Page 14 of Clutching Cthulhu’s Pearls (Time for Monsters)

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 who spits 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 li ttle 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 her latest 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 will happen 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.

“See, this is the world I wish to welcome our hatchlings into,” I say with a sigh. “Next time the pain grips my belly, we will push.”

“How?”

“Roll my shoulders forward by leaning over,” I reply with a quiver, betraying my nervousness. He envelops me in his arms, surrounding me with support. Tentacles caress my arms and kiss along my collarbone. My head falls against his chest as I absorb his affection. He licks up the side of my neck and nibbles my earlobe.

“This is good,” he purrs. “This feels like the world is right.”

Phin and I hold our breath, waiting for the next round of pain. The water sloshes in the ceramic bowl where our hatchlings will spend their first day outside my womb. It dances the same pattern as the river water waltzes to the beat of the waving branches of the trees. Leaves flutter around the shelter’s opening like the warning of autumn’s arrival. The urgency to float south where the water’s warm enough for hatchlings rings alarm bells in the back of my mind. Can they survive winter outdoors? Did Phin winter in our swamps under a blanket of snow?

“Phin, how—”

My question dies on my tongue with the agonizing stab to my womb. Phin’s strong chest pushes against my back as his palms smooth down my arms. We roll my body until I’m curled around my belly. Phin bears down on me. I grunt with exertion as I push. My body says to push, but there’s no pressure at my opening. What am I forcing out? How will I know—

Oh.

“Stop pushing! Stop, Phin, we don’t need to push!”

The pain I’ve been experiencing isn’t a tightening of my belly but the dilating of my womb. Fluid trickles onto the raft. A wiggling starts deep within me. I gasp with the strange sensation of tickling within my vagina. The fluid release intensifies.

I wish to squirm with the uncomfortable itchiness between my legs, but I don’t dare disturb whatever is happening to me. The tickles press on my inner labia. Curiosity has me reaching between my legs. Is it an eggshell? Phin said his eggs aren’t hard like chicken eggs, so did I just dispel a slimy sliver of a shell?

Shells don’t climb onto my fingers.

I raise the tiny peach creature to our faces. From its patch of brown hair—that matches my own—to its webbed toes, our hatchling fits in my hand. He’s a boy, with two tiny cocks the same shape as his father’s. His arms and legs are half the length of my thumb.

I raise him to the end of my nose to examine his face. His eyes are closed. A faint welp emerges from his tiny, pink mouth as his tongue darts onto my skin. No tentacles or barbels adorn his chin. I giggle at his sounds.

“He’s so precious,” I coo at the hatchling as the tickling of our next hatchling begins deep inside me. “I just love him, Phin. Isn’t he adorable?”

“I’m happy you are pleased, my love. I’m sorry I doubted you,” he replies, kissing my temple. “He will be more comfortable in the water. If he’s like me, it’s easier to breathe through the skin. ”

Phin takes our hatchling from my hand. He laughs at my pouting lip, not-so-secretly pleased that I’m attached to our firstborn son. While I’m scared for their survival—my second-born son’s body is smaller than the first—I’m grateful not to birth a ten-pound baby like most women. Such a feat could kill me in the wild without so much as a midwife to minimize the bleeding. After the opening of my womb, the pain reduced to manageable waves as each hatchling creeps into my vagina.

In my impatience, I reach inside me and pull out our first daughter. Not only does she have female genitalia, but she has long brown hair that curls at her shoulders. “She’s a tiny princess!”

“Yes, we shall call this one Princess,” Phin whispers before kissing the tiny head of our daughter.

She cries out when he places her in the water bowl with her brothers. The two swim to her side like protectors, which warms my heart. They’re just like their father, who protected his siblings as best he could in Leopold’s house of horrors. And while I’m legally still married to the vile man, Phin is the husband of my heart.

“We will need many boy’s names,” I say as I catch two wiggling, fighting hatchlings. These two will be troublemakers. They grab and smack at each other until I hold them in separate hands. Then, their inch-long tentacles reach for one another as they cry in tiny squeals.

“Now boys,” Phin says in a fatherly voice I’ve never heard him use. “We will have none of your nonsense. You must try to get along and set a good example for your siblings.”

Oh, my ovaries! Phin’s paternal instincts bring out the best in him.

Phin

My heart threatens to burst. Harriett’s gentle handling of our hatchlings is everything I’ve dreamed of, wished for, and wanted rolled into one vision. She coos at them and kisses their tiny heads like a true mother. Nobody taught her what to do. Her fear melted into unconditional love like a fairytale when she looked upon them.

As she inspects each one, I judge her expressions. My tentacles grip her tightly, constantly tasting her moods. I wish I could trust that her lips curl into a smile instead of a sneer—that her tears are happy, not sad. How much did the lab break me? If I had never met Harriett, would I have noticed how wrongly my insides are arranged?

“I’m sorry,” I whisper against her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have doubted your heart.”

“It’s called trauma, an old Greek word for injury,” she murmurs, playing with our youngest and fifth son. He’s the largest of our brood, with green skin and tentacles strong enough to clasp her fingers. There are no suckers on them yet, so he misses tasting his mother’s joy at greeting him into the world. “Your distrust and confusion are Leopold’s fault. Yes—before you ask—you will heal. I listened to scientists lecture on injuries of the mind—traumas—with my father in Boston. The science is new, but the concept is as old as medicine. With love and time, you will glue your heart back together and learn how to trust.”

“You have lots of faith,” I reply, hypnotized by her play with our most alert hatchling. She holds her index finger above him, and he reaches a tentacle upward to investigate. A second joins the first, pulling his head off her opposite hand.

“He’s trying to stand,” she cheers. “Oh, Phin, can we name him Crusoe? I just loved that book. It was about a brave explorer. Our son is brave too. Please? I know he must return to his siblings in the water, but he’s so fun. I could watch him learn for hours.”

“We have the rest of our lives to chase Crusoe on his adventures,” I murmur as she passes him to me. “I will remember this moment when you scold him for finding trouble and scaring you.”

“I can’t wait,” she whispers before settling into my arms with a deep sigh. “I hope our children have their father’s courage, tempered by his sensitive heart.”

“No, Hairy, I want them to be whole.” I cast a worried glance at our hatchlings, happily swimming in their bowl—except for Crusoe, who clutches the rim as if his upper strength is all that’s keeping him confined.

“Then let’s teach them to be that third person who emerges when two soulmates find one another. The synergy between us creates this loving force that highlights all the good in the world while confronting the bad. They will be better beings than us both because we will only give them the best of us.”

Her words are beautiful, even if I don’t understand them. The storybook propped against the back of our shelter shows me she will give our hatchlings her beautiful words.