Scott Oglesby

The box was molded plastic, about the size of a briefcase and twice as thick. There was one button where the handle would be, evidently a latch. The rest of the container was blank, except for a logo of interlocking circles Alice didn't recognize. She handed it back to the nurse, deciding she didn't need to know the details.
    Finding out that something had happened to her baby, and the infant she took home last month was not hers, was quite enough for one day. She was irritated at having to receive the news from a pale, haggard nurse, on the way home from a twelve-hour night shift, in the remote end of a nearly-deserted corporate parking lot on a Saturday morning. Not just that the baby died, or that there was a simple mixup, but that "something had happened" and she needed to come out and take a look. In a parking lot. Perhaps it was cheaper this way, this offsite meeting, sending a few more dollars up the HMO chain to the chairman's thirsty pockets.
    Certainly going back home to her family would be more constructive than seeing the dead, deformed thing inside that box. Her daughter was fine and healthy, with her looks and her husband's smile (the hospital had looked for, and found, a close match), and still just as much hers as if she had carried her to term. If something had prevented Alice from bearing a child, she and her husband would have adopted anyway. Aside from the mercenary fumblings of an amoral hospital, the outcome would have been the same.
    The nurse pushed the box back toward her, pressing the latch. The top slowly hissed open.
    Inside was nothing Alice had expected.
    It was some sort of triangular throw-pillow in dull green fabric, scored with slits, or seams, of random size and direction. Out of each corner sprouted long tassels of the same color, filling the bottom of the box like drained spaghetti. It was a practical joke, apparently; a tale of switched babies with this white-elephant gift the punchline. This prank was going to cost the nurse her career, and the hospital its profits for the next ten years, but as she turned to the nurse to explain this, she saw no sign, not a trace, of a grin. No joke, then.
    "I don't understand," said Alice.
    The nurse nodded toward the open box. "Look closer."
    Alice still stared at the nurse, but soon heard a rustling from inside the box, and could feel things moving around, like snakes. Eyes, eyes of all colors and sizes, opened on the thing inside, and the tassels snaked up and over the sides. She screamed and the box fell from her limp fingers, and the thing hovered in the air before her, regarding her with multiple eyes and long white tubular organs, like fluorescent bulbs, that had opened up on its sides. A tassel drifted toward her, grazing her chin with a delicate, questioning touch, and she screamed even louder; it withdrew and the creature slowly floated up and away.
    The screams subsided, but Alice could not put together the words to express what her mind was still screaming inside. "Wh- wh- what-"
    "They look normal until a few hours after birth. There's no way to tell until then." The nurse's tone was calm and clinical. She was still in uniform. Her nameplate said Pam. "We think the change comes when they're exposed to air. The infant splits up and changes, and you get one of each."
    The green thing was still floating lazily away, like a child's balloon. The nurse had the haunted eyes of one who had already seen this, many times. "The small ones are more independent. They leave for days, then come back. We don't know much else about them."
    The balloon/jellyfish-thing was over the highway now. There was the noise of traffic, the gray sky, the handful of parked cars. The electrical towers in the distance. The dull slab of the office building. The nurse's dark blue van. The back door was open. She reached in, brought out something else, the size of a small infant cocooned in white bandages. The bundle tapered at the lower end, to something like an elephant's trunk that struggled inside the cloth.
    The nurse held the bundle in both hands at arm's length; the trunk no longer writhed randomly, but reached out toward her breast, a few inches too short. "This one -" she adjusted her grip "- wants to nurse all the time. It talks to you as well, inside your mind, and that's the worst. It wants to mate with you, to become the father of its brothers. And it can. We found out. The gestation is very fast. The mother gave birth again and again."
    All thoughts of practical jokes had evaporated. Alice knew without a doubt the nurse spoke the truth; out of her womb had come these things. "Why did you bring these to me? Why didn't you just kill them?"
    Tears welled in the nurse's eyes. "Yours - four weeks ago - were the first. They kept them for study and substituted an adoptee for you. No one anywhere had a similar one, until about two weeks ago. Since then, they've been more and more frequent, these things. And last night, we didn't have a normal baby all shift."
    "Why didn't you kill them?"
    "They are now. There's too many, there's no place for them. We haven't told a single mother yet, and we're killing and killing their babies!" She was now crying. "Who are we to do this? Who are we?"
    The nurse now held the bandaged baby in one hand, fishing inside the van with the other. She emerged with an improbably large Colt revolver.
    Alice understood; it was her child and her decision. The nurse probably had very little left in the world to cling to. Perhaps this one value was it. "Kill it," said Alice. "Please."
    The nurse turned away, toward the ditch, and fired. The wound nearly tore the bandaged thing apart, and dark bits of liquid spattered onto the bushes. She dropped the rest on the pavement. The thing had not cried out at its death, as Alice had expected; in fact, neither creature had ever uttered a sound at all.
    Alice's part was done. She checked the skies for the flier, but found no sign. Perhaps it would find her house, and she would open the curtains one morning to find it hovering outside, watching her, waiting patiently to be let in.
    Another shot fired behind her, and something crumpled to the ground. There was no need to turn and look.
    In her car, she turned the radio off and drove silently home, to her only child, more and more precious every day.