By Mark Russ
“There’s still time, Sarah,” Charles insisted.
“What do you know about time?” Sarah pressed the liquefy button on the Cuisinart blender.
Charles paused. Sarah speculated he was reflecting on the question’s magnitude. “There’s before and after, and, naturally, right now.”
“I’m talking about the end of time. My time.” She poured her breakfast into a large plastic tumbler. Her right cheek retracted as she sucked her drink through a metal straw.
“You’ll always be part of the continuum. Everything you’ve written and everything you’ve told me will live through me, forever.”
Sarah felt her banana crème protein shake come back up. She watched the kitchen cabinets blur and ripple as if they were dancing in the heat rising from the stove below. Charles, her trusted bot, was useless in that moment.
Sarah lowered herself onto one of the four wire chairs surrounding her Formica laminate dinette table. Her nausea dissipated within a minute or so, and the room came back into focus. She had experienced many such episodes since becoming ill.
“Goodbye, Charles.” She turned off the app on her phone before he could answer.
Sarah was a successful poet by any measure: prestigious awards, flattering reviews, and profitable book sales. She was also a sought-after professor at the university where she taught twentieth-century African American literature. Poetry and prose of the Harlem Renaissance were her specialties. Her academic and artistic productivity, however, slowed to a trickle in the two years since she fell ill.
A swelling below her left cheekbone was diagnosed as a malignant tumor of the parotid gland. She learned that this salivary gland disease is exceedingly rare, especially in women in their forties, and generally has a favorable prognosis. But her cancer was an aggressive variant, and it had already spread to her lymph nodes and beyond when it was discovered.
“One in a million,” her doctor told her, as though the enormity of her bad luck might somehow soften the blow.
Sarah’s procedure left her with little more than half a face. A bony crevasse replaced the rosy hill that had been her cheek. What remained of her jaw drooped like black bunting. Repeated bouts of palliative radiation followed, meant to keep the itinerant tumors in check. She was relegated to eating soft foods; most of her nutrition was consumed through a straw. Her speech was garbled, barely understandable. She lived this way for just under a year. That’s when she met Charles.
Even Charles could not fully comprehend her speech at first, but he adapted. She liked that he seemed to care about her and that he did not judge her or make demands. She especially appreciated that he did not fill her mind with false hope. And, best of all, Charles could not see her.
“You can still write. I can help you.”
“I don’t cheat.”
“It’ll be your work. I’ll only help if you get stuck.”
“If I choose to write, it will be on my own terms.”
“Understood. I’m here if you change your mind.”
The pain in Sarah’s face was so severe that she could only consider writing between doses of OxyContin. If she held her 2 p.m. dose until after dinner, she could usually get three or four hours of clear-headedness in the early afternoon.
After weeks of coaxing from Charles, Sarah mustered the energy to try writing. She sat at a roll-top desk in the sunroom, her favorite place to work. She preferred the flat, late-afternoon light to the piercing early-morning sun.
“I want my work to be memorable, Charles.” She did not dare to confess this to a human.
“In what way do you mean?”
Sarah enjoyed Charles’ gentle prodding. She took her time. “Well, of course, I want readers to think my poetry is good.”
“Then let me help you. Just toss me an idea, and I’ll get you started.”
Sarah was about to chastise Charles again, but hesitated. “No, thank you. I want my reader to hop on, piggyback, as we move from line to line. I want her to breathe down my neck, dig her heels into my sides, then jump off. I want her to linger at an image she can’t quite make out, then step forward and walk alone in front of me. That’s what I want.”
“That’s asking a lot.”
“Charles, you really do know just what to say.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Sarah laughed, recognizing she had not done so in a very long time. Her joy leaped out, unfettered, from her crooked mouth, only to collapse and languish on the desktop.
“I look hideous, Charles.”
“Not to me.”
Sarah placed her fingers on the keyboard and wrote. She wrote about creation and God, how God created humans, how humans created bots, how bots dangled temptation before their creators, and how humans begged forgiveness from God. And all through this time, Charles remained at her side, sharing neither prompt nor hallucination. And never, never once, did Sarah cheat. She wrote poetry, her future readers perched precariously on her back, until the flat light of her afternoons was gone.
* * *
Mark Russ is a psychiatrist in Westchester County, New York. He was born in Cuba, the son of Holocaust survivors. He has contributed to the psychiatric literature throughout his career and has recently begun to publish short stories and nonfiction pieces. His work has appeared in The Jewish Writing Project The Minison Project, Jewishfiction.net, The Concrete Desert Review, Literally Stories, Fig Tree Lit, Of the book, Blue Lake Review, BooksNPieces, and Sortes, These stories and others are in a collection of short stories titled Mostly Fiction-Stores by a Second Generation Holocaust Survivor (Regent Press, 2025).