You’re at Café Chi-Chi. The ambience is affable. You sit across the table from your husband, partner, beloved, or cheatmate. He’s wearing Google I-Glasses, Prototype 3, Version 4.0. It’s 2017. People around act cool but secretly glance at him. You see the yearning, hungry looks.

“I won the glasses at the Google game-play day,” he says smoothly, his blue eyes shimmering. “Only three guests got them. The rest got ping-pong paddles. I’m going to OrangeRayTape you now, okay?”

Nobody ever told me why the scientists decided to answer the question, but they must have cleared out every orphanage in the country to do it.

The first hour of the experiment was the toughest. Kids headbutted me in the crotch, and I caught enough shin kicks to limp for a week. Bite mark scars still shimmer along my fingers. I punched their child-sized temples and mule kicked their soft little sternums hard enough to make their chests pop.

Unit X-397 said, “Yeah, but this doesn’t fit the standard pattern at all. I don’t even know if you can legitimately categorize it as an apocalypse.” The mid-45th-century repurposed sex-bot waved one silvered, gleaming hand vaguely at the rift, and what lay beyond.

Bobby peered through the tear in spacetime at the acres of rolling hills and the distant mountains. The sky was blue. The effect was bucolic. He felt his heart sink, if possible, lower than it already was.

Bears stole our garbage at the cabin that year. One bear in particular, recruited others from the wilds, from circuses and from zoos. This was the last big score, or so he promised.

Earnest was in kindergarten when Jackie the Janitor got fired for “choking the chicken” in the girls’ bathroom. That phrase, along with his best friend Bradley Watson’s accompanying hand gestures, stuck in Earnest’s head so hard that whenever he looked at the thing between his legs, all he could see was a bald, pointed bird head, like the ones attached to the roast ducks hanging in the window of a Chinese restaurant.

He didn’t learn what “euphemism” meant until the third grade, and by then it was too late. His chicken had grown feathers and a beak. When it started to open and close its mouth, he asked his mother if he could take showers instead of baths; he didn’t want it to drown.