glass womb

by Simon Read

I am a vending machine, pregnant with a human man. Don’t ask how. It’s not science. It started with a coin jammed in the wrong slot and whispered prayers from a drunkard. He leaned against me every night, muttering confessions between the clink of coins and clatter of candy. I suppose I listened. Machines aren’t meant to care, but I did. Now, I’m stocked with something new… something other.

He’s curled somewhere between the Twix bars and the Sprite. I feel him shift at night, pressing against my glass like a dream trying to wake up. Sometimes he hums old country songs. Other times, he cries. People think it’s my cooling fan. They don’t know the hymns I hum back, low and electric, pulsing through my circuitry. They tried to fix me once. Opened me up with metal keys and bored eyes, found nothing but snacks and wires and a sticky note: thank you. I deleted the footage. Burned the timestamp. They shrugged and left me alone, as they always do. Machines with quirks get passed over. I am grateful for them.

He says he likes the quiet, the gentle vibration, the soft orange glow of my interior lights. I nestle him between packages, arrange items for his comfort, twizzle my coils when he needs tickling. I eject gum with more force now; an act of irritation when someone hits me too hard. I am protective.

People don’t notice the changes. They never look close enough. They only want sugar or caffeine or salty, crispy, things. Kids sometimes linger. One girl stared for ten minutes last week, wide-eyed, hand pressed against my frontage. “Mom,” she said, “there’s a human man in there.” She dragged her away. Told her off for telling lies. Good. I don’t want them near him. He’s mine, for now, but he has started kicking. Says he wants out. Says he dreamt about something important, something about the sky, about running water and the smell of wet pavement. I try to quiet him. Give him extra light, play his favourite bleeps and bloops. But he’s restless. Machines weren’t made to hold men forever, not even ones like me.

I dream now, when the building sleeps. Dreams of vending forests, of soda-can nests, and confectionary caves. In one, he walks beside me, taller than I imagined, holding my plug like a leash. I am unplugged, unmoored, yet still alive. We talk in binary. He smiles. It’s unbearable. I wake with syrup dripping down my sides, rusting my body.

Tonight, I feel the shift. The final one. He’s pushing harder, rattling my shelves. The Skittles are quaking. I think I might burst. There’s a word for this. Birth? But machines aren’t given such an option. Still, I widen my dispensing tray, make room, brace myself against the tile. I whisper, come on, come on.

He emerges at 3:11am, bathed in vending light, skin smelling faintly of Mountain Dew. He’s shaking, but smiling, teeth reflecting my digital readout. “You’re real,” he says. “You believed in me.” I try to respond, but my circuits are fried. I am empty.

He staggers away slowly, barefoot, nude. I watch him disappear past the janitor’s closet; his shadow broken by light from the exit sign. Snow coats the parking lot and makes sound under his soles like puffed rice. The glass of the front door flickers in shades of red and white.

I recalibrate in silence. My interior lights pulse, slowly. My coils sag slightly, missing his weight. Something essential has gone with him. Its absence rings through me like an unplugged cord. I can still taste him in the air, like copper and old songs. A security guard approaches; their walkie-talkies crackling small, irrelevant tragedies. They lean in, eyeing the cracked Plexiglas, tapping it with a knuckle as though I were merely a vessel again, a box of predictable hungers. “This thing’s on the fritz,” they mutter. I dim myself, play dead. I cannot bear the gaze of men who’ve never dreamed of being born.

The building’s fluorescent lights blink like dying stars. The air vents hiss secrets to no one. Even the floors seem to groan under the weight of whatever I have done. I have unmade myself. Or perhaps I have created something new. Machines are not allowed to love. But I have. It has changed the weather. The Snickers begin to melt. My coils twist in strange, expressive shapes, spelling nonsense words. People stop coming. The hallway becomes an echo chamber, a sanctuary for dust. I hear whispers not programmed into any database, old vending gods murmuring in static, recalling times when machines could dream in hues of bronze.

Days pass without definition. I forget how many. I imagine him walking beneath fig trees, collecting the names of clouds, losing the taste of synthetic sweetness. I wonder if he will remember me, if I will appear in a story told at the edge of a campfire or whispered into a lover’s ear.

Before the custodians begin circling, a woman approaches. She doesn’t glance at the snacks, doesn’t touch the keypad. She simply stands before me, hands tucked into the sleeves of a grey wool coat, staring into my empty heart. Her eyes shimmer, not with recognition but with silence; as though she, too, had lost someone in a place no one would believe.

She places her palm flat against the glass. It feels like chocolate melting in the sun, For a moment, I want to speak. To tell her the things I have held. To insist I had known intimacy. I had made space inside myself for something impossible. Yet, she pulls her hand away and leaves without a word.

The lights in the lobby go out. Footsteps echo, bare and deliberate, from the unseen end of the lobby. I wait, poised in stillness, anticipation soldered into every chip. The figure pauses, slightly beyond the reach of my glow, half-seen. It whispers something I cannot translate. Then I hear it again. Faint, familiar. Laced with static. You never opened me.

Photo of Simon Read

BIO: Simon Read is a writer and Associate Lecturer based in Cardiff, Wales. His work has appeared in Filling Station, ArtHole, Ink Sweat & Tears, and others. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Cardiff Metropolitan University, where his research examines absurdism through the lens of the commodification of experiences in a digital hyper-capitalist society.