I used to feel guilty that I stayed home and ate Doritos while my girlfriend Jemma went off on a secret military mission. I suppose that’s what led me here, to the _________________YMCA, accompanying her to what I consider to be a completely unnecessary birthing class.
The birthing class instructor is a middle-aged woman. She’s sporting thick black bangs and the starry eyes of someone taken in by a cult. The room smells like some strange alchemy of sweat and pancake batter. I am both repulsed and desirous of licking the spoon.
Jemma looks intent, though I wish it weren’t so. She’s about as pregnant as I am, all things considered. But all the tests and doctors’ appointments in the world haven’t changed her mind. “It’s in there,” she insists. “Biding its time. The baby will be here soon, and we must be prepared.”
“We’re going to have soooo much fun today,” the instructor says with a confident smirk. “Aren’t we?”
Everyone else claps with tempered enthusiasm, but I don’t bother to move my hands at all, other than to check the time. I’m not judging the class itself, mind you, I just don’t think it’s applicable to our situation. My goal is to remain factually neutral, but supportive. I’ve done my research: PTSD manifests in many forms.
“We’re going to start off with some introductions,” the instructor says in a too-chipper tone. “My name is Wendy Davis, and I have been teaching this course for, oh…sixteen years.”
“Hello, Wendy,” everyone but me responds.
“A little louder, I didn’t hear you!”
“Christ,” I whisper to Jemma. “What does she think, she’s speaking to a room of kindergartners?” Jemma waves me away with a quick swipe of her right hand. Then she returns it to nestle along the flat beach of her belly. I watch her moist hands circle along the green fabric of her tank top, and I feel that gnawing pit in my own stomach grow.
All the other mothers have traditional baby bumps, but not Jemma. I start to sweat, even though the room temperature is perfectly adequate. I can’t believe this is how I’m spending my Sunday. I could be at the regional comic book convention down in _____________Town. Perhaps I got to set in my ways while Jemma was away. Sometimes I think I’d be happier on my own. (This I have never admitted before to anyone.)
Eventually, like the spreading red of infection, the introductions make their way to us.
“Hello, everyone” Jemma says in a loud, confident-sounding voice. “My name is Jemma and this is my significant other, Benjamin.”
“Ben’s fine,” I say. “Um…a good day to everyone.”
The instructor’s eyes narrow, and I can tell she’s already calculating the lack of mass in Jemma’s midsection.
“And what trimester are you in?” Wendy asks.
“Third, I guess?” says Jemma. “It’s…sort of complicated.”
“Well, we welcome you with open arms and full hearts, Jenna.”
“Thank you,” Jemma answers, suddenly shy. Her hands continue to unthinkingly massage her empty stomach. Neither of us correct Wendy about the mispronounced name.
I start to ask Jemma, “Do you think maybe we should—”
“We’re staying!” Jemma hisses, one step ahead of my thought process, as usual.
When she turns to glare at me, I notice that her brown eyes have turned a metallic purple. It only lasts a moment, but it terrifies me to the core of my being. Not for the first time this week, I think I detect a movement underneath her shoulder blades, something bending and twisting just below the bra line. Perhaps delusions can spread like a virus, or like fear.
Next comes a twenty-minute barrage of pro-breastfeeding propaganda. “Breast is best!”
I sit there in the semi-circle, like a bored preschooler, thinking of all the video games I could be playing back at the apartment. Every now and again I turn to Jemma, who is invariably shaking her head in agreement with whatever Wendy is selling. Her credulity pains me. How can a fierce warrior be so naive? She’s literally done things in real life that would have terrified me in video games.
At one point in Wendy’s monologue Jemma pinches me on the wrist. “Are you even listening?”
“Of course.”
“What’s the last thing Wendy said?”
“Um…something about sensitive nipples?” I guess.
“How are you going to help raise our baby when you insist on behaving like a child!”
I smile a little. It’s the first time she referred to the baby as “ours.”
When Jemma returned from the mission, we found it difficult to reconnect. She had been absent for four months for the training, and then another eight thereafter. She was forbidden from discussing the type of mission, or even where she had spent the year. She once mentioned something about implementing what she referred to as “pulse landmines,” but that was the most she would say. I think it involved descending to the depths of the ocean.
But still, I knew without her having to explain, that she had seen some things out there. Things that could never be forgotten. She had perhaps killed, or narrowly avoided death herself. How many comrades had she lost? She wouldn’t say. She doesn’t like to talk about it, and yet it’s ripping her apart inside.
The first week that Jemma returned she tried to act as though nothing had changed. She scheduled visits with all our friends, she ordered her favorite type of pizza (pineapples with black olives, yuck), and she even hinted that she wanted to be intimate “as soon as the shock wore off.”
But on her seventh day home, as we spooned under the shadowy death of our bedroom’s black light, she told me she was pregnant.
“You…you had a relationship with somebody while on your mission?” I asked. I was hurt by the idea, but understood we had been apart a long time. I just figured it was best to leave such things unsaid, if we were going to try and make it work between us. But it’s far tougher to hide a baby than a memory, at least for a while…
“No,” she said. “It’s not like that.”
“Then what, you’re carrying the Second Coming?”
“Something got to me out there,” she whispered, her eyes both earnest and fearful. “Through an open wound on my stomach while I was engaged on an exploratory mission. And now…I can feel it growing inside me.”
“A…baby?”
“A parasite. Or an alien….” She shook her head. “I…I don’t know. All I do know is that it’s mine and I’m going to keep it.”
Since then, she’s been resolute that she’s breathing for two.
“Okay,” says Wendy with a dramatic flair of her nostrils. “I think it’s time to split into teams and focus on conscious breathing exercises. Yay!”
Jemma is on her back now, staring up at me with a slightly mocking expression.
I say, “You know we’re never going to use this, right?”
She goes limp on the floor, splaying her arms out at her sides like a windmill. “Jill made Meghan come to birthing classes even though she knew she was going to have a C-section.”
“Yes, and at the time you thought that was…sort of ridiculous.”
Jemma places her hands on my hips and gives me a quick squeeze. “I just want you to be as committed to this as I am.”
I make a gesture to the room we inhabit. “Clearly I am.”
“Good, now help me calm down and breathe.”
As we practice, Wendy makes her rounds. She steps with all the delicacy of a gestapo. “Breathe from the sternum,” she tells the couple next to us. “Come on, Daddy, I hope you won’t be checking the sports score on your phone during the big day!”
She advises the room that she also sells pregnancy enhancing aroma therapies if anyone is interested, and that she’d just love to give a demonstration. I begin to suspect this whole birthing class thing is a front for her MLM’s.
Wendy hovers over us. At my angle from the floor, I can barely make out her expression of disgust, but it’s there all right.
“So…third trimester?” she says.
“Yes,” Jemma answers, defiant. “As I said before, it’s complicated.”
“Well, feel free to run anything by me,” Wendy says through a pasted-on smile. “Anything at all. I’m an old pro. Actually, I’ve been doing this for sixteen years.”
I say, “We’ll let you know if we need anything…”
Wendy kneels next to us on the blue, staple-strewn carpet. “May I feel the baby kick?” she asks.
“Actually, you may not,” says Jemma, recoiling from the older woman.
Wendy’s phony smile turns into a glowering tower of resentment. “I ought to call security,” she growls. “I’m not sure what your angle is, coming here when you’re clearly not pregnant. But it’s disrespectful to the other mothers who are actually doing the hard work of breathing for two.”
“Listen,” Jemma says, “you better get away from me or I’ll kick that smug look off your face.”
At that, everyone in the room grows super-quiet. Which means, of course, that everyone in the room heard the threat.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell Wendy, I tell the room, as terrified as anyone by Jemma. Perhaps more so. “Jemma’s a veteran, and she’s still finding her footing here in civilian life.”
“Well,” Wendy says while taking her feet. “If you can’t act decent in polite society, then maybe you should remove yourself from it.”
“And maybe you should go to hell,” I respond. “What kind of an operation is this, anyway?”
I help Jemma up and notice her eyes are now a steady and unflinching purple. I worry she’s going to pop a blood vessel or something. I also detect a slight, almost imperceptible quiver from the side of her neck. A lightning strike of terror assaults me, speeding up my heart rate and generally making me want to faint.
“You’re going to have to leave,” Wendy growls. “You’re upsetting the real mothers.”
“We ARE leaving,” I say, choking back thick spit and a strong urge to gag. “Come on, Jemma.”
“I am pregnant,” Jemma says in a near-whisper, tears pooling at the rims of her now fully purple eyes.
“She’s a veteran and this is how you treat her?” I say.
“I am pregnant,” Jemma insists, this time louder, almost screaming. “I’m going to have a baby, and nobody believes me!”
“I believe you,” I say, taking her hand in mine.
We walk out into the bright light of the afternoon sky, and I don’t bother once to look back at the judging eyes of Wendy Davis.
Jemma’s hand feels clammy as I help her into the passenger side. I turn on the air conditioning but keep the car parked. I want to try and get a handle on this situation.
“That…dick!” Jemma screams, punching at the dash.
“I know,” I say. “Try to forget it. People like that aren’t worth it.”
Jemma reclines in the passenger chair, leans all the way back as though she’s about to get a teeth cleaning. “But you believe me?” she asks. There is a distinct pleading in the tone of her quivering voice.
“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”
She takes my hand in hers. “Ouch,” she says. “With all the excitement, I think I might be delivering early.”
“Then you better breathe in and out, just like we learned,” I say, terrified that something might happen, yet also nervous that nothing will. At this moment, I cannot make out a future for us. All I want is a clear path forward.
“But…we didn’t complete the course…” Jemma says. “How will I know what to do?”
“It’ll be all right.”
She breathes in and out, sweat beading under her brows.
“I do love you,” I say, hoping I’m worthy of her, while inwardly knowing I never will be.
“I love you too. I’m sorry things have been…weird since I got back.”
“It’s okay. I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to understand.”
She breathes in and out, again and again, and on the tenth or twelfth exhale she pushes, and a long, thin, snake-like creature exits her skin just below the clavicle bone on her shoulder.
“Jesus,” I scream, recoiling. I am ashamed to say my first instinct is to run away screaming. That or bash it with something. The ‘child’ is something alien and unnatural. Slippery, wet, with demon-like claws and the incisors of a wolf on steroids.
It’s thin, an inch or so in diameter, but once unspooled its length is about seven feet long. It slivers around and around Jemma’s waist, circling in on itself, as though seeking warmth.
“Hello, little one,” she says excitedly. She cradles the creature’s head in her arms, and it snuggles up against her neck. I do my best to apply pressure to the wound where the baby alien exited. Jemma’s bleeding all over my Prius. I spray her wound with some hand sanitizer spray leftover from the pandemic.
“I told you!” Jemma says with a wild-eyed smile. “I told you I was going to be a mother!”
“You sure did.” (I’m not sure what else to say.)
“And now you’re a father,” she says. “If you’re willing…”
“Yes,” I whisper, choking down the urge to vomit but also experiencing some transcendent sensation of love. “Anything! Anything for you and…our child.”
“Then you need to get some food for little Cassie,” she says.
“Cassie?” I say. “Food?”
“Yes,” Jemma says. “That Wendy Davis should do nicely.”
I look into Jemma’s eyes to see if she is joking, but she is deadly serious. The snakelike little creature makes out a suckling noise with its lips.
Little Cassie’s new to this world, and she’s mighty hungry. I know then that for the first time in forever, everything is about to make sense.
“It’s okay,” I tell our child. “Daddy’s going to get you dinner.”
And I finally realize that it’s about time I did something in the real world, instead of partaking in simulated experiences through various media. I make my way out of the Prius, feeling how the first cave person must have felt leaving their cave.
It’s time to hunt. It’s time to hunt for my family.