Excerpted: Weird Babies

MOTHWORLD

Sorrow stands in front of the bathroom mirror, slicking on liquid foundation. Sorrow stands in front of the bathroom mirror, trimming a strip of false lashes. She leans forward, stares deeply into the darkness of her own left eye, then closes it. She applies a neat arc of eyelash glue. Beside Sorrow is The Void, a swirling black void, and it’s scrubbing the bathtub with steel wool. The Void scrubs the ceramic so ferociously that Sorrow stops mid-eyelash and yanks the shower curtain open.  

She says: Could you not? 

The Void says nothing. 

The gathering of faculty and doctoral candidates will be holographic. The gathering of faculty and doctoral candidates will be projected into Sorrow’s studio apartment. Sorrow pulls on a houndstooth pencil skirt, buttons a neon green blouse that shows up well over hologram, steps into a pair of pleather boots. Sorrow applies two coats of mascara over her blend of false and real lashes. She puts on a playlist of soft, ambient music. The next song that comes on is the one that was playing that night in Sasha’s office, and Sorrow wonders if Sasha’s listening to it, too. 

When you imagine Sorrow’s apartment, imagine a swirling black hole in the middle. When you imagine Sorrow’s psychic architecture, imagine a swirling black hole in the middle. 

The Void has finished scrubbing the tub and is now disinfecting the doorknobs. Sorrow scrubs lipstick off her front tooth with her index finger. She turns off the lamp and flicks on the holo-switch in the new darkness of the apartment, then turns on preview mode. Her holographic self appears suspended in a spectrum of projected light. The real Sorrow practices her smile.   

xxx 

Dead insects are pinned and framed on the walls of Sorrow’s apartment. Sorrow has never made an online dating profile, but sometimes when she’s riding the hoverbus between home and campus and home again, she imagines how she would describe herself to an internet stranger – A collector of dead things. A lover of transformation. Then later down in the second paragraph she might mention her degree, but she’d wait until at least the second date to talk about her endless and pointless dissertation, the four years she’s spent cataloguing every known metamorphological insect in the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way. Her advisor probably should have insisted that she narrow down the scope of her project, but her advisor is Sasha, and instead of discussing method refinement they keep meeting for iced coffee. Their particular booth is clear across campus, in a cafe far from Sasha’s wife’s office, and Sasha takes her coffee with two creams and three sugars and Sorrow orders hers black because she can’t drink it, anyway, with her heart in her throat. They have long, closed-door meetings and once, Sorrow emerged from Sasha’s office right as her wife rounded the corner. And Sasha’s wife smiled and brushed past Sorrow and knocked quietly, firmly, on the office door. And then Sorrow was gone, out of the building, relieved; but she kept thinking just a student, and that night she cocooned herself in three layers of blankets and ate an entire bag of salad greens while The Void stared out at the moon.  

Now Sorrow is smiling her best most natural smile and shaking holographic hands with the Dean, whose connection is spotty, while she peers over at Sasha and her wife. Now Sorrow is listening to the head of the biology department give a speech about funding and The Void is slamming the cupboard doors and dicing up ripe bell peppers. Sorrow sticks her head around the corner of the kitchenette wall and mouths, Stop! 

An acquaintance turns to Sorrow, turns on whisper mode.

“So what are you doing after graduation?” she asks, and pops a green olive into her mouth.

Sorrow looks over at The Void, who is cracking eggs into a mixing bowl. She looks over at Sasha, who is laughing at her wife’s latest joke. She thinks I’m never graduating, actually, but she says “Entomology,” and makes that particular facial expression that indicates yes, she takes her degree seriously (a little seriously), but she also acknowledges that even if she were to actually graduate, she’d be unlikely to ever find work, paid work, in her chosen field. And then, with a slight lifting of her eyebrows, she makes light of the situation – this generational, impersonal disappointment – so as not to bring down the party. “And you?” 

“Art history,” the acquaintance says. And they both whisper-laugh.  

Sorrow has practiced the answers to all possible questions – she knows that, for example, if someone asks what inspired her to study entomology at the doctorate level, she should talk about the joys of collecting bugs as a small child (never mind that she grew up on a strip of bare concrete between two brick walls) and not about her terror at the job market, her desire for subsidized rent. And she shouldn’t mention Sasha, unless it’s to praise her. 

Now Sasha and her wife are chatting effortlessly with a constellation of other professors. Now Sasha’s wife has flickered to the other side of Sorrow’s living room, and Sorrow walks in a careful arc, stands at a polite distance. 

“Quite the turnout,” Sasha says, when she notices her. “Did you read that paper I sent you?” 

“I did,” Sorrow says, though she didn’t. “Should we meet soon? For coffee?” 

On a strip of bare concrete between two brick walls, Sorrow once laid flat on her belly in too-tight clothes, the sun bearing down, and watched row after row of red ants. And now she watches Sasha’s wife flicker back to the living room, back to the party, back to Sasha’s perfect side. 

“Great to see you,” Sasha says, and turns back to her wife.

In the kitchen, The Void is rummaging through the cutlery drawer. In the living room, the energy of the party reaches a crescendo and then collapses; one after another, the guests excuse themselves. When Sorrow finally hits End Meeting, she finds herself alone in the darkness. She slumps down onto the dusty laminate, lays her head in her hands.

The Void switches on the floor lamp. The Void sets a jiggling egg frittata down on the coffee table in front of Sorrow.

Sorrow says: Thanks. She lifts the fork, gazes at the tines.

xxx 

Sorrow’s murphy bed folds up and down easily. She wakes to the cooing of balcony pigeons and a stream of blue-ish winter light and rolls out of bed and rolls a joint and opens the cluster of files that form her dissertation; her virtual stack of insects-to-be-recorded is always larger than her stack of insects-already-recorded. For the past four years, she’s been collecting vintage entomological frames, scanning them, uploading them to the cloud, then carefully cataloguing their details. Every morning, she smokes on the balcony, then records the physical characteristics of one insect. Once a week, she contacts a new planet, requesting access to their data. Her project is nowhere near complete.

The Void has locked itself in the bathroom so Sorrow skips her shower, sprays her hair with a cloud of dry shampoo. She pulls on thermal underthings and rides the hoverbus to campus. She listens to the same songs over and over, sits in her usual spot in the cafeteria, eats a tuna sandwich for lunch. She doesn’t have a seminar so she walks to the library, flips through a holofiche version of Liber de natura rerum. “This worm cannot bear to see the light,” it says of moths, which is silly, but maybe people in the year 1200 were silly, and maybe she, Sorrow, in 2040, is silly, flipping through this old book, hoping Sasha will text.

On the bus ride home she eavesdrops on some undergrads who are discussing convocation, and for a moment Sorrow relaxes into the soft knowing that she won’t be graduating this year, or next year, or the year after that. Sasha will do what she has always done – sign the form declaring that Sorrow needs another semester, at least, to complete her work. And soon enough the two of them will be sitting in their usual booth, and the days will go on like that, the sun rising and falling, the moon rising and falling, the hoverbus arriving and departing again. When the brakes screech and the artificial voice speaks the name of Sorrow’s stop she rises and waits for the doors to open, for the platform to descend, and steps out into the cold. Her breath condenses in front of her and she lifts her phone one more time, opens her email one more time, and this time, there’s something – not from Sasha, but an automated notice.

Dear [Name], it says. Your program is being discontinued.

Behind her, the bus floats away. The blood recoils from Sorrow’s hands and a delivery truck nearly hits her as she rushes from the bus stop to the lobby of her apartment, and when she gets there she can’t get her keycard to work so she buzzes and buzzes, and when The Void answers, finally, she shouts Let me up! The door unlatches but the elevator is out of order so she climbs six flights of stairs, and when she gets to the apartment The Void there, waiting, holding the door. She has never called Sasha before, never dared to, but she calls Sasha, and the line rings four times before she answers, her disembodied voice strange and flat over the phone.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’re graduating you. Your dissertation is good enough.”

“I don’t understand. It said the program is discontinued.”

“Our department won’t be taking on any additional grad students at the doctorate level. You’ll be the last one.”

“I’ll do something else,” Sorrow says. “What did you say you’re researching now? I’ll study that.” 

“Sorrow –”

“Please,” she says. “I’ll do anything.”

“Sorrow,” Sasha says again. Then she’s quiet for a long time. “This is my second marriage.”

The faucet drips, drips. Sorrow ends the call. Outside the window, it’s starting to snow. Sorrow doesn’t know what to do, so she wraps herself in her comforter and slides open the balcony door. Below, the same old woman feeds the same old pigeons in the park. Sorrow wishes she could stay still like that, on a nice, comfortable bench. She’s never not been dragged forward to the next thing.  

xxx 

Sorrow fell in love with Sasha the first moment she saw her, the first moment of her first class on her first day of undergrad, like a baby bird imprinting on its mother. She opened her eyes and there she was at the lectern, pantsuited and spike-heeled, and Sorrow sat in the very back row but stayed after class, invented a question. And she followed Sasha from U of G to U of H, and then to U of T, and into entomology and metamorphology, and after the phone call she weeps and screams and slams the cupboard door so hard she breaks it, and The Void hides in the corner, rocking back and forth.

A few weeks later, Sorrow defends her dissertation to no one, then uploads the recording to the program portal as per the emailed instructions. She’s already received an eviction notice, an order form for a cap and gown, a catalogue of commemorative rings. After her defense, she celebrates over video call with her parents, who are absolutely beaming from their house in the mountains, and Dad opens a bottle of real champagne and pours three glasses even though Sorrow is hundreds of kilometres away.

“Our Sorrow, a doctor,” her stepmother says, and Dad gives her advice on job interviews – shake hands firmly, but not too firmly – and her stepmother asks if she’s the kind of insect researcher who might work at the butterfly conservatory near their home. “They closed that down last year,” Dad says. “And besides, she doesn’t want to move back here again. There’s nothing to do. It’s not the life for a young scientist.” Sorrow nods and grins tightly, and just before they end the call, her stepmother says, “It feels good, doesn’t it? To finish something.”

Sorrow’s grant money is nearly gone, but after the call she slips downstairs to the convenience store and buys a moderately priced bottle of gin. It takes her breath away, the sting of it, like floral medicine. The Void has barely moved in weeks – it presses itself into the corner between the bathroom and the murphy bed, faces the wall. When Sorrow feels warm enough and courageous enough, she picks up her phone.

Sorrow types So you’re abandoning me and then deletes it. Sorrow types I thought we and then deletes it. Sorrow types Please help me and hits send.

The Void starts trembling like a kitten.

Sorrow falls asleep on the couch and wakes up with the texture of the upholstery imprinted onto her cheek. The Void is pacing back and forth and going out to the balcony and coming back in and out to the balcony and coming back in, letting the cold inside, and Sorrow’s neck hurts from sleeping at an unnatural angle and her head is pounding, is killing her, and it’s not until she pours a bowl of sandy cereal from the bottom of the box that she remembers the text message and the blood drains from her face. She leaves her bowl on the counter. She looks at her phone, which has zero notifications.  

The Void is still pacing, continuing its circuit, and Sorrow sits down at her computer and shouts over her shoulder, Would you cut it out?

The Void doesn’t cut it out but Sorrow’s email dings. Sasha has forwarded her a listing for a post-doc position and above it she’s written, I feel bad. Do you want this? They owe me a favour.

The posting is not prestigious. The planet is so small that Sorrow’s never heard of it – it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page – and the fellowship is only vaguely related to her area of study. And travelling across the country alone is one thing, but she’s never imagined being so far away.

Then she thinks, Far from what? and looks out onto the balcony where The Void is pacing, and Sorrow gets up out of her desk chair and tries to slam the sliding door. But it gets jammed and won’t close all the way and The Void just stands there, peering at her through the glass, and Sorrow slumps down onto the floor and lets the wind blow snowflakes onto her face.

She writes back, Okay. And when she gets the acceptance letter a few days later, she shudders with a relief so intense she surprises herself. The promise of something – anything – is so much better than the alternative. 

xxx 

Three weeks later, Sorrow hands in the keycard to her now-empty apartment and travels by hoverbus to the teleportal station. She doesn’t call her father to tell him about the fellowship until she’s already en route, waiting outside the station, her unmittened hand freezing as she holds the phone up to her ear.

“So you’re going there to study the moth people?”

“No,” she says. “Insect morphology. And they’re not moth people. They evolved from moths, but they’re just… people.”

“But they look like moths?” 

Sorrow cringes. “In the same way we resemble lemurs, Dad.”

The ticket is expensive and there’s no direct route and The Void follows closely behind her, fretting and pulling on her coat sleeve. Sorrow can’t relax until she’s made her three transfers, plunging headfirst into each swirling portal with suitcase in hand, mimicking the bored confidence of the commuters. With each transfer there are fewer and fewer people in the lineup, and when Sorrow and The Void reach the final portal, they’re the only ones left.

When Sorrow emerges at the platform, she’s surprised by the silence: it’s humid, but muffled as a snowstorm. The air smells like her grandmother’s perfume and for a moment Sorrow feels lightheaded. The Void clutches at her, trembling, and Sorrow follows a series of green signs through curved hallways to the waiting area: a round, silent, lobby where winged people with narrow faces cluster around an ethereal light fixture. It’s like a cocoon, or a paper lantern. When Sorrow finally lowers her gaze, she sees The Void lying flat on the ground, trying to scramble underneath a bench.

Sorrow says: Oh my God.

Sorrow says: Get out from under there. Get up!

Sorrow’s face flushes, but nobody’s looking. Then, Sorrow spots her: Oren, the program administrator, a tall woman with a pinched face and wheat-coloured wings poking out of an oversized blazer. She’s holding a sign that says Sorrow. Sorrow smiles a wide smile, then narrows it. She’s embarrassed at her own relief, the small pleasure of being recognized.  

xxx

It’s nighttime when Oren and Sorrow emerge from the station. There are four moons here, all full, and they move in strange loops across the sky. On the silent walk from the station to the strip mall, Sorrow imagines what she would say to Sasha, over coffee, if Sasha still loved her and still wanted to drink coffee. I felt like I was going to die, maybe, going through each portal, and now I am here and I am not dead. The buildings here are papery and built on the backs of giant stone anacondas and neon signs flicker and buzz as Oren leads Sorrow across the cracked pavement. The mall is crowded with silent shoppers, and people flutter past Sorrow to gather around discount clothing racks. Oren leads her to the grocery store where they pick up jars of nectar and soft, fragrant fruits, a plastic container of bioluminescent fungi.

Oren is wearing an expression Sorrow finds impossible to grasp. Communication on this planet is mostly telepathic, and while Oren has functional mouthparts for speaking, her voice is as soft as a whisper. Their conversations require each of them to speak into a refurbished smart watch which processes the data for up to four seconds before spitting out an audible translation. In the produce aisle, Oren asks, What were your favourite objects during your larval stage? How many hundreds of sisters did you have? Which species of snake was your first home built on top of? Sorrow does her best to answer – a plastic doll with the hair razed off, zero sisters, no kind of snake.

When they get to the checkout, The Void reaches for a brightly coloured bag of hard candy and Sorrow swats it away. It’s so humid here that Sorrow has stuffed her coat into her mostly zipped suitcase and underneath she’s wearing a cotton sheath dress, and she only went grocery shopping with her mother once, that she can remember, and her mother filled Sorrow’s sundress pockets with bottles of name brand vanilla. When they got to the checkout, she whispered, Be cool.  

Sorrow held her breath and looked out at the clear sky beyond the parking lot, and they had almost made it to the sliding doors when the security sensor screeched. When the manager came out, her mother scolded her, then gave him that look that Sorrow later learned meant Oh, kids! And now Sorrow wonders if the manager had kids of his own, kids who lined their own pockets with groceries, because he gave her a sharp warning, but let her go.  

After Sorrow and Oren have bagged their items, they walk to the bus stop, which is deserted, and Sorrow wants to say something – feels like she should say something, to break the silence – but her usual list of small talk topics don’t seem relevant here. The bus finally appears, lumbering along the ground like buses do in old movies, and even though the stop is empty, the bus itself is completely full. Sorrow and Oren stand, gripping the bar as the bus jolts and shudders away from the mall. There are twelve stops before theirs and Sorrow stares out the window at the billboards for products she’s never heard of, at the spinning, dancing moons. A seat opens up in a spot near Sorrow, but The Void snatches it first.  

Sorrow follows Oren off the bus to the research centre, which looks like an old motel on Earth – the kind you pass on the highway and assume is abandoned, Sorrow thinks, but then you see cars out front. It’s made of a mix of crumbling brick and moth paper and the stone tail of an anaconda peeks out from the far wall. Sorrow pulls her suitcase along and The Void along, following Oren, who walks quickly, and flashes her keycard at the door.  

Sorrow almost laughs when she sees the elevator here is broken, just like the elevator at her old apartment, but there’s only one flight of stairs. When they get to the end of the upstairs hallway there is a door with a sticky note that reads Sorrow. Oren hands Sorrow a keycard of her own, which she flashes against the sensor, and the door squeaks when she opens it. The wallpaper is peeling and the carpet is damp and it’s stuffy and tomblike, smaller than her dorm room back in undergrad, even, but there’s a bed, and she wants to lie down.

Standing in the doorway, Oren whispers something into her watch. “Goodnight, Sorrow.”

“Goodnight, Oren.”

Sorrow waves politely, locks the door behind her. The Void wedges itself between the bed and the far wall. There’s no kitchen here, but there’s a tiny refrigerator, and someone has filled it with snacks. Sorrow cracks open a can of bioluminescent soda, wipes dust away from the window glass. Her room overlooks the garden. She can see the flicker of fireflies, if she squints.  

xxx

Three months into her placement, Sorrow feels like a fraud. She still can’t understand the underlying logic and systems of this world. She is supposed to come out of this fellowship with a manuscript written, something of concrete value to bring back to Earth, but the most basic structures of reality are so different here, she has no idea where to begin. She looks at a small, winged insect under a microscope and watches it shapeshift with no explanation or cause. She repeats experiments perfectly and never receives the same result. She is here to observe and communicate, but her reports sound fantastical. Insects hatch fully grown and age backward; then, at seemingly random junctures, suddenly begin to age forward again. Sorrow tries to remind herself that she is elsewhere, on a planet that doesn’t care about her preconceived notions of chronology. She records her impossible notes methodically. She is certain her research liaison back on Earth would laugh, if he actually read them.

Sorrow sends her ridiculous reports from the office using an old laptop rigged up to a small satellite. The whole thing is a pain to set up – like how her grandmother described dial-up, but with more wires – and after she submits her notes, which she does every week on her own personal Wednesday, she emails her father. Research going well, she writes. Humidity’s not too bad. Who knew there were so many different flavours of nectar soup?

In the afternoons, she walks through the courtyard’s gardens, where strange, furry plants loom. It’s labyrinthian, the pathways curling and winding, and at the very centre is a bare tree and a bench where she eats glowing honey on spongey bread. The dragonflies watch her from nearby tree branches and she watches herself, too, at every moment, wondering how Sasha would assess her life. Someone real, a real person, would have at least one friend by now, and Sorrow adds that to her mental to-do list. She imagines Sasha visiting, emerging unexpectedly from the hollow of the bus. And Sorrow will be busy with her friend and her manuscript and when Sasha enters the room, she won’t even look up. And Sasha will call her name – will call Sorrow – and Sorrow will turn and smile one of those casual smiles, a relaxed smile, a smile that says, Oh, what a delight to see you! But the fact that I’m seeing you right now doesn’t affect me, emotionally, at all. And Sasha will smile back in her usual professional manner, but inside she’ll be thinking, Oh. Inside she’ll be thinking, Clearly Sorrow has built a life that surpasses me, and I wish I’d never sent her away. And Sorrow will stand up from her desk and her friend and her manuscript and show Sasha around the building, show her the courtyard and the gardens, the greenhouse and the microscope slides, and Sasha will ask if she wants to grab coffee, and Sorrow will say, Why not?  

xxx 

The Void has taken to stealing items from the canteen – canned goods, sunscreen, batteries, antiseptic wipes – and arranging them in rainbow order. Sorrow wakes to find her blouses laid flat on the threadbare carpet; she doesn’t own any yellow clothing, so The Void has laid a shampoo bottle in that colour’s place.  Sorrow shakes the dust out of the red top and pulls it over her head. The Void replaces it with a deck of cards.

Sorrow spends less and less time in her room. Down in the greenhouse, one of the insects is new. Since Sorrow picked it up in the gardens a week ago, it has returned to its larval stage and regrown to adulthood at least four times. Leaning over the terrarium, watching the flutter of its gold-foil wings, Sorrow startles at a tap on her shoulder. It’s Gen, who arrived the same week as Sorrow. The only other researcher here from Earth.

“Sorrow,” she says. “I desperately need your help.” In her hands there is a potted plant with bruised leaves and a twisted, hood-like spathe.

“What is this?”

“What does it look like? It’s a plant. I haven’t asked Oren what it’s called. I just need you to keep it alive, please, overnight. I have a grant application due tomorrow and I keep killing everything.”

“Sure,” Sorrow says. “I’ve already kept this bug alive through several deaths.”

“Thanks,” she says, visibly relieved. “You’re coming to the party later, right?”

Sorrow nods even though she didn’t know there was a party, and when Gen leaves, she turns back to her insect. Its wings have fallen off again, disappeared into the peat at the bottom of the terrarium. It crawls in the direction of Gen’s plant, rubs its tarsal claw against the glass.

Later, when the sun starts to set, Sorrow locks the greenhouse door behind her. The cicadas are screaming and on her way back to her room she peeks into the faculty lounge, where Gen is chatting with the other researchers; she has the same translation watch as Sorrow, but when she speaks into it, the words that emerge four seconds later make everybody laugh.

Nobody is looking at Sorrow. She swipes a bottle of purple something and tucks it under her arm.

When she gets back to her room, she sees that The Void has erected a complex system of dominos on the floor, which Sorrow knocks over, and The Void starts screeching – it’s the kind of screeching that Sorrow can feel in her teeth, in her elbows, and she says Stop, please stop. I’ll put them back. And so she and The Void sit on the floor, lining up dominos, and Sorrow cracks open the bottle, which is filled with milky liquid and the heads of violets. She takes a sip, and then another, and looks out the window at the moons. The tree at the centre of the gardens that was bare earlier today has exploded into periwinkle blooms, and once The Void has shut up and is sitting neatly on the floor, Sorrow grabs the bottle, tiptoes around the dominos, and slips down to the courtyard.

The moment she steps outside, a mosquito the size of a ping pong ball lands on her arm. Sorrow tries to swat it, but it bites her anyway. A bright blue bump appears on the surface of her skin.

She looks up to her window and sees The Void surrounded by yellow light, pacing back and forth. Her mosquito bite already itches. She takes a long drink from the bottle and passes through the gate of the garden. Her skin is damp and covered in goosebumps even though the night is warm, and the sounds coming from the brambles are like a holy choir of insects.

When she gets to the tree, she’s a little bit surprised to find that the blossoms are still there. They smell like the sweetest kind of berry pie. The stars here are brighter, closer, and a sudden grief catches in her throat. Suddenly she is a child running in circles. Suddenly she is a child on a concrete pad between two brick walls and a chain link fence and she is petting her dog, Tyler, who is tied up and panting. In this almost-dream, her faceless mother opens the back door. But in real life, no one is coming.

Sorrow sits cross-legged in the grass and realizes she’s lost her shoes. The singing of insects intensifies and a cloud of fireflies surrounds her and it’s like a kiss, as if all of nature were kissing her – this nature she doesn’t understand. Not that it matters now. There are caterpillars crawling on her bare feet. She closes her eyes, falls asleep by the light of the moons.  

xxx 

Sorrow wakes up and peels her eyes open and spits flower petals out of her mouth. Her head is aching and her jaw is aching and suddenly she remembers Gen’s plant, which she was supposed to take care of, and she rushes to her feet before a wave of dizziness sends her back to the ground. She stands up again, more slowly this time, and all the way to the greenhouse the colours of the garden are brightening and darkening, like someone somewhere is twisting a dimmer switch.

The greenhouse door is already unlocked and Gen is there, standing over her plant, making the face that Sorrow knows means disappointment.

“You couldn’t keep it alive either, eh?” Gen runs her fingertip along the plant’s last remaining leaf, watches it crumble at her touch.

Yesterday the plant was maroon and alive and now it is shrivelled up and leafless. In the terrarium, Sorrow’s insect is winged again, buzzing and hovering, bumping into the glass.

“Oh God,” Sorrow says. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. Sort of. I mean, Oren’s going to kill me.” She looks up. “Wait, are you okay? You look like shit.”

Sorrow nods vigorously and apologizes again and turns and leaves the greenhouse, which is supposed to be warm and full of life, but inside it, everything keeps dying – it’s an unpredictable kind of death, unstoppable, and she thinks about that and feels sick to her stomach and retches into a bush on her way inside.

The elevator is finally working again and Sorrow presses the button and waits. Oren appears around the corner and nods to Sorrow, whispers something into her watch.

“Are you unwell?” the voice says. “You have vomit on your collar.”

Sorrow is about to say No worries, feeling fine, feeling better than ever, but then images start appearing in her mind’s eye that don’t belong to her. Later, when Sorrow describes this moment, she will say it was as though Oren’s words cracked open – as though inside her words there were secret thoughts, and underneath those thoughts there were other thoughts, and all of them, the words and thoughts, appeared in Sorrow’s mind like a movie. Images rush in – Oren awake late into the night, going over the budget. Oren buying candy for her nieces and nephews. Oren smiling at her sisters and their children and feeling a wave of grief.

“I’m well,” Sorrow whispers. “I’m well.”

Four seconds later, the translation plays, but Sorrow’s already in the elevator. The doors close around Oren’s face and when they open again, Sorrow walks quickly through the hallway. The Void is standing in the doorway, waiting for her, and as soon as Sorrow sees it a terrible sound emerges, like microphones held too close together.

Sorrow covers her ears and pushes past The Void. There is trash overflowing and clothing on the floor, dirty cups arranged in rainbow order along the windowsill, and Sorrow starts collecting them, starts tossing clothing into the laundry basket.

Sorrow says: I get it. You’re unhappy here. But can you please just get over it? Can you do something other than stare at me and make me feel bad?

The Void says nothing, but the frequency rises, and Sorrow hides in the bathroom, slams the door. She wipes down the bathtub with a wet washcloth and then fills it to the top with scalding water, and she puts salt in and dried flowers, a splash of violet oil. She finds a match and lights a candle and unwraps a new bar of soap. There is soft fuzz on her toes and calves and thighs. She lathers up the soap in her hands and washes her arms, her underarms, the undersides of her breasts. As she soaps up her belly button, she’s surprised to find that her abdomen has swelled. 

xxx 

Over the next few weeks, Sorrow’s telepathy grows stronger. Context is a sort of sweetness she’s never before experienced in conversation – she’s worried her whole life about saying the right words, as though communicating with another person were a puzzle to solve. If she could figure out how to combine the correct phrases, she would receive the responses she wanted: acceptance, kindness, love. All along, Sorrow has carefully analyzed each message, searching for further information; now, the information simply appears in her mind, with no further investigation. She speaks, her colleagues speak back, and the images – the underthoughts – appear. It’s as though she’s been eating dry toast all her life and just discovered the existence of jam.

Sorrow greets everyone she sees – she smiles in the hallways, waves hello, and delights in the images that appear. At first, her colleagues’ underthoughts are friendly – she sees hands clasped together, meals served family style, silhouettes of people walking side by side. But soon, the images take on a different theme: visions of Sorrow consuming impolite quantities of nectar. Her body – her gut – expanding. And a feeling tone of concern, mild disgust.

Sorrow feels embarrassed. She eats less and less, buys the biggest sweatshirt on offer at the research centre’s store. She wears it every day, regardless of the weather, both inside and outside of the greenhouse.

It becomes a relief to work with Gen, who doesn’t seem to have developed the same telepathy as Sorrow – their conversations have only one layer, and that layer is easy enough to understand. For the most part, they keep opposite schedules, but once a week, they clean lab equipment side by side – applying their protective gloves, preparing the disinfectant, disassembling the insect rearing equipment and scrubbing it until it gleams. Gen chatters about her failed experiments, her boyfriend back home, the rising humidity.

Sorrow is rinsing the suction tube of an aspirator when her vision starts to swim. The soapy glass vial slips from her hands and shatters when it hits the sink.

“Are you okay?” Gen asks. “It’s 90 degrees in here. Why are you wearing that sweater?” 

Sorrow’s forehead is slick. “I’m okay,” she says. “I’m chilly.” She feels dizzy, dizzy enough to sit down, and she does.

“You’re burning up,” Gen says. “Are you sick? You shouldn’t be breathing on me.”

“I’m not sick.” She pulls her sweatshirt over her head, hunches over, folds her arms.

“Oh my God,” Gen says. “Look at you. You’re knocked up, aren’t you?”

“No,” Sorrow says.

“How did this happen?” Gen asks. “Are there even any human guys on campus? Were you pregnant when you got here? How did you get through the portals?”

“It’s impossible,” Sorrow says. “I’ve never –”

But then she thinks about mothwings falling into peat and the mosquito bite and the tree that only blossomed once. She thinks about her insects aging backwards and forwards, about plants living and dying and then living again. She remembers that she doesn’t know anything. That she has absolutely no idea how this works.

xxx

When Sorrow searches for the planet’s name and pregnancy on her refurbished desktop, there are no results. When Sorrow thinks about pregnancy, she thinks about reality show reruns. Teenage girls with leaky breasts and wailing babies, their boyfriends long gone. I just really wanted to go to prom. When Sorrow thinks about pregnancy, she thinks about her stepmother peeing on sticks and weeping. When Sorrow thinks about her own belly, which gets rounder with each passing day, she thinks about fibroids, tumours, cysts.

One night after her reports are complete and the equipment is put away and the sun has set and the moons have risen, Sorrow walks past Oren’s office and sees a glow around the door. She knocks softly and waits, listens for the rustle of footsteps.

“Sorrow,” Oren says. “Come in.”

When Sorrow thinks about pregnancy, she thinks about her mother. I was in the deep end of the swimming pool, she said, when I felt the first contraction. But another time she said she was in the pillow department at Sears, and another time she said she was riding the bus, and so when Sorrow thinks about her own birth, her mother’s labour, that personal beginning is fragmented into multiple realities and she doesn’t know which is real. When she thinks about her mother’s belly, she can’t remember it. When she thinks about her own belly, she feels her stomach flip.

“Quick question,” Sorrow says. “How are babies made here?”

“Made?” Oren asks, puzzled. “Like, manufactured?”

In Sorrow’s mind, Oren’s underthoughts appear. A factory line of human babies: they are built by machines, assembled by workers.

“No, not like that,” Sorrow says. “I mean, how are they created?”

Oren thinks for a moment. “They just… emerge.”

Sorrow sees the planet itself coughing babies up. The core of it, a purple and green centre, glowing, twisting, and the moons spinning above. Babies – this planet’s babies – emerging from flowers, from fruit trees. Hatching from piles of warm clothes. Their parents collecting them from a sticky place. Scooping them up, taking them home.

“Oh,” Sorrow says.

Oren’s face falls. She leans across her desk, grips Sorrow’s bicep like a vice. “Why?”

xxx

The infirmary on campus has an ultrasound machine – it’s listed in their extensive equipment records – but the staff can’t find it. No one has needed it for at least ten years. Oren tells Sorrow she’ll find an alternative – contact the nearest external clinic, which is at least three hours away, and arrange a shuttle bus for transportation – but soon the head technician comes back from vacation and remembers: the machine is in the basement.

Sorrow didn’t even know there was a basement. She and the bored-looking tech descend the first staircase carefully, and then the second, and soon they are deep in the bowels of the building, breathing in mildew and dust.

Sorrow is just glad to be away from The Void. She follows the tech in silence through a winding hallway with low ceilings. There aren’t even key cards down here – when they arrive at the steel door of the ultrasound room, he lifts a set of old brass keys from his pocket. He inserts one into the lock, jiggles it, then tries another.

Sorrow’s lower back is hurting. Finally one of the keys works and the tech pushes open the door. He pulls a frayed cord, illuminating the room with a single low-watt bulb. It looks like a doctor’s office back on Earth, but more old fashioned, with framed medical posters and a beam scale in the corner. Sorrow hops up on the table, examines a ceramic model of a thorax.

When the tech gets the machine working, he gestures for her to lift her shirt. He keeps a straight face, but his underthoughts lay the planet’s medical history out for Sorrow on a twisted spathe. Tumours appear, grow, recede. Mothish bellies expand and crack open, but the reasons are never good. Elsewhere, deep in wildness, furry creatures expand and contract and bleed – then, somehow, heal and rise again. In Sorrow’s mind, she sees the technician’s true face: a contortion of mild unease, curiosity, disgust.

Well, Sorrow thinks, I guess that’s it. I guess I’m really dead. But when he runs the wand over the taut skin of her belly, she sees a heartbeat flicker onscreen.

xxx

On Earth, the ancients believed in spontaneous generation – that under certain conditions, Nature itself (breath, spirit, soul) could intervene to create life. Thousands of years later, scientists still believed that mice could arise from rags and seeds, that maggots were born from rotten meat. Eventually, Pasteur disproved this – life only comes from life – but now that her baby’s heart is fluttering like mothwings inside of her, Sorrow wonders – what is so unalive about a rag, a steak, a kernel of wheat? What is so dead about Nature? She measures her belly with a red string. To maximize uterine circulation, she only sleeps on her left side. In her notes, she records her hypothesis – that the planet itself has (mis?)identified her as a gestational outlet – as, like in Oren’s underthoughts, a pile of warm clothes. But she’s not unhappy, exactly. She likes being someone’s container, somebody’s home.   

xxx

Sorrow’s body expands to proportions she doesn’t expect so quickly; her midsection blooms overnight with red marks. She applies cocoa butter generously, wears the stretchiest pants she can find. In the hallways, her colleagues stare. None of them understand the process of pregnancy – even Gen says that shit freaks me out – but Oren makes inquiries, finds a place where Sorrow can give birth. It’s far from the research centre, four hours by bus, but its website says it specializes in the reproductive cycles of mammalian anthropods. Sorrow marks off every Wednesday in her calendar. She’ll travel there when she’s thirty-eight weeks pregnant, just to be safe, and wait for the baby to come.

When they work together in the greenhouse, Gen grins knowingly at Sorrow. She whispers “So who’s the father?” like they’re on some old-fashioned talk show.

“God,” Sorrow jokes. “A mosquito.” As if it matters. Sorrow didn’t meet her father until she was nine. 

Sorrow takes careful notes, submits her reports on time. But what she thinks of is her belly skin. What she thinks of is the intermittent sweeping sensation across her middle, the way she’s never alone now, not for a second. She tells the baby the names of the flowers. She thinks, in the gardens, At least one friend. She imagines Sasha’s assessment and feels satisfied.

Late one night, when she’s crossed off thirty Wednesdays, Sorrow waddles up to her room and unlocks the door. The Void is sitting on her bed, already screeching. The sound pulsates and Sorrow averts her eyes. The emptiness hurts to look at.

Sorrow says: Stop.

Sorrow says: Seriously, shut up. It’s bad for the baby.

The Void says nothing, but it keeps on screeching. Its belly is a swirling black hole, the polar opposite of life, and it moves even closer to Sorrow. Sorrow locks herself in the bathroom and The Void jiggles the doorknob. Sorrow runs the bathwater and takes off her clothes and curls up in the tub and covers her ears but The Void reaches between the bottom of the door and the floor – a black, shiny puddle sparkling with nothingness. It spreads through the gap like oil. It reaches closer. 

Everything is fine, Sorrow says. Would you just leave me alone? Can’t you just let me be happy? For one fucking second.

The Void says nothing, but Sorrow knows that in the nothing there is something, and it’s You’re Already A Bad Mother and You’re Going to Die, Probably, and Isn’t It Cute How You Thought For A Moment You Were Real, and Sorrow stands up, naked and dripping. Sorrow throws open the door. Sorrow stares down The Void, stares into the folded up galaxy of its miserable self.  

Sorrow says, Get out.

Sorrow says: Get out. Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!

And messes up the order of every rainbow in the room. She picks up a garbage bag and throws the dominos inside, the playing cards, the batteries and the antiseptic wipes, the sunscreen bottles and the canned beans, the tape measures and the emergency candles. And The Void stops screeching. When Sorrow turns around, it’s gone.  

xxx 

Sorrow has only marked off thirty Wednesdays when the first contraction comes. It feels like maybe nothing, and the second feels like a hug, but soon the squeezing intensifies and she calls for Oren, who calls for the bus, and while they wait Oren holds Sorrow’s hand and whispers encouragingly into her watch. Sorrow isn’t sure if the images that appear in her mind are her own thoughts or Oren’s, but she sees the bus breaking down halfway to the research centre, the bus getting lost, turning around. She sees the bus lurching along an empty road as her body emits thick, black blood.

When the bus arrives, Sorrow climbs on alone.

The journey takes hours. Out the window is a desert, a vast nothingness, with unfamiliar cacti and low, thick clouds. The motion of the bus rattles her and jostles her and colours keep brightening and dimming again and with each contraction Sorrow’s perceptions get smaller, shrink to the point of a ballpoint pen. She imagines the centre of the universe, the smallest point at the centre of everything, and as her body stiffens and tightens, she imagines hiding there, waiting for this to end.

The name of the clinic translates to the Centre For Mammalian Studies and that’s how Sorrow feels, mammalian, as she shuffles through the front doors. The staff give her a beige surgical gown, take her earrings, her watch, her clothes. They take her bag, which she packed so carefully – her bag which The Void didn’t even mess up, because The Void is gone – and they give her a reason, probably, but without her watch, she doesn’t understand. She is like a wild animal, caged in pain, and if she had sharper teeth she would bite.

After they bring her to a room, a little round room with a window and a damp looking ceiling, they leave. Everyone leaves. They leave her there on a soft, skinny bed, high in the air, her body tensing and releasing, tensing and barely releasing and tensing again. She looks up at the ceiling in the room where she is alone and if she freaks out right now, she’ll really freak out, she knows, the kind of freaking out in which a body and mind unlatch from one another, rip neatly at the seam, and maybe never reattach. This is a choice. There are two slipstreams and one is panic and one isn’t. She chooses isn’t. She chooses doesn’t. She clutches the bed and feels her body tighten into a bud and feels her muscles seize up, a worse pain than the contractions, even, the excruciating pain in the upper musculature of her back. And the pain is so much pain that pain is pain is pain, the soft light through the window falling on a medical cabinet, puddling there, cold metal instruments waiting to be used.

When the light disappears from the window and is replaced with darkness and her moans are far away from her, distant animal sounds, the door swings open and two men enter the room. They don’t look at her. The clutch the sides of the tall skinny bed and wheel her away, out of the room, down a long, white hallway. Sorrow lays flat and watches the overhead lights pass and pass. 

They push a set of double doors open and this room is bigger, big enough for a fleet of doctors, though there are only two nurses waiting for her. They look confused, that’s what Sorrow thinks – she can’t see their underthoughts, or even hear their words, and every once in a while someone peers underneath her gown, gestures between her legs. More people enter, a long procession of strangers, and Sorrow doesn’t even care. When she gets the urge to push she pushes, and then she screams, and somewhere in some other dimension her own mother is pushing, her own mother is screaming, and she, herself, Sorrow, is born late into the night. “Mommy,” Sorrow calls into the narrow strip of this universe, and when the baby slips out from her body, she catches him herself.

xxx

Sorrow names her baby Farrow. He is small and slender and nearly translucent and he looks human, mostly – how she imagined a baby of hers would look. Nurses enter the room and bring diapers and bottles of milky green liquid and say nothing. Without her watch or anyone familiar, life after birth feels like a perpetual silent retreat. Sorrow read a paper once about people who go insane on silent retreats. Her vision keeps swimming, the wallpaper shimmering strangely, like she’s hallucinating, but the telepathy she’d had when she was pregnant is gone – she can retrieve nothing from the nurses, no words, no information, and she only sees her mother’s face in her mind’s eye, hard and bitter. Farrow wakes at least once every hour and Sorrow hasn’t slept, truly slept, in days. He keeps nursing and nursing, but her breasts feel soft and empty.

Farrow is nine days old and Sorrow has barely left her bed. He nurses ferociously and then guzzles down a bottle, too, and Sorrow lays him in his bassinet and closes her eyes and falls backwards into a deep sleep, backwards into a dream in which Sasha is wrapping her in a handmade quilt, Sasha is kissing her forehead, Sasha is rocking her back and forth until Sorrow disappears into oblivion.

When Sorrow wakes up, Farrow is screaming. She puts him to her breast again and he drinks and drinks and his skin is getting wrinklier, she realizes, as though he’s shrinking. That night, the moons don’t dance, just vibrate gently against the sky. Sorrow feeds Farrow again and changes him and lays him down. He’s swaddled in woolens, eyelids fluttering, warm milk dribbling out of his mouth.

When Sorrow wakes up again, it’s nearing sunrise. She reaches for her son, rests her hand on his tummy. Waits to feel it lift.

Then, the wallpaper changes. Suddenly Sorrow is nine, in her grandmother’s house, a grandmother she’s never met before. She is playing quietly with her doll in a room meant only for sitting. This grandmother’s sink is shiny and she gives Sorrow a glass of sour lemonade. Then the knob turns and a man walks in and kneels down and shakes Sorrow’s hand. His nose looks just like Sorrow’s nose and she likes that, and he buys her a vanilla milkshake on the way home to her new house, her new room.

The wallpaper flickers back. Sorrow’s hand is on his tummy and the lift doesn’t come.

Sorrow starts screaming. A nurse walks in, looks at the baby. She starts wrapping him in gauze, wrapping and wrapping, until all that is left of him is a soft gauze egg. Sorrow’s hands are shaking. Sorrow’s room is silent even as every good thing is slipping away. The nurse takes Farrow. The door closing behind her is the saddest sound Sorrow has ever heard. 

xxx 

Sorrow doesn’t leave her bed. When she sleeps, she dreams of neatly manicured gardens. She dreams she’s back on Earth, sniffing at roses, and her son is there beside her in a red baseball cap. He smiles up at her, sticks his face in a yellow flower. Everything feels like sunlight. Then she wakes up and the wallpaper is dark and her baby is gone.

Three times a day, a nurse enters and brings porridge and says nothing. Sorrow doesn’t eat it and doesn’t eat it but then she eats it and feels sick. The nurses have already come three times when she hears a knock at the door.

Sorrow says nothing, just rolls over and closes her eyes. She hears the scrape of the doorknob. She turns around and sees The Void.

No, she says. Please.

But The Void closes the door behind itself and gets closer. It stands at the end of Sorrow’s bed, staring at her, and Sorrow looks at the linoleum, at the ceiling, out the window – looks in every other possible direction. She squeezes her eyes shut.

There’s nothing but silence and when she opens her eyes, The Void is still there, is still looking, and Sorrow begins to wail. She sounds like a creature dying slowly in a trap. She starts shuddering and dry heaving and The Void stands there, at the foot of her bed, swirling and swirling and swirling.

I don’t want to, Sorrow says. I don’t want to look.

But she looks – she looks into the bottom of the deep well of Nothing, and the black swirling Nothing becomes Something, becomes a strip of bare concrete and brick walls. And suddenly Sorrow is very nearly nine. And the streetlights come on and the bad noises start – the sirens and strange laughter – and Tyler is panting, tied up in the alleyway, and his water dish is dry. Sorrow fills it with the hose and looks at the back door, which should be opening – which is supposed to open when the streetlights come on – but it doesn’t. It doesn’t open and doesn’t open and she closes her eyes and counts to six. When she gets to six, the door will open, and when she gets to ten, the door will open, and when she gets to thirty, the door will open, but it doesn’t.

Now the sky is almost black. Sorrow stands up and turns the knob herself, even though she isn’t supposed to, even though she’s supposed to wait. The kitchen is dark and empty and the hallway is dark and empty. The light of the television is illuminating the living room and she walks towards it. She rounds the corner. 

“Mommy?” she says.

Sorrow’s mother is sitting up straight, looking at the television. But she doesn’t answer, even though her eyes are open, and Sorrow tiptoes over, gives her shoulder a small shake.

But there is only stillness.

Sorrow closes her eyes. Sorrow counts to thirty and then to forty and then to one hundred and twenty four.

Then she hears something behind her. She turns around and sees a swirling black hole in the doorway.  

Sorrow and the black hole look at each other for a long time. Then it waves – it waves at Sorrow.

Sorrow waves back.

The Void takes her by the hand and leads her to her dresser and lays out her mermaid pyjamas, and Sorrow puts them on and climbs into her bed. And when she wakes up in the morning The Void guides her towards the kitchen and packs her a lunch, shows her where the bag of dog food is. Sorrow feeds Tyler and fills his water dish and The Void guides her past the living room, onto the school bus. Sorrow sings all the normal songs at school and The Void is there beside her, in the lunch room, on the bus ride home, helping her make hot dogs, unpack her bag. And things go on like this for three days and three nights until a neighbour notices Sorrow rooting through the mailbox on her tiptoes and asks, “Honey, where’s your mom?”

Then Sorrow is twenty-four again, in a hospital bed, staring into the depths of The Void. She keeps staring and The Void keeps swirling, and its body is the opposite of life, of light, of lightness, and the deeper Sorrow stares, the deeper the Nothingness becomes.

She stares for a long time.

And then The Void spins faster – it spins so fast that Sorrow loses track of the beginning of it and the end of it, and it spins so fast that she gets dizzy, but she doesn’t look away.

I just wish I knew where they took him, she whispers. I just wish I knew where he was.

And then a droplet of gold appears at the centre of the swirling darkness. It spreads outward in the spiral like colorant in paint. And soon The Void itself is golden, made of soft, golden light, and Sorrow squints – she can’t bear it – but The Void keeps spinning and brightening, and at the very centre of it, an opening appears.

Sorrow scoots forward. She reaches for the light, feels the electric radiance on her fingertips.

The tunnel widens. She pulls her hand back into the coldness of the room. She puts one bare foot on the floor, and then another, and stands up, the muscles of her thighs quivering at her weight.

Her head is swimming. It still hurts between her legs. She steps closer to The Void and reaches forward. Two hands, now, into the tunnel. The length of her arms, all the way to her elbows. She’s drawn forward by the light, plunging her head inside. The tunnel widens as she crawls forward on her hands and knees. Soon, she can almost stand.

There’s an opening at the other end of the tunnel – she can see it, a still point of aquamarine. She stands up all the way, now, and as she walks forward, the point of light widens.

She can hear crickets singing, and birds – she hasn’t heard birdsong since the pigeons on her balcony – and someone murmuring. It’s her own voice, maybe, or her mother’s voice, maybe, or it’s the voice of someone she’s never even met. It’s a ghost’s voice. The voice of someone far away. The tunnel smells like a humid summer night, liquid gold all around her. It feels like static electricity.

When she gets to the end, the point of aquamarine grows to the size of a doorway.

Sorrow steps through the opening. The soles of her feet touch cool, wet stone. She steps out into a narrow valley surrounded by mountains. The air is warm and smells like lilacs. Like her grandmother’s perfume. She shuffles forward along the pathway in her hospital gown. When she comes around the bend, she sees a cliffside.

Sorrow suddenly realizes she was expecting a graveyard, but this is more like a beehive – honey-coloured, sticky, with thousands of open chambers dug into the mountain. Winged people hover around the entrances, carrying bundles of flowers. Grieving, Sorrow thinks.

As she moves closer, she sees the plaques – the nameplates – marking each tomb. The colours start brightening and darkening, just like they did in the garden, and Sorrow squeezes her eyes shut. When she opens them again, everything is dim except for one small place – a bright opening at the base of the cliffside.

Sorrow gets closer, sees the name FARROW carved into the plaque. She gets down on her hands and knees, crawls as close to it as possible. There is a thick web covering his tomb and Sorrow places her hand against it.

“I love you,” she says. “I’m glad I got to meet you.” And for a moment she imagines her son’s tiny hand pressing back.

When she opens her eyes, there is a rip in the membrane.

When she opens her eyes, she sees her son rise above her: his wings are as fast and certain as a hummingbird’s. Sorrow stands up and reaches for him. They’re above the tree-line before she realizes she’s flying, too. 

Excerpted from Weird Babies by Jaclyn Desforges © 2026.  Used with permission of Guernica Editions.

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