FICTION

By William McDonald

So, a child is like an invest­ment, you see? First you estab­lish a part­ner­ship with your other (spouse, mate, lover, etc.), and then you start saving. And you save and you save until you feel like your part­ner­ship has estab­lished a foundation—both an emo­tion­al foun­da­tion and a finan­cial foundation—that can support a child.

It’s been this way forever, really. In the olden days, you pro­cre­at­ed to cover more hunting ter­ri­to­ry. Expand your pack so you can take down larger game, garner more meat. With an added arm to your hunting party, your status in the tribe grows. Farmers the same way. Have a child so they can milk the cows while you plow the fields, acquire addi­tion­al hectares and watch your crop yield mul­ti­ply at the same rate your off­spring does. Mar­gin­al product, they call it. How much you get from adding more to your workforce.

The game you hunt and the crops you yield, these are what is called ROI—or, return on invest­ment. That child, the one you feed and nurture and dis­ci­pline and wipe, is the invest­ment and this yield is your return on that investment.

Now, the way society has pro­gressed, with tech­nol­o­gy and machines and democ­ra­cy and the like, you’re seeing a return on your invest­ment within the first year. No more waiting until their muscles develop and they spend enough time in the tall­grass mon­i­tor­ing migra­tion pat­terns. We saw profits with Jojo by his first birthday.

We had a little party for him and I record­ed a video of Jojo pulling a ribbon off the present Colleen and I got him. It was just a small thing, really. A toy muppet that talked to him and said his name. Hi Jojo! The chipped-in voice box acti­vat­ed when­ev­er Jojo made eye contact with it. Built in facial recog­ni­tion tech. And the reac­tion Jojo gave was just out­stand­ing. He almost fell over with excite­ment. His mouth was wide open and you could see the two lone teeth poking through his bottom gums. He shook with thrill and he grabbed the toy muppet and hugged it tight.

Well, I shared it on my socials and the video was a hit. Kids love these things, I guess. Watch­ing others open boxes, it’s a sort of excite­ment by proxy. It’s all the sus­pense their unwrin­kled little minds can fathom.

What’s in the box? Oh boy, what pos­si­bly could it be? they ask themselves.

And then I start getting ad revenue from the money these tar­get­ed adver­tise­ments are making. I won’t say Colleen and I were in the black off that one video, but it cer­tain­ly covered a sig­nif­i­cant portion of the first year’s oper­at­ing expens­es: diapers, Gerber’s, visits to the pedi­a­tri­cian, etc.

I started posting videos every week of Jojo opening boxes. Your stan­dard kids toys. Stuffed animals, rubber balls, a red and blue plastic cash reg­is­ter. Jojo didn’t give it the same shocked reac­tion he’d given the toy muppet that knew his name, but the viewer counts were stag­ger­ing. A video of Jojo opening a box with a green dump truck got a hundred thou­sand views!

And then the com­ments, too. Com­ments from people I’d never met before. “The look on his face!” wrote one viewer, fol­lowed by three laughing-crying-emojis.

Another wrote, “Thank you for sharing—my three year old thinks these videos are just marvelous!”

Mar­velous. What a word. Evoca­tive. It’s a word you can feel. You get com­ments like that, with a word like mar­velous to describe the emotion your video con­jures, and you know all your hard work is actu­al­ly making a difference.

Colleen sug­gest­ed we give Jojo more time between each video, or liven up the gifts so the expe­ri­ence is more mean­ing­ful for him. But I insist­ed that longer space between videos will kill our momen­tum and leave room for a com­peti­tor to fill the void. And more lively gifts usually means more expen­sive gifts, and more expen­sive gifts, well, that just means higher oper­at­ing costs. So, no, I told her, stay the course and let’s see what we get if we wrap up my running shoes.

But then someone com­ment­ed, “Lame…” on one of Jojo’s videos and wrote, “if you want to see real unbox­ing, check out Little Edgar,” and they includ­ed a link to Little Edgar’s page.

This was pushing bound­aries. Little Edgar’s parental share­hold­ers gave him boxes filled with dead rabbits and pre-lit fire­works. They weren’t going for happy or sur­prised with Little Edgar. It was provo­ca­tion they were after. They diver­si­fied their reac­tion deliv­er­ables and the people—the viewers—were eating it up! Little Edgar’s share­hold­ers raked in one million dollars a year from tar­get­ed adver­tis­ers. One million! A fifty four minute video of Little Edgar crying his soft little face off because his share­hold­ers boxed up his teddy bear’s severed head got a billion views, twenty seven million upvotes, and thirty eight thou­sand comments.

The next day I got a long box—coffin like—and put a red bow around it. By far the biggest box we’d fea­tured, Jojo opened it with excite­ment and was shocked to find Colleen inside of it, lying in repose.

“Ma ma,” Jojo said and then went in for a hug.

But Colleen rebuffed his hug and stood up, remain­ing stone faced, and informed Jojo that she was ending their mother-son rela­tion­ship, effec­tive imme­di­ate­ly. It had been a good run, Colleen said, but it was time for both of them to pursue other inter­ests. There would be no more cuddles, no more swad­dles, no more lul­la­bies, no more eyebrow rubs, no more high pitched mama talk, and no—certainly no—more kisses. I really gotta give it to Colleen, not once did she break char­ac­ter. Even as Jojo reached his chubby arms up and squeezed his tiny hands togeth­er, his sign for hold me, she stayed cross-armed and cold. And when Jojo erupted in screams and tears, she just turned her back and walked away.

Views went through the roof. I mean, not in our wildest dreams could we ever have imag­ined the returns on this one video. And it was so reward­ing to read the com­ments. “This is pain,” one viewer wrote. “Thank you,” another began, “it’s really dif­fi­cult to have your heart broken by a stranger on the inter­net, but you’ve done it, I now know what real heart break is.”

It wasn’t all rewards though. After the aban­don­ment unbox­ing, Jojo fought us tooth and nail each time we tried to film another video. Colleen sug­gest­ed we give him some time off, that maybe his utility had been spent. This wasn’t a sur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion, we’d begun to suspect Jojo was holding out for greater incen­tives, and so we started con­tem­plat­ing an invest­ment in a second child. But that was still nine months away—at a minimum—plus another year until the second child could begin unbox­ing duties. So, I figured I would try and meet Jojo halfway.

“Let’s unbox some­thing nice, Jojo,” I said to him.

“No more unbox­ing,” he said.

“C’mon, Jojo, you owe it to your shareholders.”

“I hate my shareholders!”

“You don’t hate your share­hold­ers, Jojo, don’t say that. We raised you better than that.”

“I do hate my share­hold­ers, I do! I hate my share­hold­ers and I only love my muppet.” He rubbed his cheek on the top of the muppet’s soft head. Jojo! the muppet squawked.

“Well, who gave you your muppet, Jojo?”

“My share­hold­ers,” he resigned.

“I tell ya what, Jojo: you do a video, and instead of water, you can have juice before bed tonight.”

The little muscles in his neck relaxed and his bald head sunk into his pajama’d shoul­ders. “Okay, juice.” He stood up and waddled to the living room where I had wrapped up a set of steak knives a sponsor had sent me.

After Jojo fell asleep that night, I took his near empty cup of juice down­stairs with me so it could be washed. I turned the faucet on and held my hand under the water waiting for it to get warm enough. I stared at my hand and watched the bubbly, white foam of the tap water spill over the back of it, cas­cad­ing into the sink over the soft side of my palm. The water grad­u­al­ly grew warmer and my skin began to burn. It got so hot that I could no longer sense the tem­per­a­ture. Instead, it felt like a thou­sand needles pierc­ing the back of my hand. And it hurt and my skin started turning a brighter shade of pink. The color of a rose or a summer begonia in a May­field window box. And I didn’t move it. I just kept it there, holding my now puffy hand under the pierc­ing hot water, and admired how absolute­ly mar­velous the color pink is.

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 19. Support local book­sellers and inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers by order­ing a print copy of the mag­a­zine.

Photo by Imani.