"I wish life could be just as nice to me as it's meant to be."
—Unwound, "The World Is Flat"
from Challenge for a Civilized Society
I've always liked that lyric. I take it ironically, as I think it's meant to be taken. What I mean is, literally but not literally. Yes, I do think life is meant to be nice to me. (And no, I also, at the same time, realize that it is not meant to be nice to me.) And I do wish it was as nice as that (implying it isn't, which makes the line an implied complaint) while also realizing that few people have nicer, easier, cushier lives than me (which, though surely true, is not, for some reason, satisfying).
I guess that's a lot to read into a single lyric.
A thought of poking fun at all of you who are so foolish as to think this way led to a little flash fiction piece.
In it, Bellatrix travels to a world where human reproduction happens according to rules very different from ours. Which makes life a little less nice. The fact the story goofs a bit on scientific conceits like evolution and parallel universes probably qualifies it (on a technicality) to be science fiction.
I'm pleased to report that, thanks to this technically, I managed to pass the thing off as sci-fi and got it through the defensive force fields of the editors at Sci-Fi Lampoon, who published it in their Winter 2021 edition in June.
(Yes, winter edition. Yes, June. You saw what they did there, I presume.)