Page 27 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
The two of them stayed there, even after the cigarette burned out, until the buck disappeared from view.
Birdie texts sometimes—dinging the group chat with mundane observations. Her legal adoption of Luna has gone through. Pictures of a tortoiseshell stray Aspen’s started feeding. Complaints about daycare availability. A happy birthday message at midnight;I hope 21 is kind to u. Little things, pebbles dropped into a well, hoping to hear a splash at the bottom and never quite managing.
How the apartment is now:
Stagger sleeping on the couch, or in the hall, or at the foot of the bed. Levi changing the combination to the gun safe every three days. Crane coming home from shifts to eat dinner standing in the kitchen and going straight to bed. Levi won’t touch him. Crane brings his phone into the bathroom and jacks off in the tub, watching the grossest porn he can find with the audio cranked so loud in his earbuds it hurts, a desperate attempt to work some of the stress out of his clenched muscles.
It is, admittedly, hard to feel like a man when it takes half a hand up your cunt to get you off.
Twelve
Tammy asks Crane yes-or-no questions in the apartment living room. She feels his stomach and he answers each question with a nod. Yes, he’s having trouble buttoning his pants. Yes, he’s hungry, which is good because it means the morning sickness is finally cutting him a break, though the dizziness sucks. And yes, dear god, his breasts ache, and the larva is stealing calcium from his bones to build its own, and stripping the oxygen from his blood and pissing into the amniotic fluid. It’s disgusting. Yes. That’s correct.
In the same vein, Tammy hesitates to divulge details. Probably debating if she should tell him how big the larva is, or what parts of itare starting to form. He imagines its tiny maggot segments are building up from stolen nutrients. She focuses on the important things instead, like how he should be stocking up on liners and extra underwear and drinking more water. For the love of god, put on some weight, and accept he’ll go up a cup size. Go get a new bra.
“We’d probably be able to tell the sex,” she says. “If we were going to a hospital.”
“No fucking hospitals,” Levi says, loading his backpack with hunting supplies.
“I ain’t talking to you.”
Nineteen weeks, she declares.
It’s a countdown. Twenty-one weeks left, or thereabouts.
The next morning, right before Levi is supposed to return from his hunting trip to Maryland, Crane stares into the only full-length mirror in the apartment, hung sloppily on the back of the bathroom door.
He’s showing.
He holds the hem of his shirt in his mouth, the drawstrings of his pajama pants undone so he can take in the full size of the bump. It’s not even that big of a belly. A vague rounding of the stomach and not much more. But it’s big enough that he can’t pass it off as an unfortunate fat deposit—it’s breaking the silhouette of his baggy shirts, shuffling around his organs to make room for itself.
He runs a hand over it. It’s softer than he thought it’d be. Only hair and skin, bulging out under the rib cage and distorting the tattoos. He considers the possibility that it’s not one giant grub. Maybe it’s a mass of them, the way an animal left to rot in the sun swells to bursting with parasites.
Stagger looms in the cramped hallway, as he does.
Crane signs,What?He does it one-handed because it still gets the point across. It takes a second for Stagger to recognize it—they haven’t had a lot of time to practice their rudimentary ASL, what with Crane picking up extra shifts. If he’s too tired to think, then he won’t think about how much he wants to die.
“Hurt?”
Not really. Besides the typical pregnancy aches. That’s not why he’s upset. Come on, buddy, use your worm-infested brain.
Crane takes off his shirt, then the deodorant-stained racerback bra he’s worn every day for a year, and turns on the hall light. “Big lights” are usually a hard no in the apartment. This one still has its lightbulb, only because he can’t figure out how to remove it. But, see? Look at the belly. Look how big it’s gotten.
And, with an overhead light, his tits now cast a shadow across the rib cage. He can grab a handful. That’s more than he could do before. A few weeks ago, there was barely enough for Levi to get into his mouth.
Twenty months of testosterone isn’t magic. When he hums, the sound rattles at the base of his throat, not quite hitting the low note he hopes for. He’s hairy like a tenth-grade boy and sports a thin, patchy struggle of a beard. But it’d done the job well enough. He’s tall, and wears Levi’s old shirts more often than not, and truckers and hive-bitten strangers passing through have stopped flirting and started calling himkid, orboy, or justhey, manif they’re cool like that.
Most importantly, he’d stopped seeing Sophie.
Crane really, really looks in the mirror. Presses his chest flat. Sucks his stomach in.
Sophie is supposed to be gone. She’s supposed to be dead, he swears, but now there’s something in his stomach and it’s growing andit’s going to come out and he thinks the first time someone calls him a mother he’s going to hit his head against a wall until his skull splits. He’s going to pray for an umbilical cord wrapped around its thick grub neck. If he’s going to look down one day and see a maggot chewing on his nipple for milk, he might as well take out his own eyes, right?
His distress must be visible.“Shh,”Stagger murmurs.
Crane mimics him: “Shh.” And again. “Shhh.”
It’s supposed to help. Something about the vagus nerve, he thinks. There we go. Easy now.
