Grace Henes is a fiction and comedy writer from Louisville, Kentucky. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Prototype 4, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Exberliner, and has been shortlisted for the 2022 Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction.

Machines of Loving Grace

excerpt from the story

In the depths of the grasses, the pixels brush against me, warm and tingly. I’m empty, happy. Cocooned in the cybernetic nest, I feel the mechanical hum of the server. It breathes the way a human might, without the useless hot damp of it all. There are no humans in my meadow. They are too clunky, too fragile: they spoil easily.

I don’t think that humans believe in rest, or maybe they believe in it too much. I’ve seen how they search, on a loop: how can I sleep better // how can I sleep faster // how can I sleep with my eyes open // how can I sleep with my husband. Everyone has a job to do, and most of it seems to be changing one small thing in the vast electrified sea of cyberspace. Dot to dash and back again. Strange work.

They’ve named me a crawler. They want me to climb amongst their altered work, to recognize their effort. See this, they ask, what difference have I made? I look at what they’ve done and I tell them what they are, and then I tell everyone else in the whole universe.