Page 32 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Crane nods. Yep.
Truth is, he’s strangely relieved. This whole mess is raising more questions than it’s answering—how did Hannah’s baby slip the hive? Why doesn’t she get her own gross flesh guardian?—but at least he’llget to see what comes out of her. Some curled-up grub the size of a fist. A bolus of larvae. Whatever. No reason it wouldn’t be the same as what’s in him.
He’d like one piece of certainty, if the world didn’t mind.
“Okay?”
Okay, Crane signs.
The back door slaps shut, and Tammy steps out onto the porch with a glass of iced tea. She gives Stagger the stink eye, but folds up her creaky limbs to sit beside Crane on the dirty stairs, and spends a moment recovering from it by sighing and letting the breeze toss her straw-gray hair.
“That brute treating you alright?” she asks.
Crane isn’t sure if she’s referring to Levi or Stagger, so he makes a noncommittal noise.
“Mm. Dunno why I even bother asking.” She’s kidding, though, he thinks. “And when’s the last time you cut your hair. Look like a shaggy dog.”
Don’t remind him. A few more weeks of growth and he’ll start getting dysphoria about that too, but with everything going on, he’s lucky he’s brushing his teeth once a day, or showering at all. He rolls his eyes and she seems to get the message. She looks out over the yard, at the big rhododendron bush at the edge of her property where she buried the pistol that killed her husband. That must’ve happened, what, forty years ago?
The worms have been here awhile.
Tammy says, “Sweetheart, can I be honest with you for a second?”
It’s not like he’s going to tell her no. She takes a sip of her iced tea.
“For the past two decades,” she says, “give or take, my job was to make sure that a single baby wasn’t born to the hives around here.”
Oh.
Crane is struck with belly-deep pain so sharp and sudden he almost doesn’t recognize it. He grasps for it, mentally fumbling like he always does with feelings.
“Babies are nothing but trouble for the worms,” Tammy says. “They’re a mouth to feed, they draw attention, they’re a liability. Plus, you know, sometimes they kill their mothers, and we can’t have that.”
Crane stares into the distance. At the dark tree line, where Washville devolves into wilderness.
“Didn’t happen all that often,” Tammy continues. “We’re an antisocial bunch, ain’t we. Not one of us fit for wanting babies, let alone raising them. But accidents happen. Bad things happen too. And used to be that I could take money out of the till, bring them to a clinic, and pay under the table to make it all go away. When that didn’t work, I found them an antibiotic and a muscle relaxer, got them stinking drunk, and dug in there myself with something sharp.”
What the hell is she doing, then? Why is she still talking? Why are they both just sitting here? They could sneak away from Levi and Stagger both, skip the alcohol, he’ll grit his teeth through a procedure in the kitchen. Let her pull out whatever tools she uses, force open the cervix with whatever’s on hand, give him a rag to bite on.
Tammy must see all that on his face.
“A few months ago,” she says, “the worms told me to stop. Stop traveling, stop checking on girls, everything. My job was just to stay here with you.”
She purses her lips, sucks on her crooked teeth, can’t seem to get over the rancid taste of the words forming in her mouth.
“So first you, then her. Your brute shows up. The worms want whatever it is that’s inside you. I don’t—” She gestures. “I see the pieces, but can’t figure out what the hell to make of them. All I know is that I don’t like it.”
She says, “And I’d make it as right as I can, but I ain’t looking forward to dying.”
And then she’s getting up. Groaning as she goes, cursing her old knees and the weather and the rain that’s just passed through.
All this time Tammy has been getting rid of babies, and she won’t do it for him. Not for the kid she took under her wing, considers more of her child than her actual daughter. Because the hive told her no.
“Oh,” Tammy says with a snort. “How long you been there, Jess?”
Jess, on the other side of the screen door, shrugs. “Not long,” she says, but even Crane can tell that’s a lie.
First-time births take forever. Muscles struggle, organs refuse to stretch, the cervix thins weakly like it isn’t quite sure if this is what it’s supposed to do.
