I didn’t know how, exactly, the baby came about, only that it did.

One moment, I was childless, lawless, free, and the next moment, I was pulled taut.

The babe slipped from me with little fanfare—a wet plop, and his small form was in my arms, face pale, slack. A glass figurine, sallow cheeks thin, appearing hollow. I could almost see my own reflection in the baby’s features—in the glass. Close, but not quite.

The face itself was… ordinary. Human, barely. I did not know how to categorize babies, as ordinary, dime-a-dozen, blank canvases that they were. This one looked like Albie, with that dash of red hair, and I was struck with the horror that this baby was both new and thirty years old, and the hair returned to dark. Soft, formless, nothing of note.

I’d never wanted a baby. Not even when my aunts reminded me that my mind would change with age—no, I did not want one. They were unlovable things in their impermanence of mind, in their base needs that often felt too indicative of my own. Unholy things that showed too much about human nature. I didn’t understand the appeal. They weren’t cute. They were hardly manageable. They were creatures of the rawest form, wet and unwieldy, clammy things in need of constant attention. I preferred not to take on new people to care for, and a baby would, of course, be the highest form of maintenance.

So when he slipped from my body, wet yet cold, looking like glass, I was relieved. A lifeless thing, no doubt.

Still, I’d read the manuals, and as my sister, too, had just given birth, people were half-paying attention to me. So, as expected, I turned the baby face-down onto the couch so I could pinch his lower back, attempting to elicit that instinctive nerve response that would seize him into life—all the while praying for nothing to happen at all.

The babe didn’t flinch.

Smiling, I picked him back up, holding him carelessly in the palm of my hand.

The glassiness faded, and life bloomed so suddenly into him, I was convinced of a reverse-vampirism.

He did not cry.

He smiled softly and giggled at me.

I had never known heartbreak quite like this.

***

The baby did not receive a name. I grew careless almost instantly, putting him back on the couch and wiping off the slick wetness he secreted onto my t-shirt, then onto my sweatpants. Birth wasn’t difficult for me, and the carrying had nearly ceased to exist. My lips wobbled as I tried to hold back her tears, as I kept wiping the slickness down my clothes, unable to discern if the wet that had clung to the babe was the same wet that would settle between my thighs, if the stick was the same, if it was all me.

I never truly carried him. He was there, but he was an absence to my mind. I took no care for the thing growing inside me, remaining willfully oblivious until the surprise of his emergence. I thought, perhaps, that desire to care and love would come organically, should I only give nature the opportunity. And yet, when he emerged from his glass, slick and smiling, alive—I held no love for him. No biological supersedence of what I’d already known to be true of myself. My aunts were wrong.

And yet, it was more wrong to accept this as truth. To admit I’d been correct. I wasn’t supposed to do that now that it had spawned into existence, now that it was too late to take back, return, inform the world I didn’t want it. He was already here, and he’d come, somehow, of my own body.

The baby was smaller now, as his hands reached up blindly, perhaps for comfort.

I turned to the others, eyes darting, but nobody was looking now. Nobody wanted to witness this lack of love, this lack of instinct. They hovered around my sister, cooing at that normal babe, the loved babe, the expected one. My sister and I had given birth near simultaneously, and my sister had struggled for it. Her forehead, peaking out above the swell of people around her, shone in sweat. One hand briefly balanced against the lightwood kitchen table for balance before she returned it to her babe. Also a boy, naked and whole and alive. Just as slick as my own, and yet the group cooed and touched him, pet his wet hair. As if this was something extraordinary, when it, instead, was so ordinary that the beleaguered sister stood right there, having accomplished the same thing with no effort, no love. Life could not be precious in circumstances such as these.

***

I was trapped.

The family, of course, would not be leaving for some time. The celebration was endless. Life was to become ceremony, as expected with new arrivals.

I held my baby in my fist—unclenching it to cradle the creature in my palm, my fingertips supporting his head and neck as the contact turned my hand wet from his continued secretions. He couldn’t stop changing, his hair going red again, then back to dark, size increasing so much he couldn’t fit in a single hand, then shrinking again, eyes going glassy and distant, then vibrant with an acute awareness of everything within three feet. His frailty did not confuse me, but I attempted to minimize the witnesses to these changes, to what they represented about me and this child. This extension of my own body. He lived and breathed lungs of my personal, incidental creation. I wished to hate him.

My sister’s babe was static—a tuft of blond hair on his moist little head, blotchy red cheeks and frail, reasonably-sized fingers. So breakable—even more breakable, perhaps, than when my own babe had been glass.

I was struck with the urge to crack my ribs open, to suck on the marrow—to see if, should the babe reproduce this behavior, he would die. I could hardly be to blame for such a tragedy.

***

My sister named her babe. He was a likely thing already, crying out with life. 

I sympathized with him, with that primal urge—a feeling I despised. No fairness in the world to come, yet this babe cried forth storms, as though he knew his creation was nothing more than incidental, like he knew he was a product of a process engaged a million times over, a product conceived a million times more. 

My own babe still hadn’t cried. He only smiled in those moments of having a mouth, smiled as though he knew more than the other babe. Perhaps he knew his suffering would be short-lived, the stimulation to his nerve-endings temporary, and his breaths and heart would soon stop again. He would return to glass. He would shatter.

The family sought to include me, then—to double the celebrations. Twins, they called the babes, and I saw a flicker of something akin to resentment in my sister’s eyes. She was older, the responsible one. The mother, even before the babe emerged.

I could only watch the proceedings, all of it sweeping over me like some impressive painting in which the value eluded me. This was a family of artists, and I held a painting that had poured from me, that continued to pour in those shifting features, that continued uncertainty. Such things would not stop celebrations, nor would they be acknowledged in any meaningful capacity during them. This child, supposedly mine, would be held with faux reverence, my expression a constant performance so as to not appear disgusted, enraged, broken by this anomaly. Too simple. Too easy of a thing, and yet they wanted him to be under my wing for years and years to come. As if these hours weren’t torture enough, weren’t proof that this was never intended to be. As if they wouldn’t see his shifting features and demonize him for it. As if they wouldn’t want me to defend him, protect him from slander—when I would want nothing more than for this creature to bear the brunt far away from me so I wouldn’t have to.

But it was too late. Too fast. I hadn’t been given enough time. I hadn’t known.

There was a flood building within me, and every inch of skin was constructed to be a dam. Still, the water seeped through, shone onto the baby, turned my skin rubbery and inflexible, save for the baby’s exit. He turned me into a wound. I breathed and walked differently now. There would be no fixing me into what I once was.

***

My sister knew of my proclivities, her husband likely by extension. I hardly broadcasted them, nor did I make an effort to hide them. Anyone now, of course, would say that this was the anticipated consequence. A baby as a consequence had always been an interesting concept to me, and seemed to negate the point of how often people considered them special. There were so many. It still confused me.

I held him now in one arm, hand splayed web-like to the back of his evolving head. This consequence for everybody to see, for everybody to find more value in than my own life held. An accident. Consequence. Thing. People cooed, finally, waggling their fingers at him and offering me wide smiles. There would be no mention of this being an accident. For the presentation, this would be harkened as planned, as desired, though neither of those things were true.

My sister’s child held the majority of the spotlight, perhaps because my sister herself was deserving of it. All that work. All that effort. Where I would be scrambling, she must have everything laid out, preemptively understood—nothing would be surprising. It was easier like this, for her—and more significantly, her child—to be the black hole for the rest of us to circle around. Perhaps I was a pulsar, but this meant nothing when they consumed all light.

My babe held too many recognizable faces, switched between them as the celebration commenced. Oh, joyous occasion—twins, yes? Oh, not technically twins, but they could be treated as such. That one just needs to… grow into himself. Yes, that’s it. Grow into himself. Become something festering and alive and capable of violence. Birth the new rapist, the new scientist, the new man of all possibility. Let this baby imprint on someone better than his mother, less of a whore. Let him be okay. Let him create tragedy peacefully.

My sister’s husband held her baby with a proud, beaming smile, chest puffed bear-like, as if he’d birthed, as if he’d been the emancipator. As if he’d borne the hardship already, not what was to come, should he bother to contribute at all.

My sister, the mother, would raise him. She would do excellently. Already, what her baby would become was clear—straight-A student, basketball scholarships, multiple degrees. Mine was an enigma. His changing faces. Too much of him. Too much of me.

I should have cared for him. If nothing else, felt guilty for bringing him into this world, for forcing him to have me as his mother. But I did not force this. I did not want this. I was angry, the rage washing through a conveyor-belt tide that could only circle inside me, me, me. I wanted to shatter this baby. Watch him crack and splinter, marvel at how his face didn’t mirror mine, not even when he was glass, not even when he was broken. He only looked like boys, like men, like red hair shorn to bald, blue skin turned pink, spine so sharp it bit through my palms like teeth when it was there at all.

I wanted to set him down. Shove him in the couch face-down and step outside. Breathe. 

I held him. I smiled and accepted platitudes, I pretended I didn’t feel frustrated tears building behind my eyes, keyholes in need of something to fill them, to unlock the storm behind them and set an inch of myself free. Something to reverse. I didn’t know why I had this baby. I didn’t know why my life had to end like this.

He smiled up at me, laughed, his limbs extending and distending, his pencil-like fingers finding the back of my neck, as though he planned to pull me in for a kiss like one of my lovers.

I pushed back at his neck with my free hand, smiling upward, my teeth all showing like knives, pantomiming those around me. They wouldn’t stop, either. As my baby—not my baby—didn’t cry, they had nothing to protest.

My thumb dug into the hollow of his throat, and I stared at my sister’s babe, a babe whose body was so new and fresh—there were no hollows, only fullness. He described his own insides with organs, a plethora of them, all the necessary extra bones, not a single one more. Warm flesh, blood, body, as though he was born to be Christ, were his tears not so clear.

My sister kissed her child, held him, looked on in what had to be adoration, their bodies the bright curving lines of Fauvism art pieces.

He was breakable, too. Perhaps more breakable than mine. Mine, if it could be called that, was safe from the destruction as prophesied by his incidental birth, by his rise from near death, by his elongated fingers and changeable hairs. He wasn’t right. Nothing about him was right. Not even the family cooing around him in their respites from cooing at my sister’s babe truly cared for him, desired him. I was not blind to their shared looks, to their judgment—intended to be mine, but nevertheless carried in equal weight by the thing in my arms.

They guided my sister through the changing, holding her arms and scooping the baby, putting the wraps in place to hide his small sex. Bathed in attention, in focus, he had nowhere to go but the eyes of the family, swaddled in their gentle, happy sobs. Life, life, life.

My babe’s sex was exposed, long and tongue-like, rubbing at the skin of my wrist until it was red and feathery in rawness. I held him out and away from my body as much as I could, useless as the gesture was to the fleshy skin tasting around my wrist, taking and taking. This would be how he hurt. With his body. Something in me tasted the truth that he would hurt others, too, but perhaps I believed this only because of the reflections he held.

***

I still had not named him. After the first night, nobody asked for his name. I held him, and he was never to be held by others, all too busy holding my sister’s babe.

His most frequent face was that so similar to Albie’s. That dash of red, again and again, each time had me wishing it looked like blood. Wishing it was blood. I could name him that. Call him something wretched to fit his skin.

I wanted him gone. I resisted all thoughts of naming him, as that felt too tightly like a claim. I could not claim something that never should have been mine. All the others had to believe that I shouldn’t have him, but they refused to voice it, refused to acknowledge how I was unfit. This life was never meant for me, but it was forced upon me. 

He fit in my hands, too solid a weight. Babies were so, so heavy, this one impossibly so.

***

It was night when I stepped into the plumage of long grass framing the house’s exterior. I had the thing with me, held in my arms. It was dark. I wanted to be alone. I could not willfully abandon the babe in the house without consequence, and as much as I didn’t want it, the consequences for the crime of not wanting a child haunted me more. The crime of attempting to see that desire through—either in negligence or in action, even in the steps of before, God forbid it.

I could not be alone because of the child, but soon enough, my sister was joining me.

She did not have her babe. One of the family had taken him, or watched over him, balanced on the edge of his crib, head tilted and eyes wary of any dangers. They’ll have volunteered. Not for mine. 

I clutched him tighter in my fist, then forced my fingers to relax, forced myself to ignore his continued sandpaper caresses against my fingers. Days, now, and his form was still so unsure. Only the red of his hair remained.

“It is him,” my sister said.

I looked at her. The words were a broken platitude. The first ones she’d spoken to me since our simultaneous births, and they were broken, unformed, unfinished. Much like this baby.

Neither of us were made with our speech in mind, small girls that we were, born for our breaths and silence. I could not fault her for the language’s abortion of her.

I did not respond, simply kept looking. Her face had the same smooth slopes as mine, polished, no feature dominant over the other. Her face was rounder. Her child would likely be the same.

“It is him,” she said again.

“I know. Thank you.”

She shook her head at me. Her hands were empty. She looked at me, not the thing in my hands. “No. Not like that. He is…” She shuddered, the movement quaking through her like an orgasm, reaching, reaching. “No.”

Her certainty only confused me more. I turned to the garden. My babe held a paw upwards, fingers stretching and closing. Neither of us spoke for several moments. Neither or us could be blamed for the words—torn from our throats before we were ever truly born. Hollows where our vocal cords would be. We were manufactured.

Perhaps if a girl had tumbled from me instead, I would not have pinched the back. Whether or not the babe, in its future, viewed itself as anything other than female, the label would have already stained the throat, cut off sound, conversation, words. I loved the words I could use. I loved the word, No.

If I were to name this babe anything—which, in time, perhaps my hand would be forced—that was what I would name him. Not something wretched to fit him. Just the word. Only then would he stand a chance of understanding it. Only then would he understand rejection in a fraction of the manner in which I had.

The babe’s neck stretched, the muscles at his throat popping, then extending, revealing more length. A matryoshka. He tried to look at my sister. I curled my hand tighter to the back of his head, then forced his face to my shoulder.

The rain was just starting to fall. Drops like windows. Soft. Nature was its own woman.

“No,” I agreed. “It is— him.” The word spat from my stomach, still acidic. Him. Him. I lifted my chin, looking down upon my older sister. “Yours?”

My babe’s jaw distended, unlocking itself so he could gnaw at the muscles in my shoulder, the meat of me. Starving thing.

My sister shook. Still in the throes. Every piece of her trembled, a terrified young thing. I wondered if she avoided my babe for a reason, if she had refused to engage with me upon some motive. Her eyes, like seeds, suggested this could be true. She needed watering.

I moved one hand from the babe to reach over and touch her chin. The skin was warm, feverishly so, but she was so very pliant, allowing me to tilt her face upward, her eyes open to the storm cloying in from above. Was this sisterhood?

I released her. The babe stopped chewing on me, turning instead to a familiar form—a double of my sister’s babe, blonde tufts and all.

She did not see. Did not look upon him. She would not look. “Him,” she said. Her voice was hollow, already drowning. “Him.”

The word struck me. I covered my babe’s face with a hand this time, and she finally looked down at me, mechanical. Her eyes. Her eyes were so like mine. I had never seen them before. “We share?” I asked, my own eyes darting to the babe I held. He was finally beginning to shrink, reverse-sprouting. “Him?”

“Close enough.” She took a slow, calm breath. Her composure dug its nails at her surface. If she went back inside, back to the family, I was sure it would return in full. “To waste— three years. It’s too much. Too many.”

Waste. I practically hissed through my teeth. She was right. To say as I thought—these things were a waste. Were nothing. But how could that possibly be true for someone like her, even if she had eyes like mine? “You know I know. It’s too long. It’s far too long to wait for freedom, just to receive reproach instead. I can’t— I refuse to face it. I refuse.”

She held a hand out to the night air, fingers testing it, as if she was some predator checking the tension of the water. She held herself, however, like someone so afraid—her shoulders hunching over herself like an umbrella, her breaths raggedly tripping from her chest. 

Hers had a name.

I removed my hand from the mouth of my own, then stepped forward, urgent. “Bring him to me.”

Her face wrought into confusion. Were we close? Were we truly sisters?

When she left, I did not know how she would return, with whom.

***

My babe and I were almost to the treeline. Behind us, the house stretched, soothing its old bones as we looked on. It was full of light, ebbing where it sat in the dark, its facade morphing from the rain pouring down around us, cold as winter. I’d taken off my shoes on the walk here, and my toes sunk into the wet grass, into the pockets of water held between the blades like promises. The babe was something slick now, slick with a wet that hadn’t come of me, slick and shiny, his flesh pulsing and writhing as if in some attempt to mimic how I saw the house. Perhaps his bright, snake-sharp eyes could see it, too, in the reflections of every drop of rain, slowed a thousand times over for his eyes only. For this creature in my arms.

After a moment, I leaned down and dropped him into the grass. If he’d chosen then to begin his tears, silent but true, I would have never known.

When my sister arrived, her own babe cradled in her arms, I learned how to sing. My mouth remained closed, but I tilted my head, nudging mine with a foot.

Her tears were stark even despite the pouring rain. Her face turned blotchy with the evidence.

Him.

I looked down at mine, at that red hair returned, at those wide eyes staring upwards into the rain. I extended my hands. “I have two shovels. I only need one.”

It was the most kindness I would offer her: you do not have to bury yours. 

She handed me her child. The sob that tore out of her belly was alien. She grabbed a shovel.

Mine, mine, him.

The night was softer than the dirt, the bitter rain softest of them all.

“I can dig,” my sister said.

I could taste soil in the rain.

I placed her babe next to mine.

Together, we began to dig—holes far too large for two small creatures.

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