It's Alive! by Richard Woodley

milk. That caused great sadness within her, and she wished the swelling would go away, the milk would go away. She didn’t need the constant reminder of what her body had been primed to do, and then been denied.
    Frank was holding up well, it seemed. But he was so tired. She wished he could sleep.
    She wished a lot of things. She wished she had a baby. Or that she didn’t have one. Sometimes she felt guilty. Chris, a normal, healthy child, was enough. She shouldn’t have wanted another one.
    Or she should have wanted it sooner, had it sooner.
    Or never had it at all.
    When she thought about it, she felt sad and guilty. But sometimes she couldn’t think. Time just went by. She didn’t know how.
    She slept. She would not remember her awful dream. If it was a dream.

    “Reel it in slowly now, Chris. It’ll wiggle around plenty anyway, under the water.”
    Chris reeled in and cast again, squinting across the lake into the low sun. “Charley, will the baby look like me?”
    “I don’t know,” Charley said, flinging his lure far out into the lake. “Why do you ask?”
    “Well, your two boys don’t look alike. And I was wondering if that meant the baby won’t look like me. I mean, it doesn’t have to look like me. I was just wondering if people would be able to tell that I was its brother.”
    “That’s the kind of thing you never can predict, Chris. Nobody can ever be sure about a thing like that. For example, both your parents have light hair, while yours is black. We don’t know all that much about heredity.”
    “What’s heredity?”
    “Certain things in parents that show up in their kids. Physical things like size or build or color, or personality things like temperament—you know, your moods, patience, intelligence. Sometimes kids turn out very much like their parents, sometimes they don’t. When they do, we like to say it’s heredity; when they don’t, we don’t know what it is. We aren’t so sure about some things as we like to think we are.”
    “I’m not sure about everything.”
    “I know, Chris, and that’s good. Kids love to learn. Adults love to think they already know. We know how to get to the moon, but we don’t understand how everything works in our own bodies. Many years ago, before you were born, I guess it was when your father and I were kids, they invented the drug called penicillin. It was a super new medicine to treat all kinds of diseases. Diseases that killed people. Penicillin worked against those diseases, stopped them. We thought we had them whipped. But we didn’t know that much about it. Gradually some of these diseases developed new forms of themselves—just like through heredity—much stronger forms. And then penicillin wouldn’t work on them anymore. So we developed new drugs to work against the new forms of disease. I suppose in time there will be new forms of those diseases that will be too tough for the new drugs too.”
    “Jeez, that’s scary.”
    “I don’t mean for it to be scary, Chris. It’s just that the offspring of all living things seem to change over many years. We call it evolution. It certainly isn’t all scary or bad. It’s just that we don’t always understand it and can’t always predict it. Sometimes it’s like that with kids—they develop strengths or weaknesses that their parents didn’t have. Did you know that people in the days of our great-grandfathers were quite a bit smaller than people are today? People are getting larger.”
    “Really?” Holding his fishing rod up beside him, Chris turned to look at Charley.
    “Sure. I’m taller than my father was. On the other hand, he had a full head of hair all his life, while I’m getting bald. Who knows why?”
    “Will I be taller than my dad?”
    “Well, I don’t know. He’s pretty tall. You might be. Your children might be taller than you. Or stronger, or darker, or lighter, or smarter or not so smart—or anything at all. Don’t forget, you’re your mother’s child too.