“Justin Smith-Ruiu’s speculative fiction is consistently as sumptuous as it is demanding.” —Dmitri Bezmozgov, The Oort Cloud Review, vol. 2.
Never say never. Until a few years ago I “never” thought my partner and I would end up installing a Gro-Pad in front of our open window in the early springtime, when the Zephyr begins to blow in from the East, hoping to trap a little one to call our own. Yet there we were, both our biological clocks run down, more or less stuck with this small strip of gauze, like the absorbent pad in a package of fresh fish that soaks up excess fluids and that always somehow makes me lose my appetite, as the lone remaining method if we wished to start a family.
I mean I understand the controversy. Many still maintain the spores that land on these peculiar-smelling rectangular mats aren’t really human at all, and that whatever subsequently grows there is only some sort of counterfeit homunculus. But some of us don’t have the luxury of dwelling on such metaphysical riddles. There are by now thousands of beings walking among us who began their earthly lives, or at least their most recent earthly lives, on just such Gro-Pads as ours, and for all anyone can tell they walk just as human beings do, and talk just as human beings do. And that’s enough, at least for my own pragmatic sensibility, to deem them human.
This is to say, now that we’ve been through the process, that I think on balance it’s worth it. Not that we’ve had it easy. In fact things were tough for us right from the get-go, starting with an unusually gruesome mishap just a few weeks into our efforts, when, I confess, I absent-mindedly dropped a new replacement strip onto the carpet, only for Sam to find in that same spot, a few days later, a horrible mass of miniature human organs with no rational organic connection between them and no prospect for survival, like some grotesque Empedoclean abortion from the dawn of time.1 We were under no strict obligation to dispose of these remains with the ritual solemnity commonly accorded to legal and moral persons. But they were human remains, or something like it, or so we believed, and believe still. And in any case professional carpet-cleaners have by now adopted a blanket policy against dealing with this sort of mess. So we had our private funeral, Sam and I, in the backyard, for our little carpet-growth — our squandered human-spore.