Summary: by Alex Wilson Read by Nathaniel Lee Links for this episode: Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our sortable Wikipedia page About the Author… from the author’s website: Alex Wilson writes fiction and comics in Carrboro, NC. His comic with Silvio dB The Time of Reflection won the Eagle Award in 2012. His work has appeared/will appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Rambler, LCRW, Weird Tales, The Florida Review, Futurismic, Outlaw Territory II (Image Comics), ChiZine, Pif, and Dragon. Locus Magazine has called him a “promising new writer,” and Publishers Weekly also has nice things to say. About the Narrator… Nathaniel Lee is Escape Pod’s assistant editor and sometime contributor. His writing can be found at various online venues, including Daily Science Fiction, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and all of the EA podcasts. He lives somewhat unwillingly in North Carolina with his wife and son and their obligatory authorial cats. Vestigial Girl By Alex Wilson The cartoon butterflies were sleeping along the pushlight nursery wallpaper as Charlene fumbled with her cradle’s locking mechanism, using fingers too large and uncoordinated for anything so practical. She blinked away the fuzziness of the low light–clearing her eyes for less than a second–and fought against the calming scent of lavender wafting up through her mattress. She flexed the monster in her throat. She didn’t love the feeling, but would miss such control over at least this one part of her body. She heard muffled voices in the next room, beyond the transparent gate of her cradle, beyond the sleeping butterflies. Her fathers were fighting again, and they’d forgotten to activate the night muffler to hide the sounds. This was a good thing, this night. Of course they usually didn’t check on her again after nine o’clock, but it usually wasn’t so important that she hear them coming if they did. Six months ago, Charlene had averaged three hours, forty-four minutes to open her cradlelock on any given evening; tonight it took her only forty-seven minutes. She wasn’t ready to celebrate that her physical development might finally, slowly be catching up with that of her mind. She wasn’t sure what that meant yet. She had an idea that it wasn’t entirely good news. Again, she flexed the monster. She was four years old, and this limited mastery of her throat was still her only material proficiency. The lock clicked. The cradle gate swung gently open. The voices in the next room became louder and clearer. “Calm down, Gary. There’s still hope.” “Think you’ll still say that after we’ve been changing diapers another twenty years?” Daddy Oliver was calling Daddy Gary by his given name. That meant he was upset. When they weren’t upset, they called each other Chum or Babe, terms of affection rather than identity. She’d figured out all this on her own, from watching, from listening, from reading. She understood that degrees of isolation and socialization weren’t the only indicators of potential, and sometimes her fathers did, too. But could observation, without interaction, adequately prepare her for life? Could she defeat the monster entirely on her own? By eighteen months–mostly from whispers and entertainment screens and books her fathers left active where she could see them–Charlene had identified a few of the big ways she wasn’t like others her age. She was smarter and could better keep her outward displays of emotion in check. But, other than her relationship to the monster and a small amount of control over the power and timing of her breath exhalations, she was well behind her peers physically, as though her inner and outer development were incapable of progressing at the same time. “. . . doesn’t make h[...]
