Generation P.

From birth, his world was plastic. When he toddled up to the windows, they were covered in a film of the stuff. When Grandmother took him for his little walks, his stroller was covered in a sticky, staticky curtain of polythene. In school, the children had clear plastic cubicles, so that when their wax and paper encapsulated crayons rolled to the edge of their desks, they no longer fell off.

They called his generation Generation P, for plastic. When he could walk, Grandmother made him a hat with a plastic screen to protect his respiratory passages. He toddled through the world those first few years like an otherworldly creature in a space helmet, too delicate for the air of his own planet.

His parents, like most of Generation P’s, had been consumed by the Great Fry Virus. The Great Gaseous Meteor that started it all had a radiation reading of 6,000 millisieverts, on par with the ’89 Chernobyl explosion of the previous century. What it spewed through the air with a seemingly never-ending half-life crept into the noses and throats of the unprotected, caking their airways with a tar that would ultimately render the sufferers unable to sustain life.

Grandmother said that was the way things were back then, everyone learned a trade.

“They reclaimed ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ from the boomers,” she told him as a bedtime story. “Capitalism ate my generation. We had fancy jobs that required fancy school, and school wasn’t free, so we all owed so much money. Your parents and their friends didn’t go to school past the required amount and they learned they could do anything with their hands.”

His own fingers were so small, he couldn’t imagine doing anything with them. Certainly not build a trailer from the guts out like his parents, who he did not remember. He only ever knew Grandmother, whose knotty old hands had long ago treated the sick. He would catch her crying sometimes, peeking his small face through the crack in the door frame; she was looking at a photo of his parents.

The vaccines against Great Fry varied in their efficacy and affected the lifelong immunity of those injected. In five years, the so-called gold standard for anti-Fry were Viscous and Krunz, one with 65% protection, the other with 50%. He had had Krunz, the first one on the market. As soon as it became clear that the young were most vulnerable to Fry, Grandmother got him vaccinated with what was available. Lab production grinded to a stop soon after; someone needed to take care of Gen P, after all, and their mothers and fathers were not weathering Fry well. His parents fixed engines and grew corn until their bronchi and alveoli were a veritable soot pit.

“We had two objectives,” Grandmother told him. “We needed to protect the youngins’ and also save those who were already sick.”

He thought about his potty, plastic, of course, red with legs, a handle, and a cheerful painted face, and how hard it was to squat and squeeze and not fall over at the same time.

“There wasn’t enough time to do everything,” said Grandmother, massaging her whorled knuckles. “We couldn’t save them, and then you were all we had.”

Nobody in his class had parents, but someone in the neighboring class did. When the mother of that student realized she was the last one on her block to survive, rumor had it she went underground to live in the abandoned train stations.

He was three when they finally discovered plastic was an effective barrier against Fry. Grandmother watched the news and gasped. Was that all it was? she asked, biting her leathery palm in bitter anguish. A simple piece of plastic and my children would be here today.

“I’m your chilren,” he lisped, swallowing his ds. By that weekend, he had a closet full of helmets and bonnets and face shields, all one hundred percent polythene.

The grandparents left were in various stages of functionality. Some took the second chance at parenthood with vigor while others fell apart. Grandmother took many of the second group’s grandbabies to get the vaccine.

Some of them died, anyway, even in his own class. Their lungs, unseasoned by pollution and exhaust, couldn’t handle every other disease in the book, the common colds and flus and fevers. Through his scratched plastic cubicle walls, he watched as his friends attended school one day, and by the next week, never showed up again. He could count to ten, the largest possible number allowed in any one classroom, and by May, four were claimed.

Lunch was eaten in plastic stalls lined up side by side in the cafeterias. It was at lunch that he saw her, the girl whose mother was still alive. He had not met anyone with a mother instead of a grandmother, but she looked the same as everybody else. She ate her fish nuggets just like anyone else. She swung her feet and kicked her lunch stool, just like everyone else, but she never, ever smiled.

The day after, he sat closer, and by the end of the week, there was only one plastic partition between them.

“You’re the one with the mom, right?” he asked her, peeking out of the corner of his eye. She said nothing.

“My grandma says…” he hesitated, not wanting to offend her, but dreadfully worried she’d continue to ignore him. “She said your mom is still alive.”

The girl with the mother picked her slice of bread into little pieces and rolled them between her fingers until they were smooth, shiny bread pellets.

“Does…she visit you for your birthday?” he asked. Lunch would be over soon—and who knew if she would even come to school tomorrow? He had a sudden, horrible mental image of himself in a lunch stall, the rows and columns around him completely empty.

“I saw her for my fourth birthday.”. He looked up, but the brown face in the next stall was still fixated on the tray before her.

“Grandfather showed me pictures from when I was four and she was even holding me on her lap.” She reached into her school pinafore pocket and pulled out a shiny plastic locket in the shape of a heart. Her fingers pushed the mechanism on its side and it popped open, revealed a scarred photo of a woman with shiny, straight dark hair.

There was something hot in his chest. Grandmother made him a very nice birthday, but all of the photos of his parents with him were of him as a baby, and that wasn’t the same as LAST YEAR.

“Did she get you presents?” he asked, swallowing the hard lump in his throat.

“I dunno. But when I get my Viscous, I’m gonna find her.”

What was that like, then, to have a mother to find? He liked to imagine his parents living on a farm somewhere far away in heaven, but that was in the sky and nobody flew planes anymore. The filtration systems just couldn’t handle it. Her mother was still on the ground.

“Wait, you haven’t gotten a vaccine yet?”

Finally, her face looked up, but so did the cleaning men’s, and he regretted his volume. “But you could die!” he whispered, pressing his nose piggy-style against the plastic barrier between them.

“You could die, too,” she shot back, kicking the clear wall, hurting his spread nostrils.

“But I got my vaccine when I was little,” he said. “Didn’t your grandpa take you?”

“No. Grandfather went looking for my mom, and when he came back, he was just sad all the time. There was no time for a Visky.”

There was no time left for lunch, either. They had to exit the stalls to allow the disinfection process to take place. The stalls were cleaned diligently every meal time, just like their plastic class cubicles were cleaned every day. He looked at the pile of bread pellets on her plate.

“Meet me after school,” he said, his little heart beating so hard and fast he was sure it was echoing all over his little plastic world.

“Why?”

“You want to find your mom, don’t you?”

That she wanted, yes, very much.

“Then we have to get you vaccinated. So you can look. The stairs by exit B,” he whispered, just managing to slide his hallway shield on before the cleaning man banged on the door of his stall.

Grandmother picked him up every day from school, her yellow visor with the hanging polyethylene shield meant to protect those around her from any Fry particle emissions. Although asymptomatic, she didn’t want to potentially expose the youngsters. He spotted the familiar burst of color in the milling throng in the schoolyard.

“I see my grandmother!” he shouted, and tore away from the dismissal teacher. Instead of heading for Grandmother, he headed for exit B.

The girl had special permission to walk home alone, she told him as they headed down the gentle slope of the street.

“Grandfather doesn’t always come!” she panted.

“So they let you walk home without anyone?”

“I’m ressposible,” she said proudly.

Across the street from the train entrance was the vaccination pharmacy. Bearing a giant cross that glowed neon green even in the daytime, it was clean and white. Long ago, Grandmother told him, pharmacies carried everything from chocolate bars and socks to the little plastic toy car he had just gotten for his sixth birthday.

The light turned green and they crossed, the white door handle of the pharma entrance gleaming with a high plastic polish. As he reached out to pull the door open, their gentle camaraderie was broken by the girl’s startled cry.

“Mama?”

Under the arched entrance to the subway system, atop dozens of rickety cement steps damp with leaking fluids and caked with trash, stood a woman.

He was shell-shocked; how rare it was to see a pre-Gen P-er! Her face was strange to him at first. He took in her straight dark hair, so much like her daughter’s, her rosy mouth with the faint lines and creases surrounding it, more than his, but far fewer than Grandmother’s. And that was when he realized it, for once in his life, he was seeing a mother and her face was not behind plastic.

The dolls in her stroller, however, were a different story.

The girl took a step forward, and instinctually, he grabbed her hand. “Wait,” he said, raising a finger at her mother. “Look.”

Piled high and deep, the dolls crowded each other in the stroller, their pastel polyester dresses spilling everywhere, their glued-on synthetic eyelashes casting shadows on their perfectly molded faces. Grandmother had a picture with a doll like these; they used to be made from porcelain, their fake hair curled into elaborate ringlets, the ruffles on their petticoats so numerous that it was impossible to parse the body of the doll beneath it. With the high demand for plastic since the advent of the Great Fry, however, it became much more cost effective to make them from plastic instead. Their style made them appeal to grandmothers, but the woman in front of them was no grandmother.

Her eyes, unfocused and ominously glazed, set upon the girl. Breathing very hard, the girl cried again, “Mama!”

Mama smiled. It was a surprisingly gentle smile, but as soon as it appeared, she took a step back into the shadowy subway station entrails.

“No,” whispered the girl hoarsely, but the mother emerged again and retreated, two, three, six times, appearing every time with a new stroller, four, six, a dozen, until they lined the empty street before her, filled to the brim.

They were filled with dolls, hundreds of dolls and doll heads, all of them with painted, unseeing eyes, all of them with long, straightened dark hair exactly like the little girl’s.

Mama picked up her precious plastic babies and sealed them with a kiss.