The Delivery

This was entered into a writing competition with the assigned genre Horror and location Hayride.

It was the tolling engine that awoke me, not the overwhelming aroma of hay or the pain in my stomach. It was the relentless mechanical clanging that did it and I wondered how long I had been passed out with it lingering in the backdrop like a wounded lullaby.

The sound numbed me. It was orchestration of metal, painfully loud, making the floor shake with it, a thumping heartbeat like the whole thing was alive.

But where was I?

The wide wing-mirrors reflected a stream of white light. It illuminated the back of a tractor, the straws of a haybed, trundling behind, and my hands trembling, deathly pale in front of me.

I don’t know how I had got here but Time was eluding me recently, like a child in a game of tag. Remembering was a mental chase, I’d catch brief glimpses of Time in my memory; I recalled pouring a coffee, closing the windows, the sound of the rural wind whistling outside, then the rest would disappear like the wisp of a dream.

I found it alarming, these gaping holes in my mind, unnatural, grotesque, like missing teeth, the memory gaps repulsed me. Not knowing where I had been or what I had done I would religiously wash my hands, my body, drain away the stranger I didn’t recognize. Where had he taken me this time?

But this hadn’t happened before and I tried not to panic as the hayride was moving faster.

Maybe this was a dream.

There was a coin glistening on my right, probably slipped from my pocket, it was perfectly polished, and I grasped at it, wanting it to comically disappear. It didn’t.

Everything was real here. I heard a scuffling beside me, and my breath stopped.

Please don’t be him.

He wasn’t even born, yet I hoped I would never see him again.

*

I never planned on having a child when I was younger, I found them too clingy, needy like strong adhesive tape they’d fasten themselves around your limbs, your mouth, robbing your freedom, your voice, your sanity. Older, I finally became reconciled to the idea.

I expected my life to change. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.

I was one month pregnant when he started appearing.

At first it was in surfaces, another reflection in the mirror, the silver faucet, the bath water, a little boys’ face in the glass of the shower door.

Then he started appearing everywhere, in a chair across the café, standing at the park, sitting in the patio. He was always smiling impassively, never speaking, cocking his head to one side and my swollen stomach would stir as if in a silent, menacing greeting.

It got worse with time. He was quietly consuming my life, gnawing away at my innards and shredding my sanity. He was an intruder, a squatter, robbing the space inside me, cocooned by my skin, thriving like a root plant, my blood, the dirt.

As I came to term, more Time began disappearing, like photos eerily taken out of frames; the voids increased.

*

The coin lay in my palm and I thought about how I should have tried harder to smother his life while it was this miniscule.

The abortion clinic was a ghastly affair, speeding along the country highway, hands quivering uncontrollably against the wheel, half-expecting him to appear in the seat next to me, in the middle of the road, in my lap, like all the times before. But it didn’t happen.

In the stiff clinic chair, my nerves were electrified, every word from the nurses’ lips was like a pulsating shock, making me jolt. I imagined him at the window, eyes narrowed, hating me for what I was about to do. I must’ve looked hysterical, distracted, a woman deluded, incapable of choice. She asked me again, uncertain, nervous, and I almost screamed yes. This was the seventh appointment and the only one I’d kept. There were more talks and I forced calm until the tip of a needle slid under my skin.

I thought it was all over.

I felt a relieving emptiness, like a tense, evil grip had been removed from my shoulder.

That night I snapped awake to lost Time and found myself smiling impassively in the bathroom mirror with a cord in my hands, wrapped around my own throat. My stomach stirred and I could hear a small boyish laugh. A tit for tat.

I didn’t try again.

*

Now I was somehow on a hayride, moving fast, taking me further into a rural wilderness.

He had brought me here.

The pain in my stomach was becoming immense, strong waves of nausea, my skin feeling as if it was being seared open. Was this really it? I’d talked to doctors, seen movies but this pain was surreal, dystopian, my body feeling as if it was being torn, severing my organs.

My stomach was growing larger. Was this normal?

It didn’t stop expanding.

That’s when I started to scream, but not from just the pain. This wasn’t a birth; he was hatching.

I saw the face of a smiling woman in the side-mirror and screamed.

*

The woman halted the tractor, low, fragmented echoes still reverberated in the night air. Her eyes were expressionless, a thin, disjointed smile on her lips. She hopped clumsily from the seat, as if she was unused to her own body. She cradled a swollen belly.

“That took long enough,” she said. A naked, smiling boy was sitting in the bloodied remains of a woman whose stomach had exploded outwards, her body ruptured all over the haybed, like she’d vomited herself apart.

The boy, sitting at the centre, licked the blood from his fingers, unfazed at the disjointed head lulling beside him. He looked at the woman, at her gaping belly, thought about the creature pulling her strings like a marionette, and wondered how long it was until her delivery.

It was okay, she wouldn’t remember this.