By R.L. Meza
According to Head Nurse Tildy, the village women took pregnant in batches, and I was only being offered the temporary position because no one else had applied. Despite her conducting the interview like a dissection—a male nurse? How odd—I accepted the job. I’d been laughed out of everywhere else, and, like Head Nurse Tildy, I lacked options. I needed experience, an opportunity to prove myself.
I assumed, like any rational person, that the births would be strung out.
But as a cold spring wind lashed the tiny, faded village atop the rocky island, bending scrubby trees back and stirring the wildflower bushes, the pregnant women arrived at the hospital together, at noon: a dozen, ages sixteen to thirty-three. Our team of seven nurses, led by Tildy, tucked the women into beds lining the long room. We made them as comfortable as possible, considering the facility’s modest size and antiquated equipment, while the rain splashed against the windows as if thrown from buckets, and the roof leaked in earnest. Tildy ordered me to soak up the drips, runnels, and puddles on the tiled floor before someone slipped. So I scurried about with buckets, bedpans, and towels, trying to staunch the water’s invasion without bumping into anyone or bruising myself on bed corners, and failing. A crab scuttled away from my mop. Were the waves breaking on the hospital? I scooped something like a starfish with toothy jaws into a bucket, stuffed wet towels on top, more concerned with returning to the pair of women I’d been assigned to.
I had yet to meet the island’s doctor when a dozen waters broke, and the women all went into labor at once. Their collective moan drowned out the whistling wind and the surf’s violent crashing. Tildy informed me the doctor would arrive when they were ready to push, to guide us through the birthing process. But as the moan swelled like a blood bubble, bursting into separate cries, I began to worry. In my desperation to be hired, I had overstated my qualifications. My intentions were good. I only wanted to help people and be taken seriously in my efforts.
Tildy frowned at me. “You lied,” she said. “This is your first delivery.”
Lightning flashed, followed by a distant boom of thunder. The cries melded back into communal agony; fists gripped handrails and knotted sheets. Surrounded by sweating red faces and gasping lungs and gritted teeth, I must have looked awful. Nurse Tildy read the answer in my face: I’d never seen a live birth. “Well,” she said, like she’d won a bet against me, “too late now.” Another nurse called for clean towels, and Tildy pushed me toward her, adding, “Try not to vomit or faint.”
Easier said than done, breathing that sharp musk of adrenaline and body odor, with its underlying iron scent summoning images of blood-slicked predator muzzles. I’d never seen a battlefield either, but as the thunder boomed closer like cannon fire, the walls quaked, and I pictured us at war against unseen forces that sought to claim these innocent women and their children. My duty was to see them through the storm. I ignored my tired feet and aching head, assisting where I could. The women screamed and whimpered, cursed me and their husbands, and then their husbands’ boats and fishing nets, their sails, even the anchors. I’d never heard such viciously creative phrasing; I prayed my good intentions would grant me immunity from their venom. Tildy, however, seemed perfectly willing to use me as her human shield, as she stalked between the beds like an admiral, barking orders to restrain thrashing limbs, to check cervix dilation and report back.
Shortly after three in the morning, the hospital lost power. Tildy lit thirteen lanterns and passed them around, keeping one for herself.
A knock came at the main door, cutting through the howling wind, the hail pelting the windows. Tildy ushered inside a short bulky figure so thickly wrapped in layers, they shuffled, hood drawn, face swaddled in what I first mistook for tangled scarves, until lanternlight revealed wet folds of kelp. No one appeared disturbed by the doctor’s unusual trappings, the hollow rattle of shell and bones caught in salt-stiffened netting. The doctor’s hand was small in mine when we shook, clammy and fleeting, like a slick eel grabbed by accident and loosed with a shiver of revulsion. Beneath their layers, the doctor might have been stooped with age or stunted in growth; they hunched, four feet tall. In lieu of a traditional doctor’s bag, they carried a fishing tacklebox.
Tildy announced it was time to push.
Lantern raised high, she led the doctor to each bed in turn, as an orderly left a trail of towels in their wake to soak up the doctor’s seepage. If left to dry, the moisture rolling off the doctor crystalized into child-sized boot prints that crunched underfoot. When the doctor reached the pair of panting, grunting, straining women in my care, the short figure burrowed beneath the sheet tented over Mrs. Lockney’s knees, to my left, while Tildy turned her back as if standing guard.
A loud prolonged sniff came from beneath the sheet.
The doctor emerged to search the tacklebox, then a curved metal hook filled their gloveless palm; their nimble fingers attached a wire leader and braided line, before they ducked back under the sheet. Mrs. Lockney’s screams intensified at the flurry of movement between her legs. The doctor ducked out, waved me closer, and gave me the line to hold. I regarded Mrs. Lockney in mild shock. Her pained cries were subsiding into moans, and the relief in her expression prevented me from objecting. There wasn’t time for questions.
My other patient’s exam was similar: burrowing, sniffing, then into the tacklebox dipped the doctor’s hands, still smeared with Mrs. Lockney’s fluids. The doctor removed a collapsible wire mesh trap used for lobsters and crabs. They baited the trap with meat scraps, positioned it between Katie Westfield’s legs and left me holding the anchor rope, with the sixteen-year-old staring up at me in bewilderment, like we were the only two sane people in the room. Where was the stethoscope? Why wasn’t the doctor wearing gloves?
Another loud sniff from under the next bedsheet in line, and the doctor gave the nurse to my right—whose name I’ve since forgotten—a short spear. Mrs. Lockney’s line jerked taut, whizzing through my left hand, burning, then biting into my palm as I made a fist. Whatever was hooked on the end nearly yanked my arm from its socket. The spear nurse tittered. “Look alive, Captain,” she said.
“What is this?” I asked her. “I don’t understand.”
Her look told me I wouldn’t—or shouldn’t, perhaps.
I focused on the braided line in my left hand, and the trap rope in my right. I would bring Mrs. Lockney and Katie Westfield through this, alive, with their offspring intact. I would not picture the tools used to accomplish this but trust the doctor and nurses to guide my actions, though reason insisted we’d left medical science behind.
The pregnant women fell silent in unison.
Something greater was at play now. My arms buzzed softly through the air, as I adjusted my hold on the line and the rope. My hairs stood erect, scalp tingling as if a hand with millipedes for fingers stroked me from nape to forehead. I’m not ashamed to admit I pissed myself. A force observed me from the darkness congealed in the rafters, or from the maelstrom beyond—or from within my own mind’s eye—inescapable; I was instrumental, a string deaf to its plucking, a cog blind to the machine. I was flesh-and-blood pathetic, so soft and so breakable. I could only hope to please this thing to survive its attention. The other nurses, however, seemed unruffled as the doctor moved to the head of the long room, with the heavy wooden entrance doors behind.
The doctor’s arms came up like a conductor’s.
The floor rocked underfoot. A wave crashed against the windows behind my patients, and they ducked lower in their beds with muffled screams. Shadowy creatures streaked the glass.
I swear the presence above us crowded closer, a wolf breathing hot on its felled prey’s neck, as the doctor spoke a convoluted word; Head Nurse Tildy repeated it for the room, and I understood how to replicate the sounds, though its meaning remained elusive. When the doctor spoke the word again, we nurses and our charges responded with Tildy’s translation.
Tildy visited me long enough to say, “You will pull when the doctor’s arms come down. Do not stop until the babies have crossed.” She said nothing of my piss-stained clothes, and as I glanced about, I saw other nurses in similar states of disarray.
Still, when the doctor’s arms came down, the pregnant women braced, and we nurses choked up on our fishing gear. While I pulled with all my might, leaned backward, arms quivering, the spear nurse beside me took aim and stabbed beneath her charge’s sheet. I cried out at the blood spatter, or meant to; I shouted the same word the doctor had been repeating. Nothing else would come out but that word: a name, four syllables, sometimes five. In my mind, the nurse had speared the infant, and if my eyes confirmed this, then nothing would prevent me from fleeing into the storm. I hadn’t come here to fish for unborn children.
Yet that’s exactly what I did.
Katie Westfield’s baby came first. The trap shot out from between her legs so fast, it would have struck the bed across the aisle, had Tildy not materialized to catch it. The infant caught within suckled on the wad of bait but otherwise appeared healthy. “Why isn’t he crying?” I asked.
“Why would he?” said the spear nurse. She stood behind Tildy, cradling unscathed twins. As the babies came, Tildy spirited them off to a separate room; their mothers showed no indication they wanted to meet their offspring. This might have struck me as strange, were I not preoccupied with wrestling Lockney’s child free from her womb. Reeling in the shark line myself proved impossible.
Either the line was snagged, or the baby was stuck.
The doctor approached us. Mrs. Lockney’s baby was the last, and the room’s attention swung toward the line wrapped around my hands and arms, my twitching muscles and sweat-soaked shirt. The doctor beckoned to me.
“Speak,” Tildy said.
The word came from my lips.
The doctor shook their lumpen head and gestured, and Tildy said, “Bend down and repeat it.”
When I obeyed, speaking to the kelp mask with its glittering onyx eyes, the doctor reached up to pinch my lower lip, manipulating the word ever so slightly, an added breathiness. The correct utterance was orgasmic in its accuracy. I called it out again, louder, and the line in my hands went slack.
I reeled, repeating the name, tears flooding my vision as wave after wave spilled over the hospital’s windows, causing dawn’s colors to run like ruined paintings, pinks bleeding into greys, bruised plum, cold blues. Mrs. Lockney’s baby was the last, but it was coming.
Together, we helped the thirteenth being cross into our world.
By noon, the sun shone bright, and the baker’s dozen no longer resembled anything human.
They were perfect.
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R.L. Meza is the author of Our Love Will Devour Us (Dark Matter Ink: 2023), with short stories in Clarkesworld and Nightmare Magazine. Meza writes speculative fiction from a not-haunted Victorian house on the coast of Northern California. Learn more at rlmeza.com.
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