WINNER, Spring 2025
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
BY MAURA STANTON
Stella and I were standing by the food table that had been set up in our old painting studio, a cement-floored room that would soon be redone with walls of screens and learning pods. No more crappy heavy-duty steel easels, no more paint-spattered benches, no more ass-busting folding chairs, no dirty sink full of glass jars and plastic lids and ancient paint-stiff brushes. Stella was trying not to look downcast in front of our little crowd of well-wishers, mainly the animation teachers who feared they’d be axed next, and a few sympathetic administrators. She’d been teaching here longer than me. She picked up a brownie.
A handsome administrator with thick hair, wearing grey slacks and a red polo shirt, came over to the table.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “The Richardsons appreciate it.”
“We are the Richardsons,” I said.
“How is that?” he said. “Aren’t they the old fatties standing over there?” He pointed to Bev and Nathan, neighbors of ours whom we’d invited to the party.
Stella shook her head. “Nope. The Richardsons are the old fatties standing right here.” She picked up the plate of brownies. “Would you like a doughnut?” she asked. The man took one. “Thank you,” he said. “I thought they were brownies.”
“You’re a robot, aren’t you?” Stella said. She had a bold look on her face. There was nothing to lose now. The worst had happened.
The man looked at Stella, then at the brownie in his hand. “I’m an android, yes. I’m the third junior Vice-President for the second Under Provost of ArtTech. Call me Chad Smith. But how did you know?”
“Just a hunch,” Stella said. And I noticed a thoughtful look on her face as she watched the android. Would he eat the brownie (it would go down into his food bag) or put it back on the plate? Finally, Chad Smith must have calculated that since Stella already knew he wasn’t human, he didn’t have to masticate the item in question. He placed the brownie back on the plate. I could see the pinch marks from his fingers on the side. A woman on the far side of the table made a face at the damaged brownie.
“You’re a double chip dipper too, aren’t you?” Stella said.
“What?” Chad Smith asked, tilting his head and smiling.
“Never mind,” Stella said. But her eyes were squinted in a way that told me she had come up with an idea.
My wife and I had both lost our jobs at ArtTech. We were no longer needed to teach oil painting classes. Students who signed up for what used to be our classes could download hundreds of videos, complete the assignments at home, and send samples of their completed retro work to some committee in Los Angeles or New York. Or—and this was encouraged—they could sign up for the new computer class, Painting with Algorithms, and learn to create AI paintings that could be printed onto canvas or linen boards. It was supposed to be much better for the environment.
The administration, which outnumbered teachers ten to one, claimed to feel bad about losing two experienced artists like us, but, hey, what could they do? On High had spoken. But they threw us a “retirement” party.
Bev and Nathan elbowed their way through the crowd. Nathan had just retired as a non-commercial flight controller, a demanding job where he sat at a screen all day trying to prevent collisions between airdrones, float bikes, and sky scooters using a pulsar-based terrestrial navigation system. He’d been the human supervisor of a team of robots who’d been created with no social skills, and he’d often complained that he had no one to talk to at work. Nowadays I saw him out on his deck with friends or family, angrily waving a beer bottle at the occasional float bike or sky scooter passing illegally below his forty-foot airspace. Bev still worked part-time at a data-mining firm. They were about 20 years older than us.
“So this is where you used to spend your afternoons,” Bev said, grabbing a brownie. “It smells like paint in here.”
“I’ll miss it,” Stella said. She frowned.
“That’s life,” Nathan said. “You work and then you don’t work.”
“I’ll tell you what life is,” Stella said. “I heard this in an old Lena Wertmuller movie. ‘Life is like a ladder in a chicken coop, short and shitty.’”
Nathan laughed, but he shook his bald head. “So, what are you two going to do? Will I be seeing you out on the deck?”
“No way,” Stella said. She looked at me. Here it came. “Ray, I’ve just had a great idea. You and I are going to start a school. A school for robots.”
The Idea Grows
Robots know almost everything, Stella explained as we hashed out her idea in the days that followed, but they often don’t get the social codes. Sometimes they just make fools of themselves, she said, but other times they did real damage when they didn’t understand a joke or a gesture or the look on a real person’s face. Stella proposed that we open a special finishing school for robots. Expensive companion androids were all the rage, but they could also be frustrating and disappointing. Companies liked androids working alongside their human workforce, but friction often occurred over silly things like coffee breaks or the use of slang expressions like “old farts” or whose turn it was to clean the refrigerator. Fleck, our only son, was now working for a biotech firm in Zurich, Switzerland, so why couldn’t we turn the garage, where he used to play his drums, into a classroom?
God knows we needed the money. We were lucky to sell two or three paintings a year. Our combined salaries hadn’t been large, but they had allowed us to buy paints and canvases and brushes whenever we needed them. Now we’d be down to our savings, ArtTech’s small pension, and the government’s LevelPay that everyone gets. But we were art teachers. How could we teach robots?
“Easy,” Stella insisted. “A teacher is a teacher is a teacher. We just show them how to react naturally—like a human—to particular situations. We’ll do a lot of role modeling.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes I don’t even know how to act myself.”
Stella laughed. “Of course you do. Humans are full of nuances, like all the subtle shades of color on a palette. But robots aren’t. They think in black or white. And that’s what we’ll teach the robots—how to be subtle.”
I knew Stella could do it, of course, but when I looked at my pudgy face in the mirror, I wasn’t so sure. The only time I felt like myself was when I had a paintbrush in hand and was standing in front of a canvas—or leaning over the shoulder of a student suggesting a value change or a softer line. The rest of the time I felt like a fake person. I had to force myself to grin and talk heartily whenever Bev and Nathan invited us over to their deck for beer and Mexican food. I didn’t really have any opinions about baseball or international soccer or the chances of the new Mars team making the semi-finals.
Stella Gets To Work
Stella worked up an advertisement for our school, and though I had my inner doubts about the whole thing I was swept up in her enthusiasm as she cleaned up the garage, bought pine siding, arranged for it to be installed, tiled the floor herself, and bought some cheap furniture: chairs, a sofa, a table, etc. She consulted with a couple of faculty members in the Human-Computer Interaction Design Program in the School of Computing and Informatics on campus. They gave her a lot of suggestions for how to proceed and talked about the possibility of setting up a graduate-student internship sometime in the future.
SCHOOL FOR ROBOTS: Classes in Contemporary Etiquette
•Casual Conversation and Manners Office Deportment
•Modern Friendship Sympathy Empathy
•Small, month-long classes (private tuition also possible)
•Faculty dedicated to helping students find their own unique personality
•Take your robot’s personhood to the next level
•A vibrant and supportive community
•Locally managed
Our First Pupil
Our first pupil belonged to the Slaters, an older couple a few blocks away, who had heard about our school because Stella had cleverly posted some flyers at the grocery store where low-techs still liked to shop in person. Their daughter had given them a female-gendered companion robot for Christmas, and they were freaked out. They mostly kept Jacqueline—that’s what they’d named her—turned off and stored in the guestroom. When they turned her on, she looked at them attentively for cues, but they didn’t know how to provide them. So they clammed up and felt self-conscious. They didn’t know what to ask Jacqueline, and she just sat there, waiting for prompts.
“They’re the ones who need training,” Stella said, when Mr. Slater had dropped off the robot for the first afternoon of training. “He grunts a lot, but he doesn’t have any small talk.”
“Hush,” I said. “She’s on.”
We both looked at Jacqueline. She appeared to be a young woman with shoulder length auburn hair wearing a lot of permanent blue eye shadow. She was pretty, but there was a light coating of dust on her face. She was dressed in a frayed factory-issued terry cloth jumpsuit. She was smiling at us.
“Do you understand what’s going on?” Stella asked her.
“The Slater’s are dissatisfied with me. I don’t know why. I respond to all their conversational gambits. But they seldom speak.”
“Right,” Stella said. “We’re going to work on that. You’ve got to be the one to initiate interactions. Take that chair,” Stella said.
Jacqueline grabbed the chair and lifted it up.
Stella laughed. “No, Jacqueline. If we were moving furniture, you’d be right. But in this case, I’m just asking you to sit down.”
Jacqueline replaced the chair and sat down. She leaned slightly forward, her mouth parted, waiting.
Stella said nothing. Jacqueline said nothing.
“Say something, Jacqueline,” Stella said.
Jacqueline opened and shut her mouth. “That is a request that gives me too much choice. I can talk about anything but only if I know what to talk about.”
Stella nodded. “I get it. Okay, here’s the thing. Start with the weather. When the Slaters turn you on and look at you, ask them about the weather.”
Jacqueline nodded. “How’s the weather?”
“It’s raining again.”
Jacqueline blinked. Then she said: “We’ve had 12.34 inches of rain so far this year. That’s 1.43 inches above normal.”
“Very good! Now the Slaters will either say something more about the weather and you can respond, or you can initiate a new topic.”
“What new topic?”
“You second topic will be their health. You say: ‘How are you feeling today Mrs. Slater?’ If she says something like ‘My knee hurts’ you have lots of medical information you can provide her with. But if she just says ‘Fine’ you go on to topic three.”
“What is topic three?”
“That’s what we’re going to work on. We’ll develop a list of topics so that you can spring them on the Slaters one after the other. Do you know anything about them?”
“Not much. They keep me turned off.”
“But they have a daughter, right? She sent you to them.” Jacqueline nodded.
“Next topic: ask them about their daughter. Now, when the Slaters do turn you on, what have you observed in their house?”
And that’s where my Stella hit pay dirt. Jacqueline had a visual record of everything she’d ever seen in the Slaters house, including every item in their guest room closet (old clothes and ancient board games), their framed Monet prints of lily pads, a souvenir boomerang from their Australian cruise, the medicine bottles lined up in their bathroom, the ice cream treats in their freezer, and their bank records (which she’d seen over Mr. Slate’s shoulder when he grumbled over his online banking). Stella helped Jacqueline devise a long list of conversational gambits based on the Slater’s possessions.
“But always start with the weather,” Stella said, when we were nearing the end of the session. “This is the Midwest, after all.”
“How is the weather today?” Jacqueline asked, and she sounded eager to know.
“It’s nice out. And Mr. Slater is just pulling up. We’ll go over some more scenarios tomorrow afternoon.”
Kevin
Our next pupil belonged to a wealthy couple, the Kirbys, who had lost their only son in an avalanche when he was skiing off the trail in Colorado at the age of 19. They’d purchased the top of the line companion robot and named him Kevin, after their son. He looked like their son, too, for they’d provided photographs of the real Kevin to the android firm. He was tall, curly-haired, with a slightly bulbous nose, and tanned muscular arms. He had access to everything his parents knew about the real Kevin—his Spacebook Page, his smart-phone photos, college textbooks, cute sayings from childhood. But he wasn’t Kevin. Kevin had been outgoing, goofy, sentimental, emotional. Things got to him—a dead squirrel in the backyard, a show with a sad ending, an airdrone accident. But this new android Kevin seemed cold and stiff. He was starting to creep them out.
Stella had Kevin sit down. She introduced him to Jacqueline.
“How’s the weather?” Jacqueline asked Kevin. She looked eager to know. “Fifty degrees Fahrenheit, ten degrees Celsius.”
“How are you feeling today Kevin?”
Kevin looked at her. “I don’t feel anything,” he said.
Jacqueline nodded. “I believe that you are also a robot. Is that correct?”
“I am an android,” Kevin said. “I am AI.”
Jacqueline opened her lips and closed them. “I don’t understand the difference between a robot and an android,” she said, looking at Stella.
“Androids are humanized robots,” Stella said. “But not all robots look human. Robot is a more inclusive term. Now go on, talk to Kevin.”
“Okay,” Jacqueline said. But she looked at Stella again. “I cannot continue this conversation because I know nothing about this robot or android called Kevin.”
“Transpose, Jacqueline,” Stella said. “Recall one of your conversational gambits for the Slaters and adapt it for Kevin.”
We both watched Jacqueline. In a moment she nodded. “Kevin, that’s a nice shirt you are wearing.”
Stella and I were both standing behind Jacqueline. She’d gotten it! We high- fived each other.
“Thank you,” Kevin said. “But I wonder why you are still wearing the ugly terry cloth jumpsuit from the factory?”
“Because my purchasers have not given me any other clothing,” Jacqueline said. She was smiling. “But you are wearing nice new things, Kevin.”
“Yes, I look nice,” Kevin said.
Stella and I looked at each other. We had our work cut out for us with Kevin.
Depression
Stella and I had always enjoyed painting together. Stella’s easel was under the skylight and mine was near the sliding glass door. We’d paint together in the morning listening to jazz, and then have lunch. One or the other of us would go off to teach for the afternoon, and then the other would return to the studio for an extended painting session. But those days were gone. Stella wasn’t painting at all. She spent the morning planning lessons or working on publicity for our school.
I kept going out to the studio in the morning. I had a big canvas toned with Van Dyke brown on my easel, but I couldn’t concentrate. I fiddled with my paint tubes. I looked at my old drawings. Sometimes I picked up a brush, but I couldn’t get myself to make a stroke. I missed Stella humming away over in her part of the studio. Once I decided to do a self-portrait in the style of Rembrandt, but when I dragged the pier glass over near my easel, and looked at my sagging cheeks and dull eyes in the mirror, I thought, why bother? Who’d want to look at me? I certainly didn’t want to look at me.
I remembered my grandfather talking about the future he’d envisioned as a kid. Here it was—the domed colony on Mars, the hovercrafts, the cyborgs, undersea bubble curtains, carbon-eating algae, solar cars, a vast planetary zoo of endangered species, improving air quality, decontaminated deserts, shorter wars—but, uncomfortably, the past still existed, too, alongside the future. Here I was, still wearing twentieth-century sweatpants, messing around with oil paint like a cave dweller while others were creating holograms or dazzling laser light shows or fog sculptures. Nathan still chugged beer on his deck and listened to the game like his Dad and Granddad before him. Meanwhile a solar battery yard-cube mowed his grass, a new strain of anti-allergy grass developed in the lab that didn’t make people sneeze every spring. (In fact, my son Flick had once had an internship with the company that developed NoNasoLawn.)
Anyway, I felt irrelevant. Who was going to hang a heavy framed painting in their living room, a painting that never changed, when they could use a nodical to project the weightless illusion of a painting, a new one every day, or every hour, or else they could shake the nodical and the illusion would shimmer and swirl into any design they wished. Jacqueline’s people, the Slaters, still had framed Monet prints that didn’t pixel into Georgia O’Keeffe, but low techs were a dying breed.
So was this the present? Or was it the past? Or the future? Maybe eerie pods from the past had hatched inside the future, allowing primitive stuff to crawl out, like sideburns or barbequed chicken feet or that stupid new war in Eastern Europe. Or maybe we were all still in the past, except that a few pods from the future had floated back through time to offer a tantalizing glimpse of what was to come.
I couldn’t figure it out. I kept walking around the studio, sometimes staring at the big blue morning glory that Stella had left unfinished on her canvas after we were fired, or at the nothing on my own canvas.
I didn’t join Stella in the robot classroom that day. She found me that evening when the pupils left. She made me a gin and tonic.
“You’ve got to accept reality,” she said. “Art as we know it is dead. Now you’re a robot teacher. And I need you to help me, especially with Kevin. He has a lot of potential. You’re a good guy, Ray. Can you pass on some of that good guyness to Kevin?”
Role Playing
Once we had five pupils, Stella decided to try some exercises in conveying emotion similar to ones in an ancient book she’d discovered, An Actor Prepares, by a Russian theater director named Constantin Stanislavski. One exercise involved a lost ring. She made me sit on the sofa looking sad. She told the five robots assembled in the garage that my wedding ring had slipped off my finger while I was swimming. Each robot in turn was to demonstrate how they would comfort me.
Jacqueline as usual went first. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But why didn’t you take off the ring before you jumped in the water?”
I shrugged. Stella shook her head. “Jacqueline, that’s criticism. It’s not comfort.” Jacqueline looked abashed. Stella made a notation. “FX?” she called. FX, a former android soldier who’d been reconditioned to work as a waiter in a fancy restaurant, had no manners. He slammed down plates, poured water glasses over the brim, and criticized diners for not finishing all their food.
“Get over it,” FX said. He looked like he was sneering. “Who the hell cares about your stupid ring?”
Stella shook her head. “No, FX. That’s mean. You must pretend to care. Try again.”
FX shrugged. He made faces. Finally, he lifted up his hands. “I get by without a ring. You can, too.”
Stella sighed. “Kevin,” she said.
Kevin stood up and approached me. “Hey, he’s still wearing the ring!”
“We’re pretending, Kevin,” Stella said. “We’re pretending that he lost his ring when he went swimming.”
“But he’s wearing it!”
“I’ll explain later,” Stella said. “Drizzle, your turn.”
Drizzle was a tall female android who’d been bought second hand to help out as a nanny. Before her face got chipped, she’d been a fashion model. Her purchasers were upset with her because she walked around with a tight smile and paid no attention to the children. She wouldn’t play games with them or respond if they cried.
Drizzle walked sinuously over to the sofa. “Was your ring from Tiffany & Co.?” she asked in a breathy voice.
I shook my head. “It was just a plain gold band. But Stella and I have been married for thirty-two years.”
“Just buy a new one,” she said. “Get a better one with emeralds and sapphires.”
Stella shook her head and made a note. “Boris,” she said.
Boris was a true robot, not an android. He was shaped like a human but not meant to look like one. He had everything in him that the androids had—AI, algorithms, memory—but he was clearly made of titanium and plastic. You could see the coiled colored wires in his transparent head, and if he unbuttoned his shirt, a battery pack was clearly visible inside his chest. His radar eyes were on stalks so he could see like an animal as well as a human. But his purchaser, a rich college kid who had every toy in the world, was upset with him. Boris acted superior to his friends when they came over. He’d observe them playing beer pong or Frisbee toss but he never joined in. He wouldn’t play with the dog. He came across as cold and distant. The college kid wanted us to teach Boris to laugh and relax.
Now Boris approached me. His eyes flashed. His transparent hand, filled with metal bones, reached out for a handshake, but I hesitated. What if he squeezed too hard? Boris lowered the rejected hand. His featureless face was inscrutable. He turned away.
“Okay, that was good, Boris,” Stella said. “You did the right thing. Comfort doesn’t always work. Okay, we’re all going to try this again.”
And we did, for two long hours, until I had so much comfort I was ready to weep.
Knights Of Old
At Stella’s suggestion, I took Kevin for a walk around the neighborhood as an extra tutorial. It was a windy spring day, and I needed a jacket but Kevin didn’t. He watched me zip up.
“It’s fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit, twelve degrees Celsius,” he said. “You feel cold, but I do not.”
“That’s right, Kevin,” I said. “But you could pretend to be cold, imagine being cold.”
“How?”
“You could rub your hands and put on a scarf. Then people would think you were cold, too.” The wind was strong, and it pushed against my face so that I kept my head down as I tried to explain the concept of pretend to Kevin. But it was hard for him to grasp. Things either were or they were not for Kevin. If I had a ring on my finger, how could I not have a ring on my finger? Even when I took off the ring and put it in my pocket, Kevin knew it was there.
I told Kevin about this guy named Don Quixote, an ordinary guy in the sixteenth century who thought he was a knight of old and used to tilt at windmills imagining they were giants. But then I had to explain to Kevin what knights were—guys who went around on horses wearing metal armor, fighting against evil, doing good deeds, and rescuing young women from danger.
“I’d like to do that,” Kevin said. “Could I be a knight?”
“There aren’t any knights today, but you could pretend to be a knight. You could do good deeds and help people and rescue those in danger.”
“Pretend?” Kevin said.
“Pretend,” I said. “Imagine. You don’t have a horse, and you don’t wear armor but you can do the stuff knights do anyway. Get it?”
Kevin nodded. He almost looked thoughtful.
Just then a strong gust blew something down in the yard we were passing. I hurried over. It was a nest. Inside were three unbroken pale blue eggs.
“Oh shit,” I said. I looked up and saw a few wisps of straw in the crook of a branch half-way up the tree. If I’d been younger, I would have climbed the tree and replaced the nest.
“What is it?” Kevin asked.
“This bird’s nest fell down. If we could get it back up there the eggs might still hatch.”
“Is this a good deed?”
“It is,” I said. And I watched while Kevin gently picked up the nest, placed it on top of his head, and holding his head perfectly erect, climbed the tree. When he got close enough, he steadied himself, reached for the nest, and placed it exactly in the spot from where it had fallen.
Analysis
After a month, Stella got out her notes and we went over the progress our students had made. Jacqueline was our favorite. She had developed into a bright, smart, cheerful, friendly android who could talk up a storm, an ideal daughter. I envied the Slaters but I knew she was wasted on them. Kevin had made enormous progress ever since he’d heard about knights and saved the bird’s nest. He’d had learned to keep his facial tear bag full of tap water, and touch the activation button on his face whenever he watched a sad movie with his “parents.” When his “parents” mentioned a tragic news story, he could now purse his lips and sigh. We’d stirred him up even more with emotions from romantic tales of star-crossed lovers, placing Romeo and Juliet and Ivanhoe and The Little Mermaid into his accessible memory.
FX was another success story. Over and over, he’d practiced setting down bowls of water, and now he could do it without sloshing. He could say “How is everything?” in a neutral voice as well as “Can I get you the dessert menu?” And we’d trained him to smile and nod when people didn’t want dessert instead of calling them cheap assholes.
Drizzle could now play catch with a red ball. We’d shown her how to smile at a stuffed bear and cuddle it, and get down on her knees to play with roly-poly toys or wind-up ducks. And Boris had learned to whoop. He could also pry off a beer bottle cap with his teeth, and toss a Frisbee low enough for a dog to catch it.
“It’s wonderful what we’ve done,” Stella said. “I think it’s time for graduation. Let’s throw a party.”
I gave her look. “A party? What for. They are robots, you know. Or androids, if you want to cut it fine.”
“A graduation party will be great publicity for our next class,” Stella said.
Graduation
The weather was perfect, a warm spring day with daffodils. Our backyard was decorated with streamers and balloons. We had food for the human guests set out on a folding table just outside our painting studio, and I’d dragged out the tall table I used for setting up a still life to make the bar. FX was going to be the bartender. We’d invited a few neighbors as well as the families of our students and a few people who were interested in enrolling their robot in our next class.
The Kirbys arrived first with Kevin. They both had old-fashioned tattooed heads, Mr. Kirby’s a snake design, and Mrs. Kirby’s a subtle pattern of green leaves. Both of them were delighted with the progress Kevin had made, and were already spreading the word about our school, they told us. Kevin walked about the yard, and they watched him fondly. One of the daffodils was wilting in the hot sun, and he ran to get a watering can.
After he’d carefully watered the flower, he put the can back and approached me.
“I’m looking for Jacqueline,” he said. “She was going to ask her people for a new outfit for the party. I can’t wait to see her in something pretty.”
“She’s not here yet,” I said. “Oh, here’s Drizzle. Wow, she looks nice.”
Drizzle came around from the front yard in a ruffled dress with a matching sun hat. She was holding hands with two little girls dressed in pink princess dresses. Each wore a sparkling tiara and carried a blue or purple glitter bear. Her purchasers, a well-dressed young couple, both high-level administrators, followed behind. They were dressed up, too, but more conservatively in pale linen pants and loose tops. They beamed at us.
They’d already told us they were getting a lot more work done at home because Drizzle kept the kids entertained—just the way they wanted.
Boris and the college kid soared over the yard on float bikes. The little princesses waved and squealed as the bikes puttered down onto the driveway and the brake wings folded in against the wheels. The college kid gave us a hand gesture, halfway between a high five and a salute, and he and Boris headed straight for the bar, where FX, wearing a white tuxedo, was making our neighbor, Nathan, a gin and tonic. I heard the college kid ask for three beers. Unlike the androids, Boris couldn’t drink, but he could hold onto the college kid’s second and third beers until needed.
I headed over to the bar.
“How’s it going?” I asked the college kid, who was sporting the new, fashionable sideburns and wore a loose, woven seaweed shirt in pale purple.
“Oh, great,” he said. “Boris has gotten interested in my friends. I’ve found out a lot of weird stuff about them that I didn’t know before, thanks to Boris. Good for teasing, maybe a little blackmail.” The kid laughed. “Boris is my bot, aren’t you, bot?”
“I’m your bot, guy,” Boris said. “I’m your bot, bot, bot.”
FX’s boss, the chef who owned Squash Flower, the best restaurant in town, made his way through the crowd and insisted on shaking my hand. He was a heavy, bald man with an acne-scarred face wearing a hemp tunic printed with avocados. “He’s a good worker now. You did wonders.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I may be ready to hire some more robots—I mean, androids. People are always quitting on me. But this guy, he can’t quit, he can only break.” The chef smiled at FX. FX smiled back, as we had taught him to do—smile equals smile. “I will not break,” he said. “What can I get you, Sir?”
“Sir! I love that, I love that word, Sir,” said the chef. “Let’s see. I’ll guess I’ll have a gin and tonic, that seems to be the drink of the day.”
FX fixed him a gin and tonic. He measured the gin, added the ice and a lime slice, and poured in the tonic slowly so it did not fizz over.
“What can I make for you, Mr. Richardson?” he asked me.
“Thanks, nothing now,” I said. “Oh, there’s Jacqueline. I’d better go say hello to her people.”
The Slaters, large humans in baggy pants and tent-like tops, were walking slowly in front of Jacqueline. She was so thin compared to them that she seemed to be walking in their shadow. Everyone else was wearing stylish outfits, but Jacqueline was still dressed in her dirty, tattered terry cloth jumpsuit.
“Hello there,” I said to the Slaters. “How’s it going?”
“She’s very talkative,” Mrs. Slater said. “That’s good, I guess.”
“Sometimes we have to turn her off,” Mr. Slater said. “To get some peace. I don’t like the way she asks me if I’ve taken my pills.”
Stella had come up beside me. “Oh, just ask her not to mention the pills anymore. She’s very responsive.”
Mrs. Slater frowned. “Maybe too responsive. The other day she asked us if we’d get her something new to wear for this party. Now where did she get that idea?”
“In class the others were talking about what they were going to wear.”
“But they’re robots! Who cares what they wear?”
“They care,” Stella said. “They want to make a good impression.”
Mrs. Slater shook her head. She turned to Jacqueline standing right behind her.
“Go get me something to drink,” she said, pointing to the bar. “Lemonade or soda pop.”
Jacqueline immediately walked over in that direction, and I followed her, but Kevin stopped her as she crossed the lawn. He put his hand on her arm. “Jacqueline, you’re still wearing those ugly clothes,” he said.
Jacqueline smiled at him. “My purchasers do not wish me to dress otherwise.”
“That’s wrong,” Kevin said. “You should wear nice clothes like me.” He pressed the tear button on his face. “It makes me sad.” Tears began to stream down Kevin’s face. Jacqueline looked at him.
“Why are you crying, Kevin?”
“I’m crying for you. You’re so pretty but you’re dressed terrible.” Jacqueline looked stricken.
Kevin’s “parents,” who’d been talking animatedly to friends but keeping an eye on him, too, noticed that something was going on. They hurried over. “What’s up, Kevin?” his “father” asked. “What’s wrong, Honey?” his “mother” cried.
“I’m heartbroken,” Kevin said. He was sobbing. “Look at the way Jacqueline is dressed. She’s beautiful, but she’s wearing rags.”
“I don’t mind, Kevin,” Jacqueline said. “I would like to wear something pretty but it’s not to be.”
Mrs. Slater came huffing up to the group. “Jacqueline,” she barked. “You were supposed to be getting me a drink.”
“You shouldn’t talk to her like that,” Kevin’s “mother” said. “And why is she dressed in rags?”
“She’s mine,” Mrs. Slater said.
“But the whole point of this school is to encourage personhood,” Kevin’s “father” said.
“That’s right,” Stella said. She’d hurried over when she saw the commotion. “Please, Mrs. Slater. Jacqueline’s made such wonderful progress.”
“I think she’s picked up a little too much personhood,” Mrs. Slater said. Her little eyes peered at Jacqueline. “Didn’t you hear me? I said I wanted a drink.”
Jacqueline nodded. She turned toward the bar, but Kevin reached for her hand. He began to lead her away.
“Kevin?” His “mother” said.
“Goodbye, Mom,” he said. “I’m going to rescue Jacqueline.”
“Jacqueline!” Mrs. Slater shouted. “Jacqueline! Come here!”
Kevin led Jacqueline by the hand through the crowd, which parted for them.
Everyone was watching them open-mouthed, Drizzle and her two little princesses, Nathan and Bev, FX at the bar, Boris holding two beers in his big metal hands, our curious neighbors and some potential clients. Kevin’s “parents” seemed to realize that something momentous was happening, something beyond their control, and his “father” stepped in front of Mr. Slater, blocking him when he began to huff angrily after Jacqueline.
Kevin and Jacqueline headed straight for the float bikes parked in the driveway, and before anyone could call or shout, Kevin jumped on one of the bikes, and without hesitation, Jacqueline slid on behind him and held him around the waist. She looked back in our direction once as Kevin got the bike started, and her face looked wild and ecstatic. Then she buried her face against Kevin’s back as the bike sputtered up into the air. The college kid had finally noticed what was going on, and he began to run and shout and shake his fist at the air but it was too late. The float bike carrying Kevin and Jacqueline rose higher and higher and began to head north across the treetops. My heart beat fast. I’d never felt this way in my life, and I tried to memorize the feeling. Jacqueline’s long hair streamed out behind her. Kevin seemed to be waving. They got smaller and smaller. Stella, beside me, had her hands to her cheeks. I knew she was cheering them on, too, at the same time that she recognized the ruination of our school.
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Maura Stanton’s supernatural robot stories have appeared in Allium, Pacifica Literary Review, Baltimore Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Phoenix, and North American Review. Her chapbook, Interiors, won the Open Chapbook contest and was published by Finishing Line Press. With “School for Robots,” she is now a two-time winner of The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award. She also won the Fall 2015 Supernatural Fiction Award for her story, “House Ghosts.”