I started dating my most serious boyfriend when I was a junior. I’d gone out with plenty of guys before, but this was different, mainly in the aspect that I really liked this guy. Before, it was just kind of something to do, you know? It was never a big deal until I met Judas.
I had a crush on him from the beginning. I don’t know what it was about him. He was attractive, but not a showstopper, one of those guys who looks like a movie star. There was just something about him that pulled you in, like a magnetic force. He was the kind of guy who you stared at in class but never made a move on; he had the kind of face that you’d doodle in your notebook without noticing.
Anyways, I started dating him near the end of the year after I finally got the courage to ask him out, God knows how. He was a super nice guy. Polite, funny, a little socially awkward, but it wasn’t a huge thing. And eventually he ended up being the guy to take my virginity. But that’s another story. So yeah, Judas was my first everything, pretty much. Or the first one who was real. And then he ended up moving away again, something about his family’s job or whatever, and I never saw him again.
Ironically, the very day that he left was the day that my morning sickness started. At first I thought it was the flu, because it came with these awful pounding migraines, but there were no other symptoms. No chills, no fever, nothing. So, absolutely scared shitless, I went to Costco, bought a pregnancy test, peed on the stick, and when two lines appeared, I dropped it in the toilet and flushed it down, then threw out the whole box.
So now I was pregnant. This posed a huge problem, seeing as I was seventeen and my parents would literally kill me. I’d had a strict Catholic upbringing, and premarital sex was to them what murdering someone with your own hands would be to other parents.
I whipped out my phone and Googled—and this is seriously the first thing that my brain told me to do—“abortion cost in california.” The results were unspecific and mentioned health insurance, which instantly brought to mind my parents going over the bills and seeing “YOUR DAUGHTER’S ABORTION” in big red letters, so that was out of the running. My only options were to miscarriage or to run away.
Over the next few weeks, as my vomiting increased so much that at one point I had to convince my mom that I wasn’t bulimic, I found that I wasn’t hating the prospect of having a baby. At night, I was extra careful lying on my stomach, which was ridiculous, because at that point there wouldn’t have been much more than a clump of cells. I found myself talking to the baby idly, telling it about my day—I even decided that it was going to be a girl, and named her Maya.
But I swear I could hear her talking back sometimes. When I told her about my day, I could sometimes hear this reedy little voice responding, offering comfort, telling me that she loved me. I thought it was a normal thing—to hear your unborn kid talking to you in your mind. And the faster she grew, the more she spoke, the more defined her words became.
And she grew fast. I even googled it to make sure that I was normal, which I certainly wasn’t: baby bumps aren’t supposed to be noticeable until well into the second trimester, but by my seventh week, I was having trouble fitting into some of my looser jeans. I began wearing big sweaters, which I could fortunately justify with the fact that it was now January, but I chewed my nails to shreds fretting about what I would do when March came around.
I don’t remember the first time the baby moved, but I do remember the unease that grew each time after that. It wasn’t simply little kicks; at times it felt like the baby was physically trying to rip me open from the inside. By 16 weeks, I spent days on end lying in bed clutching my stomach, my insides roiling as the child inside of me jostled violently.
Sometimes, when it got particularly bad, I could see it happening in the mirror—seeing reptilian ripples travelling across my stomach, back and forth, like the lashing of a tail.
At 20 weeks, I started vomiting this gooey black phlegm. It coated the inside of my mouth and left a foul funk on my tongue that I could never get rid of, no matter how much water I swigged or how many times I cleared my throat.
Sometimes I got angry at the unborn child inside my womb. I thought that she was purposefully trying to ruin my life, that she made me this sick on purpose. The very thought just made me want to cry, but I hadn’t been able to produce tears in a while, I don’t know why. Maybe it was hormones or something. I always felt embarrassed when flashes of rage traveled through me in response to Maya’s movements. I was going to be a terrible mother.
When I was six months pregnant, my “bump” became less of a bump and more of a prominent bulge. My stomach was distended and covered in veins; my skin took on a sickly pallor, and my appetite stopped entirely. Strangely, though I was eating less and less, Maya got more and more active. The movements were so violent that sometimes she would physically jerk me forwards.
Some mornings, it became routine to wake up and peel layers of flesh that flaked off of my belly during the night, as if I were rotting from the inside. The phlegm didn’t stop either.
One night, Maya would not calm down, no matter what I did. I sang to her, I drank warm milk, I cried hysterically, I listened to music, and still she thrashed inside me as if enraged, flaying me from within. I was in tears, frustrated to the point of hysteria. So much so, in fact, that I dug my nails into my stomach and let out a guttural groan of frustration. And my tender skin was so papery and thin that I ended up ripping away a section of flesh the size of a playing card.
That was the first time I felt it: this dark, ravening force deep within me, urging me forward. Urging me to…eat it.
This black hunger was spoken in Maya’s voice. Whispering deep within me. A little girl’s voice, begging me to feast on my own torn stomach. On my own hot, thick blood.
I tried it again—sinking my nails into my belly, carving up wedges of myself. And once I allowed myself to do it a second time, I lost it. I was unable to stop myself from pulling away lumps of tissue—not just little flakes, but whole palmfuls of the stuff, shredding my pregnant tummy into bloody strips as I bit my left hand to keep myself from screaming in agony.
I couldn’t stop myself. I kept ripping myself apart, hot tears running down my face, blood staining the sheets and my legs and the hem of my shirt.
I had to stop when I looked first at my hands, soaked to the knuckle in crimson, and then at my belly, which was covered in deep whitish-pink lacerations and spilling gore all over my pretty purple sheets. Shakily, I covered it up again with my shirt, pressing the fabric against the stinging incisions.
And then—this was the strangest part—I noticed the actual hunks of discarded skin littered around me and felt that strange hunger, and before I realized quite what I was doing I was eating my own flesh. It was tangy and metallic with blood, and a little salty, though mostly tasteless, my teeth sinking through it easily. It slid so smoothly down my throat.
From inside my stomach, Maya finally lay still.
I knew that this wasn’t normal. There was something wrong with me and with my baby. But God, if she would finally just stop twisting inside of me like a snake, and stop forcing me to vomit everything in my stomach every night, then so be it.
Strangely calm, I went downstairs. It was probably midnight, and my parents were fast asleep. I took a carving knife out of our kitchen cabinet and rotated it slowly in the moonlight streaming through the window.
Then, before I could stop myself, I raised the knife and brought it down hard on my thumb, cutting five inches into the skin.
The pain wasn’t like I was expecting. It wasn’t just raw, scorching, fiery misery. It was a strangely clean feeling. Shiny, like the blade of the knife. I don’t know how to explain it.
And I couldn’t stop. I was physically compelled to bite myself hard enough to bleed to stop my screams from coming out as I sawed through my bone and cut my finger off.
Maya spoke again in that soft little girl’s voice, hungrily, desperately.
Eat. Eat.
I put my own bloody finger into my mouth and bit down hard, feeling my teeth crunch through bone. Warmth flooded my mouth as I gulped it down, nail polish crumbling down my throat. God, it hurt, but I felt so satisfied.
More, that horrible whisper begged deep in my mind.
But now I was staring at the knife again, its blade lined with a slick of scarlet. Call me crazy, but something about it was so seductive that I just spent maybe three minutes staring at it, turning it over slowly in my hand, admiring that blade. I could feel myself getting wet looking at this weapon that moments before had literally severed away part of my body.
I was still strangely calm, just aware of my skinned, raw stomach and the stump of my thumb that smeared every surface with blood. I felt sly, almost snakelike, as I crept back up the stairs and to the bathroom, patching myself up with rubbing alcohol and sterile white bandages, like I was in a hospital. All the while the knife was lying on the counter, glimmering in the light.
I took the blade back up to my room, closing the door, and sat down on the bed with it, tracing its blade over my thighs. Not breaking skin, just barely touching it, trailing spirals and stars over my skin. My heart started to pound and I felt myself becoming more and more aroused by the second. It was only when I noticed the way I was digging the blade deeper and deeper into my skin, sending beads of blood rolling down my calf, that I felt my senses return to me.
Terrified, I dropped it on the bed, getting to my feet, and in response Maya slithered inside me, filling my mind with unintelligible murmurs. I was shaking, drenched in cold sweat. Quickly, I shoved the still-bloody knife under my bed, a hand clamped over my mouth, wanting to retch my guts out.
I can’t explain what I was thinking then. All that I know is that I was in some weird trance, and only now that I’d resurfaced—and that while I was running the blade over my legs, I had been so, so tempted to shove the knife inside me.
Blade up.
I don’t know how I managed to sleep that night, but I did. And life continued.
The urges vanished for a little while. My appetite was still gone. I was looking worse and worse for wear, and I couldn’t possibly hide my pregnant belly.
My mother knew. Maybe she knew the entire time. I could tell by the pained looks she shot me, the way she sometimes had to cover her eyes to stop her tears when she saw me. But my father was mostly oblivious. He was concerned about my bloating, and because he was certain in the notion that his daughter would never dare defy the scriptures and perform most unholy acts with a man before I was wed, he took me to the doctor to see if I had a tumor. And who would’ve guessed—I was well into my third trimester. Wow, what a surprise!
He took it much, much better than I expected. All the way home, I cried and begged him to speak to me, but he refused to say a word. His face was drained of all color, and he kept shaking his head and muttering under his breath.
The moment we stepped foot into the house, he was scurrying up to their bedroom to blab to my mother. He came downstairs not thirty seconds later and slapped me so hard that I saw stars and my ears rang. He screamed at me for three hours, calling me a disgrace, a horrible child, a whore, a filthy harlot. A blight on the family. And names much worse than those…
I tried to contain my sobs as I told him about Judas, and how I’d wanted to get an abortion, but at the very word his face turned purple and his screaming started again. By the end of the night, I was curled up in bed with my hands over my ears, only Maya for company. I was shocked that they didn’t kick me out of the house entirely, but the worst they did was take away my phone and ban me from any kind of socialization—including school.
I didn’t find that out until the next day, when I woke up at noon and ran downstairs in a panic, only to have my mother tell me, ashen-faced, “We’ve withdrawn you from education right now. You have chosen to sin, and now we must bring forth the product of your mistake.”
I was in shock. “How’d you manage that?”
“We’ve withdrawn you,” she repeated.
“Wait. Did you drop me out of school?” I demanded.
Tears formed in her eyes, and she turned away and didn’t say a word to me.
I’d fucked up, majorly. But that goes without saying.
And all the while, I was getting more and more scared of myself and the strange urges that overtook me. Now that I wasn’t in school, I spent the whole day alone with myself. And with Maya.
And with the knife under my bed.
Three days. That’s how long I resisted the pangs in my stomach before I finally pulled it out. Somehow, with all of the pregnancy insanity, my missing finger had gone unnoticed— another blessing of my oversized hoodies—but I was acutely aware of how much harder it was to grip things with only four fingers. So this time, I peeled off my clothes and, naked in my room, dug the edge into my leg and plunged it in up to the handle before digging upwards again, loosing a slab of meat so large that the amount of blood that emerged when the knife came out was dizzying and nearly made me pass out.
My skin and bone tasted so good. I ate like a wild animal, smearing my face with viscera, bawling the entire time. And when I had finished that off, I shoved the knife back in, cutting away swathes of my leg. First one, then the other. And then hacking away parts of my arms, my chest, my butt. Until finally I was lying on the floor in a pool of my own blood, unable to move, feebly licking my own wounds. Literally lapping up the copious amounts of gore spilling out of me.
Of course, my mom came running, bursting inside. She saw my entire body coated in scarlet, the knife lying next to me with its blade and handle dyed red, and screamed so loud that my head rattled.
That was how I ended up going to the hospital. My dad was driving, my mom in the backseat with me staunching my countless wounds. The car veered sharply around a fork in the road, and that’s when I felt it.
My water breaking.
That’s the last coherent memory I have of anything. I have blurry, distant flashes of being carried into the ER. Doctors in blue surgical masks wheeling me into a room. Shots injected into my arm that did nothing to lessen the searing torture flashing through my whole body. My own voice, impossibly deep, crying out in pain, speaking words I don’t understand.
And Judas, showing up in the emergency room somehow, staring at me blankly as I heaved and shrieked and gave birth to his baby.
I was faintly aware of the hours passing. Twilight falling outside the window of the ward. And still it went on, and on, and on. I wanted to rip myself apart. I wanted to die. I didn’t want to feel like this anymore, but it didn’t stop, it went on and on an on. I remember being certain that I had died, that I was in hell and this was my punishment for sinning with Judas.
Beyond that, I have one memory of the actual birth. It was the horrified look on the doctor’s face when he pulled her out. I didn’t see Maya, didn’t get a glimpse of my baby girl, but I just remember the terror on his face, the way that the nurse fell back with a hand over her mouth.
After that, there was darkness. It settled over me like a velvety blanket. I basked in the sweet relief of dreamless sleep, up until my eyes fluttered open and I found myself in a dark room, wearing my paper hospital gown stained with blood, and met Judas’s dark eyes.
“Hello,” he said calmly, collectedly, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary.
“Hi…?” My voice sounded awful. I pushed a sweaty clump of hair out of my eyes.
Judas looked different. More angular, a sharpened sword. Sword…Images of my own body sliced open flashed before me, and I shut my eyes hard, willing the dizziness to stop.
“You did a good job feeding our child,” he said. “Better than others. You never went for help, even when you were cutting off your own body parts…”
There was something in his voice I couldn’t identify, so I looked up and saw the adoration shining in his eyes, and realized that he was admiring me for it. Impressed by how I’d hacked away at myself to sate the desperate, dark compulsion in my chest.
There was something so wrong with this boy.
“Who are you?” I asked.
That was when he changed fully. It was as if he had been waiting for me to ask all along, as if those three words were a charm to break him free of his prison. His human skin peeled away and fell into a torn heap at his feet, like a moth breaking out of its cocoon.
Underneath that…I don’t even know how to begin to describe it. How do I describe what infinity is, when I can’t even comprehend it myself? Thousands of eyes, mottled silver and gold scales, six pairs of angelic white wings that looked as soft as velvet. A smile that was impossibly long. Rows and rows and rows of teeth—but all of them different shapes and sizes, some razor-sharp, others flat and dull, as if he’d taken them all from different sources. As if they weren’t his to begin with.
“I am everyone,” he intoned in a voice that sounded just like what Maya’s had, in my head when I was hurting myself. “I am no one. I am everything and nothing. I am the stuff of stars and of black holes. I am time itself, the endless ebb and flow of ocean waves, the darkness inside your mind, the night terrors that haunt you in sleep. I am your fear, I am your joy, I am your god.”
My whole body trembled like a leaf. I was barely able to force out the words, “What have you done with my baby?”
If possible, his—its—jaws widened even further, revealing a sickeningly red tongue and a throat so black and endless I shuddered. “My dear, it was never yours. Nothing is yours. All of everything is mine. Even you.”
It lunged at me. Its jaws closed around my body, and I jolted into consciousness. I was lying in a hospital bed. The world was dark except for the faint triangle of light filtering through the thin curtains over the window. Machines beeped next to me.
Where was my baby? Where were my parents? My belly felt empty and hollow without Maya. I started to cry.
By morning, I was losing my mind. When a nurse finally walked in the room, I wanted to weep from relief.
“Where is she?” I begged her as she hurried to my side. “Where is my child?”
The nurse’s eyes softened in pity. “Oh, honey. Your son was stillborn. There were some unseen complications in the pregnancy, I’m afraid. He’d strangled himself with the umbilical cord by the time he came out. I’m so sorry.”
My befuddled brain refused to comprehend. “Unseen…complications?”
“That’s right,” the nurse said sadly, taking my hand. “He was deformed—he wouldn’t have survived anyways, but it’s not your fault at all. He was missing some vital organs, honey, but your boy is in a better place.”
“My boy? A…son?”
“That’s right.” She wiped her eyes hurriedly and clasped my hand.
“Your beautiful baby boy.”