goo babies til the money runs out
by Miles Efron
Like all love stories, ours starts with a bag full of cash. A cold hike in February. A black ripstop duffel we pluck from the wreckage of a downed Cessna. Even before we open it, we know what’s inside.
Until all that money came along, Lara and I were just dating. Casual. I liked how she smelled of strawberries. She admitted to lusting after the veins in my hands. But five mil makes everything get serious, fast.
Sure enough a day later, Lara births her first goo baby. Lying in bed, ablaze with afterglow, Lara suddenly frowns and says, “Hm. Something feels weird.” She peers under the covers. “What in the actual fuck?”
A week later it’s my turn.
Little cramp. Some pressure. Then, as I wok us a stir fry, it slides out of the cuff of my pants leg. Splat! The baby stares up at me with its water-colored eyes. And as I admire my first-born, I feel a pang of awe. I hoist the transparent baby into my arms and I coo to it. “Listen,” I say. “You can be anything at all. A-ny-thing.” An hour later, the baby is stalking around the apartment, hangry and babbling. It pounds two-fisted on the front door, demanding to be let out. I give it ten thousand dollars and I send it out into the world to make its mark. After it goes, in our silent apartment, I weep, so moved am I by the baby’s tender unformedness.
In this way, months pass.
The heat of summer comes. Daylight till ten pm. In a good week, we each squeeze out three or four new goo babies. The whole apartment is redolent of their rainy, ozone smell. Trails of their mineral-oil essence puddle down the halls.
With all this abundance, we feel giddy. The days fly by. Lara and I stay up late, speculating as to the whereabouts of our many children. The outcomes and the contours of their lives.
“Do you think they have talents?” Lara asks.
“Like musical instruments?”
“Or math? Or languages? Maybe one is a prodigy. Maybe they all are.”
“The one who’s traveled the farthest,” I say, “Where do you think it is? Mongolia? Australia?”
“Mars,” Lara says.
But in time, Lara and I diverge in our attitude toward childrearing. We bicker. We fight.
“The money won’t last if you keep throwing it at them hand over fist,” Lara says.
“I want to give them a head start,” I say. “Don’t you? How can you be so cruel?”
“Have you tried just loving them?”
“I do love them.”
“Hm,” Lara says, turning away.
By the time Halloween comes, I’ve burned through the full five million. I give the last of it—$2k—to the most recently arrived baby, and off it wobbles, down our street with its pumpkins and ghosts and twelve-foot novelty skeletons. Never to be heard from again.
“Well that’s the last of it,” I sigh, shutting the door behind me as I step back inside. Lara doesn’t even look up from her phone.
Neither of us is surprised when the babies dry up along with the money. The last goo baby measures only an inch in length. It’s not even alive. We bury it in the park across the street, in a cigar box.
Then, nothing. We are barren. The two of us left to wonder what came of all that potential.
Photo of Miles Efron
BIO: Miles Efron is a writer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. His work has appeared in Pigeon Pages, and is forthcoming in Porcupine Literary and Literally Stories. milesefron.com is his website.