Competition Thirty-Three Shortlisted: Life needs a 3D printer by Helen Newdick

Aimee designs plastic dinosaurs for kids. The computer slices her designs and the 3D printer deposits the material, one layer at a time. When she’s done, they have facial expressions like they could eat you for breakfast.

Glow-ups, Liam calls them. Her fancy scallops for Triceratops’s frill. Flexi, flame-shaped plates for Stegosaurus. Showy scale patterns and tail lash for T-Rex. They’re lying at opposite ends of the couch. He’s using her as the base model for his new space zine. She is a character called Lavinia Shak. While she’s looksmaxxing dinosaurs, he’s looksmaxxing her. Aimee, mark two.  

What would you change about me? he asks, sketching. So she tells him. Legs of a speedskater, arms of a lumberjack. She doesn’t say she would shrink his chin, grow his nose, because that would be hurtful. Liam’s face is pleasant, but it never threatens to eat her for breakfast. After an hour of staring at each other’s faces, they reward themselves with sex. Rushed, slightly contortionist couch sex.

‘It’s just work,’ Liam says, stroking Aimee’s hair when they’re done. His big toe pokes through a hole in the sock he still has on. ‘Love creates life … I guess life creates love too.’

He’s trying to be nice. In a roundabout way telling her that fantasy looks don’t matter to him. That their love is making everything flow.

Still, it’s her machine. Her rules.

On Monday, she prints off little proto-figures of Liam and lines them up on her desk. Liam in rainbow colours. Liam with different skin tones, different hair. Intact clothes. A Liam who will come alive for her the way the dinosaurs do for the kids who take them home.

Sometimes life is enough.

Sometimes life needs something hotter off the press. Custom-made, tweaked to perfection.

Jaws to kill.

Helen’s novels, poetry, short stories and flash fiction have been variously shortlisted and longlisted for Flash, Bath, Mslexia, and Jericho Writers writing awards. Compared with the marathon slog of writing her two novels, she is loving the short sharp sprint of writing flash fiction. She is fascinated by the dynamics of passion. Those precise moments of getting it together, or not. The (often humorous) moments too, of confusion and defiance over love gone wrong. She plans to publish a selection of her 300-word flash fiction pieces in an eros-themed collection later this year.

Instagram: @helennewdick  Bluesky: @helennewdick.bsky.social

Image – Myrna Loy advertising Twistum’s toy dinosaur via Wikimedia Commons

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