Clockwork Redux

Prologue

used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that

now you're all gone, got your makeup on and you're not coming back

-Broken Social Scene, "Anthems For a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl

"You know I can't keep you."

A dark bedroom. Three a.m. A girl lying there on her back, a bare wisp, a set of bones strung together like a Hallowe'en skeleton. Seventeen, more than half-way to becoming a real woman, enmeshed in the airless chrysalis of puberty and her blankets.

She rubs her hands over her stomach and takes a long, rattling breath.

"It's just the way things are right now. Mom would totally flip if she found out. I'd have to drop out of school." A kernel of anger hardens in her throat and explodes. "I don't wanna have to make him marry me and smoke Camels in a trailer park for the rest of my life."

She smoothes over her belly again. A life lies slumped there, nestled snug and cosy between her narrow hips. It is not yet big enough to show, but it never stops growing.

"I get that you're pissed," she says, as a wave of mild nausea rolls through her gut. "But I can't see any other way out of this. I'm a kid, with-with dreams and friends and all that stuff. You're just a blob. You don't have a brain stem yet. Shit, you don't even have ears! Why the hell am I even talking about this? You barely even exist."

She goes quiet for a few minutes. When she speaks again, her voice is dull with exhaustion.

"Oh, to hell with it. I'll just head to the clinic on Monday after school and get it over with." She gives her midriff one last, rueful pat. "I'm sorry, but you're really fucking up my life here. Either you go, or we both do."

The penny-sized being stuck to the wall of her womb doesn't care. Selfish and insensate, it continues to grow, wreaking havoc upon its host's hormones as its legs begin to bud. The next morning, it sends the girl stumbling to the bathroom to vomit. And the morning after that.

She has to make up a bag two nights later and run. She catches a bus, she doesn't know where to, at one a.m. and sleeps on it 'til dawn.

At six in the morning, the bus hisses to a weary stop in a dying city. The girl wobbles down the steel steps, one hand welded to her mouth. The reptilian panic in her eyes startles the bus driver, and he calls "Are you okay?" after her as she trots staccato down the street, but she doesn't look back.

She pukes up her breakfast in a back alley and sinks down beside the mess, breathing hard. For the first time since she got off the bus, she notices where she is.

It takes her a few minutes to give a name to the city, but she gets there eventually. The buildings are a mixed bag of art-deco treasures and glass-shard skyscrapers. She passed a novelty props store in her crazed dash down the street. The dead-end brick wall at the end of the alley is splashed halfway up with bloodstains.

"Gotham," she mumbles. "Fuck."

----

"I changed my mind," she whispers, twenty days later.

"Huh?" the man beside her grunts. He rolls over in the bed to face her. His eyes have the dull sheen of dirty windows.

"Nothing," she says, lacing her hands across her belly. There is something solid there that she never felt before.

"You were talking to the kid." It is not a question. She turns her face to the peeling wall, counting the money she has just earned in her head.

My kid, she thinks.

She waits until he's asleep to leave, keeping one hand clutched across where she guesses her womb to be. A shell across the life of a child she wants to keep; a second ribcage protecting a second heart.