A Belly Full of Brood - SHKey (2024)

The most monumental change in your life happened when you weren’t even awake for it.

The night air was cool, and summer was too terribly hot– but up here, on the third story of your apartment complex, the bugs didn’t bother you, so you left the window open for a bit of a breeze. The worst that ever happened from leaving this window open, thus far, was a sh*t-brained dove had flown in and thought your laundry basket was a nest. Shooing out a bird once was a small price to pay for the relatively fresh, cool air of the outdoors circulating in the cramped, stuffy apartment, you figured, so that hadn’t been enough to occasion your shutting of the windows overnight.

To that point in your life, it was indeed a miniscule price to pay.

The little creature, something between a moth and a centipede, that flew into your room could have been shooed out with a broom, the same as that dove. It could have been smacked and squashed with a broom, like other bugs taken care of in that messy, unfortunate way.

But you were asleep, and asleep was such a terribly defenseless way to be.

The alien– For it could be nothing else, otherworldly and strange and beautiful for it– flitted, curious, infectious, to your bed, its large, plumed antennae tasting the air around you. Ah, yes– Here it scented what it so sought: the generative gametes, tucked safely deep inside the body. Here was a species large enough, and of the right body-make, for the alien, and in such a state that you would not crush or kill it as it completed its mission.

You were unlucky. It was lucky. It slid under your blankets and crept smoothly up your leg, wriggled its way into your undergarments.

It was a tiny creature, not larger than your own thumb; as it crawled, you shifted, reached a hand down and scratched its way, but the softness of blanket and swiftness of its own motion protected it from the loathsome club that your hand was, in its singularly-focused, glittering black compound eyes.

It found your cleft, turned and nestled its abdomen’s lightly-pointed tip against your entrance, and began to throb and pulse.

Air sucked into its little body, driving a thin tube slowly deeper into your own much, much bigger body. No thicker than the typical hemming-thread of your own shirts, the tube flexed and slithered its way deeper, so small as to be unfelt. It found a hard ring of resistance, and the first disgorgement of a strange fluid began. When it moved once more, the resistance was gone, and your cervix sent no alarm at the passage of its gate.

It crept deeper, past the gate, to the keep; Past that, to one of the two treasures it sought inside. The last pass– And then that creeping little black tendril had settled across a precious ovary.

It knew, with the chemoreceptors embedded all across that little tube, there was a second; So from the nearest branching-point, the tendril began to twist and grow a second tubule, which, as steadily and surely as the primary, oozed its way towards your other ovary, and just the same enveloped it in a net of black.

Now, the insectoid alien’s abdomen began to pulse in a way quite similar, but so horrifyingly different– Instead of forcing-in, this throbbing motion was distinctly shooting something out.

This something travelled up each of those tubules, so thin and small, and began to seep into your own gonads. Defenses breached, they had no choice but to accept the alien payload snuck into your body, little throb by little throb, slowly but surely saturating not just all the ova there, but the whole of the germ layer, and even non-generative tissue, with parasitic genetics.

As the alien pulsed its life into your body, you dreamt a featureless dream, one of those many myriad that melted away like mist in the morning. As its body crumbled to a faint grey dust that smeared itself featurelessly, evenly, across your body, its expended life, its successful mission, was already growing new fruit in your belly.

You awoke with little more than a dusty patch in your undergarments and a bit of extra hunger, comparatively to the day before. Not enough for anything to be consciously noticed– Honestly, the dust might have simply been discharge, grey in black underwear, the hunger was small enough it could be a daily shift.

Your day was… Uneventful. Like every other day. Honestly, it could have passed with nothing memorable, like so many other days, were it not for how… hungry, you had gotten, at the end of it, above the norm.

It wasn’t your fault, of course, not that you knew that; It wasn’t your fault, not really, that there were ten alien embryos nestled into the lining of your womb, growing near to a day every hour they stayed there, latched on, siphoning away from you to feed themselves.

Your body simply told you that you were a little extra hungry, and you splurged, got a large meal-combination instead of a medium, and a cookie too. It seemed, for no reason, like a good day to treat yourself, and who were you to deny a very sensible reason for a bit of an extra sweet treat? (It was, of course, a very sensible reason, being a little extra peckish.)

And, come night, come the close of a day since your unknowing violation, you slept, and dreamt of warmth, and being cocooned in pink pillows made of cotton candy fluff.

When you woke, there was a bit of a… Bloated fullness, to you; You didn’t quite know what to make of it, other than, perhaps, the consequences of your splurging. Maybe the larger fry and cookie weren’t such a good choice after all– But it was a bit late to take it back, with the food well down your guts by now. You found yourself running to the bathroom more often that day, and cursed your foul fast-food luck, queasiness coming in waves and not letting up for some hours. You swore that you’d avoid that place in the future, since, apparently, something there was disagreeing rather potently with you– Why else would you be so queasy, so bloated?

The bulge of pudge at the bottom of your belly didn’t recede, however, and you found yourself terribly hungry once more. You went out– Hunger was clouding your better sense, and you knew yourself better than to try and cook while grouchy.

You tried, or at least you were pretty sure you tried, to pull yourself to the healthier quick-meal place nearby– One of those stop-and-go salad shops, the fast-casual health-lite places that claimed greenery and good nutrition on their menus as selling points to people whose waistbands worried them.

And your waistband DID worry you– Your pants were tight like you were bloating for the monthly and then some, but… You felt so much worse than even that would usually bring. But you still found yourself looking down the menu of something greasy, of something truly artery-clogging, of something that couldn’t be good for anyone, least of all you with all your troubles this day. And you found yourself ordering a goodly amount of that greasy, grubby goodness, the smell of the oil making your mouth water in a rather uncharacteristic way.

You were able to keep your hands off it in the car, but damn was the smell of deep-fried food distracting the whole way; You kept glancing at your dinner, almost like an addict might, and found yourself stuffing fries gracelessly in your face at stoplights.

When you got home, the meal disappeared down your throat in near-record time, each bite large and overzealous, cloying of slightly-stale meat-grease and vegetables that had seen better days, a meal that sat, heavy, in your stomach. You belched; You shifted on the couch; You stretched, and looked down. Your brow furrowed, and then… Well, the extra size to your belly did make sense, having just eaten a big meal like that. (Had it been that big before?)

You crawled in to bed, and found yourself sound asleep soon enough; your dreams were full of beds of burger-buns, cotton-candy clouds choked with griddle-grease..

Upon waking, you came to realize a simple fact: Your belly hadn’t been that big last night, but you were having a hard time being alarmed by this peculiar discovery.

You… Didn’t really know why. By all accounts, the fact your lower belly was… Distinctly a little bulged out should have sent fear into you. Any time your guts were bulging, that was bad news. Right? Guts were supposed to stay relatively the same size, day by day, and significant changes were cause for concern, weren’t they? If you didn’t know better, you’d think you looked… Well, a little bit pregnant. Not a lot, barely noticeable as more than just the… Regular sort of bloating a couple days of constipation and gas would give you. A bad case of it, for sure, but…

You put a hand to the little bit of bulge that seemed a little… Out of place for your regular bloating. It felt… Firm. Warm. A little firmer and warmer than it usually was.

But touching it made things feel a little more okay. You didn’t know why, but it did. You touched it, and the feeling of that extra bit of firmness and warmth almost was like… A stress ball? A worry stone? A bit of a metaphorical pencil to chew on? A flower of soothing comfort bloomed from your insides, spreading warm petals from your bulging core to push out into your guts, and you felt that surely, you’d be panicked more if this was something to actually worry about.

And hell, it’s not like it hurt. It sat there doing nothing in particular, sat there simply existing. You could manage this, a little Miralax and you’d be right as rain, and with a solution, you stopped worrying. Of course, when you happened to forget the solution itself, that didn’t bother you particularly much– Not when honestly, it wasn’t bothering you anymore. Wasn’t that odd?

You’d been snacky all day, a little peckish in between your usual meals. You were pretty sure this had to be some sort of horrible PMS, as little as you wanted to acknowledge it, so you went with the flow of it all– A little extra of chips here, a bit of chocolate there, an orange from the communal fruit bowl, a banana later on, too. You didn’t feel so bad about eating the fruit– Those were HEALTHY, after all, and one could have as many healthy snacks as they wanted! So you picked up some extra healthy snacks, and managed to find yourself through a whole bag of grapes by the time you’d finished cooking yourself dinner. A dinner which you’d intended for there to be a lunch portion of, for the day after, but… Well, guess you really were just pretty hungry. It’s alright, you’d just make more tomorrow. The chicken was rich and salty, cooked well with enough butter-sauce that it coated the insides of your mouth and throat with umami goodness, and you caught yourself swiping up the sauce and licking it off your finger greedily when you turned your attention back to the TV, to the evening’s entertainment.

You went to sleep, and dreamt of eating a grape as big as you were, until your belly was big enough a whole other person could have been in there.

Now, this was definitely different. You woke, and you were immediately quite hungry, but when you sat up there was… Well, no nice way of saying it– A desperate and immediate need to go pee. So you bolted to the bathroom, and upon sitting, noticed your belly was definitely, absolutely, bigger than it had been.

It looked like you’d shoved a little grocery bag of limes under your shirt, maybe a pound or two of them, and smoothed it over. There it sat, resting stubbornly upon your thighs, resting heavily upon your bladder.

Fear slammed into you like a truck, and in an instant you knew this wasn’t normal, this wasn’t bloating, this wasn’t something you had eaten– Or if it was, you needed to go to the hospital, NOW.

And then, you pressed a hand to it, half to see that it was real, and… Again, that feeling of… Warmth. A warm, fuzzy blanket curling itself snugly around your thoughts, around your heart, making the hard-crash adrenaline instead surge into a peculiar sort of thrill, one you’d more expect to feel cresting a roller-coaster than dealing with… Whatever the f*ck was going on in your midsection. You looked pregnant, but there was no way you could be. Not— You’d bled! Since the last time you’d– And this fast!--

As the fear swept up again, your hand pressed harder to the… Distinct bump. You didn’t know if you sought the comfort that touching the impossible bump seemed to bring, if you were trying to force it out of you somehow, or if you were trying to see whether it was real or some horrible hallucination or dream– But whatever the intention was, the result was just the same. More of that soothing, comforting feeling poured out into your blood, rushing and clearing away the fear that had tried, again, to rear its ugly head. And compared to that gut-wrenching fear, this sense of comfort and… General worldwide well-being was a far, far better thing to experience.

You found your hand moving in little circles on the growing mound of your belly, and in the midst of that soothing motion, you found yourself… Drifting, a little. Zoning out. Your eyes fluttered half-shut, pondering the feeling of a hand on tight belly-skin, somewhat itchy belly-skin, how it was nice to work out the feeling of restraint that the curve brought, how it was nice to sit there and coo and wonder over your…

Your babies.

The brain fog lifted when you looked down and saw you seemed… Just a little bigger than before. And were hungry. Undeniably hungry, now. (Were you bigger? Were you imagining it? Hoping for it?)

The hunger drove you off, and you tried to stand only to find your legs had grown numb– Had to rock-ease your way off the seat, sitting too long cutting the blood off from them. When you could stand, you shuffled back to your bed, saw it had– Somehow– been an hour from when your alarm woke you. Thank goodness you weren’t working today.

You put a hand to your belly, and the drifting-in worry about work, and what you would do when your boss saw this, how you were supposed to explain suddenly looking into… Hell, was this a second trimester? You didn’t really know. But this big, in a matter of days– Not normal. You rubbed your belly, and felt that bit of worry drift away. It’d all be figured out when you got to that, you were sure. It’d all be okay.

Food. You needed food, and needed food now. Where had these… Wait. How did you know it was babies? How did you suddenly settle so easily into thinking of this odd bulge as babies? It could be some sort of medical condition!--

Hunger snapped its jaws at your sporadic attention, and you decided you needed to ponder this over endless pancakes. … And bacon. Eggs. Protein, needed that protein.

So you hopped in your car, drove, one hand on your belly, one hand on the wheel, to the nearest endless-pancakes-serving breakfast-diner, and smiled to be shown to your own little booth.

As the first plate arrived, you barely had enough control over your animal impulses to remember not to pick up the fluffy, hot, steaming carb-loaded piles with your hands and shove them into your mouth like a starving man. You cut the pancakes apart into rude, rough triangles and slopped them about in syrup before cramming them, three, four, five at a time, into your waiting, slavering maw. Divinity had never before been so close to heart, the perfection of the pancake, sugar and maple and butter coating every desperate taste-bud for its moments of chewing before they disappeared down your waiting gullet, only a breath permitting an empty mouth before more pancake met teeth. The waitress didn’t even seem to need to ask, seeing your hunger, and when you were sopping up the syrup and melted butter with the last scraps of pancake, a fresh platter arrived, laden with more sugary dessert-breakfast, and you dug in once more with implacable gusto.

Six plates of three pancakes each later, and you were rubbing your belly, thinking about… Nothing. Honestly, after the second plate, you didn’t remember a whole lot– Syrup, sticky and cloying, and butter, rich and melty, and of course, fluffy, hot pancake. But you didn’t remember thinking much. Did anyone remember thinking about stuff? … You knew the answer was yes, you did it yourself often. Another couple hours had passed, and the waitress who served you brought you another glass of milk, eyed you with the sort of curious-but-not- curious-enough-to-ask look that was common amongst service-industry workers who saw peculiar things fairly regularly.

“Can I get like… Five scrambled eggs?” You asked, and you sounded loopier than you intended. She nodded, and walked off to get your additional food– eggs and pancakes, both. You drooled a little as you loaded another bite of carb heaven into your mouth, chewed and drifted back to not thinking a whole lot. Your hand moved in circles on your belly.

At some point, you paid and left the diner, as full as you’d felt in days. You’d spent longer in there than you would have liked, and looked much, much bigger than you remembered yourself– Fully to a bag of lemons, not limes, by now. But this didn’t worry you. Sure, there was a bit of an ache in your back, and sure, your feet were hurting. Sure, that was an awful lot of bathroom trips, but… You felt genuinely great. Really, genuinely great. Alive, in a way you weren’t used to– Or maybe that was all the sugar in your system. Still, it was nice to have your stomach shut up for a bit, now stuffed full of pancake and scrambled egg.

You walked a little around the park, and felt yourself grow, bit by bit. Your shirt rode up, and you found you kept having to pull it down– Luckily, your sweatpants were safely stretchy, though you weren’t sure how long that would last. The sunshine was nice, the birds were singing, there were people playing and going about their daily lives, and you found yourself sitting on the bench, looking around, just… Drinking it all in. Wouldn’t it be nice, you thought, to be able to do this every day? Eat a whole ton of pancakes, go for a bit of a stroll, watch people go about their lives while you sat there and stroked your belly?

“When’re you due?” A woman’s voice sounded, and you turned to see a new mum, tiny baby in a stroller, smiling your way.

And you remembered you didn’t even know how the f*ck you got this way, much less if you were actually pregnant, or what the hell was going on, how any of this went–

“O-oh, uh, fall!” You offered lamely, and the lady smiled and nodded.

“Oh, that’s lovely. Well, sorry to have bothered you, I didn’t mean anything by it. Best of luck with the baby!” She pushed off her own squirming bundle of joy, and you took your hand off your belly, trying to quell the rise of nausea and bile as you stopped, for just a little bit, touching the freaky f*cking thing and bothered to think about your situation.

Even though the sun was so nice and warm, and the day was so pleasant, and you didn’t want to really bother– NO. It was like trying to hold an eel, this train of thought– Trying to grab hold of your errant mind, force it straight to look at this situation objectively. You were growing around the middle, in a way suspiciously like pregnancy, except there should be no way you were pregnant. You weren’t in any significant amounts of pain– Nothing related directly to the belly– So it probably wasn’t some kind of fluid buildup or anything dangerous. Hell, rather than pain, it was actually quite nice, this big baby belly, sitting so nicely on your legs, so warm and heavy, and…

Your hand fell back upon the bump, and circled it first cautiously, then lovingly, as you half-shut your eyes and drank in the day, mollified by the motions of your own petting, petting, soothing away all those worries. It was too nice of a day to worry. Worries could be managed later.

With a hand still softly, tenderly, pressed up onto the ever-so-slowly burgeoning mound of belly, you headed back to your car and home for a well-earned nap.

A well-earned nap turned into a fairly long sleep, and when you woke, again, you were RAVENOUS.

Five bowls of cereal, complete with all milk drunk, and you gained enough of your sense to notice the belly hanging off you. Bag of lemons it had been yesterday, now you’d moved on to a full bag of oranges– Well into the second trimester, absolutely. Breath was a little shallower, now, and a little harder to draw– It seemed you’d passed the limit of your natural stretch and, now, the skin was getting pink-red and angry around a popped-out belly-button. You heaved yourself up from the counter you’d unceremoniously leaned yourself against, trudged to the bathroom with unsteady, heavy steps, dug out an old bottle of lotion and slathered it on your strained belly-skin. This time…

This time, when you rubbed your belly, it… Rubbed back.

Under that thin, tight skin, you felt something… Slither.

And you screamed.

No amount of self-soothing could prepare you for that sensation– For something else, pressed tight on the skin and muscle inside yourself, to move in response to your motion.

Nothing could prepare you for the tidal wave of motion that one would set off, either– That a single rub, an attempt to soothe the dull, burning ache of stretching skin, would cascade into a veritable roiling thrashing boiling pot of… Well, it felt like snakes. Eels. A little more bumpy– Little gators? Something horribly unwanted, and horribly, certainly alive.

It was a pregnancy, alright, despite your previous, desperately-hoped alternatives. You were, in fact, massively pregnant with… With…

Something. Lots of somethings.

There was no way for you to count them– They were numerous, and they were small, and they tumbled over each other with all the boundless, reckless energy of puppies or kittens, or particularly explorative fish. One would jostle another, which would jostle yet another, and send them in shivering, shuddering waves of motion through your distended, pregnant belly, making you gasp and gulp and sob as the foreign, unwanted feeling would build and crash in waves. They would calm down, and raise hell again, and did this– Until there was a knock at the door, and you realized it must have been some time of this transfixed sitting, down on the floor, tears down your face and hands clutching a writhing belly.

“Hello?” You heard from the door, and… Well.

You forced yourself to all fours, feeling your belly quiver and shudder as you did, as your motions made the little things in you frolic about again. You forced yourself to two legs, and their pitching about threatened to knock your precarious balance away just the same. You tottered yourself to the door, and opened it, leaning on it for strength and stability.

It was one of the neighbors, an older man, all smiles and sunshine. You’d met him some times before, and he was the sort with many happy grandkids, the sort of trustworthy neighbor everyone wished they had and few were blessed with. Of course he’d come if he heard you screaming, and relief rushed through you at the sight of him, and his worry. He knew you weren’t pregnant, right? He would be able to help?

“Are you alright?” He asked, concern on his wrinkled, pruny, kind face. “I heard a scream…”

“I-” You wanted to beg for help. You wanted to weep that he needed to call an ambulance, he needed to help you get these things out of you, that you didn’t want this and were terrified and were full of some sort of unknown, horrible, snakey-buggy babies–

Full of your babies.

The thought rose unbidden, as your hand circled, circled, circled. You were full of babies. The babies were in you. They were your babies. Why would you want anything to happen to them that was scary or harmful?

Because they were scary and–

And your babies.

“I- I’m fine, really,” you felt your mouth say, traitor mouth, spewing some lies from… From the belly, not the heart. Right? You didn’t, you couldn’t, love these things. Whatever they were, in you, parasites, monsters…

“I saw a co*ckroach and tried to swat it and it flew at me…” Your mouth kept moving, fabricating a story. That didn’t happen, you needed help! You needed someone to get these things out of you! You needed something to help you get rid of–

Why would you get rid of your babies?

“And these stupid pregnancy hormones, you know how they are, I’m really sorry about that…” The man was smiling, nodding, as if he understood.

“Well, just checking in. You have a lovely day, now.” And then… He turned, and was gone, walking down the hall to his own apartment.

Your hand clutched the tight drum of your belly and you whimpered.

Then, you turned, and locked the door. Headed to your kitchen. Finished the rest of your gallon of milk, and as much cereal as could be made soggy with it. When you were out of cereal and had drunk the milk, you sat on the bed, and stared at your belly in disbelief, touching, feeling, feeling those little… Whatevers they were roiling, rolling, tumbling in you. Your face was still wet with tears, tears that hadn’t stopped rolling silently down your face, into your cereal, snot coating your upper lip and tracing down either side of your creased visage.

They weren’t your babies. You had no say in them getting there and they certainly weren’t human, and with how hungry you were, you had no doubt they would be eating you out of house and home, and maybe straight-up eating you, yourself, properly.

But there they were. There they were, warm under your skin, tumbling in a way that could be called… Happy. Certainly vivacious. Certainly… They were glad to be there. Alive. Existing. And it… It felt nice, this belly. It felt… Weirdly right. Like some animal itch in your brain you didn’t even know you had was being scratched, to have your belly so tight and burgeoning with roundness– Was that the fabled baby fever? Was this what it was like, the pregnant glow? Round, and round, and round, the hand circled. It hardly felt like it was under your control, an action that had become automatic even under some scant days.

It felt good, to have that hand going round and round and round on your belly, even if it wasn’t more than just… That. It felt good and… It made things nice. That misty cotton was rising up around your head again, though it took longer this time, longer to really… Fill in all the spaces. Maybe you had… More spaces to fill.

And before you knew it, you were once more checked out, heavy eyes looking down at the babies growing slowly in your belly, as if watching them like this would make you somehow… Somehow more contented. Somehow… This was happiness.

Lunch was fast-food, drive-through, and then a nap afterwards; Dinner you went out, got yourself a proper hefty portion at a family-style Chinese restaurant, packed away two plates on your own and took the other three to go, to take home with you.

As you loaded your fridge up with fried rice and sticky-sweet fried meat, with noodles cloying in their sauce and nose-tingling spices, you could hardly find yourself able to stop looking forward to tomorrow, just to eat all that, too. You were so hungry– Your babies were so hungry.

Bed was warm, and bed was soft. You held your belly and felt your fingers tracing little circles on it even as sleep coiled in to claim your night, spirit you away to the next morning.

Morning was an easy routine: Bathroom, then quickly to the kitchen. You threw the rice into the microwave, devoured the little paper box’s contents as the sesame chicken heated up, and ate that whole box down while the mixed leftovers of mongolian beef and szechuan ma-la pork heated their way to leftover goodness. When your belly had stopped howling for food, and you felt fairly queasy at how much you’d just eaten first thing in the morning, you looked down at the belly, found yourself packing a bag of onions under your shirt– Or, not so much under your shirt, as poking out the front of it. You would need three things today:

New clothes, new pantry, and some way to try and work from home.

You called your boss– Explained everything you could think of as a decent way to get out of work– Sudden and unexpected medical emergency that made you have to stay at home, you couldn’t go out. What was it? Uhhh… Back problem. Slipped disc or something, you weren’t sure, but you were really sure you needed to stay at home for a while. You’d get a doctor’s note, absolutely. You’d also work from home, absolutely.

While they set up permissions on the computer, you set your way towards the grocery store, and, cart in front of you, began loading provisions into it. You stopped in every aisle that catered food, and before you knew it, five hundred dollars shone as the total to a very tired-looking cashier and a rather surprised you. But you paid, and carted it all out to your car, and loaded it all in. When you did, you remembered you’d forgotten clothes, and grumbled to yourself– This needed to get home, you could deal with clothes later.

When you got home, you put away the groceries, set up the crock pot dinner, and then sat at your computer and set about your job. Two hours in, you got up to grab a snack. Four hours in, you got up to grab a snack, noticed the empty ice cream carton you didn’t even remember eating, shrugged and threw that away, got yourself some corn dogs in the oven and went back to work, antsy and hungry.

Six corndogs disappeared. A bag of popcorn. Four apples.

Work was over, finally. You dug into the crock pot, dished a big bowl of stew rich and full of carrots and potatoes and beef, loaded sour cream on it, stirred it all around and chowed down. Three bowls by the end of your movie, two more as you watched YouTube, and the crock pot was simply left to low overnight as you curled yourself up, smug in the knowledge breakfast was going to be more delicious leftovers. Your babies were so happy, you thought, as you petted the belly and yawned, getting cozy in your blankets. Sure, they were big and so damn heavy, but… Well, this was a good way to be.

When you woke in the morning, you appeared to have strapped a ten-pound bag of potatoes to your front. By all accounts, you should be birthing any day now.

When you pressed your hands to your belly, and felt your little babies wiggling in there, eager to greet their parent and the general morning, you knew that wasn’t even close to right. You did wonder if they would take nine months to grow– If that was the case, you might be big as the building!-- But that seemed silly. Why, how would you be a good parent if you couldn’t even birth your brood? Besides, they still felt so horribly small in there.

You got up, peed, marched to the crock pot and finished the stew right out of it. It was too hot to wash right away, but… Well, you were just gonna make more of the same anyway, why bother to wash it when it wasn’t even really a day old? So you threw in more of the same, walked, sat, worked. Or… Worked might be putting it far more generously than what you managed to accomplish really deserved. You were in the meetings, dazed and glazed, hand going in circles on the belly, other hand shoveling ice cream and chips and various snack foods into your face.

It was charitable to say you contributed– Really, it was generous to even say you were present. What mattered was your belly, the tumbling motion you could feel deep inside, the way that your babies would press themselves to your hand, as if they wanted to be pet, as if they sought your love and affection. You had so much of it to give. You kneaded lotion into the massive bulge of your belly, traced fingers over the stretch marks zig-zagging over your impossibly gravid form, less than a week and already you were so round and fat with all these little babies.

If you didn’t need the other hand to shove food into your face, you'd have used both hands to love and pet the belly, your babies. As it stood, you used one for each, sometimes both for one or the other when it was important– To get up, to grab a cake slice onto a chocolate-smeared plate, to get things out of the oven. It was hard to bend down to do that, sadly, with the massive globe of your belly hanging low in the way– And for all the easy frozen food you had, that five hundred dollars wasn’t going as far as you’d hoped, and with how fast you were getting, you wondered if you’d be reliant on delivery drivers once you could no longer safely get yourself up the stairs, much less bring food up.

Still, though, every hour you put in at work was another dime down the mouth of your babies, and when you could finally log off and devour dinner, you found the three-pound roast and potatoes were so much less filling than you’d hoped. One bowl was set aside for a midnight snack, and the rest had disappeared into the growing globe of your gut, where the hungry mouths of all your lovely babies waited. At least this time, you could wash the crock pot bowl! It was good to know your babies were growing so big, so quick…

You woke in the morning, but were still rather dreadfully tired. There was so much growing going on in your belly– Why, looking at them now, you could see how your skin had grown redder and redder, angrier and angrier, to the point you were more stretch mark than skin when it came to the monumental globe of your belly and all the babies curled up safely inside it.

Your hands were in motion as soon as your brain was awake to move them, stroking, rubbing, petting, round and round in haphazard circles, round and round the mound of belly that hung heavy in front of you. It churned and roiled as you heaved yourself to the bathroom, and as you sat there and watched the wonderful little babies greet your motion with their own, you wondered if you weren’t looking a little big– After all, you’d seen a pregnant person here and again before, and never THIS big. Maybe sometimes online, posted pictures, but those were always multiples, and always so close to the due date, too. This… Why, if you didn’t know better, you’d say you were trying to be well on your way to overdue, but nothing felt… Well, finalized. Over. You weren’t sure how you knew things weren’t over, but– But it didn’t feel right to have them leave you now.

Breakfast finished a gallon of milk on its own, between the scrambled eggs, waffle mix, and sausages shoved in the oven (as the stove had no room for them), and your own hungry gullet chugging it straight from the jug. You’d figured out it was easier to have all the food ready and then just deal with it getting cold– As much as you cooked, there was no way that, even as fast as you could go, you could eat it all before it cooled down. But that was alright– You just ate things in the order they’d still be tasty in.

You sat at your desk and piled eggs and syrup on a crispy waffle, using it like a toast boat, typing here and there on the document that sat before you, demanding to be completed. Lotion and butter smeared your keyboard, mouse, and belly, and syrup now and again spooled clear brown onto the ponderous globe resting so heavily on your thighs. You didn’t notice until the heaping bowl of food– once a mixing-bowl, now a morning-portion– was dreadfully empty, and when you patted your stomach to belch, you found your hand came up and away stickily.

You were only a little snackish after your carton of eggs and waffles, so you heaved yourself up to the shower, found you were struggling to fit more than you’d expected. Before this, the warm water on your body had been calm and soothing, but now some part of you– Either belly or body– Would be chilly in the cool air, no matter how you tried to angle the showerhead. This meant the water ran, mostly, over your belly, with brief forays to the rest of you to wash off syrup and waffle mix and bits of other miscellaneous crumbery that had found its way about your ever-growing person. Couldn’t bear to leave the babies out in the cold, even if that meant you, yourself, ended up being cold instead.

The loofah was discarded, as its rough surface was simply too much for your thin, aching skin, and once more you went back to rubbing at the belly, soap making the whole orb slippery and so much fun to whisk your hands about. The babies seemed to like the washing, too, tumbling and bulging themselves out against your skin.

With your skin so thin, you could get a better idea of what they looked like– Serpentine was a definite descriptor, with a larger, more oblong head– Or what you were guessing was a head. The limbs were many, and spindly, though thankfully not particularly sharp– Though you could feel them drumming at your insides as they ran, or… Otherwise moved. They also certainly had a tail, and these tails, more than anything, seemed to be what returned contact with your hand. Perhaps they were prehensile!

When you felt the tails brush your palm, a rush of that dizzying cotton fuzz hit you, and hit you hard. It was like your brain was suddenly drowned in that same syrup you’d been devouring like a starving man, choked away on saccharine adoration for the lives growing from you, in you, once so deep in your belly and now so near the surface. They were your babies, your precious little babies, and how you loved your babies. There was no other way to be.

You could have stood there all day, but then you remembered that you were supposed to be at work, and hurried the shower.

Stepping out and drying yourself quickly, thanks to how cold the air seemed, you pinched at your hip and wondered if it didn’t seem a little slighter than it had been before. Had you– Well, you certainly hadn’t lost weight, that was for sure, thanks to the tireless efforts of your babies, but had you gotten thinner despite growing them?

You thought you’d been eating enough! Why, you were almost constantly shoving something into your mouth, except when you slept or– Well, needed to do other things. Maybe you just needed to eat more dense foods, less of the light healthy snacks and more of the greasy stuff? But wasn’t that bad for you, for the babies? … It’d be worse if you didn’t get enough in you, that was for sure. Couldn't have that, the babies needed their nutrition.

You sat back at your desk with another tub of ice cream, and managed a whole singular page of document by the time it was gone. Honestly, it was getting hard to type with the mass in front of you, all jostling and tossing around, constantly nudging or shoving your arms about as you tried to eat and work at the same time. It’s like they wanted to be petted all the time, not happy with just your forearms propped up on them, they wanted your hands occupied petting and stroking and loving all over them. You knew, and you murmured as much to them, but how were you supposed to make money to feed them if you couldn’t work? It’s not like your boss was going to feed you for nothing, as much as he absolutely should. Didn’t he know how important it was, how much hard work it already was, growing all these darling little babies?

Lunch was two extra-large oven pizzas, meat lover’s both, and when you pulled the first one out of the oven you had to remind yourself that it was much too hot to devour straightaway, and needed to be cut into slices so you could actually eat it anyhow. The second was thrown in as soon as the first was off the stone, and you burned your mouth twice trying to get past the barrier of delicious, gooey cheese that kept pizza from reaching stomach in the gastronomic reunion of the year.

By now, you could see them, or very nearly see them, growing. Certainly the weight was a cue, always pitching you a little more forward, straining the already-desperate belly and self forward bit by bit, but sat boredly in front of your computer, you could watch as hour by hour, the skin struggled a little more to contain its precious cargo, bundled up securely in the nest of your body. Your stretch marks were angry, incredibly so, and at the peak of your belly, your belly-button, once so proudly popped, was gone, melted back into the mass hanging in front of you, every spare millimeter of space held in its dimple smoothed out to join the hanging, rounded teardrop that once had been your modest, normal, human belly.

The thinner your belly-skin got, the more you felt the need to rub it, hold it, lug it around carefully. Edges of counters were things to be looked at with suspicion and worry– Sure, you were durable, but were you that durable? Doorways needed to be entered on the straightaway, and while the frames were welcome places to lean and rest on the arduous treks through the apartment, your belly seemed to realize it would need to get rounder wrapping your gut, as well as… Well, every other direction.

With all this additional roundness going on, it was getting harder to really cram food down like you had before. You’d have half your pizza, feel full, and half an hour later need to cram more into your belly– Not that you asked how your body was becoming able to process all this food so quickly. That was probably just… Normal. Or your babies had something to do with it, hijacking your metabolism so you could feed them properly.

Dinner was microwaved dinner after microwaved dinner, and you kept finishing one, feeling satisfied, and then making another ten minutes later. Four hundred or so calories at a time, tray by tray, you emptied the freezer you thought you’d filled well, and only once you were too tired to keep your eyes open did you pass out, a cooked and cold tray of the stuff waiting your awakening in the microwave.

You barely had the sense to re-heat the mess in the microwave before using a dirty fork to shovel it down your throat. You’d overslept, and more than any other urge, needed to eat something NOW. Still chewing on rubbery chicken, you plodded your way further into the apartment to try and get to the rest of your needs, and barely managed to turn around in your little bathroom. You had no idea how to judge your own belly size now– You couldn’t even see the scale were you to step on it, but by the looks of it, you had at least forty pounds of baby and belly hanging heavy off your front. What you could feel of your little loves, you couldn’t exactly quantify by “things sold in bags” anymore– Bigger than a bag of rice, one of the twenty-pound ones. Maybe that and a twenty-pound bag of beans together? How you wished you’d thought to buy those now, just the thought had your stomach howling its angry wishes for something, anything, filling every square cubic-centimetre of space in your guts..

There was no way you were going to make it back and forth for much longer, this much was clear. You tried to lug your mattress out to the living room, but your arms were tired, you were tired, and… Well, the belly was horribly in the way. You got it a little off the bed, and settled for taking all the pillows and blankets and sheets and nesting up on the couch instead. Nesting, how apt– When you looked at the mounds of soft things piled up, and then reclined back into them, you felt quite broody and cozy in it, and wished there was someone to bring you food and all such important things like that. Why should you have to do this all yourself? You were gigantic, and so very, very pregnant, and so busy eating, so busy growing all these babies.

Such a shame there was no help. The lack thereof brought you back up to your tired, swollen feet, and you huffed and heaved your way back to the kitchen. Finding little of decent sustenance, you growled as you tossed a bunch of leftover mish-mash into the oven, lamented the lack of eggs to quickly fry, snacked on granola and wondered why the world would make anything so dry and bland and sad and tasteless. You needed something heftier, dammit, something rich and meaty and dense! A cheese went down, one of those little fancy wheels you’d been saving since Christmas for company, not even bothering to slice it with a knife as you bit into the wax and tore it away like an animal. Peels of green dotted the floor as you chewed through it, mollified for now, but finding quickly that your fridge was more and more barren, even as your hunger wasn’t ever really sated.

You chewed through that concern like the cheese, bite by bite pondering what you could do to fix it. There was no hope for grocery shopping– You could barely make it to the bathroom from the couch, much less anything even slightly like a proper store. The oven’s bountiful payload still wasn’t done yet. You shuffled away, grabbed your laptop, dragged it back to the living room, grouched about why doors had to be so small. Another bite of cheese as you logged in late, rubbed your belly to soothe yourself, snacked away at the two-pound wheel.

If groceries were out of the question, then that meant delivery. You could call in, get delivery that way, or there were always the apps. What was nearby? What could feed you enough? Something that would keep– Something that would heat up well, or even better, be tasty cold too. It took so long for things to be ready.

You cranked out a document, submitted it, brain going on autopilot. Chew, chew, chew. The oven beeped, and you hauled up to get out the last of the frozen food. Nothing that would need an oven to reheat, it was getting pretty precarious to bend over like this, both in terms of hot thing near belly and actual balance. You weren’t sure your paper-thin skin would survive actually coming in contact with anything hot out of the oven like that, and didn’t want to risk yourself, much less your babies, on such a gamble.

Pizza and takeout, then. You snacked away at corn dogs while your other hand swapped between long rubs and clacking lamely at the keyboard.

You received a message from your boss– Opened it, furrowed your brow. It was a long message, something about poor work and lack of a doctor’s note, and there was a threat at the end of it. You didn’t have time for this sh*t, you had lunch to figure out. A pizza place was closest, could work for now.

You put your order in, and felt a nap take you. A good, solid nap that was interrupted by a knock at the door, and after the dozy moments trying to process what that was, you remembered your pizza and sprung up to get it– As much as sprung could be used for you, who looked swollen enough to burst at any given moment.

You’d paid with a card online, but still shoved a twenty in the delivery boy’s hands as he handed you pizza after pizza, which you stacked haphazardly on the table by the door.

“Havin’ a party?” He asked lamely, to fill the awkward silence. Your snapped ‘no’ was enough to cow him back to quiet, and he took the twenty with a nervous smile before the door was slammed shut. You didn’t miss the wide shock to his eyes as he glanced down at your belly.

Still, though, you thought, as you dragged the first pizza box over to your makeshift desk and began to eat, trying again to parse what your boss had told you, he did look like quite the snack. And you didn’t mean that anything less than literally.

It took you some moments to realize that wasn’t normal, but… Well, it was meat. He was meat. And you were growing your babies, and surely that required a lot of protein. The bacon on your pizza dripped its greasy agreement, acknowledging a different sort of solution briefly before it contributed in its own way towards the most important task to be found, providing for your precious little ones.

When two boxes had been emptied over the course of as many hours, you found yourself drifting away again, and greeted the rise of sleep with no resistance.

What would you call this… A litter? Your litter of babies woke you up, screaming internally as loud as your stomach. A leftover pizza came with you to pee, barely able to squeeze through the door leading to the bathroom, and you lamented the sorry state of your skin. You were sure it was nearly translucent now, the redness fading as it lacked the spare skin and muscle to hold colour anymore. Now it was just holding together, and even then, only barely. You angled to see if you could get a light to shine through it, but despite your best efforts, all there was, was belly. Your babies were not backlit by the reflection of a mirror, and you weren’t sure you could get your flashlight out of its stash in a condition like this, so they would simply have to remain unknown until birth.

Your skin certainly grew darker where your babies pressed themselves to it, though. You were certain they were a black, maybe a dark blue, something like that– A deep, saturated colour that shone through your skin well enough. You could get a decent look at their bumpy selves, too, and decided that your babies had a distinctly buglike look to them. That was alright, of course; You gave your belly a rub and pat, and they wriggled and bumped around inside there, expressing their love and excitement and leaving you adrift in blissful warm fog again. You found yourself back on the couch after that, another pizza gone, and a text from your boss telling you not to bother signing in again, you weren’t to come back until you had that doctor’s note. That was fine, you decided, looking down at your massive belly. It’s not like you’d do great work trying to type with a laptop balanced on your heaving, churning belly. You were pretty sure that, if you really compared sizes, you could fit a whole ten-year-old in there. Not stretched out or anything, but like, curled up. Maybe a tween. It was hard to tell when the only comparison for size you really had anymore was… Pizza boxes and how much couch it took up.

It was really getting hard to move around, now. This was starting to get worrying– Would you need to sit right by the door and grab deliveries, throw the trash as far from yourself as you could? What about bathroom needs? Rubbing your belly was all well and good, and sent you off on another trip to somewhere floaty and gentle. You found your mouth moving, your breath used in speech, when you came back. Babies, babies, love you little babies, you were saying, over and over, cooing and singing softly to them.

They seemed to like it, so you pat your belly with a hand, found the lotion, and began to tend to the ever-growing globe of belly with one hand while the other was never empty of pizza slices…

Right up until it was. You looked up in shock, all boxes empty, and keened softly. NO! You were still hungry!-- Quickly you grabbed your phone, found the first place with any sort of deal in a food delivery app, and ordered as much of that as you could. Two hundred dollar limit, so be it. Two hundred dollars of fried chicken buckets it would be.

This, you knew, had to go in the fridge– So, once you had snatched the plentiful stacked buckets from your front door, you sat on the couch, devoured a piece of chicken, and crammed the other half of the chicken you didn’t plan on eating tonight into the nearly-empty coldbox.

Then, with greasy hands, you spun up the television and sat to gorge and nap, gorge and nap, over, and over.

So went the day– Autoplay was your best friend, the space behind your couch littered with bones and tissue, gravy containers and grease-soaked buckets of paper.

Sleep was stolen in snatches, in between buckets, in between episodes, in between bites, more than once waking up to immediately begin gnawing on a half-finished drum or thigh, clicking a button that confirmed you were still alive. Hell, you were better than alive– This was all you could want, from here on out. Food, sleep, and entertainment. Greasy hands rubbed oil and fat into the belly, and the skin soaked up any sort of softening it could, stretching more and more grotesquely by the hour as it was.

Not that you would consider your beautiful, beautiful babies grotesque, of course.

So did night pass, one chunk of fried chicken at a time; It bled into morning as your belly bled over your knees, and you found it nearly impossible to get up. In fact, it was all the way impossible to make it into the bathroom, and found yourself shamefully making use of the kitchen sink to be rid of waste. You’d have bashed the doorframe in, frankly, if you had any sort of reach past the belly– but with each hour it was seeming less and less likely you’d be able to grab anything in front of you.

It was making you have to grab the next buckets of chicken from the fridge sideways, which was comical, were it not for how annoying it was– And you found yourself cursing a lack of extra arms, or grasping tail, anything to make this whole event just a little easier.

You’d just plopped both buckets down on the mess-laden TV-trays by the couch when there was a knocking and a call of your name at the door. You recognized the voice- A friend of yours, from high school. Big guy, friendly guy, never went anywhere with him as anything more than a friend, but you two had been solid for a while. Usually he called, but–

No, looking at the phone, you found it dead, and wondered how long that had been the case. Had you been ignoring him?

Either way, you heaved your massive, ponderous, almost-immobile belly to the door, legs straining under the weight of at least forty pounds of just baby alone, twice that easily in fluids round them.You hushed and soothed the little ones as they grew agitated under your motion, and unlocked and peeked open the door a little, peering out.

“Yes? Oh, hi, buddy, how are you doing?” You asked, polite but strained, taking every ounce of your focus to keep your hand off your belly, keep it from circling and making a mess of your mind. You just needed to get through a conversation, long enough to get him to go away, leave you and your babies in peace.

He whistled to see you, disheveled and unwashed, and then wrinkled his nose and looked into the apartment. “Hi there,” he said, slowly, and his eyes flicked between you, and the apartment, and the little indeterminate mass near the bottom of the door. “Mind if I come in?”

“Uh, yeah, sorry, I’m a bit busy,” You managed, before a riotous roil from the babies made your eyes bug out, made you stagger back and huff and wheeze. You urged them to stop, but your friend had already made it past you and your massive bulk, slipped inside the apartment, and had then frozen in place to see the state of things.

Discarded, rotting food cartons reeked of leftover Chinese left in a muggy, humid apartment for over a week, stunk of mildewing pizza and decaying chicken and animal-grease, stunk of eggshells in the garbage and spoilt milk dregs in a forgotten cereal bowl, of sausage and bacon grease lingering heavy in the air, of unwashed human and waste. He retched a little at the entry, and you sneered at your friend– Weak, you didn’t notice anything wrong, what the hell was he making all this fuss about?

“What the hell,” he asked, turning to address you by name– At which point his eyes popped and he gasped audibly, putting a hand out as if to touch and then drawing back in abject horror when the bloated mass of your impossibly-pregnant gut roiled before him.

“Holy f*ck,” was all he could say, then, before his senses returned to him and he began digging in his pocket.

“We need to get you to a hospital, whatever’s going on you’ll be okay,” he began to babble, hand shaking as he tried to unlock his phone.

Hospital.

They would take your babies.

They would cut them out and take them away and you’d never see your babies again.

He was going to kill your babies.

You couldn’t let him.

By your door, though it was unused this past week-and-change, there was a doorjamb; A black-painted, steel prop that would fasten beneath the handle of the door, brace up to keep outsiders out. It was security– Living alone, as you did, security was important.

And right now it was security for your babies.

You didn’t even think as your hand snapped around the steel, and a snarl twisted your features. You swung it, at once, directly for his head.

His head snapped back as it connected, too focused on dialing emergency services to see the weapon coming.

He hit the ground with a thud, and then blinked back to awareness, and held his hands up to defend himself.

You didn’t care. You brought the steel down again, having to swing in an arc, as you couldn’t take it directly down over your belly. It hit his arm, then his shoulder, then the side of his head once more, and he flopped, dazed.

A third hit, and his eyes went empty. You nudged him with the doorjamb, and saw he was still breathing. Just out for the count.

You threw his phone out the window, and yours too, for good measure. Just in case he tried anything and you couldn’t reach him. You barred the door and… f*ck, you were tired. That had taken a lot more out of you than you expected.

So you sat on the couch and thought, rested, wondered.

After some exhausted, frightened thinking, you decided you didn’t need those pillowcases and sheets, and tied him up. It was clumsy going, but after a bit of struggling, and a lot of creative use of feet and angles, you had your friend tied up on the ground.

Not a moment too soon– He was already shifting about as you got the last few knots in on his ankles, and collapsed with utter exhaustion on the couch. Hunger and thirst seized you, and you ate and drank, and watched him come to.

He began trying to talk to you, but the gag in his mouth was well-held, and so he mmph-ed and mrprhr-ed at you uselessly, flopping about like a fish on the ground, bleeding sluggishly from the side of his head.

You began to talk to him, in that same sing-song voice you talked to the babies in, chicken in one hand, belly in the other. It was still growing, and the shapes of your precious little babies inside could be seen shifting and wiggling and pressing themselves, dolphinlike, so beautiful and graceful, to your moving hand. You told him how you didn’t much appreciate him barging in, and if he’d just gone home everything would be okay, but no, he had to come by and make himself a bother, and once you figured out what to do with him, you would.

Because he had threatened your babies, and you didn’t like anyone who would do that, no matter how good they’d been before.

But after your food, god, you were really just exhausted. So… Well, he was all tied up. You let yourself nap, and shivered your way through a bit of hunger that flared up.

You woke, you ate, and something about your belly was different. There was a tightness in the lower portion, a… Tension? That hadn’t been there before.

Pain suddenly lanced your belly, and a gush of wet poured out of you, soaking into the couch quickly. It was, from what you could see in the low light of the apartment, green-tinted, and fairly slippery– More like a lubricant than water, based on how it made your thighs feel as they moved together, and then, instinctively, apart.

Where were the clenches? The contractions? This didn’t feel right–

Your belly tensed, a little, across the whole of it, and something began to nuzzle and press against your cervix. It was painful– A bruising batter, an insistent, unrelenting pressure. You could feel one of your babies moving differently from the rest– While they tumbled and knocked about, this one, this lowest one in your belly, was purposeful in seeking its exit.

You clutched your belly, holding tight to it with two hands, both arms unable to meet around the center, not even close. It tensed again, and a persistent throbbing could be felt within yourself as something began to slip through just the slightest bit. It felt like wet plastic, clinging and spooling inside you before quickly-exhausted muscles, already stretched beyond use, stopped managing to even tense and fell apart into random, useless quivers.

It was a good thing your baby knew what to do, it seemed, as you lifted your voice in a faint, wordless quail, the pain of the thing pressing into you warring against the opiate bliss that rubbing your belly brought. You pressed your forehead into it, hunched, though the shift in angle brought such a feeling of wrongness and panic that you jolted, jerked, struggled to make it to the edge of the couch, just to clear the way out to the world. You managed, in between gut-heaving attempts to tense, in between agonizing presses to your cervix, to hook your legs over the edge of the couch, resting only your belly on it and squat-standing over the main seating, holding for dear life to the armrest. In between muscle-spasms that threatened to take your legs out from under you, you scrabbled your underwear the rest of the way off– Not that they’d really managed much in the way of proper on-ness, these last few days, but it had felt like something you ought to do. Now, though, damn the things, anything short of utterly nude felt abhorrent and wrong, like any obstruction now would be the death of your precious babies.

But the tenses, the falling-apart quivers, did seem to be doing… Something. Your babies’ heads didn’t seem so large as a human baby’s would be, so as your cervix struggled and strained to soften and relax, you could feel the little head inside massaging at it and trying all the harder to leave.

Your nosy friend on the floor was hollering through his gag, though you could barely hear him. There were probably words in that, but it didn’t matter.

A dribble of fluid, this time tinged more with blue and a good deal stickier, passed out of your pulsing hole and hit the ground. Now, you felt… Well, a good deal less in pain. Looser, somehow, like you were a little more made of rubber. It wasn’t all at once– It took some time, you didn’t know how long, through tears and sweat and snot you could barely tell if it was a minute or a day– But you could feel the baby start to shift, and squeeze.

Like with humans, the head was the hardest part.

Unlike with humans, the head was basically the ONLY hard part. As soon as you felt that elastic ring within yourself bow, bulge, and then finally give, the whole of the baby slipped right out after– No shoulder bulge to worry about. It slithered almost under its own power, unwinding from your body and spooling out in a heap on the floor–

And as soon as it had, the birthing-tension in your body faded, and left you shaking and breathing raggedly. Your hips burned, your hole was sore, and what was probably your cervix felt like an over-stretched rubber band left suddenly to fall limp.

But you were alive. And you were… A little smaller. You’d guess you’d lost about ten percent or so of your size. A lightness, to you, to your breathing, a roominess in your belly that hadn’t been there before, blessed you for your trial by fire, and you breathed an exhausted sigh of relief.

Some sort of casing plopped onto the floor wetly after the baby, its caul and umbilical and bloody placenta splattering out of you– but not onto it.

As you heaved yourself to recline again, you noticed your darling little baby. A spindly thing, maybe three feet long, though so thin and whippy as to be not more than six pounds in its own right; should it curl up, it wouldn’t be larger than a pineapple. Its head was oblong and black, eyeless, with a pair of small antennae upon it; A large, toothy mouth opened and shut a few times, tasting the air. In diameter, this head was no bigger than a medium-sized lemon, though it could be banana-long. A thin neck, seeming too reedy to support such a head, spooled from near the centre, and a body that was as if a human skeleton had animated itself by cobbling together insect remains trailed off it. It was hard to tell, for they were so spindly, but you were fairly sure your child had eight legs, like a spider; A long, vertebral tail whipped around it as it skittered and began to scrabble about.

You panted, and looked at your baby, felt your chest. No milk– What did it eat? What did your little darling need? You tried to speak, but your hoarse, tense voice only crackled poorly.

Your friend was hollering again, and that hollering got baby’s attention. It skittered to him, body soft and seeming so sorry for lack of mass. It nosed at him, touched his hand, and he jerked back and away, tried to run from your little baby. You shot him a look, and he didn’t give a single sh*t. His pants were wet; it stunk of his urine, now.

The little antennae flicked as it headed up his chest, and those spindly legs were remarkably strong as it held while he tried to thrash and roll. Once, his legs almost connected with your baby, and a shot of fire urged you to motion. You couldn’t really grab him, but you could restrain him otherwise– And, heaving your belly up (with surprising lightness, now one of your babies was out!), you plopped it down on him, pinning him down. Without leverage, he could do little more than wiggle the prodigious, heavy belly hanging off you, a motion that only made the babies inside of you excited, wriggling and pressing into him.

He continued to scream. You watched as your baby crawled its way towards his head.

You asked it questions, what was the little silly billy doing, were the rest of their family to come soon?, so on, but it didn’t answer. It crept up to your friend, and… Vomited out a small amount of blue fluid onto his mouth. It waited…

And then it scrabbled the gag out of his mouth. You tried to tell it not to do that, as he’d start yelling, but… Well, while he clearly tried, all that came out was a gurgle and faint wheezing. His jaw was lax, couldn’t shut, and it seemed so were many of the other nearby muscles that blue mess had absorbed into. No wonder, you thought to yourself, your baby was able to get out of you so easily! It had helped you! What a wonderful and resourceful baby, indeed.

Then… It forced itself into his mouth. He rolled his eyes like a frightened horse, but couldn’t do much else– His wriggles were weak, and he couldn’t shut his jaw.

It seemed your baby was still squishy and pliable, as it wriggled its way in easily, and once the bulge of its head had passed the hollow of his throat, the tail slipped in swiftly after and disappeared down his gullet.

Well, if that’s what your baby wanted to do, it’s not like you were one to argue. You heaved your belly up and off your friend as he began to twitch and writhe, clawing uselessly at his throat and chest, unable to scream.

You plopped back down on the couch, ate some chicken, tossed the bones over your shoulder, and passed out.

Waking an unknown amount of time later, you fetched yourself some more chicken, and ate. Lucky that you could move, now, you checked the time and ordered more late-night pizza, told the guy to leave it at the door and get his tip from under the mat. Forty, this time. Six extra-large pizzas up three flights of stairs at ten at night was quite a feat.

Your friend was twitching and jerking about on the floor as you dragged the boxes in, hooking them with the bloodied doorjamb and pulling them into your living room, where you picked up the topmost one and draped the box lazily across the back of the couch, pulling out a slice, eating it, and going back to your TV. The sounds of the TV soon lured you back to sleep, once a whole pizza had disappeared.

You woke to the sounds of shuffling and rustling, and looked around to see your friend on the floor, rolling around in a… Rather calm and collected manner. Especially compared to the previous night. You grabbed a slice of pizza, and munched on it as you leaned forward to see your friend looking at you, and then… Opening his mouth.

Two black antennae spooled out from beneath his tongue. Surprised, you called out to him, and he wiggled more insistently– Sinuously, not unlike the baby you’d seen disappear down his throat not too long ago. Cautiously, you told him to roll over to you, and he obediently did so, rocking and tumbling over discarded bones and pizza tables with little care for his apparent comfort, to rest at your feet. You angled yourself sideways on the couch to get a better view of him, and saw him opening his mouth again, the antennae fluttering out of his cheeks and dancing around your legs.

You helped him sit up, noticed his spine was definitively darker, and there was a hidden second row of teeth behind his first as he began to make uncertain vocalizations at you. So you spoke again, and he mimicked; Spoke again, and he mimicked better.

It was your baby in there. Somehow, your baby seemed to have taken over your friend.

Warmth bloomed in your chest and you untied your friend– He quickly sprung up, and looked at you attentively, fairly quivering as he waited for an order. Bemused, you looked around at the area, and… Well, he had made a face at the smell.

“Take out the trash,” you ordered, and he sprung into action, quickly identifying things which were, fairly universally, garbage, and putting them in the can. He seemed to have enough knowledge still in that once-human brain to, once the can was full, take the bag out, set it aside, put a new bag in, and resume his tidying.

A thought struck you. You had a worker. You were a Queen.

It felt amazing.

You rubbed your belly with one hand, fed yourself leftover pizza with the other, whimpered to feel the thinness across your ribs. It seemed like you just couldn’t eat enough to keep yourself from being hungry; even as you ate, you could feel your body churning away at the meal, trying to process it as fast as possible to feed your growing babies.

Your eyes alighted on the worker-friend, busily cleaning up the trash. How many of those could you have?

The worker carried out the trash bags to the dumpster, came up and began clearing out empty pizza boxes next. Seemed he retained a fair bit of his old memories.

When he came up, you cleared your throat, and he looked at you expectantly.

“Help me up,” you ordered, holding your arms out. He did so, helping carry the massive burden of your belly. You were able to direct him to help you with the bathroom, and with a washcloth bath; You were too large, still, to fit into the bathroom, so getting the carpet a little damp would simply have to do. Still, clean for the first time in a while, and now no longer bearing the burden of all your precious babies alone, you felt a whole lot better. You got him to move the mattress to the living room, nested up on that, let him have the couch instead, and fed yourself all the while.

Your stomach wouldn’t let up. You’d eat a slice of pizza, and then not five minutes later, you’d be starving for another. Your babies didn’t let up either– Your Queen mattress was barely big enough to hold you and your pile-of-honeydews belly, and hour by hour you swore you could see it getting bigger. You ordered him to get you more food as you fed yourself; you ordered him to feed it to you, when your belly itched and you had to hold it, pet it, soothe the babies still inside. And, finally, you tried to get up again and found yourself pinned by your impossibly big belly, and all the babies still swirling around inside it.

He seemed to know the drill, now, though. When you napped, you would find the trash gone, and fresh food waiting by your hands. You only had to whimper a little and he was by your side, holding chunks of chicken, of cheese-curds, of beef, of seafood, anything and everything he seemed to think you might want or need. Everything was slathered in gravy, or thick, creamy dressings, or rich, decadent sauces, or was, in its own right, immensely fattening; He seemed to know and understand just how much energy it took to grow all your precious little ones, and did everything in his power to make sure you wanted for not one singular calorie.

Of course, you were only so big, and could only hold so much food at a time; It was a constant job, just keeping you fed, and you were soon used to the feeling of fingers prodding at your lips even as you dozed, a thumb caressing your throat to encourage you to swallow, even as time itself lost meaning to the euphoric daze of constantly stroking your belly, and feeling your babies push back on your hands within you. The light dimmed, and little else changed but exactly what was being fed to you in between your hazy, drifting nap-dreams.

You became vaguely aware of your belly looking more like a stack of watermelons than anything that reasonably should have been attached to you, but it was hard to be aware of anything, truly. He moved you for you, he dabbed your chin and belly, he rubbed more lotion into the near-to-popping bloat that had eclipsed your sitting frame, he propped more and more pillows up around you, he let you rest against him when breathing was even tough. Your babies moved constantly now, and you could make out more distinct motion than just swishes– Legs, tails, heads, coordinated motion. Would they be born more grown than human babies, you wondered– Would they be workers too, for you? If you were to be the center of a hive, were you going to be doing this again? You hoped so, it was so blissful. A life of breeding, of eating and getting fat with your brood, with your precious babies, it sounded like heaven, even in a little hole apartment like this. What else could you want?

When the food became raw, red meat, you barely noticed. It was still delicious, rich and fatty, had the perfect sort of savoury and bloody-iron you’d been craving, and as pound after pound of protein and fat passed your lips, you didn’t even bother wondering where your dutiful worker had found such bounty.

Even if you could see the body parts, the dismembered limbs, occupying your fridge, why, it was all for the good of your babies– Even if you recognized the wrinkly face on the head dumped in the garbage, the haze of hormones that had overwritten your better sense for over a week would surely have still reigned supreme over your higher function.

You were certain you could hide a whole adult in your belly, now.

Your body was thrumming with endorphins, with your pulse, with the faint dizziness of your too-small frame trying to accommodate this too-big brood. (How would you have survived with all of them? Without your Helper?)

Hunger screamed just below the surface of the blissful ocean you floated in, clawed at your brainstem and kept you chewing, kept you swallowing. You thought you heard your belly creak, but it could have been the floor. Meat, bloody and raw, kept being fed to you. It was succulent, but your mouth was working without your input. Your helper was feeding you rich yellow fat, blubbery and cool, but you swallowed it like a predator graced with a gift. You weren’t sure when you liked liver, but you liked it now, and gulped down near to four pounds of it in slick strips. (Was that your skin stretching under your fingers? Was it almost over? You couldn’t handle much more, you knew, with a resigned sense of finality. Soon, they would be born, or you would surely die.)

Just when you were wondering if those were lights dancing in front of your eyes, or if your skin was, really, starting to split and bleed little by little, your helper stopped and two antennae flicked out of his mouth.

Then, all at once, your belly-muscles, wan and thin and abused by the impossible stretching they’d been given, twitched. Your womb gave a single, hopeful throb.

And your mattress grew soaked beneath you.

Dizziness washed over you. Your belly shrunk immediately, a shrinkage capitalized on by the contraction that followed.

You recognized the smell of the blue fluid, and your eyes rolled back as more endorphins rushed into you, forced your body to stop tensing, to stop threatening to rip itself apart in a birth it couldn’t handle. Your babies were so good to you, helping you out like this. Your thin arms stroked the belly that had contorted itself into a misshapen lump, cooing with what breath you could spare to the brood that had been with you these… Probably two? weeks.

They were large, there was no doubt about that. They were active, and awake, in there, in you. They seemed to arrange themselves sensibly within you to await their exit, much more active participants than a human baby would be– And how wonderful, your brood, to help you still, even as they were going to leave you. The first one pressed their head against your slackening cervix, softly, less insistent than its earlier-born brethren. It prodded with digits, helping the stretching with a little stretching of its own, until finally–

It was odd, to feel so little and so much all at once. You could barely do more than feel as an intense burning pain forced its way through that protective ring of muscle, bulged your hole out around its head, and finally slithered its way into the world from your corrupted, parasitized womb. It was, at once, the most painful thing you’d ever felt, and also the single most ecstatic, divine moment you’d ever been blessed to feel happen to– In– you.

Everything was good. Everything was perfect. You might be dying, you really weren’t sure. Your brain was melting in the bliss of the birth, falling apart under the rush of hormones and chemical concoctions spewed into your vulnerable body by the parasites that had run it dry for the past two weeks, frozen at the very moment of beyond-org*smic bliss as you were forcibly convinced that you were serving your sole purpose in life.

Nine times, did you get to enjoy this world-shattering perfection; Nine times, for the nine brood that remained in you.

The birthing was over swiftly, compared to a human’s normal birth; barely two hours had passed from the first tension to the last of your babies’ afterbirths slipping out of you in a bloody, green-tinted mess. Your belly was deflated grotesquely, a baggy, saggy mass of ruined skin and muscle trying in faint contractions to pull itself back into something resembling a human shape, and not a collapsed blimp; The thinness you’d been overtaken with over the last week was clearer now, hollower around the cheeks and throat and ribs.

As your body worked to clear away the last rushes of chemical coercion from itself, you didn’t, couldn’t, know that sixteen little fertilized eggs were already travelling their way down to your exhausted, deflated womb, nestling themselves into the taxed lining to force your body to brood again, more, bigger, better.

Your children were immediately active– They sprung about and devoured their own afterbirths, then stalked about and chirruped at the Helper, whose voice sung in praise and instruction.

Nine little hunter-stalker aliens crept into the apartment complex, tasked variously, all in the goal of helping you, the epicentre of this nest, to grow, and provide, and birth, more and more and more of them.

When the last of your… No… Those little f*cking monsters’ f*cking freaky mindf*ck chemicals left you, pain wracked your abused body. You were starving, possibly literally so, your back hurt beyond what you could really well handle, your belly was a mass of fire and overstrain, and everything from nipple to knee was in so much agony it had, blessedly, gone completely numb.

You couldn’t even scream as your throat constricted and your brain, panicked and unable to handle this all, forced you to pass out.

You woke to your belly having shrunken in a little, starting the slow and arduous recovery process, but stranger was that you were laying on a new mattress, in a place you didn’t recognize. You sat up, or tried to, and found your body still horribly sore; you stopped trying and cried silently. Fingers poked your mouth and you opened on reflex, only to retch at the taste of blood; You looked up to see your friend, strange and scary, watching you.

He poked raw meat at your face again and you swatted him off– So he tried with some sesame chicken, this time, and… You couldn’t deny that. It felt like you hadn’t eaten in a week, or hell, likely more, and as soon as the scent of food lifted to your nose you were impossibly, ravenously hungry.

After gorging yourself on enough food to earn you a place in competitive eating championships, exhaustion overtook your fear and pain and worry, and you slumped away to nothingness again.

When you woke again, your belly was tinged green. You ate. You asked your friend questions he didn’t answer. You refused the mysterious meat. You asked more questions. You ate. You slept.

You woke, and the aches were gone. You’d filled out again, to where you had been when this all started; Your belly was still distended, and… You felt it might be forever, given what it had been. The greenish hue was more pronounced now. It filled you with… Equal parts of awe, and dread, to know that you seemed to be changing to suit this, your apparent, inevitable purpose.

A bit of a familiar fog danced softly at the edges of your thoughts, and bile rose in your throat to realize what that hazy, saccharine fog had heralded last time. Hesitantly, you pressed your hand to your floppy-skinned belly, barely green, feeling tougher, more elastic, than the skin you otherwise knew.

A warmth rose, softly, to your mind, and blanketed you in a tempting, familiar comfort.

You began to weep, while you could, as your hand resumed automatically rubbing your pregnant belly.

The bliss was better than the pain, after all.

You weren’t sure how long it took before you were all addled again, but you knew you could eat more, and had been eating more, the whole time. By the time your bloated womb, full of squirming brood, restricted the quantity of what you could eat, you’d become plush and plump and matronly thanks to the nonstop feeding; Whatever that meat was had become succulent again, and it seemed to be most of what you lived off, supplemented with other meats when that was unavailable.

You grew bigger, faster, this time. No other humanoid helpers came to you, but your more truly alien brood was quite capable on its own terms. You didn’t know if they were stealing the food, killing for it, or somehow otherwise securing it; you didn’t know how you were living in an apartment, maybe, when you weren’t sure if you paid rent, or how long you’d been adrift in blissful clouds. But your belly grew, and your thoughts and world shrunk until everything that mattered was in that green-tinted, translucent belly. Truly translucent, this time– You could see the little shapes of your babies swimming around in there, and cooed, and praised them, muttering in slurred words how you loved your babies so.

Truly, you did.

The next birth was easier on your body– It was prepared, this time. It was helped the whole while, this time. It had been changed by the brood more effectively than the first birth.

Sixteen brood joined the nine-and-one.

Twenty-four nestled into your womb.

You tried to reason with your friend to let you go while in the grips of pain, though it wasn’t nearly so bad as the first, the one that had nearly killed you. He didn’t let you go.

The bliss rose quicker this time. You fell in more easily. It was better than the pain, and frankly, you really did feel better while serving as little more than a broodsac for these… Handsome little alien bug things.

You birthed different kinds this time. Some stouter, stockier. Some sleeker. Some that resembled man quite closely. Some with bulbous abdomens. You slept less, ate more. The pain was little, the recovery all the shorter. Your helper was always there, right in reach.

By the time you could see your own changes on the outside, you were already lost to bliss.

—--------------------------------------

The hive that grew out of that little apartment complex was quite successful. At the centre of it, surrounded by armour-plated guards, sleek stalker-killers, nest-builders and brood-tenders, was a single, massive womb. It was little more than a womb, by this point, or more realistically a series of wombs, fourteen in all. Each day, the Hive would grow, the Womb at the middle pulsing out the day’s newest brood dutifully. Of course, it wasn’t literally only a Womb; the humans who fled the alien monsters said, once, it had been a human, a human who had been infected by some horrible alien and turned into a massive factory for the enemy.

The Womb only barely remembered, in between pitches of birthing-bliss, life as a human. It was fed constantly, upper thorax dedicated to processing the nutrient-rich mess of biomatter fed into its gaping maw, lower abdomen transformed into a green, vaguely glowing, series of chambers through which brood pulsed, day by day. Ever gestating, ever pregnant, the Womb would occasionally stretch an atrophied hand towards the out-of-reach brooding-abdomen, and, dutifully, a small thing, as much man as monster, would creep to the massive stretch of translucent green and pet still-soft hands over it.

And the Womb would rumble its approval, and slip back into the role that fate had designated for it: Breeding and feeding, feeding and breeding, until the whole of the world had fallen to the jaws and claws of its beautiful, wonderful, perfect, babies.