I took my daughter to the birthday party where the children were spinning upside down until they vomited all over the carpets. They vomited on the toddler chairs and on the birthday boy’s cake. They threw up: big chunks and tiny chunks, thick mucus runs full of yellow stomach acid. I took my daughter even though I knew she had been sick. She had the sniffles. A cough. Walking pneumonia. Big, smelly sores on the bottoms of her feet. But she has those every Sunday, so I didn’t think about it when I brought her to the party.
Every Sunday she is sick, and every Monday she wakes up smiling. I drop her off at daycare, and she screams bloody murder. Blood bursts out of her eyes and pools at our feet. By morning snack time, she is delightful, rosy-cheeked. The other mothers tell me they’re jealous of her happiness. It must be easy with her, they say. But it’s only her school-self they like, not her home-self. She is two-sided like a coin: one side is hugs, kisses and pats on the back. The other side is vicious kicks to the crotch and cannibalistic biting. Sometimes she laughs as she beats the dog, but then sometimes she sobs when birds hit our windows. There’s no telling.
Her party-self is twirly in a poofy tutu. Even her vomit looks nicer than the other kids, more colorful, more authentic. I snap several photos with my phone and upload them to my daughter’s Insta. By the end, I am feeling sick, too, but that’s also normal. Ever since pregnancy, then post-partum, I can’t hold my food in. Everything goes in grilled-cheeses and comes out sickness. My nose and shits are always runny. My doctor says this kind of thing happens. I just need to watch my sugar and exercise, but accept that the old days are gone.
When my daughter has thrown up everything in her tummy——the pirate booty, the string cheese, the veggie pouch, the fruit loops, the halved grapes, even her stomach acid——she grins and says, “More! More, mommy, more!” She pouts until I count to five and then spin her, round and round, upside down. Her princess dress swirls around her. I surrender to her joy. We run in circles until we are both retching, heaving over the beige sectional. The carpet is wet and smelly under our diseased toes. We twirl helter-skelter. This is the best thing about the children’s birthday parties: the dancing.
The other mommies take their kids home for naptime and leave our host to hose down her home, but we linger. Upside down. Rightside up. We keep going and going. We’re still there when the CDC comes to take samples of the new contagion. It’s fatal for some kids, some people. The rest of us are just dying slowly, which isn’t news, really.
We do a few more rounds of upside, downside. The room spins even when we are standing still. We make faces at the sample collectors in their biohazard suits. My daughter sticks her tongue out and wrinkles her nose, but the sample collectors are entirely consumed with their serious scientific work. The Earth is out of orbit, that’s one theory of the disease. Something we caused.
The birthday party ends after the birthday boy is hauled away on a tiny toddler-sized stretcher. My daughter cries. (I can’t tell if it’s about the little boy, or about the lack of party favors.) She throws up one more time, onto the last of the balloons, which bounce back up; the helium is stronger than the chunks of regurgitated cake.
I tell my little one, “it’s okay, angel.” This is just how it feels now. We all get sick. We hope the doctors and the scientists can put us and the whole planet back together. They might not be able to. Still the sun rises, the bills come in, and I drop her off screaming in pools of her own blood at the daycare. I’ll do it for as long as we can afford it. Together, we cough up lungs of foul black stuff, and hope for the best, taking turns on the merry-go-round. We make butterfly finger paintings from the fluid in our pus pockets. Everything we do is beautiful.
Diana Fenves is a speculative writer and artist whose work has appeared in Vast Chasm, The Chestnut Review, Bloodletter Magazine, and Wildscape Literary Journal. Her story “Baby Talk” was nominated for the 2026 Best Small Fictions anthology. She works a couple of jobs and lives in NC with her husband and two young children. More at: www.dianafenves.com.
Published 5/10/26