With a Small Bomb in Her Chest

One moonless night, when her daughter was but a few months old, Eve clawed back her silken baby skin and planted a bomb in her chest. It wasn’t as difficult as you’d imagine; a baby’s body is more malleable than an adult’s. Getting beneath her daughter’s skin was rather like peeling an orange. Or picking at the flap of a sealed envelope to slip an extra something inside.

It was only a small bomb, the size and shape of a button battery, albeit large in relation to her daughter. It was bigger, for example, than her daughter’s dainty fingernails, bigger than the snub of her nose. But, like a school uniform, the child would grow into it, grow until the bomb was eclipsed by the face of her wristwatch or an ornament she might hang from her ear.

Eve wasn’t thinking so far ahead when she buried the bomb in her baby daughter. Admittedly, the act was premeditated: she’d had to order the device in advance and research how to install it online. But even when the package arrived in the post, and Eve ripped through the bubble wrap, she didn’t expect to implant it. The instrument was insurance against her daughter’s demands becoming so unbearable they might induce an explosion within Eve herself.