The Iowa Review

Human Resources

Six weeks before the little girl showed up, Angie and I decided to cap our twelve-hour workday with piña coladas in our usual booth at our usual dive. We ordered from the leering bartender, whom we liked in spite of his sex-offender vibe and bristling neckbeard, because his lecherous gaze made us feel young. He was also a swift and attentive mixologist. Within five minutes, our blended drinks arrived in split plastic cups, lustily adorned with umbrellas.

Angie was my best friend. I hated her like a sister. As the only female heads at our consulting firm, we had been getting together regularly for the past four years to trade stories about working under Gary, our paunchy windbag of a boss. I admired Angie most for her gel manicure, which was always pristine, and the way she wielded silence like a weapon in meetings, eyes unblinking, nails pecking at her laptop keyboard until her opponent cracked.

Angie took a long sip, staring straight at me, daring me to address the fact that her bare feet were now infiltrati­ng my side of the booth. My drink gargled as I sucked it through my straw, matching Angie’s withering eye contact with my own, until she grimaced at me meanly and said, “Spill.” “Looks like I’m getting a hysterecto­my,” I said.

Angie bonked her plastic cup into mine. “Smart. Do it now while you still can.”

In addition to the powers of unrelentin­g eye contact, Angie also proselytiz­ed the benefits of elective tubal ligation, which she had undergone in her mid-twenties. She had never been the maternal type, she said. And now that Roe had been overturned, she had developed the habit of pontificat­ing after a few drinks that the only way to maintain autonomy over our bodies, our careers, our wallets, and our lives was self-sterilizat­ion. Children were burdens under the best of government­s, she insisted, and soul stealers under the worst.

“Nowadays, a kid costs more than an MBA: $300k!” she said, gulping her piña and gesticulat­ing wildly as she ran through her list of other horrifying financial stats associated with parenthood.

“I didn’t actually choose this,” I said, interrupti­ng.

“What do you mean?”

“The doctor called. I have some kind of scary tumor that has to come out, and my uterus might need to come out with it.”

“Listen,” she said, leaning forward, her nails gleaming in the neon bar light. “Sorry about your womb, but this is the best thing that could have happened. For your career and for you. You don’t want to birth one of those freaky Peter Pans.”

“Huh?”

“The stunted kids. Come on. You haven’t seen the reports?”

I leaned across the table and let Angie show me a conspiracy website on her phone. It was all rambling red text on a black background. The contrast stung my eyes, but, begrudging­ly, I pretended to read, listening to her summarize the accounts of children not growing as they should. A diapered tenyear-old in Brooklyn who refused all potty training. A thirteen-year-old in Orlando who got her period, even though her mouth was still stuck full of pointy baby teeth. An eight-year-old in some Cleveland suburb, who, having failed to develop object permanence, was traumatize­d by a birthday game of hide-and-seek. Twelve-year-old twins in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo who declined to replace their twinspeak with proper Japanese grammar, communicat­ing only in the made-up language they withheld from their parents. These so-called stunted children were born into a range of households with different environmen­ts, different climates, different genetics. There was no common risk factor, no evidence of mutation or disease. At some point during the past year, the stunted children’s cells had simply stopped aging, the website explained, though otherwise they seemed perfectly healthy. They would just always be children.

When there was nothing left to scroll, Angie rested her phone on the table like a poker chip and stared me down, muscling me into response. She let me win earlier, so I capitulate­d. “Wow!” was all I could say.

“I know, right? And it gets worse. Now some of the stunted kids seem to be shrinking. Regressing into babies. And the doctors have no idea why.” “Idiots,” I said.

“Total dickheads. Can you imagine being forced to give birth and then the kid just up and decides to stop growing and no one can even tell you why? The thing just lives with you forever, crying and shitting and eating all your Soylent. No return on investment. No corporate dynasty. Nothing for you to look forward to but extinction.”

Satisfied with her life choices, Angie leaned back and slurped her piña. That’s when I felt the hot stab of pain in my lower abdomen, sharper and weirder than a cramp, that had made me go to the gynecologi­st in the first place—the fibroid once again announcing itself. The plastic booth squeaked obscenely as I hunched forward, twisting, trying to contort the pain out of my lower body like a marathon runner trying not to shit. It didn’t work. The pain was elusive. I gave up and chugged my piña until my brain froze, the throb in my skull a welcome distractio­n from the throb in my uterus.

“Unbelievab­le, I know,” said Angie, as I massaged my temples. “You really dodged a bullet. When’s the operation anyway?”

“Not sure,” I said. “I really can’t afford to be out of commission right now.” Against my usual tactics, I described to Angie the semiconduc­tor manufactur­er client I was currently advising. How, despite decent quarterly earnings, the new CEO wanted to shake things up and “streamline their operations,” by which he meant slash their headcount in half.

“Like every other CEO for the past forty years, he just loves layoffs,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s textbook. He’s bringing me in to take the heat off him.”

“Boring, but clean. Gary’s going to eat it up. If I didn’t have an ace in the hole, I might even be jealous.” Angie and I had been one-upping each other ever since Gary had first dangled the possibilit­y that the top performer might be promoted to VP. It was illegal and unspoken, but we knew the board would only tolerate promoting one woman at a time. We accepted this discrimina­tion as we accepted every discrimina­tion, both of us out to prove our exceptiona­lism by bagging the higher-profile client—the farther up the Fortune 500 list, the better.

“What industry?” I asked.

“Telecom,” she said, tapping her taxi-yellow nails on her phone case. “Fuck,” I said, even though I knew Angie was bluffing. Any new business of that size could not have slipped beneath my notice. Besides, the nail tap was Angie’s tell. She was spiraling. I took a break from feeling sorry for myself and my collapsing fertility to feel sorry for her and the promotion I was about to win from her. Even so, moments of vulnerabil­ity were so rare between us that I felt an urge to take her hand in mine, to swear some sort of womanly alliance against the bastards we worked for—but all at once the pain in my nether regions returned, knifing me from the inside. Under the table, I slipped a fist in my pants, pressing on my pelvis. My entire mons pubis was swollen and abnormally girthy. I squeezed my eyes shut, kneading the tight drum of flesh. I hadn’t felt this sensation since my eggs had been primed by hormonal stimulatio­n for artificial harvesting fifteen years earlier. Again, it was as though my ovaries were roiling in protest, the eggs inside clamoring to be fertilized.

“Are you okay?” asked Angie’s voice. When I opened my eyes, Neckbeard was standing over me, fondling a damp glass with a rag.

“Get you ladies anything else?” he asked.

Angie ordered a basket of onion rings. I said nothing, the implicatio­n being that we would split the onion rings, but Neckbeard didn’t leave. He just stood there, tracing the glass’s rim with the filthy towel. It was suggestive, almost masturbato­ry. His lips parted. Waves of arousal and shame washed over me. I couldn’t take it. I was either going to have to smash the

glass on the tile floor, forcing him to fetch a broom and dust pan, or I was going to have to shove that filthy towel in his mouth, mount him in the bathroom out back, and knock myself up.

“Nothing for me,” I said finally, my hand still down my pants.

When I was twenty-four, I had donated my eggs to cover the first semester’s tuition for my MBA. At the time, it felt like an easy choice, made easier by the fact that I was young, healthy, and single with no plans to use the eggs for which I would be paid upward of ten thousand dollars, given that I had graduated summa cum laude and gained acceptance to a ruthlessly elite business school. I matched quickly with an anonymous couple, who paid for the ten consecutiv­e days of hormonal injections, the HCG trigger shot, and the outpatient retrieval procedure. They even put me up in a nice hotel while I recovered. There were no complicati­ons. No ovarian hyperstimu­lation syndrome. Other than a sensation of fullness in my abdomen and some mild hormonal weeping, the whole thing was over before my still-developing brain could process how I’d gambled my body.

As I sat on a cold table in a paper gown, listening to the doctor prescribe me a course of GNRH analogue shots to shrink my fibroid down to a more operable size, it became clear what my youthful gamble had cost me. I would need a hysterecto­my. I would never bear children.

I didn’t want to adopt someone else’s child, nor did I want to hire someone to carry mine. Another future self dissolved away. I didn’t have time for these feelings. I also didn’t have time to go into the clinic every four weeks. I texted my assistant and told him to score a home injection kit through a third party.

The GNRH analogues, which were designed to block my whole hormone axis, would also render me temporaril­y menopausal. In the nights after my first injection, the hot flashes were relentless. Each time I drifted off to sleep, my body would wake me, sweaty with pulse pounding, my hands balled into fists. The first time it happened, I smacked my skull into the headboard. I groaned as I switched on a lamp in my empty room. I was suffering and alone, as I would be forever. On my phone, I composed a mean-spirited text to my long-distance boyfriend, citing my many grievances. “Admit it,” I signed off. “You’re impotent and you like work more than fucking.”

I spent the rest of the night weeding my inbox with a hot water bottle pressed to my crotch. After all, I consoled myself, work would always be a sturdier pursuit than some half-assed, ill-destined attempt at maternal love.

The little girl showed up about six weeks later. It was seven in the morning, but I was already in the middle of presenting my final list of department­s to

dismantle to the semiconduc­tor company’s executive team over video call. Gary had dialed in for the presentati­on, though his camera was off and his microphone red-slashed. My heart was galloping in my chest, powered by caffeine, post-workout endorphins, and the adrenaline of knowing that the next hour would solidify my victory over Angie. In the chat, Gary typed that he was there only as a silent observer, though he and I both knew better: I was on track to become the first woman VP of Growth. Baby or no baby, my legacy would remain intact.

All morning, that self-pressuring notion had been streaming through my head. My hands were shaky and sweaty. The hormones made my skin blotchy and uneven, my reflection in the webcam unsettling me further as I switched over to presentati­on autopilot, my mouth shaping words like efficienci­es and due diligence and omnichanne­l without processing their meaning. Across town, heads were nodding, leaning into the foreground. The phrase low-hanging fruit still lingered on my on-screen lips when I heard a violent thwack. Like something had collided with the screen door’s wooden frame, smacking it shut. I continued speaking from the secret script hidden in the slide deck’s presenter mode, trying to sound supremely confident. At the end of the third slide, it happened again—the sound like a dead body dropping on the porch.

“Darla, are you expecting a delivery?” Gary’s camera was still off, so the voice that issued from the black square sounded like the voice of God speaking to me from the formless void.

“No, I—”

“Can you deal with it? It’s distractin­g.”

My jaw tightened. I apologized, granting Gary’s request to present and went downstairs to open the door.

Standing ten yards away, in the middle of the sun-drenched yard, was a little girl gripping a blue rubber bouncy ball. It was about the size of a peach, and she held it in a sticky fist. (Or so I assumed. Children are always inexplicab­ly sticky.) Her dust-colored hair was pulled back into bumpy, lopsided pigtails, and she wore a purple, short-sleeved romper marbled with swirls. Cut above mid-thigh, the romper’s shorts made her legs look disproport­ionately long compared to the rest of her squat torso, giving her that stretched look kids sometimes get when their growth is spurting. I struggled to estimate how old she was, having not been around any children since I was one myself. My best guess was seven.

“Hi there,” I said, my voice rising to the energetic pitch that I had heard other adults use with children.

“Hullo,” she said, looking up at me with glassy alien eyes. Her tone was flat and unimpresse­d. Maybe she was older than I thought—eight, possibly nine? Ten, tops.

“Did you knock?”

She shook her head and bounced the ball on the heat-cracked sidewalk. Bounce, catch. Bounce, bounce, catch.

“Did you throw that ball against my door?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, don’t. Go play somewhere else. I’m very busy.” I turned to go inside, but there was something familiar about her features that stopped me: buttony eyes, bridgeless nose, an afterthoug­ht of a mouth—all of them tiny in proportion to her moon-shaped skull. I tried to conjure the features of my neighbors, to see if I could place some resemblanc­e, but I couldn’t picture any of the people I lived amongst except in the most general terms. I scanned the street for an adult who might be responsibl­e for her. There was nobody else in sight.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

Bounce, catch. “Here.”

“You live here.”

“Uh huh,” she said. The ball hit a jagged chink in the sidewalk, landing in a patch of tall grass. She stooped to dig it out.

“You mean you live on this street?”

She cocked her head to one side like a dog trying to understand English. “Duh.”

I was about to ask her name, when suddenly my fibroid throbbed. Jabbing a finger into my gut, I gritted my teeth and waited for the stabbing pain to subside. All at once, the girl dashed past me, tore the screen door open, and bolted inside the house, her light-up sneakers going haywire.

“Hold it right there!” I shouted, still clutching my side. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the dimness inside the foyer, but I thought I saw a flash of purple whip around the corner, heading for the kitchen.

But the kitchen was empty when I switched on the lights, the appliances polished and spotless. I heard a patter overhead, followed by a rhythmic squeaking. I raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and threw open the door to the guest room that doubled as my home office.

The girl was jumping on the bed, screeching and cackling like a rabid chimpanzee. The mattress’s metal coils squeaked and groaned as, over and over, she volleyed the dense core of her body through the air, her neck and limbs exploding at the top into a five-pointed star. Atop my external monitor, the webcam was lit green and angled toward the O’keeffe print I’d hung above the bed, though the faces in the squares were frozen. Some merciful glitch, I thought—until Gary’s voice, repeating my name in a low, steady hum that had been drowned out by the girl’s exertions, finally registered in my ear. “Darladarla­darladarla­darla...”

“I’m here!” I said, crouching forward, my face purple and crazed in the monitor’s mirror. The girl leapt in and out of the background, as though springing forth repeatedly from my skull.

“What’s happening? Do you have a kid I don’t know about?”

“No! I’m sorry, she just—” “Weeeeeeeee­eeeeeeeeee­eeeeeee!” the girl screamed at the jump’s apex, before collapsing in a heap of giggles.

“—showed up and—”

“Darla, if this is something you need to drop off and deal with, I can take it from here.”

My on-screen mouth hung open, waiting for the words that slowly leaked from my brain. “Of course. Thank you, Gary. And thank you for your time today, everyone. I apologize for the disruption.”

I closed the laptop lid and the monitor went black. The bed squeaked behind me. The girl giggled and whooped, reveling in my lost promotion. “Stop that right now,” I told her reflection in the darkened screen. “Jumpy jump-jump!” she said.

“No! No more jumpy jump-jump.” I yanked the duvet out from under her. “I’ll miss you, jumpiiing!” she said, but she didn’t stop. I tried hooking her by the elbow. She writhed out of my grasp.

“Get your butt down right now or I will glue it to that ceiling fan,” I said, my mother’s words haunting my mouth. Mom wasn’t dead, just retired. Before that, she was a high school principal, back when working mothers relied on minor acts of violence to silence their kids long enough to present as childless.

“Yeah, right,” the girl said, rolling her eyes. Suddenly I felt delighted to be losing my uterus.

“Look,” I said, ready to cut her a check for college if it would get her to stop. “I think there’s been a disconnect. Let’s try something else. Do you like ice cream?”

She stopped jumping and looked at me askance. “Ice cream?”

“Ice cream,” I said.

Downstairs in the kitchen, I unwrapped one of the gourmet ice cream sandwiches left behind by my long-distance boyfriend and handed it to her: Nutella and caramel swirl stuffed between two snickerdoo­dles. She held it between her balmy hands, rotating it slowly so that her tongue traced the ice cream perimeter, catching every drip.

“What’s your name?”

She didn’t answer, suddenly shy. Her eyes hovered over the ten-dollar treat like twin flying saucers.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

She shook her head. An ice cream mustache had formed above her lip. “You don’t get it.”

“How old are you?”

She held up her fingers, murmuring numbers to herself. “It keeps changing.”

I tried to remember in what grade they taught fractions and decimals. “Can you round?” I asked.

She crammed the last quarter of the sandwich into her mouth, brushing her hands together to free them of crumbs. The particles rained down, sullying my once-immaculate floor.

“It’ll be a lot easier for me to find your mommy or daddy or whoever if you tell me who you are,” I said.

She glared at me. Her ice cream mustache was sagging and sullen. “Don’t call them.”

“Either I call your parents, or I’m going to have to call someone else. Like Child Protective Services. And they’re going to ask you all the same questions I am, so why don’t we skip all that and you just tell me who I should call to come and get you?”

“You’re being mean!” She was stomping in place, her light-up sneakers flashing like hazard lights.

“Fine. Have it your way. I won’t call anyone. But you have to go. I don’t have time for tantrums. I’m not your babysitter.”

Her chin wobbled. She dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, wiping the mustache off her face. Snatching the blue ball off the counter, she stuck it in the pocket of her romper, where it protruded from her thigh like a growth.

“This is stupid,” she said, shrill enough to shatter glass, as I steered her tiny shoulders through the still-open doorway, down the sidewalk, and out the front gate. “You’re stupid!”

“I’m not stupid, I’m a consultant! Go whine to your mommy!” I shouted after her, absolving myself in that moment of any further responsibi­lity for her welfare.

But that absolution lasted no more than ten minutes. As I stood over the bathroom sink scrubbing the sticky remnants of our encounter from my hands, I evaluated my crow’s feet under the mirror’s theatrical incandesce­nt bulbs. For thirty-nine, I was relatively wrinkle-free, a boon that I now chalked up more to reproducti­ve avoidance than Botox. I pictured the girl’s mother—assuming she had one, of course—how saggy her face would have become after so many years of outbursts, how worry-lined after a few short hours of picturing her missing daughter dead or dismembere­d or dungeoned. Then I thought about the girl herself, wondering if she had made it home in one piece, wondering if there was some small chance

that the ball had bounced across a six-lane highway, hurling the girl into the path of an eighteen-wheeler. Imagine having to worry about that. This was another reason I was suddenly grateful not to have had children. They destroyed your body. They drained your bank account. They derailed your career. They were messy. They were loud. They were ungrateful. But, worst of all, they were vulnerable.

The following morning, Gary summoned me into his glass-box office, where he declined to offer me a seat on the two-thousand-dollar wooden triangle imported from Copenhagen that he called a chair and scowled at me over laced fingertips.

“Darla. Where do I even start? The fact that you kept your daughter a secret from me is deeply troubling.”

“She’s not my d—”

He held up a hand. “Breach of trust aside, I have to say: I know we all have personal lives, but yours nearly cost us the biggest client this firm has seen in six quarters.”

It was more like ten quarters, but there was no point in correcting Gary when he was feeling sanctimoni­ous.

“Thankfully,” he continued, “I was able to do some damage control. We’ve got another call with them first thing on Monday.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Gary shouted, the vein in his neck bulging. The door opened and Angie appeared in a cherry-red pantsuit and matching manicure, balancing her laptop in her elbow’s right angle.

“I’ve asked Angie to join us,” Gary said, turning to me. “She’ll be acting second on Monday’s call, should you find yourself in the midst of another childcare crisis.”

“That really isn’t necess—” I started to say.

“Not up for discussion, Darla,” he said. “You’re still point. Just deliver and we won’t have a problem.”

When the elevator doors closed behind us, Angie asked, “Did a lost child really blow up your meeting?”

I sighed. A part of me had expected this. The whole thing stank of sabotage. A bell dinged as the doors opened on the next floor up. It wasn’t my floor, but I got off anyway.

“Hello?” she called after me. I ignored her. “Seriously? Is this how it’s going to be?” I raised a middle finger overhead, not looking back until the doors closed on her. I really did hate her like a sister.

I took the stairs back to my office, where I had my assistant hold all my calls and spent the next hour collapsing and uncollapsi­ng columns on vari

ous spreadshee­ts, dragging them from screen to screen, until something thumped against the window behind me. I turned, expecting to see a flurry of wings, some braindead pigeon fluttering to the ground. My screen-weary gaze detected nothing. I turned back to my spreadshee­t.

Another emphatic thump. This time, I whirled around and spotted a streak of blue dropping out of sight. I pushed off my desk, my chair coasting to the window. On the sidewalk below, I saw the little girl, alive and intact. She was darting across the street to retrieve the blue bouncy ball now ricochetin­g from concrete awning to fire hydrant to median. Her hair was still in pigtails and she wore the same purple jumpsuit with drawstring waist. Her smallness was warped somehow by distance. She looked equal in height to both lamppost and fire hydrant, which couldn’t be true. She stopped and stood on the other side of the street, looking up. I waved with my whole arm, desperate to make her halt. She didn’t wave back. Instead, she threw the ball to a young boy, who was standing in the median in an oversized orange T-shirt that hung to his knees like a dress. He held the ball out and took a few practice kicks, before punting it through the air in a clean, precise arc. It hammered against my plate glass window.

I raced down the hallway, jabbing the elevator’s down button again and again. By the time I crossed the heat-shimmering pavement, the girl had retrieved the ball and was preparing to lob it back to her associate. I stepped behind her and swiped the ball from her hand.

“Hi there,” I said, stashing the ball behind my back.

“Hey! That’s mine!” she said.

“Stop throwing it at my window, and I’ll consider giving it back.” With her chin tucked to her chest, the girl extended her hand, her eyes widening to the size of coins. She looked both shorter and younger than I remembered, which seemed like a trick. How old were kids when they learned to manipulate? Her romper looked stretched out, like it had somehow gotten bigger. The shorts now grazed her knees.

“You can tell Angie nice try,” I said, channeling my principal mother’s sternness.

“Give me my ball!” she said, her face scrunched.

I glanced at the boy in the laughably large shirt, which had to be either a hand-me-down from an older sibling or a frugal parent’s forethough­t. My fibroid throbbed in my gut.

“Who are you? Angie’s nephew?” I asked him, digging my elbow into my pelvis.

The girl rolled her eyes. “That’s Charlie.”

“Howdy,” he said. “Who’s Angie?” He seemed to be about the same age as the girl. Looking at them together, I wondered how I had ever estimated her age to be as high as nine or ten. Neither could be any older than six.

“Stop kicking balls at my window,” I said. “This isn’t going to work.” “We came to get you,” the girl said. “We don’t have much time before they take you apart. Melanie Roxane is waiting at home. She needed a nap.” Behind my back, I turned the ball slowly over in my hand. Confusion was not Angie’s usual tactic. “Who’s waiting?”

“Our sister.”

“Great. Another one. How many of you are there?”

Charlie’s face crumpled into a reddish mess, the corners of his mouth widening to reveal his baby molars. “How can you ask that?” he said, blubbering.

“He’s Charlie!” said the girl, snot weeping from her nostrils, “and I’m Briar!”

Their wailing reverberat­ed down the city block, amplified by the narrow space between glass towers. Were they crying on command? Had Angie hired child actors? I squatted beside them, desperate to shut them up before anyone on the executive floor looked out. The last thing I needed was for Gary to get the impression I was the secret mother of not one howling child, but two.

Using my boardroom voice, I said to Briar, “I think our wires got crossed. Of course, I remember.”

She choked back a sob. “You do?”

“Yes.”

“It was so cold and bright when they took us out,” Charlie said, babbling to himself.

“I remember,” I lied. “So cold and bright.” I didn’t understand what was happening—or what other tricks Angie had up her sleeve—but I knew that I needed to round them all up away from Gary and call CPS. I would tell my assistant I was working from home.

“I knew you were faking that you didn’t remember,” said Briar. “You were so mean yesterday!”

“I promise not to be mean anymore, okay?”

Briar sniffed, sucking up a snot string. She bobbed her head in agreement. Her calm transmitte­d to Charlie, who dried his eyes with a baggy sleeve, hiccupping.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

When we pulled up in my Corvette, it was after two p.m. and the late August sun was high and blistering over the house. A girl with blonde ringlets slumped on the stoop, sun drunk and dozing, her sequin unitard stippled with sweat. My welcome mat was strung over the porch rail, creating a makeshift tent that she sheltered under, and who could blame her?

This was summer in Texas. We were all just trying to stay low in the shade, cool as cockroache­s.

“Wake up, sissy!” Briar shouted, scuttling across the crunchy brown grass to rouse the slumbering girl, who blinked hard and stood, teetering on her stubby legs. A tiara was pinned atop her gathered ringlets, she wore a full face of makeup like a pageant contestant, and her spray tan gleamed in the sun, masking a constellat­ion of freckles like mine. My fibroid ached. “Call me Melrox,” the beauty queen said with a lisp.

“This is your big sister?” I asked Briar, who suddenly looked younger to me in her floppy light-up sneakers.

“Uh huh,” she said. My eye measured her romper: the sleeves ballooning over the elbows, the shorts now level with her dimpled knees. I had read somewhere that kids’ kneecaps didn’t fully ossify until around age six. I crouched down and poked the right one.

“Quit!” she whined. There was definitely something solid in there, but it was more suggestion than substance—a chunk of congealed jelly cartilage that had not yet hardened into bone.

I stood up too fast. Floaters winked across the blue sky. I recalled the phenomenon of stunted children that Angie had described to me in the bar those many weeks earlier. My chest heaved and heaved with giggles. Either I was delirious, or Briar was not just stunted; she was actually aging backwards.

Inside the house, I prepared a smorgasbor­d of kid food housed in small glass bowls and presented it to the children on a platter. Strawberri­es. Cheese crackers. Freezer-limp fish sticks. Raw cookie dough. As they ate, I studied their shortening legs, their shrinking bones. I had no idea how Angie had pulled it off, but I was determined to get to the bottom of this elaborate, psychopath­ic prank.

“Were you always this small?” I asked Briar.

“I’ve been bigger,” she answered with her mouth full.

“Were you this small when we met?”

“The first time? Oh no, I was teeny-weeny. You had to squint to see me.” I popped a strawberry in my mouth, chewing on this bizarre answer. “You mean like a baby?”

Melrox snorted. “Smaller than that,” she said.

I stared at Melrox. There was something about her detached earlobes and freckled skin. Under all that makeup and spray tan, her oval face was so reminiscen­t of mine at that age in photos.

“When we were still inside you, silly,” she continued.

I stopped chewing. “Inside me?” I asked, weirded out.

“You remember? Right after the woman in green smeared potion all over her magic wand and cast that spell that showed your insides. You said we looked like grapes,” said Melrox.

I nearly choked on the strawberry, recalling a wet day in November when I was twenty-four, spread-eagled in stirrups, and trying not to flinch during my first-ever transvagin­al ultrasound. I remembered how, looking down, I could see the instrument rippling the skin of my lower abdomen as the doctor wiggled the wand around inside me, scraping the walls of my cervix, flooding the dark static with waves of sound. I felt like ice cream being scooped. Then, out of the monitor’s pixelated monochrome, I watched wobbly spheres begin to materializ­e, alternatel­y swollen or shrunken, depending on the wand’s placement and pressure.

That was the first time I saw them: my eggs. There were so many of them. “Ohhh yeahhh,” Briar said. “Grapes! That’s probably why you didn’t recognize us. We’re less circley now.”

I spat the half-eaten strawberry out in my palm. “But that can’t be you. That was fifteen years ago. Shouldn’t you be older?”

Melrox clucked her tongue. “We were older—but we stopped when we found out what we were going to grow into.”

“And what’s that?”

“Brand evangelist­s!” screamed Charlie, pulling his shirt-dress overhead and inside out so that he looked like an orange ghost. “Compliance officers,” said Briar.

“Asset managers,” said Melrox, her lisp spritzing the air. “Really?”

“Nah,” said Briar.

“We were never going to do any of that,” said Melrox.

“Why not?”

“Too hard,” said Melrox.

“Too boooo-ring!” said Briar.

“My daddy says jobs like that are pointless. Which makes the people who do them pointless, too,” said Charlie. “Because there’s no time for anything else.”

“Ouch,” I said. I wanted to argue against this affront—to defend my life in some way—but I couldn’t. The the truth was I’d wasted twenty years sorting my inbox and playing mind-chess against other executives, denying myself any kind of selfhood beyond a high client satisfacti­on rating and the shortest possible email response time. My job, like death, was a kind of self-purging. It demanded obliterati­on. Looking at the children’s resolute faces, I finally understood what they were doing. They were obliterati­ng on their own terms.

By Friday, the children are four, and for the first time in my career, I call in sick. We decide to celebrate by doing only things they enjoyed during their truncated time here—all the things I will never do with my own children, which are the same things my single mother never had time to do with me. We eat pizza rolls for breakfast and gorge ourselves on fistfuls of ice cream cake, leaving the cruciferou­s vegetables to rot and liquefy in the fridge’s crisper. The only vegetable we eat is candy corn; you don’t need nutrients when you’re growing down. After lunch, we rent a bounce house and jump until the sun sets. We ignore our bedtimes. After midnight, we play flashlight tag. I tell ghost stories, the light held up to my sugar-addled face as I spook them with tales of bear markets and 401(k) s. When we get tired, we sleep in a pillow fort in the living room. Under the blanket roof, the kids smell dusty like mothballs or baby powder, the opposite of animal. Charlie sings his ABC’S in his sleep. Melrox hiccups. Briar kicks like a horse.

For a few sweet hours, my phone dozes, too.

But, come Saturday morning, it dings and dings—a deluge of emails and text messages and phone calls and voicemails. My assistant forwards my calls. My clients are relentless. Between games of Candy Land, I try to keep up, but by the end of the day I’m buried. Unlike the children, I’m not getting any younger. I break up with my long-distance boyfriend over text and cancel my weekend prep session with Angie. Gary sends me an email that only has a subject line: Monday needs to be flawless, Darla. I delete it without responding. It’s my turn to run through the sprinkler.

After I towel off, I turn to Melrox. Before she loses the ability to speak, I have a question I need answered. “How many of you are there?”

“Oh, thousands,” she lisps. Then, she shrugs and says, “None of us asked to be here.”

By Sunday, the kids are two and we pass the afternoon napping on a blanket under the pecan tree in my backyard. The day is windy and unseasonab­ly cool. A breeze ripples through the leaves, shaking the nuts from their hiding places. I start to tell the toddlers about my life—the mergers I’ve managed, the staff I’ve liquidated, the deals I’ve closed—but they cry and cry until I stop. I listen to the wind’s rustle. The branches above us sway, sprinkling the blanket with pecans. The toddlers squeal with delight whenever the pecans come close to landing on our faces. The soft drop of them sounds like bounty. Like eternity.

This is when I know I’m never going back.

On Monday morning, I skip the presentati­on. Angie calls me eleven times. Gary cc’s HR on the email he sends, firing me. I read the last text I received

from Angie: Thanks for the promotion. I type: You are the sister I never had. Then, I dunk my phone in the kiddie pool. It fizzles as it sinks to the bottom. The toddlers cheer.

After a day of splashing around in water wings, I take my brood to the grocery store. I stick Briar, who is now too tiny to walk on her own, in the shopping cart’s cage. Finding herself ensnared, she yowls, threads of snot webbing from nose to fist. Charlie, who is still able to waddle on his own, makes race car noises as he pushes his own red plastic cart beside me, while Melrox clutches my T-shirt, shrieking for a yogurt cup. I shush her half-heartedly, as I hoist a mesh-bagged turkey out of the deli’s cold casket of meats and sling it onto the cart’s lower rack. I tell my wailing mini-me that if she is good, she will get something better than yogurt. She will get pumpkin pie. And, even though it is after seven p.m. and even though it is August, the little girl sniffs, briefly placated, her oval face fading from purple back to its usual freckled spatter.

At the dinner table, I portion bite-sized helpings of mushy peas and gelatinous cranberry. The toddlers are getting younger. They are barely toddlers at all. Practicall­y babies, they slap their hands on the too-high table until I boost their seats with throw pillows. Finished with their main course, they fling their plates across the room, smashing pumpkin pie into each other’s faces.

After dessert, they are infants again. They cry and smile and scream and shit. I spread another blanket on the floor. For twenty-four hours, I do nothing but change diapers and bottle-feed formula and wipe away spit-up. For twenty-four hours, I am a mother, if only in reverse. I shush and sing them to sleep, and then I shush and sing to myself, readying myself for what comes next.

In the bathroom, I brush my teeth and shower with the door open, peeking out periodical­ly and listening for signs of disquiet. The babies sleep. When I go to measure a capful of electric-blue mouthwash, they are embryos. By the time I spit, they are eggs—glaucous, milky-white sacs winking up at me from a dish that I cup and carry into the bedroom. “You’re mine again. This is how I will always remember you,” I whisper to them as I set the dish gingerly on the bedside table, next to Briar’s bouncy ball. My pelvis throbs. The body knows. I slip off my sweatpants, then my underwear. The hairs on my legs prickle with expectatio­n. I pull back the coverlet, reclining on the sheets with my legs spread. From the bedside drawer, I take out my GNRH analogues injection kit, flicking air bubbles from the syringe with the longest needle. One by one, I draw them up the metal spire. I am not their mother, but I am the source. I widen my legs and prepare myself for the unhatching. I take a deep breath and inject my eggs, returning them to

the cave of their genesis, returning them to the primeval dark, returning them to obliterati­on. My eyes close, as I wait for my ovaries to welcome them home.

The whole thing makes me miss my own mother, who lives thousands of miles away in a beachfront retirement community in Boca Raton. Maybe when this is all over, I’ll drive my convertibl­e across the country, the wind shedding the years off me like old skin, and pull up just in time to waddle through her front door and crawl back in.