My womb gives forth monsters.

I've seen the evidence with my own eyes. And as always, they send back enough so that no one can doubt their sincerity and veracity. It's the truth. Three times I have conceived a child, and three times now the word has come back: no.

The first artifacts from the future arrived on a winter morning in February. I should imagine that the girls at Medjugorje felt something like the three hikers who came upon the pile of newspapers.

They were laughed off, ignored. The hikers knew they would be. Our unseen future friends had no doubt known as well. Copies of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and even USA Today, all dated two months ahead. All of them told the same story, in huge point type on their front pages: California had finally suffered the Big One, and hundreds of thousands of people were snuffed out. There was a reason no copy of The Los Angeles Times had been included in our care package: there was no longer a Los Angeles. One of their correspondents had written a book about surviving the ordeal despite the loss of both legs and most of one arm. A copy of that book had been thoughtfully provided.

Some people heeded. Most did not. And most of them, in turn, died. Because it happened just exactly as the future sources claimed. Surprisingly enough, the reporter who had wound up writing the book, defiantly did not go along with his prescribed actions. As a result, he lost his life as well. The surprise comes from the fact that the book, now in the Time Embassy wing of the Smithsonian, remains and is completely unchanged. Apparently, life is less like science fiction than one might think.

More and more people began heeding the objects found in that spot in the wilderness. No representative of the Time Embassy, as our faceless benefactors came to be called, ever came back in person to explain. They simply sent back incontrovertible proof of what they wished us, and in turn, no doubt, themselves, to avoid.

The government tried to bring the area under martial law. But too many soldiers had lost family or friends in the losses out on the West Coast. And people had found evidence that care packages had been sent back only to decay into nearly nothing, completely exposed as they were to the elements. A bleached newspaper fragment, a diary stricken with algae, even some form of magnetic media which had succumbed to many seasons of wind and rain. The military simply refused to cut off the world from the Embassy.

Experts were brought in. They put up a structure to protect anything else that would appear. They even have the building open at the bottom down to the bare earth, after fears of the artifacts materializing into concrete and steel. These chosen few wait, then receive what is sent, dissect the message, and deliver it to the world.

My first son was the first exception to this.

Allan was going to become an inventory quality control supervisor at one of the largest beverage distributors in New England. On his thirty-fifth birthday, he began a three-night spree. He was going to go out to their main warehouse and personally paint the cans of this particular beverage, right on the area where one's lips would rest, with a clear, odorless chemical agent. The documents they showed me stated that the taste, if any, was negligible. He did not take great care to slather on this agent, he simply painted a line across the side for the lower lips, then one over the top where the opening would be once you popped the can. As a result, for Allan was very quick about his chores, over seventy thousand people died. It was a miracle they figured out the cause in time and were able to catch my son on night #4 and shoot him before he was able to put down his brush and draw his weapon.

Allan was never born. They put me to sleep and when I awoke. Allan was gone from my body as if he had never been.

I had argued. I had begged. But so many things had been proven true, they said. Earthquakes, floods, droughts, assasinations, they said. Who knows how the deaths Allan caused affected the future beyond him (no one had yet to come up with a conclusive estimate as to how far in the future our benefactors were), they said. They said. And said.

So there was Allan. His father, I told myself. The nameless man who had provided his seed so that lonely women like me could fix their loneliness.

But then came Calvin. Two years later. He was going to blow up ten government buildings in six countries before they killed him. I saw his morgue photo. The clippings. I even heard part of a mass funeral service at Canterbury, though the trip back to us had warped the media so that everyone sounded like they were in slow motion.

And after him was James. James killed children.

The people here were kind enough not to make these things public. I was brought in, shown, and I believed.

I asked them if anyone else had received such a directed package, meant for one person. They said no. And I'm afraid I believe them.

Three seed donors. All different. I checked. Nowhere in these future documents was I present, except as a name on a birth certificate. Or perhaps a hospital photo. Maybe for each of my darling boys, I was their first victim. I will never know.

They've sent me a nice package, the folks who receive the artifacts. A jab in the leg with this, push down on the plunger, and I remove the threat of my children from the world. It will take five minutes, and I'll just sleep. Sleep without waking up.

Artifacts hardly ever leave the building anymore. But I'm looking at a picture of James from seven years from now. If you didn't know what you were looking at, you'd assume it was the boy sitting on a front porch of some house in suburbia, holding his puppy in his lap.

But if you look closely, you can see that the puppy is quite dead. And that the smile on the boy's face is blissful in claiming the deed.

That smile is the reason I'm going to use the needle. The fact I'm not sure who's behind the camera is why I brought the gun, just to be sure.