My beloved cadmium yellow,
the golden wheel, has looked after me
ever since I was very young.

It was certainly by his hand that I, as a newborn,
barely viable, was taken from my mother,
cut open and sewn up and placed into
the tender embrace of a machine.

It was not the rusty old machine that I would come to know later, but a cocoon of glass and steel. The lights above it would hum and flicker. Countless wires dug into my body. Flesh enveloping plastic enveloping air.

As I got a little older I would start to hear his voice.

On the way home from school, the sunset would let his long shadows on the ground, sprawling like spilled ink and entangling with my own, and on my bedroom walls they would appear in the form of animals, black shapes lurking in between the pastel designs of the wallpaper.

When my family had to
put down our cows and pigs,
I cried and cried.
But my beloved,
the voice in the dark,
said he'd always be with me.


The voice in the dark,
wiser than me as always,
talked me through it.

He told me about the four
configurations of the uncanny valley.

There are people that look like people.

There are people that look like monsters.

There are monsters that look like monsters.

There are monsters that look like people.

If I am so uncanny, so horrid,
then perhaps I could put them at ease
by making my outsides match my insides.

He tells me to pick up something sharp and peel off my face.