* * *
What are some therapy options for replacement children ?
The therapies listed below may strike some, at best, as old fashioned and, at worst, as reminiscent of the barbaric practices one imagines illiterate peasants used hundreds of years ago. But as we've said before, the snatching of our children in the middle of the night is a very old occurrence, so old solutions might be called for.
1. Take the replacement child to a field and beat it with a branch from a weeping birch tree.
2. Cut off the mother's hair and weave a blanket out of the hair. Lay the blanket over the replacement child.
3. Place the replacement child on a hot stove and boil water in two eggshells.
4. Abandon the replacement child in a field of weeds.
5. Put the child on a chopping block used for firewood.
6. Pretend to throw the replacement child into the oven.
7. Show the replacement something they have never seen before, like a savory pudding containing an entire animal, such as a chicken, including the beak and claws and the head.
8. Leave the replacement child tethered all night to a stake beside a well, preferably a well on a hill.
9. Toss the replacement child into a rapidly moving river.
10. Stop feeding the replacement child.
An alternative is to accept the replacement child as they are, avoiding such therapies altogether, but few of us seem able to do this since we tend, as a species, to have an obsessive desire to alter whatever around us is different from what we expected to find (see Case Study 60039 below).
* * *
What are the possible outcomes of such therapies ?
Outcome 1. The replacement child's actual parents, who will probably be both unearthly and indescribable, snatch the replacement child away, leaving the original child in its place.
Outcome 2. The replacement child becomes injured or dies.
Outcome 3. Nothing happens.
* * *
Case study 60039
Grandmother G. said to the mother, "The whole time you were mine, I never let anyone or anything take you away. But if you had been taken, I would have done everything possible to bring you back. Are you even trying to get him back? I hear there are stories about how to do that."
The old stories Grandma G. was referencing read like miracles. In the evening, a mother either does something to herself or to the replacement living in her house. By the middle of the night, the replacement has disappeared. In the morning, the mother's original child has returned and is lying comfortably in their own bed. The children who come back are said to be similar in most ways to who they were before.
"Let me have him for the weekend and I'll see what I can do," said Grandmother G. "It's like the medicine I used to have to force down your throat. God knows I did that more than enough times when you were young, but sometimes cures don't taste very good."
The replacement child fell sick after the grandmother's treatments. He did not recover.
* * *
Can replacement children offer their families joy ?
Yes, though whether such joy is recognized depends on the parent's ability to let go of old memories. Take the replacement found in Case Study 243550, who seemed happiest while staring at his bedroom wall, so this is what the father began to do with the boy. First the father set aside his memories, such as kicking a soccer ball with his old son across the yard. Then he settled the replacement on the rug in the boy's bedroom, surrounded him with pillows, and sat there beside the replacement for many hours. "Sometimes I think I'm going to stay in that room forever," the father told us, and when he told us this, he was smiling. His happiness measured 7.4 out of 10, which is just fine. The mother of the household, on the other hand, was bent over a book beside a pile of additional books (see our note above on the unfortunate gender divide in parental roles). She was holding a yellow highlighter in her right hand. Every one of those books concerned how to bring the original child back. This mother did not allow us to measure her happiness quotient but we assume it was low or immeasurable.
Let's also review Case Study 14099, where mother Karyn B. found much contentment touching or even, on occasion, stroking the replacement child's hair, which is very beautiful and doesn't feel like hair. Karyn B. told us that touching the replacement's hair felt like she was resting her hand on something with a heartbeat, like she was resting her hand on the chest of a rabbit who was considering whether to bolt.
* * *
At what point should I stop hoping for the return of my original child ?
Given the low percentage of the original children's reappearances and the toll such hope for reappearance takes on the family unit, it is in everyone's best interest to give up hope immediately, the moment you see a replacement in your child's bed. To hurry this process along, several parents have found it useful to convince themselves their original child never existed. That there is no original child to bring back. That they were given this replacement child at birth and, for a short while, they simply thought otherwise.
* * *
What do the replacement children themselves think about all this ?
We would guess some replacements wish to return where they came from; some may wish to stay where they are; and some must wish we not tell their story for them or, at least, that we tell a different type of story.
* * *
After I have given up hope that my actual child will return, what are best practices for accepting my replacement child ?
There are two common ways to view the arrival of your replacement.
One is to consider it as a loss, as we once did. But then you will always be missing something. Every time you go to the park, you will see so many original children there holding each other's hands or running up to their mothers to show off a pile of shining rocks, like your actual child used to do, and you will feel that loss again, which is very depressing.
Or you can look at the replacement's arrival as proof that, in this world, there is still something magical at work, even if it's a magic you didn't ask for. When you gaze upon the replacement sleeping in your child's bed, we suggest doing so with a little wonder. Try to tell yourself you are glimpsing one of the universe's possibilities, the possibility that there are other worlds out there, or at least other realities, and that this child may have come from such a faraway place, and perhaps they are, in fact, still half-living in such a place, a foot in our world and a foot in theirs. This positioning allows them to see things we will never be able to see, the overlays upon our own reality that we can only imagine. Perhaps beside us, to our right, directly over our right shoulder, or reflecting onto the wall, there is something hovering that is so miraculous and large that they cannot take their eyes off of it. No wonder they don't wish to look at us instead.
* * *
How do most case studies end ?
In the original case studies, which are actually the old folk stories, the replacement child either stayed put as a burden on the family, or else the parent, usually the mother, did what the wise neighbor told her to do, often involving a birch branch or an axe, in which case the replacement child either died or he went away, while the original child either came back or, more often, didn't. Nowadays, it is difficult to figure out the correct endings to our stories, as modern parents are hesitant to admit to the more desperate therapies, fearing we will frame their tales in a somber moralism. No one wants their life story to be framed in such a way. There is also the problem of privacy. A family who receives a replacement child usually will, at some point, begin to retreat into their homes, away from their neighbors and their friends, as it eventually becomes too painful to interact with families whose children are still originals. You begin to want those other families' lives, which means you are ready to throw away your own family and your own life, which is an impossible way to live. Once a family retreats into their home, it is challenging for us to find out what happens next, as they tend to keep their drapes clo
sed and they no longer answer the door.
While we might not know the endings to the majority of our case studies, we can make certain assumptions.
One assumption is that while it's possible many parents never love their replacements, it is also possible such parents haven't recognized their own love, because it isn't the kind of love they expected or wanted.
Another conclusion is that unrecognizable or unrecognized love is still love.
This said, in the two rare case studies below, we have been lucky to observe endings of a sort.
* * *
Ending of case study 53020
Husband Michael S. went away on a business trip to Missouri, and on the second night of his trip, his wife Laura called one of the replacement schools that had a nice brochure, the school with the natural lake right on the grounds and the horse stable. She spent several minutes on the phone explaining her family's situation to the intake coordinator: the hysterics, the lack of affection, the amount of work. "He's getting worse," Laura said, "and I think I'm doing everything wrong."
"Honey, I get it," replied the coordinator. "Motherhood is supposed to be filled with delight or at least have much delight in it, am I right, but I can tell from your voice that there isn't a whole lot of delight in your current situation. We get it into our heads that just because a child is sleeping in one of our beds, we have to take care of him. But if that isn't the child you wanted—I mean, you tried. It's not like you're giving up on him. Goodness, no. You're putting him someplace where he can belong."
The replacement did not cry the following week when the two men came to the door, not dressed in nice suits, as Laura had hoped, or driving an official-looking car. They were driving a blue Camry. They were wearing polo shirts and shorts. One of the men picked up the replacement's suitcase. "What do you have in here, rocks?" the man asked, and Laura replied yes, that was exactly what was in there, as this replacement was fond of rocks. The other man beckoned the child forward and placed him in the sedan. The replacement looked back at Laura only once, as if she could have been anyone to him, any tired, sad woman in a brown cardigan. There had been stories, the coordinator recounted previously on the phone, of the original children returning within days of the replacement's departure, no worse for the wear. "Do let us know if that happens," the coordinator said.
When Michael arrived home, he refused to try and conceive another child. They waited many years for their original son to come back. For a long time, they left the doors and the windows unlocked at night and the lamp on in the family room, which some people considered a waste of electricity.
* * *
Ending of Case Study 21433
It is rumored, especially in those old stories we keep bringing up, that for every kindness you give your replacement, a similar kindness will be bestowed upon your own child, wherever your own child has gone. Likewise, for every cruelty you inflict upon your replacement child, the same cruelty will be suffered by the child who was once yours. For this reason, Georgia F. put aside her lists of therapies, some crueler than others, and she began treating her replacement child with kindness and sympathy, like how she would treat a doll if everybody was taking notes. This did not change the replacement's behavior. After her husband received a promotion, they built an extension onto their house, a guest bedroom they didn't need since no one wanted to visit them, as their replacement made other people uncomfortable. One week during the following fall, they decided to rent a sailboat, since the replacement child enjoyed watching objects fill with wind. The family sailed across a faraway lake. The replacement slept on the deck. Only once did he throw himself into the water and have to be rescued. When they reached the other side of the lake, where a wooden dock led to an ice cream shop with striped awnings, the replacement clung to the rails and refused to get off the boat. "Oh, well," Georgia said, as she had wanted ice cream. "Maybe another time." They turned around and sailed back to where they had started, while overhead, the clouds gathered into the shapes of fantastical animals, animals so ridiculous and beautiful they could never exist.
* * *
Alexandria
By Monica Byrne | 4786 words
Monica Byrne is a playwright and author who is probably most famous—so far—for her debut novel The Girl in the Road, which won the 2015 James W. Tiptree Award. Her first appearance in F&SF is a story that she completed because of encouragement from Ursula K. Le Guin. We'll be sharing that story in more detail later this month in an interview on the F&SF blog (fandsf.com/blog/). In the meantime, we welcome you to visit...
What does a Lighthouse mean, when it is not by the sea?
Phan Thj Khiem, Studies in Suffering (University of Kansas Press, 2075)
BETH WOKE AT THE COLDEST hour, her mind ringing from a dream.
She lay with her head on her pillow, looking up at the ceiling, mottled with water stains the color of tea. She and Keiji had named them all—the many seas of their intimate geography.
She pushed back the blankets, eased her thick legs over the side of the bed, and pressed her fists into the mattress to stand up. On the rocking chair by the vanity, she found her dressing gown—made of flannel, patterned with crocuses—and tied it over her pajamas.
Outside, the moon shone bright as the sun, and the wind stung like ice water. But Beth was a native daughter. She liked the cold. She removed one slipper, then the other, and curled her feet into Kansas dirt. Globes of soil burst between her toes.
* * *
Later that morning, Beth made a breakfast of toast and eggs and looked through her mail. There was some paperwork from her estate lawyer. There was a newsletter from the Farmworkers' Union advertising summer jobs, including at her own Miyake Farms. There was a card from Nell Greer, inviting her to another "home-cooked dinner" at their house.
This meant the Greers were angling for her land again. They didn't bother to hide it much. The invitation was even printed on Greer Contractors company stationery. Beth tossed it aside with more force than she meant to, and its inertia made the whole pile swivel, and all of the letters ended up on the floor.
Beth stared at them.
The clock on the wall ticked in the silence.
She got up, carried her dish and cup over to the sink, washed each, dried each, and put each of them away.
There: done.
She looked out the window. The acres of farmland receded to the horizon, farther than her eyes could see, stretching away like a rubber band that never got to snap.
* * *
The night before Keiji died, they did their evening routine, like it was any other evening.
They shared a study in the back of the house. In it was a star projector, three globes, and two overstuffed armchairs. They were travelers, though of the domestic sort. After their terrible honeymoon, they'd never left Kansas again.
But Keiji had become restless. That night, Beth was surprised to find him bent over a book of classical archaeology. He straightened up and blinked in greeting, and Beth could see the page: an artist's rendering of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
Oh, that old thing, she said.
You remember? he said.
I remember that it wasn't there, she said.
Keiji nodded and looked down at the drawing again. Beth took a seat across from him, and they sat in silence. She knew they were both remembering themselves as teenagers in Egypt. The church folk had not looked kindly on it. First she marries a Jap, now she's going to Arabia on honeymoon ?
Jokes abounded. But it wasn't funny. Nothing was funny when they got there and realized that, contrary to their foolish assumption, the Lighthouse no longer existed.
How long has it been gone? Keiji asked a young British soldier.
About seven hundred years, he said.
Beth could still remember the look on that young man's face. Hilarity, incredulity, and pity. They must learn such things in school in England. But Beth and Keiji had never even thought to check whether the Lighthouse was still standing. They
'd planned to climb to the top, look out across the sea, and imagine the Roman warships arriving, or the Chinese junk traders, or the great Ottoman fleet.
Beth and Keiji had been private, before. But when they returned from their honeymoon, they were even more so. Every night during fifty years of marriage, they held their study sessions, sometimes in silence and sometimes in conversation. They quizzed each other on dates and names and geography. They pored over books of ancient sculpture and marveled at all the things in the world that had been lost. They gifted each other with talk and quiet.
And so it was, on their last night together. Keiji set the archaeology book on the table, and they both looked at the drawing of the Lighthouse, in silence.
When I first laid eyes on the Lighthouse, it was as if a mallet had dropped vertically from my head to my toes, and I stood there, ringing. The Lighthouse was both Rooted and Reaching, the midpoint of all things. When I entered the courtyard, I felt I knew its contours and colonnades as if by memory—as if I had played there as a child and forgotten till now.
Fantasy & Science Fiction - JanFeb 2017 Page 22