If Not Love, Then the Bomb, by Emily Kiernan
Lucille Fitch, despite a slim frame and a well-bred delicacy, gave birth to five children in her relatively short life. Her first, Peter, died at only a few weeks old of SIDs—or crib-death as it was called at the time—an event which shook her confidence badly, but which the doctors assured her was an unexplainable and unrepeatable as the history of the world itself. Her last child, Michael, was a mongoloid. The middle three were normal, or at least healthy: Sarah first, then Charles, and then, to Lucy’s complete surprise, an atomic bomb.
The bombs that had fallen on Japan a decade before had been monstrously large; Little Boy weighed nearly nine-thousand pounds, and Fat Man weighed over ten, but Lucy’s bomb, at eight-pounds, nine-ounces, was only a bit larger than Charles had been, and presented in, frankly, a better position. It had been an easy labor.
After preparing for the sleepless weeks of tending a newborn, Lucy found the bomb an easy keeper. It required nothing from her at all: it didn’t nurse and didn’t cry, it never fussed, and it was immune to the usual baby-troubles of colic and teething. From the first, it slept through the night, and, in fact, through the day as well. Still, Lucy would find herself starting up from her bed in the hours before dawn, stumbling through the house in her slipper feet, sure that her mother-ears had caught the sleep-destroying note, the expectant lowing of a child’s distress that seemed to reach her from everywhere and all at once.
