eFiction India eFiction India Vol.02 Issue.09 | Page 31

STORIES

30

THE SURROGATE
    JOE DAVIES                                   

S

HE’S ONLY LITTLE. One of
many unfeedable little girls in this
impoverished, disease-ridden avenue
of corrugated tin shacks, at times rainsoaked, at others baked by the unrelenting sun.
It’s seen as an opportunity, something
a people might invest hope in, though
nothing is certain in these times when few
promises are kept and every good thing is
somehow snatched from even the most
tightly clenched fist.
She squats in what shadow there is, hiding
from the sun, the rain, the eyes of the man
dressed in the odd clothes talking to her
father and a few others, who stand there listening intently to what’s being said.
Flies crawl over everything.
The smell of raw sewage, of particulate, of
so many humans living close on each other
without clean water.
Across the way, also uncertain of its stake
in the world, a small grey cat peers warily
through some small opening.

Joe Davies is a Canadian writer whose
short fiction has appeared in magazines in Canada, the US, Ireland,
England and Wales. His story this
month, “The Surrogate,” is part of
a collection called Dream Jobs & True
Callings.

The men are nodding, shaking hands, a
decision made.
***
In and of himself the man she will replace,
though he’s wealthy and privileged in

more than the relative sense, is morally
unimportant.
He has committed some transgression, is
shitting his pants with worry, confined to
a first-world prison cell little larger than his
wife’s walk-in closet. For two nights he’s
slept poorly, wearing the same shirt and
tie, the same suit he put on three mornings earlier, and he dreams of a shower and
an end to this nightmare, having been reassured he needn’t worry, but finding it disturbingly unpreventable. Though conditioned to live in step with a world so laden
with opportunity that one need hardly look
for reward, for once in a very long time the
assumptions of that hierarchy have come
into relief. The time in the cell has been
that unusual.
***
The little girl’s flight, were it not for all that
will follow, is monumental, the first halfrevolution of a revolving door that will
change everything and nothing.
Squatting on the u-shaped seat, having
never seen a flush toilet before, she runs
her hands on the gently vibrating walls.
Smooth, clean surfaces so curious and
foreign they