Page 32 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human
Twenty-Two
Twenty-four weeks.
Levi refuses a request to go to urgent care for Crane’s broken bones—it’s the pointer and middle finger of his nondominant hand, swollen and purple and visibly incorrect—so Tammy sets them in the living room and splints them with popsicle sticks and duct tape from Dollar General.
Jess doesn’t come with. Tammy doesn’t bring her up.
Twenty-five.
Crane can’t remember the last time he showered. His hair is too long. One Sunday he wakes up and realizes he hasn’t done his testosterone shot in almost a month. He stares at the vent where he’d hidden the vial of hormones and can’t make himself get up to retrieve it.
Twenty-six.
The baby moves regularly now. Turning, stretching, pressing hands or feet into Crane’s ribs.
Every movement conjures an image: a severed dog head in a Soviet documentary, reacting to stimuli while attached to an ugly machine.
Veterinarians rescuing an unborn fawn by cracking open a smeared piece of roadkill.
Still, he catches himself rubbing the places it touches, following its fingers with his own.
He hums, too. Not gently or anything; it’s just that it seems to calm the baby down when he needs a break.
There’s no voice for it to get accustomed to, only the specific vibration, or the unique muscular fingerprint of his heartbeat.
Twenty-seven.
Sophie is supposed to be dead.
Crane doesn’t hold any particular malice toward Sophie.
That flattens the reality of the situation to the point of inaccuracy.
She was fucked-up, but she was a sweet kid.
She did her best with what she had; half-convinced that if she graduated high school and went to college and got a good job and married a nice boy, she’d be fine, half convinced she wouldn’t make it to twenty if she didn’t do something drastic soon. The imbalance was eating her alive.
It wasn’t that Crane wanted her dead. It was just that she was never going to survive what it took for him to crawl out of her.
So, looking in the mirror now is like catching sight of a zombie.
Sophie isn’t alive again. She’s been dug up and stolen out of her resting place and propped up between his bones. The grave dirt mixes with the dust from the auction house that Crane still hasn’t been able to get rid of, can swear he feels turning into grit on his molars.
All he has to do is make it until the baby is born, but he’s not sure he can do that with Sophie peering back from reflective surfaces like Bloody Mary.
He’s supposed to be good, but he has to thump his chest and rock on his feet to keep from breaking the mirror and using the shards.
He has to make it without shattering so completely that he can’t do what needs to be done.
The dirt won’t go away.
He hopes Aspen and Birdie are okay.
Crane gets the idea while he’s leaning against the counter in the kitchen, eyes closed while a pot of water boils on the stove.
Stagger eats chicken gizzards over the sink, and the smell is making Crane ill.
Levi is napping on the couch. Also, everything aches, but that’s normal at this point.
Crane can’t believe the human species has made it this far.
It’s the ass-end of the second trimester and it feels like his spine is going to slip out of alignment.
He has to prop his belly up with his hand to take the pressure off.
He read somewhere—Sophie, in her teenage obsession, practically memorized the article—that human evolution has been a back-and-forth struggle between fetus and host. It’s the same evolution observed between predator and prey.
The fetus attempts to consume as much as possible to ensure its survival, and the host, in turn, is forced to construct more and more complex defenses to keep from being sucked dry.
The uterine lining is cruel, expelling every embryo it deems unworthy, because any embryo that sticks will take everything.
It will manipulate its mother’s immune system to keep from being destroyed, and widen blood vessels to suck up oxygen for its massive brain. It’s antagonistic. A tapeworm.
Why would anyone make the conscious decision to do this. It’s the medical equivalent of sticking your head into a bear trap and hoping it doesn’t go off.
The pot of water on the stove bubbles vaguely, but not enough to put the pasta in yet.
It’s a big pot because obviously, autism, eating the same thing every day, it’s easier to just make two boxes of macaroni at once and portion it out.
Maybe he’ll actually start eating regularly if all he has to do is throw a Tupperware into the microwave.
Stagger chews through a piece of cartilage, bloody juice trailing over his chin.
Crane breathes in, holds it for as long as he can, and breathes out.
Being in the same apartment as Levi is making him crazy.
It’s making him sick. He can’t get clean.
His skin is disgusting, but the idea of taking a shower is too much, too many steps, he can’t string them together anymore.
Every few days he manages to pull a washcloth from the linen closet and scrape himself half-clean, smear it with soap, try again.
Slowly, the pot reaches a rolling boil. The vent above the stove churns at a high whir, sucking up clouds of vapor. The electric coils burn red and steam heats up the tiny kitchen, fogging up the windows, making it a little too warm for his sweatshirt.
Crane steps closer to the pot. Peers at it.
He puts his injured hand in the vapor. It’s hot. Obviously.
At the sink, Stagger rasps, “Careful.”
Crane shrugs one shoulder at him.
He has never wanted anything so bad in his life. The steam clogging his mouth and burning his eyes. He wants to swallow boiling water until his tongue swells and scalds, welding itself to the roof of his mouth.
Sophie had the right idea.
He leans in. The heat is suffocating. Steam condenses across his cheeks. The pot is big enough. Hot enough. It would work.
It feels like it would fix everything.
Make the outside match the inside, right?
When he puts his face into the water—before Stagger realizes what’s happening, before he can grab Crane by the shirt and rip him free, before Crane can think too hard or too much about what he’s finally finally finally able to do—the world goes white with pain.