With reverent fingertips, I trace your calcified cocoons underneath my stretched-tight skin. Inside, if I’m lucky, I can feel the minuscule vibrations from within your tiny grey egg sacs. I wonder if you will know me when you hatch, this body that has sheltered you, my little loves.
Quarantined in this deserted medical complex, I’ve had the time to hunt down what it is that makes people so squeamish about you, little ones. Trypophobia. People are disgusted by the holes you’ve put in me, at the way you move beneath.
“You’re not the mother wasp!” my mother has shouted into the commlink. “You’re the senseless caterpillar!”
Once I was afraid, as she is now. When holding the artifact from Charon, a dried piece of Pluto’s frozen moon cradled in my gloved hand, it burst outward in a hoard of squirmy larvae. You stung me, my darlings, sliding between connective tissue, crawling through my muscle, puncturing holes in the fibers. I was in agony, shoved in the furthest sterile corner of the research facility, alone, wondering if this was how I’d die. When those trypophobics came to examine me, one vomited inside her isolation suit.
I’m ashamed to admit I wanted them to cut you out. They tried once. The professor, an ecologist with a passing understanding of mammalian biology, operated under the direction of an expert on the telescreen. The story is I screamed, even beneath the forgetful fugue of the anesthetic, and the scalpel just kept slipping.
I woke alone in recovery. In the prefab across the way, they were laughing. I knew then it would only be you and me.
My friends from class were allowed to say goodbye. The professor won’t leave. She feels responsible. My friends cried, steaming up their suits. I tried to reach out to them, but the tutors didn’t like that.
They don’t understand. I’m not afraid. I’m no longer alone. I’ll be mother to you all. You, smart things, have recruited my blood, my bone, woven them into a perfect home. You’re a part of me.
My shoulder aches as you expand through my scapula, encroaching on the pleura of my thoracic cavity. The expert on the telescreen won’t get here in time at the rate you’re progressing, loves. She says if you burrow any deeper, I may lose use of my left arm, be left with nerve pain, at the least.
“Shyala, you only come out of this if you fight.”
As if I would want to. She explains that you’re hijacking my endocrine system, lulling me with oxytocin and serotonin. But our oneness is better than anything I’ve ever experienced.
Even under the warmest LEDs, my lips turn cyanosis-blue. I’m down to one lung. While the professor measures—you’ve doubled in size since last time, my darlings—they hold me in clamps, releasing me only when she leaves to discuss the prognosis with the doctor.
I want to see the sky. My minders object, but they aren’t feeling this buzz—I’m invincible. Stopping them is easier than I had thought, and I step over their inert bodies as the blue light of the sun begins to dawn.
My heart thumps hard as my body jitters; I know this adrenaline that kicks like a mule. It means we’re ready. You squirm for freedom, and I cannot wait to meet you.
My professor appears, begs me not to go. She weeps, tells me she’ll have to shoot, the stun gun trembling in her hands. I make my way to the pods as she cradles her broken wrist, screaming.
There’s only your hum in my ears, in the pulse of my blood.
I won’t need a suit for my new life with you, loves.
The launch hurts, my body juddering in the seat while I pre-program the destination. The endless blue sky reminds me of home. I wish I could see it, feel the sun crisp on my skin. I’m tired of watery blue light and the endless cold.
My mother is patched through. “Shyala, I love you. Please don’t do this!”
I cannot answer her. I’ve lost the ability to move my face. I need her with us, need her to understand…
We pass into the upper atmosphere and there…there’s the sun rising in the viewing window, bright blue in the blue sky. That’s where we’ll meet, in a place that feels like home to us both. We place my hand on the eject button and with a metallic pop, we fly. My breath catches.
You’re hatching. The atmosphere rushes over those holes you occupied, the first ones in my scapula, echoes of panpipes in tuneful glory. I am Valkyrie, I am wonder, bringing forth life.
Even as I feel you perforating, spiraling, each mouth like fire and screaming, I love you. You worm through me, feeding, growing. I am slick, dark fluid dripping off me in pin-wheeling constellations, trailing our descent.
I see the first of you emerge from the pulsating distortions beneath my skin, striped violet and green, slathered blue streaks that must be my blood. But I don’t care. You’re beautiful with your translucent wings, and gently clicking mandibles, and all those legs.
You are everywhere. Over the wet wheezing of my breath, you hold a single note, humming between your flickering wings. You nestle against me—a crawling, fluttering gown, lowering your mouths to me again and again. Oh, it hurts!
Pressure behind my eyes mounts, my body swells, multitudinous, with spectrums of pain previously undiscovered, lighting up the innumerable pathways of my nerve endings. I’m so tired. I have no more to give you.
But here you are, at last, and it’s all I ever wanted, my little loves.
