Robot baby is put in a crib at night. It bows, bows, bows under Robot baby’s weight. In the dark, Robot baby glows like a lonely firefly. Its parents kiss it on its round robot face, good night, sweet baby, and go to their bedroom and their cold little bed, lie side by side and stare up at the ceiling. One of them imagines, overhead, the starlit sky. One of them thinks of the swell of baby’s breath, the thrum of such a small, small heart. One of them put Robot baby together in the garage with forgotten childhood things, little pieces of metal and gear, springs from childhood pens, snip of hair from little-sister’s marble-eyed baby doll, fragment of bone-dust white, and, in the place of a heart, a torn page holding a line they’ve carried all this time: All children, except one, grow up.
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