kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"Neutered.0"

words

He stood under the streetlight like a bruise, a dark circle indicative of too little sleep, too much drinking. The city was in quiet turmoil, the first stage of a grief that would take decades to progress through. It had been two months since a baby had been born. The last one, not a stillbirth--there had been a few stillbirths, at the end--had been born to a small tribe in New Guinea.

His wife sat on a ferris wheel in the park, and cried. She'd miscarried, a year ago that night, something not entirely uncommon. It had hurt her, but they'd moved on--they'd try again, after she healed. And they had tried, and tried again, but nothing took. They'd gone through severe hoops with fertility doctors, before the rumors started to spread.

Slowly, it had became more and more obvious. It wasn't just them. What had been just a personal nightmare grew far more insidious.

Rumors, then, of God, or Aliens, Biological Warfare and Solar Flares--always with the hushed capitals of a stage whisper. The biologists said nothing was wrong; the physicists held their breath; preachers called it the work of God, or the Devil, or both.

He wondered, not for the first time, and not for the last, if Tolkien had foreseen this with his talk of elves, of moving on. Where was their ship to take them to the next land? But no shiny spaceships arrived, and nobody claimed to be Noah, except perhaps the cryogenics industry.

For the first time in the history of civilization, peace had fallen upon the planet. No man warred with another, for life was far too precious, and the future they had fought for seemed more a hallucination than Heaven.

And still, nobody wanted the orphans.

Nobody wanted the orphans.

He went to his wife, crossing the cracked sidewalk and under-watered, over-trod grass that was thinning to bald dirt and pebbles; he went to her, and put his arms around her, giving her the present, knowing it was wrong but not knowing what else to do, hoping it was something; afraid that it was something. But then, what would some small psychosis be, with the world about to end?

He handed her a baby doll, wrapped up in blankets against the dark, against the cold. He handed her a baby doll, and she curled it close to her chest, and he wrapped his arms around her and it, and he cried as well. And the ferris wheel creaked and turned under their cries, and but for that the night was silent.