Uncanny, March/April 2026
Savita, a sixty-five-year-old Indian-American woman, has long dreaded Thanksgiving — not merely for its excess, but for the grief that has shadowed every November since her youngest son, Jairaj, vanished from her life five years ago. One evening, retreating to the guest room as she often does during this season, she half-watches a reality competition called Chimera, in which contestants engineer genetically modified creatures. She is struck by one contestant in particular: a composed, brown-skinned man named Jay, handsome and unadorned, who carries himself with a quiet confidence she finds inexplicably familiar.
Recognition comes in a flash. A childhood photograph appears in Jay’s introductory interview — a boy leaning against a hay roll at a farm she knows instantly — and Savita understands that the stranger on her screen is her son. Raj has done what he always said he would: transferred his brain into a synthetic, exogenous body. The face she watches is new, but every gesture, every pause before laughter, every habit of mind belongs to the boy she raised.
Through a series of flashbacks, the story reconstructs how mother and son arrived at this rupture. From childhood, Raj was fascinated by the prospect of mechanical bodies — at first as a science fair curiosity, later as a genuine philosophical and environmental conviction. He believed exogenous bodies represented a more sustainable way to inhabit the world, consuming no food, no heat, no medical resources. Savita found the idea repugnant and frightening, dismissing his arguments as brainwashing and his desires as selfishness. At a final Thanksgiving dinner, she told him bluntly that she would die of shame if he went through with it. He left the table quietly, flew back to California, and disappeared entirely — withdrawing from university, abandoning his phone, severing all contact.
Now, years later, Savita watches episode after episode of Chimera through the night, fast-forwarding to every moment Jay appears on screen. She sees her son thriving — thoughtful, principled, advancing through the competition with work focused on endangered species conservation rather than spectacle. In a late-episode interview, Jay reveals that his original biological body remains in cryogenic storage, but that he intends to cremate it soon, believing one cannot fully inhabit a new life while the old one lingers preserved somewhere in the dark.
The revelation shakes Savita. She had carried a quiet hope that the transformation might be reversible. Now she understands it is not — and more, that clinging to that hope would keep her son a permanent stranger. The show’s finale, broadcast live on Thanksgiving weekend, invites viewers to send messages to contestants via a hashtag. The gesture feels absurd, yet no more absurd than learning your child’s fate from a television screen.
The story closes with Savita lying beside her sleeping husband at dawn, carefully composing what she will write. She does not draft a plea for reversal or a rebuke. She drafts an apology — and an offer to stand beside him as he lights the pyre of his old body, finally accepting her son on the only terms he has ever asked for.
Anjali Sachdeva’s short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, won the 2019 Chautauqua Prize and the 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France). Her fiction has been published in Lightspeed and Tor.com, and featured on the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. She teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University and the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. More information is at anjalisachdeva.com.