Changeling by Amy Lane
Her name was Keesha. She was fifteen years old, and she was pregnant. She had managed to hide it for nearly seven months—it wasn’t hard. She was cocaine fat instead of heroin thin, so no one noticed the weight gain. All of her clothes were oversized anyway, and when she began to show, she just stopped wearing her spaghetti tanks, that was all. But it… that thing… was still growing inside of her, and she hated it.
When she first missed her period, her friends had been ecstatic. “Girl—you gonna get Welfare now—you can get your own place and we can part-ee.”
Keesha had a flat eyed, sullen gaze, and she had cut them off with it, until they had squirmed on the hard cafeteria benches in the study hall.
“I don’t want no part of it.” She told them, ripping the old rubber lining off the Formica, and they believed her. Keesha had once been trigger-man at a drive by. She’d told them about the dog she’d blown to hell, and how it had squirmed in its own blood, and she’d laughed with that flat eyed, sullen gaze of hers. Keesha didn’t have many friends, but who she did have stayed her friends, no matter how much they hated her.
“Who’s the father?” One girl had the audacity to ask. Keesha’s eyes narrowed, just a fraction. No one else bothered her with trivialities. The fact was, she didn’t know. It could have been any guy she’d met at a bang with good shit.
“Well if you didn’t want it,” her real best friend told her frankly, “You should have taken a pill.”
“I did take a pill.” Keesha told her. “It didn’t work.” The teacher who monitored their study hall heard that, and rolled her eyes. Keesha would have made trouble for the bitch, but she felt like throwing up, so she didn’t. The only thing worse than the stupid teachers at this stupid school were the stupid teachers feeling sorry for you.
“I heard,” one girl whispered conspiratorially, “That if you stop taking drugs all of a sudden, you lose the baby.”
“I don’t take no drugs, fool.” Keesha lied amiably back, but she took the information under advisement. That weekend she went on a run—a fine run of all the best chemicals with all the best highs. She spent her mama’s welfare check on that run, and when her mama yelled at her, Keesha laughed. “Don’t worry mama—you can have the next run—I’m through.” And then she went cold turkey.
It was awful. Not as bad as that hardness in her abdomen. Not as bad as the invasive, intrusive knowledge of another life taking root where it oughtn’t have any business being, but it was still awful. She threw up for three days, and when she was done throwing up, and could only lay under her soiled blanket shivering and moaning, the demons attacked.
They were furious, angry, twisted looking things, with rotting teeth and sinewy skin, and bones that looked like they were just about ready to pop out. They had hairy faces and dreadlocks so dirty that they crawled with critters. Their clothes were in tatters with nothing but god-awful nakedness peering through. Keesha directed them all to her abdomen, told them to take it, take that furious succubus in her stomach but not to touch her because she, Keesha didn’t deserve them. Those demons scared her so bad, she almost took another hit just to make them go away. But as soon as she thought of it the thing in her belly gave a greedy shriek of exultation, and Keesha fought off the urge. They would get it, these demons, they would get that thingand leave Keesha alone.
In the end, it won out. Keesha awoke from a deep sleep with a craving for food and no blood anywhere in sight. She almost cried then, but she didn’t. She put the thing out of her mind and went to school, where she’d get a free lunch. One of her teachers asked her kindly where she’d been. Keesha told her to shut up, and spent the rest of the day in the restful quiet of on-site detention.
She had her own desk there, nicely grafittied- up and all, just under the spot where that one kid got hit on the head with the moldy ceiling tile. The tiles were still moldy—they had never fixed that, but now they all had rusting chrome-thingies to hold them up. They actually improved the look of the school, Keesha thought, looking at the broken tiles and the taped over windows. The windows themselves were yellowing, making the light outside look peculiar, but she could still see something that disturbed her. It was nearing fall. How could that be? How old was she again? What grade was she supposed to be in? She couldn’t remember, but she could remember that it seemed that summer had just started, and she’d sat here during summer school as well.
“What’s the matter, Keesha?” Asked the detention supervisor. “You look like you just tasted something bad.”
She glared at him. “I’m getting old.” She murmured, and looked away before she could see the sad, worldly look he gave her. It was a good thing. She would have kicked him in the shins. But she was getting old. No one on her block lived much past thirty, and when they were clocking, it was usually twenty-one or so. She didn’t have much time left, and she was going to have to squander it on this thing.
She felt it then, innocent and terrible and tenacious. The innocence didn’t bother her—what should she care for innocence? She’d lost her virginity to her mama’s boy friend at the age of seven, but long before that she’d been anything but innocent. She’d known how to fight and how to steal, and how to bite someone’s hand long enough to make them let go of their food. Really, she thought nostalgically, it was all a body needed to know to survive. So the innocence didn’t faze her, and she could out last the meanest of the mean, but the terror… ah god…
She’d seen that movie where the monster popped out of the guy’s stomach. It had hauled ass out of there to go and live and eat up other lives, but the guy had thrashed around and died. He’d had this living, moving bony conglomeration of sinews and muscles and will inside of him and then he’d exploded and died. And she felt that thing in her now. Logically, she thought, it should be human. But then, she didn’t know really what was the difference between human and that monstery thing. She’d seen bums on her block that were scarier than that monster, and she didn’t want one of them inside her. She put her hands down and pushed, and it was hard as a grapefruit in her stomach and she NEEDED TO GET IT OUT OF THERE. More than anything else in the world, she needed to get it out of there.
She tried the abortion clinic then, but they needed her mother’s signature. She briefly considered doing it herself, but even she knew, in the vague, unclouded pinpoints of her brain, that she wouldn’t know what she was doing before she killed herself. She started watching every special on television about having babies, and all she knew when she was done was that there was a lot of blood, and then those actresses couldn’t possibly look that good after they shed that blood.
After five months of watching the seasons come and go in the detention room, and of wearing her starting jacket even when she was hot, and of pushing and pounding and screaming at that lump in her stomach to go away, she turned sixteen and went back to the clinic. But by then, they told her, they couldn’t do it because now it was a real baby, and not just a little fish thing floating around there.
Keesha thought she’d go insane. It was still there. For seven months it had fed off of her, wiggled inside of her, terrorized her, and now they wouldn’t take it out because it was real? She was so furious, so shaky, that for the first time since she’d gone cold turkey, she raided her mother’s stash. All that was left from mama’s last run was some weed, but it was good weed, and she sat down in the middle of her little room with the mattress on the floor to enjoy it.
“What you doing in there?” She asked it, and it had laughed happily back. That laugh pissed Keesha off. There wasn’t anything to laugh about, and shouldn’t she know it? The thing in her stomach turned a lazy summersault then, happy about the weed, she guessed, but Keesha didn’t care. “You don’t want to be born.” She warned it. “I’ll hate you. I’ll hate you fiercer than anything you ever thought of. I’ll ignore you when you cry. I’ll give you to my boyfriend if he give me some weed. I’ll bout kill you when you whine at me for food. You don’t want to be here.”
The thing chuckled and stretched. Sure—she’d be a bad mother. But Keesha hadn’t had a good one, and she seemed to be doing okay. Keesha didn’t have an answer to that. She tried. Sure, she thought, she did okay, but she was high and there was a lie to that that made it impossible to voice. When she thought the word ‘okay’ there came visions of those demons when she went cold turkey, of the lows after any run. When she thought ‘okay’, she thought of the pity of the adults, the clean scrubbed fresh smelling, wise eyed adults who felt sorry for her just because she was. ‘Okay’ seemed to encompass her squalid little room, with the cracked plaster and the crawling mattress and the broke-tile floor. ‘Okay’, she chuckled humorlessly, but the chuckle stopped in her throat, swelled there, made her face screw up and she swore then that she would not cry.
The thing in her stomach responded. It had the audacity to feel sorry for her. Poor, poor Keesha. All alone, no one to help? I’ll be there soon. I’ll make it so you’re never alone again. I’ll expect from you. I’ll give you something, for just a little attention. I’ll love you.
Keesha had heard all about love. She heard it from the bodies that touched her when she didn’t want anything from them but high. She heard it from her friends, talking about drugs or clothes or even chocolate. She heard it from the teachers, talking about something pure and sweet that made Keesha choke. This love from the thing in her stomach made her clammy. It clung to her skin like the smell of smoke, it gummed up her lungs and stuck grimy tendrils in her nose and mouth, trickled down in a black jelly to her stomach and continued to spread. It bled out her eyes in slow oozing drops and coated her tongue with a fuzzy, fungal slime. This love from this growing, gelatinous mass in her stomach made her gag, retch, puke in an effort to get it out of her, but it still kept growing, covering her in viscous, reeking muck and she would do anything, anything to get away from it.
The razorblades were easy to find, the clean, slicing motion on her wrists even easier to do. And as she lay coolly on her bed, feeling cleaner and cleaner as her blood cooled around her, she found herself sinking deeper into herself, sinking into her body, to the pit of her womb, where she confronted the thing inside her.
It was untroubled by her loss of blood, still kicking and laughing and somersaulting in its vicious innocence. It waswinning dammit, it was winning. No. Keesha screamed at it, not me, not you, you aren’t going to live. Her scream was warbling, underwater, but she still screamed. Her world was soft and infused with a gentle, obscene red, but still she shrieked at it, willing it to die in her as she died outside of it. She strode up to it, bit it on it’s tiny nose, watched it wail and stepped inside its helpless, hideous, gumless mouth and strode right down it to its soul. She didn’t recognize the soul, but she knew it was her enemy, and she stepped up to it determined to beat it down.
It covered her, like the slime of love only hotter, pricklier, and it fought ferociously. She grappled with it, feeling colder and colder, heaving for breath, screaming at it I don’t love you now die until she was sure her throat would never work again, and still it fought back, clutched her, strangled her, until her vision grew dim. But even through her fading vision she could see that it grew fainter, less bright, and the thought gave her strength to fight on…
They worked feverishly to save the baby. Keesha’s mother had found her, bleeding and cold and had screamed until someone had called the police. The police had called the ambulance and the doctors had taken one look at the old track marks and the skin’s pallor and had flinched inwardly. The baby would be addicted, as surely as the mother, and with only the whining, blubbering, shrieking woman in the hallway as a guardian, it would probably be back in the ER in a year, or five, or ten. But still they worked, because that was their job, to save the baby because the mother was dead. They gave it blood and oxygen and medicines and watched, surprised as it began to breathe on its own. Its lungs were really too underdeveloped to breathe that well, but it was doing it. They put it in the incubator, and swaddled it, laying it clean and full of formula to contemplate the sterile lights and pine-sol on-vomit smell of county hospital.
The nurses had been too busy, and too frustrated to really look at the child. They had counted ten fingers and ten toes and read blood-gas levels and oxygen intake. They noted that the cry had the thin, shrieking wail of the drug addicted child, and that it needed to eat, but they missed the flat-eyed, sullen look of the eyes. Those eyes held a speculative, focussed gleam that most newborns would never know.
This time, thought Keesha, glaring at the squalling, red-faced thing in the box next to her, This time round, I’ll do it right.
When she first missed her period, her friends had been ecstatic. “Girl—you gonna get Welfare now—you can get your own place and we can part-ee.”
Keesha had a flat eyed, sullen gaze, and she had cut them off with it, until they had squirmed on the hard cafeteria benches in the study hall.
“I don’t want no part of it.” She told them, ripping the old rubber lining off the Formica, and they believed her. Keesha had once been trigger-man at a drive by. She’d told them about the dog she’d blown to hell, and how it had squirmed in its own blood, and she’d laughed with that flat eyed, sullen gaze of hers. Keesha didn’t have many friends, but who she did have stayed her friends, no matter how much they hated her.
“Who’s the father?” One girl had the audacity to ask. Keesha’s eyes narrowed, just a fraction. No one else bothered her with trivialities. The fact was, she didn’t know. It could have been any guy she’d met at a bang with good shit.
“Well if you didn’t want it,” her real best friend told her frankly, “You should have taken a pill.”
“I did take a pill.” Keesha told her. “It didn’t work.” The teacher who monitored their study hall heard that, and rolled her eyes. Keesha would have made trouble for the bitch, but she felt like throwing up, so she didn’t. The only thing worse than the stupid teachers at this stupid school were the stupid teachers feeling sorry for you.
“I heard,” one girl whispered conspiratorially, “That if you stop taking drugs all of a sudden, you lose the baby.”
“I don’t take no drugs, fool.” Keesha lied amiably back, but she took the information under advisement. That weekend she went on a run—a fine run of all the best chemicals with all the best highs. She spent her mama’s welfare check on that run, and when her mama yelled at her, Keesha laughed. “Don’t worry mama—you can have the next run—I’m through.” And then she went cold turkey.
It was awful. Not as bad as that hardness in her abdomen. Not as bad as the invasive, intrusive knowledge of another life taking root where it oughtn’t have any business being, but it was still awful. She threw up for three days, and when she was done throwing up, and could only lay under her soiled blanket shivering and moaning, the demons attacked.
They were furious, angry, twisted looking things, with rotting teeth and sinewy skin, and bones that looked like they were just about ready to pop out. They had hairy faces and dreadlocks so dirty that they crawled with critters. Their clothes were in tatters with nothing but god-awful nakedness peering through. Keesha directed them all to her abdomen, told them to take it, take that furious succubus in her stomach but not to touch her because she, Keesha didn’t deserve them. Those demons scared her so bad, she almost took another hit just to make them go away. But as soon as she thought of it the thing in her belly gave a greedy shriek of exultation, and Keesha fought off the urge. They would get it, these demons, they would get that thingand leave Keesha alone.
In the end, it won out. Keesha awoke from a deep sleep with a craving for food and no blood anywhere in sight. She almost cried then, but she didn’t. She put the thing out of her mind and went to school, where she’d get a free lunch. One of her teachers asked her kindly where she’d been. Keesha told her to shut up, and spent the rest of the day in the restful quiet of on-site detention.
She had her own desk there, nicely grafittied- up and all, just under the spot where that one kid got hit on the head with the moldy ceiling tile. The tiles were still moldy—they had never fixed that, but now they all had rusting chrome-thingies to hold them up. They actually improved the look of the school, Keesha thought, looking at the broken tiles and the taped over windows. The windows themselves were yellowing, making the light outside look peculiar, but she could still see something that disturbed her. It was nearing fall. How could that be? How old was she again? What grade was she supposed to be in? She couldn’t remember, but she could remember that it seemed that summer had just started, and she’d sat here during summer school as well.
“What’s the matter, Keesha?” Asked the detention supervisor. “You look like you just tasted something bad.”
She glared at him. “I’m getting old.” She murmured, and looked away before she could see the sad, worldly look he gave her. It was a good thing. She would have kicked him in the shins. But she was getting old. No one on her block lived much past thirty, and when they were clocking, it was usually twenty-one or so. She didn’t have much time left, and she was going to have to squander it on this thing.
She felt it then, innocent and terrible and tenacious. The innocence didn’t bother her—what should she care for innocence? She’d lost her virginity to her mama’s boy friend at the age of seven, but long before that she’d been anything but innocent. She’d known how to fight and how to steal, and how to bite someone’s hand long enough to make them let go of their food. Really, she thought nostalgically, it was all a body needed to know to survive. So the innocence didn’t faze her, and she could out last the meanest of the mean, but the terror… ah god…
She’d seen that movie where the monster popped out of the guy’s stomach. It had hauled ass out of there to go and live and eat up other lives, but the guy had thrashed around and died. He’d had this living, moving bony conglomeration of sinews and muscles and will inside of him and then he’d exploded and died. And she felt that thing in her now. Logically, she thought, it should be human. But then, she didn’t know really what was the difference between human and that monstery thing. She’d seen bums on her block that were scarier than that monster, and she didn’t want one of them inside her. She put her hands down and pushed, and it was hard as a grapefruit in her stomach and she NEEDED TO GET IT OUT OF THERE. More than anything else in the world, she needed to get it out of there.
She tried the abortion clinic then, but they needed her mother’s signature. She briefly considered doing it herself, but even she knew, in the vague, unclouded pinpoints of her brain, that she wouldn’t know what she was doing before she killed herself. She started watching every special on television about having babies, and all she knew when she was done was that there was a lot of blood, and then those actresses couldn’t possibly look that good after they shed that blood.
After five months of watching the seasons come and go in the detention room, and of wearing her starting jacket even when she was hot, and of pushing and pounding and screaming at that lump in her stomach to go away, she turned sixteen and went back to the clinic. But by then, they told her, they couldn’t do it because now it was a real baby, and not just a little fish thing floating around there.
Keesha thought she’d go insane. It was still there. For seven months it had fed off of her, wiggled inside of her, terrorized her, and now they wouldn’t take it out because it was real? She was so furious, so shaky, that for the first time since she’d gone cold turkey, she raided her mother’s stash. All that was left from mama’s last run was some weed, but it was good weed, and she sat down in the middle of her little room with the mattress on the floor to enjoy it.
“What you doing in there?” She asked it, and it had laughed happily back. That laugh pissed Keesha off. There wasn’t anything to laugh about, and shouldn’t she know it? The thing in her stomach turned a lazy summersault then, happy about the weed, she guessed, but Keesha didn’t care. “You don’t want to be born.” She warned it. “I’ll hate you. I’ll hate you fiercer than anything you ever thought of. I’ll ignore you when you cry. I’ll give you to my boyfriend if he give me some weed. I’ll bout kill you when you whine at me for food. You don’t want to be here.”
The thing chuckled and stretched. Sure—she’d be a bad mother. But Keesha hadn’t had a good one, and she seemed to be doing okay. Keesha didn’t have an answer to that. She tried. Sure, she thought, she did okay, but she was high and there was a lie to that that made it impossible to voice. When she thought the word ‘okay’ there came visions of those demons when she went cold turkey, of the lows after any run. When she thought ‘okay’, she thought of the pity of the adults, the clean scrubbed fresh smelling, wise eyed adults who felt sorry for her just because she was. ‘Okay’ seemed to encompass her squalid little room, with the cracked plaster and the crawling mattress and the broke-tile floor. ‘Okay’, she chuckled humorlessly, but the chuckle stopped in her throat, swelled there, made her face screw up and she swore then that she would not cry.
The thing in her stomach responded. It had the audacity to feel sorry for her. Poor, poor Keesha. All alone, no one to help? I’ll be there soon. I’ll make it so you’re never alone again. I’ll expect from you. I’ll give you something, for just a little attention. I’ll love you.
Keesha had heard all about love. She heard it from the bodies that touched her when she didn’t want anything from them but high. She heard it from her friends, talking about drugs or clothes or even chocolate. She heard it from the teachers, talking about something pure and sweet that made Keesha choke. This love from the thing in her stomach made her clammy. It clung to her skin like the smell of smoke, it gummed up her lungs and stuck grimy tendrils in her nose and mouth, trickled down in a black jelly to her stomach and continued to spread. It bled out her eyes in slow oozing drops and coated her tongue with a fuzzy, fungal slime. This love from this growing, gelatinous mass in her stomach made her gag, retch, puke in an effort to get it out of her, but it still kept growing, covering her in viscous, reeking muck and she would do anything, anything to get away from it.
The razorblades were easy to find, the clean, slicing motion on her wrists even easier to do. And as she lay coolly on her bed, feeling cleaner and cleaner as her blood cooled around her, she found herself sinking deeper into herself, sinking into her body, to the pit of her womb, where she confronted the thing inside her.
It was untroubled by her loss of blood, still kicking and laughing and somersaulting in its vicious innocence. It waswinning dammit, it was winning. No. Keesha screamed at it, not me, not you, you aren’t going to live. Her scream was warbling, underwater, but she still screamed. Her world was soft and infused with a gentle, obscene red, but still she shrieked at it, willing it to die in her as she died outside of it. She strode up to it, bit it on it’s tiny nose, watched it wail and stepped inside its helpless, hideous, gumless mouth and strode right down it to its soul. She didn’t recognize the soul, but she knew it was her enemy, and she stepped up to it determined to beat it down.
It covered her, like the slime of love only hotter, pricklier, and it fought ferociously. She grappled with it, feeling colder and colder, heaving for breath, screaming at it I don’t love you now die until she was sure her throat would never work again, and still it fought back, clutched her, strangled her, until her vision grew dim. But even through her fading vision she could see that it grew fainter, less bright, and the thought gave her strength to fight on…
They worked feverishly to save the baby. Keesha’s mother had found her, bleeding and cold and had screamed until someone had called the police. The police had called the ambulance and the doctors had taken one look at the old track marks and the skin’s pallor and had flinched inwardly. The baby would be addicted, as surely as the mother, and with only the whining, blubbering, shrieking woman in the hallway as a guardian, it would probably be back in the ER in a year, or five, or ten. But still they worked, because that was their job, to save the baby because the mother was dead. They gave it blood and oxygen and medicines and watched, surprised as it began to breathe on its own. Its lungs were really too underdeveloped to breathe that well, but it was doing it. They put it in the incubator, and swaddled it, laying it clean and full of formula to contemplate the sterile lights and pine-sol on-vomit smell of county hospital.
The nurses had been too busy, and too frustrated to really look at the child. They had counted ten fingers and ten toes and read blood-gas levels and oxygen intake. They noted that the cry had the thin, shrieking wail of the drug addicted child, and that it needed to eat, but they missed the flat-eyed, sullen look of the eyes. Those eyes held a speculative, focussed gleam that most newborns would never know.
This time, thought Keesha, glaring at the squalling, red-faced thing in the box next to her, This time round, I’ll do it right.
