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a body bag. It was not her that had absorbed my father’s
fury, but that which she carried—the woman’s womb was
filled with something gigantic and inhuman. Her lower torso
was so incredibly bloated that it had burst the thick plastic
confines of the body bag. The corpse of the unborn thing
was a labor of hideous departures from human anatomy,
pushing so tightly against the woman’s skin that the details
of the creature could be seen quite clearly.
The unborn nightmare was easily the size of a bear. One of
its claws extended out toward me, stretching flesh far beyond
its natural limits. Most noteworthy was the creature’s massive
jaws, a cavernous maw filled with serrated, dimly glowing
hooks. The monster had been severed almost in two by my
father, and its mouth, like its mother’s, was frozen around its
last otherworldly sound—a scream no human vocal chords
could produce. Within seconds, the thing pent behind dead,
striated flesh disappeared, leaving behind what looked like
an empty sack made of flaccid skin and splattered blood.
In the ether, I thought I could hear an invisible descent of
something plunging into eternity, its limp body occasionally
clapping against the walls encapsulating its journey.
It seemed the rumors I’d heard were correct—when
caught sleeping in New Victoria, men were stolen away
by their nightmares, while women gave physical birth to
them. I grew annoyed at my father’s impatience, denying
me the sight of a nightmare breeching sleep. Yet such
was my father’s way, always overzealous where killing is
required. Still, just before my father had broken the grip of
the nightmare, I glimpsed something in the gutted spaces of
my mind, through the hole made by the burrowing vision—a
lost memory of my childhood.
I’m sure I spied lines of small cages filled with children,
all of them pale and staring. As I looked over the hazy
fragment, I could feel my family’s collective disapproval
burning me, so I gently set the memory down and watched
it sink into oblivion. But before the memory had all but
50 | Mark Anzalone