A star, a sun, a planet, a place, a sandbox with three little nuisances in it. How big a problem they’ll be is up to them.
“I will be president someday,” says the oldest, who has made a sandcastle.
“I’m gonna go to space,” says the middle child, who has tried to make an alien and succeeded in making a gingerbread man.
“I want to grow flowers,” says the youngest, who has left the sandbox and is playing with a dandelion.
“Dope,” says the oldest.
“Chump,” agrees the middle child. They throw a little sand at the youngest and uproot her flower for kicks and then go back to their work.
Carefully, slowly, gently, she replants it. Then she pats it once on the head.
“You are dandelions,” she told them. “You’re weeds, but the kind I love.”
School was out. The grass was green. The children were explaining where their grades had been.
“Who cares what my grades are?” the eldest child told their mother. “You donated their gym. Fuck ‘em, they’ll graduate me with a recommendation and like it. Besides, what world leader has ever been grilled on their high school records? Nothing worth knowing ever came from other people anyways.”
“Look,” said the middle child, “what kind of astronaut needs biology anyways? It’s not real science. And chemistry is hard. Physics is awesome but I think there’s too much math – I’m really more of an insight guy. Flashes of pure brilliance. Like, for example, I had this idea… what if instead of becoming an astronaut I just buy NASA and tell them to make me a spaceship?”
The youngest child took her admonishment (and grudging praise for her biology marks) in silence, then wandered outside to her corner of the vast lawn.
“You are buttercups,” she told them. “You are my favourites.”
April dawned. With it came ritual.
“April fools’!” shouted the eldest child. “I moved out yesterday when you weren’t looking! Also I’m dropping out of college so I can spend more time schmoozing with my classmates. Don’t worry, they’ll still give me a passing grade. And while I’m at it, I haven’t paid last month’s rent. See ya!”
“April fools’!” began the email from the middle child. “I actually failed all my classes two years ago! All my tuition money has been going into developing a really small and pretty piece of personal electronic paraphernalia, or at least buying someone else’s version of it. See ya!”
The youngest child, who had been kicked out of the house three years earlier to teach her self-reliance, was watering the little planter she kept in a corner of her apartment.
“You are tulips,” she told them. “You are wonderful.”
On the last day of June, three things happened.
First of all, the eldest child launched her campaign, ‘vote for me and I will hurt people.’
“I will hurt lots of people,” she announced. “I will hurt them very badly. I will not stop even if they ask me. This is my promise to you, and I also promise that if you vote for me I probably won’t hurt you as much. Yeah!”
Second of all, the middle child’s IPO was FUBAR’d by the IRS but TLDR the free publicity made it A-OK and the SEC ended up doing F-all.
“We don’t actually make things,” he told the interviewer, seated atop a heap of stock options. “We make ideas. We make one idea: science is probably cool, but research is boring and dumb and graphs are hard so we’re going to sell you a little plastic computer constructed by slave labour. That’s it. That’s the future.”
And finally, the youngest child worked day and night and got the local park’s central bed up and blooming ten times larger than it ever had before.
“You are lilies,” she told them. “You smell beautiful.”
On the fifth of May, the eldest child was inaugurated.
“Wow,” she said, staring out across the crowds. “All you fuckers really voted for me, huh? Holy shit!”
On the twenty-ninth of May, the middle child launched his golden parachute and became the richest man in the whole world.
“Never stop believing in yourself,” he said. “That’s the secret. And I guess the future or other people or something.”
And on the thirtieth day of May, the youngest child, with love and tenderness and the care of a mother crocodile breaking her children free from their shells, watered a single flower of heartbreaking beauty.
The flower stood up. It was about fourteen hundred feet tall.
“You are Tropaeolumtitanis titanis, and you will destroy absolutely everything,” she told it.
It did.
People objected, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. And if some mourned for the future of humanity, of the greater good, of so on and so forth, they did so in a kind of abstract way that very specifically avoided any names.