Dear God, make my baby of an impossible kind of plastic that melts at room temperature. Make him red and shiny, like fresh-painted toenails. Make the plastic that oozes from him stick to naked skin, like tar. After he is born I want it to seal me up from the inside out. The doctor's hands will be covered in the mess, looking like blood but much thicker, brighter, brilliant-like paint. The doctor will look up at her hands and scream. Or maybe she will be confused and perturbed, and will try to shake the mess from her arms, feel it thicken on her rubber-gloved hands and grow panicky when it hardens her fingers into arthritic claws.
Give me a plastic baby, God, and I will name him Belphegor, and he will be your sword of flame. Give him the voice of a klaxon. Make his cries cloud the air, extinguish all other sounds.
The nurses will want to throw him in the incinerator because of the hospital's strict policy against abominations of humanity, but I have a plan. I will distract them by wailing about my sealed birth canal-and Jeremy will steal him from the incubator. He will take one for the team and carry our baby in his bare arms, blood from ruptured eardrums mixing with the sludge covering Belphegor's body. Jeremy will walk from the hospital all the way to our apartment, just reaching the recycling bin on the curb. He will place Belphegor in the manger, full of milk jugs and bags from the corner store, and then he will raise his hands to you and become a frozen monument to your wrath.
Jeremy is not so good at a lot of things, Lord. Yes, he is very good at getting me pregnant. He is very good at leaving abortion pamphlets in places that I am likely to find them. But he cannot keep a job and has no career ambitions beyond making enough money so that he may play first-person shooters in relative comfort when not working. He has a tube of fat around his waist that has been there since puberty and will remain there until he dies. I am confident your purpose for Jeremy is not on this earth. Jeremy's contribution to this world will be his self-sacrificial death.
Dear God, make my plastic baby grow by assimilation, requiring neither tiny jars of pureed carrots, nor the cupped hand of a parent against the back of his smooth skull. Give Belphegor the power to melt the contents of the recycling bin within himself, to swell as if pumped with pressurized air. Give him a hunger, God, and the sense to sniff out water bottles, take-out containers, electronics packaging, sandwich wrappers. Let him crawl from the yard of our apartment complex, leaving a trail of rainbow-sheened plastic, sealing the earth so that nothing more can grow. Let him find it in the gutters, let him find it collected into the corners of schools and courthouses, let him grow until he is the size of a car, and then let him find it on those, too.
Make my plastic baby a creature of your wrath, Lord. Instill him with a hatred of, and a desire to, destroy, all things. Make his screams shatter the storefront windows of Court Street. Make the black smoke scent of burning tires that wafts from him drive dogs mad, turning them against their owners. Make him render every power line in the neighborhood to flailing, sparking lightening-spitting snakes. Make him stop by Jeremy's parents' house and obliterate that stupid goddamned barn house mailbox I was forced to repair after I backed into it.
Give me an army of Belphegors unleashed upon the earth. People will run screaming from them. Cities will be quieted of movement under the spell of their red plastic wake. This land will be written off as a loss and people will flee to the oceans in hopes of finding an island big enough for three hundred million humans.
I will stay in my hospital bed, Lord, awaiting my judgment. After he rips open the roof of the hospital, a house-sized Belphegor will find me rubbing the smooth impermeable flatness between my legs. His screams will change into pained tones and I will hold my arms up to him and instruct him to come to his momma. He will take me in his massive fist. It will feel like diving into a pool of warmed wax. The pores of my skin will seal shut and I will start to suffocate. He will bring me to his mouth. His breath will smell of gasoline. I will not close my eyes when he shoves me down his throat. I want to see what he looks like from the inside. I want to see if he has a ribcage or a heart or a spleen, or a big heavy liver filtering out anything positive or pure or good that might find its way in. I want to see if he has any working parts, or if he is simply a globular mass being held into form by your ethereal will, Lord. I want to see the schematics of your horrible miracles, Lord, just before Belphegor floods my lungs with petroleum.