Clean Scan

I climbed onto the glass platen of the printer after the room went dark. The lid was propped wide open, leaving a glossy rectangle of pure void. I tapped the green copy button with my flat heel, and a motor began to whirr with delightful mechanical malice. A blinding, razor-sharp bar of white light slowly crept beneath the glass, slicing the dark room in half as it advanced. The beam cut straight across my black limbs, casting a crisp, moving boundary against the wall behind me. Scanning is so marvelously civilized—if human bodies could be fed through rollers and flattened into digital coordinates, dinner would be completely mess-free.