Her

Chapter ten: Mine (Edited)

Chapter ten: Mine

Nine months later

I sit at our table in the cafeteria with the girls. We giggle and chatter amongst ourselves and the table starts to jiggle from the impact. Each of the girls are smiling; their mouths wide open, showing off their porcelain, straight, white teeth that lay inside. Every body has something to say and everybody is enjoying everybody else's company. It feels like its a good day; a day full of excitement and buzzing for the day ahead and though we are in the same place with the same people, with the same old things to do, every day seems new; with a new laugh about something, a new hidden joke we share or a new something we find out about one another. These girls had started to make living here less boring and more fun. I now didn't dwell on the sameness of the place or the boringness, but rather just the girls. I focused solely on the girls. But then, through the laughter, smiles and constant chatter, came a noise from the other end of the table that made us all stop suddenly. "I won't let them take you again," Abigail's voice whispers down to her stomach. "You're my baby."

Abigail speaks in little whispers to her stomach as though we can't hear her. Except we can hear her, we can all hear her saying things which everyone knew should not be said. It put everyone on edge. But Abigail didn't seem to notice our uncomfortableness, that, or she just didn't care. Abigail hadn't been the same since the doctors and nurses had given her back to us after she gave birth to her first baby. It was like she had been possessed or something because the Abigail that sat next to us now, wasn't the one who had left to have her baby nine months ago. It's like something inside of her had snapped. We all guessed that Abigail had finally given in to the doctors and the nurses and decided on her own to get inseminated again. But in reality no one actually knew what had happened. Did Abigail herself make the decision to get inseminated again, or did the doctors and nurses make it for her? We didn't know. But I think everyone preferred the not knowing because since Abigail had come back to us, no one had ever asked her what really happened. Maybe because they didn't want to know what really happened because either way, Abigail had been inseminated again and that's all that really mattered. 

But that wasn't the only thing that mattered to me. I wanted to ask, in the last nine months I had opened my mouth to ask so many times only to think better of it, or have someone else interrupt me. It just never seemed to be the right time. But ever since Abigail had come back to us, she hadn't been like herself at all; she hadn't complained, she hadn't been fiery or passionate, in fact she barely even spoke and as well as that, Abigail didn't even look like herself. Abigail's hair was always a mess now, in this crazy mass of red around her head that looked uncombed and unwashed, her skin deathly pale like it had never seen the sun, big blue bags existed under her eyes like she never slept, her body frail and deathly thin because she hardly ate, the skin around her finger nails cracking from lack of protein and always talking to the unborn baby in her stomach in soft whispers like it could actually hear her. And it wasn't normal things she was whispering either. I mean sometimes I heard other Breeders whisper to their pregnant bellies too, but they were always nice, encouraging things like; won't be long now, I know you love the institution, you're such a good girl and things that were actually proper and normal to say. But the things Abigail was saying to the baby inside her stomach weren't normal things to say and so whenever any of our group ever heard her whispering they stopped what they were doing instantly as though they were bracing themselves for what might happen if anyone else heard. Because everyone knew what would happen if someone did hear. The types of things Abigail was saying to her unborn baby were things that weren't even allowed to be thought, let alone said and she kept saying them as though she was begging someone to hear, as though she was wanting to get in trouble. But why? None of us knew and it made me feel guilty that I still hadn't gathered up the courage to ask what had actually happened because it was evident something had happened, but as for what, I wasn't sure.