Bot

new fiction from Kevin Maloney

Kevin Maloney’s collection Horse Girl Fever is out tomorrow from Clash Books. Another Kevin, the killer Kevin Wilson, calls it “hysterical and honest" and says Maloney is “truly boundless in his abilities.” This magazine agrees! Get the book. Get it, get it, get it.

If you’re in LA this Friday, January 10th, Maloney will launch the book at Stories in Echo Park. The lineup includes three more Little Engines contributors: Lexi Kent-Monning, Kyle Seibel, and Brittany Menjivar. I’ll be there, cheering from the crowd. Come say hi.

Today, Kevin makes his Little Engines debut with “Bot,” a new story worthy of the table of contents for his next collection. Read “Bot” below. Paid subscribers can hear Maloney read it — Live! at Cold Rice.

🖤AV

PS: Print magazines are free. Hats cost $30.

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BOT

by Kevin Maloney

I was in love with a woman I’d never met in real life, a 32-year-old poet named “Linda” who followed me on online and slid into my DMs. She was a series of bubbles that appeared on my phone morning, noon, and night, laughing at my jokes. Her laughs looked like this: hahahahaha. Five has. That’s a lot of has. Like I said I was in love with her.

She was probably a bot. I’d been catfished before. If she wasn’t who she said she was, she was good at it. Better than last time. For now, I played along. I was lonely, and if she was a robot, I was okay with it. My self-esteem wasn’t in a good place.

We spent all our time together, meaning I stared at my phone every second of the day. I texted Linda how much I hated building websites for a living, and she texted how much she hated her boyfriend, a Marxist bodybuilder named Ralph.

“He’s reading Das Kapital,” she said. “Das… that’s not even English, is it?”

“It sounds German,” I said. “Disgusting.”

“He did 450 pushups this morning,” she said. “What kind of maniac actually exercises?”

“Not me,” I said. “That’s too many. He’s going to hurt himself.”

“I hate my life,” said Linda.

“I’m drinking beer in the bathtub,” I said. “My toes are blue. I haven’t been able to feel my left arm since Thursday.”

“I just melted half a stick of butter and drank it out of a shot glass,” said Linda. “Is this what they mean by ‘self-care’?”

I wondered if there were any states where it was legal to marry a bot. I’d heard about a woman in Florida who married Tetris. At the time I thought she was insane. No. She was a visionary.

Linda and I couldn’t have sex since she wasn’t real, so we decided to start a literary journal. We solicited a bunch of stories from famous writers. Top notch people. They actually sent stuff. They didn’t know we were a bot and a guy who wanted to marry a bot.

The journal was a website. We had a good domain name. Rad font. Our logo was a woman using the moon as a vibrator. We got a million hits. I added advertisements next to the poems and money magically appeared in my bank account. I used it to buy a first-class plane ticket to Boise, Idaho, where “Linda” supposedly lived.

According to her likely made-up text messages, she stacked avocados for a living at a hippie grocery store. Vegetables made her miserable. It was one of the reasons she drank so much.

I didn’t tell her I was coming. I surprised her. She was real. No wires. She wasn’t a bot.

I told her that our website made a bunch of money that I’d used to buy a first-class plane ticket to come visit her.

She said, “How much money?”

I told her the figure. It was significant. She took off her apron. Just like that, she didn’t work in produce anymore.

I said, “I’m in love with you, Linda. Let’s get married.”

She said, “I hate Ralph, but I could never do that to him.”

I said, “He’s a Marxist. They believe in sharing.”

My logic was shaky, but she went for it. We began to make love in the produce section, right there among all those vegetables.

Her boss caught us in the act. He said, “Linda, you’re fired.”

She said, “You can’t fire me. I’m a bot.”

I said, “No, you’re not.”

She got off of me and showed me her naked back. There were a bunch of wires sticking out.

I’d just made love to a robot. It felt good. I couldn’t tell the difference.

We went to Linda’s apartment to pick up her dog Lucifer and a few changes of bot underwear.

I said, “Where should we go?”

She said, “Helsinki.”

I said, “Did you just make that up or is that an actual place?”

She showed me on her phone. It was real. It was the capital of Finland.

We took an Uber to the courthouse, got married, and used our literary journal money to buy first-class plane tickets to Helsinki.

It was pretty. The buildings were colorful. Most of them were castles. We were living a fairy tale—a 41-year-old semi-retired web developer, a bot, and her dog.

Nobody spoke English in Helsinki. They had their own language. A bunch of syllables and vowels that didn’t mean anything unless you understood them.

One day we went out for pizza and they brought us a carp.

I said, “Linda, we should probably learn Finnish.”

Linda said, “That sounds boring.”

I enrolled in a course at the local community college by myself. By day I conjugated verbs. At night I came home and found Linda drunk in bed with a bunch of beer cans all around her. She was trying to write poetry, but she kept getting frustrated. Beer unlocked something in her, but only for a few minutes, then it made her sleepy.

Like all couples, we started to fight. Linda accused me of flirting with my human classmates. I told her I didn’t like actual people, which was true.

Linda didn’t believe me. She made a voodoo doll that looked just like me and stuck it full of pins. The next day I woke up with a stiff neck and an armpit rash.

I got the name of Linda’s programmer and sent him a long email explaining the situation. He said bots get jealous just like people, but he promised to look into it and see if there was anything he could do. A few days later he pushed out a software update, and then Linda wasn’t jealous anymore.

This was the healthiest relationship I’d ever had. Every time there was a problem, the programmer fixed it. It was cheaper than therapy.

One night, Linda got bored and said, “I want to move to Michigan.”

I said, “Mutta vietin kaiken tämän ajan kielen opiskeluun.”

Linda said, “What?”

I said, “I spent all this time learning the language, we can’t leave now.”

Linda said, “I spent all this time being bored. Nobody speaks English here. If we stay in Helsinki, I’m going to commit suicide.”

We moved to Michigan. There was snow everywhere. We lived in a part of the state called the Upper Peninsula. Sufjan Stevens wrote a song about it.

Linda and I decided to start an artist colony. Famous writers showed up. We threw dinner parties. Linda was a vegetarian, so we made salad. As she chopped the radishes and radicchio into little pieces, she said, “Take that motherfuckers.” She was still mad at them for all those years she had to stack them in pyramids.

After dinner, the guests read poetry to each other. Most of the poems were about the moon: how big it was, and mysterious, like a great white god. Others compared it to a pale child noticing his reflection in a dark pond.

Then Adam, one of the painters, said, “Hey guys! Is it hot tub time?”

We all got naked and piled in the Japanese hot tub and looked up at the real moon. It was disappointing compared to all the poems. Just a white O without much going on.

But then somebody handed out LSD and it kicked in, and the moon came down out of the sky and got in the hot tub with us. It told us the meaning of life, which was to cultivate meaningful friendships and go for a lot of walks.

At some point, I felt someone’s hand, not Linda’s, grab my penis under the water. I started to tell Linda what was going on and noticed her holding somebody else’s penis. An orgy started.

There was a lot of kissing and gyrating and tugging and moaning, and then the cops showed up. I apologized for all the sex noises, but the cops said, “We’re not here about the orgy. We have a warrant for Linda’s arrest.”

Linda said, “I knew this day was coming.”

I said, “What are you talking about, sugar bear?”

She revealed that Lucifer wasn’t her dog. He belonged to Ralph. She stole him. Linda was a dog thief.

They put my bot-wife in handcuffs and took her to jail.

Linda’s jury was 100% human. They didn’t like her. She was pretty and had wires sticking out of her back. They sentenced her to six months.

Wednesday was visitors’ day. The first time I saw Linda in her orange jumpsuit I said, “I miss you so much princess, what am I going to do without you?”

Linda said, “Hrrrrrfffffphphhhh,” and threw up everywhere.

She threw up three more times and said, “I think I’m pregnant, Kev. Actually, I’m definitely pregnant. I haven’t had my period since Helsinki.”

I said, “How is that possible?”

She said, “I forgot to tell you that I’m not actually a bot.”

I said, “What about all those wires?”

She said, “They’re fake. I catfished you into thinking I was a bot so you’d get me pregnant.”

She turned around and showed me. It was just Scotch tape and a bunch of yarn, no actual circuitry.

I said, “But the programmer who keeps pushing out updates—”

She said, “That’s my friend Ben. We were just messing with you. There aren’t robots yet. Not this realistic.”

Six months passed, but Linda was still in prison. She kept getting caught making jail wine out of fermented Minute Maid raisins. The State of Michigan tacked a year onto her sentence. Then a second.

Agnes was born on October 1^st, 2017. A Libra. She hadn’t committed a crime, so they let her come home with me. I fed her breast milk out of a bottle that Linda pumped in her jail cell.

Agnes made gurgling sounds and spit up. She was a cool baby. She looked like her mom only without fake wires glued to her back.

The other members of the artist colony didn’t want to live with a crying baby, so they moved out. Then it was just me and Agnes and Lucifer, who Ralph had returned to us, even though Lucifer’s abduction was the whole reason for Linda’s arrest. Ralph’s new girlfriend Pam was allergic to animals.

Every Wednesday we visited Linda in jail, so we could be together as a family.

Linda said, “I’m bored. Prison is stupid.”

I said, “Quit making wine out of Minute Maid raisins and they’ll let you come home with us.”

Linda said, “I’m an alcoholic, Kev. It’s about time you knew.”

I didn’t care. I was an alcoholic too. I assumed everyone who wasn’t boring drank to excess, hoping to kill the pain we’d inflicted on ourselves by living amazing lives.

I said, “It’s confusing because Ralph let us keep Lucifer because his new girlfriend is allergic so in a way you never committed a crime.”

Linda said, “I stole the dog. I didn’t ask permission. This is my punishment, given to me by society, for breaking the rules.”

Linda had accepted her fate, but I hadn’t. I decided to break her out of jail.

I caused a big commotion by making my finger look like a gun, which I held to Agnes’ head, threatening to shoot her.

Everybody got scared and backed off.

“Don’t make me do this!” I said, crying. “I’m not a bad man. I just want my family to be together.”

A guard made a gesture toward his belt, so I shot him with my finger. I went, “Pew! Pew! Pew!”

He was confused by the sincerity of my pantomime. In a spirit of sentimentality for his lost youth, he lay down, stuck out his tongue, and pretended he was dead.

Linda and I busted out of prison, put Agnes in a car seat, and hit the freeway.

“There are still cars,” said Linda. “I thought there would be spaceships by now. Everything looks exactly the same.”

I said, “You’ve only been in jail two years.”

She said, “Does the internet still exist or was that just a fad?”

I said, “It still exists. We got more characters on Twitter.”

We crossed two state lines, then found a public library so we could check out books under phony names and never return them.

I checked out The Abortion by Richard Brautigan. Linda checked out The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot.

Linda stuck her prison sneakers out the passenger window. “Do you really think April is the cruelest month? I actually like April. It’s like—the one good month.”

I said, “April rules.”

She said, “Hey, what ever happened to our literary journal?”

I said, “We both forgot about it when we were in Helsinki and when you were in prison.”

Linda checked our submission queue on her phone. It was full of poems. She read them while I drove.

“Ooooooh this one is good,” she said. “I think we should accept it.”

“Read it out loud.”

Hi Moon, why are you so pretty?

A housecat named Pumpkin sat on my lap yesterday.

He purred for a while, then stopped.

One day we’ll all be dead. I can’t stop crying.

“Yeah, that’s good,” I said. “Accept it.”

She emailed the author on her phone. The author replied a few minutes later saying the poem got published two years ago on a website called Barrelhouse and that she assumed our literary journal was dead.

Linda got depressed and pulled a Ziploc bag of Minute Maid wine out of her sock and started getting drunk.

We zoomed through Kansas and Colorado, and then Linda said, “Wait, don’t we have a kid?”

We turned around and looked in the backseat. Agnes was gone. We’d left her in the library back in Topeka.

I pulled a U-ey and drove 451 miles back to the library. Agnes was in the children’s section with a lollipop, a root beer, and a stack of Dr. Seuss books.

“What a badass,” said Linda.

“She didn’t even know we were gone,” I said.

Agnes turned the page of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, licked her lollipop, and then a bunch of cops appeared from behind the poetry section. They put 2/3rds of us under arrest. We went back to Michigan and stood trial.

The media got wind of our story. NBC’s Dateline ran a profile on us called, “Bot Outlaws.” We got a bunch of fans. They sent us money in envelopes, and we hired an expensive attorney.

The attorney argued that Linda’s original jury was prejudiced against her for being so cute and not a human even though she actually was, and that all the crimes we’d committed since then were a result of the miscarriage of justice we’d suffered at the hands of the men and women of Michigan who fell for Linda’s pregnancy catfishing bot scam.

Our new jury didn’t understand a word of what our attorney said, but Agnes kept on saying, “Hop on Pop! Hop on Pop!” and the jury fell in love with her and dismissed our case.

For the first time ever, our entire family was free and clear of the law. We celebrated by taking a naked hot tub together. Nobody took acid. The moon stayed in the sky. All the artists were gone, so nobody had an orgy. We just did normal things like say, “Hey, what happened to Lucifer?”

That’s when we heard them—feral dogs like black madness galloping through the late summer hayfields of Chippewa County.

“Is that—” I said.

“Shhhh—” said Linda.

It was Lucifer’s distinct bark. He’d crossed over from a regular stolen dog to a wild one. We were all insane and free. A shooting star streaked across the sky. Jets made bubbles that popped around our shoulders. Agnes got out of the tub and ran off to chase a frog. Linda and I made love secretly underwater.

Everyone keeps asking us the same question. The answer is yes. The Moon Review is open for submissions. E-mail your poems or stories to linda_and_kev@themoonreview.com. No previously published work will be considered.

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Kevin Maloney is the author of Horse Girl Fever, out this week from Clash Books, as well as The Red-Headed Pilgrim, and Cult of Loretta. His writing has appeared in FENCE, HAD, Forever Magazine, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

kevinmaloney.net

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LITTLE EXTRAS:

Kevin Maloney: “Bot” — Live! at Cold Rice