Pretty (from the Munich Tales)

PRETTY
By Michael Kroetch

She had built herself up out of spare parts, old things she´d found around in the junkyard or on the street. Nothing was original. She had a man´s voice that came from a 1950´s educational movie designed to teach school children the proper way to dance. Her cheeks were stolen off a billboard that once featured a tough cowboy smoking a long thin cigarette. Her ankles had been a boxer´s. Nobody famous, unfortunately—not that she cared. The whole thing of who she was wasn´t supposed to last or even impress—it was just the getting by that counted, the getting through another day somehow. The war had given her some of her toes in the form of bullet casings. She liked them, how they jingled a little when she walked. Because her breasts had been replaced with hubcaps and her vagina with a Hoover vacuum engine, she wasn´t really sure she should be calling herself a “her” anymore. But she did anyway. It was more out of habit than some kind of political statement. Her belief in politics had been lost long before her teeth. She poked at the silicone microchips which now passed as her teeth. They needed cleaning. But then, in her world, what didn´t? Everything that wasn´t dirty or falling apart was already dead and sealed up waiting for Armageddon to roll around so it could unthawed and given a second chance. Personally she didn´t want another roll of those dice. She´d landed in this slim slice of history and was making do and getting by. Not well, maybe, compared to the uber-rich who came by her place every once in awhile on one of their sightseeing excursions, but not as bad as the scabrous unmentionables who still tried to have jobs and keep the military machinery up and running. Having replaced all semblance of the “her” that had once been human, she no longer qualified as being able to fight and also was not really detectable by their recruitment equipment. To their machines she no longer read as a biological entity and appeared more like a mobilized advertisement out harvesting data—more like what they themselves were, if the truth be told. But truth was another of those old conventions she'd jettisoned long before giving up her teeth. Truth was whatever it needed to be for those who could afford it. And, simply put, she couldn´t. Not that she minded. Her world was not about victory, honor, or honesty. It was about trying to keep her body, such as it was, together and functioning enough, just enough to get through to the next day. There wasn´t going to be another generation after her. She knew that much. She felt lucky to even be able to say there was going to be another day. She smiled at the thought of anyone wanting a child, given the what of the way things were. She smiled and then did a little bit of a jig, her bullet casing toes jingling along in an almost dainty and pretty way as she did.