Will Cordeiro

I needed an anniversary gift for my husband—well, technically he wasn’t my husband. At that point, we had lived together for eight years.

The children found it by the brackish crick, washed up where fiddler-crabs burrowed on the mudflats. It looked like something riddled.

The robot—little more than a claw, some wires, a jerrybuilt scaffold—totters through the scrapyard, picking up pieces. It selects an antenna; it plugs in a circuit-board.