Changeling by L Mari Harris

While we were still new, I laid it all on the line with Jason. I needed him to know what had grown and settled inside of me, thoughts of splintering, of stunted appendages, and an inescapable feeling that something I once held close had been lost in the mist.

I described my collection of nineteenth century photo books of anomalies and memorials. How I’d study each photo under lamp light, blinds lowered to the outside sun, front door double chained, as I tried to understand why the damaged and the dead mattered so much, why its meaning always felt just out of reach like the receding tide.

The night he asked me to marry him, he presented me with a wrapped present tied with a red ribbon.

It was a photography book of Southern freakshows. Gator boy, werewolf family. Sisters forged together at the torso.

I accepted his proposal.

A curtain drew closed in my mind, and I felt a way forward.

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But now, Jason turns into a one-man PSA when my third trimester begins—know your exit routes in case of a house fire, gently turn into a skid, know how to spot a stroke F.A.S.T.

He charts my temperature and blood pressure on the kitchen calendar every morning. Reminds me to avoid horror movies and Stephen King novels, says stick to cooking shows. Kayla, everything affects the baby. Here, take your vitamins.

He sees the photography book he gifted me last year lying open on the counter, the whorls of my fingerprints still visible on the pages. He closes and buries it in the trash under soggy chamomile tea bags and empty dill pickle jars.

Kayla, why was this out? I thought you’d outgrown this obsession. This is my baby, too, you know. We discussed this.

I want to remind him women have been doing this for millennia, that we discussed nothing. But it will just start another argument.

After he heads upstairs to get ready for work, I pull the book back out of the trash and tuck it behind the bottles of bleach and disinfectants under the kitchen sink. There’s a photo of a chubby little girl with a horn growing out of her forehead, golden ringlets cascading over her rounded shoulders, that I want to study more closely. I’m trying to determine if she has Jason’s or my eyes.

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My obstetrician tells me Jason’s protective feelings are perfectly normal, that many men become overbearing during this time. She laughs when I tell her I feel like I have two aliens growing in my house. Says it’s not the first time she’s heard that complaint.

Later, Jason and I are watching Top Chef when I see shadows scurrying along the wall from the corner of my eye. Jason keeps shoving handfuls of popcorn in his mouth. The shadows disappear, and a low buzzing begins, insect legs whispering, paper-thin wisps of wings fluttering. I heave myself up and say I’m going to bed. Before he turns the volume back up, he tells me it’s good I’m finally prioritizing my health. The buzzing grows louder and closer, until it feels like it’s settled behind my eyes, pressing into the gyri and sulci of my brain.

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These last few weeks I balloon up even bigger. Jason can’t keep his hands off me, measuring my belly with his palms while he waits for me to take my vitamins. With every kick and fleeting bump under my skin, he laughs and traces the movements like it’s a game. Look at my little man go! He’s convinced it will be a boy.

Maybe she’s very strong.

Jason ignores me. Tell me what he feels like. I want to experience it, too.

I am learning to play along: I finally understand what everyone means when they say they feel complete for the first time in their lives. I smile and briefly touch his hand.

What I want to say is:I have dreams of transparent skin and horns and forked tongues, whispers of smoke and fire.

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A week before my due date, my water breaks.

The birthing room is cold. Muscles and fascia and tendons I didn’t know I had hurt as I bear down. I keep shouting I need to rest, I can’t do this much longer, that I’m not made for this pain. Jason keeps dabbing the sweat from my face, telling me to push harder. Starbursts explode behind my closed eyes as my body spasms and stretches, until finally, just at the point when I’m about to pass out, an easing, slipping past.

I hear my obstetrician tell Jason to cut the umbilical cord, and suddenly, the buzzing begins low, then crescendoing, billions of paper-thin wings beating against the walls and ceiling. Filling the room, pressing against my eyes, my mouth, then my shoulders to my chest. These wings, warm, wet, pushing down, binding me to their weight. And from what feels like it’s coming from another room, I hear Jason, exalted and prideful: Look at what we made.

Something flutters past my head, then falls to the floor. I open my eyes; from above, I see it all. Everything I ever imagined.

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L MARI HARRIS — L Mari’s stories have been chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 and Best Microfiction. She lives in the Ozarks and is currently at work on a linked flash fiction collection about the region. Follow her @LMariHarris and read more of her work at lmariharris.wordpress.com. 

Art by AMANDA BERGLOFF — Amanda is a mixed media artist whose cover and interior art has been published in Non-Binary Review, Tiny Spoon Literary Magazine, Utopia Science Fiction, Mud Season Review, Invisible City, Women Artists Datebook, and other publications.