The Best American Series

I read The Best American Series which is a collection of short stories.  I didn't realize at first that some of the stories were non-fiction so the story about the ecology of the island of Manhattan was throwing me off at first.  I liked this book.   The stories were intriguing and kept my interest going.  I often think I don't like science fiction but my favorite story in this book was science fiction.  In this story an unmarried woman, living with her parents, has a child.  Her child, like many others born in this particular decade, is a cube.  Some babies are cubes, some rhombuses and some pyramids.   Very few children are baby shaped.  She takes her baby cube to the playground and sets it in the sand by the playground equipment with all the other cubes.  She talks to her cube and she plays with her cube.  She feeds her cube by setting it in a dish of breast milk and the cube soaks it in.  The cube grows up and gets larger.  When that decade ends fewer cubes are born and more and more baby shaped babies emerge.  Eventually the cube babies are stored in institutions on shelves.  This was one of the strangest stories I ever read.  Last week I read a real story about a public health emergency in Brazil where a mosquito born illness has resulted in the birth of thousands of babies with microcephaly.  These Brazilian babies will need life long care and support and I might not have thought too much about it if I hadn't just read this science fiction story about cube babies.  I love short stories and I loved this book too.