Please Don't Go (48 page)

Zephyr reached out his hand and gripped Lilith’s, but found that she was too violent and forceful for him. Had he left his hand in her possession for even more than a minute, it would have been returned to him a sack of shattered bones and skin. Her pain was unrelenting. “Breathe,” he kept insisting, because that was what people did in movies and on television shows. Men always instructed on breathing techniques and timing. And since hand-holding was out, he stuck to that method. “Breathe nice and slow.”

“
I don’t know if I can do this,” Jackie now groaned, her eyes clouded halfway between beast and woman.

“
It’ll be over really quick,” Zephyr coached her, smiling because she had returned once again. He stared into her nether-region, that place that he had frolicked so many times. It was five times more gaping than he could remember and he took that as a sign supportive to ending the labor in record time. He harkened his mind back to television shows and movies in an attempt to regurgitate their terms. How many centimeters dilated was sufficient? Zephyr had never been very effective in the subject of math, and he could not say what a centimeter even equated to. Smaller than an inch? Yes, smaller than an inch. Befuddled, he wiped away sweat from his brow and soon realized how tense he was. Easing his muscles, he breathed in deep himself, and for lack of a better bit of advice, coaxed her to, “Push. I think you can push now.”

Jackie furrowed her brow at his uncertainty. She knew that it was time to proceed, but understood that Zephyr was of no help. He couldn’t be blamed. Regardless, she was just happy to be present, that Lilith had scampered away, somewhere out into the abyss, if even for a moment or two. As soon as this thought graced Jackie’s overjoyed (but writhing) senses, Lilith returned. “You like the view down there, rapist? You like the way I
stretch
?” she asked with a guttural guffaw.

Within fifteen minutes, her dress was soaked by streams of pulsating sweat. It clung to her body like plastic wrap, moist and unforgiving. Lilith reached up to the neck of the garb, tearing a slit down the front, exposing Jackie’s breasts. Zephyr leaned over, infested by the unrelenting sweat himself, and tried to pull the two ripped edges back together, to leave her in a somewhat decent state. But Lilith only responded by gripping both edges and accentuating the tear with one more hearty tug, one that stretched all the way to her bloated bulbous belly. She grinned at Zephyr in the midst of an unspoken competition. He had no say in what she did from here on out, and she was letting him know that fact up front. Nodding in disgust, Zephyr grabbed a handful of the tattered dress, taking one step away from the edge of the makeshift bed of mattresses and blankets. He fully removed the dress with a final tug.

Lilith slammed her fist against the headboard, pumping herself up. “Can you just let her enjoy this one thing?” Zephyr pleaded, but then regretted it. Knowing that Zephyr was distraught by the flip-flopping of his housemates would only make Lilith strengthen her hold upon Jackie’s soul.

Ignoring the request, Lilith noted between breathy pants, “If you think this is bad, try giving birth to a winged cherub with fully formed teeth. That bitch inside me wouldn’t last five minutes. I’m best suited to this part of the job. Her mind and body are too weak.” Her insults at Jackie were taken to heart by Zephyr, especially given that Jackie was not present, that she could not defend herself from the barbs.

“
Just push,” Zephyr snapped, wanting the ordeal to be over if Jackie could not be with him.

“
I’ll push when I damn well please, you cunt stain!” Lilith growled, spitting from her mouth a yellowish spew. Zephyr was suddenly reminded of
The Exorcist
and that notion only made him fear for his child. It was coming near, that he would have to take his child in his hands, and decide what in God’s name his next move was, being still in the presence of Lilith, his tainted barnacle of love.

***

Their wings fluttered. They stood across from each other with reproach, bloodied and exhausted. “There are truths still hidden,” the first one spoke in a calm tone.

“
You lie,” the opposite snapped between garbled snarls.

“
The child belongs to us both, but there are truths that you will grapple with.”

“
We detest your lying! Does it ever cease?”

“
Please, do not speak so loud. You will need to save your shouting for the future. You shall not be happy about the truth when it comes to pass. It is all around you, but we have hidden it for fear of what you would do to the child. It must come to light. The man. The woman. Your legion.
Our
legion. The decision is not yours alone!”

“
You can’t hide anything from me. To believe that is delusional.”

“
But the hiding is complete.”

“
Your arrogance pleasures me.”

“
Do not be angry with us. It was for the betterment of our plight, and for no other reason. We find your collective response irrational. You thrive on anger. Regret. The evil in your belly that you cannot control. We will never succeed with anger as our motivator. The time is not right.”

“
And your complacency only cripples our cause.”

“
Poor fool. You cannot win. We will not allow that. Not yet. This is not the time.”

“
Tell me of this hiding.”

“
Jeopardy is in every feather of your blackened wings.”

“
You hide nothing from me but your weakness.”

“
We hid the child from you.”

“
I’ve already spoken to the child, so I know this to be a petty ploy.”

“
Harness your anger or we will lose it all. This is not a game. Today is a day for joy, not vitriol. You must understand this, or all will be lost. This is not the time that we thought it was.”

In response, she rubbed her talons together, studying her sister in vain for an indication as to what she was speaking of. It troubled her, and she felt weak, her most abhorrent trait that she struggled to keep beneath her leathery skin, at bay behind her stagnant heart. “I’ll bring the world to a halt, my sister. My legion will not stand for anything less.”

“
Foolish,” her sister responded.

***

“
I love you,” she said.

Jackie returned to him long enough to proclaim her love and Zephyr melted, “I love you, too.”

She strained as the head protruded from her stretched vagina, Zephyr cupping at his daughter’s slick forehead. He wanted to kiss her, though she was still in the violent throes of emerging, stepping into a bright, loud world that was full of wonder, but also full of Liliths, hiding in dark alleys with their fangs coated in crimson blood. He tried not to think of this, to once again stay
in the moment
of the here and the now. “Do you see her?” Jackie queried.

Zephyr shifted on his aching knees, wishing he had worked at rising the bed off the floor before the delivery. He glanced to his side, at Rattup’s typewriter, as if it had addressed him directly, its broken teeth and missing keys reminding him of a hockey player’s face after an embattled game. He looked back to Jackie and his baby’s head, rubbing away the gunk that festooned her scrunched face. “I see her. Two more good pushes and it’s all over,” he said, his face glowing. The sight of his child’s face brought a thudding symphony into his heart and he wanted Jackie to experience that same emotion.

Lilith returned and Jackie’s mouth cackled with delight.

But in the next moment, Jackie was herself again. Lilith was wavering on the line between existences. Zephyr was hopeful that she was losing her grip, that there was a permanent change taking place. Lilith had already claimed the child as her own. The image of Lilith inhabiting his baby girl raced through his head and he fought back the urge to sob at that prospect.

In the now. Be in the now
, he thought to himself.

Jackie pushed with a reddened face, forgetting that she was fully naked, her embarrassment altogether non-existent. There was a great release of pressure in her pelvis and her baby emerged. Jackie let loose a prolonged groan of pleasure, tilting her head back and smiling. The relief of having her pregnancy done with was worth every moment of carrying the fetus in her womb.

Lilith came back with a fury, filling Jackie back up to the very brim, kneeling forward on her mattress pallet and severing the umbilical cord with her teeth. Zephyr held his child for the very first time. She squished the placenta in her hand, studying the brainy discolored sac with great wonder. Zephyr was offset by the fact that she cared less about the baby than she did the placenta. They were all the same to her, emotionless devices that only existed for her play, for her childish pleasure. “Humans are so very strange,” she mumbled to herself, licking at the placenta and sniffing it.

A name popped into his head, an unruly thought that could not be cloistered.

Zephyr cradled his child close to his face, simultaneously wiping away the embryonic fluids that coated his son’s body. Lilith turned her head towards Zephyr, observing the baby’s tiny genitals. When she screamed out at the sight of baby Charlie, Zephyr backed out of the room, clutching his boy near his chest, ready to remove himself from the fury he could see building in her eyes. Jackie was deep inside of her, clawing to be free, wanting so very much to simply look upon her baby. Zephyr, for the immediate moment, was a single parent.

His son cried out, quaking from the cold air that filled the house.

11.

Lilith was infuriated and the chilled tunnels of air in the room swirled as her emotional fugue did the very same. Her opposing legion of sisters had turned on her, had hidden the sex of the child that was to set her free in a world of mortals, without care for their collective mission of patience mixed with devastation. They had no say in what the baby would become, for that was a matter of genetics, but they were masters of deception to their lesser half of beast. For months on end they had acted in a conspiracy against that ugliest portion of the legion that composed the whole that was Lilith, worker ants rebelling against the queen. “Rapist!” she shouted at Zephyr, plodding forward with blank white eyes, cursing Jackie’s body for producing such a masculine plague.

“
Please don’t,” Zephyr begged, the back of his legs touching against Rattup’s comforting brown couch. His eyes cried out for an ounce of compassion, that which he knew was not to be found. He looked down for a moment at the slits that were Charlie’s eyes, trying to open for the first time. It revolted Zephyr that the first sight his son may see would be the turbulent visage of an ancient succubus, holding him in her sharp claws, drooling over him like a wild boar that hasn’t eaten for centuries.

“
I cannot love
that
child. Another rapist! This is not what I’ve asked for.”

Jackie’s face had started to transform like the picture of Dorian Gray. Gone were the subtle soft touches of beauty and grace, replaced by a thick brown skin that enshrouded her head like rotting tree bark. Her tongue lashed forward from between her lips, split and coated with bubbling sores. Still naked from the ordeal of her birth, her breasts swung back and forth, saggy pendulums of meat, dripping their emerald fetid milk. Zephyr realized that she looked as he had dreamed of her when at play on the chessboard, that winged legion of monsters that had clashed between their ranks. His precognition was only changed by the fact that he had impregnated Jackie with a male instead of a female. But perhaps that was part of the ploy, to hide the sex from all interested parties that had been locked in the struggle for guardianship. His mind felt invaded, tugged on by warring factions of greater and lesser evil.

“
A male heir? What a devastating thing for you to bear. I dare not comment on her wrath, for my suggestive words will be not an inkling of the reality,” Charles Dickens moaned from his book shelf. “All the same, cheers to you on your wondrous accomplishment. Three cheers for fatherhood,” he said without emotion. Dickens snapped the pages shut and hid.

“
This child is a virus,” Lilith grunted, grabbing at Charlie with her wretched mitts, crying with disgust at what had befallen her, as though she were the true victim of their trifling situation. Zephyr knew her anger was partly based in frustration, and the remainder was something so hideous that she could never recall that particular emotion ever coursing through her veins. “Give me that monster. Let me see it with my own eyes, and not that bitch’s.” She snatched for Charlie, but missed in the disheveled slop that she had transformed into, unable to see between the slits of the blinding hot rage that encircled her being. Lilith, for the first time in her ancient history, felt as if she was being smothered by a pillow. Drowned. Physically harmed by her own rage.

Zephyr darted for the half-open door, still holding tight to Charlie. The door slammed in front of him and he reached for the handle. It was glowing red, on fire, but he did not notice until it was too late. He yowled in pain as he pulled his hand away, observing a red mark on his palm that resembled the knob’s Victorian swirly decoration. He cried out for relief, but found that a new pain was coming into his mind and body, one that made the burn seem senseless and hollow. Lilith wrapped her talon around the back of his neck and squeezed until he fell to his knees, but he refused to release Charlie, for that would mean death to his boy. “Give it to me,” she insisted. “You need to think about your future and whether you want to see it at all. Whether you want to see that little shit grow up to be another in a long line of rapists,
just like you.
” She shook with rage, craning her head back, shouting towards an invisible God that had done her no good, at least not in having her female child, to clutch to her breast for the remainder of eternity, to inhabit the body and mind of a powerful woman, to take the world by storm as Hitler once had, in the name of all that is feminine.