The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: How to Start a Coven by Deirdre Danklin

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from How to Start a Coven by Deirdre Danklin (Variant Lit 2022).

Mother Love

When my husband and I went to the fertility clinic, the doctor said we could build our own baby.

“What do you mean, ‘build?’” my husband asked.

“There are all sorts of genetic improvements, listed here…” the doctor handed us a glossy brochure. Babies with shark skin, babies with lemur eyes, babies with the bioluminescent glow of deep-sea creatures. We could build a baby that flew through the air, a baby that could make itself invisible, a baby that, when threatened, emitted a noxious poisonous cloud from its tear ducts.

“We’ll discuss it,” I said.

That night, my husband and I had sex again (just in case) and I put my legs up in the air.

“If your parents built you,” I asked, “what would you have wanted them to include?”

My husband hummed off-key and kissed my unsightly moles.

“A singing voice,” he said. “I’d want to sing like a nightingale.”

We ended up choosing a lichen baby. Half-algae, half fungus, our baby would be the strongest, most long-lived baby the world had ever seen. Our baby could live in space! Our baby could thrive for a thousand years after all the nuclear bombs went off.

When our daughter was born, I wrapped her in a moist towel and pulled her spongy body to my breast. She didn’t need me for food, she ate rocks and photosynthesized, but I liked to hold her close and coo a mammalian song.

“Is there still a part of us in her?” my husband asked.

“She’s what she needs to be to survive,” I said.

So, we loved her.

In nine thousand years, the sleet gray rocks of the earth will be crawling with green lichen. There will be nothing left of humans, but my baby will thrive under the silent sky.

Deirdre Danklin holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University. Danklin’s novella, Catastrophe, won the 2021 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize and was published by Texas Review Press. Danklin’s nonfiction has been published in The Ploughshares Bog and CRAFT, among other places. Currently, Danklin is an adjunct professor of writing, and she writes editorial letters for Fractured Lit, The Masters Review, and Uncharted Mag. She won a 2022 independent artist grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and two cats.

Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.