the android in a flat, factory voice, “complete payment to renew service.” Plastic cards flutter to the floor. “Your bill is overdue.” Alfonso curses, thrusting another card in front of the android’s indifferent gaze. “Please—”
“Damn it!” Alfonso twists, reels, smashes a fist into the android’s face. Amika screams. “I bought the damn thing, but it stops working if I don’t pay a fucking subscription.” Steel strikes marble with a skirling shriek. A glass eye pops from the collapsed frame, rolls across the marble, and taps Amika’s foot. The red light blinks up at her from behind an iris of mahogany brown.
Amika sits down at the edge of the bed. Zippers herself up shut and shrinks inside, where everything she finds is her own.
Sarah Cline lives in San Diego, California. Her writing has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, The Horror Tree, and The Chilling Pen, among other fine publications.
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