What Has Been Sown, What Will Be Reapt nosleep

How closely have you been following the news lately?

And no, I don't mean the news of what life-threatening escapade that orange baboon is up to these days. No, I don't mean the latest humanitarian crisis bubbling over across the globe. I don't mean the latest political race, or the newest melted ice cap, or even the latest celebrity breakup. Have you been paying close attention? Really close attention?

The stories started out small. Just in tabloids. Reports by local South American newspapers about women in the Andes mountains claiming, hysterically, that they were pregnant. Women who swore up and down they were virgins. There were stories of them swelling up. Of beatings some of them were forced to endure from enraged fiances. But never a report on any births resulting. And so the stories passed. And the world kept moving. Yet the same type of story kept showing up in other places after that, far more than it had before. Virgins swelling up. Virgins swearing pregnancy.

See, hysterical pregnancy is a legitimate thing. The human brain is more powerful than any of us can ever understand--it has its methods. There's a catch to hysterical pregnancy, though, and it's pretty obvious. There's no baby. Sometimes, the hormone test will test false positive for a plethora of reasons: strange illness, recently being a mother, and even solely believing oneself to be pregnant. But the urine test will tell you the truth. If that one lies, then the ultrasound undoubtedly will not lie to you. The doctors will not be able to find a baby, no baby will be born, so the illness will pass. That's what hysterical pregnancy is--nothing more than a construction of the mind. The placebo effect in its greatest iteration.

The stories kept multiplying after the spike in stories of the women in the Andes. Have you really been reading the headlines? Really been scanning them, like I have? Have you noticed the uptick in sensational stories about the pregnant virgins? It was slow at first. A few more stories in Colombia. Then Mexico. Then Texas. Then California, then Germany, Italy, Mongolia, China, Japan, Hawaii, then back to California, then back down to the Andes.

Some of the women weren't very believable. One was a patient with schizophrenia living in an inpatient ward in France. She had claimed to be a virgin who was growing more pregnant by the day, but no one believed her. She was, they presumed, a virgin, since part her condition caused her great terror at sexual contact, and that aspect of her condition, plus a negative hormonal test, doubly assured medical professionals she was barren. She made headlines because she bit off the ear of a doctor--said since he wasn't listening to her, he might as well not listen at all, which is pretty darn clever, if you think about it. That was a few years ago now. I haven't heard anything about it since, and, trust me, I've looked. Awfully odd, isn't it? Awfully...strange. Strange that such a sensational story would just vanish, never to be followed up on.

Others have had slightly more ground to their claims. See, one of the most recent cases I noticed was a student at Harvard University, Allie Crivaldi. She’d grown up in an upper crust neighborhood. Gained fame at the local science fairs--was going to revolutionize the future of sustainability. That is, until she dropped out, claiming, wild-eyed, that something was growing inside of her that took precedence over all of her work. The thing is that she was dating a woman--a woman she’d been dating since the age of fourteen. And she didn't drink, and didn't party, and hardly, if ever, left her dorm. Yet she packed up all of her stuff and moved out into a cabin she purchased with a section of her trust fund. Said she had to rest before it came. The profile was part of an article on psychotic breaks from stress in young adults. That's what everyone assumed it was. The thing is, though, that every student in that article got a follow up. Everyone except Allie. No one’s followed up on that particular story since it broke. That was six months ago. And the reports are only growing more prevalent by the day.

Before it comes. Why did she phrase it that way? See, I could find consistency throughout these articles. Not through nationality, economic status, race, age. The one common thread I found running through those who quoted the women was that nearly all of them didn't connect it to a religion, and didn't connect the baby to a gender. They weren't giving birth to a baby Jesus or a fertile Parvati, no matter the religion of the women. Hell, most of them didn't even reference a baby. They called the baby it.

Isn't that strange? That all across the world, all of these reports, would refer to the babies in the same way, just as more and more women started hysterically imagining themselves to be with child? Where did the delusion come from? Where did the women go after the articles were written, the outlandish claims made? Isn't that odd?

We’ve all read the joking articles about doomsday cults, telling media outlets emphatically that today is the day the world will end, and then bashfully retracting the statement a day later, to be met with mocking, and thinkpieces about the viability of religion? Where were the follow ups? I've been following this trend, the uptick in these stories, with feverish dedication. And in the stories consistent with my criteria--frenzied woman swearing up and down that she's a virgin and doesn't know why it is growing down there--there was not one follow up. Not. One.

Something’s...out of place. There are pieces that contradict conventional explanations. See, in the stories--the “it” stories--the women were explained away either for not being virgins, or for not really being pregnant. That could cover the lot of them. But there was a jigsaw puzzle stuffed into the wrong place. See, there was a girl, a 10-year-old, from Eritrea. She had been...infibulated. Her labia majora had been sewn shut. Tightly, too. She was not yet married, though she was engaged. Her first uterine lining had not yet been shed.

And yet, said the UN officials who reported on her death, she confided in a close friend about a suspected pregnancy. That friend went to the girl’s father, who went to her fiancé, who strangled her and tossed her in a river. But then she got a proper autopsy from South African authorities. And tests of hormones in her blood all came up positive. That didn't have to be conclusive, just rare. That is, until they found a small ball of cells, just beginning to bud inside her womb.

Even anti-femicide groups didn't follow up with that one. It was to be pigeonholed into one of those strange, inexplicable things we push to the back of our mind for fear we’ll remember them. The Swiss watch found deep within a 400-year-old sealed tomb in China. The planes and helicopters found inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphs. And now, the virgin with the ball of cells--not a tumor, not a cyst, but a blastula--growing within her. It’s easy to ignore. Almost too easy. Like an outside is within your mind, forcing you to exit the page. Exit that memory. Forget about it.

But I can't forget about it. Because the reason I first noticed the uptick in the stories of virgin pregnancies in the last few years was my frantic Google searches after the ultrasound found something shambling inside of my uterus. I suppose I could have been drugged. That’s what the doctor suggested to me that day, her cold, dry hand resting on my elbow as I sobbed uncontrollably into my hands. “You can be honest with me, sweetie,” She tried to make eye contact with me through my gushing eyes, but I wouldn’t look at her--I was too busy trying to combat the lack of oxygen that was threatening to knock me out cold. “You don’t need to lie to me, or feel guilty--”

“I’m not!” I snarled then, ripping my elbow away from her hand with unnecessary force. She recoiled. “I am a virgin, Doctor Carter. A bona fide virgin. I’ve--I’ve never even held hands!” I wailed, choking on my sobs as I forced the words from my throat. I had the most awful feeling creeping up my spine--a florid red rage that was ripping its way through my arms, making me bare my teeth at the doctor like an animal when she tried to reach out to me again. For a reason I knew, but that refused to come to my tongue, I wanted to reach my hands into my womb and rip that thing out myself. Whatever that deep, guttural need was, I could taste it--coppery, hot, briny--even if I couldn’t verbalize it. I wanted this thing out.

“Well, sweetie,” the doctor started again, more cautious now, “Any chance you could’ve been drugged? Have you gone to any parties in the past three months with chunks that you can’t remember? Have you ever--” She paused here, looked at me out of the side of her eyes, as if she couldn’t embrace what she was about to say fully. “Ever woken up...unusually fatigued or...sore? With signs of...of forced entry to your home?”

I shook my head with such vehemence I thought my neck would snap. Allie Crivaldi’s face flashed in my mind like a neon sign. Her curly blonde hair and yellowed, crooked smile were eerily similar to mine--the type of smile that was its own form of birth control. I know what it’s like to be that girl. Too smart, too loud, too fleshy for her own good. Overlooked by men because she speaks over them. Yes, I knew Allie a little too well. Not personally, although we did attend similar schools. But in reading her words, and seeing her photos, I recognized all of the parts of myself I’d cursed as I realized I’d have to buy jeans that were another size up, or that all the contours in the world wouldn’t take away my double chin, or as another boy told me through nervous teeth that I was just too intimidating. I believed her--me and my rusted showerhead alike. I believed her because I knew I was telling the truth.

Fear boiled in my stomach as I felt another sob rise to my lips. Almost on cue, I felt one of the hard kicks I’d been feeling all week. I had a thought, then, looking in the doctor’s pitying eyes, that made me sick. Isn’t it a bit early to be feeling kicks?

She offered me an abortion pill that day. Sick with anxiety, I’d taken it from her. And when I got home I administered it exactly according to instructions and then waited. Waited for the mucus-like blood they said would pour from me. Waited for the cramps they claimed I’d have to endure for hours before it ended.

But all I felt was sick, and, as I stumbled around my apartment, tearing apart the refrigerator to find something, anything, that was raw and meaty and full of protein, I felt ravenous. Ravenous in the way that I felt as if someone was chewing on my stomach from the bottom up. And then, after I had eaten, the sharp pains again. The kicks, in a monotonous rhythm--SLAM, SLAM, pause. SLAM, SLAM, pause. The brief pauses left me always on the precipice of relief, thinking I had found respite, and feeling more joyous, calm. Til the next one came, and somehow hurt even more thanks to the second of calm.

It was a vindictive sort of game, and it lasted for hours. I cried myself to sleep. I went to a follow up a week later and they saw the thing in my uterus again--the thing that was not a tumor, the thing, said the nurse with a voice that shook, that had a heartbeat.

We listened to it together as my voice cracked with sobs. “I’m so sorry, dear,” she kept repeating, over the THRUM THRUM THRUM THRUM THRUM. It was so fast. Faster, the nurse said, than any heart she had ever heard. I tossed and turned in my bed that night as the television in front of me blared with news stories. Inane ones. Ones that didn’t matter. They didn’t matter unless they were other women talking about it. I’d started skipping classes to comb through archives. I’d been searching in the library--traced the furthest story back to ‘82. Nineteen eighty two. The question that kept slamming into the front of my forehead refused to let me rest. Where were the follow ups? Where were the follow ups? What were the women giving birth to?

I began to have strange, awful dreams. Dreams that would strain against the back of my eyelids whenever I went to blink. I was standing in a great field--a field that could swallow the world with its immensity. I was surrounded by other women. Hundreds of them. Even thousands. And none of them had eyes. They had all been crudely ripped out of their heads. The women swayed back and forth on their feet with the cadence of the gentle breeze, as if they were cornstalks.

All of their wombs had been...inverted. Not ripped open, but inverted. As if someone had grabbed very hard to the inner uterine wall as they ripped themselves out of the small of their backs. Some of them were wailing. Some of them weren’t. And I could see Allie Crivaldi. Her blonde hair, glinting in the distance. Her entrails, spilling out of her back.

Their eyes had been tossed into small holes in the ground in front of them. Planted.

I couldn’t move. That was the first thing I noticed. My arms were leaden--beyond leaden--it was as if my veins had been injected with fatigue. I felt myself swaying, gently. Less than the other women. I felt my ankles begin to sink into the dark soil.

This was all the dream was for the first few nights--horrible enough in itself. My condition worsened, my ankles swelled. I had to go buy new shoes. My classmates at Brown were looking at me for just a bit too long. “Been taking advantage of the meal plans, Ella?” giggled my TA as I was leaving discussion section.

“I...I…” She just laughed and assured me she was kidding. I left with a sea of sickness in my throat anyway.

The thing is, she was right. I couldn’t stop eating. I was always hungry, but only for...certain tastes. Raw meat, yes. Sinewy. And wet. I wanted the iron to cool my tongue, needed the fat to soothe my aching teeth into rest. I couldn’t deal with the char of our manmade devices--didn’t want to. My mouth was so hot. And I needed it cool.

The dream escalated. The same swaying, cornstalk women, planting their eyes in the ground. But then, one night, I saw a flicker on the horizon. Just a brief blip. Something...moving. Deliberately. Not with the same bucolic swaying at the eyeless women, but with purpose. Its limbs were long and spindly--each step moved it for miles. It wasn’t massive, rather...thin. Sprawling and gangly and malevolent. Each night it crept across the land, dragging its feet across the field like a great rake. It wasn’t until the night it got close enough for me to see that I realized it was covering the holes in the ground with dirt. It was planting the seeds.

I couldn’t sit still during my classes. I fidgeted, chewed restlessly on a nail during lecture. My stomach would growl, audibly, sometimes over lecturers, who would shoot scathing looks at my blushing apologies. Once, the thing kicked me so hard that I cried out in pain and the lecturer insisted I go to the school’s medical building. Instead, my heart beating mercilessly, my stomach in red-hot pain, I went to the dining hall and shovelled steak into myself. Each time I went to the nurse the heartbeat grew faster, almost to the point where it was one continuous hum. I grew used to the kicks, and to cope it stopped giving me the respite in between. It ratcheted up the speed and intensity til I had to call into class because I couldn’t walk. I opened by refrigerator with bloated fingers--I’d never smelled anything so good as the red, untouched, even virginal meat that was calling to me in honeyed tones from the shelf.

I ripped it apart with my bare hands and teeth and then, as if on command after finishing, I fell asleep on my couch, television still blaring. Blaring about things that didn’t matter, not really. How closely have you been reading the news?

Something was off in the dream that night. The air tasted salty, with a hint of rot, as if we were near an ocean. But we weren’t near the ocean. The air was sweltering, and sticky. And the Farmhand had reached me. He loomed over me, thin, spidery arms behind his back--they must have been seven or eight feet long. He towered ten feet above me, his beady green eyes opening and closing sideways as he hunched down to peer over me. I turned my cheek to him--I could taste his blistering breath on my tongue. It was the smell of mold, but also lilies. Death, but also meat. Day and night.

I braced myself for what I presumed had been coming for all of these nights, whimpering. Soon I would be like these eyeless women. He extended a great finger down to me, and the breath got hotter, stronger. Wanting desperately to avoid the pain I knew was coming, I shut my eyes so tight I saw stars. The long joint dragged its sharp edge across my face, lightly, leaving only a light red scratch in its wake. It roamed, lazily, in circles for a moment before its tip came to rest on my eye. I inhaled sharply. Then, the thing chuckled--a low, groaning sort of sound, like a foot creaking on a stair in the early morning.

The claw moved from my eye, tracing a path down my body, before it came to stop at my womb. I heard the crackle of joints at the thing bent down to place its great, birdlike head, with its great beak and sideways eyelids, down by my ear. And then it whispered something to me--so quietly I could hardly pick it up, and yet with enough intention I felt each soundwave burst against my ear drum. It breathed:

“What has been sown, has been sown. What will be reapt, will soon be reapt.”

I cried out at this, shock washing over me as I realized the implication of its words. Almost unconsciously, I whipped my head to the side to face it. Its beak was centimetres away from me. I realized then, through my haze of dizzying terror, that the beak was full of teeth. And it was baring them in such a way I got the impression it was smiling.

My eyes shot open then, really. I was alone, in my room, drenched in sweat, hands clutched tightly to my womb. My chest heaved, but once I realized I had been dreaming, my breathing slowed, my chest expanded, and I found some respite.

Respite, that is, until I looked into the mirror, and saw the long, red scratch spanning from my eyelid to my womb. Kick, went the thing. I dry heaved above my porcelain sink.

How closely have you been following the news lately? My eyes have grown bloodshot from staring at the screens, reading the tiny print. I’ve stopped sleeping, because each time that I do, the thing leaves its claws on my eyes for just a second longer, almost imperceptibly.

How closely have you been following the news lately? Not as closely as me, let me assure you. Because I know I’ve seen other women in the field with eyes--other women that wait for the claws of the Farmhand. But I know I am not like them. Because I am not waiting for him. I am next.

I went to the nurse today. She told me something strange. She said the baby--the thing she has no choice but to call a baby--is breach. Facing my spine. And something else she’d noticed, she said, twiddling her thumbs. There was something she’d omitted the last time she’d seen its face, because she hadn’t truly believed it. But she’d studied the photos and felt as if she had no choice but to tell me.

It has teeth.

Submitted April 25, 2017 at 10:59AM by tamikaflynnofficial http://ift.tt/2oG7mtS nosleep