Perfect Baby

by Chris Carrel

Dear neighbors:

Congratulations on your new baby! She is really the cutest, most beautiful baby we have ever seen. Everybody in the neighborhood thinks so. With her wispy auburn hair, bright eyes and ever-smiling cherub’s face, she is a lovely sight to behold. 

We’ve seen her many times on your daily walks through the neighborhood and many of us think she is a perfect baby. Perhaps, the perfect baby.

Of course, we hate you for this. I can’t say I speak for everyone on the block, but I’ve talked with most of them and we agree. Your perfect baby is an affront to the other babies of the neighborhood, an insult to all the other average (and less) children who live here and the perfectly ordinary people that spawned them. 

We have tortured ourselves wondering what it must feel like to have such a perfect baby. How pleased with yourselves you must be! Did you immediately know what you had when the doctor presented her in the delivery room, or did her perfection only emerge in the days and weeks following? 

Let me tell you this: our babies came out squalling bloody messes, covered in mucus and placental streaks, and shrieking like the final vengeance of some small, terrible woodland predator. Their skulls were misshapen and bald, and their pale newborn skin painted with ugly red blotches. They were full of anger and bile at having existence inflicted on them and this foreshadowed difficult childhoods to be endured. Even before we received the exorbitant hospital bill, we knew on a gut level that our babies would ruin us in ways small and large. We know that we are being aged towards an earlier grave than had we remained childless.

We sit in our living rooms watching television and fearing the future. Our children will bankrupt us. They will make poor life choices and amass unpayable college debts. They will be no strangers to affliction. They will gain addictions and fail to learn lessons in a timely manner. They will ask us for money over and over again until one day they refuse to speak to us anymore. We will lie to them and lie to ourselves about the amount of pain we cause each other. We know on some level of parental intuition that they will only disappoint us and yet, here we are, huddled together in our homes, hoping for the best and dreaming of better possibilities.

Your perfect baby mocks our dreams! Future success beams from her like the shafts of golden light that surround the head of the Baby Jesus himself. One look at her and we can see the future valedictorian and star multisport athlete. If we squint we might be able to see her smiling face in the newspaper alongside an article detailing her many achievements. Her high school peers will unanimously vote her Most Likely to Succeed and though she could leverage her college degree into a successful career in business, she is too talented for that. We imagine a breakout star in cinema or pop music, perhaps both. A successful podcast empire, of course! She is the kind of child who will buy her parents a house and take care of them in their old age.

When we see you and your perfect baby we are filled with deep oceanic currents of envy. We want to scream at life’s unfairness. Some of us want to punch you in the face (we would never harm your baby, though).

We thought you should know about the simmering unhappiness you have caused. Honesty is important in maintaining a happy neighborhood.

What do we want? How about you keep your baby inside, or at least cover her up so that we don’t have to see her irrepressible cuteness as she coos at you or the sight of a butterfly or something. Have some decency.

Chris Carrel writes speculative fiction and other odd things from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine, Idle Ink and A Thin Slice of Anxiety, has work forthcoming at Literally Stories and eMerge Literary Magazine, and posts occasionally at ccarrel.bsky.social.