Concerning the Multiplicity of Children in Central Florida’s Suburbanized Wetlands
by Ichabod Cassius Kilroy
This is a story of children, and the adults those children will or will not grow up to be. Since the dawn of time, everyone who has ever existed has been either an adult they are or an adult they are not, even the living.
This is how the real world works: people die and become no one, or people live and become someone, and in becoming someone they then kill all other possible selves.
It follows a clear line of reasoning that what makes the many possible selves of children into a single, finite adult self are their choices.
And so, this also is a story of choices.
There are knives in Mori’s pockets when she leaves the house that morning. Accompanied only by her blades, her rituals, and her ghosts, she recites the inventory of her armory with each step into the outdoors.
There is her newest knife, the plastic butterknife from last week’s Fourth of July party, detritus still caught between its teeth. There is the chintzy souvenir pocket knife her father bought at a beach two years ago, and then discarded in a junk drawer as soon as they were home and unpacked. There is the dirtied palette knife she was given for her last birthday, not sharp, not even a true knife, but named as such and therefore still dangerous. There is the pâté knife with its blown glass handle, shaped like a blue macaw. There is the butcher knife, in a sheath of tape and old art, pulled as carefully and as quietly from its block as any nearly-nine-year-old is able.
Finally, there is the butcher knife’s sister, the paring knife, but unlike the other knives, this knife Mori white-knuckles, keeps tight in her hand, her hand pressed to her chest.
It’s no walk at all from the screened-in porch to the large, fountained lake behind her house. The neighbor houses, all vast expanses of Spanish tile and too-white paint, surround the water on all sides. The houses themselves are broad and high-windowed, with curtains drawn to keep the easternly sunlight off of furniture and art and people, and the spaces between the houses are wide, and so despite being physically surrounded, Mori is alone and almost unobserved in the predawn.
Her most present observers are the two families of birds that live upon the lake, the cormorants and the swans.
The cormorants see most of what takes place at Mori’s house, but are sometimes busied by all their diving underwater. The swans see all.
It’s important now to discuss the natures of the relevant fauna. Watching birds has always been Mori’s favorite thing to do, and it is what she likes best about her house.
Cormorants are genial and live en masse, finding great success as fishermen. They are focused only on family and their ever-important fish, surviving through sheer fecundity and their niche success in fishing.
Conversely, swans are aggressively territorial. Though beautiful, a swan is a dangerous bird. The swans in Mori’s lake are a mated couple that have nested and raised chicks there, annually, since before she was even adopted.
It is of particular interest to Mori that swans mate for life.
The swans in Mori’s lake are unhappy with the presence of the cormorants, but have begrudgingly accepted it now that the other waterfowl have learned to give them berth.
Just shy of five years ago, shortly after the finalization of Mori’s adoption, the swans successfully drove out a raft of ducks, who were smaller in number and generally less tenacious than the cormorants.
While the swans have hatched six cygnets this year, and the fleet of cormorants have hatched any number of smaller birds, Mori’s parents only have her, and her new little brother.
Her brother’s name is Orion. He is four, nearly five.
From her spot, crouched low in the muddied grass, just outside of where the swans will mind her presence, Mori can still observe her little brother’s room. It’s easy to find, as his window is the window next to hers.
The blue glow of Orion’s tabletop nightlight is almost lost as the sun begins to crest, but Mori knows it’s there, and is comforted in the knowledge that he is still safely asleep and resting.
“Unless he isn’t resting,” one of her ghosts pipes up. It’s one of the many that are nearly the same age as she is now, she can tell from the voice, but Mori refuses to look back at her dead self. She has more important things to do.
“When I was you,” the ghost continues, and how Mori’s ghosts love to prattle on. She isn’t sure if that’s to do with being dead, or if she’s doomed to grow into someone loquacious. She hopes dearly it’s the former.
“When I was you,” the ghost repeats, “I thought Orion was asleep one morning. I was so sure of it. I’d been putting slips of paper in his doorframe after tucking him in every night, you should be doing that too, so I could see whenever he opened it, and one day, when I came out to warn the swans, the paper was still there and the lamp was still on, just like it is today, but he’d gotten out somehow. He was a terribly clever baby, wasn’t he? And anyway, Dad had backed over him on the way to work.”
Mori whirls around and glares at the ghost. It stands there beside the lake, wet and horrible, just slightly older than her, the little purple pajamas it died in all dirtied with the same brackish mud that’s collecting now on the soles of her feet. It has their father’s ankle weights looped around its wrists. This is one of the drowners, then, and not any of her many accidental deaths.
“Why would I put paper in his door when it didn’t help you?”
The ghost, to its credit, manages to look quite remorseful as it stands there dripping. “I just thought it might help this time, that’s all.”
It leaves with that. None of her ghosts ever stay visible for very long, but she knows they’re always there regardless. Mori has had her ghosts for as long as she’s been Mori, but there’s so many more of them to consider now that she has Orion to worry about too.
The ghost who typically warns her about the swans is usually here by now, but it’s apparently not showing up today. Mori can’t be bothered to wait around on a ghost.
Carefully, she sets down her paring knife and removes her mother’s winter coat. Its many thickly lined pockets have made it essential in the business of collecting knives.
She takes each knife out carefully, because the ghosts who died playing with them are a real bunch of downers, and lays them flat upon the grass.
The swans eye Mori warily. She has never gotten close enough to the nest that they need attack her since that horrible first time, but they rightly distrust the display of power that is Mori’s knives, and her daily repetition of this ritual.
Those cormorants that are on the surface of the water will, occasionally, glance her way, but are too busy in the great social circle of their flock to really care about a distant little girl.
Once all of the knives are out, the real work begins. She holds each knife up to glint briefly in the new sun. Neither the palette knife nor the butter knife actually glints, but it’s the act itself that’s important.
“Just stay away from Orion, swans,” she warns the birds. Sixteen cold eyes follow her as she returns the blades to the coat. The unaddressed cormorants have stopped caring entirely.
Mori picks up the coat and shrugs back into it, wishing that the once powerful scent of her mother’s heady perfume and tobacco was still present. Because of the involved process of adopting Orion, they haven’t been skiing in over a year, which made stealing the coat very easy, but unfortunately removed much of the motherness of the object, and with it much of its protective powers.
It could have been any rich woman’s coat now. Smart. Beige and pink. Shiny zippers. Nearly perfect, except that there was a little burn on the inside of one of the sleeves where a cigarette had been quickly and awkwardly palmed, because the behavior that was attempting to be modeled at Mori’s house was that things like smoking and drinking were very, very bad for you.
Some of her older ghosts disagree with this entirely, but still others show up with oxygen masks and graphic scars from horrible lung surgeries, or else have been crushed horribly by drunk drivers, or have been drunk drivers themselves.
Her consensus on drinking and smoking is still out, is the main thing. If she lives long enough to decide on her own this time around, Mori has long since resolved to try everything at least once. It is, after all, so very rarely her first time doing anything that kills her.
She picks her way across the grass, through the patio, and back inside. The neat, blue-black kitchen takes up all the space to her left, the dining room and stairs all the space to her right. Her mother isn’t up yet, and likely won’t be for another few hours, and her father is long gone to work, so it is up to her to make breakfast for herself and Orion, after waking him up and putting away her knives.
She takes the stairs two, sometimes three at a time, soft-footed and nimble, unhappily observed by a younger, broken-necked Mori who sits hazily astride the railing.
Mori enters her room. She steps around her easel and over boxes and tubes of paint. There’s a soft woosh at each step, the result of her meager weight pressing down atop the plastic grocery bags she has laid over her carpeted floor to protect it.
After taking the butcher knife out of her pocket, the paring knife already abandoned on the counter downstairs until she has time to return to it to its block, Mori folds the coat and places it and its knives in the very back of her closet.
Now it is time to wake Orion. He’s curled up like a little invertebrate nymph, huddled under two, maybe three blankets despite the constant wet heat that permeates their home and all the outside world. His hair is curlier and darker than even hers, and needs trimming. His nails have sidewalk chalk still embedded under their sharp little points, and his mouth is sticky with some unidentified substance. Mori thinks he’s terrific, for a baby.
She drums her knuckles against his nightstand, and he wakes with a gentle start. “Mornin’, Mori,” he yawns, sleepily rubbing at his eyes. “Cereal?”
She nods shortly. “Cereal. You can have it with chocolate milk, though, ’cause your room is clean.” To her, this is an act of reasonable parenting, and while some ghosts have warned her about her own diet, none have yet voiced concerns about how she feeds her little brother.
Together, they make their way downstairs, this time carefully, each step taken individually. Mori notices the little stair ghost is gone. The hand that isn’t holding her butcher knife is holding Orion’s hand. He trails a stair behind her, still coming into the world from Nod.
His grubby hand clings to hers needily; even though he’s been here for less than a year, and according to her ghosts, one or both of them will not be here for much longer, Mori loves her little brother. As best as she can tell, he loves her back.
When they reach the bottom of the stairs, she turns toward the kitchen, and he reluctantly trundles toward the TV. He doesn’t know how to turn it on yet; his foster home had a much simpler setup than the many boxes and services and options of the television here, but he’s good at fishing out the remote from whatever small space their mother has let it fall into during her late-night media consumption marathons, and Mori appreciates all the help she can get.
She uses a stepstool to, in this order: return her knives to their block, get down two bowls and two cups and a box of puffed rice cereal, grab both the chocolate and plain oatmilks from the fridge, and make herself and Orion each a bowl of cereal and a glass of water. Orion roots around under the couches and behind the cushions until he finds the remote.
She joins him after grabbing spoons, and they sit beside each other to thumb through a rotation of cartoons, the early morning news, and nature programs.
Cartoons are either incredibly dull or vastly interesting, with almost no in-between, and the interesting cartoons never seem to be on when Mori looks for them. There’s the news, but the news is always depressing. A happy medium, however, is found in nature programs. While they are only something Orion tolerates, rather than enjoys, and their narration tends toward the dull, or even silly, Mori finds the footage of the animals themselves is richly fascinating.
Mori has loved nature television her whole life. It was while watching a documentary about swans that Mori first learned of their propensity for annual reuse of their nests, which was all she’d been trying to investigate when the adult swans took their great wings not to the sky but to her delicate body in her first weeks with her parents.
She’d been bruised for months. A social worker had been called by the hospital. The case had complicated their adoption of Orion, though obviously not permanently.
Old evidence holds true: all the morning cartoons are for even babier babies than Orion, and the news seems to be something dreary, and so the program du jour is instead a rather serious diatribe on the many things that are currently killing penguins.
Orion gets bored immediately and finds his iPad. He ends up playing The Sims quietly for the next several hours.
Mori, however, is fixed to the television. She is fascinated by nature, even more so than she is art, and should she survive to adulthood she will, in many cases, become a biologist.
Orion, when he lives that long, only has one feasible life path. Orion always does something with computers.
One or two of Mori’s ghosts have attempted to explain exactly what it is he does with them, but it seems to her that they too fail to really understand it, and they can never quite tell her how exactly it is that they know what Orion does at all.
What Orion does with computers, if and when he grows up, is run intensely hyper-specific mixed model simulations. In college (which he attends early) he comes up with a revolutionary biomechanical interface that is able to glean data and metadata, from both machines and biological entities concurrently, allowing for devastatingly accurate simulation environments.
From there, he sets parameters and desired outcomes, and runs mixed model simulations based upon the Everett interpretation. He highlights controllable factors, uses AI to guide simulation outcomes, and has a whole team who presents everything to his investors with friendly, watered down flowcharts and slide show presentations that indicate either the overwhelming certainty of any streamlined, idealized outcomes, or the foreknowledge that a given venture is bound to fail.
He makes millions, then billions of dollars. His biggest client bases are political groups and corporations, obviously, but he created his device, as so many inventors do, not to help or to hinder the world at large, though it does both in spades, but to solve a personal problem.
Mori’s future, should she survive to adulthood, is never so streamlined nor clear. Despite this, much of the time, Mori will gain potential degrees in biology, with the most frequent occurrence being a doctorate each in sociobiology and in cognitive neuroscience.
Her graduate level work is usually in child psychology. She puts herself through school after falling out with her parents, and, providing she lives long enough, is paying off her student loans well into her fifties. She writes papers primarily on child neuropsychology and neuroplasticity, epigenetics, nature vs. nurture, and neural learning methods.
Despite the business of her academic career, as a hypothetical adult, Mori still paints, though not nearly as much as she used to when her brother was still alive, and only ever the things she knew and loved when she was small.
Sometime around noon, after Mori has washed and dried the dishes from breakfast, and just as she’s starting to think about lunch, their mother emerges from her room. She still wears her long, expensive satin pajamas as she coolly makes herself a cup of coffee and then retreats into her upstairs home office with a dismissive hand wave and a mumble of what might have been “be good,” or “eat food.” It doesn’t matter which she said, as they’ll obey both instructions.
Their mother looks like neither of them, and is therefore considered quite beautiful. She is short, has a long neck, fair skin, and once-blonde tresses that run straight and smooth down to her slim shoulders. She used to be in marketing. Now, she freelances, though in what realm is unclear to both Mori and Orion. She’s definitely the best mother Mori’s ever had, if you can even count foster mothers toward that sum, but she still isn’t very good.
The reasons Mori believes her mother has failed her are, primarily, based in information gathered from her ghosts. She has heard them describe the ways in which neglect will warp a child. She has listened on the dangers of attention seeking behaviors, and what can happen when a wound or illness is ignored.
She has seen too, through her ghosts, what happens when her mother takes too great an interest in her life. She has tentatively attempted to touch the hollowed-in bellies of teenaged ghosts who went hungry so that their mother would smile at them more, or who burned themselves out trying and failing to be WASP-y and vivacious enough to make their mother laugh at parties.
Mori knows that for as many ghosts as she has, she has yet to meet one who has a good relationship with their mother, and so she has, preemptively, written her mother off entirely.
Orion doesn’t like their mother either, but he’s yet to like anyone. For a while still, this will be written off as a hazard of being four, but it’s much more than that. It’s something inherent to the experience of being Orion, some portion of him that always fails to trust.
The closest he can come to either love or trust is what he feels with Mori. When he survives into adulthood, he starts going to therapy on his own. No more of those uncomfortable family sessions started in the months after Mori’s death, during which the only valuable skill that any of them seemed to take away was the art of dissemblance.
In individual therapy, he learns a lot about attachment disorders and the trauma of having been in the foster system since the day he was born up until his largely unhappy adoption. He learns the ways in which his adoptive parents failed him. Parents, not family. Not Mori, no. Never Mori.
Maybe because she’s lived through it too, the adoption thing, but his big sister never once lets him down. If, in those years of therapy, a therapist might mention to Orion that his idealization of Mori serves as a counterpoint to the devaluation of his parents, they are promptly fired, their previous advice then ignored.
To expand upon attachment disorders, with which most versions of Orion and Mori will be diagnosed, one early sign of an attachment disorder in a child is a that they will fail to seek necessary comfort from the adults in their lives.
For example, most children, when attacked by swans, after limping home to their mother and father, might trust that whatever argument they interrupted could never be as important to their parents as their safety and well-being, but this was not the case in Mori’s situation.
She stood there, bruised, bleeding, and silent while they yelled at each for three whole hours, before she passed out onto the divided space between the carpeted dining room and the tiled kitchen. She remembers, before she passed out, watching the kitchen clock, the one next to her knife rack, tick up and up and up. There was never a good enough place for her to speak up, and so she didn’t. She had waited.
Attachment disorders are rife with behaviors that serve as negative coping skills. While hiding illnesses, pain, injury, etc. from a caregiver might save the child immediate grief, or might simply be a way to avoid the sting of rejection that would follow an adult caretaker not caring, this behavior can prove deadly. Avoidance and shyness can spiral into a self-isolating cycle of harm.
Another way in which an attachment disorder might manifest is in a child displaying overly friendly behaviors. Unsolicited touches are given. No care is taken around strangers. They also fail to alert their parents to dangers. They lack a preservation and reticence most parents would take for granted in their children, and this too can lead to potentially deadly outcomes.
Just a few months ago, Mori and Orion’s mother arranged an afternoon at the park with some of her friends and their children. There were many complaints about Orion’s hugs, how long they lasted and how frequently they came. He asked startling questions, made all the more startling by his age, and then laughed at the inability of other children to respond to them. He pulled the hair of a little girl even younger than him, and—when her mother came to check on the girl—threw himself into the strange woman’s arms.
Mori and Orion have not had any playdates since.
There are of course other, more immediate dangers that can coincide with parental neglect, and these are further compounded by the children’s place of residence.
Even now that it has been suburbanized, Central Florida is a very dangerous place to be, much more so when one is small. There are snakes, alligators, insects, otters, and arachnids, all of which can pose great harm to a child.
There are, as previously established, the swans that live in the children’s immediate vicinity, and in other parts of Central Florida there are geese; both species can show great propensity toward violence when they feel threatened.
There are large, murky bodies of water. There are bodies of water everywhere. There’s a great big pond next to the elementary school which Mori attends. The pond has an alligator as long as a car, with no fence around it at all. Mori wishes she would be taught how to swim. She wishes Orion would be taught how to swim.
There are miles of wet, unstable ground, held up only by rot and tree roots, perfect for tripping.
There are dogs, which pose a series of problems if a parent does not properly warn their children about approaching strange animals and if a dog’s owner does not seek essential vaccines and training for the animal.
There are cars, many cars. There are the cars driven by their parents, who are often drunk or mentally elsewhere while driving. There are the cars driven by tourists, who might find themselves confused by the poorly planned roadways and series of identical lakes and theme parks and hotels and swamps, leading to a higher incident of both accidents and fatalities. There are the tourists themselves, or any stranger, who might intentionally or unintentionally harm a child.
And then, neglect and cars notwithstanding, there are their parents themselves. Statistically, it is always most likely that a child will be harmed by someone that they know.
Despite all the pain that knowing and being known can cause, the fundamental rule on which their endless universes hinge is this: the only person who will never intentionally harm Mori is Orion, and the only person who will never intentionally harm Orion is Mori.
They’ll grow up together over and over again, even if it isn’t for very long, and certainly they will squabble and bicker. Orion will rip up Mori’s paintings. Mori will delete save files and coding that Orion has spent hours on. They will pinch and tease and pull and yell, and they will drive each other and their parents crazy, but at the end of the day they are now and forever, all the other has or will have in this endless place of possibilities and they take this burden of love quite seriously.
After a lunch of cold turkey sandwiches and apple slices, Mori and Orion spend the afternoon outside. First, they play in the screened patio. Mori has a bicycle that she’s almost taught herself how to ride, and which only sometimes kills her. She does tricks with it and then walks it like a horse in a circle, reciting everything she knows about horses in the process while Orion feigns both amusement and interest.
He’s still on his iPad. He continues to mess around in The Sims for a while, dresses up Sim Mori in all the best outfits, sends her and Sim Orion to the Sim playground, where they swing on Sim Swings and their Sim relationship grows more positive as a result of meaningful time spent together.
Eventually, his iPad needs charging, and Mori runs out of horse facts, so after he puts his iPad away inside, on the charger, they get out Mori’s sidewalk chalk.
Chalk always makes his hands messy, but his sister is very good at drawing animals, and he is very interested in the making of patterns, and so chalk-drawing is a nice meeting of their interests. They color over days and days of worn-down chalk figures, though the perpetual rain of the Floridian summers helps keep the pavement clear enough that they won’t need to clean up too much after having their fun.
After Chalk comes Catch, a game they both hate, and after Catch comes Tag, a game they both love. Tag moves out of the patio and into the expanse of grass and wet that is the collective yard of their fenceless suburban neighborhood.
Tag, as enjoyed by Mori and Orion, requires a sort of touch-tackling and a great deal of guttural yelling.
They play loudly. At one point, their mother opens her office window at the side of the house and yells for them to be quiet.
After this, they play Quiet Tag, which is nearly the same game played at nearly the same volume, but when repeatedly asked in a sort of call and response with their mother why they’re still being so loud, what Mori and Orion repeat back is this: “We’re not. This is Quiet Tag.”
They then resume their loudness.
Their mother gives up and slams shut her window.
Quiet Tag eventually becomes a shared meandering around the lake. They wander over to each of the scant trees surrounding their property. Mori spots nests in every tree. Orion is too small to see if she’s being honest when she claims to see them.
They walk past anthills, and around to the far side of their lake, where the rushes have been tramped down by the belly of an alligator. Even without the gator slide, it would be obvious that there was a gator in this side of the lake. The presence of a mangled Mori who got too close to her nesting site confirms it.
The cormorants are still fishing. Mori points out how they dive and bob into the water, how their chicks watch and so eagerly learn from their parents the ways of being a waterfowl. Mori puts her arm in front of Orion’s chest and holds him close to her, protectively, even though the swans are just white blobs on the other side of their lake, and their cygnets smaller gray blobs, and tells him how cygnets are highly impressionable and will imprint on the first thing they see.
Orion doesn’t say anything in response to that because he’s not listening. He’s thinking instead about that first time Mori and their parents visited him together, as a family. How all their parents could talk about with his foster mother and the social worker was how smart he was, and how unusual and pretty, with his thick, dark curls and his big dark eyes. How none of the adults had come near him at all.
How Mori hadn’t cared about any of that but had instead come to watch him play on his foster mother’s phone. How she had asked about his games, shown interest in him as an individual.
He remembers the drawing she gave him that first day, the faint sketch of a cormorant she had seen on their way to meet him, as he will always remember it. He keeps it folded in his pocket no matter what he is wearing.
If he gets older, he will start to pin it to his wall, and then he will place it behind glass in a frame, and he won’t talk about it to anyone he sleeps with; and if he gets old enough to sleep with anyone, he sleeps with anyone and everyone who will have him.
And even as he doesn’t tell them about that drawing of the bird, he will tell a girl he knows well sexually but whose name he can’t remember about the time his sister pushed him out of the way of a car, only to be hit herself, the clean smear of blood on the bumper contrasted against the mass of exposed bone and angles that groaned for a few minutes before expiring on the asphalt.
Or another version of him will tell his first boyfriend during their last fight about the time his sister was boiling water for pasta for dinner because their mom forgot to feed them and how she’d become burned and then the burns had become infected and how she had died in a hospital, not even holding his hand as she went, because her hands were hidden behind so much gauze.
He tells everyone everything about his sister and all the ways in which she dies. He tells them everything except for the fact that this is the person he is looking for in all these endless simulations. That her loss is the genesis of all his life’s works and meaning. That this is the person he is trying to save.
Orion looks up at Mori as she goes on and on about the swans. He wants to ask her if he’s missing something in his data. He wants to ask her if it was ever anything like this at all, or if their halcyon days are only a wish he didn’t know he was granting. He wants to ask her a million things a million times because he knows without knowing that in here, he can.
And Mori knows without knowing, as she prattles on and on about the swans, that no matter how many simulations Orion runs them through, in here she will never really be any of her ghosts.
That her father didn’t really forget that after a bite from a wild animal that she needed rabies shots. That her parents hadn’t neglected to ensure she learned how to swim before she got jokingly pushed into a pool at a classmate’s birthday party. That any of the endless series of deaths that exist in this machine are not-hers as often as they are, and that for all the countless deaths far worse than the single real death that necessitated their existence, there will be an endless series of lives that are, if lonely, kinder, to both her and Orion.
And yet, in spite of this kindness, a piece of her will continue to hope that there must be—even if it is a deemed a number so cosmically small as to be dismissed outright by the series of computers analyzing and reanalyzing them—a chance for their world to allow for a series of choices that will lead them to a life in which they can be together long enough to find out how hurt each other so deeply that all the infinitely wounded versions of Orion won’t need to keep seeking her out like this, and then long enough still after that that the hurt will cease to matter in the face of their love.
She still heeds her ghosts, because it’s easier that way, and it gives her more time like this before the resets which will come and come after both of their deaths until somehow that impossible dream is captured and made, if not real, real enough.
More time to know and to be with Orion. To learn about the adults they might have grown up to be. To hold him back and protect him from the birds who have no intention of hurting him in the first place.
Infinite time in which she can love her little brother and talk to him about the territorialism of swans, and in which she can contemplate on the multiplicity of children.
All the time, really, that she could ever need or want.
Ichabod Cassius Kilroy (Ick, to its friends, fans, and haters alike), is a transsexual pile of mostly-real guts that could probably pass the Turing test, were the Turing test given to gutspills rather than to computers. It is a graduate of the 2023 Clarion workshop, enjoyer of iced coffee, and running out of cute little witticisms for this author bio. In case of emergency or boredom, it can be reached at: mx.sickilroy@gmail.com.