the city.
"God! What happened to your hand?"
My roommate is dressed in only his boxers. He has a squid tattoo over his heart.
I hug the doorframe and almost collapse. "I need to get to a hospital."
He grabs his keys from the mantle and doesn't bother getting dressed. "I'll bring the car ’round!"
At the hospital, they ask if I have the missing "finger segments." I shake my head, not knowing what was real and what was a dream. Maybe I cut off my own fingers with the cigar cutter. I remember it in the drawer, covered in blood. They treat my hand.
Through the whole process, I try to ignore the sharp pains in my stomach.
They discover something wrong with my lower intestines. Other doctors come in to observe. They pull out broken eggshell and inform me that I have a spontaneous growth that resembles a uterus. They do an MRI. The uterus, or shell gland, connects to an oviduct that connects to a single ovary cluster that looks like a clump of grapes.
My intestines can't function properly because of the overcrowding. I end up using a colostomy bag to shit.
They want to surgically remove the penguin sex organ that has grown in my rectum. The procedure is expensive and risky, and I know it wouldn't do any good. If it can grow once, it can grow again.
I stock up on canned seafood.
I try to find my ex, to make amends for my outburst in the rain. It was one mistake, a long time ago. I need to make amends. Dana has fled Eddington. Her old friends pretend they don't know where she went. They must think I'm some kind of monster.
I hit Dana a few times. It was wrong, but she hit me just as much. We were in love. We fought. We drove each other crazy.
Every month the world outside my house goes away, and I give birth for the Queen in Yellow. I try not to bond with my chick, but each time, I can't help myself. The Queen devours her albino delicacy, and with my purpose fulfilled, I return to the here and now to wait until the next month and the next birth and feeding.
Bird bones and egg shells take a lot of calcium to produce. I stock up on prenatal pills and calcium so that my teeth don't fall out and my bones don’t become brittle. I’m extra careful in the shower so I don’t break a hip.
The ordeal never gets easier. Sometimes, in fact, it is more than I can bear.
While waiting to give birth in what I now consider a dimension parallel to our own, I often stare out the open window into the nothingness of the onyx void. There is no God. There is no reason this is happening to me. I throw the cigars into the black. And my cookbooks. I amputate my left arm up to the elbow, an impulsive decision that I immediately regret. I use my belt as a tourniquet. My chicks need me, if only for a moment.
My unconditional love is all they have.
###
About the Author:
Born, raised, and currently living in Oregon, Wesley McCraw writes speculative fiction. Right now he is focused on horror. Next, maybe it will be romantic, comedic fantasy.
Wes graduated from the University of Oregon, where he completed the much-acclaimed Kidd Tutorial, a one-year intensive writing clinic. During his time at the university, he was also a member of Write Club, where he trained under screenwriter Omar Naim (The Final Cut, Dead Awake).
The Forgiving is based on Wes’s screenplay of the same name. He plans on adapting more of his screenplays in the future, including Brief Pose, the 2011 winner of the StoryPros screenplay competition in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror category.
Wes is also working on a multi-installment epic, House of Cabal, a romantic comedy, Lucky in Love, and the sci-fi pulp serial Vampire Fiction.
You can follow Wesley’s misadventures in self-publishing at:
https://selfwrite.wordpress.com/
and find him on twitter @wesleymccraw.
The Ovum Horror Page 3
