Photo: © Depositphotos.com/chayathon
Written by Sayzie Koldys

Sayzie received the art above as part of Volume Ten, “The Challenge Edition,” in which contributors selected art for each other. She used it as the basis of her work.

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I made her favorite soup, but Violet isn’t eating again. Starving herself on a genetics holiday, for god’s sake… It’s very upsetting to her father. Poor David’s gone to great care in decorating the house, and it took half the neighborhood to raise the antique Happy National CRISPR Day! banner and run it lengthwise down the street. Inherited from seven generations of his patrilineal line, and sewn on cloth made from cotton before the Great Modification, it’s a family heirloom. We can see only the green bottoms of the double “pp”s from our kitchen window, and who knows how much longer the fabric will hold up, but it’s really quite beautiful in both its color and stitching, and isn’t it the ephemeral nature of beauty that we find so compelling, after all?

“Please, Violet. This isn’t funny. Your father and I—“

“Please, Violet. Please Violet. You’re right—this isn’t funny,” Violet says. She pushes her bowl away, slouches back her chair, and slips her thumbnail between her teeth.

Click. Click.

Violet, age 15, is on her second hunger strike. The first, when she was 8, lasted three days before she finally consented, and then she ate an entire peach in one sitting—but only after we agreed to a vegetarian diet.

Click.

I really think the schools are at fault with outbursts like this. Eight years old is just too young to understand the compromises they had to make. Those weren’t easy decisions. People were facing overpopulation, starvation on the back of a changing climate… I don’t like to think of it either. But it’s certainly not appropriate for a third-grade curriculum.

Afterward, I joined the PTA and spent six months lobbying the Regional Board of Education to remove farming from the textbooks, but Violet decided it was every child’s “right to know” and she printed the 3D models and handed them out on the playground. The other mothers said Fuck it—Heck, Janice Peterson said it right in front of the children, so Violet said Fuck you—a new phrase for her at the time—and I decided to resign from the Association and go back to volunteering in the library, just to keep the peace.

This time, it’s been seven days since she’s had anything to eat and there are hollows under her eyes. She bites her nails instead. Click, click, click.

“Fuck you,” Violet says now, because we’ve told her that she cannot go to the protest unless she breaks her hunger strike and eats her soup. Violet is very angry with us, but especially with me, as if by virtue of the fact that she was enhanced—excuse me, modified—in my womb makes perpetual reduction my fault. As if all mothers are terrible people because our great great great grandmothers made an impossible choice between starving to death and having smaller and smaller babies. How could anyone have known that particular genetic switch flips only one way?

The sweet smell of corn rises up from Violet’s bowl. My stomach gurgles, and I instinctively raise a hand to my belly to quiet the noise, to spare Violet the sound of my hunger. This does not change the fact that I want to slap her.

“Photosynthetic recovery time had already gotten so short that one 5 kilogram eggplant fed 12 people. That could have been enough,” Violet insists.

David shakes his head. He’s a bit of a history buff and has read hundreds of accounts of that time. He’s absolutely convinced. “It wasn’t. Now eat your mother’s soup and stop this insanity.”

When I was pregnant with Violet, I read everything I could about what to eat, what to avoid. I found the soup recipe in an old cookbook for expectant mothers and adjusted the measurements. It was my favorite before it was hers.

“It’s like you’re both insisting on a delusional existence,” Violet says, “like you’re choosing a life of ignorance.”

“At least we have food,” I tell Violet. “Why don’t you go insert yourself in the 2080 VR again so you can understand what real starvation feels like.”

“I’m willing to starve for what’s important,” Violet says.

Click. Click.

David reaches across the table and taps at Violet’s soup bowl. “Well, when something important comes along, I’ll let you know.”

I’m not as certain as David is about our situation, but I see no point in worrying about it until we know what we’re up against. And even then, what can we do? I used to tell Violet that the government isn’t a monolithic evil—it’s made up of people who all want to do the right thing. No one wants humanity to come to some dire end in 27 generations or whatever any more than you do.

“You are so naïve, Mom,” she said.

Other than the occasional outburst, she’s mostly given up on us. She used to bring home visual representations of what a smaller and smaller future would look like, physically and medically. Especially medically. Of course we had a rule against showing images like that at the table—we’re not barbarians—but she’d do it anyway. And more than once, she ruined a perfectly risen soufflé.

“This is what will happen to our lungs,” she’d say, slapping the delicate crust and aiming the whoosh of steam in my direction. She hasn’t done anything like that in months.

“Fuck you,” Violet says instead.

I don’t even know what she’s protesting. No one is technically protesting anything. They’re demanding that the World Congress allocate funds to Reversal research. I get it. No one knows how small we can get without… consequences. But no one knows how we’re supposed to have larger babies without raising the maternal mortality rate or running out of food again either. And people disappear at these—these protests.

“Humanity is plummeting toward extinction and you don’t even care,” Violet says.

Click, click, click.

I reach across the table and slap her hand away from her mouth. Lightly.

“Of course we care,” David says, “but theoretically we can get proportionally smaller for generations to come with no adverse effects. The science is completely unclear on this, and—“

“Unclear? Unclear to whom?!” Violet threatens. She has a real head for numbers and statistics, I just wish it showed in her grades. “157,000 scientists have submitted their data and signed off on the Necessity for Reversal. Our organs have a 94% chance of malfunction. My great great great grandchildren are going to be so dense that they just sink into the earth. Or maybe we’ll just shrink out of any understanding of space and time, after all!”

Click, spit.

“There’s ample evidence that our rate of reduction has stabilized over the past two generations,” David says, but it’s nothing he hasn’t said to Violet before. It’s nothing she’s taken comfort in since that year she became a vegetarian. “Besides, you’re overreacting,” he says. “It’s impossible for the human body to shrink out of space and time.”

“If I have to sit here much longer, I might find that regretful,” Violet says.

Click, click, click, click.

Outside, there are voices. They’re chanting something I can’t make out, but it sounds like “Fun is the future! Fun is the future!”

“You’re not going anywhere,” David says.

Of course I already know that Violet is leaving. She hasn’t moved yet, but she’s made a decision.

“Fuck you,” Violet says.

But I also know what she really means is Thank you. She means I’m strong and I’ll be ok and I have to go. She means I’m willing to fight for this life for my children’s children even if it’s a battle you don’t believe in. She means Please, be proud of me. She means I love you.

Violet looks toward the door, and then at me. I nod. A gesture so small I could deny it if it came to that. When she stands, she sways to one side as if in the wind. I reach out to steady her, but she pivots and is gone.

Don’t you see? The hardest thing about being a mother is that you can’t put them back in the womb.

 

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