My Father: A Fetus’ Prerogative

By Georgia Bowan

I came out of my mother with bits of her womb stuck under my nails.

I was a scratcher, came from blood. They say I latched myself onto her walls before she went and died on me. My father, he was tall. He had hunched shoulders and long legs, dark hair flaring from his nostrils. He used to joke he was part tarantula, elongated and bony and covered in thick black fur. I think he was descended from the spider people. He was upper middle class, worked with computer-bots, electric jolts, dollar bills and powerlines or something.

He looks different now, his hair is greying and his teeth are turning black. Everyone’s teeth are turning black nowadays.

My father sits on the edge of the bed and tells me that I killed my mother. He says this means I was born from violence and I need to understand what it means. I still don’t understand what it means, I don’t know if I ever will. He runs me a bath of boiling water.

My father took me home as soon as the octopus tentacle chord was cut, wouldn’t even let the nurses wipe the goo off of me, let alone clean my mother’s flesh from under my nails. He hadn’t even been bothered to check if I had a dick or a cunt.

He never trusted hospitals, had to get the hell out of there, had to run far away.

He tells me he remembers it so clearly while he’s pressing his palm to his forehead. He has his deepest lines there on his forehead, they look like they could sink all the way into the back of his skull. He remembers clutching the bloody and fragile body of an infant, the one he had created but was alarmed to find he had nothing in common with.

I have a compulsive and incurable shaking disease. When he carried me into our home for the first time, I wouldn’t stop reaching my tiny red fingers out for my father, tremoring all the while. I haven’t stopped ever since, and nobody really knows why.

But my father chuckles, runs his hand over his balding head and tells me the only thing he could think to do in the first moments after he brought me home from the sterile ward, was smother me with a pillow. He’s so nonchalant when he says it, but I understand. It wasn’t the right time to have a baby, to raise a creature, another fucking human being.

Everything was turning terrible in the world, violence clogged the arteries of our country, and the best professional role to be was a cadaver. Money was worthless, being used to wipe the shit-stained assholes of anyone who was out of toilet paper.

Father tells me that after everything his ancestors had been through, snatched from East Berlin to be starved, gassed, and worked to death, the kindest thing he could think of to do was end the bloodline.

He looks off into the distance vacantly and tells me that he has never wanted children, never wanted to spawn anymore of his kind.

Even as a boy, he says the idea of procreation has always left a bitter taste in his mouth. And after the uprisings, the cut-throat severing of International Relations, and the violent downfall of the ‘civilized’ world, the people did what the people have always done when everything goes wrong: find a scapegoat and gut it from mouth to taint.

Instead of recognizing the flaws in the systems and structures that had failed them, they blamed the blacks, Muslims and finally, the Jews.

That was back when religion still bound communities together, now everyone is bound by suffering. That’s what my father tells me, tells me he was hovering a pillow over my small and freakish face. I was bald and drooling. I looked like an alien, I looked nearly translucent, taking my first breaths into my vibrating lungs. And I was shaking all the while. Tremoring.

When he looked into my eyes, he changed his mind, changed his mind for good. He says my eyes were the only recognizable human feature I had to offer, and that was enough to make him change his mind. Saved my life, black pools of irises saved my life.

I am alive now because he didn’t have it in his guts to do away with me. Says he saw something in my black irises, a darkness that would haunt and pity him for his crimes and failures in this life. And that is the story of how I came into the world, tremoring and bloody and with big black magic eightball eyes.