The Stork's Mistake

A porcelain-skinned moon hangs over Babyland’s confectionary wasteland, where elfin artisans knead infants from riverbed clay, slide them into humming bread-ovens, and gamble away vigilance with a makeshift golf ball carved from ivory. When the timer forgets its duty, pigment deepens: honey gold, mahogany, obsidian—each shade a scar of inattention, yet every cherub exits the kiln laughing, unfazed by chromatic fate. Inside a vaulted stockroom, a fastidious registrar pigeon-holes these toddling parcels—labels, ledgers, color swatches—awaiting the maternal call. A white-picketed household telephones in an order for "a brother the color of milk"; the stork, half-asleep in moonlight, misfiles desire, lifts a carbon-dark newborn, and wings across constellations. Dismay erupts below: pastel curtains tremble, neighbors gasp, the factory foreman vaults onto a penny-farthing bicycle, pedals through cumulus, overtakes the errant bird, and swaps infants mid-air as if rectifying a typo in heaven’s manuscript.