Genre: Fiction

In the dystopian world of Hon Lai Chu’s novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines Press, 2025), translated from the Chinese by Jacqueline Leung, a Conjoinment Act has been passed by the government wherein people are encouraged to have their bodies surgically joined to another person, creating couples who purportedly become more fulfilled beings while providing improvements for economic and environmental states. The novel’s structure alternates between sections detailing the narrator’s struggles with her own thinking and decision-making around “conjoining” and sections of her dissertation on the program’s history, including case studies and the origins of bodily “conjoinment.” Taking inspiration from this format, create a dystopian premise in which a society’s government has instituted an optional, controversial policy. Write a short story which intersperses bits of fictionalized research within the in-scene action for a touch of surrealism.