Spams
And what if I do go back to my daughter, grown, and wife, Irene, dead and buried and I didn’t even know, exchanging video messages with her for 3 years—mine made daily, hers long before—3 years manning this space station alone, eating 3 years worth of toast and baked beans for breakfast, which works out to about 1,100 packets of beans or exactly 1,095, or given the average of 56 beans per serving, 61,320 beans, give or take a little, although considering they’re NASA’s beans the standard deviation from the mean is probably negligible—maybe that’s what they thought, so clever, while making substandard clones of me that couldn’t survive beyond 3 years—I’ve had 5 nosebleeds and lost another tooth this morning, total 4, while opening with my teeth the packet of beans, 56 beans per serving—a negligible error given all the spare Sams, me!, in the hidden room beneath the station ready for activation, the room I almost wish I hadn’t found and seen mes lying serenely, new, and common in their containers while I’m dying or Sam’s copy number god-knows-what is dying and Irene is dead, god only knows how long, and her husband, the original Space Station Sam, is on Earth with my daughter, with his daughter, with my daughter, while I live on the moon with his memories dumped into his cloned head, my head, yeah, my head, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, because even if I do shuttle out of here I can’t show up looking like this, tampon-nosed and gum-mouthed, to see my daughter after 3 years, no, more . . . no more spare Sams, space Sams, spare space Sams, say that 3 times fast, Spams!; I could stick it to NASA, those clever shits, torch the place, but what would be the point when they’ll rocket over new ones, and besides I can’t set other mes on fire lying there innocent and oblivious, as if I could murder anyone let alone myself, murder myselves, five thousand Spams, 15,000-years-of-reliable-space-station-servicing Spams: fresh, eternal, cosmic.
Bio: Born in Korea and raised in Toronto, Hairee Lee is currently finishing his MFA degree in creative writing at Emerson College. Before pursuing graduate studies, he taught high school chemistry for several years in London. He has a forthcoming fiction publication in Fractured West and has been been published by 680News and Didrik’s Dinner Series. Hairee won the Norma Epstein Creative Writing Award for Short Story and for One Act Play, and he is a fiction reader for Redivider.