CW: Child death, blood / bodily fluids.
The first child exploded in the parking lot of a nondescript fast food joint in one of the safest, most unassuming parts of our city on a clear summer evening. Beatrix Middleston (five years old, never stopped moving, loved butterflies and Spiderman and her cat, who she named “Dippers”), was skipping to her family’s car, one hand held in her father’s warm grip and the other waving a Disney toy she’d claimed from her recently eaten kids’ meal, when, suddenly, her entire body burst open, disintegrating into a mist of bone, blood, and viscera.
There was no warning, no pained scream or pause to say, “Daddy, I don’t feel good.” She was just there one moment, playing in the air, and not there the next.
The force of the explosion was so strong that her father was flung nearly ten feet away, into a nearby hedge, his hand ripped clean off his arm and his brain battered within his skull. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, flitting between the glare of consciousness and a pit of scarlet nightmares, he screamed, over and over, “What happened to Bea? What happened to Bea?”
Mr. Middleston survived, in a way, but his question remained unanswered.
• • • •
I heard about the first child from my wife, Erin, who keeps tabs on every form of social media imaginable. She said there had been some sort of incident at the Burgerama earlier in the night. She said one of the kids in our son Malcolm’s kindergarten had died there. It was all over the groups and the chats and the videos. Everyone posting the news did so in stunned fear.
“Who?” I asked, stomach twisting. Not “how” or “why.” Not “my god” or “how terrible.” No, just “Who?” My first instinct was to hope that there was enough distance between my family and the tragedy that I could give the child and parents a sufficient amount of sympathy then lock away the incident in a place my own emotions couldn’t touch. I didn’t want to know these people. I didn’t want to have to deal with all that knowing them would entail.
“Bea Middleston,” Erin answered.
I let out a breath I didn’t even realize I was holding. I recognized the name, but couldn’t summon a face. It almost certainly meant there was enough distance to not worry.
“We don’t know them,” I said. I needed confirmation. “She’s not one of Malcolm’s friends.”
Erin shook her head.
“She’s in one of the other sections. I think she’s in Ms. Lincoln’s class.”
Another sigh of relief.
“What happened?” I asked.
Run over by a car speeding through the parking lot. Cracked skull from falling out of the Burgerama playplace’s upper-level obstacle course. Choked on a chicken nugget swallowed with too much haste. The mind conjures every variation of grim fate when disaster’s left in the abstract. I needed detail so that I could try to understand, so that I could try to prevent the horror from visiting us too.
“Nobody seems to know,” Erin said. “The dad had to go to the hospital. He was pretty badly injured, so it sounds like maybe an accident.”
I stared at my phone. Goddamn it. I knew I’d spend the rest of the night searching for further information, for police reports, for camera feeds of the Burgerama and surrounding businesses. I knew I wouldn’t sleep until death took a shape I recognized.
“Hm,” I said, as evenly as I could. “That’s awful. Really just awful.”
Erin, perhaps out of reverence, whispered, “I know, right?”
I nodded. “Just awful,” I mumbled.
We didn’t speak of the incident again that night, but each of us did peek into Malcolm’s room before dawn just to make sure he was still sleeping soundly in his bed.
• • • •
The second child exploded on a quiet, poplar-lined street on his way home from a friend’s house. Aiden Falenkova (ten years old, shy around new people, obsessed with Pokemon and astronomy, drew “The Adventures of Acornicon,” a comic about a dragon-squirrel trying to find a golden nut), was riding his bike past a row of quaint, well-kept mid-century modern homes on a sunny afternoon the day after Beatrix Middleston’s death when he, too, blew apart like a boy-shaped grenade. Fresh off a series of Pokemon victories against his best friend Lucas and proud of his deck-building abilities, Aiden popped a wheelie as he rolled past Mrs. Hannah Allstrom, a forty-one-year-old stay-at-home mom who glanced up from trimming hedges in her front lawn when she saw him. Allstrom waved, recognizing Aiden as one of the neighborhood kids, and he waved back.
“Be careful with that,” Allstrom called, chuckling.
As Aiden reached back down for his handlebar, a tremendous bang rushed through the air, toward the Allstroms’ house, and Aiden was no more. His bike flew forward, smashed into a tree, and collapsed onto its side. A crimson puff rose from the sidewalk where he had last been. The grass in the street-facing portion of the Allstroms’ yard was scorched white and spattered red. Mrs. Allstrom, knocked onto her rear from the blast, began to scream. She hadn’t even noticed the thin tip of a finger that had landed in the shrubbery beside her.
• • • •
I slowed the car to a crawl when we drove by the Burgerama parking lot. The restaurant was closed and the lot was cordoned off by a circle of squad cars, black vans, and police tape. A long white tent almost like a greenhouse sat in the middle of the lot, covering the spot where Bea Middleston had exploded. People in unidentifiable uniforms, dark suits, and hazmat gear shuffled in and out of the structure. I didn’t feel safe passing the area, yet I couldn’t look away or drive faster.
“That’s not just police,” I said, eyeing one of the dark-suited individuals. “That’s something else. FBI. NSA. Someone with way more power. Why would they be here?”
Erin raised her phone and took a picture of the scene. “There’s an online rumor that she just blew up, like a bomb. It’s really weird that there hasn’t been an official statement yet.”
“Yeah, I saw that,” I said. “How could something like that happen?”
I scrolled through a list of possibilities. A secret government armament. An engineered microbe or rogue nanotech. A passing anomaly in space-time. The direct gaze of a god.
“Can we get Burgerama?” Malcolm asked from his booster seat in the back.
“Not today, sweets,” Erin answered. “They’re closed.” She exchanged an anxious glance with me.
“We’ll get Wendy’s,” I said over my shoulder. “Okay, bud?”
Malcolm nodded. “Why are so many weird people at Burgerama?”
Truth or lies. Harsh reality or comfortable illusions. Trauma or ignorance. I didn’t know what to choose for Malcolm, let alone myself.
“Something happened there yesterday,” Erin said, having made the decision to tread a middle ground. “And they need to investigate it.”
“What happened?” Malcolm asked.
“Someone got hurt, but they’re not sure how.”
Satisfied, Malcolm nodded. “But Wendy’s is open?”
I gave a thumbs-up. “Yep. Sure is.”
We drove on, left the Burgerama behind. I felt like the crosshairs of a massive weapon had passed over us. I rolled down my window to take in some fresh air.
The day was beautiful. Warm, but not too warm. A little breezy. Minimal clouds. People were out everywhere, walking, biking, shopping, eating. We needed to stop at Target for some new towels and a bath mat. When reduced to a single meaningless chore, life made sense.
Sirens broke the sanity.
They wailed from seemingly every direction.
I slowed the car and pulled to the side as an ambulance and three police cars flew past us.
We inched back onto the road, and more sirens tore the air.
“Oh my god,” Erin gasped, scrolling on her phone. “A new post in the community group is saying another kid . . .” she stopped herself. Malcolm was listening.
I feared that I knew how the sentence ended, anyway.
“Another one? When?”
“Just now, apparently. Like, minutes ago.”
It seemed impossible. Such a beautiful day.
The sirens grew louder.
“Maybe we should go home,” I said, braking at a red light. “We can get the towels any day.”
Erin’s eyes had gone wide. “Yeah, maybe.”
As we waited for green, more emergency vehicles—and some of the black vans from Burgerama—flashed by, siren calls slashing open a path through traffic.
I made a U-turn at the light.
“Can we still get Wendy’s?” Malcolm asked.
It depends on whether or not any children have exploded there, I wanted to say.
Instead, I slapped a smile on my face, stared at Malcolm in the rearview mirror, and laughed, “Of course we can, bud.”
He began dancing in his seat, utterly indifferent to yet another set of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars hurtling by on the opposite side of the road.
• • • •
The third and fourth children exploded on a sweltering evening two weeks after Aiden Falenkova’s demise. Gregory Munsell (eight years old, a class clown, loved pancakes, pillow fights, and fishing with his grandfather) tensed and readied himself in goal as Ahmad Alshazar (eight years old, obsessed with sports, dreamed of becoming an astronaut after winning a World Cup with the US National Team) pushed the ball upfield, sprinting out in front of both his own team and Munsell’s faltering defenders.
The two didn’t know each other, except as competitors on the soccer pitch. Munsell and his teammates weren’t even from our city—they lived in the next suburb to the north, a wealthier part of the metro area. It didn’t matter. Horror respected no arbitrary borders or relationships. Rather, it created its own, and, at this moment, as Alshazar and Munsell met, one-on-one, with Alshazar winding up to unleash a shot, it circumscribed and united the two kids. Alshazar’s foot met the ball, Munsell began to dive, and both young athletes burst into a cloud of blood that commingled with the setting sun on the horizon. The players nearest the two were knocked over by the explosion, the goal’s net shredded from bone shrapnel, and the ball launched with cannon-force into a nearby parking lot, smashing the windshield of a car.
Parents, grandparents, and siblings in attendance began to scream and shout. The remaining soccer players began crying, walking off the field in dazes. A woman rushed onto the field, threw herself onto the scorched, red-flecked patch of grass where her son had been about to play hero only seconds before, and began to wail with the voice of a million lost moments.
• • • •
The city meeting for concerned parents and citizens was well-attended, as far as civic engagements go, with more than half the seats in the high school auditorium filled. Given the public nature of the soccer match explosions two days before, officials could no longer sweep the nature of the children’s deaths under a rug. Too many witnesses had seen the truth. We needed someone to explain to us how such things could happen. We needed someone to assure us such things would no longer happen.
Erin and I sat in the middle of a row toward the rear of the auditorium.
The first speaker, our mayor, drowned us in platitudes and well-wishes for the community. The next speaker, the chief of police, numbed us with generic logistics for each “incident” and downplayed the threat to our children.
An older man in a dark suit and red tie stood behind the mayor and chief during the entire presentation. We expected him to speak, too, but he merely nodded at all the empty rhetoric.
The meeting ended abruptly, without a question and answer session or anything approaching a plan of action, and angry shouts erupted from the audience.
“So what’s happening to these kids?”
“Give us answers!”
“How can we make sure our children are safe?”
“Stop covering up what’s going on!”
“What are you doing to stop this?”
“When do we get our phones?”
Everyone nearby turned to stare at the man who yelled this last. The man shrugged.
“They took our phones,” he said. “Everyone who was recording the soccer game, they took our phones. When do we get them back?”
The man in the black suit stepped to the speakers’ podium and the crowd quieted.
“These ‘incidents’ are isolated,” he said. “Your children are as safe as they ever were.”
“Lies!” someone screamed. “Children are blowing up!”
The man in the black suit steepled his hands on the podium and leaned forward.
“Your children,” he repeated, slower, with more emphasis, “are as safe as they ever were.”
Erin suddenly shot to her feet. “Why are they exploding?” she shouted. “Children don’t just explode. Something unnatural is happening here. Do you have any idea what it is? Do you even care?”
The man in the black suit leveled his gaze at her. It seemed he was trying to shrink her with his intensity. I stood up, too, hoping to provide a shield to my wife’s sword.
“Senseless tragedies happen all the time,” the man growled. “It’s the nature of the world. We must try to move past them. More information will be provided when it’s available. That’s all for tonight.”
The man stepped away from the podium and rushed the mayor and the chief out of the auditorium.
More infuriated shouts followed them.
The school’s principal took to the stage, her face flushed from either rage or embarrassment.
“I guess that’s it, folks,” she said, clearly confused. “I apologize for the brevity. Have a good evening and a safe drive home. We’ll notify you when there’s another meeting.”
Haltingly, we all began to shuffle toward the exits.
In the parking lot, as we wandered to our car, Erin asked me, “So what do we do? We can’t live here, with kids blowing up for no reason.”
I nodded.
I knew she was right. We needed to protect Malcolm. But we couldn’t move, either. We didn’t have the money, not on my teaching pay and her social worker’s salary.
“I know,” I said. “But how can we go anywhere else? We can’t afford a better place. And this was supposed to be a safe city. If it’s happening here, maybe it’s happening everywhere.”
Erin glared at me, angry at the unfairness of living in this broken world.
“Maybe,” she grumbled, “but I don’t think so. It’s just bullshit that we have no guidance. Good luck everybody, hope your kid doesn’t burst into flames tomorrow.”
I sighed. “Yeah. Maybe we should try to keep Malcolm at home as much as possible. None of them have exploded at home.”
I unlocked the car and we both got in. Erin slammed her door shut.
“I don’t know. How can he have a normal life if he can’t go anywhere?”
“What then?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
She put a hand to her forehead and smashed it against the side window. I pulled at my cheeks until my eyes hurt.
“I really don’t know.”
I turned on the car and stared across the school parking lot. In dozens of other vehicles, other parents, caregivers, and concerned citizens sat in similar poses of frustration and helplessness. For some reason, no one drove away.
• • • •
The fifth child exploded three days after the city meeting. Emma Hightower (eleven years old, played clarinet, won several regional chess tournaments, wrote poems about clouds and stars and finding aliens on distant worlds) licked an ice cream cone in the shade of an umbrella and watched the other kids laugh and splash and play in the pool. She didn’t know how to swim, but came to Mazie Desmond’s twelfth birthday pool party at the city rec center anyway because Mazie was her friend and everyone else in their class said they were going. As it turned out, though, everyone else took up residence in the deep end of the pool, wanting no part of the summer heat, and Emma was left alone on a lounge chair with all the sweet treats Mazie’s parents had brought to the party.
Mazie’s mother noticed Emma sitting by herself with the snacks and exited the pool to talk to the girl.
“Hey Emma,” she said, shaking water from her hair, “why don’t you get in the shallow section? I’m sure some of the girls will paddle over.”
Emma shrugged. “I don’t really like the water.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Emma squinted at her friends, whooping at the opposite end of the pool.
“Okay,” she said, “but I don’t want it to be weird.”
She rose from the chair, finished her ice cream, and dragged herself to the pool stairs.
“Go on,” Mazie’s mom said, following close behind. “It’s not cold.”
Emma dipped one foot into the sparkling waves and exploded in a hail of crimson fragments that rained down into the pool.
The blast threw Mazie Desmond’s mother headfirst into an anchored lifeguard chair, which collapsed and toppled into the now bloodied water. The kids in the pool began screaming and crying. They rushed to get out, to escape the red tide that crept toward them; they scrambled over each other in panic, pushed friends and classmates beneath the surface. Several kids scaled a nearby fence to escape the chaos.
Mazie Desmond’s mother twitched then went still.
The birthday ice cream began to melt.
• • • •
We walked up and down the aisles at the grocery store, pointing out items to Malcolm that he might want to take to school for lunch. He started kindergarten in less than two weeks. Thousands of other children across the city were about to return to school for the year, too.
My intestines clenched. Sick with worry over sending our son out into the world beyond our front door, I’d suffered diarrhea for the past several days.
“Crackers?” Erin asked. “Peanut butter crackers?”
Malcolm considered the bright orange box. He grabbed it, shook it, and nodded.
“Yeah, peanut butter crackers.”
Five children, blown apart for no reason we could understand. How could we make sure Malcolm wouldn’t be number six? How could we let him leave the house without dissolving into puddles of anxiety and guilt until he returned?
“Cheez-Its,” I said, gesturing at nothing in particular.
Malcolm made a gagging noise. “Blech. Cheese.”
My phone buzzed. Another response in the Reddit group I joined. It was dedicated to conspiracies, and today’s conspiracy du jour was a summary of the exploding kids in our town that I’d posted that morning. I scrolled through explanations.
“It’s a Russian death satellite. It beams concentrated microwaves into a small space, superheating its target in milliseconds, causing water in the body to explode.”
“It’s a delayed reaction between a chemical in the pesticide the city uses and the hormones in the children’s blood.”
“It’s a sudden depressurization of the body brought on by the vacuum created by microscopic black holes caused by CERN.”
“It’s the cell towers with their superpowered signals.”
None of these people had any idea what was happening.
“How about cereal?” Erin asked. “Cocoa Puffs?”
Another family with a young child passed by us. The kid was shouting something about school being too scary.
“Sun Chips,” I said, even though I didn’t see any.
“Sun Chips! Sun Chips! Sun Chips!” Malcolm chanted.
Erin sighed. “Okay, Sun Chips.”
I reloaded the Reddit post and a message that read “This thread cannot be found” popped up. I reloaded again and the same message greeted me. I tried twice more. Same results.
My post had been scrubbed from the internet. Our exploding children didn’t exist to the rest of the world even as victims of conspiracy.
My abdomen knotted, burned. I needed to find a toilet.
“How can we do this?” I asked, staring at Erin.
She didn’t look at me. She didn’t look at Malcolm. She looked at a bag of cheese curls and well beyond.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But we have to. So we will.”
“Oreos,” Malcolm blurted. “The orange ones.”
“Oreos,” I repeated, dazed. This world could not be real.
A few aisles away, a child shrieked—in anger or sadness or joy, I couldn’t tell.
• • • •
The sixth child exploded on the first day of autumn.
Despite protests to his mother, Flavion Moore, sixteen and a junior in high school, drove his younger brother Dayrick (seven years old, quiet and thoughtful, enjoyed puzzles and building detailed cities with Legos, wanted to be president of the United States when he grew up) from their house to Dayrick’s elementary for morning drop-off.
“What’s on your schedule?” Flavion asked Dayrick as they neared the school.
In the back seat, Dayrick shrugged. “Art today. We’re using chiaroscuro to draw landscapes.”
“You’re using what?”
Dayrick slowly sounded out the word. “Chi-a-ro-scu-ro. It’s like, shadows and light.”
“Man,” Flavion said, laughing, “your art class is intense. We were, like, coloring pictures of dogs and cars and stuff when I was in second grade.”
Dayrick made an annoyed noise. “I hate crayons.”
Flavion laughed again.
“Damn. Strong feelings for crayons.”
They pulled up to the school and Dayrick opened his door. Flavion caught his brother’s eye in the rearview mirror.
“Stay safe, you hear?”
Dayrick nodded.
“Yeah, yeah.”
He slid out of Flavion’s car, put his hand on the window to close the door, and exploded in a fine mist. The opened car door flew off its hinges and hit the side of the school, tearing apart a swath of the building’s brick facade. All of Flavion’s car windows burst, glass meteors streaking in every direction, slicing Flavion’s face and arms. The car’s roof buckled, twisted, nearly tore free from its moorings.
A fire alarm inside the school began to ring.
Blood pouring from his nose, his ears, and the myriad wounds on his face, Flavion staggered out of the car and collapsed onto the school’s blacktopped driveway.
“Stay safe, man,” he muttered, “Stay safe. Stay safe.”
Dayrick’s remains drifted away on a breeze.
• • • •
Malcolm stands at the patio door, staring outside at the mounds of fallen leaves in our backyard.
“Can I go play in them?” he asks.
I wrap an arm around his tiny shoulders.
“No,” I say. “Not today. Maybe for a minute or two tomorrow.”
Children continue to explode all the time, but no one talks about it much except to say what a shame it is. The mayor, the police chief, and the man in the black suit, who returns for periodic city meetings, all claim the explosions are an unavoidable cost of living in our world, like catching colds and getting bruises. In the same breath, they continue to tell us these incidents are “isolated” and “very rare.” They say we can’t study why the children explode or understand how to prevent the explosions because too much infrastructure would have to be built up around the problem, too many studies would have to be run, too much money would have to be invested when there’s already not enough money to go around.
I suspect the truth is that someone with too much power and too much money is, somehow, benefiting from our kids exploding.
Malcolm sighs.
“Can we go get donuts?” he asks.
“I can go pick some up,” I tell him. “Or mom can.”
I’ve written to state senators, congress members, and media outlets detailing the terror we endure, but no one responds to my missives. Any mention of the explosions I post online gets deleted within minutes, no matter the post’s privacy settings. Erin tells me that the posts other parents make on social media quickly disappear from view, too. She says people seem to be losing interest in discussing the explosions; they know that whatever they say will be lost to the all-encompassing scrubbing campaign.
Malcolm stays in our house most of the time. We don’t really let him go anywhere except school. We spend most of our time inside, too. It’s not ideal—in fact it’s probably unhealthy—but we’re playing the percentages. The less time he’s outside, the less time he’s risking explosion. We’ve even avoided playing in the backyard, just in case.
Malcolm sighs again.
“Can I open the door and just smell the leaves? Please? Please?”
I consider the glass in the door. I rap my knuckles against it, judging its thickness.
“A crack,” I say. “Only a crack. And only for a few seconds.”
We regret that we can’t move away, to somewhere children aren’t exploding. We regret that Malcolm is missing out on so many experiences, so many tiny instants that make up a childhood.
Other parents we’ve talked to are enacting similar rules and creating similar lifestyles for their families.
We want our children to be safe. We want our children to live. But we’re not sure what that means anymore.
I slide the patio door back and let the frozen air touch Malcolm’s face. He giggles. My heart crumbles. This is what we can give him. This is all we can give him. And it will never be enough.
