#also specifically ragewrites and the uncertainpoets replies

[smallepics]

The nuclear family has a nuclear baby.

The whole neighborhood watches in horror as the nuclear family brings it out onto their nuclear lawn and lets it make its grotesque noises.

It has ten fingers and ten toes that scrunch and relax like inchworms in the dirt. Its ribbed thighs rolly polly beneath its weight and it grabs the grass to root, turning over applesauce.

While the baby plays in radiation the nuclear mother and the nuclear father go inside to set off a bomb, it rattles like thunder and pops like altitude. When the watchers blink away blindness the baby is still gurgling in pleasure.

Its baby crib has melted bars and its baby playthings have microwaved shapes and once the sun spurts die down the neighborhood thinks, “it’s getting awfully dark for a baby that does not glow.”

No one can stand to hold a baby through a hazmat suit, so the neighbors pass the baby from breast to breast and imagine their lives with a nuclear child, a nuclear student, a nuclear sun.

All the nuclear baby does is munch benignly on its greens, but it stares endlessly into my headlights; I wonder what is in them to attract creatures so.

I ask the two headed faun but I only have one set of ears and it professes double answers. I turn the ignition back over and continue down the road.

The nuclear baby does not know it is a nuclear baby until long after the bomb goes off and the waste has been buried beneath the ground. The nuclear baby does not know it is a nuclear baby until it is sitting on a concrete dessert.

prompt: write about a mutated animal