Author: Carlton Mellick Iii
Date: 2012-01-02 11:44:31+00:00

THE INFANT VENDING MACHINE

So she wanted to have a baby, and my response to her asking was: “You sure you want one?” But she was very hard of hearing and believed I said: “Sure I want one!”

Leeca didn’t have any ears. She replaced them with the finest set of wooden jewelry carved to artistic perfection. Very stylized and trendy accessories they were, yet one had to sacrifice hearing to obtain such design.

Her face was quite smile-exploded, brightened like a child’s after my answer. “I would so love to have a baby!” she cried.

And I was overtaken by her happiness and could not succumb to explain the mistake in her comprehension. So I forged excitement, because my love for Leeca was much stronger than my fear of becoming a father. I told her, “Then we will have one!”

We went off to make our child at flinn. Flinn was a time period which was not night nor day nor any combination of the two (twilight, dawn, etc.). A calendar day lasted fifty hours, and consisted of a day going to night, going to day again, then going to flinn. People didn’t like to go on the streets at flinn, because the world’s colors would be negative - which means all dark colors went light, and also: reds became blues, yellows became newas, greens became purples, oranges became trophers, and so on… there are too many colors to continue, especially since the invention of newa as a primary color. By the way, mixing newa with yellow makes tropher, and mixing it with blue makes gangi, and mixing it with red makes hotup.

It’s wonderful to see the world with so much color. After the newa discovery, I promised myself to pick up painting as a serious hobby, but then the government announced a fifth primary color would soon be under development for future eyes to see. So I told my paintbrush, “You might as well wait until then.”

Walking the rubber streets, there were anti-negative lights lining our path - created to correct flinn-altered colors back to their original appearances. However, they would normally confuse rather than correct, often enforcing tin-gut feelings or dizzy sickness. Luckily, we got to the grocery store, where the anti-negative lights didn’t shine, before they sickened us.

Babies are created by infant vending machines. They do not come out of vaginas anymore. They come out of a slot not unlike that of a soda machine.

Leeca inserted three quarters.

“Which style would you like?” I asked my highly decorated wife.

“Hmm… We must have a white baby!” she replied. “White is a clean color!”

“I mean, what do you want, a boy or a girl?” I asked.

“Dark colors are very dirty! I do not want a dirty child in our home!”

“How about a boy?” I asked.

But she said, “How can I have a dark-skinned child in our nice home?! Their footprints must be like mud!”

“You can have a white-raced child if you wish, you can have any child you want! But we must choose which sex our baby will be categorized as: there is male, female, and there is a neutral button here for a non-gendered child, and a random button here that will go similar to a slot machine!”

“I hear that animals do not have souls!” replied my wife. “Do non-white children have souls? I do want a baby with a soul and I do not want an animal for a baby!”

Impatience entered me, so I hit the random sex button. Immediately after, Leeca pushed in the icon of a white infant. Then both of us entered our DNA by placing our thumbs within scanning holes.

“We shall name it Sylvia!” Leeca exclaimed, as she typed S-Y-L-V-I-A into the computer.

“But we are not yet sure if the child will be boy or girl…”

“We shall have a girl!”

Soon the child popped out and the birth certificate printed. The child was male.

“What have we done?” I cried. “Our son will be ridiculed his entire life for having such a feminine name!”

“We must throw him away and make another!” Leeca cried.

“No, no,” I told her. “That would be a great sin against the church!”

“But our son is destined to a life of gender confusion otherwise!”

“Still,” I said, “we must accept Sylvia for whom he is! Even though he is a woman trapped within a man’s body, he is still our son!”

The baby lied there in the vending tray, gurgling and slipping cries here and there. Leeca glanced down upon him, and though he was a male daughter, she fell in love with his small wiggly body.

“Oh, what a beautiful girl!” Leeca said to him, reaching out her arms to press him to her breast.

But as an autocar drove by on the rubber roadway, its anti-negative headlights beamed upon little Sylvia at the brink of Leeca’s grip. And the little white baby turned into a black baby for a short splash. That’s when Leeca realized that it was flinn time, and our white child was really black, only appearing to be white at this time.

“Oh my!” Leeca screamed, leaping away from her newly born infant. “It’s an animal! I will not raise our daughter as a male and an animal!”

“But the machine says NO REFUNDS…”

“I don’t care about a refund! We must dispose of this child and get another! You must have change enough for one more!”

“But the destruction of a human being will suffer us great consequences,” I told her.

“No, it won’t! Look there, in the recycle bin! It is full of mistake-infants whose flesh will be recycled anew!”

“The destroying of a child may be seen as lawful within the eyes of the government, but it is seen as a sin within the eyes of God.”

“But you are an atheist! You must not bare a God-fearing attitude!”

“Yes, I must admit I do not worship nor believe within the God I was raised to love, which makes me an atheist! However, as a God-fearer would, I cannot help but feel guilt by discarding our own progeny for the sake of its imperfections.”

“But if we were to take this animal into our home, we would not be able to give it the love a child needs! It would live a hard and sad life, and would turn our lives the same!”

“We must at least try to accept it,” I told her.

“But will we succeed in accepting it?! We may be able to decline its destruction and take it into our home, but can we show it love?!”

“Yes, we must.”

“But deep down inside, both of us will despise it because of its differences! Subconsciously, you are a racist man, but society has taught you to suppress your hatred!”

“I admit to being afraid of animal men, feeling uncomfortable in their presence, but I do not hate them.”

“But you are afraid because you fear your hatred will be revealed! And you fear that the acts of racial hate performed by your fellow white men has driven the animals to hatred as well, that it might be unleashed upon you!”

“Then let me take this child into our lives so that I may prove you wrong. I will show all the world that I can love animal children just as much as white ones.”

“But the child will be better dead than if you fail! Must you risk a child’s happiness just to prove a point?!”

“Would the child be happier if we were to recycle him into something completely different?”

“The animal wouldn’t know any better!”

“You do not know that for sure.”

“Animals don’t have souls!”

I calmed, trying to avoid such commonplace arguments, realizing I wasn’t going to find a way through to her.

“I am sorry, Leeca,” I said with wide eyes. “But if I do not at least try, I will never forgive myself.”

She glanced down upon the child, red-eyed at the white infant, knowing full well that its white complexion would turn black the next morning.

“It’s still our child,” I softlied. “It still has our genes and is still the product of our joining. It just has a different color of skin. That is all.”

I picked up the child and offered it to my wife.

“Couldn’t you love such a thing?” I asked her.

She accepted Sylvia to her breast, awkwardly, without looking into her son’s eyes.

Instead, she looked at the pictures on the infant vending machine, which displayed examples of what children are supposed to look like. The one she narrowed on was a little white (or maybe black) girl wearing only a diaper, happy-mouthed and clapping, BIG blue eyes.

Then she said, “It would’ve been such a beautiful baby…”