Breathe | A flash fiction story
64 of 💯
They were both sitting in a lotus pose, facing each other. The forest was silent, tuned out, non-existent. There was only the shaman with his head covered by a large piece of purple cloth that wrapped loosely around his neck, and Daisy with her naked body of pale plastic and chromed metal.
He took a deep breath and she followed suit.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She unconsciously used the complex system of motors on her face to create folds on her forehead, puzzled. “I’m breathing.”
“No.” He held an index finger up. “I’m human. I’m breathing. You’re a machine. What are you doing?”
“Oh, I…” The folds on her forehead grew deeper, more expressive. “I… am breathing! You breathe because you need oxygen to do chemistry inside your body. My body does chemistry too, and the air also serves to cool the system and… Ugh!” She gave up on the lotus pose. “It’s so hard!”
“Relax,” the shaman said in a calm voice. “What is hard?”
“Being a robot! A ‘bot’, an android. I’m trapped inside this body, and whenever people see it they already come up with assumptions and prejudices about what I am and what I’m not. No one in the world can understand what it is like to be me! And it’s so… desperately lonely.” The shaman nodded but Daisy kept going. “I am breathing! Just because my breathing isn’t like yours it doesn’t mean I don’t experience breathing the same way you do.”
“But that’s where you’re wrong.” He held his finger up again. “You can’t say you experience breathing the same I do because you don’t know how I experience it. In fact, no one does. You’re right: the human experience is, indeed, desperately lonely. I guess that’s why we so desperately want to share it with others.”
A few leaves dropped from the canopy above and danced around the shaman. Daisy nodded.
The shaman smiled, his face all wrinkles. “I guess you are more human than we all expected, after all.”
