| Motherhood |
What we called humanity was sterilized by a widespread viral
infection in 2003, when I was 9 years old. I was too young to
understand it at the time, and now it is still a hard notion for me to
conceive. I catch pregnant every time a man coughs in my direction,
it seems. And that is the only reason I am alive at the age of 25. As
long as I keep pushing out little blood farms, they’ll spare me. At the
first sign of menopause, I’m juiced.
They keep us in prisons, the adults in solitary. We’re isolated from
each other to keep us from hatching plots, I suppose, though I doubt
they have any true fear of our being able to overthrow them. No,
more likely because, as creatures who mostly wandered the earth
alone before the plague decimated their enemies, they understand
loneliness. It is too easy to imagine how individuals of their kind fell
together – Lucien, for instance, who’s refined and intelligent,
obviously of blue blood back when he still had his own; Marcus, who
loves to push us around just enough to draw a little blood he can
humiliate us by licking off; Juniper, with the manic eyes, the one who
goes from cell to cell sniffing, drinking our periods when they flow.
Three people like these would never have anything to do with each
other, but these are not people at all, and they fell together out of that
desperate need for companionship bred from travelling alone
through an unfriendly world.
So I’d guess they separate us not for any fear of us, but so that, like
them in the old days, we’re so glad, so grateful to see any others of
our kind, we fall together indiscriminately, desperate for that human
act of touch. For half an hour or so, I fall in love again and again and
again.
The window set high up in my cell door opens briefly, and a plate
slides through. The meat is tough today, and I hope it is from a pig
or cow…but it is impossible to avoid wondering if this is from one of
us who didn’t make it. One of the women I’ve seen in the yard, or
even talked to at some point, as we shamble in loose circles under
our masters’ watchful eyes. It’s been so ungodly long since I’ve
seen the sun, I see it in my head the way I used to draw it when I was
a kid, a big yellow circle with orange and red lines pointing out from
it. Now I am so accustomed to this dead black sky and its blind
starlight. I knew about constellations in the old world, but I could
never see them, really. My mother used to try to point them out, and
it didn’t make sense to me that anyone could see pictures in those
little dots of light. Now, I have my own constellations. One set of
stars reminds me of a plane, and I imagine it swooping down one
night and liberating me, or maybe just crashing and killing us all.
One looks like a rat, hunching to attack, its tail curling up behind it.
That makes me think of Juniper, which gives me chills. Another
seems to me to be a woman, and it’s to that one I pray every night, to
restore us to some kind of life. Then I wonder if maybe we’re not
already fulfilling our absolute base obligation as human women, in
this post-plague world, repopulating the race, what little good it will
ever do.
The first five years I almost went crazy. The kids were allowed to
spend a certain amount of time together every day, but there was no
other stimulation. Spending 23 hours a day trying to sleep or in
some way entertain myself with only a pre-adolescent child’s
experience to reminisce over…my mind was on the verge of
implosion. Like most children I discovered masturbation and for a
few weeks or months, I guess I did that until it got boring. I spent
endless hours tracing patterns on my flesh with my fingernails. Once
I scratched hard enough to draw blood, hoping to make a permanent
mark, but that only earned me a visit from a passing guard who
licked and sucked greedily at the mark I’d made.
In my head my parents were still alive, and my big brother, and I
talked to all of them every day, and I invented their sides of the
conversations, trying desperately to have my old life back. It was
when I started to hear their responses instead of composing them
that I was in trouble…but then I was thirteen and my existence
changed.
The door opened at an unusual time, and Juniper crept in, hunched
down, nostrils twitching. “You’re bleeding,” she said.
I was, but I wasn’t sure why – I’d been hoping I was dying and would
die quietly and alone, before they could finish me off. “No, no, I’m
not, I’m fine,” I whimpered, backing futilely against the wall.
“Lie down.”
“No!”
“Lie down, lift up your dress.”
I remember an illusion of fighting, but their strength is enormous,
even when you’re not a skinny pubescent girl. She pushed me down,
held me with a casual hand, and lifted up the smock I wore. Blood
streaked the insides of my thighs.
“Good, good,” she gurgled, and my mind almost broke.
I waited for the pierce of teeth, but instead I felt licking. Gentle
determined licking, then sucking at the mouth of my sex.
Finally, she let go and stood. I stared helplessly at the – at my blood
filling a wrinkle above her mouth.
“Good,” she said again. “Not long for you.”
So it was true, I was dying. I watched her go, then my body heaved
and hitched in dry racking sobs. It was no life, to be sure, but some
primitive instinct in me railed at the idea of its ending.
Juniper returned every day, twice a day. I went numb after the third
time. Then, after four days, it stopped. She marked the date on a
calendar she carried. I was allowed to return to the exercise yard
again, apparently no longer contagious, I thought, but now at a
different time.
Rather than going out at the children's hour, I was now with the adult
women. I was the second youngest among them, a pale and terrified
eleven-year-old was the only younger, but they were kind to us. The
oldest was thirty-four, and she wanted to teach us how to survive our
new lives – the key, she said, was acceptance of our fate. She said
that clearly this was what God intended for us, perhaps as some
punishment for the wickedness of humanity, and our duty was to
follow through and obey his will to the end. Then we’d go to
heaven. I can understand why that was important to her, why she
needed to have something to look forward to after death, since
everything up to that point looked worse than hopeless.
But for me and Latoya, a fifteen-year-old on our walk schedule, it was
too far out of reach to do us any good.
She said, “My parents were atheists, so I guess I am too. They had all
kinds of ‘If there’s a God, then why…’ questions. I only need one. If
there’s a God, why are we making babies we’ll never hold with men
we never met? If we were created in His image, why are we
livestock?”
Juniper arrived every time I started bleeding, marking the dates in her
book. Finally, when I was almost 14, she came with another, Lucien.
He was not a guard on my walks, so I’d never seen him before. I
thought he was very pleasant-looking, blond and pale and
handsome. (“Oh, that one,” said Latoya, “with the I-don’t-want-to-be-
doing-this-to-you face. I bet the Nazis had a guy like that to make the
Jews feel bad about fighting.”)
Lucien did have a sorrowful look to him. “Juniper tells me that you’
re regulating,” he said in his best funeral director’s tone. “You’re
ready to begin making babies.”
“But I’m only 13! Women m-make, ah, have babies; I’m just a girl!” I
don’t know what was worse, finally having the expectation laid out
before me, or killing off the last of my conventions.
“Charlotte. It is Charlotte, isn’t it?”
I nodded. I could feel myself pouting, as if in proof of my youth.
Lucien sat down beside me and put his cold hand on mine.
“Charlotte, we’re in control now because there aren’t many left of
your kind. And of those few left, even fewer can bear children. If you
are one of those special few, that makes you very important, both to
your kind and to mine. It’s your duty to try.”
I understood what he was saying – having babies makes me valuable,
but not having babies makes me expendable. I could be fertile and
buy myself years of life. And this life, such as it is, was still not as
bad as having my existence blink out. I didn’t have anything to live
for, I knew, but I wasn’t ready to die. I suppose that’s what breeds
hope – that simple instinctual response to death, that refusal, it
makes you look for a justification of your life. So you hope, even if
the only things worth hoping for are beyond the realm of possibility.
You hope for something worth living for.
For my first, they sent me a man in his late teens. He was kind.
Under the circumstances, it could have been much worse. He
apologized a half dozen times or so before sticking it in me and again
after. I cried, but later, alone again, I wanted him to return.
Next time, it was an older man. He called me Marsha a lot, and he
cried with me.
That first week, I was visited by a different man every day. There is
no way of knowing which it was.
Cheryl, a 20-something woman on our walks, wondered how they
plan to track heritage, to avoid inbreeding among our children.
Margaret, a half-crazed thirty-year-old, fell on her scratching and
screaming. The guards carried them both away, licking their wounds.
There was little talking among the rest of us after that. We were all
hearing over and over again Margaret’s scream, “You stupid mare,
you sow, you heifer, they don’t care! Our children’s children can be
witless and deformed, and that just makes their job easier!”
My walk schedule changed again a few weeks later, when another
guard, Dorothea, confirmed I was pregnant. I was put on a new diet
and allowed to walk only with the other pregnant women. We were
paired up on that walking schedule. My partner was Julie. At 17, she
was pregnant with her fifth child.
“One thing,” she said, “we don’t have to worry over getting back into
shape. For one thing, we aren’t ever not-pregnant long enough to
try; also, the men are so happy to have sex at all, they don’t care how
we look.”
She seemed either callous or daffy at first. Later I realized she was
just trying desperately to be an optimist, no matter what. It was
exhausting to listen to her putting a positive spin on everything, but
she needed it, I guessed, and I wasn’t going to try to take it away.
So for eight months, I listened to her talk about how she’d almost
had an orgasm with this or that one, and some of the men were quite
handsome, and she’d felt her baby move and couldn’t wait to see it.
Then one night there was a new girl, one with a flat stomach I couldn’
t tell was carrying anything. For my last week as a pregnant girl, I
played the role of the wise older woman, making the new girl feel like
it was no big deal. No big deal at all.
Two weeks after that, when I resumed my normal schedule, all my
friends were gone, all on pregnancy, as I had been. All except Karen,
the 34, now 35-year-old, the one who trusted in God. I spoke to her,
asking whether she knew how long before Latoya would be back, and
she reacted as if I’d accused or insulted her, babbling, “I can have
children! I’ve had dozens, you little brat, and what the hell do you
know about it? I was breeding before you could spell!”
A guard grabbed her and dragged her away. One of the new women I
was walking with told me Karen hadn’t caught pregnant in over a
year, and her time was up. No one ever saw her again.
After the first baby, it was never that hard again. You become
anesthetized to pain, anguish. You tell yourself at least your baby
has a good thirty-some years ahead of it, breeding the next
generation of red, red wine. You come to think of yourself, not as
cows, but as a vineyard.
How easy must it have been for them? They’d existed in our
shadows for so long, eternal yet having to fear us. Suddenly in 2007,
our numbers were cut to the point that it was so easy to gather us up,
children and adults alike, because we were lost, alone, desperate for
direction. They might have just drunk us all right then, ensuring their
own extinction as well. Whose idea was it to keep us? If they could
just wait a few years, they’d never have to fear us again, and they’d
always have food. And since it bought us time, we were so dumbly
glad. Like cows.
Every time a man comes to me now, we cling to each other
desperately as we couple, and nearly all of them whisper of a
growing force among the men, a resistance that will someday set us
free.
Part of me wants to believe. The rest of me sees it as the men’s way
of keeping busy, keeping sane. We hatch babies. They hatch plans.
But when they’re buried inside me, grabbing my hair and whispering,
“We’ll be free, and we’ll marry and keep our babies,” oh how I need to
believe it.
infection in 2003, when I was 9 years old. I was too young to
understand it at the time, and now it is still a hard notion for me to
conceive. I catch pregnant every time a man coughs in my direction,
it seems. And that is the only reason I am alive at the age of 25. As
long as I keep pushing out little blood farms, they’ll spare me. At the
first sign of menopause, I’m juiced.
They keep us in prisons, the adults in solitary. We’re isolated from
each other to keep us from hatching plots, I suppose, though I doubt
they have any true fear of our being able to overthrow them. No,
more likely because, as creatures who mostly wandered the earth
alone before the plague decimated their enemies, they understand
loneliness. It is too easy to imagine how individuals of their kind fell
together – Lucien, for instance, who’s refined and intelligent,
obviously of blue blood back when he still had his own; Marcus, who
loves to push us around just enough to draw a little blood he can
humiliate us by licking off; Juniper, with the manic eyes, the one who
goes from cell to cell sniffing, drinking our periods when they flow.
Three people like these would never have anything to do with each
other, but these are not people at all, and they fell together out of that
desperate need for companionship bred from travelling alone
through an unfriendly world.
So I’d guess they separate us not for any fear of us, but so that, like
them in the old days, we’re so glad, so grateful to see any others of
our kind, we fall together indiscriminately, desperate for that human
act of touch. For half an hour or so, I fall in love again and again and
again.
The window set high up in my cell door opens briefly, and a plate
slides through. The meat is tough today, and I hope it is from a pig
or cow…but it is impossible to avoid wondering if this is from one of
us who didn’t make it. One of the women I’ve seen in the yard, or
even talked to at some point, as we shamble in loose circles under
our masters’ watchful eyes. It’s been so ungodly long since I’ve
seen the sun, I see it in my head the way I used to draw it when I was
a kid, a big yellow circle with orange and red lines pointing out from
it. Now I am so accustomed to this dead black sky and its blind
starlight. I knew about constellations in the old world, but I could
never see them, really. My mother used to try to point them out, and
it didn’t make sense to me that anyone could see pictures in those
little dots of light. Now, I have my own constellations. One set of
stars reminds me of a plane, and I imagine it swooping down one
night and liberating me, or maybe just crashing and killing us all.
One looks like a rat, hunching to attack, its tail curling up behind it.
That makes me think of Juniper, which gives me chills. Another
seems to me to be a woman, and it’s to that one I pray every night, to
restore us to some kind of life. Then I wonder if maybe we’re not
already fulfilling our absolute base obligation as human women, in
this post-plague world, repopulating the race, what little good it will
ever do.
The first five years I almost went crazy. The kids were allowed to
spend a certain amount of time together every day, but there was no
other stimulation. Spending 23 hours a day trying to sleep or in
some way entertain myself with only a pre-adolescent child’s
experience to reminisce over…my mind was on the verge of
implosion. Like most children I discovered masturbation and for a
few weeks or months, I guess I did that until it got boring. I spent
endless hours tracing patterns on my flesh with my fingernails. Once
I scratched hard enough to draw blood, hoping to make a permanent
mark, but that only earned me a visit from a passing guard who
licked and sucked greedily at the mark I’d made.
In my head my parents were still alive, and my big brother, and I
talked to all of them every day, and I invented their sides of the
conversations, trying desperately to have my old life back. It was
when I started to hear their responses instead of composing them
that I was in trouble…but then I was thirteen and my existence
changed.
The door opened at an unusual time, and Juniper crept in, hunched
down, nostrils twitching. “You’re bleeding,” she said.
I was, but I wasn’t sure why – I’d been hoping I was dying and would
die quietly and alone, before they could finish me off. “No, no, I’m
not, I’m fine,” I whimpered, backing futilely against the wall.
“Lie down.”
“No!”
“Lie down, lift up your dress.”
I remember an illusion of fighting, but their strength is enormous,
even when you’re not a skinny pubescent girl. She pushed me down,
held me with a casual hand, and lifted up the smock I wore. Blood
streaked the insides of my thighs.
“Good, good,” she gurgled, and my mind almost broke.
I waited for the pierce of teeth, but instead I felt licking. Gentle
determined licking, then sucking at the mouth of my sex.
Finally, she let go and stood. I stared helplessly at the – at my blood
filling a wrinkle above her mouth.
“Good,” she said again. “Not long for you.”
So it was true, I was dying. I watched her go, then my body heaved
and hitched in dry racking sobs. It was no life, to be sure, but some
primitive instinct in me railed at the idea of its ending.
Juniper returned every day, twice a day. I went numb after the third
time. Then, after four days, it stopped. She marked the date on a
calendar she carried. I was allowed to return to the exercise yard
again, apparently no longer contagious, I thought, but now at a
different time.
Rather than going out at the children's hour, I was now with the adult
women. I was the second youngest among them, a pale and terrified
eleven-year-old was the only younger, but they were kind to us. The
oldest was thirty-four, and she wanted to teach us how to survive our
new lives – the key, she said, was acceptance of our fate. She said
that clearly this was what God intended for us, perhaps as some
punishment for the wickedness of humanity, and our duty was to
follow through and obey his will to the end. Then we’d go to
heaven. I can understand why that was important to her, why she
needed to have something to look forward to after death, since
everything up to that point looked worse than hopeless.
But for me and Latoya, a fifteen-year-old on our walk schedule, it was
too far out of reach to do us any good.
She said, “My parents were atheists, so I guess I am too. They had all
kinds of ‘If there’s a God, then why…’ questions. I only need one. If
there’s a God, why are we making babies we’ll never hold with men
we never met? If we were created in His image, why are we
livestock?”
Juniper arrived every time I started bleeding, marking the dates in her
book. Finally, when I was almost 14, she came with another, Lucien.
He was not a guard on my walks, so I’d never seen him before. I
thought he was very pleasant-looking, blond and pale and
handsome. (“Oh, that one,” said Latoya, “with the I-don’t-want-to-be-
doing-this-to-you face. I bet the Nazis had a guy like that to make the
Jews feel bad about fighting.”)
Lucien did have a sorrowful look to him. “Juniper tells me that you’
re regulating,” he said in his best funeral director’s tone. “You’re
ready to begin making babies.”
“But I’m only 13! Women m-make, ah, have babies; I’m just a girl!” I
don’t know what was worse, finally having the expectation laid out
before me, or killing off the last of my conventions.
“Charlotte. It is Charlotte, isn’t it?”
I nodded. I could feel myself pouting, as if in proof of my youth.
Lucien sat down beside me and put his cold hand on mine.
“Charlotte, we’re in control now because there aren’t many left of
your kind. And of those few left, even fewer can bear children. If you
are one of those special few, that makes you very important, both to
your kind and to mine. It’s your duty to try.”
I understood what he was saying – having babies makes me valuable,
but not having babies makes me expendable. I could be fertile and
buy myself years of life. And this life, such as it is, was still not as
bad as having my existence blink out. I didn’t have anything to live
for, I knew, but I wasn’t ready to die. I suppose that’s what breeds
hope – that simple instinctual response to death, that refusal, it
makes you look for a justification of your life. So you hope, even if
the only things worth hoping for are beyond the realm of possibility.
You hope for something worth living for.
For my first, they sent me a man in his late teens. He was kind.
Under the circumstances, it could have been much worse. He
apologized a half dozen times or so before sticking it in me and again
after. I cried, but later, alone again, I wanted him to return.
Next time, it was an older man. He called me Marsha a lot, and he
cried with me.
That first week, I was visited by a different man every day. There is
no way of knowing which it was.
Cheryl, a 20-something woman on our walks, wondered how they
plan to track heritage, to avoid inbreeding among our children.
Margaret, a half-crazed thirty-year-old, fell on her scratching and
screaming. The guards carried them both away, licking their wounds.
There was little talking among the rest of us after that. We were all
hearing over and over again Margaret’s scream, “You stupid mare,
you sow, you heifer, they don’t care! Our children’s children can be
witless and deformed, and that just makes their job easier!”
My walk schedule changed again a few weeks later, when another
guard, Dorothea, confirmed I was pregnant. I was put on a new diet
and allowed to walk only with the other pregnant women. We were
paired up on that walking schedule. My partner was Julie. At 17, she
was pregnant with her fifth child.
“One thing,” she said, “we don’t have to worry over getting back into
shape. For one thing, we aren’t ever not-pregnant long enough to
try; also, the men are so happy to have sex at all, they don’t care how
we look.”
She seemed either callous or daffy at first. Later I realized she was
just trying desperately to be an optimist, no matter what. It was
exhausting to listen to her putting a positive spin on everything, but
she needed it, I guessed, and I wasn’t going to try to take it away.
So for eight months, I listened to her talk about how she’d almost
had an orgasm with this or that one, and some of the men were quite
handsome, and she’d felt her baby move and couldn’t wait to see it.
Then one night there was a new girl, one with a flat stomach I couldn’
t tell was carrying anything. For my last week as a pregnant girl, I
played the role of the wise older woman, making the new girl feel like
it was no big deal. No big deal at all.
Two weeks after that, when I resumed my normal schedule, all my
friends were gone, all on pregnancy, as I had been. All except Karen,
the 34, now 35-year-old, the one who trusted in God. I spoke to her,
asking whether she knew how long before Latoya would be back, and
she reacted as if I’d accused or insulted her, babbling, “I can have
children! I’ve had dozens, you little brat, and what the hell do you
know about it? I was breeding before you could spell!”
A guard grabbed her and dragged her away. One of the new women I
was walking with told me Karen hadn’t caught pregnant in over a
year, and her time was up. No one ever saw her again.
After the first baby, it was never that hard again. You become
anesthetized to pain, anguish. You tell yourself at least your baby
has a good thirty-some years ahead of it, breeding the next
generation of red, red wine. You come to think of yourself, not as
cows, but as a vineyard.
How easy must it have been for them? They’d existed in our
shadows for so long, eternal yet having to fear us. Suddenly in 2007,
our numbers were cut to the point that it was so easy to gather us up,
children and adults alike, because we were lost, alone, desperate for
direction. They might have just drunk us all right then, ensuring their
own extinction as well. Whose idea was it to keep us? If they could
just wait a few years, they’d never have to fear us again, and they’d
always have food. And since it bought us time, we were so dumbly
glad. Like cows.
Every time a man comes to me now, we cling to each other
desperately as we couple, and nearly all of them whisper of a
growing force among the men, a resistance that will someday set us
free.
Part of me wants to believe. The rest of me sees it as the men’s way
of keeping busy, keeping sane. We hatch babies. They hatch plans.
But when they’re buried inside me, grabbing my hair and whispering,
“We’ll be free, and we’ll marry and keep our babies,” oh how I need to
believe it.
