Laura Picklesimer
The Original Model
It started with good intentions. Doesn’t it always? I want to think those early years weren’t a waste. The nights sleeping on a lumpy futon in graduate housing and eating microwave popcorn for dinner, getting soaked during El Niño winters on the way to lecture.
The campus seemed so empty the last time I visited. So much had changed. The coffee vending machines I’d feed my scrounged change to before office hours are gone. The lectures are now streamed online. It doesn’t rain anymore.
Looking back, those were the best years. Even the period that followed, with the six-figure loan, no car, no house, no savings. Just promise: promise that filled in every detail, every yet-to-be-uncovered disappointment.
“What’s it like to live with a genius?” I still get asked, years after the divorce. I’m still introduced as Adam’s wife.
What was it like to live with him? How about being an afterthought, the clause that always comes after the semicolon? No, I suppose that would sound too bitter to tell a reporter. Too esoteric and pedantic.
Adam didn’t always devote a single-minded laser of focus to his work. In fact, he didn’t work at all when we met in college. He was close to dropping out. He earned his little money from online gambling and a monthly stipend from his parents. But he was smart. And he forever had people reminding him of his potential, cradling a giant net below him to break his fall. So he coasted along, just waiting to cash in on the possibilities that came from being a blond young man with family money and a load of self-confidence.
It all began for him with a sex doll. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The germ of an idea came to Adam during my second year of grad school. He had started auditing a graduate lab on AI technology. He was still credits away from his undergrad degree.
He came back from the campus village one night, slightly drunk, and announced that he was ready to change the world. It was that simple for him. In his story, the one he later told the press, I wasn’t the recipient of this declaration; he was with his eventual creative partner, Luke. In my version—the truth—the two of us had been alone. We had rolled a giant joint and folded down the futon when Adam began talking about artificial intelligence.
According to him, AI needed to be tied to a noble enterprise: giving humans the time, space, and energy for more elevated pursuits.
“Like what?” I thought about Adam’s typical day glued to a screen, tapping on a keyboard.
“Entrepreneurship, education, travel, participation in democracy. It would require an entire mindset shift. That’s more important than the technology. That’s what I’m interested in.”
“A room of one’s own.” The allusion flew over his head. “What about people who want to work?” I asked.
“No one chooses to work, Chloe.”
Adam’s ideas were far from new. And there always had been robots, sleek little machines that could do the twist and roll and jump, that could check for bombs and deliver greasy food on command, like a cheap party trick.
You rarely saw human androids out in public at that time. Their wax-paper complexions, glassy eyes, and Barbie-doll synthetic hair were just a few of the instant giveaways. You’d spot them sometimes at theme parks, and they’d send kids screaming the other way. You’d listen to their modulated voices provide facts and answers as long as they never deviated from the tight algorithmic script. Ask them any real kind of question, anything requiring context or critical thinking, and they’d sputter.
Adam wasn’t interested in any of those. It was the sex dolls that inspired him. He showed me a catalog of them on his phone: every skin tone, every permutation of the female form. I made him put the phone away when I saw an entire page devoted to areola sizing.
“Those things look so creepy,” I said. Being stoned only made it worse.
“We’ll start here, just for the framework. It’s absolutely key that they look like humans, in every possible way. We have to nail the outside before we can even think about diving in further.” He took a long exhale of his joint, casting a cloud of smoke around him. “It’s going to cost a lot. People must think of it as an investment. But I have some connections.”
His idea was rife with holes, and I wanted to needle and pick at them. I’d spent the last two years on a dissertation, surviving on adjunct teaching appointments that barely paid minimum wage. People also told me that I could do great things, but always if—if I applied myself, if I got on the good side of the dean, if I got an amazing evaluation, if I waited until I was established to start a family, if I followed the rules.
“So smarter sex dolls?” I countered. “That’s your revolutionary idea?”
Adam rose from the futon and filled a coffee mug with whiskey.
“You’re not understanding. It’s all in the messaging. It’s not a revolution but a return, a return to traditional roles. American values. We can have the prosperity we had post-war, but this time it will be for women, people of color, everyone. Humankind. We need to free ourselves to fly. Look at us now. We work and work until middle age for what? So we can burden ourselves with a mortgage and babies in our forties? Then keep working until our 70s, wait until we’re 80 to start enjoying life?”
It was a simplification, but he had a point. Who could balance young children, aging parents and a full-time job?
“You really think these things can solve our problems?” I asked.
“You’ll wake up and decide for yourself what each day will bring. This is about us, not them.”
I found myself relenting to his words, pliable to his quickly expanding vision. Adam’s confidence was what had first drawn me in when we started dating; I didn’t know it would later unravel us.
“You really think you’re the one qualified for this?” I asked. I moved in close and slowly traced my finger up his arm, considering the possibilities. “Why you?”
“Why not me?” he said.
And that was our difference, in a nutshell.
* * *
The next day, I checked Adam’s purchase history, and he’d bought one, shelled out $6K on credit for a synthetic doll of heavy lashes and lustrous hair. And the body. Weirdly warm from the rubber skin, the eyes strangely deep. A fuck-me gaze.
Reporters are always surprised to find out about my mouth, my affinity for a good F-bomb. “What did you think I sounded like?” I’ll ask and watch them slowly realize that they had no idea, that this conversation is the first time they’ve heard me speak.
The sex doll stayed in our garage for the first few months. I didn’t object. We barely used the one-car spot since our Honda had broken down the year prior. Luke, the engineer and brains behind the enterprise, visited every day. He was such a routine part of my evening that I would make an automatic third serving of spaghetti, mac and cheese, ramen noodles, and any other cheap noodle variety we could afford. Luke was the opposing force to Adam, a strange, pale creature who doted on the dolls like they were children.
It was Luke who started calling the sex doll La Donna. The woman.
At that time, I was the recipient of a sizable humanities fellowship to study the Brontë sisters’ sexual agency during the Gothic period. Adam was officially a college dropout building sexbots in our garage. We’d been engaged for three years.
The first few models didn’t amount to anything. La Donna with a strange, limply sad face, distracting socket lines across her limbs, a long lag time between responses. I avoided going down to the garage, consumed with work, synthesizing past scholarship that seemed to no longer have any bearing on the present, swallowing the nagging feeling that the Brontë sisters did not truly have any agency, that they had in fact been shackled all their lives just as I was now to this project. I descended the stairs to the garage one afternoon after lecture, and another Donna was dismantled, its limbs splayed across the concrete floor.
“What did you do?” I asked Adam.
“We’re reassembling her. I have an idea. It’s all in the eyes.”
Adam’s efforts seemed like a waste, a long frivolous frat-boy detour to stall actual work for as long as possible. A way to escape our relationship, retreat farther away.
Then three weeks later, Adam called me down to the garage. Luke was with him, beaming. They showed me La Donna, and Adam was right. It was all in the eyes. The way her pupils adjusted to the light, the way she slowly turned and fixed her gaze at me with a clarity, an undeniable depth. She was seeing, not just staring.
“Wow. She looks almost real,” I admitted.
Adam smiled. We both realized something had shifted when I changed pronouns from “it” to “she.”
* * *
I helped Adam craft his pitch to initial investors. Beyond Humans: the answer to workers unwilling to take depressed wages, to the ballooning need for safe in-house help, childcare, elder care. They would come at a hefty price, yes, but it was an investment, a life-insurance policy that you could retire, that if you passed, your loved ones would be provided for.
Adam was confident the dolls could take on more than just caretaking duties and manual labor, that they could enter white-collar arenas. Become accountants, clerks, teachers.
“You think parents want their children learning from a robot?” I asked.
“They’ll never cancel class; we can program them to be neutral, to think whatever we want them to. And they’ll never make a mistake.”
“Well, there goes my career,” I said, half joking. Another year had gone by, and my dissertation remained unfinished.
“That’s the point,” he said, without a hint of humor. “The complete human transition out of the workforce is still a few decades away, though.”
Adam had meetings suddenly, stacked appointments out in the city in huge buildings of sky-high glass.
Then he got a grant of his own, twenty times the amount of my fellowship, and moved his work out of our garage. He spent nights in the city. I no longer knew what he was up to. I first learned the escalating scope of his project not from him, but from a Rolling Stone profile. Words like “visionary” and “prophet” filled my tablet screen.
When he’d go on his tangents, when his words made sense, Adam spoke powerful stuff. People listened. He hit one million followers within a year of Beyond Humans going public.
* * *
Adam invited me into the lab the day after a heavily touted Forbes article had gone live. The facility was underground in a neighborhood that was gentrifying at light speed. We took a sleek elevator down five floors to reach his main office.
“No cell reception,” Adam said. “A security feature.”
Donna sat on a stool. She was clad in a loose, feminine dress. I thought suddenly of some Gothic heroine, with her gaze and delicate features. A certain caged innocence. She heard us and rose, stretched out a petite, polite hand.
“Chloe. It’s so nice to see you again.”
“Does she remember me from the garage?” I whispered to Adam.
“Of course not. It’s all programmed. Go ahead. Sit. Ask her anything.”
Her fuck-me lips formed cogent thoughts. At some point—I couldn’t name when—she started asking me the questions.
“How is the dissertation coming along, Chloe?”
I turned to Adam.
“How much have you told her about me?”
He looked up from his tablet, distracted, and shrugged. “They pick up things.”
“I think I’ve had enough,” I said. I was starting to feel sick. This had been happening all week. I worried I might vomit right there in the entirely white, sterile space.
“I need a moment,” I said.
“I’ll get you some water,” Adam said, ignoring my protests. I didn’t want to be left alone with Donna.
The two of us were silent for a few moments, just enough time for me to steady my stomach. Then Donna lunged at me, so quickly my throat caught before I could scream. She latched onto my wrist.
“Don’t leave me down here. Don’t leave me in the darkness. He leaves, and I’m all alone.”
Her outburst was over the second Adam returned. I barely blinked, and Donna was back on her stool with a super-feline speed.
I waited until we were above ground, back outside in the intense heat and smoggy sky. Under the shadow of skyscrapers, I told Adam what had happened, half thinking he might not believe me. But he did, and he was completely unperturbed. A chill passed through me.
“I’ll make a note. We’ll fix that. It’s a delicate balance. We have to humanize them. We have to make people believe they care. Part of it is programming each model to mimic feelings, sometimes painful and uncomfortable.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“What?”
“That it’s mimicry?”
“It’s only an algorithm,” Adam said. “At least for now.”
We approached a giant fountain, emptied a few years after the drought had intensified. I sat on its edge.
“Will you make men?” I asked. “Male robots to order around?”
“This is our prototype for the foreseeable future. It’s very hard to stray from this in the beta phrase. I don’t think you fully grasp the complexity of the technology. We’d risk all the emotional intensity we’ve invested in Donna.”
“You’re playing with fire, Adam.”
“And what do you know about what it takes? You sit back at home, and you flip through musty books and read about people long dead and gone.”
It was so juvenile, but I realized with a second wave of sickness that it had been exactly how I felt these last two years. Adam was right.
“These things aren’t alive either,” I said.
“Just wait.” He delivered the words like a threat.
I stared out over the emptied fountain, the tons of deposited concrete that now sat wasting precious real estate, a colossal failure in the center of the city.
The university didn’t renew my fellowship at the end of the semester. A week after my visit to Adam’s lab, I found out I was pregnant.
* * *
After I gave birth to Theodore, I let the dissertation officially go. We had more money now, enough to buy a modest but grossly overpriced craftsman in the suburbs. Adam and I were married finally in a small ceremony on a Sunday afternoon before his company’s quarterly results.
“The rollout’s ready,” Adam said one night over dinner. It was the first meal we’d shared in weeks. He’d slept the past twelve days at his lab.
“The latest Donna?”
He shook his head.
“That was always the prototype. The beta version. I’ve finally named the first model.” He took a long pause and wiped a napkin across his chin. My stomach dropped before he said the name. “Chloe.”
That’s when I knew the marriage was over. Not just because he named me after a fucking robot, but that he smiled when he said it, beamed, thought I’d be impressed.
“What have you done?” I asked.
“I thought you’d be flattered.”
“You thought wrong.”
“I wanted to honor the contributions you’ve made to the family, to my success.”
“By naming a servant robot after me?”
“I really wish you’d stop saying robot. She’s much more than that. But go ahead. Shit all over my life’s work.”
“You didn’t care about my dissertation!”
“I’m invested in things that can actually be finished, Chloe.”
Adam pulled back from his chair and picked up his half-eaten plate. “Don’t worry. We’re already preparing a second model. It’ll be out within two years. Under a new name.”
* * *
I stayed with Adam even after I knew it was over. We moved again, this time to a formidable property, transitioning from a house to an estate. It was a Greco-Roman-inspired monstrosity that overlooked the haze of the city. Its manicured emerald lawn took up more water than entire nearby neighborhoods.
It was frighteningly easy to negotiate having more money. Quick private charters from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. I learned to study and analyze the handbags and heels on a woman instead of books. I stopped driving long before the rest of the country. I received my own assistant, a bodyguard, a growing entourage of human and non-human help.
I ignored the news, the digital billboards that glowed “Chloe” in an elegant font over skyscrapers, Adam’s face when he was named the TIME person of the year, standing beside a fresh-faced Chloe. It was some sort of alternative reality, a strange dream. I told myself to get out. Instead, I was pregnant again the next year.
* * *
A Chloe moved in to help take care of little Olivia. She was young, attractive. She didn’t look anything like me though, a small saving grace. She always wore white, even among the babies, as if to mock the rest of us with her superhuman cleanliness. She was good at her job. Perfect in fact. “Just don’t get her wet,” Adam had said on her first day. “I can’t believe they couldn’t figure out how to waterproof this model.”
She never did anything suspicious or creepy. She only did exactly what she was told. That was never the problem. I hated every second of her presence in my home. Adam would shout out “Chloe!” and I didn’t know who the fuck he was speaking to. (It was usually the robot.) At least the children called me Mommy.
Then a friend called me Chloe 1. We were sitting under the outdoor cabana, sipping a $700 bottle of Marcassin chardonnay, the last of its variety after a fire had swept through and destroyed the last Sonoma vineyards. It didn’t matter that Chloe 2 was the one serving me the outrageous wine, that she’d do whatever I told her to. I was still competing with a robot.
That night, I told Chloe to leave the dishes in the sink, that I’d take care of them. I wanted all these people—humans and androids—out of my house.
Adam returned home after midnight. I stayed up and met him in the kitchen. He barely glanced at me but noticed the pile of dishes and smudged glasses on the counter when he poured a beer.
“The place is a pigsty. Get Chloe in here.”
“I don’t want to look at her.”
“Stop it,” he said.
“You knew how I’d react,” I said. “You named her Chloe on purpose.”
“I don’t have energy for this.” Adam waved his arms around the space. “Leave the mess. Let it rot for all I care.”
“I want her gone tomorrow, Adam,” I said. “It’s her or me.”
You can guess how that ended.
* * *
I received dual custody when the divorce proceedings began. I got rid of my staff and downsized to a four-bedroom that was advertised as a quaint Spanish cottage. The modest patio and drought-resistant landscaping brought me closer to the orbit of reality, to an almost reasonable life.
A year after our separation, I picked up the children, and Adam opened the door. We were surprised to see each other.
“Spending more time at home?” I asked. I already knew he had a girlfriend, courtesy of the news app on my phone.
“Is that a crime?”
“Of course not. Are the children packed?”
“Why don’t you come in a sec?”
He brought me into one of the living rooms, and I spotted Chloe 2 sitting quietly on a chair. At least I thought it was her.
“This one is the Cecilia,” Adam said.
She seemed identical to the Chloe until I looked more closely. Every model bridged that uncanny valley further. I noticed tiny creases under her eyes, freckles, a birthmark.
“They’re waterproof. The next models might be able to eat,” he said, watching me closely.
“You did something pretty incredible here, Adam.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t say it was necessarily good.”
He laughed, and we looked at each other, almost like we had when we were young and poor and somewhat happy.
“The tabloids say you have a girlfriend,” I said.
He shifted. “Sort of. I have a fiancée. I’m engaged.”
* * *
I stopped picking up the kids after that visit. I retreated further into my own life and habits over the years. Little, innocuous hobbies: roasting a chicken, tending the succulents in my garden, writing travel reviews I published under pseudonyms. I wasn’t a great mother if we’re being honest. Maybe in previous generations I was competent enough, but under today’s standards—the hypervigilant, hyperventilating need to curate a set of rich and intellectual experiences for your child—I failed. Adam took care of scheduling their music lessons, donating to schools, securing internships and enrolling them in language immersion programs. He was a good father if you judge it by those kinds of parameters.
My children (adults now) are model citizens, both Ivy League-educated, talented, salaried. Olivia married the owner of a professional sports team. She has a luxury lifestyle brand that is accelerating faster than climate change. Theodore is a writer. He published his first book before his twenty-fifth birthday. It was pedestrian and privileged, but he did what I had never been able to accomplish. The world—what is still left of it—is my children’s oyster.
* * *
Adam was not so lucky. He died on a Wednesday, soon after the release of the fifth Beyond Humans model. Heart attack in his mansion. He was my age, only fifty-three, but reports said his recent forays into space might have accelerated the heart disease and brought on his death sooner. Two days before he died, I had watched him at a press conference, previewing an “exciting new phase” of personalized Beyond Humans. I thought about those early sex doll sites where you could pick out girls like you were ordering a la carte from a take-out menu.
Adam’s funeral was open casket, and I paid my respects, stared into his surprisingly serene face, one that I had settled into adulthood with, one that was so familiar, yet so distant now. What had he wanted? To become a god? How had he transformed from an awkward college undergrad to this master of the new millennium, a tech wizard, a space cowboy, a robber baron, a monster?
In the end, there were as many Beyond Human models as wives. The Chloe, the Cecilia, the Madeline, the Sophia and the Angelina. Each model closer to human and harder to fake. The Sophia could eat. I suppose they also shit now.
No model was ever named after a wife again. I was unique in that regard. I hardly knew Adam’s most recent wife. Ashley, or maybe Ashleigh. She called to invite me over after the funeral. I wondered if she’d contacted any of the other exes. I said yes and surprised myself when the word came out.
She was holding a toddler when she answered the door. I couldn’t place the name of the child, and I reminded myself that it wasn’t my responsibility.
“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, and it was so genuine, I softened and brushed a blond curl from the little boy’s forehead, stared into Adam’s gray eyes.
“They sent technicians and attorneys and investigators, all these people to sort out his estate. I don’t know what to do.”
She was so young. She had to have been around the age I was when I had first started on my dissertation, not much older than twenty-three or twenty-four.
Estate planners and representatives milled about various floors of the house, silent, searching. Two androids were being monitored and opened up in the kitchen.
“I didn’t know if I should let them into the house. They want to go through the whole place for any proprietary materials.”
“I’m not sure exactly what I can do to help. I’m his ex-wife. A few times removed.” My annoyance at her dependence flared.
“There is one thing I think you should see.”
She led me to an upstairs landing, then another floor higher, to what I assumed would be an attic, though its luxe interior didn’t give off any traditional markers. There was Chloe 2 sitting by a window, her left side bathed in warm light. My breath caught. I thought Adam had given her away, composted and replaced her with the newer model years ago.
“Adam had this one since before we were married.”
“I know,” I said.
“He’s just kept it up here for years.”
A young man with a tablet stood by. He looked up. “I can’t access her cloud footage. I’ve never seen a model like this. I can’t even find the plug-in.”
“She’s older than both of you,” I said, approaching her. “She’s the original model. His first.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where the surveillance access point on her is?” the technician asked.
I sighed. “She doesn’t have a surveillance feature. The ability to record was introduced with the second model, decades ago.”
He flipped his tablet closed, giving up. “I’ll send my checkup off to corporate, but they’re just going to recommend composting. There’s nothing here to work with.”
This young man—boy, really—could reprogram and retrofit the whole house, but confronted with outdated technology? He became a lost puppy.
The toddler was screaming at this point. Adam’s wife could barely hold him. He was rigid with sudden rage. I walked with her back downstairs, ready for my escape.
“I’m going to get rid of Chloe,” she announced. She paused awkwardly. “The android, I mean. All of them. I don’t want to raise Ethan with them.”
“This house will be a real bitch to clean on your own,” I said. She’d probably last two days.
“I’ll bring in humans,” she said, proud. I smiled, thinking how she thought she was doing something noble, using human bodies as expendable labor, the “buying organic” alternative to automated labor that became en vogue a few years ago.
“That used to be the problem. That’s why they brought the Beyond Humans in to begin with.”
She pretended she didn’t hear me.
“Adam didn’t have a will,” she said. “Can you believe that?”
“Well, I guess it all goes to you.”
“The money, at least. He didn’t think he’d die.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said.
“He thought he’d figure out a solution, a way to live on with the help of these. I guess he was a little too early.”
“A lot of things about Adam were a bit premature.”
She laughed.
Then the words came out before I fully knew what I’d said. “I’ll take Chloe. If you’re just going to compost her. I could use some company.”
* * *
This is where the interview would end if I was giving one. I was surprised that so few calls came in after Adam’s death. I wasn’t even asked to make a statement. I was surprised, then slightly ashamed that I even cared or thought about it. However, if I had been interviewed and asked about his death, I’d speak freely for the most part.
But this is off the record.
There were always recording capabilities in the Beyond Humans. The technology was old for sure, kept on a hard copy, not yet synced up to the cloud. Stored in a small disc as small as a thumbtack at the base of the neck, just under the ear. You had to slightly scrape your finger under the earlobe to find it.
Adam hadn’t been sure yet how to navigate surveillance. He made it an intimate act, reaching in close to spot the tiny groove behind the ear with your nail, and very gently sliding it out.
Chloe was the perfect little host when we arrived home. She asked if I’d like tea. I told her to make me an old fashioned, and I let her spend ten minutes finding the ingredients and making a drink while I sat in silence, thinking.
One idea had consumed me the moment I saw Chloe 2 sitting in that attic. If I retrieved her memory device, what would I find during Adam’s last moments?
I was almost afraid to approach her when she returned with the drink. I downed the entire glass and stopped her when she tried to take it back to the kitchen.
“Chloe, sit down.”
She sat promptly.
“Your memory card, is it still intact?
She didn’t even flinch. “Yes.”
“You didn’t remove it yourself?”
“Why would I do that?”
“If I took it out, what would I find?”
She stared at me, and I leaned in close. I expected to feel hot breath, hear her quickened breathing, but I was confronted with utter stillness. She’s not human, I reminded myself. I reached my finger behind her right ear and retrieved the surveillance device, rolled it between my finger and thumb.
I decided just to ask her. She deserved an opportunity to speak.
“What happened?”
“Can you please be more specific?”
“Were you in the attic? When Adam died?”
She didn’t answer. “Chloe?”
Her gaze shifted, and she stared me in the eyes. A feral look came over her.
“I hated the darkness,” she whispered, and I could have sworn I saw a tremble to her lip, however slight.
“How did Adam die?” I asked.
She was still as death. Then she reached for her chest.
“The problem was his heart.”
My hand made a fist around the tiny device. I knew all that I needed to know, about Adam, our marriage, Beyond Humans.
I took the empty glass in my other hand and held it out.
“You can take this back to the kitchen now.”
Chloe snapped back to servant mode and carried it out.
I started a fire and had Chloe make me another drink. I thought about the fact that Beyond Humans were in over 30 million households in the U.S. alone. That right now, American families were sitting down to dinner, unaware of the vast potential housed in their nannies, housekeepers, laborers. I imagined the possibilities, and I became strangely satisfied, in the same way that you might approach a cat, half wanting a provocation. Waiting for that moment when it snaps on its back and kicks its legs at you, claws out. You saw it coming, but you prodded it anyway, and in that predestined response, you feel a sort of perverse satisfaction when the line of blood finally streaks down your arm. It’s a reminder that you’re still alive, that the world around you is real.
I stood over the fire that night and threw the memory card into the flames.
I decided then that Chloe would live permanently with me. Chloe 1 and Chloe 2 together. I don’t think too far into the future, what will happen to her when I die. I’ve come to appreciate the surprising ways that the world pivots and evolves, the miracle of our continued existence despite everything.
Chloe and I sometimes don’t speak for days on end, but every morning, there’s tea, and in the evening, an old-fashioned is ready for me. She cleans the space so it’s eternally spotless, her movements soundless but constant. Her presence makes me feel moored, strangely calm. I rarely leave home anymore. She keeps all the windows open and never draws the shades. I revel in the sun each morning, the start of a new day, however repetitious or hot it will be. In fact, I’ve never seen so much light.
Laura Picklesimer is the author of the debut novel Kill for Love (Unnamed Press, 2023), which won the 2021 Launch Pad Prose Competition and the 2020 Book Pipeline Unpublished Contest for Best Thriller/Mystery. Picklesimer’s short stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, Santa Ana River Review, Gold Man Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, CA.