Isn’t this what life’s all about?

Isn’t this a dream come true?

Isn’t this a nightmare too?

—“Little Girls,” Oingo Boingo

---

“—once we have children.”

The words seem to bypass her ears altogether, rattling in her brain so loudly that she cannot hear what comes next. Children? She associates the word with monsters, screeching midgets that climb on her pinioned body and hurl D-cell batteries and clods of dirt at her head, destructive fiends that smash stained-glass windows and rip pages out of yellowed books. How can her sensitive, fragile lover want to burden herself with the creatures that tortured her throughout her own terrifying, monotonous youth? Liz often imagines Lynne as having ethereal, iridescent wings growing out of her back. Children will tear them to shreds as they climb and chew on them, and Lynne will smile and exclaim at their precious destruction. It happens every time. Liz has touched the tattered stubs that jut from her own mother’s shoulderblades, tried to figure out which rips are from her own teeth and which are from her brother’s and father’s jaws.

“—and perhaps you can bear one, and I can bear one…” Liz nods numbly, curling the phone cord around her fingers, mulling over this new possibility. She’s never been able to imagine herself pregnant; indeed, except for the five days each month when her body rids itself of red rotting cells, she barely even remembers that she has a womb. What kind of being could she possibly give birth to? She thinks of harlequin babies with their red jellied eyes and cracked skin, androgynous alien babies with huge triangle heads and smooth green skin where their genitals should be, silent infants that grow up to be soulless adults and blank-eyed children.

There is a pause on the other end of the line. “Sweet one? Are you all right?”

Liz leans against the cinderblock wall. “I’m fine,” she says. “Yeah, um. Kids. We could…you really want kids? I mean, have you thought this through?”

“Of course!” Lynne’s voice is burbling with joy. “The Goddess loves children.”

Ah, Liz thinks. Lynne’s other lover. At times, she is almost jealous of Lynne’s relationship with her deity. There is a strange serenity that comes into Lynne’s voice whenever she speaks of the latest message that the Goddess has sent her, a tone of happiness and peace that Liz knows her own human efforts would never be able to inspire in her girlfriend. Prophets must know this joy, she thinks, and madmen. It’s hard to tell which one the skinny girl in the wheelchair might be.

“I don’t think I could handle children too well,” she ventures. “I mean, I don’t know what to do with them, you know?” She forces a chuckle into her voice. “You know, whether I should bathe them or change them, or which end I should put food into.”

“You’ll be a wonderful mother,” Lynne assures her. Liz refrains from banging her head against the television set. What does her girlfriend see in her that suggests motherhood? “You’ll have so much to teach the children!”

“Yeah, when they’re older.” Liz tries to make a joke out of it. She can’t let Lynne see how much the idea of having children scares her. She’d kill them, she knows it. She could get distracted and let them drown in the bath, or she’d accidentally put rat poison in their baby formula, or she’d be driven insane by their crying and smother them with a pillow, or she’d let them starve while she skips meals and chokes down ramen. How can she be trusted to make sure another human being reaches adulthood when she can barely take care of herself at college? “Most of my wisdom really isn’t the “don’t put that in your mouth, you don’t know where it’s been” stuff. I’d be better off telling them what kind of tattoo to get.”

“Liz!” Lynne sounds like she thinks Liz is joking. “You’ll be a great mama, don’t worry. Now what should we name the children?”

Liz slumps against the wall, throwing out whichever names pop into her spinning head. She hangs up fifteen minutes later and wonders what her mother would say if she came home for spring break pregnant.