Fiction
She’s been pregnant for 665 days but she could easily pass for a woman in her fourth month. She’s still full of beans, and perfectly comfortable, despite the now quite regular manifestations of the baby underneath her skin. Sometimes it’ll use its feet to stretch her forehead, sometimes she’ll find the imprint of its spine on her thigh, and other times she’ll see its tiny fingers play the violin with the veins in her wrist.
The baby manifested for the first time when one evening, as her husband was getting himself ready for some mid-coital ear-biting, he noticed what looked like a small hand pressing out from the inside of his wife’s left cheek. At first, he believed she was messing with him—they’ve always loved mocking the Titanic scene with the hand up against the window, but after checking all corners of her mouth, he had to agree she wasn’t. The husband is a rational being most of the time, but at that moment he did believe his wife was possessed. She told him not to be daft. It was obvious the hand was the baby’s. If it had been a demon, it would surely have hurt and she’d felt nothing but the slightest tickle.
To be on the safe side, they drove to the hospital, where they were given an intern who unearthed her patient file and, after a while, noticed the dates of their appointments: the woman had been pregnant for more than eleven months. Initially, the couple considered blaming themselves for not noticing, or their relatives for not caring enough, but soon decided it was the fault of their obstetrician. The man was geriatric and hadn’t changed his methods much since he started out.
As the woman hadn’t had any ultrasounds, she was carted off to radiology. Her husband was abandoned along the way: it was believed the woman had had intercourse with a species that required a longer process of gestation and nobody wanted to break the news. Bets were allowed until the monitor was switched on. The baby was human. Granted, it had taken more than one ultrasound image to capture it, but that was also the case for babies who respected conventional timetables.
A human being is, after all, a lot to take in.
After the bets were paid out, the woman was administered drugs to induce labor. Her husband, some lucky interns, several attendants and all consultants (including an ENT and a geriatrician) assembled to stare at the woman’s cervix. As nothing happened, things were inserted: a hook (for the membranes), a vacuum cup (for the baby’s head), a hand and part of an arm, and then two different people’s hands simultaneously (to rule out ineptitude). In the end, a curtain was installed to separate the woman’s head from her body and she was cut open.
Nothing.
Her womb was so empty it filled the room the way a baby’s silence might have. Several people threw up. Others crossed themselves. The woman was given another ultrasound and another one with a different machine. The baby still couldn’t be captured in a single shot, but together, the pictures did add up to what was generally accepted a human being. The image wouldn’t get fully set until after birth but there were feet and a belly and a head. Enough, for now, to prevent anyone from imagining anything wild, or different, or at all.
Another hand was inserted.
With the baby very much still inside of her, the woman was sent home. She Ubered as her husband was still in recovery—he’d thrown up so violently he’d fainted and fallen face-first onto the vacuum cup. In the back seat, the woman remembered how, before the C-section, he’d said that what with the world and its hands in her, an exorcism might have been a better choice. He’d pretended lightheartedness but she knew he would want to go and find a priest as soon as they got out.
She also knew she’d never see him again. As the woman realized this, the baby curled itself around her neck the way the sun would, and the husband never could.
Utterly, totally, selflessly.
After four weeks of going about her life, the woman had a visit from her mother-in-law. When she opened the door, she noticed that the older woman took a step back to check the house number, unsure if the woman she was looking at was the woman she’d looked at so many times before.
The woman wasn’t so sure herself.
“Women have been popping out babies since forever,” the mother-in-law said. “It’s basic physics: it got in, so it has to come out.”
To the woman, it sounded like something you might say to a child who’s swallowed a Lego or something else unfit for consumption.
“I guess it just isn’t ready yet,” the woman said.
“Nonsense! You’ll burst! Do you at least know its sex by now? And have you decided on a name?”
“No,” the woman said, “but I’ve found a preschool and suitable friends. Bought the plot of land next to ours. It’s all set. Everything’s been decided.”
The mother-in-law still wasn’t looking at her. For fear she’d changed again? Or was she afraid she herself might change?
“You just have to let it go. It’s not natural for a child to stay with its mother that long.”
The woman felt like saying something about the husband. She also felt like saying she’d never felt more … loose. It was as if everything that had become fixed by her birth had been set free. The woman had no memory, obviously, but she felt as if she hadn’t been as much since before she was born.
As many.
She hadn’t popped out a baby, no. But something had popped.
Like buttons on a jacket.
Day 666. According to the tabloids, at least. She feels like pointing out that every civilization has counted time differently. For all she knows, she’s been expecting for minus 705. Or for fathoms and imploding stars. But after today, when the baby again doesn’t come, they might finally realize she’s not carrying the Antichrist. They might even find someone else who fails to deliver.
The woman has installed herself in the living room with the lights switched on and the curtains open. She wonders if the crowd outside appreciates the resemblance to a birthing room, and if they do, if they realize they’re the ones in the delivery bed this time. The woman feels like she’s earned the right to imagine their legs open wide. To picture their feet in stirrups, particularly those of her husband and the consultants, now trying to stare her and the baby into submission from her front lawn. But she doubts they’ve ever opened anything at all.
When it’s dark enough outside, the woman switches off each lamp until the streetlights morph her window into a massive mirror. At first, she sees them see nothing—just the limits of their own reflections—but then, maybe, just possibly, in all that nothing, something finally seems to stir.
Sofie De Smyter is an English TA and student counselor at KU Leuven (Belgium). Words in Profiles, The Belfield Literary Review, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2024, and Litro. She was shortlisted for this year’s Fish Publishing Prize.