My mother always claimed that she had been a virgin when I was born. I didn’t believe her. No one did. I grew up wondering who my father was. I never doubted I had a father.
On the night of my fifteenth birthday, I had a strange dream. A giant wasp man came to me. He gazed at me with his yellow eyes as he lowered his body onto mine. He curved his great abdomen up and in, and stuck his stinger deep into my groin. I felt the sharp pain of his venom entering my body. When I awoke, my stomach was aching and I was bleeding. I thought it was my period. But the bleeding soon stopped.
I had the same dream the next night, and the next. After a week of this, I told my mother.
She turned white. “It’s your father,” she said. She had me sleep with her after that, in her room, with the door and windows locked. But the wasp man still came to me every night in my dreams, though my mother never saw him.
After a month, my period had not come and I could feel a bulge in my belly with my hand. My jeans didn’t fit. I told my mother I thought I was pregnant. “We must take you to the doctor,” she said. But I was afraid to go.
By the end of the second month, my belly was so large that my friends were teasing me and asking me about the father. I could feel the baby moving within me constantly, like a pot boiling.
By the end of the third month, I looked to be at least nine months pregnant. My mother dragged me to the doctor. The doctor tried to listen to the heartbeat with that fetal Doppler thing, but it sounded more like a hailstorm than a heartbeat. “I don’t understand this,” said the doctor. They gave me an ultrasound so they could look at the baby. “My God, this child is full of fetuses; I can’t even count how many!” exclaimed the doctor. He recommended that I abort most of them, so that the few remaining could survive. I begged for a few days to consider, and they let me go home.
In a week, I looked like a cartoon caricature of a pregnant woman, my belly distended in an impossible mound. I had to hold it up with both arms locked under it, and lean ‘way back in order to walk.
The next day I tried to get out of bed to pee, but I couldn’t lift my belly anymore. My mother hooked me up to a catheter. “It’s a good thing for you I’m a nurse,” she said grimly. I agreed.
I lay on my side in the bed, my belly enlarging and elongating daily. It shoved my swollen breasts up against my chin, and curved my back into a C. My legs curled up, useless, behind me. My belly looked like an enormous fleshy sock full of writhing kittens.
I was constantly and terribly hungry. My mother fed me nonstop while I was awake. My life became nothing more than that: eating when I was awake, and then sleeping. While I slept the wasp man came to me. Every night he would kiss me on my mouth, and then walk behind my massive body. I would feel the sharp hot pain of his venom as he stung me. “Why does he bother?” I wondered. “Can’t he see that I’m already pregnant?”
I could never eat enough, it seemed, and my arms became as thin as sticks. My mother hooked me up to an I.V. as well as continuing to feed me by mouth, and I felt a little better. It became hard for me to breathe, so my mother put me on oxygen, two little tubes running into my nostrils.
“How big is it, my belly?” I asked her one day.
“It’s running up against the corner of the room over there,” she answered, pointing to the opposite end of the room. I was still in her bedroom, the master bedroom. When she pointed this out to me, it seemed I could feel it, the pressure of the walls against my rippling, seething belly.
“What if I’m full of maggots?” I got up the nerve to ask her one day.
“Don’t worry, honey,” she said gently.
When nine months had finally passed, I gave birth to a baby. The pain was distant, barely noticeable, even though the baby emerged right behind my head, for my buttocks were pressed up against the back of my head by then. My mother delivered the baby, and brought it around to the front of me. She was beaming.
“See, it’s a beautiful baby, a girl,” she said. “What do you want to name her?”
“You name her, “ I said. “I’m too tired to think about it.
She placed the baby to one of the enormous sausages of my breasts, where it suckled me. I held the baby against my monstrous body with my little stick arms.
As the baby suckled, I felt another baby emerge from me. “Oh,” exlaimed my mother. “So soon!” She ran to catch it.
“It’s another girl,” she announced.
They were all girls.
They came out every few hours after that. It always felt like I was having a bowel movement. Over the next few days, my breasts grew massive, two bulging veiny white trash bags full of milk. The breasts buried my face, forcing me to feed and breathe through tubes. They blocked my vision; I could no longer see the babies. I could not reach the nipples of those breasts with my little arms. My mother had to hold the babies up to me now.
“Maybe now I will empty out,” I thought. “My belly will shrink away, and I will be able to walk again, to live again.” But the months passed, and although the babies continued to stream out of me, my belly and breasts grew only more swollen and engorged. My shoulders were forced back into a sharp V, my arms pushed back into a tangle of shriveled limbs behind my back.
When the wasp man came to me in my dreams, I spoke to him for the first time. “Why are you doing this to me?”
He kissed me on the breasts, first one and then the other. “My queen,” he whispered.