How the children lived before they filled the sky—
Wailing underneath lab tables. Grabbing for the scientists’ wingtips. Getting their grubby little mitts into all the atoms.
There’s slobber on the palladium! a scientist would cry.
The babies rolled around the lab floor until kicked, gently—mostly always gently—into corners. The toddlers the scientists lured into rabbit cages with marshmallows. The oldest of the children could be bribed with Bunsen burners for a moment’s peace.
Despite this, they were cute, the children. Mascots who watched in awe as the scientists broke all the rules the children had been taught by God.
The only thing you should believe in is yourself, the scientists told them. That and wave-particle duality.
The children needed the scientists for yummies and boo-boo kissing, but the scientists were loath to admit they needed the children even more.
After the first child spilled her juice and cured all the polio, all the scientists began bringing kids to the lab. The ones who couldn’t find any, made children out of carbon and whatever extra chromosomes they found sitting around.
None of the scientists ever investigated why when two children bumped heads a third emerged—they were too busy making cool lasers—but things were getting out of hand. The petri dishes got broken. The rhesus monkeys got jealous. The pool was packed except during adult swim.
Hmm, the scientists muttered. Math.
They drew up plans to release the children back into the wild, but this involved too much time spent looking for station wagons in supermarket parking lots.
When they found one, they’d cry, Eureka! and toss as many children in the car as they could fit.
34, one of the scientists yelled, and from that point on it became a kind of experiment. What was the largest prime number of children they could fit? Did the golden ratio come into it? What if they shrank some of the children?
They resolved to invent a shrink ray just the second they got back from soccer practice.
About creating a soccer team—
The scientists never asked if they should do it. They only knew they had to do it because otherwise the children would bite them.
The children were terrible at soccer. The bumped into each other constantly, no matter how often the scientists yelled at them to space out and run the plays string theory indicated were most effective.
New children overran the field, bumping into each other and creating even more children until their chubby little bodies filled the nets. Then the parking lots. Now the sky.
Hmm, the scientists murmur. Our hubris.
And it’s true. Their hubris readings would be off the chart if the chart wasn’t hidden under a growing pile of children, sticky and adorable. It should never have gone this far, but nothing in all their calculations told the scientists when they should have stopped.
And to have never started?
That was unimaginable, even for those who had imagined everything else.
~
Adam Peterson is the author of the flash fiction collections My Untimely Death, The Flasher, and [SPOILER ALERT] (with Laura Eve Engel). His short fiction has appeared in Epoch, The Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He can be found online at www.adampeterson.net.