“Push now!”
She gave a noncommittal push, immediately tore up her head as she cried out.
“Again!”
She tried again, harder, testing the waters, cried out worse.
“Something’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong, push!”
Her red sweating face twisted, she ground her teeth, pushed, pushed again, gasped, started weeping.
“Oh my god, it’s not right, something—”
“Push!”
She did, howling until she was out of breath.
“I feel something, keep—”
She sucked in air, clutched fistfuls of grass, body trembling, Cordo keeping her legs from locking up.
“I see—”
Cordo cut himself off to comprehend what he saw.
“What? What?”
“Push!”
He let go of her ankles and with both hands grabbed the two pairs of legs that protruded from Hortense. He pulled with all the intent of a deep-sea fisherman while ordering Hortense push! and she sobbed a kind of cry you only hear once in four lifetimes and at last she felt emptiness and she dropped her legs and head, eyes closed, taking blessed breaths of air, and she might have gone off to sleep yet again had not she felt the movement of the still-attached umbilical cords between her bloody thighs.
As the ringing of her own screaming dissipated, it was replaced by…not crying exactly but complaining, grunting, such as an old cigarette smoker makes before coughing wretchedly.
Complaining, gagging, clicking.
Why wasn’t she crying?
Hortense lifted her head.
“Is she…”
What Cordo held in his arms didn’t look real but rather like some plastic horror movie doll— à la Chucky—or…a kind of alien. Actually two aliens.
One of the babies had what a doctor—a particularly learned doctor—would diagnose as harlequin-type ichthyosis. The absence of an appendage between the legs seemed to identify it as a girl but noting else would have led you to that conclusion. She had yellow skin that was like a broken china doll’s, pieced and glued back together, or like a lizard’s plated back, such a complex network of bloody cracks was there all over her. She had arms and legs but no digits—they had failed to separate—so she looked like she had purple ballpeen hammerheads at the ends of her limbs. She had no separation on the back of her legs—no apparent anus—no hair and no ears. Her eyes were not eyes at all but rather large dollops of tangerine marmalade. She had an oval-shaped mouth, lips too pale and too thick and incapable of closing, thus you could see her enormous tongue and, perhaps worst of all, her gums, which looked more like wet leather. Altogether she looked as though she’d been set afire in the womb and was now dead but indeed the complaining, unobtrusive as it was, came from her.
The second child was a boy, that was clear. But there was no separation between his legs—the heels of his feet were connected and converged in an obtuse V-shape, not unlike a mermaid’s fin. Further, he had light black hair intermixed with birthing fluid on his head but his ears, which could only be described as cauliflowered, grew out from his neck as though they were supposed to be gills. Most shocking, however, was the lack of nose, mouth, and eyebrows. In their places was a horizontal slit that looked as though it had been cut or torn open and peering out from this slit was an enormous black eye. The boy emitted no sounds as his head hung limply.
But all these details took a moment to process. What was immediately evident was the unsettling fact that the boy and the girl were inseparably one. That is, the boy’s back end grew out of the girl’s back while his head reached out from her stomach, skin, spines, and organs fused, in effecting making an addition sign of the two.
Both Cordo and Hortense had no words. The air was filled with the girl’s whining. Cordo chewed through the umbilical cords and then nestled the tangle of arms and legs and heads to his breast and rose, Hortense’s throat clicking as though she were going to protest, but as he stepped past her, she lay back her head and issued her last breaths. She died with her eyes reflecting the moon.
The girl’s complaining grew steadily quieter as Cordo crossed the cliff and came to a halt at the edge. Down below the waves were furious, washing over a plethora of sharp rocks.
He looked at the girl’s unbearable face and as she was choking, he held her—them—tightly to his heart and he looked up and saw the moon, clouds rolling all around but not over it.
He didn’t close his eyes, didn’t look anywhere else but up, as he stepped over the edge of the cliff.
Afterword:
Thank you for reading. This is my second book and one I’m particularly proud of, not least because its content is especially out of my wheelhouse.
I first got the idea for this book while in a horticulture class in college. We briefly touched upon the topic of apomixis, which immediately shocked my brain with an electric cattle prod. I knew there was an idea within the concept, I just didn’t know what it was just then.
This novel also means a great deal to me because, as someone who initially got into the creative craft due to his interest in the horror genre, I consider this to be the first successful attempt at horror writing I’ve achieved.
I want to thank you for buying it and sticking with it through the grotesque descriptions, the sex scenes, which may have been uncomfortable, and the technical language.
I hope I have earned some fans who are anxiously awaiting my next book. Whatever the case, thank you always for reading.
-Liam
Most Unnatural Page 21
