The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  Her mother’s hand stopped just before it was about to feed her mouth the muffin, then quickly slipped it in.

  “Never mind.” Millie stirred her soggy Grape-Nuts, then grabbed her bowl and slid back her chair. “I need more nuts for all my m—”

  “It had nothing to do with you.”

  Her mother looked at her, directly into her eyes. Millie was so unpre-pared for the intimacy of such contact—she could count on less than one hand how many times it had happened—that she had to contemplate her cereal to fight the hollow, shaking feeling.

  “Do you hear me, Millicent?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  By lunchtime, the morning’s conversation was understood to be over, the matter settled. As they ate sandwiches on the couch while watching the people in charge, their projected faces grim, Millie only glanced once or twice at the shelf, where the foil-wrapped chocolate alligator her dad had brought her from a New Orleans vacation poked its head out from behind a red vase. She also watched her mother’s smoking to see if it got faster or more intense. It did, but not remarkably. Half a cigarette faster, if that. Millie tried not to be nervous about what that might mean. Was she saving up to say something? What would that feel like? What would Millie do if her mother told her she was proud of her? How would they celebrate? They’d never done anything fun together.

  Millie watched the projection.

  “We must fix it,” said a congressmember named Anita Bennington. “We’ve ignored the abandoned for years, turning away while building shelter after shelter. But we cannot ignore this.”

  “I say we overturn the overturn,” said a congressmember named Abe Lakeland.

  “Outrageous!” said a congressmember named Theodore Belinski.

  A long moment of silence followed. Theodore looked around.

  Anita sighed. “And what is it that’s outrageous, Theodore?”

  “What is…? Right! Ah, why, the very idea of overturning the overturn is outright outrag—”

  “Thank you. But, Theodore, didn’t you support the federal overturn to save the unborns?”

  “Correct!”

  “I don’t need to tell you that an alarming percentage of your unborns were born to detrimentally apathetic, monumentally selfish, unwittingly but undeniably dangerous, or simply terrible people,” she said. “Surely you must know Chester Walton is not the only abuse case of his magnitude.”

  “Ah, but we don’t even know the magnitude!”

  “He’s dead, Theodore.”

  “Yes, Anita, yes, he’s dead, but we don’t know the magnitude of the abuse, itself. He very well could have been hit on the head and accidentally fallen into something hard.”

  Anita dropped her shoulders. “Isn’t there someone else I could do this with? Mirabelle?”

  “Mirabelle’s not on unt—” Abe cleared his throat and ruffled his notes around. “That is, Mirabelle’s not in….not in until some other time. Mirabelle—I mean, Theodore—is here now, and his position is clear, I think.”

  “His position is clear,” Anita said, “but he has no idea how to argue it. I tell you, Abe, I just wish we’d chosen someone a little more capable of delivering a cogent and persuasive rebuttal.”

  Theodore sneered at her. “When they finally activate that demon fail-safe, the only good thing that’ll come of it is that you’ll be too goddamn old

  to—”

  She whispered, “Theodore!”

  He covered his mouth. The hushed room looked at him and at one another before all faces turned down, away from the cameras mounted in the high chamber corners, each congressmember suddenly focused on a spot on a tie, a hair on a sleeve, a crumb on a lap.

  Abe coughed. “Listen here.” He fingered through the loose papers in his hand and selected a page to move to the top. “One-year-old girl in Oklahoma with bruises on her head from being punched with a closed fist.” He looked up for effect. “Traumatic brain injury.” Eyes back on his notes, he said, “This infant here in Utah starved to death after fourteen hours of being deprived of food.”

  Theodore rolled his eyes. “Who knows how many times an hour a baby has to eat? I’m sure it was an innocent mistake. Why wasn’t the mother home feeding the baby?”

  Abe read his notes. “She appears to have been at work. The baby was in the care of his father.”

  “Well!”

  “And this child here in Virginia,” Abe went on. “Four years old and paralyzed. Her mother backed over her with the car.”

  “Another innocent mistake!”

  “And then she did it again.”

  “Could happen to anyone.”

  Abe waited with his notes. He blinked at Theodore.

  “Right! Well, I’m sorry, Abe, but you haven’t convinced me to vote in favor of overturning the overturn. That’s a small number, right there, and we can’t very well sacrifice the lives of the unborn for the lives of the born.”

  Abe gave a flick of his eyebrows before going on to read case after documented case from his notes: a six-week-old with bone and skull fractures; a one-year-old whose mother had starved him because she didn’t want him to get fat; a six-year-old thrown off a bridge by his father; a four-year-old whose mother kept him chained outside in a dog pen; a—

  “Enough! All of those children—Hold on. The one with the skull fractures. Alive?”

  “Oh, yes. Technically.”

  “And bridge boy?”

  “Brain dead.”

  “But alive!”

  “Yes.”

  “Good enough. Thank you, Abe. All of those children are alive, as are the children whose cases aren’t even bad enough to qualify for that folder you’re holding, there. That is the point, isn’t it, Anita? Without the overturn, all of these precious children would never have been born, and then where would they be?”

  “Where is anyone who hasn’t been born?”

  “Who knows? But these children are here and able to suffer their unique torments thanks to me. When we save one unborn, Anita, we save all unborns, whether they’re wanted or unwanted, loved or beaten silly. Why, you would have those children believe they should never have been born, and that’s no kind of thing to say to a child.”

  “No, Theodore, I would suggest that their parents should never have reproduced.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “All of it.” Anita addressed the room. “You are clearly not prepared to change your position on the overturn. Correct, Theodore?”

  “No, ma’am. Yes. Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Noted. Now, I should mention for those motivated more by numbers than by emotional appeals that the lifetime estimate of healthcare costs, lost worker productivity, criminal justice expenditures, etcetera, caused by parents who create abused and neglected children is upward of two hundred billion dollars. And that’s for just one year of confirmed abuse cases. What legislation do you propose that will address the fifteen infants and children dying daily of abuse and neglect, correct the one-point-five million unique cases of abuse in the last reported year, and reverse the nation’s lost productivity by ensuring children grow up abuse-free?”

  “Legislation?”

  “Well, Theo, do you think we should impose harsher penalties?”

  “Hogwash! We have too much to do already without worrying about changing sentencing laws willy nilly. Besides, what use is it? The ones who’re dead will continue to be dead, and the ones who survive are too young to vote, which makes them of little use to us.”

  “But they’ll vote someday.”

  “Fine. When they can, let them change the laws.” Theodore strode off projection and returned with a large poster board. He flipped it to reveal a sonogram image of a fetus curled up in a womb. “I will never agree to revert to a time when we would allow the termination of this embodiment of human potential.”

  “You do know, don’t you, Theo,” Abe said as he straightened his notes and slipped them in a folder, “that before your embodiment of potential becomes jus
t another one of us it’s going to be one of those kids you don’t care to change the laws for.”

  Theo looked at Abe, and then at Anita. He shrugged. “Was that supposed to be part of—”

  “Sh!” Anita stalked off and returned with her own poster board. When she flipped it around, the image that faced the chamber elicited gasps and covered eyes.

  Millie’s mother looked away from the projection.

  Millie leaned in to study it. Still not as bad as Chester.

  “What the hell, woman!” Theodore gagged. “Obviously…obviously some kind of solution is…is…” He stumbled off projection with his hands pressed to his mouth.

  Anita and Abe gathered their things and the chamber cleared.

  Over the next several weeks, as Millie continued to wait for a hire date, Congress publicly addressed the millions of emails they’d received in response to their debate. Some citizens continued to advocate for a revocation of the overturn, but most pleaded for hormonal birth control.

  “‘I know it’s bad,’” read Anita from one email, “‘and I know they say it causes abortion, but that isn’t one-hundred-percent proven, is it? Can’t we consider making it legal again just to try it out for a little bit? What’s one or two little hormones, anyhow?’”

  The majority, however, expressed anxiety about the trustworthiness of their own population. How did they know people would take their birth control? What if they didn’t? Could they implement some kind of government-sanctioned vigilante monitoring system, complete with rules and a tiered system of punishments increasing from light (ration card suspension and shunning! wrote a citizen named Betty Cox) to harsh (exile, solitary confinement, surprise assaults with some kind of metal tool, suggested emailer F.J.)?

  Still weeks later, and still with no word from the Fact, Millie and her mother watched as Congress met for what they announced would be the final conversation on the matter.

  “The people are right to question themselves,” Theodore said, once again positioned in the front of the room. He stood with his back to Anita, and to the photograph she’d propped on an easel for public viewing. “I’ve given it some thought, and—”

  “I agree!” Anita slammed her fist into her palm. “We must implement licensing!”

  The word “licensing” was repeated by nearly everyone in the chamber and reverberated under the high ceiling in clashing tones of disbelief and wonder. One woman in the back looked genuinely surprised.

  “Wait, wait!” shouted a front-row congressmember named Mirabelle Brown. “What would that do to our economy?”

  Anita fluttered her fingers. “We’ve been outsourcing for tens of decades. Who’s going to suffer when we reduce the number of people in our own country we’re denying work?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Mirabelle said.

  Abe stood to speak. “Look at it this way. Just give me one second, please.” He took a deep breath and read from a notecard he pulled from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “If we reduce the number of children, we reduce the prison population—that bores everyone here, I know, but it does interest the fringe groups—and we shrink the homeless population. We cut unemployment. Further…” He squinted at the card. “Further, children born to willing, prepared parents will have a better opportunity to experience a safe, loving, and supportive environment that will instill in them the confidence to start a company or a factory, or in some other way be a job creator.” He returned the card to his jacket. “I agree with Anita that licensing might be the next, perhaps the only, logical step in healing our nation, as much as I must officially disagree with it for its potential to go horribly awry.”

  A small voice from the back of the room offered, “What if there aren’t enough qualified…reproducers? What about the perpetuation of the human race?”

  Abe whispered to Anita, and she shrugged. He said to the chamber, “Is this, uh, is this a serious question?”

  “Yes.”

  Abe thought a moment. “To what end?”

  “What?”

  “To what end? Perpetuate the human race why?”

  “Because.”

  Another voice from a sitting member shouted, “You can’t stop people from having children! What kind of monster are you to try to strip us of our basic human right?” The woman stood and stomped to the front of the room. “I will not allow any person, any law, any government body to deny someone a child due to some missing arbitrary qualifier—”

  “OH, EDWINA, THE VICTIMIZATION!” boomed a voice some-where in the middle row. A thick barrel of a man rolled his wheelchair to the front of the room and parked beside Edwina. “You with the weeping heart weeping only for you and your rights, your rights, your rights! Heaven forbid we trample on your personal rights. May I say, Edwina, this is a mi-raculous one-eighty on your part. Weren’t you one of the first to set flame to individual rights when you didn’t agree with those rights?”

  “I was, Mick. I most certainly was, but that was a right that didn’t… well…it wasn’t…it was to protect the children, you s—”

  “Well, hallelujah! Individual rights matter again. Certain rights of certain individuals, anyway.” He muttered, “And you wonder why you’re kept out of the loop,” then raised his voice when she started to sputter. “All right, Edwina, all right. But individual rights at whose expense?”

  She looked down at him, and then out at the chamber. “The…the taxpayers’?”

  “No, Edwina. Or, yes, but we don’t really care about them, either, do we? The expense—the worst of it, that is—is paid by children like Chester Walton. And by this child.” Mick picked up Anita’s poster board and flashed it at her, and then at the room. Eyes snapped to aversion. “But why concern yourself with them when you have your personal, individual, precious procreation ‘right’ to protect?”

  The political conversation ended there, but it went on in the Daily Fact. Millie waited in the living room every morning while her mother read in the kitchen, and when her mother finished without saying anything about any of it to Millie, Millie took the paper to her room where she couldn’t smell the smoke or hear her mother’s watery cough.

  The licensing conversation had infiltrated coffee houses where reporters, as they reported it, observed young people nodding at each other about it in universal agreement. According to one writer who had stood for two hours with a protest group on Tinytown’s Main Street, the pro-creation activists saw a victory in the survival of the overturn, but they couldn’t help feeling defeated by any measure that would in any way say “no” to creation. The overworked and traumatized shelter volunteers said they refused to get their hopes up. Historically oppressed demographics bristled in their letters to the editor. Heterosexual men and women who had abstained from romantic coitus for years expressed a sudden and inexplicable desire to have children. The designers of the dark fuck database, and others involved in child sex trafficking, reportedly began exploring their options in some of the other high-birth rate countries “just in case,” said one anonymous source.

  Editorial writers took the predictable pro and con stances, the con insisting, The fantasy of eugenics is once again rearing its devil head, and the pro assuring, If this child-saving measure comes to pass, no doubt all consideration will be given to fairness and equality. The suspicious wondered, Just how long has this been in the works? Dare I say the American public has been manipulated? and, Exactly how does the government intend to enforce the consistent use of hormonal birth control?

  Millie’s first day at the Fact—which began with a second of mild disappointment when she learned Nellie had long since moved on—was the same day her new employer ran a story that answered the question of consistent hormone use. The hormone, the White House Press Secretary announced in a brief press release, was already in the microchips the government had been implanting into children and newborns over the last four and a half years. Activation was scheduled for “soon.”

  Millie’s first assignment, to run the following
day, was to interview InSystem public relations specialist Juanita Escallon.

  “This is the first interview InSystem has granted us,” said her dark haired, bright eyed, smiling editor, Hugh. “I left some of my own questions for her on your desk, but feel free to add your own if she’ll let you get that far. Don’t do a feature. Simple Q&A with a short intro.”

  Millie’s interview with Juanita Escallon, who agreed to answer only four questions, published the next day just as Hugh had promised.

  InSystem’s Juanita Escallon: Daily Fact Q&A

  InSystem public relations specialist Juanita Escallon agreed to speak with the Daily Fact as part of the company’s media campaign to quell fears about the birth control hormone currently active in chips implanted into every known biological female in the country. As Ms. Escallon had only enough time to answer four questions, the Daily Fact selected those it believed would address the public’s most pressing concerns.

  Daily Fact: Isn’t eight years old a little young for activation?

  Juanita Escallon: No. And I consider it a grave tragedy that we know that for a fact.

  DF: How do you know when to stop releasing the hormone? Who gives the order, and when?

  JE: The Parent Licensing Board notifies us with an approval of a client or clients, and we deactivate the hormone release within twelve hours of receipt.

  DF: How do you respond to people’s objections to being forcibly sterilized?

  JE: Are there really so many objections? I have seen quite the opposite. They embrace this solution to overcrowding and child mistreatment—not to mention personal financial distress—as if we had injected each of them with a vaccine for cancer.

  DF: But there are those who believe the mandated hormone treatment is an infringement of their right to privacy and bodily integrity.

  JE: Oh, if they want children, they can have them easily enough. Do you want to know the worst that will happen with the hormone in place? Women who enjoy sexual intercourse with men can expect to want to have sex again. (Laughs.)

  DF: This leads to my next question: why sterilize women and not men?