- Mar 22
- 4 min read
Sleepover
Silas’s parents in Bern, I came over and we messed with their MedPod. Silas was slicing mangoes and I reached for a piece and just like that, I had one fewer finger. Silas led me, shaking, to the Pod, in his parents’ bedroom, assuring me it’d be okay. I’d never been in a MedPod, Silas’s family several rungs up the income ladder. I wondered what his parents would say if they found out.
“It’ll feel amazing,” Silas said, guiding me inside. In sixteen seconds, my finger was back. And I felt good all over. I passed a hallway mirror: Even my acne had cleared.
“Wow,” Silas said. “Head-turner.”
We drank our smoothies, adding rum, then gin. I’d never drank so much and darted toward the bathroom to throw up. Silas steered me toward the Pod.
“It fixes that, too.”
We emptied the bar. All the booze gone, Silas suggested wounds. I asked what he meant. He picked up the knife and dragged it along his wrist. Blood was immediately everywhere.
“To the Pod,” he said.
Silas dared me to go next. I punched the wall, bruising my knuckles.
“Weak,” Silas said.
I made a small incision with the knife in a fingertip, a glorified papercut.
Silas looked impatient.
I took a deep breath and stabbed the knife downward into my thigh, hitting bone. It hurt more than I could imagine anything hurting.
“Now we’re talking!”
In forty-four seconds, you couldn’t tell where the knife had gone in.
We cleaned up and found drop cloths in the garage, lining the floor outside the MedPod. The MedPod didn’t clean carpets.
We stabbed ourselves, then each other, deeper and longer each time. When that grew old, Silas suggested cutting something off.
“We did that,” I said. “My finger.”
“Then let’s break something.”
Silas suggested a hammer to a hand or a foot.
“You first,” I said.
Silas fetched a hammer, along with a cutting board, which he placed on the nightstand near the Pod. He wanted me to clasp his hand, hold him in place, and bring the hammer down on his wrist, as hard as I could. I told him I didn’t want to. He promised if I helped him with this, we could stop.
“I swear, Ephram.”
We each got down on our knees. I grabbed his hand and he flattened his wrist on the wood. His skin was so soft, Pod soft, Pod perfect. We counted 1 . . . 2 . . . 3, but when I brought down the hammer, Silas jerked backwards, pulling my arm toward him. Instead of breaking his wrist, I crushed mine.
Silas tried to help me to the Pod, but I pushed him away, hobbling there myself. The break was ten times as painful as the stabs.
“You’re an asshole,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
Silas reminded me he’d picked me up. That he lived miles away, way up in the hills. And I didn’t have a coat.
“Take me home.”
“Stay.”
“No.”
Silas jogged to his parents’ bedroom, ordering me not to leave. It was past midnight. I didn’t want to walk in the dark.
Silas returned with a metal box.
“What’s that?”
Silas rolled some numbers on a dial, a combination. The lid popped open, revealing a gun in a red velvet bed.
“Shoot me,” Silas said. “Anywhere you want.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Shoot me. You owe me. You control the gun. I’ll lie in the MedPod and as soon as you fire, we’ll seal me in. I want to do it. I’ve been wanting to do it, have someone help me. That’s why I invited you here.”
This was not the reason I’d hoped Silas had invited me. I remember what he’d said earlier: head-turner.
“No,” I said.
“You know you want to.”
He wasn’t wrong. The pain in my wrist was gone, but I remembered it, and clearly.
“After, we’ll watch a movie. You can stay overnight.”
“No more hurting ourselves?”
“I promise.”
I followed Silas to the bedroom. He loaded himself into the Pod.
“Aim somewhere meaty, like my thigh, or in my . . .”
The bang of the gun shut Silas up. He looked in shock, desperate, more than in pain.
I closed the hatch and pressed the button. Nothing happened.
Silas’s panic mounted. Usuallly, a green light washed over whomever was inside, but nothing. I lifted the hatch and shut it again. Still nothing.
Blood was seeping through Silas’s shirt. He sat up, pressing into the wound. Underneath him, in the middle of the MedPod bed, was a sizeable hole.
“Fuck,” I said.
“What?”
I pointed behind him, then leaned over and looked inside. I saw charred metal. I saw disconnected wires. Sparks.
“It’s broken,” I said. “The bullet went through you. It’s fucked up.”
Silas exited the Pod, falling face-first to the ground. The blood pumping out the hole in his back arced onto his parents’ bed.
He looked up at me. “You have to drive me somewhere, on the north side. The mayor’s house. He’s got the only other MedPod in town.”
“I’ll call an ambulance.”
“No time. They’d have to drive all the way here then back. Drive me to the mayor’s. He knows my parents.”
“I don’t know how to drive.”
I dragged Silas toward the front porch. He was fading quickly, blood everywhere. I collapsed next to him on the concrete, exhausted, terrified. The north side was so far away, even if I could drive.
“Ephram,” Silas said, jolting awake. “When I got out. I was going to shoot you. Like, in the ass. What a story you would’ve had.”
Silas slumped into my lap. I held him against me, ran my fingers through his hair. I ordered him to stay with me, like in movies: Stay with me, goddamn you. Stay with me!
I might’ve said it in my head, or I said it out loud. I wasn’t sure. It could’ve been out loud. Or maybe it was something internal, something just for me.
MICHAEL CZYZNIEJEWSKI is the author of four collections of stories, most recently The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Press and Moon City Review, as well as Interviews Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. He has had work anthologized in the Best Small Fiction series and 40 Stories: A Portable Anthology, and has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Pushcart Prizes.