Thomas points behind me.
Phin swims ten feet behind the raft…holding three wiggling catfish over his head like trophies.
Chapter 14
Mississippi River, two weeks later
My sweet Hairy was a ray of sunshine as we floated across what she called the Ohio River. Even during the rough transition to the bigger waterway, which she calls the Mississippi River, she put her faith in me. When she looks to me to care for her, the power in my body is my greatest treasure…but not when the pain of birthing our hatchings dulls the starlight in her eyes. Birth steals her sweetness and reveals the monster within my lover.
She screams, clutching her folds as if to hold them together. I’m frightened for her and of her. Part of me wishes to hide in the shadows until the hatchlings emerge. Her screams stab my ears and pierce my brain. Who is this wild creature whospits curses in one breath and pleas sweetly at me to help her in the next? I don’t trust her rapidly changing emotions. She’s not the woman with the gentle spirit and soft voice who hummed to herself as she danced in the moonlight.
“It hurts,” she wails.
She’s suffering. I’m helpless. Worse than helpless, I’m the cause. I implanted my eggs.
She lays upon the nest of soft grasses I built for her over the last few days, sweat dripping from her brow. Her hair sticks to the underside of her chin as if she emerged from a swim. The flush on her cheeks has spread down to her navel, her clothes tossed into a pile hours ago. Her legs spread wide, and I have an unobstructed view of the paradise I haven’t entered since I gave her my eggs. She’s as beautiful as she was under the moonlight when we first met.
Her scent fills the small structure on our raft. I’m ashamed of my body’s response to her when she suffers. Her body readies itself to birth our hatchlings—not to receive my cocks—but my primal reaction to her has no intelligence. What’s in my heart and what my body displays are not in agreement. I hide my lower half in the frigid river in hopes of cooling my desires.
“Take the pain away, Phin. How can I stop the pain?”
“I don’t know,” I confess. “Leopold never let me attend a birth.”
While watching my hatchlings die on their way into the world would have broken my spirit, I wish I had shown more interest in the birthing process. There, thinking of Leopold and my failed attempts at fatherhood chased the desire from my body! He made birth sound like women’s work, but he delivered the hatchlings. I should have attended, too. However, my presence terrified the women, so they were probably glad my face wasn’t the last vision they saw before my eggs killed them.
“I’m glad this is your first birth, too,” Hairy says between pants. She clutches my large hand in her tiny one as if lending me strength as she suffers. “I just hope our hatchlings are healthy. It’s too soon. Humans carry their babies for months. They must be tiny to birth after only two weeks of gestation.”
What’s gestation? Time in their mother? No matter when you aren’t talking about humans, right?
“But you carry hybrids who are mostly…inhuman like me. They may have your eyes or hair from forming within their eggs inside you, but I doubt they are as human as you think.” My chin drops in shame. Despite accepting my eggs, she thought she carried human babies. I don’t dare tell her how much this guts me. Will her lip curl in disgust when our hatchlings crawl out of her like tiny salamanders? Will she refuse to love them if they are mute with little humanity like some of my siblings?
“Oh, Phin—” she cries as the pain pulls her mouth into a silent scream. “—I will love them because they are ours. They symbolize our love for one another. It doesn’t matter—”
She’s twice as scared as me, which pricks my pride. I lift myself onto the raft and slither to her side. She grabs my hand in a white-knuckled grip. My mind fails to find the words to soothe her. I don’t know what to do or what will erase her fear.
“Do I push? Do I push? Do. I. Push?” She screams until her eyes and the vessels under her skin bulge outward at me.
“If you continue screaming, someone will hear you,” I whisper in a voice roughly grated by helplessness and horror. My mind retreats from her anger and erratic behavior. In my youth, humans became erratic moments before they beat me… Hairy isn’t Leopold or Mr. Breyers, but she’s never acted like this before. Did birthing my hatchlings break her?
“Do I push?” She repeats in a terse whisper as she grabs my chin to capture my attention.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know!” My whispers turn into shouts as I cover my ears and shut my eyes to block out this horrible place where we find ourselves. “I’m just an animal who can’t understand his kind or even his own body!”
“Oh, Phin,” she says, calming down from herlatest round of pain. Her touch on my cheek brings tears to my eyes. I allow them to flow down my face to relieve the pressure on my heart. She’s so confusing. I can’t handle this! “I know this is scary, but I need you to be strong for us…for our hatchlings. Okay?”
I nod until she presses our foreheads together. Her breath fans over my nose and calms the swirling whirlpool of my thoughts. She’s acting out because she’s as scared as I am. I must remember that I’m not a pawn to her. She doesn’t have the answers like Leopold or Mr. Breyers, who used their intelligence to find reasons to punish me. Hairy seeks my help in surviving and finding someone to love. We are more alike in this than different.
My love needs me.
“Now, sit with your back against the wall. I will sit in your lap, and together, we’ll push them out as a unit. I don’t know what willhappen when they come out, but I need them out. NOW.”
Harriett
Next time, it won’t be this way.
Next time—and there will be a next time with how my body craves him even as I writhe in pain—I’ll know what to expect. We’ll be settled in a homestead. Phin will have seen birth before and will know I get loud when my body hurts. He won’t look at me with round, frightened eyes or shrink away from my touch as if he expects me to strike him. For now, I must be strong enough for both of us.
Oh, thank goodness! Once I’m in his arms, our heartbeats synchronize and the tension melts from our bodies. If I don’t scare him again, this will be a magical experience. I must keep my cool if I don’t want him to run off and hide in the swamp. Our hatchlings deserve better than us, but we’re all they have.
