Twins
“I just want a baby,” she speaks into the dark, in a voice that catches on the fan above and splatters onto the popcorn ceiling, eviscerated. “Just one. Maybe two if I don’t have to be fat twice.” Twins are cute.
Tonight is the newest recruit in a long series of sleepless nights. They wait for her analysis impatiently, as if in a harried queue. Tom's arm drapes over her stomach, and he has been clear. Clear as the mall parking lot today when that car backfired and everyone thought it was December 11th, 2012, all over again. Saying that sentence that began "I just want..." aloud in the daylight would scare Tom as thoroughly as that car backfiring had scared her. But not nearly as badly as the lights hovering over the treetops had scared her, just a few hours later, just a few hours ago.
“Just one,” she pleads into the dark. A concession.
Then: There, on her side. Is it … Is it? There it goes again.
A kick.
She cups her side and feels the bulge at her lowest rib. There, on the side. Another kick, like a snapping rubber band between intercostal muscles.
She knows her uterus isn’t all the way over there. She knows. She is being silly. Playing a grownup version of a child’s game. But still, another kick.
The lump is larger now. No longer the size of a gumball, but fist-sized, now filling her cupped palm nicely. The games she played as a child were called Dear Santa, and My Tooth is Under My Pillow, and Daddy Is Coming Home I Know It. The children all called them games, but her adult self knows them to be lies. Harmless lies for recreation or necessity. Lies to pass the time or make the world more bearable. The game she plays now goes presently unnamed but is a fruitless one nonetheless; Tom had scheduled his vasectomy on December 12th, 2012, and stated in no uncertain terms that the next time she asked to co-mingle their genetics, she could find another lease.
“Please,” she whispers to the darkness. She is playing a new game now, one she calls Prayer. The funny thing is, until that dark day three years ago when that psychopath ended not only his future but in some lesser way her own, Tom had been the one nagging and reproachful. She had resented his audacity. She would be the one getting all fat and stretched out, not him. How dare any guy even suggest it? To initiate a pregnancy without planning to carry it was, in her mind at the time, just plain rude. Like asking someone to wipe your ass for you.
She felt differently afterward, after December, after Clackamas when they held each other trembling, vibrating with fear, as people fell around them, from gunfire or the other people, pushing, pushing, running. Afraid. Then the burning in her hip, right below the ball of skin and mass she now clutches. That bullet was the last thing to penetrate her body, she realizes. She ached every second of the years that followed: first from the incident (they’d left a piece in; it wasn’t hurting anything), then from the loneliness of three solid years of celibacy.
“Please.” This time she says it forcefully. Commandingly.
The blanket tucked around her begins to glow, a pulsant yellow strobe. She will not peek–cannot peek, she is sure about that–but her eyelids part in spite of her resolve.
The mass below her fingers trembles, doubles in size, shudders, then trebles. A basketball now sits on her hip, as casually as if she were a kid on Miller street again asking the neighbor if Jimmy can come out for a game of pickup. Sure, after he’s done with dinner.
Dinner, she thinks. And she swallows acid, a gnawing pain that infuses her chest like heartburn, but spreading further, lower, self-replicating. The swelling intensifies now, no longer able to expand outward but expanding, expanding all the same. It pushes inward now, parting the delicate infrastructures of her to do so. Past kidneys, liver, diaphragm, it pushes.
She rises from the bed, Tom’s hairy arm flopping onto the sweat-soaked sheets. Her balance is off. She stumbles, getting under the fresh growth, now so oppressive and heavy. She cowers under the mass that has nearly matched her abdomen in size; it is the head of a mangled creature, a horrifying writhing figure from one of Tom’s nuclear wasteland video games. She has become one with it. She must learn to exist sideways now, a monster casting a pulsing pale glow, so strong and detailed that she can see her own veins projecting shadows of enlarged and enlarging spiderwebs on the tile walls of her modestly appointed kitchen.
It is almost funny.
At once, pain ricochets, a magazine ripping, a large one like Italian Vogue or Modern Bride, all hundred plus pages tearing at once, somewhere deep in her belly. She drops to the tile like a body in a crowded mall. Her back now, oh God, her back is agony.
Blindly, she pulls herself to the counter and, there, in the drawer, yes, the knife, the carving knife, no, that’s a paring knife, yes, that’s the one, good girl.
She positions herself on her back, below the mass that has nearly doubled her. The taut skin of her belly is a cross stitch of purple and red slits and her skin tries, yes, tries and fails, to contain its form. It has given a valiant effort, she thinks. It has been a Good Skin.
She slides the knife into the crevice below her lowest rib, where the mass has created a tight ninety-degree angle from her rib to the bulge below. It’s a sharp knife, expensive, hardly used once since it was purchased, and parts the papery skin as easily as one unzips a dress. It should hurt, she thinks after the first incision, but would she even notice an additional pain at this point? She thinks not.
She aligns the knife for another pass, pressing more firmly this time, now separating muscle and—
She pulls back. Is that bone?
It is not.
To her compounding horror, the slit below her rib widens, its sides separating with the tearing cry of holiday paper cut by experienced hands. A smell, that of roadkill, of a thanksgiving turkey left out until Monday, of a rat long dead in the ventilation unit, wafts hot gusts into her face from the empty cavern beneath her ribs.
Then, the vascular glow of her monstrous abdomen blinks out, as sweetly as an old television set after Johnny Carson. She is alone in the darkness. She gasps once, twice, and tries to call out for Tom, but cannot. Her heart beats so forcefully, her face is so full of blood and fear and pain, and she cannot raise her voice above a squeak. She manages a rasp, but it dies in the air, unacknowledged.
In the dark, another fetid wash of hot air flows over her face from the aching maw of her over-inhabited womb. She clutches the knife and rasps again. This time her cry for Tom is loud, if still unsteady.
And Tom is there in the doorway. She can feel him in the doorway, and yes, the shadow is darker there. She has never been so grateful to have him near. Beautiful, sweet Tom with his unkempt hair and his slept on beard and his unwashed, sweaty boxers. She has never loved him more than in this very moment.
“Tom--” she squeaks, but in supplication or warning, she cannot say. All she knows is pain, mingled with relief that she is no longer alone in the darkness.
“Mal--?” he says. But two small points of sanguine light have blinked into the darkness from somewhere below her, somewhere deep inside her mangled body and they stop the words short.
The babe is hungry. The phrase wells up from deep within her subconscious, distressing and immediate. The baby needs to feed.
She should tell Tom to run, tell Tom to get out, but she cannot. She cannot stop staring at the twin-eyed pricks of hot, sanguine light beaming from the cavity of its birth. Beautiful lights, really. Sweet lights.
Her grip on the knife loosens. She fingers it now, caressing it, as their gaze strengthens. The babe… The blade knicks a callus as it passes over her thumb. A distant part of her brain feels it, feels the blood run down the length of her thumb and drip onto the tiled floor. She drinks in the twin lights, breathes them in, and as she does so, feels awash with such ecstasy that the distant, knowing part of her brain is stricken dumb. In its place, with ravenous force, an echo:
The babe is hungry.
“Tom?” Her voice is clear, unwavering, strong. The baby… “Help me up. I must have tripped.”
She reaches for him in the dark as he rushes to kneel by her side. He smells of her coconut mango shampoo and his sleep sweat and their untold plans for the future. And yet—
The baby needs to feed.
Charity Morris is a Fiction candidate for the NEOMFA out of Cleveland, OH. She has been published in ADDitude Magazine, Miniskirt Magazine, Havik: Journal of Arts and Literature, CafeLit, The Antonym Magazine, and The Lucky Jefferson, among others.
