How many babies are born before we realize that all their children are boys? That now women are the past, thanks to my one-note issue, to their deadly sperm making deadly pregnancies, taking each of their partners the way of their own mother: blood-wet, breath-gasped, split-wombed, never to recover from the makings of their children.

Now all these babies left behind. Now only me and my three sons, only us four shut-ins against a town full of adultered widowers, of angry fathers parading our yard with my many grandsons in tow.

Now the first babies being left on our doorstep. Now all the rest, following soon after.

Now my walking out onto the front porch to see the rows and rows of abandoned twins and triplets, the exponential crop of my seed.

What loud reverberance of hunger-cries they make! What diaper-complaints! What pain, what suffering, and amid it my boys, still unfeeling for what they have done!

What else to do but to lead outside these three useless fathers, these three no-use sons of mine?

What next but to make them take up the scythe and the shovel?

What point was there in anything else? What good fathering could boys as bad as they possibly do?

So at last their lesson in how to reap. And how to sow. And how, when there is nothing left, to plow it back under.

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_{Recent Fiction from The Fanzine:}

_{"The Odditorium" by Melissa Pritchard}

_{"Identical City" by Joshua Cohen}

_{"The H Word" by Carlos Kotkin}