Love, Death and Robots. Volumes 2 & 3

A bell rings. The shop’s main doors to the concourse slide open. A woman steps through, hesitant. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and she hasn’t applied any makeup, and I can tell, even before she’s all the way through the door, that she’s one of them: a mom.

She hasn’t been off rejoo long; she still looks fresh and young, despite the plumpness that comes with kids. She still looks good. But even without rejoo-collapse telltales, I know what she’s done to herself.

She’s got the tired look of a person at war with the world. None of us look like that. No one has to look like that. Nitheads look less besieged. She’s trying to act like the person she was before, like the actress or the financial advisor or the code engineer or the biologist or the waitress or whatever, putting on clothes from her life before, that used to fit perfectly and don’t now, making herself look like a person who walks without fear in the open air, and who doesn’t now.

As she wanders the aisles, I spy a stain on her shoulder. It’s small but obvious if you know what to look for, a light streak of green on a creamy blouse. The kind of thing that never happens to anyone except women with children. No matter how hard she tries, she doesn’t fit anymore. Not with us.

Ipswitch Collectibles, like others of its ilk, is a trap door of sorts—a rabbit hole down into the land of illicit motherhood: the place of mashed pea stains, sound-proofed walls, and furtive forays into daylight for resupply and survival. If I stand here long enough, holding my magic Brontosaurus by the neck, I’ll slip through entirely and see their world as it overlaps with my own, see it with the queer double vision of these women who have learned to turn a drawer into a crib, and know how to fold and pin an old shirt into a diaper, and know that ‘collectibles’ really means ‘toys’.

The woman slips in the direction of the train sets. She chooses one and places it on the counter. It’s a bright wooden thing, each car a different color, each connected by a magnet.

The old woman takes the train and says, “Oh yes, this is a fine piece. I had grandchildren who played with trains like this when they were just a little more than one.”

The mother doesn’t say anything, just holds out her wrist for the charge, her eyes down on the train. She fingers the blue and yellow engine nervously.

I come up to the counter. “I’ll bet you sell a lot of them.”

The mother jerks. For a second, she looks like she’ll run, but she steadies.

The old woman’s eyes turn on me. Dark sunken blue cores, infinitely knowledgeable. “Not many. Not now. Not many collectors around for this sort of thing. Not now.”

The transaction clears. The woman hustles out of the store, not looking back. I watch her go.

The old woman says, “That dinosaur is forty-seven, if you want it.”

Her tone says that she already knows I won’t be buying.

I’m not a collector.

* * *

Nighttime. More dark-of-night encounters with illicit motherhood. The babies are everywhere, popping up like toadstools after rain. I can’t keep up with them. I had to leave my last call before the cleanup crew came. Broke the chain of evidence, but what can you do? Everywhere I go, the baby world is ripping open around me, melons and seedpods and fertile wombs splitting open and vomiting babies onto the ground. We’re drowning in babies. The jungle seems to seethe with them, the hidden women down in the suburb swelter, and as I shoot along the maglines on my way to bloody errands, the jungle’s tendril vines curl up from below, reaching out to me.

I’ve got the mom’s address in my cruiser. She’s hidden now. Back down the rabbit hole. Pulled the lid down tight over her head. Lying low with her brood, reconnected with the underground of women who have all decided to kill themselves for the sake of squeezing out pups. Back in the swelter of locked doors and poopy diapers amongst the sorority who give train sets to little creatures who actually play with them instead of putting them on an end table and making you look at them every damn day…

The woman. The collector. I’ve been holding off on hitting her. It doesn’t seem fair. It seems like I should wait for her to make her mistake before I pop her kids. But knowing that she’s out there tickles my mind. I catch myself again and again, reaching to key in the homing on her address.