Stick With Me, Baby

STICK WITH ME, BABY
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

There was a reason Johnny ate all that paste in school, although it wasn’t evident until he met Roxanne in first grade. She colored within the lines, got picked first for kickball and had been known to partake of a couple of pots of paste before breakfast herself. She was everything he wanted in a woman. He sidled up to her in class one day and never sidled back down. There was so much paste in their systems that it oozed from their pores and when they made physical contact their skin fused into one.

They were brought to a surgeon who cut them apart and grafted some skin wherever he saw red stuff, but when Roxanne left her hospital bed to stick herself back onto Johnny, the adults in their lives gave up. They were married for propriety’s sake, but honestly, the way they were stuck together, they couldn’t have tried anything naughty even if they had thought of it. Johnny and Roxanne sought out like-minded individuals, the greatest paste eaters that the nation’s elementary schools had to offer, and whenever it felt right another kid would stick himself or herself to them. Before they were done, they were a human blob, four-hundred and sixty-seven children strong. Governments world-wide feared that this might be the next step in human evolution, humans grouping together like cells to form an even higher life-form. But the truth was, humanity had nothing to fear.

I mean, these kids couldn’t even go to the bathroom properly.