ROBOT LADY’S READY TO GIVE BIRTH.  We know she’s ready to give birth because she’s doubled over, her spider-leg hands clutch her metallic stomach. No skin, no veins. Only wire and metal. Sometimes copper, shiny like sunspots roping through her robot body. I see my baby wriggling around in her egg-shaped womb. Her egg-shaped womb incubates my daughter like the time my mother brought home chicken eggs for us to hatch. We cased the eggs in a glass fish tank with glowing lightbulbs taped to the top. Robot lady frankensteins across the living room, legs swinging toward her robot face and both her arms bent at right angles. Robot lady paces, retraces her steps, leaves no traces behind. Most of the time, Robot lady’s tethered to a machine pumping her full of amniotic fluid. We can’t just leave her there, my husband had said when robot lady was first delivered and we set her up in the nursery. Seems inhumane.

I’d wanted to strap on a silicone baby bump and simulate the pregnancy along with robot lady, pretend I was the one who got to be pregnant—and surprise, I'd had the baby in the middle of the night—so our friends and neighbors wouldn't know we'd maxed out our credit cards to bring robot lady home with us. Sometimes I have nightmares that my baby is born with wires instead of hair. My baby is born with stiff arms and unblinking doll eyes. My baby an approximation of human life. I try to find a heartbeat, vibration, warmth. In these daydreams, I shake her, beg her body to spark awake. Other times, I have daydreams that I walk in on my husband fucking robot lady. Robot lady's on her back, my husband's hands between her robot legs, our daughter in her womb between them. Can you blame me? He's tangled up in robot lady's wires. She's carrying my child.

I’m not going to fuck the robot lady, my husband says when I confront him. That's like asking me if I’d fuck our digital ice maker? His hand on my knee. His thumb running across my thigh. I trace the outline of his lips because robot lady could never touch him so tenderly—or could she? She can stream Mozart directly to her womb with the push of a button. I sing to her bubble womb sometimes. Hush little baby, don't say a word. Momma's gonna buy you a mockingbird. Does robot lady even know what a mockingbird is? Can she understand bird calls? Will she think of my baby as her own? I do not ask these questions. I do not ask these questions because I do not want the answers.

The developers unveiled this technology on stage at a tech conference while wearing white lab coats. Robot ladies strutted around under pink and purple LED lights clutching their expectant bellies. I'll bet these men couldn't tell you what a fallopian tube is to save their lives, I said to my husband while we were on the couch watching a clip of the tech conference on YouTube. Huh, my husband said, already imagining how a robot lady of our very own could solve all of our problems. Our problems stretched out between us on the couch while the developers acted like game show hosts. Declining birth rates? What declining birth rates? The crowd cheered. Infertility? We don't know her.

Did a robot write these slogans? I asked my husband but he wasn't listening. He was already scanning the QR code that appeared on the screen asking if we wanted to learn more.

Now robot lady's giving birth. Robot lady cannot scream. Robot mother holds my daughter first. •





Christina Tudor is a writer living in Washington, D.C. Her fiction has been featured in CRAFT, SmokeLong Quarterly, matchbook, HAD, Flash Frog, The Citron Review, Best Small Fictions 2024, and more. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in fiction. Her debut chapbook, CALL MY BODY A CAUTIONARY TALE, will be published by Thirty West on October 23, 2026.

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