THE FIRST TIME Carolyn stood before a stranger and watched him worship her swollen stomach, kneeling on the carpet and kissing the spot just below her protruding belly button, she felt like a god.

She thought of a different man on the bus weeks ago, his legs spread wide in leisure, uncaring for the selfish space he took up as Carolyn stood with her hand wrapped around a strap suspended from the ceiling, the dimpled canvas digging into her sweaty palm.

If she met that man now, she would crush him underneath the weight of her unborn child, suffocate him between her pubic bone and the bulge of life.

I am your merciless god.

“Thank you for this,” Evan, the man on his knees, said as he blinked up at her, eyes gleaming with awe as though he were witnessing a true miracle to which he never thought he’d be privy. He was so enraptured, every word a breathless whisper he could barely push from his tongue, and it made the tips of Carolyn’s fingers tingle. She placed her hand on the back of his head as his lips and tongue traveled lower, feeling like a minister delivering a benediction, anointing this man somehow, although with what, she couldn’t say. Perhaps a pardon when the great mythical storm of judgment came to sweep away men like the one on the bus.

You can stay. I’ll allow it for now.

Although she loved towering over Evan, her ankles were as swollen as her ear the summer she learned she was allergic to bees, the lobe turning into a lumpy aberration overnight, fluid-filled flesh that was strangely hard as bark. She shifted to the bed, reclining and resting her legs over his shoulders, puffy ankles grateful for the elevation, and let him gently open her with his mouth, coaxing everything into the easy bliss she craved. As he licked and kissed, she thought of another man on the pregnancy fetish forum, the one who kept getting banned for his antagonistic comments, his hatred of all the other men.

I hope the next woman smothers you there. I hope you die with her legs around your neck, your nose under her big belly. That’s true devotion, he’d written. Carolyn replayed the words in her head over and over again, like a seductive whirlpool picking up speed, sucking her down, down, down until she squeezed her eyes shut and came, her inner thighs fluttering against Evan’s cheeks.

It was strange how patient the men were with her. Before she’d found herself host to a baby she still couldn’t picture in her mind’s eye—the very thought of it brewing inside her like some unknowable potion was no less baffling as the months passed—men had been selfish and thoughtless in bed. Carolyn had been incidental to their pleasure. Sex was a rugged, bereft affair, something akin to smoking a cigarette and tossing the still burning end into the street. But now, she was treated as a rare, treasured object, a holy grail of womanhood they’d been searching for until the moment they found her.

They all wanted different things. It was very personal and specific, as it turned out. A sacred oath between a man and his mind about whose origins Carolyn could only speculate. One man, Nathan, had confided in her that it all began when, as a child, he’d been sent over to their neighbor’s house by his concerned mother, a casserole in tow as he knocked on Miss Fisher’s door. Like Carolyn, Miss Fisher was single and very pregnant, no one to care for her as her condition grew more precarious.

“All alone in that house, it’s just not right,” his mother had fretted as she sent him on his way.

When Nathan knocked on the door, it slowly creaked open, and he couldn’t resist the urge to walk inside. At thirteen, he was finally becoming aware of the interior lives of other people, insatiably curious about what went on behind the peeling paint of every door on his block.

“She was standing naked in the living room and putting on her stockings, her foot propped on the couch,” Nathan told Carolyn as he traced the half-moon curve of her belly. “I’d never seen anything more beautiful. She was the Madonna and Venus on the clamshell all in one. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I knew nothing would ever compare. I knew I was ruined.”

He’d dropped the casserole on the floor and ran back home. Later that night, he touched himself under the covers, waiting for darkness to hide his mortified blush. Years passed, the obsession growing worse until he struggled to come with a woman who wasn’t pregnant, closing his eyes and thinking of Miss Fisher’s growing bump. He tried roleplay and fake bellies but could never suspend his disbelief enough for the fantasy to work.

He wept as he told her this story, wet cheek pressed to her skin, hand quaking with gratitude where it rested on her breast, and his willingness to share such vulnerable things filled her with a strange fascination.

“I just think a woman is at her most beautiful when she’s about to give birth,” he whispered to the writhing creature beneath her skin, and Carolyn shoved him off. Sent him away. She thought again of the forum’s heckler, his seething, righteous revulsion.

You don’t even understand it, what it means. I would lick every mark on the body and know what it meant and how it got there, the cost of it. You talk of wanting to be fed like babies, and it makes me wish I could find you, shove the afterbirth down your throat until you choke.

Even in their idolatry, some men’s desires were inextricably linked to seeing her as something made to produce, a vessel for all creation. To bring other lives into existence but not to serve her own.

It made her feel like one of those dairy cows hooked up to endless suction pumps, lying on their sides with distended stomachs pressed against wooden slats, just milk factories groaning in mass production. It was then that she realized this was no worship of her at all. It was devotion to a part of her, a mechanism within her that was capable of something they were not. It was like loving the mother for the dinner they place on the table every night. It was a new lack of personhood.

It was all very personal and specific. They wanted different things. Some wished to smell her, nose pressed to the space behind her knees, her armpits, her vulva, her stomach. Some wanted to fuck her while cradling her belly with reverence, like a fragile package they were delivering with care. There were men on the forums she trawled who insisted “the bigger, the better,” claiming they wanted no more than “a belly with a girl attached.” Carolyn steered clear of those; they were men whose narrow, myopic definition of “woman” only included a body with a uterus and tits, as though that had anything to do with it, as though other people couldn’t also be pregnant. It reminded her of that Tropic of Cancer passage she’d first read when she was thirteen, palm cupped over the page as though guarding a candle’s flame, afraid of being discovered and having it yanked away. It was some man rambling about the mysterious nature of the vagina, the way the mythos built up only to discover it’s just a slit in the body, an opening like a line drawn down the sidewalk. It was the first time she’d seen the word “cunt” in print.

She kept her clandestine activities to herself for as long as anyone with a delicious secret can. The excitement of a double life always leads to a boundless need for sharing, breaking apart the juicy plum and slicing it into sections to pass around the party.

“You can’t keep doing this. These men could kill you!” her friend Rosemary warned.

Was it some innate rebellious urge inside her, Rosemary demanded, the need to keep proving that nothing had changed, that drove her to click on those tawdry forums late at night? Or was it the sea of hormones driving her desire to a kettle-whistle of urgency? Make me understand, she insisted.

“Men could always kill me. Why should now be any different?” Carolyn replied, and Rosemary’s mouth dropped open. Carolyn imagined shoving things inside it: a fistful of marshmallows, a tangle of shaggy underbrush, a giant cork.

“But think of the baby,” Rosemary said with a weakness that suggested she already knew there was no dissuading her.

After all, this baby was nothing more than the culmination of a series of negligent acts that stacked upon each other like a house built from eroded bricks, the facade getting weaker with each addition. Why should it shift her reality? Why shouldn’t she carry on as recklessly as before? She couldn’t even picture the life inside her as human life at all. When she lay in bed, the fever-twitch of her legs keeping sleep on the periphery, she pictured Little Otik: gnarled roots for hands, a bloodthirsty tube of a mouth that hungered for flesh and siphoned it clean off the bone. Sometimes the way it thrashed inside her made her certain it was a reptile, a sidewinder or a salamander doing concertina bends in her body, a slither and a shake underneath her drum-taut skin.

She couldn’t be sure who the father was. It was most likely insipid Colin with his days-old coffee growing mold in mugs by the sink, his annoying habit of repeating funny lines in films and laughing too loudly, as though repetition of jokes he didn’t create transferred ownership. Or worse, it was David, narrating everything he saw out the window as they drove to a restaurant, like a toddler who has just learned to read and can’t resist recounting every billboard’s message with glee, eager to prove his worth. Perhaps these faults were immaterial, but to Carolyn, it was like the screech of a faulty microphone. Sure, she’d been incidental to them, but they were incidental to her too; she did not wish to expend any energy on sussing out who was linked to the witchy totem that grew inside her.

Somehow, it was easier to scroll through posts about “perky juicy tits” and “women in bloom” instead, some of them from men with ridiculous screen names like Mommy’sMilk7 or UncutCabron. It was all very crass, but while it should have made Carolyn balk and shudder, it only made her giggle. She felt like a preteen seeing her first pornographic magazine, the artifice of it, the over-the-top theatrics overshadowing the titillating intent, a sense of staging and logistics that shattered the illusion. When she first saw photographs like that, she couldn’t stop thinking of who was adjusting the carefully placed lights around the room, what they did in between shots, if the models ate sandwiches, mustard dripping onto their breasts that had to be wiped off before the next setup.

But as Carolyn kept reading, she realized there was no trickery at work, nothing manufactured about anonymous people who were shameless about the shameful. The words took on a new, enticing shape, and the throb below her waist was hard to ignore. It was the honesty that struck her, curled its whisper around her waist and tugged her close. There was no hiding in a place like this, a moment like the one with Evan on his knees.

But that was then, when it was still new, before the skin of the apple was peeled back to reveal the mealy flesh underneath. The magic is gone, and that doesn’t explain why Carolyn scrolls once again, flipping through forum pages like a particularly boring, glossy ad stuffed into her mailbox. Maybe it’s simply a ritual at this point, a nightly block of time marked for this purpose, the satisfying mechanical click of the keyboard, the hazy bath of pale blue light across her face as her ant-sized bladder and the creature thumping against her uterine wall keeps her awake.

She reads posts that have become boilerplate, comments that ring flat and unimaginative because she knows the layout of this room now, has paced from one corner to the next and measured the steps it takes.

On page five of a thread about the “ultimate” taboos in the fetish, everyone’s deepest fantasy scenarios, she sees him again: EarthquakesInsideYou.

I fantasize about fucking a woman to induce labor, his post begins.

Carolyn has read about this but has never been sure if it’s an old wives’ tale or if it’s actually true. Sources quibble about the authenticity.

I want her water to break over my head. I want to be there for her when it all begins, the man continues. I want to be the only person besides the doctor to know what the inside of her looks like. All of you are idiots. I hate your simple-minded mommy issues. You don’t really like what you think you do. You can’t handle the reality of it.

Carolyn can hear Rosemary chiding her, pleading for her to think of her safety, the baby’s safety, but she can’t help but click the man’s screen name, grabbing his email from his profile, and contacting him. Here is someone whose honesty digs deeper than the rest. This is a new frontier. She has to find out what’s on the other side of it.



IT TURNS OUT they’re not a man at all. Carolyn had just assumed. They’ve all been cis men so far. She’s never seen anyone on the forum who isn’t. Not until now.

Riley—the one who answers Carolyn’s email—doesn’t believe Carolyn is real at first. They think they are being duped, and she really can’t blame them, as none of it feels very real to her either. It’s a comet that whizzes through the black sky once every seventy years. Some stray sparks are bound to scorch the earth as it descends, but this is her last chance. She’s reaching the end of term, and she wants to think about anything else and also nothing else. It’s hard to explain, and she doesn’t know what to say to this person so in the end, she tells them how far along she is, how she’s ready for it to be over, and that they’re unlikely to ever be afforded this opportunity again.

When they’re alone in her apartment, it’s awkward at first. Riley is a shy, fidgety-fingered person who gives Carolyn timid smiles and asks if she needs anything, eager to fetch her some water or brew some tea or place another pillow behind her back. They have very straight, copper-colored hair and kind eyes. Petite, but with a tension to their frame. Like a sprinter braced in the blocks, waiting for the sound of the starting gun.

“I don’t think people spend enough time thinking about why they want what they want,” they finally say, as though there’s a question hanging in the air that hasn’t been answered yet.

“Really? I’m tired of every want I have being assigned a value,” Carolyn sighs, slinging her swollen feet over the ottoman. “I would like to run around grabbing everything that pleases me and never be asked why.”

“I’d like that for you too,” Riley says with a cautious laugh. “I just don’t think everyone is responsible enough for guilt-free wants.”

“Neither do I. Not very fair of us, is it?”

“Maybe not.”

Riley’s hand hovers near Carolyn’s belly for a moment but drops away. For all their talk of the fear of those men, they don't seem to be able to face their own, and Carolyn realizes she’s forgotten the most crucial aspect of internet anonymity: it affords people endless masks. Rip one away, and another one is bound to be underneath.

“You’re not really a pregnancy fetishist, are you?”

“No. I only wanted to…” Their eyes flit to hers and away again, like a child afraid that admitting the deed will only worsen the punishment.

“Shock them? Scold them? Troll them?”

“All of the above, I guess?”

“Why’d you meet with me?”

“I don’t know…” Their nose wrinkles, and when the light catches on their blue-gray eyes, they look too innocent for all of this. “I had to know you. If you were real. What you were like. What you wanted. Why you met with them.”

It disarms the bands of tension holding the room like a slingshot poised for fire, and then Carolyn tells them everything. How it started, how it went, what she liked and hated about it, how she planned to stop until she saw their post, how alien her body and her condition is to her. How she doesn’t know what to do about that. How she’d been deprived of so much—alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine—and wasn’t willing to be deprived of this too. She tells Riley that she’s always been the girl who couldn’t resist overturning the rotting log to see what lived in the damp dark. She squeezes scabs to watch the blood pool underneath. In the dry winter air, she bites the uneven, chapped skin from her lips, peels it in strips with her teeth until it’s raw and puffy. Even when she’s repelled, the repulsion is a boomerang back to desire.

Throughout it all, Riley keeps tending to her, bringing her food and water, removing plates and rinsing them in the sink, but it doesn’t feel condescending. Somehow, it settles into the groove of friendly care, as though Riley is the host and she’s the guest. They only interrupt her stories to ask curious questions, to better understand her points, and when it’s over, things go quiet for a while.

Until they surprise her by asking, “do you still want?”

And Carolyn surprises herself by saying, “yes.”

The heaviness in her body is getting harder to navigate, her center of gravity shifting too often to track, so she lays down on her back on the couch, pillowed and reclined. Riley is tentative at first, but Carolyn mocks them with a joke about one of the more unbearable men on the forum, asking if they’re going to be like that or commit to this damn thing and prove themselves better. The shared laughter seems to shake Riley’s reservations loose, and Carolyn lets her neck go long, her eyes shutter closed, everything warm and quiet in her head, one of Riley’s hands on her cheek, the other cradling the side of her stomach.

Suddenly, they’re just two people keeping one another company, a silent agreement to confine the borders of it to something manageable, simple, unexamined, a luxury Carolyn realizes none of her loaded encounters have afforded her.

Riley licks a long, slow line up her belly, and Carolyn shivers. When Riley wets their own fingers and reaches down, Carolyn trembles again, opens her legs a little wider in invitation. Riley has to slide onto their side to kiss Carolyn properly, her domed stomach far too big for anyone to lie on top of anymore. Riley’s neck tastes like salt and smells like soap, and that’s always been Carolyn’s favorite part, the feast of skin. Everyone tastes different.

Afterward, in the bathroom, it happens. A tide released between her legs, a swift spill like an overturned bucket that doesn’t seem possible at first. She starts to laugh at the stupidity of it all, the way this is unfolding, but the sound is cut off by the pain that has her clutching the wall and letting out an unholy shriek.

When Riley comes rushing in to see what has happened, Carolyn finds herself saying, “I’m sorry, you weren’t supposed to be here, I didn’t plan this,” words that make both no sense and all the sense in the world.



SHE IS BEING RUSHED to the hospital by a stranger, and it would be like this, wouldn’t it? Rosemary has been called and is on her way; soon, she’ll be walking into this very odd situation, an arrangement that would garner many laughs if Carolyn could think about anything other than the pain and the inevitability she can no longer stave off.

It’s a long, strenuous stretch of time that cannot be measured in minutes or hours but only grunts and sweat and delirium. Throughout it all, Rosemary holds her left hand, and Riley holds her right.

“You made this happen,” Carolyn hisses to Riley, accusatory. Riley’s lip quivers like they wish they could take it back, but it’s done now. They’re here even if it was all a joke they sent into the abstract ether of the internet days ago.

When it’s over, and Carolyn is holding a freshly toweled baby, viscera and angry red patches blotted away, she can finally laugh, a sound propelled by exhaustion and Demerol.

“What sitcom is this?” Carolyn chuckles as she looks at Riley on one side and Rosemary on the other, sucking her cheeks in. Carolyn can tell Rosemary wants to scold her but knows now is not remotely the time.

Rosemary strokes Carolyn’s hair, sweetly kisses her forehead and says she’s going to get Carolyn some more water. Riley stays. The room is still and quiet. Carolyn’s baby is falling asleep in her arms for the first time, and it does indeed look human. Too much so, in fact. Carolyn thinks of those pictures of crystalline pure waters on the Mediterranean coast, an undulation of blue that must be a painting or a dream, a product of shared imagination.

“It was beautiful,” Riley whispers.

“No, it wasn’t,” Carolyn says, thinking of the sharp stabs in her abdomen, the spray of fluids, the pressure building and bearing down until she thought she was being asked to pass a boulder from her body, something too immovable and dense to ever be released.

“It was though. It really was,” Riley says with a perplexed squint, as though they’re searching for the reason why this is true, how something so full of horror could be beautiful, but are unable to name it. “I should probably go.”

“You really should.”

They don’t leave, and while Carolyn feels the obligatory tug of social convention, why should it be any less odd than all the strangers who helped slide this slippery child out of her only minutes ago, gloves and masks and empty words of encouragement passed from their mouths? It was a stranger who helped create this child, and a stranger who held her hand while the baby was birthed.

Carolyn expects to look at her child and see another stranger as well, but when she looks down at the baby, she knows them. Everything else is still brushed with a fuzzy softness, the blur of a purposeful stare that steals the focus from your vision, but she knows this is no stranger and never has been. Maybe no one is. Maybe they all are. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

What strangers will her child meet? What will this new kind of worship be like, when the person in her arms needs her, when the eyes that look back at her are also her own?

Carolyn lets it all drift away; she can’t think anymore, eyes and throat thick with fatigue and drugs.

Rosemary comes back into the room bearing water. She tilts the cup to Carolyn’s lips so she can drink without moving.

Dylan Pierce  is a queer Pittsburgh-based writer currently working on a novel and helping their partner keep the local film community weird and wonderful whenever they can. Their work has appeared in Maudlin House, SFWP, No Contact, and Sundog Lit.