Part 1The last thing I remember is walking home from school. I think I was carrying a backpack and it was cold. I had hair then, long and brown and I am not entirely sure what happened to it. I don't really have memory of much else. I think my name is Phoebe, and that I am probably around fourteen years old. I must have parents somewhere out there because I have faint traces of memory of sharing my life with a man and a woman. But those, like everything else in my mind, fall over the brim of sanity into the dark abyss of the unknown. I do not know why I am here or where I am for that matter, but I know they have robbed me, whoever they are. They stole my life, my mind.
And now I am carrying what could only be a fetus in my abdomen. When I first woke up there was nothing there at all, no swollen knot under my skin, no life force feeding off of me. And as far as I remember, though I am not trusting my mind at all these days, the only way you can get pregnant is to have sex, and that is not something I remember ever doing at all. I get the sickly, sneaking suspicion that why ever it is that I am here, revolves entirely around the tiny, nearly human creature that I am carrying in me.
I must have read every book on this shelf in my cell three times by now. I am beginning to know "The Mismeasure of Man" by heart. I can not understand why they, whoever they are, gave me books. Or a bed for that matter, or a toilet and sink. They seem to want me to have the comforts of living a normal life, yet force me to live in complete solitude.
They feed me three meals a day, they usually consist of different masses of slop, some taste salty, some sweet. They all range in color from a pinkish gray to a greenish gray and have the consistency of a slightly more gelatinous form of grits. Every day, they push the plates through a slat in the wall. Every day its the same luke warm temperature. They never give me anything to drink, I drink tap water from the sink that tastes as if someone has poured bleach in it. But if you dehydrate enough, any water may seem appealing.
I remember strange things sometimes. The come and get me out of bed at night while I am sleeping. They do things like shave my head, put me up on a cold metal table and run tests. I feel more and more like a lab animal and less like a human being as each of these fleeting quasi dream memories pass through this wrecked electronic mess that is my mind.
I remember waking up, if ever so briefly, in a tub of blood with men in masks and white coats around me. Shove another pill down my throat. Two gloved fingers tapping my arm to find a pulse. To find a venue to make me forget. I only forget enough to make my memories seem like a distant thought, I only remember enough to inspire nightmares for the rest of my pathetic, caged existence, sleeping and otherwise.
As I can remember them, the ones who keep me here, there are two of them. A man and a woman. The man with dark hair and piercing eyes of an almost mechanical nature. Thin and cruel in the way he moves, hands constantly bearing syringes, vials, feverish guilt.
The woman is blond with bright eyes, the rest of her face is always obscured by a mask and she mumbles to herself in strange foreign tongues. I saw here once through the door window. But I have never seen anyone in the adjacent hallway since then.
And sometimes at night I see strange things, I think it is the isolation starting to eat at me. Judging from my stage in this apparent pregnancy, it has to have at least been seven or eight months. I can't keep track of the days anymore since I have no sight of things as simple as daylight, not to mention a clock. I measure the days by my sleep cycles, and their blinding monotony is only broken up by the strange apparitions. The glowing orbs of light that tell me to disembowel myself with the spoon provided to me by my captors with my meals, and the strange rabbit like thing that chews up the eyes of its enemies and laughs like a weak and feeble child.
Then there is the girl with the half rotted off face, with the maggots swimming under her skin, giving it the appearance of expensive rice paper. She screams and cries, she says she was my sister, that I betrayed her and threw her to the wolves to be devoured. She tells me to watch as she pries her chest open and eats what is left of her own worm infested heart, that she wants mine next.
She paces about, screaming and crying and shaking. Speaking in what sounds like tongues and ripping out hair along with bits of flesh.
And then I start pacing and screaming and crying and shaking too. I rip at my scalp with my fingers but have nothing to grab a hole of. There is nothing there at all so I did my nails into the sides of my head and make a feeble attempt to shelter myself from the ever loudening noise.
And once I finally come to peace with the chaos around me, once I become content to have the company of the moaning, screaming, dead thing, I find myself all alone again. All alone with strange tissues growing in my stomach, something that was starting to feel less and less human as every sleep cycle passed.
I can feel it kicking and moving, throwing hard punches from the inside of my abdomen, I am frightened to see what it will turn out to be, I am frightened that I will never see my baby as well. This isn't how I would have imagined it, you know. I was like any other little girl, playing dress up in her moms clothes and carrying around some worn and chewed baby doll. I had the american dream. A picket white fence and a nice brick house in the suburbs, a good job and a loving husband, I always assumed that during my first pregnancy I would be out shopping for baby clothes, picking out names. But none of that is the case now, none of it. I am in an oversized rat cage with a baby fathered by god knows who. I feel like I am supposed to be happy but all I feel is the most primitive form of fear.
And as I feel this baby kicking me as I prepare myself for my next sleep cycle, all I can think, is that it will be time to have it soon.
To be continued.
