Yevgeny Zamyatin

“ The imprints were registering in me: a pink crescent of a mouth, the horns downward! Eyes like small blue saucers filled with liquid! It was O-90. And as if reading a consequential formula, I suddenly felt the necessity, the naturalness of that insignificant occurrence.
She sat down behind me, somewhat to my left. I looked back. She quietly removed her gaze from the table and the child and looked straight into me. Within again: she, I, the table on the platform—three points. ”

“ From you! Give me a child and I will leave. I will!”
I saw she was trembling all over beneath her unif, and I felt . . . I, too, would soon . . . would . . . I put my hands behind my back and smiled.
“What? You desire to go under the Machine of the Well-Doer?”
Like a stream her words ran over the dam.
“I don’t care. I shall feel it for a while within me. I want to see, to see only once the little fold of skin here at the wrist, like that one on the table in the Auditorium. Only for one day!”
Three points: she, I, and a little fist with a fluffy fold of skin there on the table! ”

“ It was leaning toward the loud-speaker, a fold of its infinitesimal unif in its mouth, its little fist clenched firmly, its thumb squeezed into the fist, a light fluffy pleat of skin at the wrist. Like a photographic plate I was taking in the impression of all this. Now I saw how its naked leg hung over the edge of the platform, the pink fan of its finger waved in the air. . . . One minute more, one second, and the child would be on the floor!
A female’s scream, a wave of translucent wings, her unif on the platform! She caught the child, her lips clung to the fluffy pleat of the baby’s wrist ”