My wife Emily is incredibly religious. From the jewelry she wears, to her complete unwillingness to skip Sunday mass.
I have no issue with this. Or, at least I didn’t at first.
As per her request, we got married in a church, attended a preparatory program, and even waited until after the big day to have sex.
I mean, sure, perhaps we rushed into it a bit. You’d be surprised how well withholding sex works when it comes to a proposal. Emily and I had only been going out - or courting as she insisted on calling it - for six months before I got on one knee and popped the question. To this day I’m not entirely sure what my motivation was.
On the one hand, Emily is great. She’s beautiful, kind, caring - all that jazz. On the other hand, I feel that her devotion sometimes…interferes with logical thinking. For example, she believes that masturbation is a surefire way to end up in hell. I remember this one with particular clarity after Emily walked in on me rubbing one out in the shower.
There are other… curiosities too. Such as the idea that starvation - or fasting - brings you closer to God, any negative occurrences are merely ‘God’s plan’, and that even the possession of any kind of contraception is inherently evil.
Now, before you say anything, I knew about that last one before we got married. Emily made it clear that she has always wanted to have children and that it would be the first order of post-wedding business.
I conceded, as I have never been opposed to the idea of kids myself, although I didn’t understand the rush either. I mean, why couldn’t we wait a bit, see if we were at least sexually compatible?
I got my wish in the end, but not at all in the way either of us had expected. After trying for several months we went to see a doctor. That’s how we found out that Emily wasn’t able to conceive. She cried for weeks on end and bought stacks and stacks of books on infertility. Some pages are still stuck together with tears.
But once it became clear that science was helpless, she turned to the one book that always solved all of her troubles.
The Bible.
“God has always answered my prayers,” she said, “He’ll answer this one too.”
Now, look - I understand. I really do. Everyone deals with grief differently, so I didn’t bug her about it. Not even when she’d read it aloud for hours in bed when I had work in the morning. She prayed a lot too. What used to be a quick prayer before bed, quickly turned into hour-long sessions of crying and whispering words unknown to me.
However, instead of getting better, she started shrinking in front of my eyes. Her skin turned translucent and she looked like she’d dropped about thirty pounds since she’d found out. I wasn’t home during the day, so her rapid decline was even more apparent.
“Honey, maybe you should see a doctor,” I suggested after I came home one afternoon to find her hunched over the kitchen table. At first, I thought she was crying, but as she raised her head to look at me, I realized my mistake.
Her face was a light shade of green and her lips were covered in dried skin-colored gunk. She looked like she hadn’t slept a wink the previous night.
“Emily! Oh my God!” I charged toward her and cupped her face in my hands, “What happened?”
She didn’t answer immediately, swaying dangerously from side to side, as though she was about to pass out.
“I… I… have some good news,” she whispered eventually, brushing her fringe away from her clammy forehead, “I just feel really…sick.”
With that, she slid off her chair and bolted towards the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. I could hear gargled retching and thumping coming from inside.
“Emily!” I called again, “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
No answer. The retching had ceased and the bathroom was totally silent. I paced around the corridor, picking at the skin on my thumb, wondering if she’d lost consciousness.
“Emily?”
The bathroom lock clicked and a wide-eyed Emily emerged, the corners of her lips still crusty with puke. She looked even more sickly than before, and only now I noticed how limply her clothes hung from her frail frame. But despite her obvious ailment she… was smiling.
“Josh,” she whispered, gliding towards me as though she was a ghost, “I have something to tell you.”
A chill crawled up my spine. Seeing my wife so sick and yet so…buoyant was a sight nothing short of unnatural. Two pink spots appeared on her hollow cheeks, as the last of the blood in her body flooded her face.
“Honey…” she took my hands in hers, her eyes twinkling, “I’m… I’m pregnant!”
I stared at her, alarms blaring in my mind.
“Isn’t that great?”
“But…” I started, my skin prickling, “We…we haven’t had sex in months…”
She beamed as though this was a part of the good news, “I know!”
“Then how…” I stammered, mentally accounting for all the times I’d left Emily on her own, “…Are-are you cheating on me?”
The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them. But how could my wife be pregnant if we hadn’t had sex?
Her face turned pale again.
“Of-of course I’m not cheating on you!” she looked legitimately hurt, “Honey, it’s a miracle!”
“What…what miracle, Emily? I don’t understand. How can you be pregnant?”
She wiped the tears welling up in her eyes, “I prayed every single day for God to give us a child. Now, he has!”
I chewed the inside of my lip, wondering if my wife had finally lost it.
“I knew God would help us!” she squealed, “I never doubted it for a second! We’re having a baby, Josh! Why…why aren’t you happy?”
“Well, perhaps it’s because…I mean, wait, so you’re telling me this baby was immaculately conceived..?”
“Yes!” she cried, almost leaping up and down with joy, “Can you believe it?”
I most certainly couldn’t, but Emily was looking at me as though she had just witnessed the Second Coming.
“Well…show me the pregnancy test!” I said, peeking over her shoulder into the bathroom, “You…you did take one, didn’t you?”
Her face fell.
“No…I didn’t need to…”
I stared at her, completely at a loss for what to say.
“… I know because God gave me a sign!”
“What…what sign would that be..?”
She grinned from ear to ear as though this was exactly the question she was waiting for me to ask, suddenly pulling up her baggy sweatshirt to reveal her stomach.
It was bloated and pot-shaped, curving downwards as if she’d swallowed a deflated ball.
Sweat sprang out on the back of my neck as I stared at it in horror. My wife, on the other hand, looked delighted.
“What do you think, Josh?” she chirped, as though she was merely asking my opinion on a new pair of shoes, “Isn’t it amazing?”
“Erm…it’s…it’s….,” I choked, “Honey, c-can we go to the doctor?”
Her smile disappeared, “A doctor? Josh, we have God helping us now! What kind of doctor could possibly be better than th-?”
She clutched her stomach suddenly, her gag reflex kicking in.
“Emily?” I gasped, alarmed, “What’s going on?”
She heaved, a hand over her mouth, a glob of saliva hanging from her bottom lip. I reached out to help her, but she shook her head weakly, “No! Just-just leave it, I’ll be fine!”
“Fine?” I stared in bewilderment at her belly, still exposed beneath her top. It seemed to be…moving.
“It’s-it’s kicking!” she cried, clutching it with her free hand, “Look, honey, our baby is kicking!”
It was kicking, alright. Her belly was morphing with slow, rhythmic waves.
“What…what is that?” I whispered, taking a few steps back.
But she retched before she could answer, a stream of bile spilling out of her mouth and onto the carpet. Something was squirming in the light brown liquid. It was gray and about one foot long. It writhed around the puddle as if it was gasping for air - like a fish on the shore.
“That’s a…that’s a…” I gulped, grabbing onto the doorframe to steady myself.
And then they were spilling out of her nostrils, like long, rubbery globs of snot.
Slimy, white worms were hitting the ground with rain-like thumps and slithering across the floorboards.
“Emily!” I yelled, gripping her by the shoulders and bending her forwards, in a feeble attempt to help. Worms were crowning in her throat now too, blocking her airways, and sending her crumpling to the ground.
With shaking hands, I mashed the buttons for 911. My wife’s eyes were glassy and bloodshot, as she lay on the carpet surrounded by hundreds of bile-drenched slugs.
The doctors couldn’t save her. She was pronounced dead before we even reached the hospital.
“Your wife had a severe case of… roundworms,” the doctor shook his head, obviously jarred, “The condition is not usually lethal and we’ve never seen anything like it. Why didn’t she come for a check-up before it got to this stage?”
There was nothing I could possibly say to make sense of the situation.
“She…she thought she was pregnant,” I whispered, staring down at my hands.
“Pregnant?” the doctor sounded bewildered, “Certainly some pregnancy…”
I knew all too well how it must have sounded. I blamed myself for Emily’s death. If I’d been there, if I’d spent more time with her, perhaps this could have been avoided.
But…she was gone and nothing was going to bring her back.
Well, except maybe a miracle.
I immediately regretted the thought.
Because you see, that’s when I first felt the gnawing in the pits of my stomach.