Page 39 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Twenty-Eight

Crane thinks about the kiss constantly. Constantly. When he stitches up the hole and cleans up worm guts. When Stagger washes him every few days. When Stagger sleeps on the floor next to the bed and Crane lets his hand dangle down, fingertips brushing the blanket he’s taken.

No matter how much he thinks about it, there is never a second. He wonders if Stagger thinks about it as often as he does but does not ask.

Someone calls into the news station to claim this is proof that global warming is a hoax.

Someone else calls in to insist that liberals control the weather.

A third says no, it’s the space lasers causing this, not carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide is good actually.

The newscaster is baffled. Who said anything about carbon dioxide? Levi turns off the TV.

Thirty-seven marks on the wall between the door and the gun safe. The next time she visits, Tammy places her hand on his belly, checking for the millionth time that the baby won’t come out breech.

There’s three more weeks until term, she says, but it never hurts to keep an eye on things.

Crane’s water breaks at thirty-seven and a half.

Surprise.

It happens while snow comes down heavy, while Crane is not writing his suicide note.

That’s the truth; that is technically not what he is doing.

Levi is making lunch (beans to go with the cornbread Tammy dropped off), Stagger is inspecting an instructional manual to make sure he still remembers how to read with what’s left of his brain, and Crane has the notebook he’d practiced drawing dragons in, giving himself a task that isn’t thinking too hard about how much he hurts.

He’s been hurting bad for a while. That morning, he’d woken up early to piss—and also because cramps were bad enough to shake him into consciousness—and found a wretched mess of blood and mucus in his boxers.

It was so bad that the underwear wasn’t worth saving.

Just went directly into the trash. But those fucking cramps haven’t let up.

More than once he’s struggled off the couch to double-check the marks by the door, just to make sure they don’t say forty. They don’t.

Stagger keeps looking at him. Crane keeps signing okay. Gotta work through it is all.

What Crane is doing instead of writing a note is sketching.

It’s not turning out great, and his memory of the subject is fuzzy.

Blame pregnancy brain, and the passage of time.

It’s supposed to be the main character of a comic he saw in high school, a flimsy wide-eyed twink with a soft face, but proportions are the devil and he turns the page to try again.

That said, it does feel like a suicide note.

What are suicide notes except a thesis statement about everything that went to shit?

Every now and then they include a little memory, a tiny story, just to drive the point home.

Crane’s story isn’t even a good one.

In high school, the art class Sophie shared with Aspen was tucked away on the top floor, hidden by a set of heavy double doors.

Unlike the rest of the school, which contained gleaming tile and shiny lockers, the art classroom had concrete floors and unfinished walls, paint spills and massive windows that turned the place into a sauna during the month before summer break.

The advanced art kids took over one corner, scrambling to finish their portfolios, only rarely coming over to ask for knives or permission to use the kiln.

The kids who were only there for an easy A, and Sophie, were confined to a collection of tables in the center of the room as they worked on their final project.

The final was a “future self-portrait.” Select one of the following mediums (pencil, ink, acrylic, oil, watercolor, pastel) and create an image of who you hope you will be at the age of 25.

Extra credit (10 points)—include a 200-word essay explaining how your use of value, perspective, color, and /or style reflects your prediction.

Sophie was excited. Extra credit meant a chance to show off just how good she was at writing essays.

Two hundred words was insulting, actually. She could do better with a thousand.

Plus, the drawing was, on a mechanical level, pretty good for a fourteen-year-old. It was also the most stereotypical, cookie-cutter shit anyone in that art room had ever made. During a check of the initial sketch, the teacher frowned.

“Is this you?” she asked.

Sophie frowned back. “Yeah. See—that’s my hair, and that’s my mole.” She pointed to the drawing’s hand. “There.”

“That’s not…” A pause while the art teacher tried to figure out the words. “I mean, is it you ? It’s you, but when I look at this drawing, what am I looking at?”

Sophie squirmed, studying the sketch in front of her.

What else was there to add? She was going to grow up, go to college, and get a job, obviously.

Any specifics of a future life like that dissolve into static, but don’t they for everybody?

She’s not a psychic. And it wasn’t as if she was going to do a whole project on what she really wanted.

If she drew a picture of herself with no skin on her face, she’d be sent to the guidance counselor’s office expeditiously.

It’s just—she’d drawn what the rubric had asked for, right?

Her at twenty-five, if she managed to avoid setting herself alight for that long.

“I don’t get it,” Sophie finally admitted, pretending she didn’t want to cry.

The art teacher was about to try again, but one of the other students started to paint the table out of boredom, and she had to go. So Sophie went back to her own table and stared at her drawing helplessly.

Aspen was sitting across from her, ignoring the project in favor of a comic book they’d positioned themselves against a wall to read. They’d placed a sticky note over what was clearly a big bold 18+ .

“You’re going to get an F if you don’t start soon,” Sophie informed them.

“I already have an F,” Aspen said. “Are you crying?”

“No.” Then, “I think I messed up the project.”

“Okay? Let me see it.” Aspen put down the book, the cover featuring two men gazing at each other in a loving embrace, and yanked the drawing closer.

“Oh shit. Yeah. This is boring. You have to actually do something interesting.” Sophie was not interesting in any way that wouldn’t get her locked up.

“Draw yourself—I don’t fucking know—killing a billionaire. ”

“I’m not getting in trouble like that.”

“Fine. Draw two husbands. Draw yourself as a boy. Whatever.”

Sophie yelped. “I’m not a boy , either.”

Obviously, Sophie was not a boy. She was a girl who just had to try very, very hard to be a girl.

She was a girl who looked at pictures of transgender men on social media and got pissed because they got to be men and she didn’t.

If she really was a boy, somebody would have told her.

Somebody would’ve given her permission to do something about it.

“Sure,” Aspen said, unconvinced, and slid their book across the table. “Read some gay porn and get back to me on that.”

Sophie didn’t touch it.

See? It isn’t even a good story. Nothing actually happened. Sophie didn’t make a decision or take a risk. She didn’t look deeper. She didn’t do shit. She muddled through her boring final and turned it in and received her first-ever grade of B.

The world was not made for ones like you.

When the swarm said that to Sophie for the first time, she’d sobbed. They were right. She was miserable and trapped. She wasn’t a boy until the worms finally told her it was okay, because she couldn’t do it herself.

Come with us, come with us, come with us.

The only time Crane decided something for himself was when he put his face into a pot of boiling water.

From the kitchen, Levi knocks on the counter. “Food’s ready. You hungry?”

Crane is always hungry. He gives up on the sketch and motions for Stagger to help him up, which he does. Hoists Crane right up, easy as anything.

Pop.

Crane’s boxers, and his sweatpants, and the floor are wet.

Now, Tammy had told him there was a chance he’d lose control of his bladder at some point.

It’s a rite of passage, she explained, the muscles loosening in preparation for birth and the uterus jamming itself into the bladder since there’s only so much room in the abdominal cavity.

Granted, she’d said it as you’ll piss yourself , the last word coming out yerself like it always does with her, but still.

All the preparation in the world doesn’t make it any easier when you find yourself soaking wet and sick with embarrassment.

It’s still coming out, too. Crane holds his stomach, can’t make himself move, can’t see his legs but imagines the trickling mess down his thigh.

Levi says, “You good?” He sticks his head out of the kitchen. “Oh shit .”

Crane needs to go to the bathroom right now, but Stagger won’t let him move. Crane whimpers. It’s mortifying. Let him go.

That’s when one of those fucking contractions hit again.

A pain in the lower back, a cramp at first before it rises to a sharp point, wrenching across his stomach and squeezing out more hot liquid that soaks right through his pants and begins to drip onto the hardwood floor.

He tries to shift his weight to make it stop but it just gets worse.

Feels like something slippery, slithering out of him.

“I’m calling Tammy,” Levi says.

No. No, Levi doesn’t need to do that. It’s fine.

They still have two and a half weeks. Look, the tally marks on the wall say so.

It’s not due yet. It hasn’t been forty weeks.

Ignore the fact that Braxton-Hicks practice contractions don’t get stronger like these have been getting.

Ignore that these have been getting closer together, more frequent; swear to god, this pressure is pushing the baby’s head into the waiting gap in his pelvis and he can feel it lodged there.

He wasn’t timing on purpose. He didn’t want to know.

Levi, ignorant of or just ignoring Crane’s mounting panic, jams his phone between his shoulder and his ear and immediately goes to pack up the food that’d just finished cooking.

“Hey. Where you at? Gas station? Yeah, his water broke.” Cabinets thud as he gathers up Tupperware. “I don’t fucking know, it’s not like he’s said anything. I’ll just—fine. Hold on. Crane, how bad is it ?”

There is no good way for Crane to admit he has been ignoring actual labor contractions for at least six hours, so he just signs, Bad.

Stagger translates, “Bad.”

“Bad,” Levi says into the phone. “I can come get you. We gonna do it here? Your house?”

The contraction’s grip on his stomach loosens and Crane gasps for air. He remembers being in middle school again, lying in bed. Pretending to be an animal in a stall, birthing a calf into the hay.

“Fuck,” Levi says. “Alright. Be there soon.”

Levi hangs up, jams the containers of food into the fridge, and grabs a duffel bag from inside the makeshift nursery.

Crane tries to place it but can’t. Levi answers the question without being asked, as he starts plugging the combination into the gun safe: “Apparently, you pack bags for this kind of shit. Underwear and phone chargers, stuff like that. Come on, gas station, let’s go. Tammy said the worms want you there.”

Crane realizes they never bought a car seat.

What a thought. After everything, they forgot a car seat. He doesn’t want this baby, he’s going to kill himself, all this is at the behest of a pile of mutant invertebrates and talking flies, and they forgot the fucking car seat.