Ingredients

□ 1 dozen eggs

□ ½ cup self-raising flour

□ ½ cup hazelnut chocolate spread

Directions

1. Once you get out of here and go home, your husband and parents won’t trust you to use the oven just yet. As soon as you’re left “unsupervised,” though, take the thing that is not your child out of the crib and bring it into the kitchen.
2. Place the creature in your son’s highchair, ensuring it has a good view of the counter and the oven. But don’t you dare look at it, all wizened and shrivelled and in no way resembling your plump, pink-cheeked baby boy.
3. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
4. Set one egg aside. Prepare other eggs as follows: Poke a hole in the top with a pushpin, or the tip of a corkscrew, or any other pointy object they’d never permit you to have in here. Enlarge the holes a bit by peeling off small pieces of shell.
5. Empty contents of eggshells into a bowl to save for another day. You can’t just throw out eleven eggs. That would be crazy.
6. Ignore the constant shrieking from the creature that is not your son, the gremlin that wails all day and night. Your boy is such a happy baby, gurgling and cooing, and such a good sleeper. Since the switch, though, you haven’t gotten more than fifteen minutes of uninterrupted sleep at home. In here, you barely notice the patient down the hall screaming about the devil and the FBI. She’s not nearly as loud and shrill as that squalling thing.
7. Rinse eggshells. Soak them in salted water for 30 minutes, then rinse them again. Turn eggshells upside down to drain water out.
8. Seriously, pay no attention to the screeches and howls from the monster in the highchair. Don’t think about its perpetual, ravenous hunger. No matter how much you feed it, it’s never satisfied, and it only gets scrawnier. It hasn’t been growing, except for the long claws on its gnarled fingers and toes, and an incongruous mouthful of sharp teeth.
9. Crack the twelfth egg open. Mix white and yolk into a bowl with hazelnut chocolate spread. Add flour and mix well.
10. Don’t even glance at that thing. You’ll only become enraged, wondering how your family and friends can see that withered, wrinkled abomination and believe it’s your son. But you shouldn’t blame them. It’s not their fault. The faerie cast a glamour to trick them. Nobody can fool you, though. You’re his mother. You know your child, and that is not him.
11. Place eggshells in mini muffin tins, using aluminum foil to prop them upright. Fill a piping bag with batter, attach a small tip, and pipe each eggshell ¾ full of batter. It’s okay if you’re clumsy. You won’t need to pipe perfect frosting swirls onto the finished cupcakes. That’s not the point of this recipe.
12. Bake for 10-12 minutes. It shouldn’t take that long, though, before the imposter is startled into laughter, exclaiming, “I’ve lived a hundred years; I’ve seen tiny acorns grow into mighty oaks, but I’ve never seen cakes baked in eggshells before!”
13. Hopefully, the changeling will immediately go poof! and your darling son will appear in his highchair. With any luck, the faerie mother won’t make a personal appearance to collect her child and return yours. You wonder which scenario is likelier, but you can’t ask other people’s opinions. You know better than to mention the changeling to anybody ever again. You’re not crazy.

[Mary Kuna (they/she) is a writer and librarian in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, where they live with their librarian spouse and a rambunctious cat named Pippa. When not reading or writing, she is running, knitting, or at ballet class. Their work has appeared in Aôthen Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Dark Moments, Queer Sci Fi’s flash fiction anthologies Clarity and Innovation, and other publications. She can be found online at marykuna.com and tweets sporadically at @MaryKuna.]