The baby was a monster.
That wasn’t a metaphor. It was real—and growing inside of Melanie. At first, they thought heart defect. Dr. L pressed the transduceragainst her belly and listened. Melanie expected the sound she’d heard with her two sisters’ pregnancies—a rhythmic, metallic whisper, like someone bending a tiny saw back and forth. But what came through the speakers was hard and clattering, like Legos shaken in a tin bucket.
“Hmm,” said Dr. L, and no syllable had ever been more terrifying.
The doctor tested the doppler device with Melanie’s heartbeat, and it was rapid and distressed but normal. Human. The placental sounds came through like wind rippling through leaves. The blood inside Melanie did what blood was supposed to do. It cascaded with purpose through her veins, plumped her heart. But every time the wand passed over the space where the baby’s heart should beat, where it did beat, it sounded like nothing they’d ever heard. Wild and chaotic. Wrong.
They couldn’t tell much from the image on the screen. It looked like television static brought to life. Shapeshifting shadows engaged in a restless liquid shifting. It never stopped moving, thrusting itself against the container of Melanie’s womb, which she experienced as a nauseating flutter. Butterflies but not. Beetles.
Dr. L frowned and called in colleagues to crowd the machines. They arrived with their crafted smiles, their thin greetings. They came into the room with the bounce of curiosity and left with something much colder. “It’s too early for amniocentesis,” they said. “But we should do one as soon as we can.”
“Well, what is it?” Jonah asked anyone who’d answer, though no one did, actually, answer.
Melanie knew he meant what was the problem. What disease or syndrome. But in her mind, she knew the real question: what the hell was growing inside her? She felt its wrongness. Felt it the way you feel a stranger behind you in a midnight parking lot. She was in perpetual flight mode, but she couldn’t flee from her own body.
At ten weeks, the nausea started. Melanie couldn’t stop salivating, and when she spit into the sink, the drool came out like cobwebs—dryer and stringier than it should be and tinged a sickly yellow. Her extremities swelled. Her joints stiffened. And either she didn’t want to eat anything— couldn’t if she tried—or she moved through her kitchen like a threshing machine, gobbling everything in her path, discarding anything she didn’t crave or couldn’t, now, digest. No rhyme or reason to it, though the fresher the food was, the stronger her body’s rejection of it. The sight of a sliced apple made her vomit. So did the smell of baked bread. But she tore open packages of ramen and ate them raw like biscuits, pouring the salty powder onto a plate and dipping moistened fingers in to stuff in her mouth.
“This isn’t right,” she told Jonah. “This can’t be…normal.” “Pregnancy cravings,” he said. “I read about a woman who couldn’t stop eating dirt. And another who craved chalk.”
But this wasn’t that. Sometimes, she found herself in the kitchen in the middle of the night, like she’d floated there in a dream. She’d look around the kitchen and want to tear the sink apart and eat the parts or suck on a dishrag, like the sponge-smelling bacteria was nectar. She’d go over to the window and thrust it open, breathe in the penny smell of the metal screens, and only barely keep herself from running her tongue along the grimy window track.
Finally, Jonah worried, and she would have too but for the feeling of being separate from her body, separate from her life, a spectator watching herself move through her days. Only sometimes did she come back to herself, when the pain came. The pain like a door slamming on her organs, sharp and shocking, doubling her over. So intense she’d grunt like an animal.
When the time came, they could barely draw the amniotic fluid. Something didn’t work, though they didn’t really say it. She caught on from the long silence, the doctor switching needles, the sweat pouring from beneath the nurse’s surgical cap.
“What is it?” she asked. But she didn’t ask the real question: “How do I end it?”
Because if she said it, they’d think she was the problem, that she was the monster. What kind of person felt this way about their own baby? What kind of person couldn’t wait to scoop out their insides and be free? As if reading her thoughts, the creature inside her seemed to flip over, batter her rib cage, grab hold of her uterus as if to let her know she was in for a fight.
When Dr. L came back to her with a clearer image, one in which the monstrous form of the creature could finally be distinguished, when there was no denying the extra limbs, the flower-like lungs bracketing double hearts, when they could see the rough outline of a head that was almost all mouth, she asked, “What are my options?”
The medical team looked at each other, at their equipment, at the clock ticking over the door of the exam room. At everything but her.
They didn’t know.
New legislation, they said. She was already so far along.
“Maybe another state?” suggested Dr. L.
But bills passed in every state around her, or the wait for a procedure was months. She didn’t have months.
In the meantime, its poison spread within her. Each day, her body betrayed her. And the monster sucked her dry from the inside, hollowing her bones and turning her muscles to flimsy nothing. Her bloodwork showed deficiency after deficiency, while the monster grew and grew. No one at the hospital tried to cutely compare its size to various fruit and vegetables. No one cheered its good health.
In the garage one night, she had to fight with everything in her not to gulp down a bottle of paint thinner. Not because she wanted to end herself but because the creature wanted it. Just the smell of it seemed to excite it to frenzy. It wanted to drink. It didn’t care about her. Maybe it didn’t even know about her. Maybe it only knew the need of any growing thing.
They had to put locks on the cabinets, toolboxes, and electrical panels. Her appetite was its appetite. Her shoveling hands were its hands. She was just the vessel. A walking nest for the monster whose need for life was a black hole inside her, pulling everything that was Melanie into an endless vacuum.
No one could explain how or why it had happened, and while doctors and scientists and governors had theories, she just wanted to scream and scream to get it out of her. It was killing her. For all any of them knew, it might kill them all. Even if they didn’t care about her, shouldn’t they care about themselves? About the future of other women who might become what she was becoming? Who might bring the end of them all?
The monster hollowed her bones, drained her until one day her legs stopped working. Her arms felt light as silk and just as practical. She felt herself reduced to heart, to brainstem, to a ceaseless, battering rage.
While she had any fight left in her, Melanie had to fight. That meant an attorney. A hearing. It meant marshalling Dr. L, Jonah, and her poor bewildered parents who shrunk deeper into themselves every time they saw her.
She didn’t expect the crowds. The people gathered outside the government building with their signs:
Life is Life.
This Might Be the Next Einstein. Even Monsters Matter.
“What about you?” asked one reporter—a woman. “Don’t you matter, too?”
All the reporters seemed to be women, all the camera operators, men. She wondered what this signified. The woman standing alongside her. The men viewing her through the cool distance of a lens.
“Not to them,” answered another.
Not to them and not to the monster. At this point, Melanie barely mattered to herself. But a tiny, stubborn part of her still insisted that her life was her own. That she had a right to it. With whatever she had left, she felt obligated to be seen, to make the case for her own existence, as surreal as that concept was.
Jonah pushed her in her wheelchair up a mile of ramps into the halls of a space that smelled of women’s work and men’s choices. And she was right: the panel was six old men. Grey heads in a row like a stone monument. Their young female assistants shot her sympathetic looks, but they weren’t the ones at the table.
“Explain it to me like I’m a six-year-old,” said one statesman. “If it’s in there, how can it hurt you?”
“In there,” Melanie repeated. Like her uterus was a concrete vault, separate and impenetrable. “Sir, in there means inside me. Inside my actual living and breathing body.” The body that used to be able to walk, she told them, that could stand at her drafting table for hours, prepare meals for friends, hike through sun-dotted forests and touch trees. She tried to express everything she’d lost, and when they seemed unmoved, she said, “I don’t think I’ll survive this. Shouldn’t that count for something?”
“But you don’t know that,” came the reply.
“We’re never given more than we can handle,” said another. How were these men in charge of her body? Her life?
Dr. L actually did explain it like he was a six-year-old, like they were all six-year-olds, in fact, just curious children who could thoughtlessly stamp her out the way a child stamps a sandcastle out of boredom. Or spite. She passed out tablets, so she could take them all on a guided tour of Melanie’s womb. Then she patiently explained how to work the tablets. When the images came up on their screens, they smirked at Melanie like they’d discovered her doing porn.
The doctor pointed out the monstrous size of the thing, its giant ravening mouth with double rows of teeth, its budding claws.
But, they asked, isn’t this what God intended?
How did she know she wasn’t a vessel for something miraculous? “What about a C-section?” came the suggestion. Like it had all been a logistics problem. “Wait until it’s ready, and then just pop it out that way.” “That doesn’t help my patient,” said Dr. L. “It’s killing her right now.” The sharp reality of that, the naming of the thing Melanie felt in every cell, came like a bracing splash of cold water. She felt terrified hearing it but liberated too. Because at least it had been said. At least her reality was now theirs, too.
She swore she’d never use this argument but found herself saying, “If this was your wife or your daughter, what would you do?”
None of the men had an answer for that. They had platitudes and chilling, dull-eyed disinterest, but no answers.
She lost.
She lost, and she knew she had no time to try again.
Weakness enveloped her, like being cocooned in iron. She and her bed became one. And Jonah disappeared to the corners, to some watchful periphery that told her he’d given up too. Now, he served the monster. He moved to the spare room and only came to feed it. To pay painful tribute to the alarming mound of her belly. Every day now, it seemed, she could feel the stretching of her flesh, the leeching of everything she’d been.
The thing gnawed at her insides and grew. She could feel it pushing her organs out of the way, shoving its limbs through her rib cage, twisting them until every breath or cough shot daggers through her body.
Now she was too big to do anything about it. Now, even if she wanted to throw herself down a flight of stairs or drink the bleach the thing inside her craved so ferociously, she knew she’d be the only one to pay. It had gotten what it needed. And all those men around all those tables had gotten what they wanted: a brood mare. A wet, helpless incubator. For what? No one knew.
Reporters stopped calling. Social media moved on. There were other monsters. Always.
Nine months came and went. No one knew how long these things gestated, so no one wanted to touch her.
Then ten. Eleven.
The thing filled her until she could barely breathe. Her skin stretched so taut, it started to tear, and even the air around Melanie was agony. The worse it got, the more stubborn she became. It wasn’t about fighting anymore. It was about persisting. She was alone now. The burden was all hers. So was the pain. She didn’t have it anymore. She WAS it. A giant swollen bruise.
And then in the grim half-light of morning, she woke to something she hadn’t felt yet–a roiling, frantic movement inside her. The monster looking for a way out. It scraped at her, pummeling her, the outline of its many, many teeth raising on her skin like she was being embossed from the inside.
The doctors came to her. She had a dim awareness of light, of masks and gloves. Of strained, panicked voices. Jonah took her hand, and she realized how long it had been and how cold his hands had become. She looked for his eyes, the first things she ever loved about him. But he was
fixated on her belly, on the doctors guiding a rolling curtain into place so she couldn’t see them cut her open. So she couldn’t see the creature when it came. Which felt like a colossal cheat. If she was left with anything at this point, it was a morbid curiosity.
When the epidural actually worked, when cold nothingness plunged through the lower part of her body, she wanted to cry for the first time in months. The pain dimmed. The feeling of being consumed from within faded. She floated above herself, wondering if she could watch from the tree outside her window. Could she opt out of it all, the way everyone and everything had opted out of saving her?
But no. She came back to herself. Still blank. Still aware of pain’s dimensions. Still aware, barely, of her body being tugged, inside and out, of hands everywhere.
And then the screams. A stampede to the door. Equipment knocked to the floor. Where was Jonah? Where was anyone?
The creature rose over her, dragging pieces of her with it. It had glossy, seal-like skin and more limbs than they’d known. Like a sleek spider with a mouth like a nightmare. How had that been inside her? And how had anyone thought she’d be all right?
It tore aside the curtain, its many unblinking eyes looking down at her. Its limbs wrapped around her, and it laid itself on her chest. The weight of it was impossible. The feel of it cold and damp, and it smelled like a brackish river. She knew her body was still splayed open, and she hoped she’d die before the feeling returned.
Its hinged jaw opened like a bear trap. The moment had come: its life or hers. She knew which one of them would win. Probably, she’d known it from that first ultrasound, that first panel. Those grey-haired men all in a row.
She wished she could be there when this monster—or others like it— came for them. Her last burst of life was a sharp vengeful satisfaction. Here was the life they wanted, the only one they valued. Here was the monster they’d made.
She wrapped her arms around it and invited it to feed.
Lorin Oberweger, an award-winning author, has co-written and ghostwritten eight books, several for New York Times bestselling authors of fiction and nonfiction. Her work, commissioned by major publishers, has received glowing notices from the New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, NPR, and others. Her latest co-author credit is Thank You for Coming to My TED Talk, written with Chris Anderson, director of TED Conferences. With bestselling author Veronica Rossi, Lorin is the author of the New Adult books, Boomerang, Rebound, and Bounce, published by Harper/William Morrow under the pen name Noelle August. The novels were praised by Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, among others, and Boomerang was chosen as a “new and notable” selection for Target Stores across the US.