By Martha Newman
Featured Art: “Transfer Station” by Lesley Weston

“That fucking cunt,” Nancy snarls, glaring out my vibrating kitchen window at the washed-denim sky. “First he puts a car in space and now he wants to colonize Mars.” My windows are being rattled by recurring sonic booms, and so are my nerves. Every time a test flight takes off, and our local billionaire gets one step closer to the Red Planet, I fight off the urge to take cover under the kitchen table like our dog, quivering and gnawing on a table leg.  

Nancy takes a sip from the sweating glass of lemonade in her hand, leaving a waxy, red smile on the rim. “All going to hell,” she says, “to hell in a handbasket.” 

Nancy is my neighbor and earlier this summer she swapped out a perpetual glass of chilled Sancerre for lemonade. No one in the subdivision has brought it up, but we all suspect it explains her increasingly caustic mood. “He’s a miserable toad. A hideous, malevolent, cunting toad.” I love the way Nancy uses the word “cunt”—genderless and non-anatomical and ferocious. I love the angry crimson sneer her lips make when she says it and I imagine her saying it about me—the shape her mouth would take, how it might feel to be swirled around the warm, wet interior of Nancy’s mouth, and then spat out like the venom of a poisonous tree frog.    

“We’re Earthlings, darling, you and me. Not built for spacesuits. Let’s die here, in our finery.”  

I don’t think humans deserve another planet. I think we should be forced to stay on this one and look at what we’ve done—like a dog who shat on the rug.  

I don’t say these things in front of my children for obvious reasons. When Godfrey (six) tells me he wants to be a zoologist and study exotic animals in the rainforest, I do not say, “Sorry, sweetie, but by the time you’ve graduated from enough schooling to be a zoologist there won’t be any wild animals to study or a rainforest to visit. But there may still be cows, so you could probably do something with them.” Instead, I say, “That’s wonderful, my love! Would you like to help me feed Frodo today?” A 50-pound Aussiedoodle may not be a wild Macaque but he’s the best I can do.  

Luna (two), meanwhile, spends most of her waking hours eating, or at very least demanding to be fed. Again, I do not warn her of the coming food shortages or try to familiarize her with the insect-protein-based space food she can expect to eat as an adult (“entomophagy” is the word for eating insects, and I think we should all familiarize ourselves with it). Instead, I select the choicest fresh veggies, steam them until tender, then lovingly puree each in a separate vessel before spoon feeding them to her, all while humming “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine,” because it is the only way to get her to eat more of the food than she spits on the floor.  

I am told—not infrequently, I might add—that I am a “good mom.” Usually by other moms in the interminable school drop-off and pick-up cycle. “You’re such a good mom,” they sigh, leaning on their glossy, hybrid-electric SUVs, sipping oat milk matchas. I suspect they only think this is because I have attractive and well-groomed children who do not kick, punch, bite, or play with their feces. Also, because I remember to wash my hair every three days and never wear elastic-waist-banded pants in public. 

“Something slimy came out of my bum,” was the first thing I heard this morning. Still half asleep, I opened my eyes to see Godfrey looking down at me in bed with a quizzical expression on his face, wearing only the top half of his Curious George pajama set. “It wasn’t poo, though,” he clarified before walking away, wagging his slimy bum at me as he went. 

I had been dreaming of heather fields in Iceland. The solitary vastness punctuated only by miniature horses and elves. A gentle mist hanging low over the horizon. I closed my eyes once, briefly, to see if I could return to that quiet expanse. But it was gone.  

Godfrey was right, it wasn’t poo. But it also wasn’t the most alarming thing to come out of his rear end (aquarium rocks, age three), so I cleaned him up while singing “This Land Is Your Land” and decided not to tell their father.  

Their father, Nate, is by all accounts, a catch. I was aware of this when I married him, and it’s one explanation for my haste in having his children. Nate appears unperturbed by the coming apocalypse. When I informed him that only four percent of the mammals left on this planet are wild—with humans and livestock comprising the other ninety-six percent—he tousled his still remarkably thick chestnut hair and replied, “Well that leaves a lot left, huh?”  

This was three years ago. We were sitting in the gingham-wallpapered waiting room of the pediatrician’s office, while they ultra-sounded Godfrey’s intestines in search of more aquarium paraphernalia. I was brandishing the lobby’s copy of Scientific American aloft. Nate was on his phone and had not looked up. “No, darling. I think the point is that it doesn’t,” I replied.  

“Aw well,” he said with a folksy shrug. “Guess it’s just a reminder to be grateful for what we got while we got it.” He was still looking at his phone. 

I don’t know when my WASP of a Connecticut born and bred husband adopted the subtle accent of a Midwestern soybean farmer. Perhaps around the same time my tailbone fractured birthing Godfrey. It is true what they say—parenthood changes a person. 

I haven’t slept through the night since Luna was born. This is not entirely her fault. She started sleeping through the night after only three months, and now I’m the one gasping awake in the thinnest hours of the morning, crying out to be fed and held and bounced and burped. And because I know there is no one coming to save me from my paroxysm of loneliness, I pace. I used to pace the hallways of our house, but quickly ran out of runway, and the claustrophobia that ensued aggravated the feeling of desperate aloneness, and so now I pace up and down our street.  

We live on a pretty, tree-lined street in a quiet neighborhood full of tidy lawns and chipper neighbors, like Steve and Leanne, who live in an identical house directly across from ours. (Nancy is the outlier.) At first, I worried that someone would see me out there, in the middle of the night, walking back and forth in my pajamas and annual Christmas-gift Uggs. But night after night for the past two years I walk the seven doors down the North side of the street and the seven doors back up the South side of the street and I have never seen any sign of human life. It’s the only thing that brings me solace, walking past the signifiers of humanity—house, car, trash bin—and imagining there’s no humans left.  

I first read the word “anthropocene” in that same article by Scientific American. It is the unofficial term for the current geological epoch, defined as: “The period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.” A lump formed in my throat as I read it. Sweat prickled my upper lip. I looked around the pediatric waiting room. At the framed photos of smiling babies. At the giant puzzle-shaped play mat on the floor. At my blissfully unaware husband, with his fabulous, intact hair. And then down, at my swollen, pregnant belly. The magnitude of what I had done took my breath away. The shuddering irreversibleness of it. I have blithely brought children into a world which shortly may no longer exist. I am legally required to secure my children in a car seat so that they may be more likely survive childhood, but not to build a fall-out shelter or seed bank so that they may survive in the long run. 

I fell asleep with Luna in the car the other week. Just for a split second, and while stopped at a red light, but still. When I came to, the sound of a car horn blared angrily behind me and Luna was staring into the rearview mirror with unmistakable reproach. Now I’m anxious she’ll become a particularly loquacious toddler and rat me out to Nate. Or, worse, develop some strange phobia to driving and become one of those weird people who never get their license. This is a game I sometimes play—what kind of fucked-up will my children be?  

Luna is a pretty child. She has blonde, silken ringlets, enormous green eyes, and velvet lashes (her father’s contribution) that frankly make me seethe with jealousy. She is some cross between the Gerber Baby and Shirley Temple and I am certain it will be her downfall.  

“What a pretty little girl you are,” perfect strangers coo at my barely verbal offspring. “Just like a little doll.” They’re always women, these objectifiers of my young daughter’s body. I feel obliged to smile at the intended compliment—modestly, and with a slight downward tilt of the chin—and say, “Oh thank you, that’s so kind.” But in truth I’d like to grab these cows by the hair and use my perfectly manicured and elongated nail to scalp them while crying out “BE GONE FIEND!!”  

(I once attended an arts camp in the Adirondack Mountains, and was witness to a girl get her hair caught in the clay-spattered pottery wheel as she demonstrated her perfect centering technique on a block of gray, slimy, potential. The wheel made one full rotation before she realized her predicament, and in another full rotation she was separated from a four-inch-square section of her waist-length hair. The collective quiet just before her scream felt like the instant water turns to ice—clean and crisp and perfect. I loved her without exception in that moment, as she hovered on the brink of suffering. We are all perpetually hovering on that brink, I believe. It’s just that in these brief, exquisite moments, we can touch it.)  

“Mommy, mommy, mommy, why?!” Godfrey wailed at me, as I tried to wipe the slime that wasn’t poo from his bottom this morning. We aren’t taught to be honest with our children. It wouldn’t be kind. To say, “I have absolutely no idea what mechanism in your body produced this monstrosity, and therefore no ability to help you. And I’m really just hoping you don’t die.” I considered giving him a sippy cup of prune juice, because it was all I had to offer, and then at least we would both be mollified by the fiction that I know what I’m doing. But I didn’t want to risk making the situation worse, so in the end I did nothing but stare vacantly into the open refrigerator humming “Hooked on a Feeling,” which isn’t even a child-appropriate song.   

I used to work. I used to have a profession, but I’ll be buggered if I can remember what it was.  

Nate works. Or, I assume he does. The truth is, he could just be leaving the house each day and doing anything he damn pleases. If I could leave the house and do anything I damn please, I would go to IKEA—to the showroom of perfect, sterile bedrooms. I’d climb into one of their unpronounceable beds and see how long it would take someone to realize I wasn’t just another disposable part of the display. I bet I could go days without anyone noticing. Days of uninterrupted, Scandinavian-inspired sleep. 

I was reading the other morning about that floating island of trash—called, I now know, the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” It’s basically the Julian Assange of environmental catastrophes. We know where it is, mostly, but never entirely what it’s up to. And we just can’t figure out what to do with it. I like the idea of cordoning the entire thing off—all 1.6 million swirling square kilometers of it—and then skimming the debris out from its gyre with an enormous pool scooper. Sometimes, this is what I think about while I pace.  

When I can’t stand my life anymore —roughly every ten days or so—I clean out the closets. I’ve employed all the studied methods. I’ve Kon-Mari’d™ and ClutterBugged™ and gone NEAT™. I’ve disposed of all of Nate’s stained t-shirts and I routinely donate Godfrey’s outgrown clothes. I feel such immense relief stuffing once-longed-for possessions into heavy-duty trash bags, and then graciously dumping them on a heap of crap discarded by other anxiety-prone individuals. It’s as though the craving I felt when longing for these objects can be soothed only by the relief I feel in disposing of them. With every trash bag I vow never to crave again. I cast off my worldly possessions, feeling cleansed and shorn like a renunciate. And then what? I try to lull myself to sleep at night with the idea of these items ending up in happy homes, but I think it’s more likely they make their way to the Great Patch, where they languish until being ingested by marine life.  

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, I sometimes intone while I pace, feeling with every footfall my evolution towards that rough beast, as I slouch along in my Uggs. The Second Coming will not be marked by anarchy, but apathy. Apathy illuminated by the twinkle of an LED-brightened screen. 

I am the person in the neighborhood tasked with speaking to Nancy. “You just have a way with her,” Leanne says with a wink, one elbow propped on her mailbox, dressed head-to-toe in athleisure wear. And so, when Nancy’s sprinkler system is out of sync with the community policy, or if her un-weeded yard is polluting a neighbor’s, or if her cat is hunting birds from Steve and Leanne’s bird bath, I am dispatched to her house with some token offering of my mortification—gluten-free scones, vegan short bread, a pound cake made of nothing but wishful thinking and self-denial.  

Nancy’s house is a mausoleum of her many unlived lives. Headshots from an acting career that involved little to no professional acting, exercise equipment dedicated to a business enterprise that never left the garage, a piano we all know she can’t play. Nancy never had children, and this fact is referred to as the source of her eccentricity, her bitterness, and her refusal to play nicely with others. It’s become the tagline to any conversation about Nancy’s disagreeable behavior—“Well, you know she never had kids.” Secretly, I am in Nancy’s corner. I applaud her lack of legible success, or successors. I worship her irreverent housekeeping. I hope her cat eats those fucking birds.  

The last time I was sent on diplomatic mission to Nancy’s—to discuss, on Steve and Leanne’s behalf, the novelty doormat of enormous boobs Nancy had just set out—I found her midway through excavating a hallway closet.  

“What do those cunts want now?” Nancy asked, without looking up from a pile of what appeared to be mostly taffeta.  

“It’s about the boobs,” I sighed, with little conviction.  

“Oh, honey, it always is,” Nancy said, crackling with laughter. “Here,” she said, offering me a round, cardboard box covered in a layer of dust. “My grandmother’s, from her modeling days.” I opened the box and pulled out a coiled pile of pleated carmine fabric, twisted on itself like a king cobra. “It’s a Fortuny Delphos gown,” she said. “Should be worth a fortuney,” she riffed, erupting into laughter again.  

I lifted the sleeping beast from its box, and it unfurled around me, suddenly more boa constrictor than cobra. “That thing is over a hundred years old,” Nancy said, hoisting herself to her feet. And then, to my shock, and utter elation, she began to undress. Nancy undressed in her hallway the way a child would at the beach before careening into the sea. Kicking off house shoes, ripping her sweater and t-shirt off in one piece, wriggling out of jeans and underwear. Clothes landing with a relieved sigh in a pile at her feet. I felt I was watching a rare ecological sight—baby sea turtles hatching under moonlight, trillions of cicadas emerging with biblical synchronicity, a white bison’s first trembly steps. Behold: a human female, naked and unashamed. (Nancy’s entire body is covered in freckles. I had thought it was just her arms and face. But no, every square inch. Freckles, and the downy, gilded fur of a peach.)  

She held up her arms for me, and I slipped the gown over her head. It rippled over her like a second skin. She purred, stroking the fabric against her body. “What d’ya say… should I wear it to the grocery store?”  

Nancy once asked me why I had children. She is the only person who ever has. We were standing on her un-weeded lawn, eating crumbly lemon poppy seed scones, and I was complaining about my feet growing half a size from both pregnancies and how I could no longer fit into my favorite pair of slingbacks. 

“Why’d you have kids, anyways, honey?” She asked. As though this were a solution to my footwear problems.  

I was briefly stunned. “Because… because of… because of the love, I guess? The unconditional love?”  

“Hah! Sure, I know all about unconditional love,” Nancy snorted. “It’s called butter.”  

My mouth watered.  

I avoided Nancy for a couple of weeks after that. Afraid she’d somehow sensed my dirty little secret. Had spied the wet sick of doubt sloshing about in my insides. I paced an extra length for the next two weeks.  

The truth is, I don’t know why I had children, not really. But I resent the notion that I’m just mindlessly on some socialized walkalator, moving from life phase to life phase like cattle through an abattoir. I think it’s baser than that, more primordial—the amoebic single-celled organism buried deep within me determined to emerge from the genetic stew. To replicate and then define itself, to become an “I” as only humans can. All these many disparate I’s jostling around the particle collider of my insides, and eventually oozing out from the cracks to form new life. New, self-determining, self-obsessed life.  

Or maybe it’s that our craving for things extends to people, extends to children. The ultimate solution to all that empty, existential, bottomless want. Humanity as one enormous, writhing garbage patch.  

Or maybe that’s all just the lack of sleep talking.   

Maybe we have children for a more hopeful reason. For the unspoken prayer that they’ll get it right. That the only solution to the problems created by humanity will come from future humans, and a breathless, aching, gnawing desire to wipe the slate clean. 

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Martha Newman is a writer and actor living in Los Angeles, where she has worked in film and television since 2010. Her short stories have been selected for the longlist for the Masters Review Short Story Award for New Writers. Her work will be published in FICTION Magazine in the summer of 2026.