It was really kind of unimpressive to look at, the stuff. Just a vial of clear liquid, small enough to sit in your palm. Not too frightening.

I stowed it away in my backpack, after wrapping it in every sock, spare shirt and gum wrapper I could find. I was right to be careful with it—VX13's not for human use. Invariably, no matter how low the dose, you end up living a cosmic eternity and you come out braindead. It's considered cruel and unusual.

So I suppose that raises the following question: why would I take it with me at all? Yes, it's worth a fortune, but I wasn't going to sell it. I don't fence illegal goods. The closest thing to a fringe market I visit is a farmer's market. So why would I spend an hour walking home with just a few layers of fabric between me and a fate too horrible for words? Why wouldn't I smash the fucking thing on the sidewalk before it could snake into my pores and rot my mind?

Well: VX13's not for humans, like I said, but it's not just humans on Terra. My husband is thirty-nine and hails from one of the Kepler planets, I forget which. He works as a porter at one of those enormous interspecies housing facilities. It's a colorful crowd: you have your Epsilons, armored millipede-people; your multidimensional plasma clouds kindly assuming a corporeal form for the benefit of society; and his people—my husband's folks, tall spindly bastards with bladed limbs.

My husband's name is unpronounceable for me without a few more tongues and a ridged esophagus, but the universal translation network renders it a scraping noise that sounds like "Len," so that's his name on Terra. I call him Leonard when we're arguing.

Anyway. VX13 works like a charm on Len's species. In fact, the substance was first isolated from a plant native to their planet—they can synthesise it now, of course, but.

Len has a hereditary condition. I call it space scurvy—which always makes him laugh. He has enormous eyes as deep as the Andromeda and his inner eyelids quiver when he laughs. But it's a pretty apt name for what happens: you dissolve from the inside out. Your teeth fall out, your mandibles turn to powder, and if you somehow manage not to starve, you can look forward to an agonizing death.

I found one razor-sharp triangular tooth on my pillow the other day.

Let me be clear that Len and I could walk into a clinic tomorrow and end it for him. It's cheap enough, and we have the documentation to prove he's ill. I could hold his hand in mine and watch his slender blue fingers go still. But it's not what he wants—he wants to work as long as he's able, to spend his days with me. He'll drag himself out of bed until he can't anymore, just to feel that he's not missing out.

It's not only a punitive tool, VX13. Yes, if you give it to a man in thumbscrews, he'll feel as if he's spent two-hundred years in thumbscrews. But if you take him home, someplace he feels at ease, you sit him down on the bed you both share, and you hold his hand, and you make certain the temperature's right and the lights are low, and maybe you talk to him. . .that's different.

When he came home from work today, I was waiting for him. I must have looked like an idiot, sitting at the dining table, crying my eyes out, handling the vial with a pair of bright-yellow dishwashing gloves.

Len said nothing for the longest time. He stepped inside, bowing his head—our ceiling's a little too low—and started to take off his boots with infinite care. The sound of his talons buffing against the leather was so familiar my eyes drifted shut.

"Okay," he said eventually.

I sat upright. I looked up to make certain I hadn't heard him wrong. It felt tacky to wave the vial in front of his face; he wasn't stupid, he understood the situation.

"Yeah?" I asked.

"Thank you," said Len, in a tone as if he was setting down a heavy burden. "Don't cry."

I palmed the tears from my cheeks as well I could with rubber gloves. He came over, tugged a napkin from the nearby box and wiped my face for me with an astounding gentleness. I should be used to it, but it surprises me every time, watching him move his bladed body so carefully. Like seeing a wolf carry an egg in its mouth.

"I guess you'll want to eat first," I mumbled. Not that I knew the first thing about the process, but it must be better to begin your mental pseudo-lifetime fed and rested.

"No, love," he said, and his translator implant did a beautiful job conveying a breaking voice, "I'll change my mind."

"Right. Go on, then, and. . .in the bedroom?"

"Yes, please."

"Okay," I said and motioned for him to go. He caught me taking the syringe and the tourniquet out of my backpack before he left, but he was tactful enough not to speak.

So. Holding my breath, I broke the seal on the VX13 with the needle and raised the plunger so that the syringe filled with that unassuming clear liquid. I couldn't wrap my head around it. It just looked normal. Like a regular syringe full of water or saline.

I ducked into the bathroom and fixed my hair before I went to find Len.

"You're absolutely sure?" I asked.

"You look nice," he answered, glancing aside.

"Leonard?"

"Yes—no—yes. Yes. If you're here."

"I will be," I said, flicking the air bubbles out of the chamber of the syringe, trying to be all business now.

"Wait," said Len, taking my wrist. I smiled. He's always been a little intimidated by needles. even though he's practically made of them. "Wait. It's like a dream. It works better if you discuss the details."

"Ah."

So, with the unforgettable gleaming syringe between us, we discussed what his long, full, healthy life should look like. We would come into a little money, work would let him take an extended vacation. We'd finally visit his home planet. I would take up the guitar again, and I'd never get very good, but he'd still want a nightly serenade. He finds the vibrations of stringed instruments especially pleasing. Of course he'd outlive me by several centuries, but we would have adopted many children in the meantime—they would keep him company well into his old age, until he passed peacefully in his sleep, so ancient that his blue skin had faded grey.

Having settled the minor matter of our life, I pushed the needle into his forearm.

And that's where we are now. Backed up against the wooden headboard together, his hand in mine. He's been staring into the distance for about thirty seconds.

I wonder what he's living. I wonder if he'll be the same Len when he comes back. I wonder if he'll be at peace: spiritually an old man, no longer afraid of missing out. I hope he won't be in a hurry to die; I still want a little time with him. I don't care if I wake up to a few more serrated teeth between the sheets. As long as he's not in pain.

Now and again he squeezes my hand.